Pandemonium (6 page)

4

Half a block from the Hyatt Regency, traffic came to a dead stop. We were on Wacker, just above Michigan Avenue, almost in the shadow of the Hyatt’s black steel and gray-tinted glass towers. Competing mobs of protesters and costumed counterprotesters had overrun their sawhorse-delimited camps on the sidewalks in front of the hotel and were spilling into the street, compressing police officers and unaligned audience members between them. The protesters had signs and bullhorns, but the less organized countercrowd—DemoniCon attendees in trench coats, nightgowns, and red, white, and blue jumpsuits—looked to be having more fun.
“Just drop me off here,” I said. There was nowhere to go except back the way we’d come, or maybe a hard left into the river.
“Hold on,” Lew said. His phone was still plugged into his ear, and for a moment I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. He’d spent half the drive on the cell, interrogating a series of underlings who either couldn’t or wouldn’t install something called a domain controller. It was weird to think of Lew, disorganized geek, as a
boss.
But it was clearly killing him to be away from the office. “I’ll circle around and come back on Wacker.”
I’d already opened the door. “Just pop the trunk. You can get back to work.”
“It’s just these guys, if you don’t watch them they do it half-assed, and then you’ve got to scrape the servers and start over.”
If you don’t watch them?
I laughed. “Lew, Lew. You the man. And I don’t mean, you the man. You the
man.
”
“Get a job, slacker.”
The Audi’s trunk yawned open. I swung the duffel onto one shoulder, and the weight nearly tipped me off balance and onto the hood of the car behind me. Lew stepped out of the car, careful to keep his door from dinging the SUV next to him.
He shook my hand and clapped me on the back. “So this doctor guy—call me and let me know how it goes. Good or bad, okay? Maybe me and Amra can cancel our thing, come back down, have dinner.”
“No, don’t do that. Seriously.” He’d already apologized for having to do something with Amra’s friends tonight, and even one apology was very un-Lew. “I’m going to get an Uno’s pizza, a beer, watch some hotel porn, and go to sleep.” The cars next to us started rolling forward, and honks erupted from the line of cars stopped behind us. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I got to the sidewalk, and watched the cop wave Lew’s Audi into the opposing lanes and send him back the way we’d come.
“Well shit,” I said. On my own again.
I turned and hiked up the hill toward the hotel, the duffel feeling like a dead body on my shoulder. The frigid wind lashed my hair and ruffled my spring jacket, a nylon, no-name thing from T. J. Maxx. Though I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few hundred yards ahead of me was the lake.
As I reached the edge of the crowd, a huge man wheeled suddenly and I had to put out an arm to avoid colliding with him. He was big, over three hundred pounds. I would have taken him for a Fat Boy impersonator if not for the rest of his costume. He wore the Truth’s broad-brimmed fedora and a black trench coat cinched tight as a sausage casing. He grinned down at me, his face huge as a moon. Maybe he wasn’t possessed, but there definitely seemed to be more than one person in there.
“Sorry,” I said, and moved sideways, nudging between a teenage boy wearing horns (the Piper?) and a chaps-wearing Lariat. I shifted the duffel to my front and used it like a bumper to plow through a sea of impersonators: a Pirate King; a pair of white-gowned, curly-haired Little Angels; a Smokestack Johnny in pinstriped overalls; a half dozen shield-carrying Captains; two more Truths; a Beggar (pockets stuffed with Monopoly money); a goggle-eyed Kamikaze; a bare-chested Jungle Lord.
The religious protesters were outnumbered, but made up for it in noise and passion. They were stacked up behind a row of sawhorses, shouting back at the DemoniCon fans, singing hymns, and waving signs:
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ANY GOD BEFORE ME
LET JESUS INTO YOUR HEART—NOT SATAN
SIMON SAYS: NO AMERICAN IDOLOTARS
DON’T BE DEMONI-CONNED
The protesters could have been from any number of denominations, from Roman Catholics to Latter-day Saints, but the flavor of the signs struck me as distinctly fundamentalist. Possession was the perfect disease for the postmetaphorical wings of the church. Most Anabaptist strains of Protestantism incorporated possession into their theology, and quite a few used the disorder on both ends of the equation: demons could take you, true, but so could Jesus. “Asking Jesus into your heart” wasn’t just a turn of phrase—he
took
you. The Pentecostals favored the spiritual third of the Trinity over Jesus himself, with the Holy Ghost repossessing believers at regular intervals, overriding their vocal cords to inflict glossolalia, and then moving on, leaving the suddenly empty vessels to collapse in the pews.
A funkily dressed woman in hoop earrings—I never would have taken her for a fundamentalist—held a sign that said, THE BODY IS GODS’ TEMPLE. I smiled at the punctuation, and the woman took this as interest and flipped the sign over: NOT THE DEVILS PLAYGROUND. She wore a gold brooch in the shape of two Christian fish intersecting like an eye:

I nodded—yes, very nice, have to be going now—and stepped past her. The brooch marked her as a Rapturist—and maybe they all were. It made sense for them to be here. The Rapturists saw possession as one more sign of the end days, clearly described in Revelations, and they’d taken possession logic a step further than most sects: Armageddon was being waged now, between angels and demons, with human bodies as the battlefield. To a Rapturist, DemoniCon attendees weren’t just misguided kids; they were plots of enemy territory to be captured.
I wondered what they’d make of me. To a Rapturist, I was fucking Iwo Jima.
A minute more of nudging and sidestepping got me past the last sawhorse, through the fundamentalists, and onto the mostly clear cement patio surrounding the Hyatt entrance. I pushed through the revolving door and stopped, dazed by the sudden absence of sunlight, bullhorns, and wind.
My eyes adjusted to the dimness. The atrium was an immense glass box. The furnishings projected a bland veneer of luxury, like a Ford Crown Victoria with deluxe trim. Gleaming floors, stiff couches, a long front desk in dark wood.
ICOP should have already started its sessions, but the lobby was largely empty of people. There was no one at the front desk, and only seven or eight people sat in the couches and chairs arranged in constellations around the room.
I crossed the marbled floors until I could see around a large column to the far end of the lobby. Past the elevators was a set of escalators, one leading up and another two leading down to the underground ballrooms. The area in front of the escalators was cordoned off by burgundy velvet ropes like the kind used in movie theaters. The only way past was through a metal detector guarded by a rent-a-cop, a black man in a gray uniform parked on a high stool.
I shifted the duffel bag and deliberately looked away from the guard. I was okay. I could get to the elevators, and my room, without going through the metal detector.
As I waited at the front desk I flipped through the credit cards in my wallet, trying to remember which card I’d used to reserve the room, and whether any of the cards could cover it. My mother used to talk about her “flood of bills” every month, and maybe that was why I’d started picturing my own debt as water rising in a sinking ship—with me trapped in the lower holds. The ship was going down, no doubt about that, but a few cabins still had pockets of air, and my job was to swim to the ones that had enough breathing room, like Shelley Winters in
The Poseidon Adventure.
“One night?” the clerk asked me. She was a mocha-skinned woman in a tailored blue suit. I nodded, wondering if she thought I was a fan trying to sneak into the legit conference. I should have worn a tie. “And will this be on the Visa?”
I stifled the urge to say, “Which one?” My credit union Visa was dead, and the airline tickets had sucked the last of the oxygen out of my Lands’ End card, but there might still be a few inches of breathing space near the ceiling of my Citibank. “Let’s do Discover Card,” I said. I had maybe $800 left on that one.
I kept my relaxed smile in place until the transaction cleared.

Ten minutes in the room and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to unpack, so I’d toured the bathroom (fantastically clean) and closets (oddly small), then inspected the mandatory hotel room equipment—TV, telephone, minibar—each with its own tented instructional card. Some poor slob with the same college degree as me had probably spent weeks designing each card. Or even sadder, they’d fired the poor slob with the useless degree and hired a high school kid who could use Microsoft Publisher.
I opened the drapes, and sat on the king-sized bed. I was thirty floors up. The second Hyatt tower blocked my direct view, but to either side I could see Lake Michigan: a broad plain the color of steel stretching to the horizon, scored with whitecaps. So huge. Repeated exposure to maps had never eradicated my boyhood conviction that this was no lake, not even a “great” one, but a third ocean.
The thing in my head paced back and forth, running a stick along the bars.
I got up, closed the drapes. Sat down in one of the chairs. Got up and looked through the drawers in the bedside table. Empty, not even a Gideon Bible. There hadn’t been one in the last hotel I’d stayed at, either. Maybe the Gideons were falling down on the job.
I opened the duffel and looked through the printouts from the ICOP website.
Dr. Ram only showed up on the schedule for two events. The first, in less than an hour, was a poster session (whatever that was) with several of his grad students. The important event was his talk at 3:00 p.m. today in the Concorde room, one of the underground conference rooms.
So. Ambush him at the poster session, at the talk, or somewhere in between?
I pulled out the two collared shirts I’d brought—one blue, one white—both of them wrinkled as hell. I couldn’t decide which one to wear and decided to iron both of them. The room’s iron, annoyingly, was heavier and more fully featured than any I’d ever owned.
I didn’t know when it would be best to approach Dr. Ram, or what I would say. This part of my plan had been hazy, even though I’d written over a dozen letters to him since I’d first read about his research, explaining my situation and proposing that my condition and his research interests seemed to intersect. Some of these letters were eloquent and cogent. Some were written from inside the white-noise cocoon of Nembutal.
I hadn’t sent any of them. The problem was this: Demons didn’t write letters to neurologists; therefore I wasn’t possessed. Perhaps I had
been
possessed, but in that I was no different than thousands of other victims. There was no such thing in the literature as half-possessed—demi-demons weren’t on the menu. So I was either a possession victim unique in the annals of the disorder, or I was crazy—and frankly, my credentials for crazy were impeccable.
I had managed to work up the courage once to call his office. He wasn’t accepting patients—at least not walk-ins like me. I’d considered flying to California and pitching my case personally, but then I’d read on his website that he’d be attending this year’s ICOP. I’d convinced myself that this was my best chance to get to him.
I put on the blue shirt and hung up the white one, and changed from jeans to beige, wrinkle-free khakis. I looked in the mirror. My hair was sticking up in the back, but otherwise I looked perfectly normal. Just another sane, reasonable person who had every right to walk up to a neurologist and introduce himself.
The thing in my head shifted like a toolbox sliding around the bed of a truck.

In the lobby I acknowledged the security guard with a nod and tired smile and walked through the frame of the metal detector. Detector and detective were silent. I followed the registration signs down an escalator to a long windowless room. A line of registration booths divided up the alphabet.
ICOP registration procedures were designed to keep out curiosity seekers, religious nuts, and especially the attendees of DemoniCon, ICOP’s shadow conference. The $185-a-day fee immediately scared off the merely curious and the average fanboy. But even if you had the cash, only members and guests of ICOP sponsoring organizations (APA, AMA, WHO, and a dozen other acronyms) were allowed to register.
Fortunately, a DemoniCon fan site had offered an alternate entrance mechanism.
Go to www.apa.org and apply for a $45-a-year student membership—don’t worry, you’re not going to pay for it. Choose Check or Money Order not credit card. Enter a disposable e-mail address (you just need it for a couple minutes) and a fictitious street address. After the site tells you that your membership is inactive pending payment, go to the site’s Forgot My Password page and enter your temp e-mail address. That’s right, the site automatically generated an account for you when you applied. Thanks, morons! The site will e-mail you the password (in plain text of course—these people haven’t heard of encryption). Now log in to the Members Only section and go to Edit My Account. See that 15-digit membership ID? Copy that bad boy to the clipboard. Next, go to the ICOP website. In the conference registration form, choose APA from the organization dropdown list, and on the next screen, paste in that membership ID (evidently this is a web service to APA’s server, because it actually checks if the ID’s in their database—fake IDs don’t work). Last, pay $15 via credit card (sorry folks, there’s no “check or money order” option here). Voila. Your only problem: now that they have your credit card, if they ever bother to check that you’re not a student, they’ve got you for FRAUD. Enjoy the conference!
I stepped up to the “M-N-O-P” booth, and presented my driver’s license and web receipt. The woman spent a long minute looking over the receipt and studying a laptop in front of her. I realized I’d made a mistake. Anyone from ICOP could have run across the site. How many DemoniConners had tried this scam? How could they not notice the unusual number of APA student registrations?
The woman handed me a conference badge. “Keep this with you at all times,” she said. Then she gave me a program book and complimentary nylon tote bag.
I walked a short distance away and sat heavily on a couch. I looked at the program book first. Most of the speeches and panels were being held in the dozens of small rooms under the Hyatt, but the bigger events—the keynote address, the Vatican panel, the speech by O. J.’s lawyer, Robert Shapiro—were hosted in the ballrooms. The poster sessions were in one of the main ballrooms.
Okay then. Ready for ambush?
I eventually found the right ballroom. People drifted in and out of the big double doors, watched by a security guard glancing at badges. I took a cleansing breath and went inside. I found myself in the middle of a seventh-grade science fair.
The room was filled with double rows of tables, their surfaces walled off into individual display booths by cloth-covered boards. The mysterious poster sessions, I realized, though there were few actual posters: almost all the visual aids—graphs, data tables, diagrams—were printed in off-tint ink-jet colors on 81/2 x 11 sheets and stapled into the cloth. Titles were usually in huge type, printed a few letters at a time across several pages.
The tables were numbered. I walked down the aisles, looking for the one assigned to Dr. Ram in the conference guide. The topics I passed were all over the map: reports of UFO abductions correlated with incidents of possession; demographics of possession victims by country; a demon cosmology based on aspects of Tarot; a pictorial history of Kamikaze airport shrines; thematic similarities in victim abuse stories; postpossession Kirlian aura distortions; genetic predisposition for possession in twins; recurrence of folkloric devices in the
New England Journal of Medicine
articles; Indian asuras contrasted with American demons; a theory of telepathy through quantum entanglement maintained in Penrose microtubules; Joan of Arc as an early example of possession disorder; an airborne vector for possession explained by wind patterns over Superfund sites…
My own demon’s name caught my eye, in a paper called “Expanding the Post-War Cohort: A Bayesian Analysis of Incident Reports, 1944–1950.” The bearded guy in front of the table was having an energetic discussion with another bearded guy, so I took time to skim the abstract. I couldn’t figure out what the point of the article was. Everybody knew that the big three—the Kamikaze, the Captain, and the Truth—had all appeared around the same time. The paper was arguing that several more ought to be included: Smokestack Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, some demon named the Boy Marvel, and my own Hellion. Okay, knock yourself out. What did it matter? I imagined bearded guys all over academia working themselves into a lather over this, precisely because the stakes were so low.
A few minutes later I’d found the row that had to contain Dr. Ram’s table. Three numbers down from it I slowed my pace, took another deep breath, and slowly exhaled.
No one was there.
I checked the number: 32. Definitely his table. I was immediately ashamed at how relieved I felt that he was gone.
The table wasn’t empty, though. A thin stack of articles was set on the white cloth: “Voxel-Based Morphometry of Gray Matter Abnormalities in Post-Possession Patients.” Dr. Ram’s name was on it, followed by three others. I’d already read it online, and could only follow every third sentence.
I couldn’t see the doctor anywhere in the aisles, and I was pretty sure I’d recognize him from his pictures. My relief turned to annoyance. Where the hell was he?
“We are,”
the woman at the next table said. She was leaning against the edge of the table, a sheaf of pages in her hands.
I glanced around, but I was the only person there. She smiled at me expectantly. She was about my age, short brown hair, triple-pierced right ear, but dressed semiformally in long dark skirt and chocolate boots.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She nodded at my badge.
“We are…”
I looked down at my badge. “Del Pierce?” I said.
She laughed. “
Penn State.
I did my undergrad there.”
“Oh, sure, yeah.” My fake alma mater. But I had no idea what the “we are” thing was about.
Her booth featured a series of seven photographs—snapshots enlarged to blurriness, printed on slick ink-jet sheets—each of a young girl in a white nightgown. Several seemed to have been taken in hospital rooms. The research paper’s title, in 78-point Futura, was “Cases for Nonlocal Intelligence,” followed by the smaller subtitle, “Information Transfer and Persistence among ‘Little Angel’ Possessions.”
“You’re looking for Dr. Ram,” she said. “Are you into the neuropsych end of things?”
“Yeah, kind of. And you’re working on the Little Angel?”
Otherwise known as the Angel of Mercy and the Girl in White. The demon possessed pretty, prepubescent girls, dressed up in lacy nightgowns, and went around visiting people on their deathbeds: cancer patients, motorcycle accident victims, burn unit residents. The Angel’s kiss killed them. Urban myth had it that her touch relieved these unfortunates of pain and gave them an overwhelming sense of calm. The deceased were silent on the matter.
“I know,” she said. “Been done to death.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t say that.” (Why not?) I picked up a copy from her own stack of articles. It was stapled, maybe twenty pages long. I looked at the abstract, something about how some girls possessed by the Angel knew things that only other Angels—Angels that had appeared in other states, in other times—would know.
“So you haven’t seen him, have you?” I said. “Dr. Ram?”
She shook her head. “Those papers were on the table when I got here to set up. But if I see someone I can tell them you stopped by.”
“No, don’t do that,” I said quickly. “I’ll catch him later.” I lifted her article and said, “Thanks for this. It looks interesting.”
I turned and walked away, making a show of reading the rest of the abstract with great interest. The research team had interviewed eyewitnesses to the visitations going back to the forties, concentrating on what the Angel had said that wasn’t reported in the media. Then they’d interviewed families of patients who had died during the visitations. They found out a couple things: One, Angels knew things about the patients that no stranger would reasonably know; and two, Angels knew details from previous visits that had never been broadcast or published.
I reached the end of the row, glanced back. She wasn’t looking at me, but there was no one between us. I tucked the paper into my tote bag. There was a garbage can ten feet away, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by throwing it out in front of her.
And the paper
was
garbage. So these “nonlocal intelligences” knew things they shouldn’t know, and seemed to be the same “person” possession after possession. In any decent junior high science fair, the appropriate response to those claims would be,
Duh.
And that pseudo-scientific phrase:
Nonlocal intelligence.
Every booth lobbied for some new term, each more ungainly than the last: meme, archetype, viral persona, possession disorder variant (PDV), intermittent shared consciousness (ISC), socially constructed alternate identity (SCAID)…
None of the names would catch on.
Demon
fit.
Possession
fit. A seventh grader could diagram that sentence: Demons possess
you.
Subject, verb, object.
I circled through the big room, shuffling sideways around clumps of people having minireunions—this must be quite the social occasion for academics who only saw each other at conferences. I couldn’t look at the poster titles anymore; I was just trying to get back to the only open door, where I’d come in. The bag dug into my shoulder. My face felt hot.
Ten feet from the door the way was blocked by people watching a slideshow projected onto the white wall. I shouldered my way through the crowd, and looked up as the picture changed. It was a picture of the farm the Painter had created in the airport—the same white farmhouse, the red silo and red-brown barn, golden fields bounded by lines of trees—but rendered in paint on a brick wall in some city, and on a much larger scale: judging by the garage door at the edge of the slide, the painting was at least fifty feet long and maybe twenty feet high. Then the picture changed, to a chalk drawing of a boy in swim trunks, arms around his knees, perched on a rounded boulder in a stream. A towel was draped over his back like a cape.
The thing in my head jerked and shuddered, and I clamped down on a wave of nausea. I pushed out of the crowd, not caring that people were staring at me. I reached the hallway and went down the stairs, heading for the exit and cold lake wind.
Some academic would write a paper about the recurring subjects of the Painter. There were probably factions arguing about the meaning of the farm images, and young turks proposing radical interpretations of the boy on the rock. Trying desperately to make it all
mean
something.
The truth was scarier: nobody in there knew what the fuck was going on. Or else everybody was right and it was all true: aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics, hellfire and hallucinations.
Pandemonium.