Congress With Demons

The envelope sat on the shelf underneath the register for an entire week before Dun could bring himself to examine it. The shift had been particularly busy as he and Eishka sorted and hung clothes on the racks, as well as dusted all the display shelves and mopped the floor. Weekdays were generally slower; bargain hunters liked to wait until the weekend to hit all the garage sales and thrift stores in one fell swoop.

As they sat behind the counter and ate their sack lunches, Dun finally opened the large manila envelope and looked through the contents. As requested, Johnny had included a stack of comic anthologies and had interspersed the printouts between them, hiding the pages inside the books. Eishka held up a copy of Albion: Complete and peered at the cover image.

“This looks like a –“ she struggled to find the word, “- toaster?”

Dun took the book out of her hands and appraised it. “I think it’s supposed to be a robot. A robot head. A toaster has slots in the top, not on the side.”

“Oh.” She extended her hand but Dun held onto the book, flipping through the pages. He found four plain-paper sheets secreted within: an article from crimelibrary.com. He quickly plucked them out and placed the book on the counter. Eishka now seemed wholly focused on her tuna salad sandwich and Dun placed all the printouts back into the envelope, leaving the books out. He knew he shouldn’t have asked Johnny to buy him comics, as he never read any of the normal superhero books, and Dun didn’t have any interest in dark tales of antiheroes or supernatural beings or psychedelic weirdness, precisely the type of preference Johnny had always displayed when it came to graphic storytelling. He paged through the collected edition of The Filth and shook his head. But maybe that was the real problem: Dun never did the things which authority figures claimed would warp your mind and destroy your soul, whereas all his friends had, and he had turned out worse for never knowing. And now it was too late, but he found it difficult to embrace the counter-culture nonetheless.

“I like pictures,” Eishka said, moving closer to better view the object of his scrutiny. Dun had to force himself to refrain from closing the book. The protective impulse came to him naturally, but she was older than he, after all.

“Yeah, I think most people do.”

“Do you want to see my picture book?” she asked, her face brightening.

“Uh, sure. You have it here?”

“Yes. Some of the others tried to steal it, so I brought it here to keep it safe.”

Eishka went into the back room, where donations were stored until they could be rotated into stock, and returned with a large leather-bound photo album. Written on the front endpaper was a phrase he could not decipher. The lettering reminded him of Arabic characters, but more simplistically rendered. As Dun looked at the pages taken from various sources he recognized more than a few celebrities: an actor he had seen in a film just a few days ago on television, a well-known musician smiling shyly on the cover of a magazine, a tennis player forcefully charging the ball at the net, a New Age guru who made the rounds of daytime talk shows on an annual basis. But none of these attractive people engendered anything but a vague fear in Dun.

They were all blond.

On the front side of the last page was a photo he had quickly glimpsed in his perusal of the articles Johnny had printed out for him: Malik Leahy sitting in court, staring off into space with an expression bordering on haughty contempt. Dun turned the page over and on the other side was a Polaroid pressed between the cardboard and the plastic.

It was also Malik, but in this picture the subject was looking at the camera with an expressivity which seemed to be entirely joyful. His heart thudded in shock.

“You knew him, from before.”

“That is Kahil, my friend.”

“What? No, that’s Malik.”

“The Agents of Agape,” Eishka explained, “are all similar, but there are a few who are the same. They are like us, but not of us.”

“He had a twin?”

“Each piece of the Design is but a fragment of a larger whole.”

Dun felt another headache coming on.

“They are the light, they are the love, but some of them are too beautiful for this world. My beautiful Kahil, my friend, he could no longer bear the weight. I took it from him when he asked me to do so. And his brother was cast down.”

“So you’re saying all these people –“

“Are the Agents of Agape. Dog knows that love moves downward in the tree. The light shines down upon the shadow. Have you never looked upon any of them and felt yourself expand? Felt joy in their presence?”

“I don’t like blond people. My whole family is blond and they can rot in Hell for all I care. And Taylor, he’s another one.”

“No, he is not of them. He is like us, pieces of shadow moving between.”

Dun turned back to the final page. “Tell me about Kahil.”

“Though my existence is wretched, and fearful, I once knew lucidity. I once knew love. My lover, my friend, my Kahil. Though he was not mine to possess, he belonged to whomever needed to see him. It was against the Design for such a one as I to seek him out, to embrace the light. The Agents of Agape were meant to inspire your kind, not mine. But he found me, one day, shivering among the dross, and he took my hand. He spoke to me in the sacred tongue. ‘Dog is with thee,’ he said, ‘come lie with me.’ And I went away with him, to learn the ecstatic mysteries.”

“Is that why you are a girl now? Because you weren’t supposed to be with him?”

“No, that is not the true reason. Though reason enough, in the sight of Dog.”

Dun looked down again at the photograph and it was strange, he began to intuit how this carbon copy of the Angel was in some way just as Eishka had characterized him:
not exactly. . .angelic

Kahil was laughing at the moment his image was immortalized and it made Dun want to begin laughing as well. His eyes were that same faded-denim blue, his hair the exact shade of spun gold. But there was something about him which caused Dun to understand what Eishka was attempting to explain in regards to the purpose of these beings that Malik, for all his identical physical perfection, could not.


The buzzing of the intercom interrupted yet another reverie, staring at the face of the Angel. Annoyed, she reached across her desk for the phone, almost upsetting her coffee mug and an apothecary jar full of M&Ms.

“Dr. Mentjis, Jonathan Winston just walked into the building. Is he supposed to be here?”

“Goddamn it, I told him to call me, not come over here!”

“I could just tell him we can’t let him in because of the restraining order.”

“He’s already here, and I do need to talk to him. So escort him in here, if you please.”

“Okay then.”

A few minutes later there was a quiet knock upon her office door, and upon granting admittance Petra led in one of the world-renowned experts on sexual aberration, Dr. Jonathan Winston.

“Good morning, Karen,” he said, his tone as always incredibly smug.

“Thanks Petra.” She closed the door behind her and Karen continued to read a file she had grabbed at random as Jonathan stood before her desk, waiting for her acknowledgement. Finally, she looked at him, narrowing her eyes.

“How did you find out?”

“That you’re holding my prize case study, you mean? I’ve got all the moles corruption will afford me. Can I sit down, at least?”

She shrugged, and he placed himself in the chair immediately across from her desk. She viewed the face familiar to her not only from television screens and dust jackets, but as a former student who, along with at least half the females in her Studies In Deviancy seminar, was obsessed with her sandy-haired, intensely blue-eyed visiting professor. One of the attributes which made him attractive to aspiring psychiatrists was the fact that he was only slightly older than they: adjudged to be a prodigy of observation and diagnosis. There was nothing so much which aroused the female intellectual as arrogant genius. But the bloom left the rose as soon as she graduated, and learned that arrogant genius is sexy from the distance of student-teacher interaction, but very unattractive when experienced in close quarters, professionally speaking.

“So how is my Angel?”

“He slapped one of the other patients last week. A female schizophrenic.”

“Now Karen, the politically correct term is dissociative.”

“He hit her hard enough to knock her down.”

“May I see the surveillance video? I assume you have one.”

She picked up a remote off her desk and pointed it at a nearby television monitor. The screen sprang to life, a timestamp running across the bottom, then the scene played out in severe gray tones, the sound somewhat distorted but cleaned up to the best of the ability of the video services company which had created a separate tape of the encounter. He asked to see it again and after the second viewing he looked at her, pursing his lips as he considered the event.

“He acts like he knows her. From before.”

“It is puzzling, she had the same type of association when he was first admitted. As soon as she saw him she became extremely withdrawn for a period of time, as if she had known him prior, and feared him.”

“But he couldn’t possibly – who is she?”

“Her name is Melinda Rosen. She’s 22, a ward of the state for pretty much her entire life. She ran away from foster care at 15 and spent the rest of the time on the streets. She had a particularly violent episode almost two years ago at a shelter and County insisted she be admitted because they didn’t want to deal with her outbursts.”

“Not his type of girl, to my mind. And who is Kahil?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’ve talked to the mother, but she didn’t know.”

“Did she cry?”

“Of course.”

“That woman is going to end up with an inflammation of the tearducts. Hmm, maybe Kahil isn’t a ‘who,’ but a ‘what.’”

“But she said and he says you should forgive me.”

“The name means –“

“’Friend’ or ‘lover’ in Arabic, yes I know. The mother is quite well-versed in Arabic nomenclature.”

Jonathan chuckled. “She claimed she had a dream that an angel came to her before Malik was born and told her she would receive the Holy Fire and give birth to one of their kind, so that’s why she named him thus.”

“Divine intervention, how thrilling.”

“He was a beautiful baby, I’ve seen the pictures. Malik Azhar, luminous angel.”

“Yes I’m sure you saw everything before the restraining order was filed.”

“I don’t mind that so much, I have all the material I need. It’s the injunction which adds financial insult to intellectual injury.”

“We all have our cross to bear, Jon. Do you have any brilliant theories rolling around in your esteemed brain?”

“Well I can’t really posit anything without talking to him.”

“And you can’t do that, so why did you come here then?”

“Has he ever sat in this chair?”

Karen stared at Jonathan, open-mouthed and incredulous. She knew, as everyone who traveled in the same academic and professional circles, that Winston was obsessed with Leahy, far beyond his role as the subject of a would-be true crime bestseller, but she never knew how obsessed until that moment. But why should he be any different from the prison groupies or anyone else in Leahy’s sphere of influence? The Angel had a sort of negative charisma that she had to fight against on a daily basis, or risk falling into the event horizon herself. She felt sorry for her former teacher, though she would never admit it.

“Yes Jon, he sits in that chair every time he comes to see me.”

“How does he look? Has he gained weight?”

“A little. But he’s allowed to use the weight room, and the exercise yard.”

“Has he told you why he tried to set himself on fire?”

“No, he refuses to speak about his suicide attempt. Most of the time he tells me he’s sexually frustrated.”

“And no one has offered to alleviate his suffering? Not his good doctor, for example? His entirely compassionate and sympathetic ear?”

“Leahy has no effect on me. He’s a sociopath. I do not find sociopaths sexually attractive.”

Winston snorted contemptuously. “Oh please, Karen! Your sympathy for deviancy is off the charts – I’ve read your monographs, remember?”

“That’s hilarious coming from someone who spent an entire chapter of his latest book, which will probably never be published, waxing eloquent about the physical attractiveness of Malik Leahy. The ‘halo-like’ hair, the ‘eyes like the brightest of sunlit skies,’ the ‘pouty, cherubic’ lips. I bet your editor had to pry apart the manuscript pages.”

Jonathan was silent for a moment, his face still but his eyes bore into her with a malicious weight.

“Fuck you, Karen.”

“Oh I don’t think it’s me you want to fuck, Jon.”

She watched bemusedly as he rose from the chair, grabbed his briefcase, and left without another word, slamming her office door shut for emphasis.

“Nice chatting with you Jon, as always. Pompous asshole.”

That last part she muttered to herself, attempting a greater professional demeanor than she currently possessed in regards to Dr. Winston. She heard raised voices in the foyer, but felt assured Petra could handle him, as she was completely immune to the charms of most men, which came with the territory of managing a facility full of nutjobs.

Karen was always careful to include psychiatrists in that category.