A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (18 page)

Father Wanderly, Dad, and Dr. Navidson tightened into their own circle, and they talked fast and over one another so I couldn’t really make out who said what. But they were all talking about how Marjorie was in fact possessed by a demon, with the proof being what she was and wasn’t capable of doing.

“—fourteen-year-old girl couldn’t possibly know all she claimed to know—”

“—to give details advanced seminary students wouldn’t give—”

“—the name of the book, in correct Latin—”

“—to refer to Freud and this fictional demon from a long-dead author—”

“—even if she looked it all up on the computer—”

“—no way she could’ve memorized it all—”

“—she did more than memorize, she synthesized—”

“—never mind anticipate that she’d need to say or use that information during our interview—”

“—right—”

“—a girl like her can’t speak as eloquently as she did—”

“—no way—”

“—a girl wouldn’t ask the questions she asked—”

Mom yelled at them, “Marjorie has always been an extremely intelligent young woman. Of course she can do all those things you’re saying she can’t do.”

Dad said, “Sarah, we’re not saying she’s not an intelligent girl. That’s not the point. Now’s not the time to—”

Mom didn’t wait for him to finish. She tugged roughly on my arm and said, “Come on. In the kitchen. With me. Now.”

I followed her into the kitchen. I thought Mom was crying but she wasn’t. She was seething with anger and muttering under her breath. She slammed cabinet doors and poured herself a big glass of wine and a cup of milk for me. I asked her to warm it up and she put it in the microwave, slamming that door shut too.

We sat at the table with our drinks. I tested the milk with my lips and it was the perfect temperature. I finally asked her, “Who are you mad at?”

“Everything. Everyone. Myself included.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad at you, honey. You’re the only person I’m not mad at.”

“Marjorie too?”

“I’m not mad at her either. She’s sick and she needs help, and I don’t think anyone in the other room is really going to help her, but it’s my own damn fault that I can’t stop it now. I should never have let it happen in the first place. I mean, can you believe this? Any of this? How did we get here? The cameras, writers, producers, protesters, priests. What a mess. I was just so scared that we were losing her and I didn’t know what to do anymore—and I wanted to believe. Wanted to believe all of it. I still do.”

Mom looked down and saw me staring at her. She said, “Drink your milk.”

I wanted to tell her that it was going to be okay, that Marjorie had told me that she was faking so when Father Wanderly performed his exorcism she would fake that it worked too. But I didn’t. I can’t really explain why. I remember so much of that fall in detail (and I’m in the unique position of having six televised episodes of my family to revisit when I do forget
something), and sometimes I feel like I’m still the same eight-year-old little sister who longs for big sis to tell her what to do and how to do it.

I said to Mom, “I believe. You should too, like Dad. Yeah. I think Father Wanderly can help. He can. He’ll make her be normal again.”

Mom crumbled into chest-heaving sobs. I didn’t know what happened so I kept saying
Mom
over and over again, and when I tried to ask her what was wrong and tried to hug her she shook me away. She wouldn’t let me pull her hands away from her face, and she told me to get out and go away. When I said, “Why, what did I do?” she told me to leave her alone and go see Daddy and the priest because they had all the answers and to leave her alone, and I still asked her
why-why-why
until she screamed, “Get the fuck away from me!” and threw her wineglass at the wall.

LATER THAT NIGHT WE ENACTED
a new bedtime policy to help keep Marjorie from hurting herself any further and to give everyone “peace of mind.” That was the phrase Dad used, and I tried to make a joke out of it; pantomiming my presenting him with a literal chunk of my brain. It didn’t go over well.

The new policy: Marjorie was to sleep with her door open, and Dad was to be in his room with his door open. Mom was to sleep with me in my room. I could leave my door open or shut. It was up to me. Right before he left, I’d heard Dr. Navidson whisper to Dad about letting me choose whether or not to leave my door open as it would empower me, give me a sense of control over the situation.

Mom had finished a third glass of wine by the time I was sent to the bathroom to get ready for bed. When I got to my room she was in my bed already, still in her clothes but underneath the covers. Mom told me no stories. She said she was too tired and that I had to go straight to sleep. She
didn’t apologize for swearing at me and throwing the glass in the kitchen either.

I stood in my doorway, undecided on whether to leave the door open. I saw it as an important choice, one not to be taken lightly. I said more to myself than to Mom, “If I close the door then we won’t be able to hear anything, you know, in case we need to hear it. But if I leave it open I think it’ll be too bright in here for me to sleep, and too noisy too. But I kinda want to leave it open because everyone else has theirs open. But if I close it”—I opened and closed the door like I was working a bellows—“we might sleep later than everyone else by accident and I’ll be late for school. And if I leave it open, I might not fall asleep and be too tired to go to school. If I close it—”

“Merry. Enough. Shut the light off. Get in bed. Now.”

I left the door half open, which I figured was a good compromise. I took off my glasses, put them on the bureau all folded up, and I crawled over Mom and into bed. She was on the outside and I was pinned between her and the bedroom wall. Her back was turned to me. I sloppy kissed her ear and said, “Good night, Ear.” Mom didn’t turn her head and just sent an empty air kiss back to me.

I was wired, twitchy, leaking giggles and random noises. I tried breathing my end-of-the-day sigh, the one that signaled it was truly time for bed. It didn’t work. I put my icy-cold feet on the back of Mom’s bare calves as a joke. She barely flinched, and told me from some faraway place to go to sleep.

I lay there on my back with my hands folded across my chest, trying to remember and recount everything that had been said in Marjorie’s room. I knew that the adults would pick through the video and be able to break down what she’d said and find the potential meanings and secrets. I knew that for them, words meant so many different things. I worried that
they would figure out Marjorie didn’t have a real demon inside her, that she was faking, and then they’d cancel the show and our family would be back in trouble with money again. But then I thought about her scratch marks and how scary she was, and I wondered if it was possible for her to be both possessed by a demon and be faking it too. And then I worried about getting a demon stuck inside me, and I worried about it happening to my parents—what would we do then? I rolled the word
demon
around in my mouth, squeezing it with my tongue, tasting it, letting it flick off the back of my teeth, saying it in my head until the syllables didn’t fit right and it sounded weird and indecipherable, just like the strange demon name Marjorie had given them.

I woke up later that night and Mom was snoring deeply. I didn’t really have to go pee but I went to the bathroom anyway. I left the bathroom door open and my peeing was so loud I giggled with embarrassment, but I was also laughing at whoever would be stuck watching and listening to the tape from the hallway cameras.

I crept out of the bathroom without washing my hands and stood in the hallway. It was chilly even though steam whistled in our old radiators and I could smell the heat, which I’d imagined was the smell of burning dust. Dad’s door was still open. He slept pushed all the way to the side of the bed closest to the hallway. His mouth was open and his lips drooped like one of those silly dogs with the saggy skin.

Marjorie’s door remained open as well. Getting up to pee when I didn’t really need to was how an eight-year-old lied to herself: Of course, I only got up to use the bathroom, not to go see what Marjorie was doing.

I watched my sleeping father as I slunk into her room. Without my glasses, everything was a little bit fuzzy. Like my father, Marjorie was lying on her side, facing the door. But she was wide awake.

“Did you hear me peeing?”

She whispered, “I’ve been watching Dad all night. I’m worried. I think he might be the one who’s possessed. No lie. His face twitches like he’s in pain. Hasn’t he been acting so strange? So over-the-top religious now, and always so angry? I’m scared. I think he thinks about doing bad things, really bad things, like in the growing-things story I told you.”

I shrugged and thought about telling her that Mom had been angry too. “I think he’s okay.”

“He spent over an hour reading from the Bible. I think he was reading the same passage over and over because he wasn’t turning any pages.”

“Marjorie—”

“Shh.”

I’d forgotten to whisper. “Sorry. Are you still faking?”

“What do you think?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am. No worries, monkey.”

“Why’d you say all those things? Why’d you scratch yourself like that?”

“I had to do it. To make them all believe.”

“Mom doesn’t.”

“She just says she doesn’t. But she does. I can tell. Whenever she looks at me now, it’s like she’s watching a scary movie.”

“Did the scratches hurt?”

She didn’t answer my question right away. She said, “Be prepared. It’s going to get worse. Mom and Dad are both going to get worse. But this is the only way, now. We have to show them.”

“Show them what?”

“The scratches hurt, yeah. But that’s nothing. I’ll have to do something worse, much worse, eventually. Go back to bed. They’ll wake up soon.”

I tiptoed out of her bedroom, almost believing that if I was sneaky enough, if I was light enough on my feet, the hallway camera wouldn’t see me, or whoever was watching the footage would think I was just coming out of the bathroom again.

Of course, the next morning I got in big trouble. Someone (I’ve always wondered if it was Ken but I never asked him) must’ve told Dad about my nighttime wanderings as soon as he got up because he lit into me at breakfast, in the middle of my bowl of chocolate Cheerios, full-on yelling at me for the first time in front of the cameras. It was a serious scolding; he stood so that he towered above the sitting me, his face all red and eyes jumping out of his head. He repeatedly asked if I thought this was some sort of game, if I thought they were all fooling around? I cried and apologized, told him I was worried and only checking to see if Marjorie was okay. Mom didn’t say anything and went outside for a smoke while Marjorie’s bagel was toasting. He asked why I thought they had made the new bedtime rules. He said that I wasn’t dumb and that I was smart enough to figure it out, but in a way that made me feel dumb.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, I was forbidden to go to her room or to be with Marjorie if I was by myself until further notice. If I did it again, I wouldn’t be able to watch my
Bigfoot
and
River Monsters
shows.

OF COURSE THE
show used material from that night in Marjorie’s room to fill the third and fourth episodes.

They showed the actual interview with Dr. Navidson in the room from two different angles. They slowed down the film to focus on Marjorie’s facial expressions and hand gestures, and at the 12:37 time stamp of the interview, when she first referred to herself as “we,” there’s a frame (caught from both camera angles) where her irises appeared to be red, as though someone had taken her photo with a flash. The show interviewed two photography experts who analyzed films and arrived at no conclusion as to the source of the red in her eyes. They also slowed down the interview film to point out some odd shadow play that occurred on the wall behind Marjorie, offset to her right, and for the viewers, their left. At three different times, there appeared to be long, tubular-shaped shadows, waving and writhing in the background. Again, the photography experts
were consulted, and again, they came to no conclusion although, without giving their evidence, they immediately dismissed Photoshop, editing tricks, and other ways of physically doctoring the film as a possible cause.

Sound and voice experts examined Marjorie’s audio. They dissected the parts where her voice changed, and examined the speech patterns and frequency waves, and made readings of her emotional state using Layered Voice Analysis. One expert claimed that the other voices she spoke in had totally different voice biometrics (which reflect both the anatomy of the speaker—the size and shape of the mouth and throat—and the behavioral/regional speech patterns/style of the speaker) and could not have come from the same person.

They fact-checked everything Marjorie had said, verifying the sources she quoted, and they briefly investigated and examined her claims about the Pope performing an exorcism in St. Peter’s Square. They showed a clip of Pope Francis laying hands on a man in a wheelchair who convulsed and slumped as the Pope prayed. They showed the Vatican’s written statement; a nondenial denial that he’d performed an exorcism in public. They quoted a book Pope Francis had written when he was an Archbishop titled
On Heaven and Earth
, highlighting the second chapter (titled “On the Devil”) and its ominous snippets relating to Satan and his terrible influence. They ran a brief third-party interview with the Bishop of Madrid who had indeed petitioned the Vatican to train more of his priests as exorcists.

They outlined a brief biography of the writer H. P. Lovecraft. They detailed an extensive bibliography and the recent renaissance of his ideas and influence on current popular and literary culture, noting the new volume of his work published by the Library of America. They explained his Elder Gods/Cthulhu mythos and where the demon Yidhra fit into it, and attempted to place Yidhra within a wider context in the history of demons/spirits within folklore and religion.

Between the many segments of their dissection of Marjorie’s interview, they ran reaction interviews from everyone involved. There were multiple clips of Mom and Dad giving their thoughts and opinions. Dad was always shot in bright light, usually on the back porch, his chest puffed, standing tall, resolute, like he was ready to do whatever it was he was supposed to do. It didn’t really look like him, not the him that I remember. His eyes were solar flares, and he smiled too widely, all teeth. And he didn’t sound like I remember him sounding. He didn’t talk to the camera. He orated. He gave pep talks about how our family would overcome. He proselytized, working in Bible references and “May God bless our family” whenever he could.

The interviews they ran with Mom were shot with her sitting in the kitchen, in dim lighting, almost sepia toned, and with a cigarette trailing smoke in an ashtray more times than not. They painted her as the Doubting Thomas of the family, which she was. But they also made her seem like she was on the verge of an emotional breakdown, which she was, but so was Dad. I’m convinced they employed more than a little creative editing to her interviews. On the show she became the character who was inarticulately denying reality; the reality of our reality show. The off-screen interviewer would ask her to explain the shadows on the film or Marjorie’s red eyes (something they didn’t do with Dad, or if they did ask him to do so, they didn’t run those interviews) or some of the things Marjorie had said and they’d cut to Mom shrugging, stammering, shrinking into her chair, and mumbling, “I don’t know” or “not sure.”

Dr. Navidson was filmed speaking somewhere in the house, and even I can’t tell exactly where he was when he was interviewed since he stood right up against a white wall (Kitchen? Living room? One of the hallways? Stairwell landing? Guest room?) and his head took up the whole screen. He fumbled around and appeared very uncomfortable one-on-one
with the camera. He declined to comment on specific details of this case, noting patient-client confidentiality, but admitted that he did recommend to the bishop that Marjorie’s was an extraordinary case, one that was beyond science.

They ran a get-to-know-me interview with Father Wanderly, with him sitting in a pew inside his church. He detailed his experience as a Jesuit, his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the College of the Holy Cross, spoke lovingly about his dog, Milo, a cocker spaniel mix that had lived with him at the rectory for sixteen years. The off-screen interviewer asked him if he knew any jokes. Father Wanderly seemed genuinely embarrassed, said that he didn’t know many, but did tell one: “Did you hear how the devil is having a terrible time of it with our current economy? The wages of sin have gone up ten percent.”

In one of Father Wanderly’s reaction interviews (conducted in the foyer, with him standing in front of the stairs, natural light pouring in from one of the windows behind him and to his right) he was much more forthcoming than Dr. Navidson had been in outlining the reasons why he was confident Marjorie was indeed possessed by an evil spirit.

They even ran an interview with one of the protesters out in front of our house, which, shockingly, turned out to be a huge mistake. I’m guessing Barry et al, knew that running the interview with the sign-carrying kook would encourage more protesters, and more protesters would mean more (free!) media coverage. But as sniveling and weasely and so obviously uncaring to our family’s well-being as he was, I don’t think that he would’ve purposefully dropped the busload of infamous Baptist hate-group loonies on our doorstep, which is, of course, what happened.

They ran a single reaction interview with me. It was very brief. Ken was off-camera. He asked me questions while I sat on my bed. During taping, which happened after I’d returned home from an especially crappy
day at school, we talked for close to an hour. Most of it was about the previous night in Marjorie’s room. Some of it was about what it was like living with the cameras, and what it was like just being me in general. They aired only three questions and answers, a snippet used as the closing segment to the fourth episode:

Ken: “Do you love your sister?”

Me: “Oh yes. Very much. She’s my best friend. I want to be just like her and I’d do anything for her.”

Ken: “When Father Wanderly and Dr. Navidson were asking her questions last night, were you scared?”

Me (after a long pause during which I changed sitting positions on my bed, from legs unfolded to legs crossed, or crisscross applesauce): “Yeah, a little. But I wasn’t scared of Marjorie. I was scared of what Father Wanderly says is happening to her.”

Ken: “What was the scariest part?”

Me: “Well . . . seeing the scratches all over her. I didn’t think she’d do that to herself.”

THEY FILLED TWO EPISODES WITH
material from and relating to that night because they could. But also because they had to.

Two days after the night in Marjorie’s room, Father Wanderly informed us that the bishop heading the northern pastoral region of the Archdiocese of Boston (which was composed of sixty-four parishes in southern Essex County) had given his permission and blessing to perform an exorcism on Marjorie. Father Wanderly, after briefly consulting with Barry, also told us that he would need eight days to be fully prepared. No one questioned this.

For those eight days the world outside our house grew increasingly
chaotic. School became intolerable. Kids picked on me more often and more openly. Given the recent bullying laws passed in Massachusetts, which placed considerable legal culpability upon the school if bullying incidents went unreported, faculty and administration were in a tizzy, and Mom was called in routinely for meetings. The adults didn’t seem to know what to do but Mom wasn’t about to keep me home from school. All I knew was that the kid who called me “Sister Satan” and pinched my arms hard enough to leave bruises three days in a row was suddenly not at school for the next two, and when he returned, he wasn’t allowed to go near me.

Marjorie had already stopped going to school altogether but a group of her former classmates set up an Instagram account under her name and posted screencaps from the show—both of her and of the actor playing her. Years later I found out that the screencaps had violent or brutally sexualized captions. There was one picture of Actor-Marjorie masturbating in the hallway with the caption: “Twerk for Satan! Fuck me in the ass, Jesus!” The page’s creator and five other students were suspended for a week.

Despite the cold of mid-November, the number of protesters in front of our house swelled so that the road was almost impassable to traffic. Two policemen were assigned detail to keep the protesters from encroaching on the property and from making contact with us or the crew. The police had to replace yellow tape daily and often had to clear people away from the mouth of our driveway whenever a car left or entered.

Mom took a leave of absence from the bank. She didn’t tell me, but I overheard her telling Dad that it was the bank’s idea. She went grocery shopping in towns that were thirty minutes or more away. She spent her evenings on the phone with her parents (my only living grandparents) who lived in California. They didn’t understand what it was we were doing on
the show. Mom told me that after everything was done, maybe we’d go for a visit. I said, “Yay! For how long?” She said, “I—I don’t know. Maybe for a really long time.”

Dad spent most of his mornings at Father Wanderly’s parish, attending the two morning masses, and apparently even served as a Eucharistic Minister. He told me it was the best way to start the day. I remember him telling me that “going there fills me with hope, and all the prayers and support from my fellow parishioners are sustaining, like sunshine for a beautiful sunflower.” I wanted to tell him that this, all of this, wasn’t about him, but I chickened out. He spent most of his afternoons arguing with and attempting to intimidate protesters. He grew scarier by the day.

So while our place or status within the community continued to deteriorate, the goings-on inside our house turned relatively calm. Now that we had a hard date upon which an exorcism would be attempted, Marjorie’s bizarre behavior went into a kind of remission. She wouldn’t talk much and she still wore her earphones most of the time, and I’d catch her talking to herself and giggling at nothing, but she willingly left her room and came downstairs to eat dinner with us in the kitchen.

For seven days there wasn’t anything that happened inside the house that was dramatic or show-worthy. I know this because Barry spent most of that week stomping around, going room to room as though he expected that he himself would find demons defecating in dark corners or the walls bleeding or something equally entertaining. No such luck. He snapped at crew members, especially at Ken, once telling him, “You have to figure out something. We need
something
to shoot.”

The “something to shoot” turned out to be a post-dinner family scene. It was the night before the exorcism was to be performed, and we were all in the living room watching TV. Dad had put on a show where a survivalist is dumped in the middle of the wilderness and eats tree sap, bugs, and
rodents for ten days. In this episode, the guy was somewhere deep in the Boreal forest. I was watching, but not really watching. I did cartwheels across the room and front rolls into the couch, asking Dad to rate them by giving me a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Mom only halfheartedly asked me to stop, so I didn’t. She wasn’t paying much attention anyway, and had her nose buried in her smartphone.

Marjorie came downstairs and said, “Hi. Is it okay if I watch TV too?”

We all stuttered and stumbled over one another saying “yes” and “sure” and “come on in.” Marjorie plopped herself down on the floor in front of the TV, lying on her stomach, head propped up in her hands. We all watched her watching TV. There was an odd feeling in the room. We were nervous that something would happen, but at the same time, we were glad she was there.

Barry and Ken suddenly appeared in the front foyer. Two cameras, one at each end of the room, were focused on us. Barry announced that he wanted to tape a scene of us together trying to maintain our normal family life. He actually said “normal family life” to us. He whisper-consulted with Ken, read some of Ken’s notes, and then gave us some direction.