None of the names would catch on. Demon fit. Possession fit. A seventh grader could diagram that sentence: Demons possess you. Subject, verb, object.
I circled through the big room, shuffling sideways around clumps of people having minireunions—this must be quite the social occasion for academics who only saw each other at conferences. I couldn’t look at the poster titles anymore; I was just trying to get back to the only open door, where I’d come in. The bag dug into my shoulder. My face felt hot.
Ten feet from the door the way was blocked by people watching a slideshow projected onto the white wall. I shouldered my way through the crowd, and looked up as the picture changed. It was a picture of the farm the Painter had created in the airport—the same white farmhouse, the red silo and red-brown barn, golden fields bounded by lines of trees—but rendered in paint on a brick wall in some city, and on a much larger scale: judging by the garage door at the edge of the slide, the painting was at least fifty feet long and maybe twenty feet high. Then the picture changed, to a chalk drawing of a boy in swim trunks, arms around his knees, perched on a rounded boulder in a stream. A towel was draped over his back like a cape.
The thing in my head jerked and shuddered, and I clamped down on a wave of nausea. I pushed out of the crowd, not caring that people
were staring at me. I reached the hallway and went down the stairs, heading for the exit and cold lake wind.
Some academic would write a paper about the recurring subjects of the Painter. There were probably factions arguing about the meaning of the farm images, and young turks proposing radical interpretations of the boy on the rock. Trying desperately to make it all mean something.
The truth was scarier: nobody in there knew what the fuck was going on. Or else everybody was right and it was all true: aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics, hellfire and hallucinations. Pandemonium.
“Have you heard the poem about the dog who had a bone in his mouth?” the bag lady said. She had no shopping cart or bags, but she clutched an oversize vinyl purse the size of an artist’s portfolio, which I decided met the minimum qualifications for the position. She wasn’t talking to me, and I kept my head down. The concrete bench was cold against my butt and thighs, but I still wasn’t ready to go back inside.
The woman spoke at a notch above normal volume, her words delivered with the overenunciated deliberateness of the borderline autistics I’d met in the hospital. She was impossible to tune out. She wore a red hooded sweatshirt, a blue-striped winter jacket over that, and a long checked skirt over gray sweatpants. The tops of her rubber boots were trimmed with leopard-print fur.
She was addressing a bearded old man who sat at the next bench. He could have been any age between seventy and ninety. He sat like a sculpture, hands folded in his lap, and listened patiently. Seated next to him was a strikingly handsome white woman I took to be his daughter, or maybe granddaughter. She studied a program booklet, though she didn’t look like an academic: long black hair that reminded me of Amra’s before she cut it, tanned legs crossed under a tight skirt.
“It’s a very good poem,” the bag lady said. The old man said nothing. The black-haired woman glanced up, then exchanged a look with the only other person outside with us, a man about a dozen feet away. He was a florid, fiftyish man in jeans and a blazer, with boyishly long sandy hair. One hand was jammed in his jeans pocket; the other held both a Mountain Dew can and a lit cigarette. He’d been pacing and smoking, somehow managing to drink and smoke with the same hand. He took a drag from his cigarette, looked at the bag lady, and shrugged.
“The dog came to a puddle and saw his reflection,” the bag lady said. “He looked in the reflection and what he thought he saw was a dog with a bone in his mouth, but he didn’t recognize that the dog was himself, he thought it was another dog with a bigger bone in his mouth. So he dropped his bone to get the other dog’s bone, and lost his bone in the water. Now there were two dogs without bones. The moral of the story is that the grass is always greener, you see?”
“This is the way of the world,” the old man said. His voice was strangely flattened, like a satellite phone call digitally processed for maximum compression. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
“I’ve read all of Philip K. Dick’s books,” she said. As if this were the natural follow-up to a dog poem. “Flow My Tears, Ubik, The Owl in Daylight. I’ve read VALIS twenty-two times. I carry the book with me at all times. Look.”
I glanced up. She’d pulled a paperback from her purse. “Would you sign it for me?”
She opened the cover and thrust it at him, inches from his face. He didn’t flinch or pull back. He slowly took a pen from the inside of his jacket, supported the spine of the book, and made a series of curving strokes, finishing with an X through the middle. I couldn’t see what he’d drawn, but I doubted it was an ordinary signature.
“Thank you very much,” the woman said, and closed the book without looking at it. “I hope you find Felix. I have to go now.” She turned abruptly and nearly walked into the grille of a cab pulling into the drive. The cab jerked to a stop. The woman paused for a long moment, staring at the driver, and then she moved around the hood, heading for the Hyatt.
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.