Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (24 page)

“You could say you’re safer, but then are you really doing what we’re called on to do? What does it ever accomplish? You’re safer if you sit in your house and do nothing. Won’t you be starved for humanity?”

Ruth folds her socked feet under her legs.

“The scariest part,” she says, “is that the world will always appear to be so much more perfect when you’re demonized.”

•  •  •

Marianne makes a bed for me atop the shag carpet of her floor. We take turns changing into our pajamas. “You go first,” she says. It was too soon for nakedness.

“Are you ready?” she asks from the hallway. She must have changed in the bathroom because she enters wearing lavender pajama pants and a white top. The lights go off and her feet stick to the hardwood floors when she walks. Each part of her body adjusts itself, and the sound of her hair dropping on the pillow is like a light patter of rain.

“This is fun,” Marianne says.

“Sure,” I say.

“Just like a sleepover,” she says. “I love sleepovers.”

I don’t respond.

“Do you like them?” she asks, her voice quieter this time, more careful.

“I do.”

“Do you want to play Truth or Dare?”

“Maybe next time?” I say, gently as I can.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, good night then.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, but the words are so quiet I doubt they reach her.

In the morning, the son of Jesus breaks egg yolks in a glass bowl. “You lose a lot of protein when you go into the spirit realm. It’s exhausting. It requires a different kind of energy.” Ruth’s slicing a mango at a curved booth in the back of the kitchen. Marianne plays with her wet hair. “You’ll be tired. A lot of times we’ll sleep for a few days.”

“Did you sleep well? Because I didn’t,” Marianne says. “I was talking to the Holy Spirit all night. I was seeing things. Getting salvation.”

“Are you sure you don’t want some fruit?” Ruth says, holding out a mango for me. “We have peaches, plums, bananas.”

“We’ve been trying to eat really healthy,” Marianne says. “Nothing processed.”

Ruth nods. “I usually have almonds and yogurt for breakfast. But, of course, today’s an exception. Today is deliverance. Today we can eat whatever we want.”

“I wish they had a Trader Joe’s here. I love Trader Joe’s. Do you know about Trader Joe’s? They should open one in Savannah. I bet it would do really well,” Marianne says, glancing at the ceiling.

“Not me,” Ruth says. “I hate Savannah. Too many demons.”

“It’s not as bad as Charleston,” says Marianne. “You know, with repression.”

The son of Jesus shovels two eggs and two sausages on my plate, and then points her spatula at me, the tip wet with oil. “Did you put on your armor today?”

“I don’t know about any armor.”

“Well, everyone has their own method,” Marianne says. “I—”

“Armor!” the son of Jesus interrupts. She stands by the sink with the water rushing over a colander of plums and she starts shouting to God and moving her hands all over her body as if untying herself from a tangle of rope.

“Mom’s fast at it,” Ruth says.

“I usually put my armor on in the shower,” Marianne says. “Sometimes I go to the shower and I say, ‘Oh, God, I just don’t feel like putting on my armor today.’ ” She holds a spoonful of eggs near her cheek.

“But you gotta do it,” she says. “Why don’t you do it now?” I stop chewing.

“Come on.”

“Please, dear God, don’t let the demons get me today,” I say. “I don’t know what I would do. I’m new.” I lift my hands in the air and pretend to pour a bucket of water on my head.

“Amen!” The son of Jesus takes my plate. “Get changed, girls.”

Marianne heads to her closet and throws a few items on the bed. “What do you think I should wear?” she asks. “I like looking nice for the Holy Spirit.”

“Maybe the purple one?”

“Yeah,” she says, drawing out her vowels. “You and Jesus both.”

•  •  •

In Portal, when you look out past the fields that lay scattered and untilled you see patches of grass formed into the shape of fallen rags, trees dead so long the insides have been ingested by animals and used for better things, and the noon sun that filters through their cracked wood makes them glow in an unformed shape, no longer trees but lost things making their way across the land.

This afternoon, at deliverance, there’s a woman crying in waves. Everyone has their eyes closed, searching for the enemy. There will be manifestations, women screaming. They’ll find child abuse. Destroyers. Voices will churn in darkness. There will be victims of alcohol and victims of war. Tim will train new exorcists. He’ll give them a thicker demon workbook. He’ll tell them what to watch out for when the enemies attack. He will tell them to move around in the circle. He will take a particular liking to an apprentice who also sees a vision of a man trapped inside a tornado when trying to figure out what is wrong with a man whose wife ran away to Mexico. Daphne and Daisy will draw their thoughts on yellow legal pads. The drawings will be chaotic and dark: human bodies slashed apart.

•  •  •

I’m thinking about my physical reaction to their words—the way a bodily response feels like a verifiable symptom. The Greek language has many words to describe pain, but English does not. The word
pappapai
is physical pain whereas
otototoi
is a cry of grief.

Physical pain is corporeal and so wounds feel like evidence. We point to bloodied knees. We cough in napkins because yellowed phlegm means sick lungs. We stick lights down our throat to illuminate a gathering of strep. If the existence of pain is always, if possible, confirmed through the flesh, then the pain of the mind—psychic pain, tragic pain, the pain of broken hearts—must also desire such confirmation.

I think of the eight million soldiers who emerged shell-shocked from the trenches of World War I, when what we now call PTSD was called hysteria, and because hysteria was considered a female disease, unacceptable in males, soldiers expressed their trauma through the body. Snipers went blind. Soldiers who had bayoneted men in the face developed hysterical facial tics. Those who knifed men in the stomach were burdened with nauseating cramps. A soldier who was buried in the earth from a shell explosion later feared the dark.

•  •  •

Caleb worked six-month rotations as a contractor in Afghanistan and received three months’ leave. Always gone, it seemed. Eden waited around the trailer. No work to do but twirl her wedding ring and sweat in the cool waters of the inflatable pool, wearing a cherry red swimsuit with wide coverage. Babies floated and splashed. She found items around the trailer to sell: turquoise jewelry, yellow crochets, porcelain figurines of ballerinas with their toes painted the most delicate pink. Caleb’s promises weighed heavily in her gut. What did she want? Simple things. Home, children, security.

The minister got what he had hoped: Caleb quit his plans to save veterans. But contracting in Afghanistan, away from the trailer, and away from his youngest daughter, wasn’t what the minister had in mind. Already he’d tired of seeing Eden checking her mail, wandering lonely around the trailer—doomed, even, to be a widow, he figured, with the way things were going. She hated the phases between deployments of relearning each other’s habits and bodies.

One Saturday Caleb heard the minister’s heavy footsteps coming up the hall. He was folding laundry, and the minister stepped inside and closed the door. “You need to be home for your wife,” he said. The minister stood close and leaned forward. He set a thick finger on Caleb’s chest.

“I’m going to count to three,” Caleb said. “And I’m going to hurt you if you don’t stop.”

“One,” he said.
Two.
Caleb remembered the time the minister walked into a car dealership and started praying and how they threw him out. He thought about the minister’s sons-in-law and how they worshipped him. They couldn’t even go out and buy a car without asking Tim to ask God. Caleb punched the minister. “I won’t kneel to you,” Caleb said. “Never.” The minister wept on the ground with his eyes open, staring at a ceiling that never did rip open to show him heaven. He ran Caleb out of the house by chasing him into the yard with the immense gait of a bear. Caleb stuck around the trailer anyway. He and Eden fought, kissing and patting, and then separating with vicious talk, sitting quietly at mealtimes. Eden wasn’t really on either side of things. A mind too long wound with Scripture sent her in circles between loyalty to her husband or to her father. The minister spoke to neither.

Weeks later, Caleb and Eden separated. Eden stayed at the trailer. Caleb drove off. Still, he wanted no one but Eden. All night he drove through sloping countryside, stopping at Mexican cafés, throwing back cervezas for the first time since the demon slipped out. He checked in at motels with coupon deals. In a week he was living on a boat at Lake Allatoona. He asked his son, Isaac, to think of a name for the boat. Together they decided on the name
Infidel.

When the kids came to visit the
Infidel
, they dressed as pirates, and in the evening, when the water was dark and flat as a stain, Caleb dimmed the boat lights and kept the motor at a slow purr. Alligator fish, attracted to the noise, rose to the surface. Caleb and Isaac started shooting them. Blood everywhere.

•  •  •

In the summer, four months later, Caleb has a vision of me dying in a dark jungle mist. Hacking at creeper vines with a machete. Going in circles. There’s no way out.

“I got my radar on you. Something is happening,” he says.

Sometimes, if I wake, and a curtain twists in a night breeze, I think of him, and the others, slipping away in the dark.

One day he calls and suggests I rid my house of what he calls contaminated items: two bookcases, a table, and a bicycle. I ignore him. Months later, another bat comes into my room. Then a third time. When I listen to a recording of my exorcism, the power goes out. For these months, I wake at 1:46 in the morning. I’m fitting patterns together that aren’t really there, the same way Caleb might have done, stringing a narrative through his past that made sense in light of the war’s atrocity. But it’s not the specificity of Caleb’s demons that I believe, only that there’s something happening to my psychology. I wait two days and then I do it. I push each item onto the street. A neighbor takes the bicycle and stores it in his yard. Every day when I look out the window I can see the bicycle and I’m reminded of illness.

I had a friend who used to believe in a theology of angels and demons. One night he woke up and the barn across the street was burning. Three black figures ran from it. The neighbors burned the barn to rid it of demons. He was afraid of the dark. The local minister told him to look into the darkness and say:
tell me your name.
When he left his Pentecostal upbringing behind, he also left those beliefs.

“The point is,” he said, “that we’re just slipping from one hallucination to another.”

I’m thinking of this story because I’m watching a clip of three soldiers urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. The media keeps asking how this atrocity could happen. I no longer find myself asking that question. I’ve come to understand how easily, how intrusively, a heightened situation can make us, any of us, slip.

The unknown can come for us. And when it does, it’s devastating. For America, the unknown came on 9/11. The mythic bridge building gone. The moment that shined a light on everything that preceded it.

•  •  •

I drive four hours from Iowa City to Missouri to see him. He won’t stop telling me it’s an emergency that he needs to talk. The image of bat pushes me back to him. Caleb is damp from the rains. There are white flakes on his cheekbones from a recent sunburn. His eyes are dark and worried as if someone reached inside and scooped out all the blue.

His mother lives in Columbia, a half hour from Centralia, and when I ask Caleb whether his mother and stepfather know that he sees demons, he shakes his head. He doesn’t care. “They’ll figure it out.” His stepfather is sitting on a rocking chair, watching football. The stepdad is eager to tell me about the moment he heard about the chopper crash in Afghanistan. “Caleb called from Savannah,” he says. “He wanted to let us know that he was still alive.”

We drive toward St. Louis. Caleb hangs his arm out the car window. The air stings with diesel fumes. His kids are in the backseat, the two from his ex-wife, Isaac and Isabel. They sit close.

“I thought you believed God brought you and Eden together?”

“We make choices in our life,” he says. “I was wrong before about God. I still had learning to do. I was putting everything God gave me into what I thought I wanted. Not what it will be.”

“There was a man who came for deliverance,” I say. “But they couldn’t save him. I saw him hiding out at some motel wearing camo.”

“Luciferian,” he says. “You know I wouldn’t be surprised if Tim were a Luciferian. I don’t think he’s ever been through deliverance.”

“It says in his book he has.” Caleb doesn’t answer. “You didn’t read the book, did you?”

“That crap?” He shakes his head.

“You told me to read it.”

“Things were different then.”

“You don’t believe anymore?”

Caleb slits his eyes and rolls his head toward me. “I’ve been through too much. I see it every day. It’s real. I was wrong before about God. I still had learning to do. I was putting everything God gave me into what I thought I wanted. Not what it
will
be.” He stuffs Copenhagen under his lip and mumbles through it. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “They saved me. They do good things, amazing things, but they’re fucking
crazy.
They messed up my friends Mary and Chris so bad. You meet Mary and Chris? They infected Mary’s mind, made her think she was a terrible person—they get in your head.” He points at his head and looks at me. “Chris couldn’t even deploy—he had to miss work to take care of her.”

In St. Louis, the Arch rushes like a geyser across the sky. Its metal twists sunlight. We stop so Isaac and Isabel can take a ride in a tourist helicopter that flies at its height. Isaac mourns for a bird killed in the chopper blades.