It would be the fourth time he had performed an exorcism, and the first time he had cast out an actual demon, but, to be frank, this was not his worst Thursday night. Not yet. And he knew exactly what to do: First he’d walk in, and then he’d say the words.
If he didn’t go through with it, the building inspector would be at the apartment in twenty minutes, would see the mayhem, and call the police. Then, at best, the Chinese would revoke his visa and expel him from medical school; at worst, they’d haul him off to a Tibetan prison where he’d never see the light of day. That could be his worst Thursday night.
Perhaps not.
Cory sat in the hallway outside the front door, his head in his hands, trying to stem the blood from a gash above his right eyebrow. Richie was behind him inside their apartment, strapped to a chair with duct tape. A pillowcase was over his head, his throat gurgled, his mouth muttering incantations.
It still was not his worst Thursday night.
One from several years before still came back to him in his sleep. For a time it had haunted him when he was awake, too. Those waking visions hadn’t happened in some time, but he realized that moment they were returning.
He needed to remain in the present. He ran his hands along the smooth concrete beneath him, and then against the rough stucco of the wall. He did not want to get swept into his memories, but the burnt coppery taste in his mouth sent him back, in fragments, and then all at once.
Darkness. Headlights. The brakes locking. A dull thud raking up his legs. The leather steering wheel slipping. His failing hands. The tires skidding. A screech to spawn a million nightmares. Her gasp-cry. Airbags shorting out. Blonde and blood ricocheting between bending steel and the killing-tree. A nickel-smoke smell coating everything. Her battered body. Her broken back. Her neck bent at an inhuman angle. The glint of recognition in her eyes as he crouched beside her. Her light vanishing, and taking with it his own.
You believe in angels, if you’re raised a Mormon. Holding your girlfriend as she dies is great a way to stop believing in angels.
Blood colored the interior of the crumpled sedan a deep scarlet. Leaving the church sprayed scarlet onto Cory’s family relationships, and he chose a medical school thousands of miles from home.
Providence put Cory in Rhode Island; His great aunt and uncle, both practicing Mormons and one a celebrated classics professor at Brown, hosted him frequently at their home for dinner.
At first all was well; warm meals appeal to any student, and the conversation simmered with an intelligentsia which Cory never encountered in Utah. Neither the professor nor his wife batted an eyelash when Cory preferred not to discuss religion; They were kind, validating even. But something still grated on him. The way the books on the shelves were arranged. The way the conversationalists never swore, not even once. The way you could almost smell the prayers said before he’d arrived, and after he’d left…
It got to him. One night, after a round of Shirley Temples, Cory unbottled.
“How can God be both good and powerful?”
The professor set down his glass, and looked down at the floor, his brow furrowed in thought. A moment passed; the professor didn’t answer.
“How can you be a Mormon when you know so much?” Cory spat again.
For a moment, the professor remained in reverent thought, but then he spoke.
“When I live the Mormon way,” he said, “I become the kind of man I want to be.” Then he went back to his Shirley Temple.
Cory decided New England wasn’t far enough away. When Richie told him about the exchange program in Beijing, he went. But then something happened to Richie, something Cory couldn’t explain, not with all the thinking or all the medical textbooks in the world.
The Mormon incantation to exorcise a demon is brief, and passed down through lore, not handbooks; learning the words may well be a rite of passage for every boy and girl. Cory had spoken them three times before.
When he was seventeen, he’d been coming home late from a game with two friends. A man was following them, shuffling his feet in side steps. They’d been mocking him. He’s possessed, one of his friends had mocked. Cory spun around, raised his arm, the words parting his lips in mock humor, and he said the words. The man became angry. The boys ran away.
The time before that was different. Growing up, his neighbor was mean and she had a wart on her nose. One day while playing outside when he was eleven, the family kickball went over the fence and into her yard. Cory clambered over the fence to retrieve it from the jungle of her back garden azaleas. The woman found them, furious he was trampling her flowers. She yelled at him. Cory screamed in fright, threw his arm up, and then he said the words.
“How could you say those things to Sister Wentworth?” His mother had yelled at him that night. “She is a good woman; How dare you disrespect her with those words?”
The first time was a distant memory, about the same time he learned to read. He was strong and he was brave, but he was alone in his bedroom that night and there were monsters all around him and in his closet and he was afraid—so afraid that he could not sleep. He couldn’t quite remember it but from under the clasp of his burgundy afghan he must have broken his arm free to raise it to the square and breathe the words he might have learned in church the day before. And perhaps that night there were no demons in his closet or monsters all around—but after he said those words, he fell asleep and, that night, the nightmares no more troubled him.
That Thursday night, when he held Bethany, as she died, the light that vanished from her eyes was brain cells suffocating. She didn’t have a soul to leave her body, no more than the Oldsmobile did.
But now, in the hallway, his face in his hands, he could hear voices echo out his mind. His friends. His mother. His great uncle.
He’s possessed.
Behind his closed eyes, her face appeared to him again, her neck twisted and bent.
How dare you disrespect those words.
The light slowly returned, her neck straightening out, the cuts on her forehead healing.
When I live the Mormon way…
She smiled at him, the way she had for years before. He felt her hand caress his forehead, healing the wound above his eyebrow, combing through his hair just the way she used to when they kissed…
… I become the kind of man I want to be.
Tears streaming down his face, Cory stood up. He opened the door and walked straight into the apartment.
Cory raised his hand, and then he said the words.
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Calvin Burke is a student at Brigham Young University where he recently wrapped up research for Terryl Givens‘s forthcoming Stretching the Heavens: Eugene England and the Maturation of Mormonism (UNC Press).
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