Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (16 page)

In Mozambique, since the civil war ended in 1992, it’s assumed that when you return from war, you are possessed by the war; by dead enemies and dead friends. Your blood is contaminated. It can contaminate an entire community. The blood causes insanity. A ghost following a soldier home is a natural part of war.

It’s easier to forgive a possessed soldier.

Upon homecoming, the soldier will be asked to reenact the killings. The ritual is called
kuguiya
and means “to stimulate a fight.” Everyone in the village watches. If the soldier killed a child, he imagines killing the child again. If he raped a woman, he rapes her again. Only through repetition will the ghost leave.

If the reenactment fails, then the soldier is exorcised.

•  •  •

American society believes the same myth each election, that it is an exorcism of evil. We like simple solutions. In our foreign wars, we rid nations of evil. George W. Bush borrowed the vocabulary of religion for his war. Now Caleb borrows the vocabulary of war for his religion. Caleb sees the heroic, I see the tragedy. Not just because his friends died, but because of the way they’re an emblem of our national tragedy. In primitive cultures if one is sick, it has to be a demon, and finding the one who cursed you is halfway to the cure. Does the exorcist too ever require an exorcism? People see PTSD as a problem specifically of war, but it’s also a problem of our culture. A physical reaction is a sign of societal malaise. Their demons, and America’s demons. For many, the military is not just a way to pay for college, it’s also a way to save oneself from one’s past, from the America you were born into.

P
ART
IV

THE WAR ON TERROR IN BIBLICAL TERMS

B
obby says he was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and high school. He has a sweet, singsongy voice. He says nobody liked him.

Vivian, Bobby’s wife, a woman with dreams of becoming a dancer, says she cannot dream any longer because her legs cripple and her heart beats too fast.

A man named Walter sits wide-legged on a chair. He’s wearing snakeskin leather boots and a camo bandanna wrapped tightly around a mop of silky hair. He has a handlebar mustache. Walter doesn’t want to talk about what he did in Vietnam.

A man with a greased pompadour and a turtleneck sweater steps shame-faced into the room. He has dark, shifty eyes. On his forehead deep lines curve like claw marks. He sits next to me. He smells of whiskey and baby powder. “I’m late,” he whispers. “Call me Brother John.” The Holy Spirit, as far as he knows, has never baptized Brother John. When someone put their hands on him for the baptism he saw dark, ugly faces on the back of his eyelids. He’s never known what that meant. “I think those ugly faces are me. I tried to see a picture of Christ and I could not. I only saw me. Ugly me.”

Noah, a bearded man in a hoodie, wants to smooth over some marital issues he’s having with his wife, Mary.

The professor has the voice of a man with a weak throat. He says his father once wrote the word
stupid
on a gingerbread cookie and gave it to him. He teaches literature at Georgia Southern.

A seventy-three-year-old man named Ezra says he’s a pretty capable person but that he should have accomplished a great deal more in his life. He says that when he was five years old his pastor raped him. “I thought it was because the Father didn’t love me.” Ezra has been traveling around the country since he was fifteen seeking deliverance, getting different kinds of exorcisms. Nothing has worked. They told him his faith was weak. Ezra thinks it’s because Jesus hates him. Ezra’s mouth opens and closes. “I’m here and I’m alive. I think I’m barely sane. Sometimes I just think this is what life is about. That I’m just going to hang around and wait to die.”

•  •  •

It’s February, and snow falls for three days in Portal, hiding what people know of the land before it melts in a single day, sucked back into the earth. Outside, horses seek ways out of muddy fields, birds bathe in snowmelt, and grass has rotted flat. The continuous thaw of earth.

We are all at the Bible Covenant Institute in downtown Portal, a drab one-story building with a sun-faded roof. One side of the building borders Main Street. It’s not a Bible institute but a local couple used to run a Bible college out of the building, and the name stuck. Now the Portal community uses it for different events, and the Mathers hold deliverance retreats here when it’s available. Always Friday through Sunday. From one window you can see the Laniers’ ING general store, where women wearing track pants smoke cigarettes and hold their faces to the sun.

Seven men and woman are here to receive deliverance. They’ve traveled from all over the country. Mostly Georgia, but also Maryland and Washington State. I didn’t tell Caleb I was coming. I didn’t want him to think he converted me.

Inside, rippled windows make the sky look like sloshed water. An elk head with marble eyes hangs openmouthed above a circle of red chairs. There are two rooms in the building. One in the back with its own entrance. A plain room with two couches and a sword hanging on the wall. The other room is large enough for a thirty-person square dance. Five foldout tables circle the main. In the corner of this room is a kitchen. They will feed us.

A team will exorcise us. There are generally five to eight people on a team. Each team has a leader. The leader decides on the demon. We will be exorcised in the corner, in a place the minister calls “the living room”—an area full of couches and foldout chairs and a coffee table, sectioned off by velour curtains hanging from plastic poles.

Katie isn’t going to be on any teams. This means we’re allowed to talk to her and tell her why we want deliverance. We aren’t supposed to talk to the team members at all. We won’t be delivered until tomorrow morning, and today, Friday, we will spend learning the basics of demons.

Katie tells us she had a demon called Jezebel. The slut demon, from the neighborhood boys who raped her as a child. The morning after her deliverance she ate eggs. “I’d never tasted eggs without demons,” she says.

A very old lady raises her hand as slowly as a body rising from water. Her septuagenarian skin looks illuminated from the inside as if she continuously fed on lightbulbs. “I’m possessed by a demon,” she says. Her glasses are big and reflective so no one knows what her eyes are doing. She talks about cabinets opening, plates shattering, heads spinning, voices appearing. Movie stuff.

I tell them that Caleb sent me and that he thinks the trauma of other veterans is going to transfer to me.

•  •  •

We break for lunch in the main room, where aproned women remove Saran Wrap from glass trays, chop potatoes, stack floury buns, drain pickles, soften aluminum-wrapped butter squares, peel plastic from single-sliced cheese, and stir iced tea in a blue cooler labeled with masking tape. A woman is cutting onions with a small blade. She is one of the team members who will be giving deliverance.

“I am the son of Jesus,” she says.

The son of Jesus has on a sparkly pink shirt. She wears lipstick. Wide blond hair frames her face like wings.

“I’m the son of Jesus,” she says again. Her hands rise simultaneously, palms up. Her eyes roll back. Only white shows.

The deliverees surround her, holding plates stacked high with meat.

“I don’t get it,” Mary says. She’s wearing all red, shaking her hips, eating standing up. “Why are you the son of Jesus? You’re not a man.”

“Because,” the son of Jesus says, and she pauses and her hands drop to the table in a loud slap, slides forward until her arms straighten and her breasts rest on the polished wood. “Because he told me. Because I know.”

“No, I mean, you’re a woman. Why the son of Jesus?”

“Man’s the original. Woman came from man. When a man and a woman marry they become one flesh. Two individuals but one entity. We’re all sons of God.” When she speaks it looks like she’s carving a clay statue really fast with her hands.

“I’m the son of Jesus. A disciple.”

Bobby says, “Are gay demons more difficult to get out than other demons?” He is a small man wearing a big shirt.

“They aren’t harder to get out but it might be harder for the victim to recover from the session. Usually, homosexual demons attach themselves to their victims during a moment of sexual abuse. Most don’t realize this. They think there’s something wrong with them.”

“But it’s just a demon?”

“
Just
a demon.”

The son of Jesus touches me with her hand. It’s cold like a wet paper towel. “I’ve never seen you before. Are you married?”

I tell her I have a boyfriend. She drags me to the fridge, away from the others, and gets really close to my face. It’s covered in a thin patter of cream. “Any man who doesn’t propose within a year isn’t worth it.” She waits until I say, “
Okay.
”

Back at the table, they’re talking about hormones and how they’re getting in the water, causing fish and stuff to change sex.

I wander over to a couch and I sit with my legs pressed together, trying to finish my burger. A woman cuts my vision with her hand. “I’m Tanya,” she says. We shake hands. Another woman says, “I’m Lynne.” Lynne has short hair and green eyes like cut avocado. She has a peacock on her scarf.

“I’m in training,” Tanya says. She holds her hand out as if waiting for a ring. Before I can shake, she pulls back and flips her hair with it. “I went through deliverance last summer and I just loved it. I came back to learn how to do it for the others.” She leans forward. “Girl,” she says, “get ready for wholeness.”

Tanya had an accident but I don’t know what happened. Half her face is paralyzed.

“Where do the demons go afterward?”

Tim told me that if the demons are sent in the wrong direction, they might run straight into an unknowing pedestrian, a grandma, a cat, they might even run into my laptop and destroy my hard drive. Once when he was still young and inexperienced, Tim sent a demon into the street and it entered a man—just this regular guy walking to the grocery store—and the demon made him shatter the window of his Mercury Mountaineer in the church parking lot. The demon stole his radio.

“I don’t know where they go,” she says. “Lynne, do you know?”

Lynne shrugs.

Tanya grabs her purse, digs, finds a piece of Juicy Fruit, chews. The purse is a clutch sewn from the ass part of Levi’s blue jeans. It has rhinestones and matches her jacket. “You’ll have to ask Tim.”

Paper plates pile up in the garbage cans. Conversation grows quiet. The kitchen door closes. Women clean. Children are ordered to play. The demon camp welcome lunch is over.

•  •  •

The minister begins his talk on demonology in the living room while Katie watches. A few of the men and women being trained in deliverance sit quietly among us. Tim says they might do this—watch us—because they need to feel things out before the exorcism. Tim has on khaki shorts, high white socks, whiter running shoes, and a Hawaiian shirt—the tropical storm kind. He raises his arms, and the tips of his fingers catch light.

He says we should listen to him but that he’s not God. He says Christianese is church talk for the unenlightened. He says the first time he learned to control the weather his wife was holding on to a piece of sheet metal and the wind blew her in the air like a parasail. He commanded the wind to stop and it stopped. He tells a story about an endless bowl of spaghetti that’s still somewhere out there in the world. He says people are trying to actively teach that there are no demons in America. He says once they were messed with by a demon named Jesus.

He’s talking, rolling on the floor, rubbing his back against the wall, opening his hands near his cheeks and faking yelling. He’s making us laugh. Throbbing. Red-faced. Screaming. We’re sitting on the floor and in chairs and he is above us.

“The lowest order of demons are the foot soldiers,” he says, “and in the Satanic Kingdom the most powerful demons rule over cities, states, countries. The demons assigned to warfare in the Western world use subtle tactics and attack ancillary measures in our life, trying to mess up schedules.”

He demonstrates different ways people have come into the kingdom using the door as the metaphorical bridge between heaven and earth. He enters on his knees. He enters weeping. Indifferent. Screaming. He does it over and over again.

He says he hates Fridays because he’s talking to all these demonized people.

“Just remember,” he adds, “that if you go through deliverance too casually you’re going to come out shell-shocked.”

He leans over, lets his back bend and his arms carry weight. He walks forward and stands in the middle of the circle, a defeated gorilla. He rises straight again. He says demons know how to deal with Westerners. He says he can make our demon materialize if we needed evidence.

A simultaneous no, a begging, please don’t!

Katie pulls a sweat cloth from her purse. She runs to him, makes the handoff, sprints back to her chair like those fast kids on the tennis court. Tim wipes his forehead and throws himself against the wall again. He shakes, letting his lips slack and glisten. “Does anyone have any questions?” he says.

“What’re you going to do to us?” “Will it hurt?” “What is it like when the demon leaves?” “Will we know when it’s gone?” “Will we feel it?”

Tim says he won’t touch us. That it’s not like
The Exorcist
, where people are puking and they have to stab you in the heart and your head is spinning and the devil is trying to have sex with you and your face is rotting. They vote on the demon—like a demon democracy—and the other demons follow. It’s quiet. It just takes a minute.

He sits down and his hands make a beautiful curving movement to his thighs. He says some of the exorcists talk directly to God. Some see pictures. Some see scenes from movies. Caleb sees scenes from
Die Hard
.

“What if it’s something you can’t get rid of?”

“We’ve seen everything,” he says.

I have a shopping demon! Lynne yells. I’ve got a divorce demon. I’ve got a retirement demon. I’ve got a debt demon. The minister laughs, stomps his feet.