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.
"Dr. Ram."
He didn’t hear me. I followed him down the hall toward the elevators, persisting even as he shed members of his entourage by ones and twos. One of his shoes was untied, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Dr. Ram, if you have just a second—”
He glanced at me, then was immediately distracted by a scruffybearded man at his elbow. Dr. Ram grunted at something he said, and then the elevator opened and the people around them shuffled forward, and Dr. Ram and the bearded man went with them. Dr. Ram looked up, and waved me inside. I put out a hand to stop the door from closing, and wedged inside.
“Thanks! I enjoyed your talk. I was—”
But the bearded man was still talking, something about calcium channel blockers. We went up.
At the eighteenth floor Dr. Ram stepped out, and the bearded man was still talking as the doors started to slide shut. I abruptly jumped forward, and Dr. Ram’s eyes widened. The doors closed behind me. Dr. Ram didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t want me to know where his room was. I opened my mouth, shut it. I fought the urge to say, “I am not a stalker.”
“Are you a student of Dr. Slaney’s?” he said.
“What?”
He nodded at my badge. “Dr. Slaney. Or perhaps Dr. Morgan?”
His accent was pure California, vowels stretched a bit longer than a Midwesterner’s.
“I want to show you something,” I said. I unzipped the tote bag, flipped through the other pages I’d picked up, and withdrew the fMRI printouts. I held them out to him. “I’d like you to look at these.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t have time. I have to meet someone . . .”
I stood there, holding them out to him. Finally he took them. He looked at the first one, shuffled it to the back, looked at the next one.
“Where did these come from?” he said intently. He studied the first scan again.
“Me.”
He looked up, his expression guarded.
“I’ve been following your work,” I said. “What you noticed about activity in the temporal lobe—you see it there?”
“I see something.” He flipped a page, tilted his head. “But even if I take these scans as valid—which I would not—they could mean almost anything. You could have been experiencing fond memories of your birthday, or simply contemplating a new haircut.” He handed the pages back to me, but his voice was kinder. “I know these scans might be alarming to the layman, but heightened activity in the temporal lobe by no means suggests that you were possessed while getting your MRI.”
My cheeks flushed in embarrassment. “I’m not—” I breathed in. “I don’t know how to put this. I’m possessed now. I can feel . . . I can sense this presence inside me. I know that it just feels this way, that it’s just a subjective sensation that could be a symptom of the disorder, but—” I smiled tightly. “It’s just that I feel like I’ve trapped this thing in there.”
I had to give him credit; he didn’t immediately dismiss me. What I was saying was impossible—no one that I’d ever heard of walked around saying that they’re possessed.
But he thought for a moment, and then said, “What would you have me do about this?”
“I was thinking. If your theory is correct—” I almost ran into a Jurassic-size potted plant, and stepped around it. “If this section of the brain is responsible for possession, then if we disable that section—”
“Disable? How?”
I looked at him. He lifted his hand. “No. No.” He turned and started down the hallway, the laces of one shoe whipping along the floor. I hurried after him.
“At least consider it, Doctor. There are similar operations being done for tumor victims.”
“You don’t have a tumor! I can’t just cut into your brain based on a theory. It’s not even a theory, it’s a hypothesis, and an unproven one at that. Maybe, years from now, there will be some surgical option—”
“So you have thought about it.”
He stopped in front of a door. He seemed genuinely angry now.
“Young man. No one would do what you’re asking, no respectable doctor. You’re grasping at straws.”
I shoved the papers back into his hands. “Please, just look at them. Maybe we’re not talking about surgery; maybe there’s some chemical way to—I don’t know, interrupt the process.”
He shook his head, fishing in his pocket for a key card. “Even if I believed you, there is no way to do what you’re asking.”
“I’m not making this up. Just look at them. My name’s on there, and I wrote down a couple phone numbers where I can be reached.”