Whispers in the Night (23 page)

“Why don't you go watch TV, Mr. Black?” Daniel asked.

“Hurm. I wouldn't enjoy that.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you are doing this on purpose.”

“No, I'm not doing this on purpose.” He took off his boxers.

“Come on, Mr. Black. I don't have time for this.”

“Why are you here, then, surrounded by old folks?” Mr. Black asked with a rising sharpness to his voice.

“Morbid curiosity.” The words spat out more sharply than Daniel intended.

“Tell yourself that if you want.” Mr. Black's eyes alit with dark perspicuity. “You live in a world of the weak and the wounded. Being here lets you feel superior to your fellow believers.”

It dawned on Daniel how difficult it was to tell the demon-possessed from the mentally addled. He thought he had Mr. Black—still standing naked from the waist down, a collection of wrinkled flesh—pegged as merely senile.

“I'm not afraid of you. My soul is safe,” Daniel said, comfortable in such tiny leaps of faith.

“Your soul? Hurm. Your soul is barely worth a dollar to me. What am I going to do with it? I can't compete with the magic of being saved. Take comfort in your manipulator, accepting Jesus every time you doubt or feel doomed, while finding yourself alone after every prayer. I prefer the certainty of clean sheets and three meals.”

With that, Mr. Black shambled down the hall.

“Who's there?” Mr. Reams growled. He sat up, his stubby fingers on either side of his eye, stretching it open. It darted about like a scavenging rat, bloodshot with a cloud pooling over it.

“It's me, Mr. Reams,” Sh'ron said.

“Who's that with you?”

“He's only been here a few days. Can we do anything for you?”

“Just empty my urinal,” he snarled. It came out
“Emy mah urnal.”

Mr. Reams rolled away from them. Huge swatches of bandages covered his backside, shielding the pink raw flesh, a succulent sponge oozing blood from its center. Decubitus ulcers were fairly common; though caught early, the bedsore had fingernail marks around the wound.

As they walked back to the lounge, Daniel could feel the mental pull of the place weighting him down. He hoped to lose himself in some reading. Forget the despair, the subtle groaning of the soul, the environment that gnawed with teeth of confusion, apathy, doubt, futility . . . the gamut of nightmares that were his activities of daily living. He recognized the handiwork of the Devil when he saw it. He knew Satan's many voices when they spoke: Mr. Black, his mother, his own. The voices that spoke of the cracked and fragile thing that he called faith as being little more than a trick of the weak mind. Though raised in the church, Daniel had never quite made the faith his own. It was more like other people's expectations of it in him. Still, it was easy to put on the show; the show was reflex ingrained in him, and that was all anyone looked for. If you parroted the right answers, you were in. And you learned not to ask the tough questions, or your soul was in danger of damnation. Questions like why a good God would allow any of His people to be flesh puppets for the fallen. This place, Daniel believed, was a test. Once and for all his doubts would be put to rest; unquenchable fires purifying the quality of his faith.

His doubts scared him the most, plaguing him most whenever he thought of Aaron.

“How's Aaron?”

“What'd you say?” Jarred from his thoughts, Daniel felt like a man in the throes of a nightmare startled to full wakefulness. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, for him to recognize Jake.

“I asked, ‘What're you reading?' ” Jake stared at him with mild concern. “Your test is coming up soon.”

“A book on unseen spirits. You know, angels and demons, that sort of thing.”

“Why?”

“Jesus was always running around dealing with demons.”

“And look where it got him.” Jake's fingers danced with antsy frustration along the end table's edge.

“We only fear the spirit world because we don't understand how it works. That's why I've been studying. Haven't you ever wondered how demon possession works?”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“All right, check this out. Say you're driving in your car minding your own business. Pretend that your car is your body and you, the driver, are the soul. Possession is like being carjacked.” Daniel paused to let the lesson sink in. The weight of his book shifted from hand to sweaty hand.

“Carjacked. I like that.”

A balding woman wheeled herself down the hall, inching along by her foot pulling her, an eerie, determined intelligence in her eyes. She slumped forward in her wheelchair. Concerned, Daniel rushed to kneel alongside her. She bolted upright in her chair, glared through him, and let loose a barrage of expletives and ravings that caught him so off guard that he fell over.

“I don't think I'll ever get used to them. They're so . . .”

“Real?” Jake offered.

“You know, my girlfriend used to have to drive by a cemetery on the way home from school. Then one day, the city put up a stop sign right in front of the cemetery. A friend told her that one time, when he stopped at the stop sign, he looked into the cemetery and saw a ghost coming toward him. My girlfriend laughed this off, so I asked her, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?' She said, ‘No,' so I asked, ‘Have you ever looked into the cemetery since then?' She said, ‘No, if I looked, I may see a ghost, and then I'd have to believe in them.' ”

“I still don't get what would make demons possess a bunch of old folk.” Jake laid down the remote, only to pick up a cigarette. The smoke curled up around him. A defiant gleam in Jake's eyes seemed to dare Daniel to come up with something even close to rational.

“It's the deal we made. It wasn't easy coming to a detente that would allow us to . . . accommodate demons. They need a home in a host body to give them rest and allow them to express themselves in the physical world. Remember, they're spirits. Wandering about is like hanging out in a desert. I remember a story in the Bible about a demon called Legion.”

“ ‘For we are many.' ” Jake tamped his cigarette into a cracked, black ashtray. Something about his casual sureness gave Daniel pause.

“Right. He and Jesus crossed paths and Legion asked if Jesus was there to torment him . . . them before the appointed time. Jesus said no, but he was going to cast them out from the man the demon had possessed. Legion begged to be put into a herd of pigs, so he was. The same principle's at work here. To be frank, senile people have little left of their minds to offer much resistance. For all we know, they may suffer from a preexisting mental or spiritual problem that the demons merely took advantage of.”

“That's where I have a problem. You can't tell me that all of these crazy old people are demon possessed. Some of them are just sick or old. Look here.”

He grabbed a few of the patients' charts from the nurse's station. Some patients were brought in for Alzheimer's, some had become noncommunicative, some physically abusive. Senile dementia, hallucinations, simple schizophrenia, history of seizures—theirs were a veritable laundry list of sundry ailments.

“Not every case is possession, but it's possible that some of the diagnoses of mental disorder could be,” Daniel said.

“So what would you do?”

“That's easy. The Bible kept it simple. All we'd have to do to exorcize the demon is—”

“We? Oh no, my brotha, you been misinformed.
We
ain't doing shit. Ain't no way I'm about to go up against no pea-soup-spitting, head-spinning mothafucka.”

It amused Daniel to see Jake slip from his professional persona when he got worked up. Somehow it reassured him, like they were connecting on a personal level. Daniel pressed on. “C'mon, Jake, we have to do something.”

“There's that ‘we' again. Call me funny, but if a bunch of demons ain't bothering me, there ain't no need for me to be bothering them. If all I have to do is wipe they ass and get them a drink every now and then, I'm Mr. Status Quo.”

“It's kind of our responsibility . . . as nurses' aides. You see, once the demons have found a home, they act like anyone else and hang on for dear life. Unfortunately, they also torment their victims and try to kill them.”

“That sound you hear is my bullshit detector going off. Is this why you wanted to work here?”

“What would it take for me to talk you into this?”

“You don't have enough words. Shit, English don't have enough words.”

“Even if you saw . . .”

“Even if I saw what?”

(
“How's Aaron?”
) The floor alarm cut off whatever reply he might have had. Only a resident wandering through a restricted exit could have triggered it. Ms. Mayfield stood before them, more horrible given the humor of her filthy appearance. She had covered her gown in her most recent bowel disgorgement, but she paraded about like she was the height of fashion. Having bathed in a bed of her own ordure, she was a sour bouquet of sweat and excrement.

“Where you going, Ms. Mayfield?” Daniel asked.

“I wanted to be where everything was happening.”

“You know I'd come get you if anything happened.”

“By the time you get me, everything will be over last year. It's cold in here.”

“Go lie down, then, sweetie,” Daniel said.

“I can't. It's thundering something fierce.”

“When it thunders, the angels are rolling out the rain barrels, and when it rains, one of them done dropped a barrel or two and bust it.”

“What do devils do?” she asked.

Daniel chuckled.

“You're different from the others here. What do you do when God's promises fail you?”

“They won't,” Daniel said. “I know . . .”

“You
know
very little. We know. Black was right about you, you wear your story like a poorly chosen hairstyle. You grew up in church parroting your parents' faith. You'd done it for so long, dressed it up in clothes of youth group and mission trips that everyone thought it was the genuine thing. Even you. Except on those dark nights when you fear that you have nothing to call your own. Thus, no matter how often you fall on your knees, you lie in bed terrified that you'll be left behind. Don't tell me what you know. I've been
there
. Sang with the hosts. Seen Him. There's no room for faith here.”

No one understood. He barely understood. These creatures were an offense before God. The idea of Jesus' miracles terrified him. They weren't miraculous, they were unnatural. He'd grown up sympathizing with Doubting Thomas. When Jesus returned from the dead (returned from the dead!), even then some didn't recognize him; as if their minds refused to accept it. The horror, the abomination. Thomas said he wouldn't believe until he saw the Christ's wounds for himself. So he stood there, tracing the open gash along Jesus' side, his fingers feeling the torn flesh, still struggling to believe.

Like Thomas, Daniel feared that even had he put his fingers through the pierced flesh of Jesus' hands, he still wouldn't believe. Better to submit to the authority of his church elders, those who better understood such things, and trust in them. It was somehow easier to trust in principles, their clear (and safe) black-and-white tones. The demons, their presence, their reality threatened to unravel it all, to color his world in faded-blood shades of sepia.

 

 

The windows of the sullen yet formidable building stared at him with a stern blankness. Daniel listened to Mahalia Jackson finish her dirgelike rendition of “In the Upper Room,” keenly aware that his shift had started ten minutes ago. He'd been working at the Regional Healthcare Facility for under a month.

A chill wind rocked the car.

(
“How's Aaron?”
)

With Mahalia's last note, Daniel walked duty-bound to the front door, scourged by the biting fall wind. The mournful quality of the dingy, amber-colored walls increased his anxiety. Holiday decorations, reminiscent of the ones his fifth-grade teacher used to do, hung in feigned cheerfulness.

The first-floor nurse's station stood abandoned.

The elevator door waited, its doors agape with expectation. The car rose with a tenuous tremble, as if old, insecure muscles strained to pull it up. He stood near the back, part of him bracing for the impact sure to come when the cables snapped. The elevator stopped a foot shy of the third floor out of spite. The stale, fetid air of looming death greeted him.

He felt a singular sense of disquiet. Two aides had already quit that day, one leaving a note that read “I will never be back again in life.” The smell wafting about the halls was particularly stomach-turning, probably due to the addition of his own anxious sweat. He focused on his enemy to keep his nausea from overflowing. Jake whispered into the phone at the nurse's station; the frustrated look on his face screamed that his baby's mother must've been needling him about his responsibilities. A horrible howl came from the room Sh'ron exited from.