Demons (6 page)

The professor shut off the television, stood up abruptly, and went into his bedroom-office next door. I could hear him pull a book off the shelf, and turning pages.

We slept only fitfully that long, static night.

I had a dream of a laughing man in a hooded cloak with a face like shifting, running sand—sand that sometimes shifted into the well-sculpted shape of a fairly ordinary human face and sometimes crumbled to re-form into the face of a chimpanzee.

He was laughing but laughing sadly, his voice echoing in the high school gymnasium where we sat in the bleachers, he and I. My echoes mingled with his, when I suddenly spoke up: “You’re laughing, but really you’re quite sad like one of those songs about being a clown when you really want to cry.”

“Yes,” he said, sobering suddenly. “I am the one who brings sleep and dreams. And what has happened to the world? Who has vomited their colors all over my canvas? Where is my art now? Where is my art now, I ask you?”

His tears eroded his head so that it sagged off his neck and crumbled into a stream of sand that slithered down over the wooden bleachers.

4

Not long before dawn, as Melissa sank into a doze, I found a sketchbook and pastels I’d given her; she’d never used it, so I did. It kept my mind occupied in the taut, weary hours of the night. I tried drawing everything but the demons, but could find no rest in denial. So I tried drawing what would later be called a Sharkadian, and found myself sketching a sort of bas-relief pattern, or something like Morris wallpaper, around it, locking it in.

“That’s not a bad thing to experiment with,” the professor said, looking over my shoulder, his words slurring a little. He’d been at the vodka. “You’re unconsciously, if it is unconscious, fitting them into some kind of pattern, making some kind of artistic sense of them. And who knows what such a process might divulge. . . .”

But I soon put the sketchbook aside, exhausted and irritated by his occasional critiques and perhaps troubled by the fear that he was clutching at straws in suggesting the drawing was something useful. Nothing seemed useful anymore, except a deep hole to hide in.

The first of the Lulls came about nine A.M. During Lulls the demons seemed to vanish, or to go into some kind of dormancy. They were not sleeping—those who could be seen seemed to be listening.

It was a global Lull. The riots and panicky surges of refugees stopped in their tracks, when the demonic attacks ceased for a time, the refugees wondering which way to jump. Wondering if angels were next, Michael wielding a fiery sword. The world sank onto its haunches and let its shoulders sag as it panted for breath and wiped its brow.

During the first Lull there was time for pundits to argue on television. Back then they were still babbling the tediously familiar polemic of denial, with their “not demons but anarchists in rubber suits, bulletproof vests, cyborg enhancement,” their “hallucinations, and the hallucinating attacking people, some of them in costume and makeup . . . water poisoned by terrorists,” their “mind-control projections combined with bombings.”

Then there was the inevitable countersuggestion: The demons are indicators that the moment has come for complete resignation and submission to Jesus (or Allah or angry ancestral spirits or Yahweh or . . . Lord Satan). Long lines formed outside churches, synagogues, Buddhist temples, and outside both the Church of Satan and the First Church of Interstellar Contact—this latter an extraterrestrial contactee outfit run by channelers. It was a riot of metaphysical confusion.

Only Paymenz and a few others kept their heads.

“We will go to the Council for Global Interdependence,” Paymenz said to me. “We need an objective. That will be our first one.”

“What,” I asked, eating bread and jam in the bedroom, “is the council for . . . ?” Most of my attention was bent on sounds from the drainpipes on the outer walls that might have been the clicking of large claws.

“CFGI. The Council for Global Interdependence. It’s not much of anything yet—it’s just a gleam in Mendel’s eye, compared with his plans for it. But there are real contacts there, and I was preparing to go over there yesterday morning. It happens that the very day of the demonic coming, about seventy representatives from twenty countries came to town for a conference funded by the Council. Shephard’s conference, actually. One that’s not going to go on, but— Most of the conferees are here and may be in the convention center yet . . . and Shephard . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at me but said nothing. I was thinking the same thing: Hadn’t Shephard suggested perhaps that the conference wouldn’t happen?

Paymenz seemed to shake himself and went on. “The council is sheer talk so far, but it represents those who’ve made other initiatives.”

He sipped his tea. I saw his eyes wander to a vodka bottle leaning precariously on one of Melissa’s stacks of magazines, but he looked resolutely away from it. Melissa was sleeping—twitching in her sleep. She would sleep for five minutes, till something unspeakable drove her out of the dream, and she would sit up and then sink slowly back.

“What sort of initiatives?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“You said ‘those who’ve made other initiatives.’ ”

“The initiatives . . . well, it actually began in the middle of the last century. Or perhaps much earlier . . . but most notably, the formation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Then came the U.N. Peacekeeping force—the NATO actions in Kosovo, the global peacekeeping forces in East Timor. A slow movement toward a real global society with real global policemen, with uniform human rights rules . . . and it was not all as spontaneous as it seemed. It was planned, as much as it could be. They didn’t know that the Indonesians would do what they did in Timor—but they knew what to do if a situation like that arose. And they did. The Council is another project of those same planners. I was one of many consultants. It’s something still in its infancy, still unformed and tentative. It could go very wrong—or it could be something wonderful. At any rate, my boy, that’s what I’d have said a few days ago. Now, all considerations of the future are subject to redefinition. The future itself is problematic. All our paradigms are in ruins. Let us go, however. Wake my poor daughter, and let us go to the Council.”

Late afternoon. The sky was lowering with smoke and haze; it looked as if the world was roofed in shale. We were in my converted Chevy—it had been converted to an electric car about ten years before and never seemed to have reconciled to the change. The body was a little too heavy for the electric engine, and it strained to reach forty. I was driving, the professor beside me, Melissa in the back, leaning forward between the seats.

A burning garbage truck careened around the corner—I pictured it as a leviathan leaping from the surface of a sea of trash, a burning metal-and-rubber whale thrashing in and out of the oceanic swells of debris and decay at one of those really enormous landfills. It curveted on two wheels into the middle of our street, streaming flaming trash, its driver a black man with a bottle in one hand, laughing and weeping—I had to drive onto the broad sidewalk to avoid it. The truck was soon out of sight behind us.

“We’ve got the wrong car for this,” I said, as we swerved around another drunken cadre of looters banging and bumping shopping carts full of holo-set players. “You need one of those hydrogen-powered SUVs—oh shit . . .”

This last as an Arab with a rage-contorted face slammed a teenage boy onto the hood of our car. He’d backed him out of his half-demolished liquor store, was digging his rigid fingers into the boy’s neck. I had to hit the brakes to keep from dragging them down the street—Melissa yelling out the window, “Stop that, stop that, let him go!” The frustrated Arab, seeing his shop destroyed by looters, finally had one in his hands, and his face was—oh yes—
demonic
as he slammed the boy’s head on the hood of my car. He was enraged, but was he possessed? No.

No, no one was possessed. Not exactly. There have been no possessions.

Have I said that before? I say it again. It means something.

The boy flailing and the Arab smashing, the two rolled off my car’s hood.

“Help them!” Melissa yelled.

I looked at Paymenz. “No,” he said. “Drive on. We must get there.”

Driving on, past a group of children throwing bricks through the window of a store, I remembered the game HACKK, a first-person computer game I’d been addicted to. In HACKK, a biowarfare virus that attacked the human brain had turned most of the population into murderous zombies. The zombies were controlled by Terrorist Overlords. You had to get through the smoking ruins of the city to a sanctuary on the far side, killing psychotic ax-wielding viral zombies as you went, with weapons you picked up along the way, while outsmarting the Terrorist Overlords. It had been superbly realistic 3-D, in which every adversary was a distinct, cunning individual, and yet it had been dreamlike, had the tantalizing familiarity of some half-remembered nightmare.

“Who was it,” I wondered aloud, as we veered down a mostly empty street—smoking ruins on one side, shattered plastic boxes trailing from store windows on the other—“who said that some video games had the quality of the bardos? E. J. Gold, I think. . . .”

“You’re doing that nervous, irrelevant commentary again,” Melissa said, her voice tight with fear as we drove through gathering shadows.

“Let him say whatever gets him through here,” Paymenz said.

I was driving as I was speaking—as if in a trance. I was so tired. “Remember Gold? One of the last century’s grassroots, homegrown California gurus. He used the game
Quake
to induce a kind of paranoia-sharpened awareness in his followers, told them to think of the bardo states that would come after death as computer games set up by some mysterious programmer. Or something along those lines. Learn the rules of that bardo and you’d find your way out, pass the test into the next realm . . . the next level. . . .”

What were the rules for
this
game? Were we in an afterlife bardo, here?

It wasn’t that, either. Demons or no, this was life in all its homely grit, its panoramas of blandness and grainy contrast. Still, there were rules we had yet to define in the new world erupting around us, rules as if from some mysterious programmer. And that had always been true—but now that truth was prominent, unhidden, demanding notice.
You’re taking part in a game the rules of which you do not understand! Find out the rules! Now!

We passed through streets, then, that seemed untouched, distinguished only by the lack of human activity. No moving cars, everyone still hiding.

But two blocks from the convention center, we saw something big and black and steaming from vents on its knobby head, crouched just within the shattered-glass cube of a gas station. Just caught a glimpse of it, dormant in the Lull, and then we were past it—driving those last two blocks at the best speed the whiny little car could muster—and reached the convention center, near the Yerba Buena Gardens. A chopper was landing on its helipad as we approached. I watched raptly as it came in, its movements professionally smooth, landing easily. The helicopter was civilization embodied for me in that moment: civilization intact, confident, almost graceful. It was so reassuring.

“That might be Mendel,” Paymenz said, watching the chopper.

“Watch out, damnit, Ira!” Melissa yelled.

I slammed on the brakes, swerved, just managed not to rear-end a white limo pulling up at the police barriers ahead of us.

I sat with my foot still jammed down on the brake, panting, staring at the opaque windows of the limo. Gently, the professor reached over and put the car in park for me; he turned the key, switched the engine off.

The building was modern, highly designed—one of those buildings you imagined on its drawing board when you saw it—but on the whole it was shaped like a giant bunker with frills: a concoction of beveled concrete and big panes of frosted glass and angular assemblies of painted girders. There were fidgeting cops standing behind cement barriers around the building, many of them swaying where they stood, probably drunk. Others seemed grateful they had something to do that they could understand: crowd control, though there was no crowd.

A cop approached us, his beefy face blotchy red, his mouth open, breathing hard. “You . . . you people—just turn around.”

“Officer? It’s okay,” said a tall—
very
tall—black man getting out of the limo. He wore a gray three-piece suit cut so masterfully that it made this man, who must have been more than seven feet tall, seem to have normal proportions. His movements had a touch of the mantis about them, but his face was chiseled with quiet intelligence, and his every word emanated simple authority. The cop evidently knew who he was, and walked away without another word.

“Dr. Nyerza,” Paymenz said.

“Professor Paymenz,” said Nyerza, nodding. “It has been too long, sir.” A soft equatorial accent.