Pandemonium

“I’m sorry, he’s sleeping at the moment.”

“Sleeping?” I repeated stupidly. I wondered what artificial men dreamed of. “Okay, when he gets up, could you . . . just ask him if he’d call me. Let me give you a number. I won’t be there until tonight, but he can call anytime.” Selena seemed reluctant, but she took down the number. I thanked her and hung up.

O’Connell came out of the shop with bottled water, snacks, a travel pack of aspirin. She saw something in my face and stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I just want to get home,” I said.

When we arrived that night at the house where I grew up, I stepped out of the pickup, leaving it running. I had nothing to take inside: everything had been left at the farmhouse. I closed the door, and O’Connell scooted behind the wheel. She stared straight ahead, the side window open between us like a confessional. “I tried to kill you,”

she said.

“You were doing your job,” I said. “I hired you to be my exorcist.”

The porch light flicked on. I walked toward the front door. O’Connell stepped out of the cab, and I turned around. She said, “I broke my vow to you. I promised to be your pastor.”

“No, you promised to be Del’s pastor. You still are.”

Just after 3:30 a.m., my bedroom door opened. It was Bertram: bald head, fringe of messed hair catching the reflected light from down the hallway. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him.

“I’m awake, Bertram.” Awake because I’d fallen out of sync with this body. It was becoming strange to me, a vehicle I was having trouble steering. The body’s owner was an insistent weight inside me, shifting and straining against the straitjacket I’d made for him.

“My apologies for the late hour,” Bertram said. But it wasn’t Bertram’s voice. His tone was flat, the rhythm too regular, as if the words were being pulled one by one from a database and streamed for broadcast.

I sat up. He walked toward the bed, adjusted the chair.

“You didn’t have to come all this way,” I said. “You could have just called.”

Valis slowly sat, rested his arms on his thighs. “It’s no trouble. However, I can’t stay long. Phil is resting peacefully at the moment, but if there’s a problem, you’ll have to excuse me if I have to leave suddenly.”

“You’re, uh, monitoring him from here? Cool trick.”

He turned his palms over, smiled. “I am vast.”

“And active. I’ve heard that.” I crossed my legs Indian style, stalling. “I guess O’Connell was wrong about you.”

“Mother Mariette has a narrow frame of reference in regard to possession. When I declined to turn stones into bread, she decided that I was an imposter.” I didn’t follow the reference. Valis said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Del? Or do you prefer Hellion?”

“Let’s just stick with ‘hey you’ for now.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I watched a man die yesterday,” I said. “An old man. He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”

“The golden age of science fiction,” Valis said.

“He was the source,” I said. “For some of the demons, at least. My cohort. We were all—I don’t know—stories. Characters. He made us up and then sent us into the world.”

Valis smiled curiously. “Perhaps you’re thinking that Phil made me up as well. That you and I are imaginary.”

I blinked. It sounded stupid when he said it like that. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Yet your author is dead.”

“I’m not saying I have it all worked out.”

“You’re not completely wrong, I suppose. There are some humans who have a gift for seeing the seams that stitch the world. Call them whatever you like. Your old man was one, Phil another. Who knows how many are out there? Thousands at least. At this moment, some teenage Japanese girl is pouring over a manga, a Hindu boy is praying