Pandemonium

And then he lurches forward, throwing himself off the couch. He’s on all fours, his chest heaving, as if he’s gasping for air.

The side of Meg Waldheim’s head appears in the frame; she’s leaning forward. Tell us your name, she says. The subject looks up at her. His eyes are wide in animal terror. He doesn’t recognize them. Tell us your name, she says again.

The subject screams. The sound is raw, unmodulated. He scrambles away from her. Only his leg is visible now. And then he’s up, back in the frame, running and half stumbling for one of the outcroppings of wall. Suddenly he drops out of sight of the camera.

A dark blur as Fred Waldheim crosses in front of the camera. A moment later he’s back in view on the other side of the couch, moving deliberately to where the subject is, somewhere on the floor. He says something the camera doesn’t pick up. He raises one arm, and says louder, There there, we aren’t going to hurt you.

The subject screams, and this time he’s screaming a word at the top of his lungs, the same word over and over: Mahhhhhm!

Mahhhhhm! Mahhhhhm!

Meg Waldheim, still off-camera, says again, What is your name?

This part of the video annoyed me. They must have realized his name by then—how much more obvious could he be?

“Del,” I said to the screen. “His name is Del.”

Over the past few days, whenever I’d grown tired of watching the laptop, or staring at the water-stain heart on my wall, or trying to sleep, I’d spent a few hours composing pages for a mental scrapbook called Things I Shouldn’t Remember. Alongside “Lew reads Del The Flash”

and “Mom Reads Del Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” was a jumbled collage of a page called “My First Exorcism.”

First the hands: touching my head, my shoulders, my legs, trying to soothe me but hold me down, too, to stop me from bucking and twisting out of their grip. A circle of faces around the bed, all men, and my father among them, calling my name. And through it all the preacher’s voice, rising and falling, rising and falling. In that moment my mouth is open and my chest is full, ready to scream or laugh. That was it. A fragment, a leftover, like a dusty playing piece from a lost board game. It wasn’t something I’d suppressed. It was just that I hadn’t recalled it lately.

Because this wasn’t the first time I’d remembered the exorcism. Every once in a while when I was a kid I’d stumble across the image in my brain—those disembodied hands, those floating faces—

and then, unable to make anything of it, let it fall back into my mental toy box. I didn’t even know anymore if I was recalling the original event or the memory of a memory, a distorted and embroidered version fed by the fears of a kid growing up in a religioncharged family. The scene had a lurid quality that suggested it’d been lifted from one of those hellfire-and-brimstone evangelistic comic books Lew brought home from Vacation Bible School. It was easy to convince myself I’d made it up. Easier to let it sit in a box, unlooked-for.

Until now. Now I didn’t have any choice but to abandon amnesia. Anamnesis, baby.

All clear?

Yeah, me too. Me the fuck too.

The first thing I said to her was, “How’s Lew?” I wanted to know, but I also wanted to short-circuit any talk about me. It was a tactic I’d used to great effect during long-distance calls from the psych ward.

“He’s doing better,” Mom said. She told me about blood tests, ACE inhibitors, the real cardiologists he’d be seeing as soon as they got back to Chicago. But as soon as she’d run through the headlines in Lew’s recovery, she was back on me. “Where are you? What are you doing with that woman?”