Boyfriend from Hell (26 page)

“Hello.”

“Uncle Jim, it’s Veronica.”

“Veronica!”

“How are you feeling, Uncle Jim?”

“Not good. My knees, both of them ache me day and night. Doctor says I could use surgery and my back isn’t good either. Ever see that movie,
Seabiscuit?
Pain is what you get being around horses.”

“Uncle Jim, I want you to try to remember me when I was a little girl. Say, around ten. Can you remember me when I was around ten?”

“Pretty little girl. Little Veronica. Didn’t see much of you or my brother. I was up here in Saratoga.”

“There were Christmas dinners. Easters. Did you ever see me draw, Uncle Jim, pictures?”

“Draw? Nothing comes to mind.”

“Nothing?”

“I’m trying to put my mind there. Little Veronica around ten …”

“Drawing.”

“Nope, can’t remember.”

“Never saw me with paper and pens or crayons?”

“Nope.”

“If you happen to remember, will you call me? Do you have my number?”

“I’ve got it, drawer in the kitchen. How’s school?”

“I’m out of school, Uncle Jim. I graduated and I’m working in New York as a writer.”

“Did I know that?”

“You did, Uncle Jim.”

“Fancy that, a writer.
I
ought to write a book. I could tell some stories.”

“You will call me if you remember something?”

“Sure will. Good luck at school.”

She looked at the drawing. She accepted that a person unconsciously moves the Ouija board, it is not done by an outside force, so she must have done this unconsciously from some dark place within her. She wondered if the woman in the psychiatric facility who had the same dream of Satan had ever done a drawing like this. She was unnerved by the possibility that an institutionalized woman might have done so, but she needed to know.

Ronnie went to the Web site and sent a message to CR.

I’m the person who shared a Satan dream with you. Something I must ask you. Imperative you respond. Please.


She kept checking her e-mail the rest of the afternoon and then a message from CR came up on her computer screen.

CR: What is so imperative?


Ronnie: I’ve been making drawings of Satan and demons. I don’t remember drawing them and then they’re there on pieces of paper. Doodles but elegantly done, scary images. Did you ever do anything like that?


CR: Oh, sure.


Nonchalant, “oh, sure.” Ronnie’s hands began to shake as she typed.

Ronnie: Drawings of Satan, like he appeared in the dream?


CR: Yes. I couldn’t draw as far as I knew and out of nowhere I started to, like professional drawings. Very frightening.


Ronnie: And then did they stop?


CR: After a few years.


Ronnie couldn’t imagine how you could live with something like that for a few years.

Ronnie: What caused it to stop?


CR: Just did. Everything strange stopped.


Ronnie: What else was strange?


CR: All the things that happened. The telepathy. I knew things about people I couldn’t possibly know.


The exchange with Bob replayed in her mind, her saying his father traveled so much and rewarded his patient mother by leaving her, which Bob insisted she couldn’t have known.

Ronnie: What else, please?


CR: Going into a daze. I would go into a daze and do what I never could do before. Like the swimming. I only swam sprints in college. Suddenly I could swim the English Channel.


Ronnie drew a deep breath in anxiety—it was like winning a road race over fifty-one women.

Ronnie: You swam the English Channel? When?


CR: 1982. Just before they brought me here. These are all the signs. It happens when he gets into you.


Ronnie: Who gets into you?


CR: Satan. When he possesses you.


Ronnie: You’re saying you were possessed by Satan?


CR: Yes. And then they brought me here. Have to go.


Work was out of the question for her. She wanted to get to the
New York Times
microfilm collection immediately. She went to the Forty-second Street Library and looked in the index for 1982. Under sports she found a listing for a Connecticut woman swimming the English Channel and on the microfilm located an item in the sports section:

Claire Reilly, 22, of Bridgeport, a Connecticut woman with no long-distance swimming experience, swam the English Channel yesterday. Reilly formerly competed for the University of Connecticut in 100-meter races. She covered the twenty-one miles of open sea from Dover to Calais in twelve hours and ten minutes. “I just got it in my head to swim the English Channel and I hired a boatsman to track me,” she said afterward. “I was able to keep going even though it was the longest distance I ever swam. It was like I was in a trance the whole way.”


Ronnie was desperate to get to Kaufman for her session the next day, deeply unsettled by the knowledge that she had the same manifestations as a woman who had been in a psychiatric hospital for over twenty years. She presented Kaufman with printouts of the conversation with the woman and a copy of the
New York Times
article from 1982, along with the latest drawing. As Kaufman examined the material, Ronnie said, “I had the same dream as this woman. Did the same drawings. Had the same kind of out-of-the-blue physical act. We both had a telepathic experience. And she ended up in Empire State!”

“So many things going on, Veronica. The drawing is fascinating. Satan looks almost sly. It’s really quite clever.”

“I don’t see anything clever about it. And I can’t remember drawing it.”

“You drew it. Nobody else did and to me it’s your comment on the very fact of Satan as an image intruding in your life.”

“Well, since you like it so much,” she said sharply, “you can have it. My gift to you.”

“Thank you. You might, as we proceed, see if you can give vent to this repressed artistic side of yourself with different subject matter.”

“I have no control over it.”

“Then there’s another goal for us.”

“I know where you’re going. If I give up the book then I won’t have this Satan overload. Let me ask you this. If I do give up the book, will I be all right?”

“You’d have a better path to being ‘all right.’”

“I give up the book and there’s still work to do. I don’t give up the book, there’s more work to do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m frightened. To be having parallel experiences with an institutionalized woman—”

“It’s been a series of frightening incidents for you, the dead cat, and going further than that, back to your childhood. And now, Veronica, you have to be a grown-up. As to the book, could you work your way through it? Possibly. Why in the world would you do that to yourself?”

“Suppose I don’t work on it for a while. Pick it up at a later date.”

“You really think the book will be better for you at a later date?”

Ronnie took the drawing from Kaufman’s desk and studied it.

“This isn’t me.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

Ronnie drew a deep breath, then said, emotionally, “I don’t want to end up in a mental institution.” Kaufman waited. After a full minute of silence Ronnie finally said, “I’m going to drop it.”

“Good! Excellent! I’ll give you a letter if you need it. Now let’s look at these parallels with this woman you’re so worried about.”

“They’re signs of satanic possession, you know?”

“Don’t you want to say ‘presumed possession’ or ‘alleged possession ?

“They’re still the standard signs. Textbook.”

“You said telepathy. You never told me about telepathy.”

“Apparently I knew things about my roommate’s boyfriend he never speaks about. I thought he told me. He may not have. How would I have known?”

“Intuition, coincidence, a lucky guess. I wouldn’t make too much of it. As to the dreams and the drawings—Satan is not a symbol you and this woman invented. He’s time-tested over centuries, and if you dream him or draw him, and she does, too, I’d hazard it isn’t the first time more than one person ever did.”

“But if it’s happening to you, it doesn’t matter if it happened to other people at other times.”

“This is true. What we need to do is demystify these things. Swimming the English Channel, the Central Park race—I’m going to say that on the surface it sounds special, two unusual feats you share. It could be, though, like the drawings, a repressed ability. It’s not like you never ran. It’s not like she wasn’t a swimmer.”

“Not on that level.”

“It’s only a question of degree. A person, stressed, who regresses when stressed, writing a book on possession, which includes textbook signs of possession, begins to see signs of it within herself. Not supernatural to me. You’re integrating the book into your life. And if a woman in an institution who thinks she was possessed shares similar experiences, parallel experiences to yours—a mathematician could probably explain it to you within the laws of probability.”

“Maybe.”

“Here’s a question on an entirely different level, are you going to feel guilty about dropping the book?”

“A little.”

“Because of Richard?”

“Perhaps.”

This was an opening to a subject Kaufman was eager to pursue, Richard.

“Why, if this book is so wrong for you, did he leave you with renewed purpose in doing it?”

“He wasn’t selling me on it. He made that clear.”

“You
did
decide to go on.”

“My friends don’t think much of him either.”

“I don’t know the man.”

“If he wanted me to go on with the book, and by the way, he never said I should, it could’ve been for the original reason, he liked me for the subject. Or because he liked what I wrote so far. Or he doesn’t have access to the same kind of insights about me that you have.”

“Fine. I’m only wondering why, on his watch, he would have you persist in doing something so completely wrong for you.”

Nancy and Bob were delighted with the news of Ronnie finally abandoning the project. They talked over a spaghetti dinner in the women’s apartment. Ronnie estimated she used about three thousand dollars in advance money for living expenses since the start of the book. Bob was willing to shoulder the amount as an informal loan. Ronnie thought she could handle it within her savings. They agreed it was important for her to write something else as far from Satan and demons as she could get.

Ronnie had been finding herself passing time spinning the channels on daytime television and thought instead of continuing to do it aimlessly, she might write about it, and was able to land an assignment from her editor at
New York
magazine for an essay on daytime programming.

Jenna Hawkins was unflappable, stop, go, go, stop. She drafted a letter to Antoine Burris saying the writer was withdrawing under medical advice and returning the advance. Hawkins told Ronnie she should prepare herself for Burris claiming ownership of her outline, since he sent a check for her research, and Ronnie said she didn’t care. The agent liked the idea of the
New York
article and suggested she might eventually package an anthology of Ronnie’s pieces, Hawkins coming up with a title on the spot,
In a New York Minute: Essays by a Writer on the Scene.

Ronnie had yet to inform Richard and thought she had better do so before the agent’s letter reached Burris. She called his cell phone number and, as usual, he didn’t answer, so she left a message saying she would send him an e-mail.

Have decided not to continue with the book. Was making me crazy. All being handled on the up-and-up by the agent. You said you had no vested interest. Hope so. Sorry.


Her friends and the therapist harbored a circumstantial case against Richard, anchored by the fact that he didn’t stop her from continuing with the book. She granted him the presumption of innocence. She was curious about how he would react, though. Whatever his reaction, she was not going ahead with it.

Two days and not a word, electronic or telephonic, from Our Man in Satanic Ritual Abuse, she noted. She went out for a hamburger with Nancy and Bob and told them about the e-mail dialogue with Claire Reilly and the
New York Times
item.

“‘It was like I was in a trance the whole way,’ the woman said. Sound familiar, road race fans?”

“She thinks she was possessed by Satan?” Bob said. “What does thinking you’re possessed by Satan have to do with swimming the English Channel?”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s not one of his events. But in possession, unusual physical strength is one of the so-called signs.”

“But you don’t believe in possession,” Nancy said.

“I don’t. Here’s what’s fascinating, though. On some level believing you’re possessed becomes the same thing as being possessed, and I guess that’s the case with this person.”

“Ronnie, believing you’re possessed is not the same thing as being possessed,” Bob said. “One is possessed and the other isn’t. And there isn’t any such thing.”

“God, am I glad you’re out of this book,” Nancy said.

“You two were right about it. Although, for a while there, I felt very ganged up on.”

“We
are
your gang,” Nancy said.

As she watched television and took notes she wrote something light-hearted for the new piece and it occurred to her that she would have been eighteen months on the book without ever going near lighthearted. “Although you have to admire,” she wrote, “the athleticism of beach volleyball teams who show up on ESPN, if this is now an Olympic sport, shouldn’t there also be an adjacent one for building sand castles?”

Richard called, startling her in the middle of the day.

“It’s me, Ronnie.”

“Hello!”

“Just emerged from some really interesting interviews. Years ago, this cult might very well have kidnapped some children. Doesn’t appear to be any sexual abuse, at least nobody claims any. They did, it appears, force the children to participate in some animal sacrifices.”