Pandemonium

middle of it when they walked in. I weighed what I could tell her. Enough to be plausible. But too much and I’d have to manage her reaction.

“It’s complicated.”

She waited. I sat down at the table, and she sat next to me.

“The noises weren’t bad at first,” I said. “They came mostly at night, but I was handling it okay. Then they started to get worse, more persistent. I missed some days of work.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact.

“So anyway, my car’s totaled, the people at work want to fire me, I wasn’t sleeping well . . . I knew I was stressed out. The doctor who took care of me after the accident referred me to a shrink, a psychiatrist. I told him my history, you know, the stuff from when I was five, and the stuff from high school. But if it’s related to possession it’s something he’s never heard of before, so we had to spend a lot of time talking about what I think is going on. And in the meantime he’s teaching me meditation techniques, ordering scans of my head, having me try out medications. And of course none of it worked. The MRIs and fMRIs and CAT scans didn’t show anything, no tumors or blockages. The meditation exercises were all things Dr. Aaron taught me years ago, straight out of some post-possession handbook they all must read—and I’d been trying those.

“The drugs, though. He opened up the whole medicine cabinet: antianxiety, antipsychotics, anti-everything. Nothing was too horrible, but the worst combination made me sleep sixteen hours a day and then wake up with a dry mouth and a queasy stomach. But the noises didn’t go away.

“After one particularly rough night I went in to see him and he says, why don’t we try some environment that’s less stressful, where people could watch out for you? Like on Wild Kingdom, why don’t we tag you and bring you to a safer environment? And the next thing I know I’m in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, hanging out with schizophrenics. There was a guy there, Bertram—nice guy, maybe fifty, totally whacked. One minute we’re having a perfectly normal conversation, talking about Pakistan or the weather or something, and the next second his head would jerk up and he’d stare at the lights and say, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Feel what, Bertram?’ ‘They just scanned us.’

See, he believed there were these super-telepaths named slans . . .”

I was rambling.

Mom sat silently, her mouth pulled tight. She’d sat through the recitation, absorbing the facts like blows. Her face had hardened, and her gaze had shifted from my face. I didn’t know what I’d expected—not tears, my mother was not a crier—but not this. Not anger.

“What is it?” I said.

Headlights slid across the front window. Lew and Amra’s Audi coasted into the driveway, bass pumping. The stereo cut off. Mom stood up quickly, walked past without looking at me. “I’m going to make coffee,” she said. “It has to be decaf, I can’t drink caffeinated at night.”

Amra followed me down the dimly lit stairs, one hand on my shoulder. Sometime during the run to Jewel, she and Lew had decided to stay the night instead of driving back to their house in Gurnee, about an hour away. Dinner had become a slumber party, and slumber parties required board games. Amra was trying very hard to treat me the same as she did before she knew I’d escaped the loony bin. At the last step, I reached out and found the lightbulb chain. “The vault,” I announced.

The basement was a maze of shelves, and the shelves were stacked with the treasure of our childhood—Lew’s childhood and mine. Mom saved everything, not only every GI Joe and Matchbox car, but every Hot Wheels track, Tinkertoy, and puzzle piece. Anything that didn’t stack neatly was sealed in clear plastic tubs. Farther into the dark were our baby clothes and old toys, Dad’s army uniforms and paraphernalia, Mom’s wedding dress, boxes of letters and books and tax returns, and odds and ends with irregular silhouettes: elementary school art projects, bicycle parts, an arbor of golf clubs and fishing poles. I was itching to explore farther, but not with Amra.

“The games are over here,” I said.

I led her past the comic collection—eight long white cardboard boxes and one small brown box labeled in Magic Marker block letters: