Vicious Circle

“It feels like I just went to sleep, and then woke up,” he muttered. “I was in that sod-awful flat down Seven Sisters Road. You were there, Fix. I was talking to you, and for some reason I was . . . I guess, lying down, or something. Anyway, you were above me looking down. Then I closed my eyes, and . . . I had really bad dreams. The kind where if it was a movie you’d wake up screaming, but you try that and you find out you can’t.” A new thought occurred to him. “Ginny. Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?”

“Was that the girl?” I asked, and he nodded. I remembered the white-blond, stick-thin apparition who’d worked beside me through the hours of that night, shoveling off-license ice packs into the bath where Rafi lay sprawled to stop the water that was keeping his temperature down from boiling away. Rafi was right, it had been a bit like a dream—and she was one of the things that faded with the daybreak. I’d never seen her again, and it turned out the flat was only in Rafi’s name so there was no way of contacting her. “I lost touch with her,” I murmured, which had the merit of being accurate without hitting him in the face with how quickly his lady had bailed out on him.

He knew how to read between the lines, though, and two years of being Asmodeus’s finger puppet had left him a little deficient in the putting-a-brave-face-on-it department. I had to look away from the naked pain in his eyes.

I was fervently grateful that this scene wasn’t being played out in Rafi’s cell. Dr. Webb—despite the lingering unpleasantness of Saturday’s punch-up—had allowed us to use one of the interview suites, only insisting that a male nurse stay in attendance and that we should all be locked in until we signaled that the visit was over. The nurse—a humorless Welshman named Kenneth, about the size and heft of a bulldozer—stood in the corner of the room watching Coronation Street without sound on the wall-mounted TV. It was as close to privacy as the Stanger offered.

“I was possessed,” said Rafi, sounding as though he were once again trying the concept on for size and finding that it didn’t even go over his shoulders. “Asmodeus took me over. Lived inside my body.”

“Rafi, love,” said Pen, wiping her bleary eyes, “you shouldn’t keep going over this. You want to get well first. Then later on, when you’re . . .”

She tailed off into silence because Rafi was shaking his head with slow, stern emphasis. “No,” he said. “I need to know where I’ve been. You can’t just sit up in bed, yawn, and stretch and get on with your life. Not after two years.”

“It won’t be that easy in any case,” I said, feeling it my duty as bastard in residence to shoot his hopes down before they flew high enough to hurt themselves. “Getting on with your life, I mean. You’re not here on your own recognizance, Rafi. You were sectioned. Getting you out is going to take time. You’ll have to convince a whole lot of people you’re sane again.”

Pen glared at me as if it was my decision to make. “He was never mad, Fix,” she said, her voice betraying her because all the crying had left it shaky and high. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I do. But it doesn’t matter a good goddamn what I know, Pen. Rafi isn’t in here because anyone ever really thought he had a mental illness: he’s here because demonic possession isn’t legally definable—and because Asmodeus couldn’t be let out on the streets to amuse himself with the traditional demonic pastimes of torture, mutilation, and murder. We did what we had to do. And unfortunately, once it’s done, it’s not quick or easy to undo.”

Pen stood up, her fists clenched, and faced me down. Just for that moment, it seemed, I was the enemy—the voice of all the unreason and all the hypocritical hedging that had put Rafi here in the first place and was happy now to leave him here until he rotted.

“I think we’d like to be alone for a while,” she said pointedly. I threw out my hands in a placating gesture and headed for the door.

“Wait, Fix.”

When I turned, Rafi was looking at the ground—or maybe he had his eyes on the ground while he looked within himself for a script for what he was going to say next. That search seemed to absorb every ounce and inch of his attention.

“What?” I asked, a little brusquely. I was with Pen on this one: I wanted out. Wanted to leave them alone to match velocities again after two years in which Pen had had a life and Rafi had had a padded room. And I particularly, fervently, needed to be somewhere else when the conversation got as far as Dylan.