Emmylou nods and holds up her Bible, and Lorna can see that there is another, slimmer book clutched beneath it. “Uh-huh. Detective Paz got me these notebooks. I finished the first one already.”
“Well, I’m sure we’d like to read it. Darryla tells me you’re reading to the other patients. I saw you in the dayroom.”
“Yes, I like crazy people,” Emmylou says. “They do less harm than the sane, and many of them are close to God. One of the hard things about being crazy is that people stop looking at you like you’re a soul. And I touch them, and help them to pray, if they’re possessed. Sometimes it works.”
Lorna’s throat is suddenly dry, almost crackly and painful. She swallows, wishing she had thought to bring a bottle of water. She thinks she is nervous because she has not done any real therapy in a long time, assuming that is what this is. Could it be that she fears the mad? No, nonsense, put that out of the mind! A little initial nervousness, which she assuages by fiddling with the recorder. She falls back on the good old Rogerian ploy, affirm the patient by repeating her statement. She says, “Possessed.”
“Mm-huh. Of course, if I believe that, that’s another symptom of me being crazy, right?” Emmylou has been staring down at her hands and the Bible she carries, as if anxious to return to the sacred realms, but now she lifts her head and turns her eyes full onto Lorna’s. This is highly unusual. Crazy people do not go in much for eye contact. For an instant there enters Lorna’s mind the thought that Emmylou Dideroff is the furthest thing from crazy, that it is the hospital authorities and the psychiatrists and the guards and the real estate tycoons who control the city of Miami, and the people in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., running the government who are crazy; for an instant another world appears to her inward eye, a world as real as stone or bread. But just as quickly a lifetime’s defenses against this world take charge, and although the hairs stand up on her arms and a chill runs down her spine, she is able to pretend that nothing has happened, that she is in command of the situation, she with her Ph.D. and her pass out of here and this woman is an uneducated redneck lunatic murderess….
Lorna clears her throat and says, “So…you think you can exorcise other people just by touching them?” Thee — word in invisible quotation marks.
“Christ can,” says the other confidently. “That was the main kind of thing he did when he was among us, and he still does it. Sometimes he uses me, sometimes other people. But we can all do it our own selves, really, Christ is driving out demons from the inside of us all the time, or the world would be a much worse place than it is, if you can imagine that.”
“Mm. But…you don’t have a demon in you, do you?”
“Who says I don’t?”
“I thought you were conversing with saints.”
A stunned look appeared on Dideroff’s face. Her mouth gaped and then suddenly and surprisingly she bursts into hearty laughter, which she quickly brings under control, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry. That just struck me so funny. Lord!”
Lorna has not joined in this laugh, although the valuable wordhebephrenia now swims up out of her memory, and she scribbles it down, followed a second later by a question mark. “Would you like to tell me what was so funny?”
“Oh, it’s hard to put into words. Just, really, you assuming that demons and saints can’t dwell in the same person, or not even that, because it’s pretty plain you don’t believe in either saints or demons dwelling in folks and you were trying to, I don’t know, catch me out with some kind of lawyer’s trick, when it’s just so plain that it’s just the ones who are most afflicted by demons who get to be saints. What you said, to a religious person, it’d be like saying, oh, because you’re sitting in the dark, that means youcan’t turn on the light! ” Here she lets out a little giggle. “That’s why I laughed. I’m sorry.”
Lorna decides to forget everything but this apology. “Emmylou, I’m not offended. I’m just trying to help you.”
“To…?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re trying to help me to…”
“I believe you’re mentally ill. I’m trying to help you get better.”
“So that I can be tried for murder.”
“Well, yes, so that you can aid in your own defense. But it seems to me that you could develop a pretty strong presumption that when you committed the crime you’re charged with, you were not legally sane.”
“I don’t see how that could happen. I haven’t got a mental disease and I sure didn’t murder Colonel al-Muwalid.”
“Well, then who did, Emmylou?” Lorna snaps. “The invisible man?” Lorna felt herself blush. The damned woman has made her lose her clinical perspective, although she immediately excuses this as another result of being out of practice. To her surprise, Dideroff seems to be considering this rhetorical outburst as a legitimate question. Her face is grave as she answers. “Yeah, I’ve been giving that some thought, all right. It’s my fault in a way. I thought I could carry it all myself, but he won’t be carried. He’s been waiting and waiting, I can see that now, he counted on my pride, and now he’s away loose, doing his work.”
“Who? Who’s been waiting?”
“The devil, of course. And his minions on earth. Another sin to my score, I guess.”
Lorna writes down “paranoid ideation” and “religious mania” on her pad.
“Minions?”
“Mm-huh. The spirit that destroys don’t ever have much of a recruiting problem, and he don’t tell me his plans. A little murder ain’t nothing to him, but as far as the why of it, your guess is as good as mine. He’ll wreck things here on earth for the pure fun of it, he likes when there’s misery and despair and for people to give up on the Lord. Oh, my, that poor man probably hasn’t got an idea what’s happening to him.”
Lorna was lost. Her pen stuttered to a stop. “What poor man?”
“Why, that policeman. Detective Paz. I felt him fly right out of me and stick to him and he saw it too, only he’ll never admit it, that’s the pity.”
“Okay, Emmylou, let me get this straight. You think the, ah, devil that was in you jumped out of you and into Detective Paz?”
“Mm-huh.”
“And that would mean he’s no longer in you, right?”
Lorna is looking at the woman as she says this, and so she sees something remarkable happen. The person she has been talking to disappears and is replaced by someone else. The blue eyes turn from mild to icy; the very bones of the face seem to recompose themselves into something less, or more, than human. Lorna is familiar with the expression “it made her blood run cold” but has heretofore considered it a mere figure of speech, but it is actually, she now finds, a good description of what she now feels.
The new Emmylou says, in a quite different voice, one that seems to penetrate Lorna’s head without using her eardrums at all, “It don’t work that way, honey. My name is Legion.” And she smiles, showing more teeth than Emmylou Dideroff actually has in her mouth.
This cannot be happening, Lorna thinks, and closes her eyes. It is all she can do to keep from screaming. When she looks again she sees yet another change come over Emmylou. Her body stiffens, she cocks her head unnaturally to the left, as if straining to hear something, or attempting to dislocate her neck. Her mouth opens, her eyes flutter rapidly, a blur of lashes. She stands, she reaches for something invisible to Lorna, and falls forward. Lorna catches her and now she does cry out.
To Lorna’s surprise and relief, Mickey Lopez is not particularly exercised over the day’s session with Dideroff, nor does he regard it as a failure. They meet later that morning in the office he keeps in the mental health center. Mickey is his usual avuncular, supportive self. “Okay, you moved fast, but she challenged you, and I think you did the right thing,” he says after listening to the tape.
“I did?”
“Yeah, entering the fantasy, as if you wanted to participate in it, this cops-and-robbers game she has going, with the devil tossed in. But you can’t get distracted.”