Pandemonium

On the wall above the urinal, someone had written dogma: i am god.

“So . . . ,” I said. “You piss.” I realized at this point that I was a little more buzzed than I’d thought.

He nodded without turning to face me. “The body has its own imperatives,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. Out in the bar, someone shrieked in laughter.

“People don’t treat you like a demon,” I said. “They like talking to you.”

“They like talking to Phil.” He stepped back from the urinal, zipped up, and walked toward the sink. “They prefer to think of me as their old friend who is not gone, but merely gone crazy. It comforts them.”

“Wait—you let them think you’re faking, but you’re really . . .” I processed this for a second. “A demon pretending to be a man pretending to be a demon.”

“Exactly. A fake fake.” He turned on the faucet. Hot only. I was surprised to realize that I believed him—or at least didn’t disbelieve him.

“Okay, so if you’re really a demon,” I said, “how come you never possess anybody else? Jumping would pretty much settle the matter, wouldn’t it?”

He addressed me through the mirror as he washed, steam rising past his face. The water temperature didn’t seem to bother him. “Divine intervention is not always divine invasion. I have intervened in Phil’s life twenty-two times. Nineteen of those disruptions involved simple transmission of information, compressed into cipher signals that would trigger anamnesis.”

“Say what?”

“Anamnesis. The loss of forgetfulness.”

I blinked at him.

“Total recall.”

“Oh.”

“A few times it was necessary to take more direct action. The first time he tried to kill himself,” he continued in that distant voice, “I seized his body, wrote the emergency room number on the palm of his hand, and awakened him. But the watershed moment came in 1982. Phil experienced a stroke followed by cardiac arrest, his third and most damaging attack. In order to restart his heart and resume blood flow to the brain, I had to seize complete control of biological functions. It was necessary for me to install a holographic shard of my essence.”

“You possessed him.”

He shook water from his hands—two economical flicks of his wrists—and drew a paper towel from the stack above the sink. Outside, someone was shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words. “I continue to pump this heart, to work these lungs. I fear that if I left this body for very long, he would die.”

“Okay, but . . .” I shook my head. “Why?” I laughed. He regarded me calmly, and that only made me laugh harder. “I mean, why not just let him die? It was his time, right? What good are you doing him walking around in his body?”

His head tilted, and he smiled. “That’s the question each of us must ask.”

He pushed open the bathroom door and the noise from the bar rushed in: angry shouts, amused catcalls, drunken hoots. A crash as some very large piece of glass—or maybe a hundred smaller pieces—struck something hard and shattered.

Valis held the door for me. Across the room, a bare-chested man hung above the bar by one arm, legs tucked up under him, swinging from the rack of wineglasses. The rack alongside the short end of the bar had already been pulled down.

The swinging man was clad only in a kind of leaf-covered loincloth. His face was painted red, and little horns protruded from his skull. In his free hand he held a wooden panpipe. At the top of his swing he let go, arced through the air, and came down feetfirst on a round table.

“Time to dance, my revelers!” he shouted.

“Jesus, it’s just like the Olympics,” someone near me said.