Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (20 page)

Mary pushes me into the center of the room. “You go next.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Come on.”

Everyone is nodding. She brings me to the chair and I’m surrounded on all sides. The son of Jesus sits next to me and puts her face close to mine. “How’s it going?” she asks through clenched teeth.

She crosses and uncrosses her legs, piles both hands on her knee. Everyone is summoned. Faces come close and then move suddenly away.

“You’re one of God’s favorite daughters,” she says.

“It’s true,” they repeat. “You’re God’s favorite daughter.”

God’s favorite.

All mouths are moving. The tan man hums in the corner with his head down.

“No, really,” the son of Jesus says. “You just don’t get it. You’re one of God’s favorites. Okay. She isn’t hearing us. The words are just bouncing off. I see a shield in front of you. Push that shield away.” I push the shield into the son of Jesus and she gets mad.

“Oh, boy,” she says. “You’re having a hard time believing this, aren’t you. The rest of us should be jealous. He’s flipping nuts about you. He’ll be the absolute love of your life.”

Love of your life,
they repeat.

“Oh, boy, oh, Lord. You’ll never believe this. Look who just walked in the door,” the son of Jesus says. “A pink mist. That means love is coming in the room. He wants to pour his love on you. Let him woo you. Jesus is going to be your greatest romance.”

Your greatest romance.

Everyone hums and closes their eyes while having their imagined love affairs.

Noah touches my hand. He’s crouched on the floor, looking up at me. “I see you in a hospital bed, lying down, and there’s this golden liquid in one of those bags they put on the side. You know what God just told me? God told me you need a transfusion. I asked what kind. He said an identity transfusion. I really believe that God wants you to do a transfusion right now and that this gold liquid needs to pour in you and that you need to realize your identity.”

Noah rolls over and disappears behind me.

“Okay, listen,” the son of Jesus says. “You need to say ‘I am lovable.’ ”

“I don’t want to.”

“Say it.”

“I am lovable?”

“You’re asking a question. Don’t ask a question, just say it.”

“I am lovable.”

“You’re asking a question.”

“Say it.”

“I am lovable.”

“Say it. Again.”

I say it again and again until I’m screaming it.

“You’re still not saying it!”

I’m crying and bent over and they’re all screaming at me to scream and so I just keep screaming. I hear breathing. I think I hear the bones in my neck crack. The son of Jesus is coming at me slow, wide, and ethereal in her dress.

Say it.

Katie enters the room and recites the Bible in a whispery voice:

“When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first and that is how it will be with this wicked generation.”

“You’re in the enemy’s camp now,” she says. “All alone.”

P
ART
V

I AM THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

A
pril Somdahl’s trailer sits at the end of a wide dirt track near a patch of hundred-year-old North Carolina woods: a dark wall of yellow birch, flowering dogwood, witch hazel, wild strawberries, and the thick rise of spruce. Chickens nap in its shady border, burgundy heaps of damp feathers. A fence holds back the growth.

April didn’t want to move to the trailer but her brother Brian returned from the war convinced that the Iraqis were going to invade America. He told April to move to the woods, to a place away from people, with enough land to grow vegetables and raise chickens. April didn’t think the Iraqis were going to invade America, but she loved her brother and so she bought the trailer, a place where she could take care of him until he’d recovered from the war. Three days after she bought the trailer, Brian shot himself. They found him facedown in the Cumberland Center Pavilion, head blown off, bleeding on the steps where he married his wife three years earlier.

April says to get to the trailer you go past the hog farm, and past the dumpy trailer park, past the place where civilization ends, and then take a right at the balloon.

The driveway’s a half mile long. No visible neighbors besides a small mobile home where an older man lives with his mother. There’s six grand worth of oil stored in his shack. April says it’s a country that takes no joy in the toughness of women. Men drive trucks but women don’t. April bought a Chevy Silverado. Pissing everybody off.

In the end April bought the trailer for Brian, not because she believed his theories about the Iraqi invasion of American soil, but because she knew he’d need to be alone to recover from Iraq.

When I arrive two horned goats in a wire cage take their hooves to the metal. The trailer door’s open and the television flickers blue. I walk up the steps. A fake Uzi in the shoe rack points toward a framed diploma from the Hypnotraining Institute of Northern California: “April Somdahl is hereby awarded a diploma as Master Hypnotist.”

No one’s inside. The air is quiet.

April and her daughter Khaia appear wordlessly from the backyard. In Khaia’s arms—an oily black chicken, motionless and gripped by the child’s tight fingers as if taxidermied into a position of grief.

“This is my blind chicken,” she says. It’s got no eyes, just a beak. “Oh, chicken,” she says, rubbing her cheek against its small head. April and her daughter have curly black hair that sticks out nearly a foot from their heads. “Come here, chicken.” Khaia loops a rubber band over the chicken’s neck, slides it over the beak, drags it up the head until tiny feathers rise straight. “There they are.” Two eyes like swollen ticks. “Not
really
blind.”

The chicken is carried up the porch steps, into the trailer, set on the carpet like a child. Khaia disappears. The chicken paces around three cats wrapped like dolls in blankets. Another whacks at ribbon. On the windowsill is a caterpillar named Wormy who lives in a plastic home. Outside, in the backyard, April built a purple chicken coop. Beyond that, rumors of bear.

April’s already making sweet tea and tells me she wants to sunbathe while we talk because there’s a competition going on at work: she needs to outsexy Donna. “She wore this black silk halter top with these itty-bitty jeans and black heels that looked like they should be onstage. I show up for work in my sweatpants. ‘Oh, I won,’ Donna said. ‘I look hotter than you today.’ I feel honored that there’s this beautiful person competing with me. She doesn’t even know that she’s beautiful.”

April owns a tattoo parlor with an alien-war theme outside the Marine Corps base of Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville. If you go past the alien landing diorama you’ll find a statue of a uniformed skeleton on a long march. As the war approached, the marines wanted eagles and United States flags. When the war began, the marines wanted meat tags to help identify their dead bodies. After the troop surge, marines wanted tattoos of their dead friends. Recently, the employees put up a life-sized dartboard of Osama bin Laden.

April walks onto the porch in her American flag bikini, muscled as a seal, sitting with her legs straight and spread, brushing her hair.

“Egyptian,” she says. “Some will recognize. They’ll say, ‘You got African in you? I can tell by your cheeks. I can tell by your lips. I can tell by your hair, ma’am, with that curl in it. You got African in you?’ ”

April has Egyptian blood. The only reason she knows is because Brian wanted a genetics test. The guys in his unit started calling him an Iraqi: “You look so much like an Iraqi I hope I don’t accidentally shoot you.”

Brian knew they were right. One of them looked like he could be his brother. “Don’t worry,” April said. “I’ll go ahead and get my genetics tested and let you know whether we’re Iraqis.” The more April thought about it, the more she worried it was true. She waited until a year after his death. Turns out they weren’t Iraqi.

“Immigrant is what Native Americans call white people,” Khaia says.

“That’s right, fish lips,” April says. April weeps into the hand towel and wrings out her tears on the porch and they evaporate into the sun. “I’m going to have to get another towel. I’ll get one for you too.”

Then I’m alone with Khaia, who’s pointing to the cat named Pit Pat. “I think he died.”

“He’s not dead,” I say. “He’s asleep.”

“I think he’s dead.”

“He’s not.”

“He speaks human. Years of talking to him makes him know.”

•  •  •

Brian enlisted after 9/11, and it was less for the war and more for his father—to earn his love. But when he showed up to the recruitment office, the army told Brian he was overweight and the Marine Corps said the same thing. He dropped pounds quickly. His sister April asked how he lost so much weight. He said, it’s easy—you just quit eating.

“Your dad is a coldhearted fucking old-fashioned marine,” April said. “You’re never going to get love out of him, so quit trying.”

He was the type of father who would check the dishes for water spots. When he found one on the spoon in the silverware drawer, what he’d do is he’d rip the drawer out, dump the clattering utensils, then take all the dishes in the kitchen—breaking and slamming and piling them in a mountain of fucking dishes. He’d tell April to clean them all up again. She do it too—stay up until two or three in the morning doing the dishes.

They’d been living in military housing at Camp Lejeune. At wit’s end, April told her mother, “It’s either him or me. I’ll run away. I’ve got friends.”

April ran away. Their mother finally took everyone to a bullet-shaped trailer in Kinston, North Carolina, on a street called Blue Creek Road. Their mother stayed in her room most of the time and smoked cigarettes and cried a lot. A year passed and their mother left them, five teenagers, alone, in the trailer. Brian found an envelope of cash on the bed. A handwritten note, too. April said she wanted to read it. She thought maybe their mother left because the house wasn’t clean enough. Maybe they were arguing too much? Brian read the letter and then told April she couldn’t read it. She never did.

April’s biological father was in a freak accident that damaged his brain and so he couldn’t help them.

They divided up household tasks. Brian had to take out the laundry and keep his bathroom clean. Nothing too hard. Sarah got a job at Taco Bell and brought tacos home. James worked at Golden Dragon Chinese Takeout and brought noodles home. April used her babysitting money to buy toilet paper. She didn’t have friends with cars like they did. Sarah’s boyfriend had a car. James had a beat-up old truck. When April met a boy named Dane with long blond hair, she remembered liking him because he had a truck. She met him in the month of April and she remembers that detail because her birthday was coming up and she saw him on the street and she said, “I’m gonna be sixteen, come to my birthday.” He was a tall Scandinavian-looking man. It wasn’t much of a birthday. Dane came, though, and they had cake and they have not been apart since.

One day Brian was eating his after-school snack in the kitchen and April was in the back room doing homework when she heard the front door slam shut. April ran outside to find that Brian’s father had returned. He was barking orders, demanding that Brian get his shit and get in the car.

April said he’d have to take her with him. “You don’t even know what kind of snacks to make him.”

“I can only afford one kid right now,” he said, and they left.

All those years Brian slept in a hallway. Eventually he made enough money selling pot to buy a beat-up car and come back to April. “I’m so happy now,” he said. “I’m so happy.”

When Brian shipped off to Iraq as a helicopter mechanic with Fort Campbell’s 96th Aviation Support Battalion, the two made a habit of talking every night using Internet voice chat.

Nighttime in Baghdad, morning in North Carolina. April hooked up a mic and kept his spirits high ever since he saw troops outside his window, walking up and down oil pipes, and suspected a different reason for the war. April asked how things were going and he’d say things were fine. He lied to her for a while.

The first story he told was about the day he tried to help a wounded soldier whose cheek had been ripped off by shrapnel and all the flesh was just dangling there by a thread. He smoothed it back on the bone, gently, like papier-mâché.

Then there was another story about a ripped-up face. One time when he waved to a soldier walking casually across the tarmac, the soldier turned around and half his face was gone too. Brian marveled at the whiteness of bone.

But April said killing the Iraqi man is what really messed up her brother. There was so much blood on the windshield he couldn’t even see the body.

April asked if the Iraqi man had a wife and kids and then she apologized for even asking.

Brian went on these patrols where they’d blast through a wall and they’d be shooting men, women, children, and dogs. On the other side of the wall was a soccer field where the Iraqi children played.

“Fucking shoot everything that moves!” That’s what the soldiers told him, and so he shot everything that moved. “Even the dogs!” Brian said.

Later they turned the soccer field into a cemetery.

It wasn’t too long before Brian invited other soldiers into the room at night to listen to April’s voice. Soon the room was piled with soldiers from the 96th Aviation Regiment, all in their sleeping bags like on a grade-school sleepover.

“Keep talking, April,” they said. “Just keep talking.” If someone walked by, a guard, or a superior, someone who’d get the men in trouble, April pretended to be a radio and recited the news of the world. Sometimes she sang songs from
American Idol,
or lullabies from childhood.