Pandemonium

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, triplepierced 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