For a while he thought—he tried to think—it was an ordinary obsession. He even went to one of those groups for “love addicts” where they do enactments to purify their bodies and ask their higher powers to shield them from the lower powers. But when the others talked of their need for reassurance because their parents had never loved them, or described the thousands of dollars they’d spent at singles’ retreats, Paul knew his problem came from another level.
He kept thinking he should do something, maybe a freedom enactment. But he could never seem to do it. He would plan one, set up his sanctuary with strings of flowers and twenty-four-hour candles, spray the air with purifier, and go off to work, determined to go home right away and fulfil the inner path, as people say. Instead, he’d let Lisa take him off to a disco and then her apartment, and by the time he’d get home, the candles would have burned out and flower petals would lie all over the floor.
One time he tied his childhood spirit string around his wrist when he went to work. Since Paul’s parents’ death the string had meant a lot to him. He used to keep it in a special glass case on his permanent altar. When he put it on that day, his wrist stung for a moment and he found he wanted to yank it off and throw it away. Instead, he left it on, and suddenly the pain vanished and he closed his eyes and smiled. He went to work, he told me later, more cheerful than he’d felt in weeks. At lunchtime when he saw Lisa she “twitched” (his word) when he kissed her. That night, when they made love, she said she wanted to play and gave him some kind of costume to wear (he wouldn’t say what). Only, he had to take everything off, including the string. The next morning when he got dressed he couldn’t find it. They searched the whole bedroom, until Lisa persuaded him he better get to work. She’d give it to him when she found it, she said. Sure.
And then, one night, Lisa had some kind of appointment. So Paul stayed home for once and was watching Slade!, that cop show on TV where the hero investigates possession for the SDA. In the episode, Slade goes to a Southern town to investigate some mysterious deaths and gets stonewalled by the local sheriff’s office. At one point, a woman is running through a swamp, trying to escape a group of Malignant Ones who’ve taken the form of dogs and cats. She takes refuge in a cabin and bars the door. Inside, she recites the Standard Formula of Recognition. You know, “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your Malignant Intervention.” Well, in the story, she gets halfway through the formula when one of the dogs smashes through the door and knocks her to the ground. Then, after they all attack her, they change into the local cops. Shock. Horror. Commercial.
But for Paul the real shock came with his reaction to the Formula. Without realizing it, he started to say it out loud in his apartment. He got as far as “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know—” And then he stopped, gasping in pain. He felt, he said, like someone had kicked him in the stomach. When he stopped speaking the pain eased, but he was shaking and sweating. A couple of minutes later, he thought of trying it again, but just the thought filled him with terror. The panic stopped as soon as he gave up the idea of trying to say the Formula.
Paul didn’t sleep much that night. He just lay in bed, wondering if he should call the SDA emergency number, telling himself it could wait until morning, jumping every time he heard a strange noise outside his apartment or even the wind against his window. Over and over again he thought how if he wasn’t saying the Formula he should do something else, maybe set up a ring of protection, or else just write down his fears on sanctified paper and burn them. Instead, he just lay in bed, terrified. But when morning came, it all seemed okay again. Paul found himself laughing at his “paranoia”. His suggestiveness. He shouldn’t watch so much TV, he told himself.
Two days later, however, he managed to tell Lisa he was sick and was going to leave work early. Come to her office, she told him. She could make him feel better. Heal him. Her friends told her she was a natural healer. She had healing hands, they said. Her friends said she should quit her temp agency and run a hand sanctuary.
Paul realized he had never met Lisa’s friends. Not a single one. Nor her family. He started to feel clammy and cold, and thought how he didn’t need to lie to go home sick.
He left his office but he didn’t go home. Instead, he changed his suit for jeans, T-shirt, dark glasses and cap, and sat in a diner across the street from the building. When Lisa left he followed her. At first, he tried to stay close to the buildings, even duck into doorways. But after a couple of minutes, when she didn’t look back, he got bolder, even moved up close. This is ridiculous, he told himself. If she did spot him, she probably would just laugh at him. Never let him forget it. Maybe he could convince her it was some sort of sex game. He half felt that way himself. He would get aroused and instead of him following her, it felt like Lisa had hold of his penis, like a tow rope, and was pulling him along (his image, not mine).
He followed her to a hospital, the huge Mirando Glowwood Sanctuary for the Healing Arts on 7th Avenue. Paul expected they would need passes to go up to the rooms, but no one seemed to take any notice of either of them as he followed her past the front desk to the giftshop, where she bought a mixed bouquet of flowers, and then up a couple of flights of stairs. Paul found himself relaxing. After all his suspicions, she was just visiting a sick friend.
Paul never found out what was wrong with the man in room 603. He was so concerned that no one give him away he didn’t even bother to notice if the floor focused on any special area of medicine. When Lisa entered the room Paul strolled past the doorway, slow enough to notice a man asleep or unconscious in a private room, with a man and woman in chairs beside the bed. Friends of Lisa, he thought, with a guilty thrill that he finally could meet some of her friends if only he could think up an explanation for how he got there. But then the man and woman just got up and left, seemingly without even noticing Lisa was in the room. Paul pretended to be reading the names posted outside a room down the hall until the two had left, and then he moved back to just outside 603, where he could look inside without being noticed.
Lisa had pulled back the sheets and now was unbuttoning the man’s pyjamas, all without him moving or opening his eyes. Paul said he looked like he’d been lying there, unconscious, for a long time. There were sores up and down his body. When the man’s body lay all exposed, Lisa began to undress. Paul told me how he wanted to run, to get as far away as he could, but he couldn’t make himself move.
The moment Lisa straddled the man, he came alive. Or rather his body came alive, thrusting into her and thrashing on the bed. The man himself stayed unconscious, his face as blank, Paul said, as the sky. Nor did anyone else seem to notice anything. The bed thumped, strange noises came out of the man’s throat, yet people just walked by—patients in bathrobes, visitors, nurses. Once, a woman in one of those candy-striped volunteer outfits bumped into Paul, smiled cheerfully and walked on, taking no notice either of the pounding noises inside the room or Paul staring back at her terrified.
As the body rolled about with Lisa the sores opened up, spitting out a thick mixture of blood and pus, like a fountain with ten or twenty spouts. Paul watched it soak the bed, ooze down onto the floor. He watched Lisa scoop it up in her hands and smear it all about the man’s face. She’s killing him, he thought, and knew he should run for help, or at least cry out. But he just stayed and watched.
When Lisa finally lifted off the man, he went limp again, draped across the drenched bed. Only now Lisa took the flowers she’d bought and placed them on the man’s genitals, where they—clung. That was the word Paul used. The flowers seized the man’s crotch like some animal feeding on his discharges.