Congress With Demons

Are you sure you really wanna do this?
- “IYDKMIGHTKY (Gimme That)” (Steele)

Dun’s mother once told him that she could smell the crazy on him, like body odor. He gave off a strange, metallic sort of scent that was like the ozone produced by scorched water.

And maybe crazy was true when the world shimmered before him, in the heat. Not just the heat, mind you, but the very concrete facts of things, rippling mutable and unsound. Like now, as he sat eating a box of Ritz crackers given to him by the home. Some faceless organization had donated cases of the things, so all the residents received a box, along with slabs of oily processed cheesefood. It tasted like plastic. The medication made it difficult to eat sometimes, there were days when everything tasted like mold, or ash.

Petra brought around little dishes of mango. Dun liked mango because it was eating sunshine. He was of the opinion that sunshine tasted like honey, not oranges. And then, as he examined each piece before putting it in his mouth, she was there beside him, whispering.

“Flesh. I love when they bring us flesh.”

“It’s a mango.”

“Have you ever eaten flesh that they didn’t burn? It’s slippery like this.”

Dun looked at her, at the gaunt face and too-big eyes with voluminous dark circles beneath, as if she’s been smudged with a piece of charcoal. He thought to ask the question that most made sense.

“Doesn’t this food make you sick, then?”

“Mostly.”

Dun didn’t know if Eishka was real to anyone else. It seemed as though she were: she took her meds at the same time everyone else did, she would spear her lime Jello at lunchtime and hold it up to the light. She said it was a prism between this world and the one she came from. She would laugh at inappropriate moments during Seinfeld in the lounge. But there were times, like now, as they sat with their dishes of mango, building towers of crackers in front of them, that he believed what he saw and heard was meant only for him.

“What does flesh taste like?”

“It’s greasy and sour. Unless it’s an angel, and then it’s like this: slippery and sweet.”

“Did you eat an angel?”

“Oh yes. But now that I’m becoming a girl I’m not allowed.”

She was a prototype for the ruined ingénue: short brown hair that bore the mark of obsessive trimming in a dark dorm room, sans mirror. Pale skin that bore every little bump and bruise in full detail. She would pick at her chapped lips and mumble to herself. But everyone mumbled here – ongoing conversations either to stave off the fugues or encourage their arrival – and those aspects alone were not enough to convince him that her seeming otherworldliness was more than merely delusional. Rather, the evidence lay underneath the stereotypical exterior.

Dun and Eishka worked at the thrift store sponsored by the home and during one of their shifts on a slow rainy day she turned her back to him, pulling up her shirt.

“Wha – what are you doing?” he asked, confusion and titillation fighting for dominance.

“My wings, they itch.”

And below the scapula, on either side of her spine, were two protrusions. Dun touched them, gingerly, and they felt hard, like bone. Eishka let out a breath, and whispered.

“Can you scratch them?”

So he did, until the skin was reddening, and she pulled down her t-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra, he noticed. Dun imagined it would be difficult for someone who wasn’t born human to remember things like that.


There were days when Dun felt fairly lucid, even in the midst of all the shimmering. The shimmering seemed the worst of his problems, really, in that it made it very difficult to concentrate. On anything. And during the course of one of those days he asked Eishka, “Why did you lose your wings?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. What is the obsession of you people with talking about everything?”

He had to snicker at the phrase “you people.” As if he himself was ever considered a real person, and not just another wacko, cluttering up state-funded facilities like this one.

“Aren’t you supposed to be trying to fit in?”

Silence was her response.


The continuing parade of personalities made time in the hands of the state tolerable. Dun was ever-curious about other people’s lives, it made it easier to forget his own. Though his dreams were more like sleeping memories, he always dreamt of his family and their disgust.

Easier, instead, to sit in the game room, white walls glaring in the mid-morning sunlight through windows eternally uncovered. Easier to listen to stories, perhaps true, perhaps contrived. But always interesting.

Malik, for example, he always had interesting stories to tell. His name meant “angel” in Arabic. His parents weren’t Arabic, they were actually Irish, but they had visited the Middle East as missionaries and became enamored of all things from that region. And they had given him a very suitable name, as his appearance could be said to be positively angelic – blond and blue-eyed with a broad, babyish face – and his outward manner was calm, almost blank. Dun knew from true crime books that a great many sociopaths were blank in that they had successfully disconnected from their emotions so extensively as to not appear to possess them at all.

Everyone called him “Mal,” and Dun knew from an episode of Firefly that it meant “bad” in Latin.

A truism, one of a handful that defined his world.

Some people were bad, others appeared to be good. But you couldn’t assume anyone was good until they had done something to prove it.


Taylor was the one who drove Dun and Eishka to the thrift shop and back on their work days. He enjoyed driving the others around, as opposed to anything that required actual labor. He was also a blond – Dun didn’t trust blond people. Everyone in his family was blond except for himself, though his mother always insisted on using the term “dirty blond” to describe his hair color. Taylor was hateful, he had nicknames for everyone he knew.

“Okay, we got the bedwetting pyro and the freak girl what thinks she’s an alien, we’re good to go.” He wrote something on a clipboard he picked up from the front passenger’s seat.

“I never wet my bed, you jackass,” Dun would mutter in his defense, and sometimes Eishka would put a hand on his arm, silently supportive. Other times she would gaze out the window, completely absorbed by the outside world.

“In all o’them psychiatric manuals it says that pyromaniacs do what they do ‘cause they don’t have any control over their bodies, like, they wet the bed.”

“I’m not talking about this!” Dun would yell, his body clenched.

But the same conversation would spiral out of control, ending with Taylor claiming curiosity rather than malice.

“And what about you?” Dun asked. “You can’t even kill yourself and stay dead, so you can’t say shit about all of us being freaks.”

“Hey, I never gave up. It’s my damn family wouldn’t let me die in peace. Bastards, all o’them.”

“I thought you were the – what is the word – bastard?” Eishka interjected.

“Aw, don’t pretend like you don’t speak English, freak.”

“Shut up!” Dun yelled at him. Every conversation involving Taylor ended with Dun getting a sore throat from yelling. He knew it would behoove him to act more like Mal, but of course everyone was terrified of Malik, even Taylor. When pressed, however, he feigned a righteous bravado.

“Aw who gives a shit what he done? He ain’t gonna do nothing to none o’us, so I’ll say what I wanna say.”

“He doesn’t have to do anything, that’s the point,” Dun countered.

“He’s one of them,” Eishka whispered.

“Them who?” Dun asked.

“Like us, but not of us. One of them. They have light, but you can’t see it, you can only be blinded.”

“What the hell is she goin’ on ‘bout now?”

“Just drive the fucking car, cutter.”

That shut him up. Malik called Taylor “cutter” in a disdainful monotone, eying his ever-present long sleeves.

You think you can escape the world by bleeding to death?

His voice was so hushed that the threat was almost neutered by his tone. But it was there, even as his eyes seemed wide and guileless.

That’s only the beginning, cutter. Think about it the next time you want another scar to remind you of your misery.

Taylor just stood there and took it, mouth slightly agape. The other members of the discussion group gave each other a variety of looks, ranging from sheer terror to amused derision.

Finally, he looked away and said, “Aw what the hell do you know ‘bout it, anyway?”

Malik’s gaze in response seemed to indicate that whatever he knew, the time for revelation was over. Their counselor had entered the room.


Group therapy was a rather bizarre construct at the nuthouse, available only to the more highly-functioning patients. The counselor merely attempted to control chaos, as any actual therapeutic benefit to be gleaned did not register with her clients, ensnared in their perceptions of a hostile universe.

“You’re viewing things through a very distorted mirror,” she told them repeatedly.

The only time Malik ever smiled was during group therapy. He would appear polite and humble, clear-thinking and eager to progress beyond his problems. When she left, nervously gathering the files and shoving them into her briefcase, leaning on the buzzer to summon the ward monitor, his face would quickly return to its’ stolid void.

“Stupid bitch.” The words again hushed, but all the more malicious in the delivery.


What did he do, anyway?

These questions whispered, fearfully. Answers varied from the apocryphal to the mundane. The fear was that he was potentially too violent to be assigned to their ward, but while in captivity Malik had never been seen doing anything out of the ordinary by The Powers That Be. And funding was tight, especially for those entirely dependent on the State.

So everyone wondered, and watched.

Then Eishka came to Dun one day and told him a secret.

“I know what he did. And I know why he’s here.”

“Everybody knows why he’s here,” Dun told her, tiring of the way in which the conversation always seemed to turn towards the Angel, as if no one had any control over their own thoughts. “He’s crazy, just like the rest of us. Except you, maybe. I don’t think you’re crazy, just misunderstood. I mean, you never tired to hurt anybody, did you?”

Eishka didn’t answer the question, merely stared across the room at her blond nemesis.

“He’s here to kill me. Because he is one of them.”

One of the truisms of Dun’s sad, small existence crumbled a bit, at that moment. Because he believed her, and the world grew a little more malevolent in the time it took Eishka to reveal her own demons.


His mother was yelling at him again. Dun's mouth became a thin white line and he continued to tighten the trucks on his skateboard until the wheels rolled without a hint of wobble. She wouldn't find him, he was actually in the neighbor's backyard in a hollow he had fashioned out of a large oleander bush. Nettie was a retired woman whose property lay behind his stepfather's and she paid him $20 every time he did yardwork for her. Dun cut a hole in her fence in an area not readily visible so he could get away quickly when he needed to. Not from Nettie – she was mostly deaf and very indulgent of Dun – but from his stepfather. His mother called his name till she was hoarse and he could hear her walk back into the house, the boards of the back porch creaking and the screendoor banging against the frame. Once he was finished he would return and do his chores, but he needed some time to himself to decompress from the rigors of school, and when his stepfather came home from work there was little chance of doing anything resembling relaxation.
“Duncan, your mother tells me she called for you last week and you refused to talk to her.”
“I didn't feel like it.”
“We've discussed this before, Duncan. Part of your therapy involves communicating with your mother, giving her the chance to make amends. She understands that what she did was wrong, allowing your stepfather to hurt you.”
“Look, I keep telling you, it's not that she didn't do anything. Because she did. She used to tell me I was crazy every single day. She'd say I was crazy like her dad, and her dad's dad, like that was my destiny. Who the fuck was I supposed to believe if not my own mother?”
“The use of profanity is not necessary, Duncan. I understand you are frustrated with her, but you need to make an effort towards healing, moving beyond your anger. Because you will never mature, never evolve, unless you let go of that anchor.”
“You don't understand shit.”
Even beneath the layers of unconsciousness, Dun had the thought that Taylor reminded him of his stepfather. They were both good-looking, but in the way a dangerous animal is often a work of unparalled beauty, mean to entice. To ensnare. To facilitate destruction.


A month after the arrival of the avenging angel, Eishka had become more withdrawn. Days when she refused to leave her dorm room, spurned all food save something bland and comforting, like mashed potatoes. A larger dose of the anti-psychotic du jour made her just as blank as her enemy.

“So I hear you tried to kill your stepfather,” Malik said, seating himself directly across from Dun at dinner. He was wedged in, the monitors were stationed at every table to ensure everyone ate, nowhere to run.

“Yeah,” Dun replied, meeting that keen blue gaze. Although his heart was pounding painfully, he refused to give ground, knowing what he knew. “So what?”

“Well that's quite a feat, burning down the house. I mean, why not resort to something simple, like poisoning him?”

“Because I wanted to hear him scream.”

Malik pushed his food around on the sectioned tray, his expression unchanging. Then he smiled, briefly, like the sudden movement of a cloud across the sun.

“You've got a taste for fear, that's good. What does it taste like to you?”

Dun longed to be as facile, as stone-hearted, though little human foibles kept appearing to trip him up. Like being in love with a demon. He was caught between the poles: humans were meant to care, but demons actually cared more, longing to embody all that their counterparts kept in check.

“Like dirt. Like your shit.”

The Angel cocked his head, curious at the taunt.

“I'm sure you'll find out if that's true.” Then, not a word more, as he ate the food in front of him with visible detachment, every bite an unfamiliar sensation. It was ashes in Dun's mouth, though lately he had not experienced the gustatory confusion that he normally did. He looked up at Malik who was staring at a spoonful of peas. His eyes moved to meet Dun's and he heard something louder than all the ambient noise surrounding him, even louder than the eternal internal dialogue which the medication could never quite quell.

You really wanted to eat his ashes and be avenged. I know. It's what I do.
Remember that now, dear Duncan.

When one dropped a utensil, as Dun did at that moment, his fork clattering to the floor, they had to carry on with whatever tools remained and the spoon was smooth in his mouth, coating his tongue with the flavor of vengeful ignition.


On Thursdays the local shelter brought cats and dogs for the residents to interact with, and although the research regarding pet therapy in relation to Class III-and-above psychosis was largely undocumented, the administration felt any measure was better than none at all. Everyone interested gathered in the Common Room and cooed over kittens and puppies. Malik normally sat on one side of the room and viewed the proceedings at a disdainful remove.

“There's no shortage of mewling brats on this planet,” he said, placing his hands over his eyes, stretching his tall frame out on the chair, the bottom half of his legs resting on a table piled high with aging periodicals and copies of Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

“Oh Mal, you don't wanna come pet the pussies?” Ruth asked him. She was a 50-something matron whose last bout of postpartum depression landed her in the nuthouse after she attempted to drown herself in full view of her brood of six. She had convinced the oldest two to help hold her under when she struggled in the bathtub. Had her husband not arrived home at the moment they were doing so, she might have finally escaped the dark cloud hanging over her psyche, which was now still visible, though not as bothersome.

The Angel said nothing, and Dun played with his favorite Daschund, Greta, who he knew had been saved from the gas chamber when he had pleaded with the Shelter manager that she was helping the crazy people with her ever-merry nature. They had managed to turn his tearful plea into a PR opportunity and earn themselves a large donation from a philanthropist animal rescuer (read: crazy cat lady with a lot of cash). The crazy cat lady sent him greeting cards on every holiday, emblazoned with felines fighting over a ball of string.

“She's a multi-millionaire, but she sends the most cheap-ass cards I ever seen. Even my momma, on the Welfare and the Social Security, sends me nicer cards than that!” Taylor opined once after seeing a stack of the cards on Dun's dresser.

“My mother said rich people are frugal. Not that I would know.” That observation from Dun's roommate, Nate, a garden-variety manic-depressive. His medication rendered him mostly level, though he generally became agitated if he missed his favorite television programs.

Eishka held a kitten and sang to it: a crooning beyond words. Dun felt Malik watching her, the gaze cutting through the shield of his back, as he was always careful to place himself between the two whenever they occupied the same room. A laughable enterprise most likely, the thought that a human could come between creatures eternal and elevated beyond the reasoning of Man.

“Did you ever have a dog?” Taylor asked him, holding a puppy. He pronounced the noun dawg.

“No, my stepdad didn't allow pets.”

“Aw, every boy should have a dog. I had this big ole black Lab, he was a good dog. Too good actually. My grandmaw Jess called him Buddy, but my momma Jess called him The Hellhound, 'cause he was black as sin, she said.”

“How come your grandma and your mom had the same name?” Ruth asked him.

“My grandmaw Jess had five girls and she named 'em all after her: Jessilynn, Jessimine, Jessianne, Jessilu -”

“Which was your mom?”

“She was Jessibelle.”

Malik let out with a raucous laugh, which to Dun's ears sounded cruel.

“I always wondered what happened to that scarlet woman,” he said, returning to the monotone.

Taylor looked over at the Angel with an angry glance, but held his tongue, generally quick to strike at anyone who maligned his family, regardless of whatever he might say about them.

“But that damn dog, he would always run home and tell my momma whenever I cut myself. The last time I tried I was living in the room over my grandmaw's garage, and I locked myself in the bathroom, locked the dog out in the yard, and the next thing I know the paramedics are puttin' me in the ambulance (am-buyew-lahnce) and they're sayin,' Taylor Joe, we ain't gonna do this again, ya hear?"

“Like Lassie,” Ruth said, in a dreamy tone.

“I don't like collie dogs,” one of the other patients said, a grimace contorting his face.

“And they don't like you either,” Malik answered.

Anthony was one of those terrified of the Angel; he dumped his kitten bundle back in the box and departed the room at a half-run.

“I don't think most dogs like me anyway,” Dun said, only half-aware of the voicing of his confession. “My mom said they could smell the crazy on me and I scared them.”

“Dog is with all of us, from the most exalted to the lowest of the low.” Eishka whispered.

“But not with you, girl.” Dun moved closer, as if he could protect her from the mere sound of Malik's voice.

“It is true, I am abandoned. Dog has forgotten me.”

“What the hell you all talkin' 'bout 'Dog?' Don't you mean God?” Taylor asked.

Malik laughed again, and the sound had progressed from cruel to torturous. Petra leaned into the doorway of the Common Room and gave him a withering glance.

“Mr. Leahy, could you please refrain from deliberately upsetting people? Otherwise I'm calling Ms. Jones right now.”

Malik stopped immediately. Dun thought it was as if someone had hit the mute button on his universal remote. The room was now empty save the four of them, and he led Eishka away, trembling. Taylor followed, attempting nonchalance but his footsteps betrayed his dis-ease. Dun wondered if it was safe, leaving Malik alone with the animals, but as if she knew his pondering, Eishka placed a hand on his arm and spoke in a strangely consolatory tone.

“He won't hurt them, his design is but for one. And Dog is not with me.”

“Dog ain't with none o'us, I'm thinkin,'” Taylor muttered.


Even at the bosom of the glass teat, the outside world was incredibly circumscribed. Access to television was generally restricted: the patients were not allowed to watch the news, for example. But the community had banded together to convince the administration to give them access to Court TV; if they had one commonality, regardless of the nature of their psychiatric ailments, it was that they loved to watch true crime documentaries and docudramas and make tsk tsk tsk sounds at the screen when the culprit was apprehended in the end.

Dun sat watching such a show one morning, shortly after breakfast, and his eye was caught by a seemingly familiar expression, a flash among a montage of faces for an upcoming program as the voiceover intoned: They were all heartbreakers, and their lovers paid the ultimate price for their devotion.

His head began to pound, the lounge swimming before his sight in a puddle of green and tan. He swallowed repeatedly, attempting to regain control of his immediate senses. He tasted smoke in the back of his throat and his stomach roiled with remembered rage. He did not notice he had coiled into a ball in his chair until he felt Petra’s hand on his shoulder, heard her voice in his ear.

“Dun, is it another migraine?”

He stretched out from his contortions, attempting to look at her face, but all he could see was a shimmering blur.

“I guess,” he croaked. “I need to lie down.”

She helped him to his room, cranked down the glass slats and put a cold compress over his eyes. When she retreated, locking the door behind her, Dun lay there for a time, listening to the sounds of his body and wondering what he could do. It occurred to him he had at least one source of outside information, and he needed to use it. After attempting to sit up several times only to find his equilibrium had been completely sabotaged by the current attack, he fell asleep, briefly.

”I can’t forget to call Johnny,” he told himself.
There was darkness.
And a voice. He knew this voice, it was the Voice of Counsel which everyone possessed; though at times this voice sounded more like gleeful devilry than deep wisdom.
And the voice asked the question it asked at every juncture where Dun was certain things were going to go horribly wrong, but there was no other path to take.

Are you sure you really wanna do this?

When next he opened his eyes she was there.

Eishka smiled at him and Dun smiled in return. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside his bed and he did not think to ask how she came to be there, within the haven of the locked room. It was a question unimportant, and ephemeral, in comparison to the greater mysteries of the universe.

“This,” she said, breaking the soft silence and extending a slender-fingered hand, “this that you call world, is a luminous pearl in the dark hand of Dog. It is the base of the tree, and the tree is everything.”

“Where are you, in the tree?”

“We are all below the light, save those made of light. He came from that realm. I was somewhere below, but still exalted, and necessary, in the Design.”

“If you’re a demon, what is he?”

“An angel. His name fits, you see, as does all the appellations we receive. But angels are not as you believe them to be, nor demons.”

“But what are you then?”

“We all require belief. From the bottom to the top. But some pieces of the Design, they cannot bear the weight of belief.”

When next he opened his eyes he was alone.

Dun rose from his bed and opened the top drawer of his dresser, looking for his phone card.