Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (23 page)

She folds her arms and glares at me in the way only a worried mother can—an equal amount of cruelty and kindness.

The son of Jesus paces. She lifts her hands in the air as if to feel my words. She takes them and puts them in her mouth.

“How long were you there?”

“Not long. A week.”

“Tell me again,” she says, and I tell her again about the bat dreams. I note that, when I’m trying to interview them, they try to make me the subject. Among these folks, she is the go-to person for dreams. She attends conferences, leads sessions, takes calls. “I want to take a look at you,” she says, “but first we need to wait for Brett.”

“Is that—?”

“He’s just.” She sets a finger to her lips. “He’s just Brett. The others should be home soon.”

Lamplight muddies the living room. There’s a bookshelf stacked with Bibles. Only Bibles, and dozens of them. Hardwood floors gleam dark as water. Men wearing tool belts wander around the house, looking for ways to fix the heat. All the food in the pantry is on the floor, stacked high on the counter or on the kitchen table. The heating man is in the pantry on his hands and knees.

Ruth and Benjamin, her children, are on the couch in the living room playing video games. Benjamin rocks and jumps while he plays. He calls his sister Fuzzy.

“Fuzzy,” he says. “Hey, Fuzzy. Guess who got drunk last night?”

Ruth won’t have any of it. “Only thing you’ll get drunk on is caffeine,” she says.

“You’ve never had a sip in your life.”

“I ate a bourbon ball, Fuzzy. I was wasted. Remember?”

The son of Jesus laughs and holds Benjamin’s face. “I had a thought about
your
dream, Benjamin. We’re going to write down your dream and put it in the mail and send it to our address. In case something happens. If something happens we’re as innocent as possible, you hear?”

Benjamin embraces his mother. “I love you,” he says. He has on Superman pajama pants.

“Take this paper,” his mother says. “Go and sit and write down your dream. Tell me what you remember.”

Ruth’s phone goes off but she doesn’t recognize the number. She sets it on the table and when the voice mail dings, she listens. “Shit shit,” she says. “It was my dad.” She’s staring into her phone, pulling on her hair, repeating, “I missed it. I missed it.”

She talks about holy wars and the Old Testament, the parts where Father would say to Israel: you need to go fight these people or you’re not going to have peace and they’ll come after you and you’ll be influenced by their gods! “Every time Father told them to fight they were victorious. Do I believe Father is telling us to go to Afghanistan? I don’t know. I think Afghanistan is a nation that needs to know God. Do I think it’s the great evil? I don’t know.”

“Are you worried about your dad?”

“Over some of these Arab countries,” she says, “there are large demonic beings and they tell their underlings to attack or to destroy. You hear about American civilians, contractors, relief aid workers being blown up on the side of the road. You probably saw the photos of the charred bodies hanging from the bridge.” She touches her finger to her lip. “I hope they get to be at the same base.”

“Do you think George Bush has a demon?”

“Well, anyone who strives to work on Capitol Hill is demonized. Without a shadow of a doubt, Hillary is Jezebel. No doubt. Bill’s a total Ahab.”

“I was outside,” Benjamin interrupts, remembering his dream, “and there was a police officer in my room but it was like I was in the middle of the room. I saw its winter white walls. The officer—she said they found drugs. Specifically marijuana.” He raises his finger in the air. “They said it was in a Wendy’s bag.”

“A female cop?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she familiar to you?”

Benjamin presses his pencil eraser to his cheek. He shakes his head.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” the son of Jesus sings, “but I know who holds the future.” She does a quick dance.

Benjamin scribbles his dream. “How do you spell the word
room
?”

“R-O-O-M,” his mother says.

“Maybe God is saying fast food is crack,” Ruth says, standing by the window, stretching her arms in dim porch light coming in through the screen.

“It’s that or you need to take out the garbage in your life,” the son of Jesus says. She looks at me, waves me into the kitchen. Tonight she’s making something called the cheese ball for her coworkers.

“Let me tell you about my favorite dream,” she says, pouring cheese-ball ingredients in a bowl. “I’m lying on a mattress on the floor and I have all these little pieces of blanket covering me and there’s a Coke machine next to me and in walks this huge lion with these gorgeous blue eyes. He nudges me. He’s the Lord. The Coke machine means that my relationship to him is going to be refreshing.”

She takes a beater out of the cabinet and plugs it in and we listen to its roar. “There,” she says, and she pulls out the beater and licks it. “Everyone just guzzles down this cheese ball. It’s real simple—just cream cheese and onion and old-fashioned cheddar and butter.”

She takes another lick.

“You want a beater?”

“I’m okay.”

“I know you do.”

“You’re right,” I say. I take the beater and lick.

The phone rings. The son of Jesus hurries to rinse her fingers before reaching for the phone. “Hello? Hello? Rats.”

She leaves the kitchen and returns with a box of fudge. “I make the best fudge in the world,” she says. “Want some?”

I take the fudge and I push it in my mouth. She touches my shoulder. “My kids are nine years apart,” she says, bending over, searching the butcher-block shelves, stacking cookie tins in her arms. “Lemon bars,” she says, opening a tin. “Try this.”

I press a lemon bar in my mouth.

“Yeah,” she says. “You know. I had all these miscarriages between the two of them. Let me tell you something.” She leans against the sink. “I was crawling in bed one night and suddenly I was in heaven. I saw this cute little girl in a blue dress. I asked the Lord: Is that some part of me? Or is that me? What’s going on? I was lost in heaven. This one is yours, the Lord said, and suddenly I was enveloped in heaven and I was meeting all my dead children. How many kids? I don’t know. I was so depressed at the time. My body didn’t have the progesterone to carry the babies past my periods. The doctors started giving me a progesterone depository but it wasn’t strong enough. One baby I carried two months. One a little longer. One was born without a brain. The doctor looked at me and said that there was nothing he could do. But in heaven, they were so beautiful. They had never known sin. They had never known this earth. And when I was up there, suddenly, I was glad they were never born. One even remained an infant—just for me to hold. I said to the Lord, are they all here? Are all my children here? He said, Do you really think I would let one of yours fall?”

Ruth and Benjamin are still sitting on the couch in the family room facing the television, arguing over the remote. “My babies,” she says. “Can I tell you something else? This might blow your mind. This was three years ago. The Lord took me into a vision. In front of me I saw a great wall of fire. I saw him walk into the fire and I knew I was to follow him. I followed him. I was standing in hell. I’m seeing a man on the floor in excruciating pain. He was retching and writhing in the most horrid amount of pain—just screaming. He was probably new to hell. He sits up a little and says: pray for the living, not the dead. Then I hear some woman yelling at me,
You are here to mock me. You are here to make fun of me.
She is screaming this at me. She is wild. And then the Lord shows me one more person—a young man standing there doing nothing. I made this choice, he says, I made this choice to be here. That’s when I realize that everyone in hell had made a choice to be there. By their choices on earth, they chose hell.”

“Who were they?”

“They were all from different eras. The young boy, he probably died somewhere between 1910 and 1930. The woman, she might have been in hell for two or three hundred years. The young man, it was like his feet were in rock and he was just standing there ripping away at the wall. I could hear other types of screams and moans coming from the dark. Since then, I don’t challenge the Lord about it. I know that everyone who’s in hell made the choice to be there. There’s no denial in hell. I came out of that vision and it haunted me for a very long time.”

“Did you see any demons?”

“No,” she says, “I didn’t see any demons. I only saw people.”

•  •  •

When Marianne returns, she throws her purse on the table. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says. “I just got a promotion at Walmart.” She’s a large girl with an upturned nose, wide brown horse eyes, and shimmering, poreless skin. She never stops smiling.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says.

Brett returns at midnight. He bursts in from the dark. I recognize him—the same boy who came to the Bible Covenant Institute the night of my deliverance. The boy who had bats flying around his head. The boy who worked at a mental institution. The boy who carried a Bible in his right pocket with a gold thread dangling low.

“She needs a second look,” announces the son of Jesus, and Brett nods like it’s no big deal. He’s in town because there’s a deliverance retreat in the morning. He drove to Portal from Tennessee, where he works a regular gig at the circus.

Everyone keeps looking at me. I don’t want them to do whatever they are going to do, but I’m curious.

“This woman,” Ruth says, panting slowly between words, “did she give you anything?”

“Just some ChapStick.”

“The demons can hide. Talk to the ChapStick. Tell the ChapStick: you’re just an object.”

They’re all staring at me, waiting, and so I tell the ChapStick that it’s just an object.

“And remember,” the son of Jesus says in a soft voice, “Jesus is going to woo you. I see a pink cloud coming into the room right now.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

She puts her hand to her breast and grows quiet to search her memory. “He just won’t give up on you, will he?”

To be polite I sit down among them, gathered on the carpeted living room floor, beneath the light of a single lamp. Their veined fingers climb the air. Voices humming.

“I see despair,” says the son of Jesus.

“I see infinite sadness,” says Marianne.

“Suicide,” says Ruth.

Their heads bob.

I feel a burning in my spine. Something moving around. What I feel is this: my spine being pulled, whole and wet, like the long gut of a shrimp. It’s not what I believe. It’s my body betraying me.

“It’s gone.”

The son of Jesus says, “There it is. I see it. Over in the corner.”

“Get out!” Everyone collapses to the floor.

I have my hands on my face, crying. There’s no perfectly objective response. When trauma moves from one person to another, psychologists call it transference. It’s the same word the Mathers use to describe the movement of demons.

•  •  •

“The suicide demon,” the son of Jesus says, “is very focused. I’ve had it follow me home twice. I’ve had to battle it. One day I’m unpacking boxes and I’ve got a knife in my hand and I’m cutting a box and all of sudden I see myself cutting my wrist.”

She takes her finger to her wrist and gasps, as if the blood were draining all over the floor. “Another time, it came at me and said, ‘Your kids are grown. You don’t need to be around anymore.’ ” The son of Jesus smiles, though she talks of blood and demons. “One woman at the clinic talked about slicing her wrist as if it were nothing at all.”

She repeats: nothing at all.

“That’s what I felt when I was thinking about cutting my wrist. I went
whoa.
” She lets her wrist flop. “I could do it too,” she whispers. “Like it was nothing.”

For a long time we’re quiet. The son of Jesus folds her body on a couch patterned with images of tropical birds.

The demons follow you after deliverance. That’s what Ruth, the daughter of the son of Jesus, believes. Ruth has big red hair like steel wool. She thinks she’s been followed for years. She was checked once after college for reinfestation. Nothing returned. The demon takes on a form and uses it to haunt you. Benjamin had a second look in November. The demons had returned. But Ruth believes it’s only because he was delivered at age ten.

“Everyone’s life goes to crap after deliverance,” she says. “Sometimes the demons come back with a passion.”

She had an old friend reinfested by religion. A Methodist girl who spent Saturdays at the club scene in Orlando preaching to girls with a loudspeaker while they threw up: Have you ever lied to anyone? Well then, you’re a liar. Have you ever lusted for anyone? Well then, you’re an adulterer. Have you ever thought hurtful things about a person? Well then, you’re a murderer.

“I had six months. Most people have a year. God gives you a little grace time. The bottom line is now the enemy wants to destroy you. You’re in the middle of the war and it’s a continuous war.”

Ruth went from a degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Florida State University to a job at Lowe’s Hardware. She was also engaged to her longtime boyfriend. After deliverance, he left her. She burned all but one photograph of her ex-fiancé, which she occasionally looks at to remember how happy she’d once been. She tells herself: no—that’s the past.

She believes she started seeing the casualties of war.

“You can’t just pray one day and think it’s over. If you go to war, if you don’t have the cover, casualties come about. It’s an active war. It can take months and years. You will see the casualties. I was a casualty. The bodies will stack up.”

The moment a demonized person walks into the House of Women, Ruth starts praying. Ruth is tired of it—says it’s exhausting. They had a woman stay with them a couple of months ago while she was receiving deliverance in Portal. The woman kept waking up in the night.

“The demon was there in front of her,” Ruth says. “It had bright red eyes and it kept trying to choke her.”

I ask why anyone would ever go through deliverance if life is always turning out to be so horrible.