Pandemonium

I glanced at the old man, and he caught me looking. His eyes were set back into his skull, but they were glittering and sharp. One eye closed, reopened. A wink.

I thought of the Painter back at O’Hare. That same wink.

“A fan,” he said. His lips gravitated into a slight smile, and he seemed to shrug without moving his shoulders. “I have certain responsibilities.”

The cab’s rear door opened, and a dark-skinned man stepped out, hefting an oversize laptop bag. I recognized him from his book jacket photo, especially that expanse of wavy, oil-black hair, just shy of Elvis length.

Dr. Ram strode in my direction, nodding vigorously at something being said by the person who had stepped out of the cab after him. His companion was a priest: a bald head above a clerical collar and a long, black, loose-sleeved cassock.

No, not a priest—or at least not a Roman Catholic one. It was a woman. Her head had been shaved down to stubble, but that only revealed a fine, elfin bone structure: high cheekbones, a pointed chin. She walked with her head bent close to the doctor, matching his intensity. Although Dr. Ram was nodding, they seemed to be having an argument.

I stood up. I hadn’t expected to see him just now, but this was the time to talk to him, before he went to his presentation, before he was surrounded by students and colleagues.

The bald woman glanced at me, but then she noticed the old man on the bench, and stopped. “Hello, Valis,” she said evenly. She sounded Australian, or maybe Irish. Her ears were beautiful.

“Good afternoon, Mother Mariette,” Valis said. Dr. Ram had already pushed through the revolving door. She followed after him. I hadn’t even moved. Valis’s friend (son? son-in-law?), still carrying the Mountain Dew and cigarette, stalked over. “What the hell’s O’Connell doing here?” he said, amused. “I thought she retired, became a hermit or something.”

“She’s an exorcist, Tom,” Valis said in his long-distance voice.

“One can’t retire from a calling.”

“I have to go now,” I said. “I . . . it was nice to meet you.”

Valis inclined his head in a nod. The woman smiled and the other man—Tom, Valis had called him—raised his pop can and cigarette in a salute.

5

Dr. Ram was mobbed before he left the podium. I hung back, waiting for my moment to get his attention, but his admirers—fellow scientists, students, fans?—kept asking him questions, and he kept nodding and answering as he unhooked his microphone, packed up his laptop, and made for the exit. The crowd moved with him, forcing him to go slowly, like a man underwater.

The bald woman that Valis had called an exorcist, Mother Mariette, wasn’t among them. She hadn’t shown up for his presentation. You didn’t have to be there to know the talk would be a success. Dr. Ram was already a celebrity in the neuroscience world. The field had failed to come up with a hypothesis for possession disorder that would stand up to repeated testing. For the past few years researchers had hung their theoretical hats on linking possession to artificially induced OBEs: out-of-body experiences. Most research teams were looking for a chemical explanation, but then a team from Sweden, during surgery to implant electrodes inside a woman’s skull in order to alleviate her debilitating seizures, had zapped the woman’s parietal lobe, in a structure called the angular gyrus. The woman, who was awake during the operation, reported floating above her body. A few other researchers replicated the experiment, but most groups were constrained by ethical considerations: without some extreme medical necessity, they couldn’t just open up the skull of someone and start zapping.

Dr. Ram had taken another approach, and started running former possession victims through functional MRIs, hoping to see heightened activity in the angular gyrus, or perhaps some deformation in the area that these patients had in common. Perhaps they all shared some mutation that made them prone to possession; perhaps they suffered some damage from being possessed. He examined over eighty possession victims in a two-year span.

And found nothing. Nothing for twenty-four months. Then Dr. Ram got “lucky.” One of his patients (name withheld, of course) was possessed by the Piper while receiving the fMRI. The session went to hell. Dr. Ram never spelled out the details in any of his papers, but somehow he was driven from the room, and a female nurse was “harmed.” Given that the demon was the Piper, everyone understood this to mean rape. The MRI, however, recorded what had happened inside the patient’s brain moments before he pulled his head out of the MRI tunnel, yanked off the headphones, and started singing. This was the first time this had happened anywhere; MRIs had only been around since the eighties, and demons didn’t submit willingly to medical examinations. Dr. Ram had posted still pictures and a few mini-movies of the famous scan on his website. They reminded me of the radar weather maps on TV: colorful high-pressure systems of thought rolling over a cauliflower-shaped island, blossoming in reds and yellows and virulent greens. When Dr. Ram finally went back to replay the scan, he was shocked: the parietal lobe and the angular gyrus had stayed dark, but a portion of the temporal lobe had lit up like a thunderstorm. Brain function (or malfunction), Dr. Ram argued, might be able to completely explain the disorder, wresting the disease from the grip of faith healers, Jungians, and UFOlogists. Once you had a way to attack the disease scientifically, anything was possible: demon detectors, unequivocal diagnoses of possession, testable treatments . . . a cure.