Infestation (NARRATIVA) ~ di Joseph Bathanti - TeclaXXI

 

NARRATIVA

 

Joseph Bathanti

Infestation

Duccio di Buoninsegna,  The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain [La Tentazione di Cristo sulla montagna - predella della Maestà del Duomo di Siena], 1308-1331, tempera su tavola di pioppo, New York, ©The Frick Collection (courtesy).

 

          On a frigid night, in the last few days of December, Fritz and Claire drive downtown to see the Pittsburgh premier of The Exorcist at The Warner.

          Claire has read the novel, a best-selling paperback with a distorted face smeared on its cover that looks like the pistil and vulva-form stigma of a purple orchid. She insists Fritz read it, but he refuses. He doesn’t want his vision of the devil in any way complicated. He prefers a cartoon abstraction: a man in a red devil suit, with a Van Dyke and trident. An image he can easily dismiss.

The devil who lives in the novel, however, the real Devil, Claire assures him, is the seductive, cloaked wayfarer, that most exquisite and alluring of all angels, Lucifer, who presented himself to Jesus in the desert, who can molt volcanic rock into bread, or convince a devout man to slide a razor across his windpipe. Not a metaphor or a symbol – but an extant demon.

The movie is interrupted repeatedly because viewers break down or faint. A woman suffers a massive stroke and has to be rushed to the hospital by paramedics. A somnolent weeping pervades the theatre. Many simply walk out. Claire squeezes Fritz’s hand between both of hers and emits a static crackle each time she gasps. After Regan, the little possessed girl, played carnally by kewpie-like Linda Blair, drives a crucifix into her vagina, Fritz veils his eyes with his free hand and scans the remainder of the movie through his fingers. 

The film concludes with a close of the little girl, drained and seared, the bloody tatters of deliverance, yet clearly beatified by the exorcism that results in the deaths of two Jesuits. Yet, as Mike Oldfield’s score, Tubular Bells, a diabolical Panis Angelicus, filters through the catatonic theatre, there is the unmistakable sense that the demon has not at all been vanquished, but loosed once and for all. Then the audience files, like the condemned on their way to the death house, into the crystalline last days of 1973 – so dazzlingly cold that the famous clock depended from Kaufmann’s department store expires.

Later, in Claire’s apartment, where Fritz often spends the night, she explains that possession starts with infestation – the first manifestations of the demon. In the movie, the first sign of infestation comes from the attic, what Regan’s mother assumes are skittering rats. Half the time, Claire says, she thinks she’s possessed. Like rats are racing along the joists in her brain, diving into her bloodstream, gnawing on the wires that splice her together. There are entire rooms within Claire occupied by rats.

They have offices where they talk on telephones, and take down information to file in their long grey cabinets. They are planning something. Fritz and Claire laugh at this. But Fritz wants her to drop it. Since they left the movie, he’s been hearing things: a scat across a washboard, a stick dragged along an alley floor.

 Claire sighs, smiles and slips out of her sweater, stands there, protractedly unbuttoning her blouse, shirttails hanging over the front of her jeans. She unzips them, but so tight, they remain glued to her hips. She walks to Fritz on the couch, and puts her hands on his shoulders. He slips his thumbs in her belt loops and tugs the jeans down her unshaved legs until she walks out of them and sits next to him.

They smoke a joint and end up in bed, a mattress on the floor, surrounded by candles, incense, the music of Ravi Shankar. Fritz cannot stop thinking about the movie, the guttural voice of Regan as she blasphemes. He realizes he’s been hearing that voice all his life, but he can’t place it. He shouldn’t have seen the movie. He shouldn’t have smoked the reefer.

Claire says again there’s something inside her, and smiles. “I’m possessed,” she says. Fritz wants her to stop talking about possession. He doesn’t like the smile.

“Let’s call upon our dead ancestors,” she suggests.

And indeed they are snared, on the mattress, in a séance ring of candles, the sitar music taking them farther and farther away from Claire’s tidy apartment on Jackson Street, not terribly far from where Fritz lives with his mother and father. Fritz’s mother’s father, Federico, the cobbler, Fritz’s namesake, died in the fire that destroyed his shop on Station Street. Fred the Shoemaker believed there were people born with the power to put the eyes on you, the malocchio. Fred visited Graziella, the Omega Street mage, to obtain roots and salves. He maintained shrines to the saints who wield the pistolas that kill devils.

Fritz’s mother is just as superstitious as her father. Fritz refuses to summon Federico, yet afire, gone before Fritz ever met him. Fritz wishes him Godspeed and peace, but he doesn’t want him or any of those ocld world haunted paesani coming back, God forbid, from Mount Carmel Cemetery.

But Claire finds the company of i morti illuminating. She often converses with her dead grandmother. She asks if Fritz can see the fog billowing through the apartment. “Often fog is an infestation.” He thinks he sees it, wisping in the cornices, spreading along the floor.

Claire is so powerful; Fritz is having her hallucinations too. But, of course, that can’t be. He slips off the mattress, pulls on his jeans, steps outside the circle of candles, then walks into the dark bathroom for a glass of water. He turns on the light. Dark hair getting long, his shadowy face. His eyes are clear, but he looks troubled. “It’s okay,” he says very softly.

Back in bed, he holds Claire tightly, runs his hands over her smooth body, kisses her forehead, breasts, and shoulders. Looks into her so deeply he sees the rats in their offices, scribbling, taking notes, typing away.

Fritz and Claire have been together nearly five months. He does not want to be without her, yet worries he will be with her forever. Fritz wants to escape Claire. She’s insane – in the manner of his mother. But he loves Claire. He loves his mother. Perhaps he’s possessed. Perhaps Claire – perhaps his mother – is the infestation.

He has sworn never to fall for an Italian – like his mother: with her sacramental devotion to getting back at people, making them pay for every wrong she catalogues and nurtures; her mouth that assassinates people, then closes against them, like the gates of heaven, not a word nor prayer nor hand to help them out of the flames of hell once she succumbs to vendetta; whatever she does at the The Suicide King, the club she works at as a hostess. Fritz refuses to even walk down the street The King’s on – the same street the Park Schenley’s on, where his Irish father’s a waiter – for fear of seeing his mother dangling from the ceiling in a Go-Go cage.

That torrent of Napolitano blood from his mother gnaws at him like rats, that recessive speck of lunacy that filters capriciously through his veins. Claire’s family is Calabrese – even worse. Her father is a beast, an animale, that kicks down doors and drags his prey out to the street.

Claire reads Fritz’s mind. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not your mother.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my mother.” He turns and reaches for his cigarettes on the floor next to the mattress.

She smiles. “Come closer.” He lights the cigarette. “Look at the Christmas tree.”

The tree is in the far corner of the room. Fritz set it up and he and Claire spangled it with wildly-colored construction paper chains they’d both learned to make, as first grade classmates, all the way back at Saints Peter and Paul. He remembers Claire as a tiny starving bird whose refusal to eat her lunch was a daily opera – the ravishing Sister Hyacinth draped above her with a raised stick. He had loathed Hyacinth – the way she terrorized Claire. But he had wanted to scream at Claire to pick up her sandwich and eat it – so he wouldn’t have to listen to Hyacinth’s sinister sing-song. Now he’s hearing Hyacinth’s voice oozing in his skull and he realizes it’s always been there – another infestation.

        Yet, it also strikes him, at that very moment, that Claire, even as a six-year-old, so frail, as if about to deliquesce, fading into the ether by degrees each time Hyacinth’s stick struck the tabletop, had the unimaginable will for her ritual ceremony with Hyacinth. Tiny Claire would not take her bulging white eyes from her untouched sandwich, would not speak, would not eat – no matter what, unto death, it seemed to Fritz back then.

 As they gaze at the tree, it shimmies and glows, though it is not strung with lights. This goes on a moment or two. Fritz looks away and, when he returns his eyes to the tree, it sits there utterly still. It is easy to rationalize the tree’s sudden animation. Claire’s apartment is on the second floor of an enormous drafty old house – though Claire has cautioned that a sudden inexplicable draft is often an infestation.

As they stare at the Christmas tree, Claire whispers: “Frederick,” his Christian name, which she calls him exclusively. “Do you hear that?”

The vaguest scuff of boots on the vestibule stairs leading up to Claire’s apartment. Compton, Claire’s old boyfriend, dressed wholly in black, come to exact revenge. But he’s locked up. In the summer, he bashed out the windows in Claire’s car. He threatened to set her apartment on fire, to kill Fritz. He must have gotten out of jail. He’s come to kill them both. Compton is the devil.

Barefoot, in just jeans, Fritz gets up, goes to Claire’s door, opens it and peers down the long stairs. He walks down to the vestibule, steps out on the porch and smokes a cigarette. The big houses and the street are silent. The sky is an immaculate black plate of steel and ice. It is the portal off the earth, and tonight there is nothing to keep Fritz from being sucked up by it. He flicks the orange butt into the street, and hurries inside.

Claire has wrapped up in a shawl and sits on the mattress. She wears a dripping black lace mantilla that Catholic girls wear to church: that demure, contemplative, untouchable innocence vouchsafed in stained glass and first communion commemoratives.

There in the sanctuary, at Saints Peter and Paul, staring at those girls, as a second-grade communicant – Claire, his classmate, among them – Fritz had first started thinking of the devil, but not with anything like the certitude of the word, devil, or even flesh; but with more of a vague indeterminate anxiety. Now he hears it again: a clicking, the sound of sin – the way it eats into your soul, imperceptibly at first, and then one day you’re doomed. The infestation of impure thoughts – those girls he learned to long for in church.

Well before Claire read the book or saw the movie, she had studied demon possession. Documented cases abound. The Catholic Church corroborates every bit of it. Even as Fritz and Claire sit there, in Claire’s apartment, possessed people check into Saint Francis, Mayview, Western Psych. Every crazy house in Pittsburgh overflows with them.

Claire pulls the novel from somewhere behind her and holds it in front of Fritz. Purple, vibrating, it rests on her open palm a foot from his face. “I’ve seen it levitate,” she says, then that smile.

Fritz snatches the book from her hand, dashes to a window, and flings it to the frigid night. She continues to smile, stands and drops the shawl, naked – forbiddingly beautiful –

save for the mantilla. “I want you to perform an exorcism on me.”

Fritz envisions her trussed to the mattress, shape-shifting, grunting filthy epithets, as he rains holy water upon her. He is close to blacking out.

What hangs in abeyance this night is the struggle between good and evil: Jesus wandering the desert, strung out from forty days and forty nights of fasting, while that son-of-a-bitch necromancer flatters Him, coaxes Him to leap from the church steeple. That same devil who haunts East Liberty – the Italian neighborhood where Fritz and Claire were born and grew up – seducing little boys to jump off the Meadow Street Bridge: the first warm flush once the syringe depresses into their arteries. Claire comes from a long line of vicious men – her father and brothers, Compton. Satan is the logical heir of that patrimony.

If Fritz stays with Claire, in her apartment, he is in peril – even deadly peril. If he walks out, he’ll be delivered.  He will have chosen light over darkness, life over death. But, tonight, he doesn’t want to lose her. That will happen soon enough. He sees it now: a day when he’ll call and she’ll be gone – the line disconnected, the apartment emptied – to a monastery or convent. On her kitchen table is a large manila envelope from The Sisters of Mercy in Erie. She’s told him, more than once, she’d like to be martyred.

The young, tortured Jesuit in the movie, Father Karras, his faith dwindled, had demanded the devil take him, forsake the little possessed girl. Just behind Fritz’s eyes, that scene plays over and over: the demon divulging from Regan into Karras, the priest’s face greening, capillaries firing, eyes milky. Father Karras had flung himself to his death – through the windowpane, thudding down that long medieval stone staircase in Georgetown.

Fritz’s vision narrows – smoldering, blackening, at its edges. In the shrinking lens stands Claire, cradling the cat that Compton, in one of his furies, tried to murder. Fritz does not like the cat, but pretends to. He can’t even pronounce her name: Cassiopeia. From Claire’s breasts, the cat stares at him with green glowing eyes. 

“Frederick,” whispers Claire.

The sitar music grates and whines – so heavenly, it is demonic. Fritz is about to rip the record from the turntable when it simply ceases. Then rumbling, the entire house shaking, as the furnace engages, then the whistle and thunder of the ductwork. Salt trucks, down in the street, shudder, chains peeling, slag and rock salt eating at the ice.

 “Frederick,” she says again. She holds now, instead of Cassiopeia, a crystal cruet of holy water blessed by Pope John XXIII. On its face is a crucifix.

It is imperative that Fritz leave Claire’s apartment. Soon her head will swivel 360 degrees. She’ll profane in a guttural rusted brogue. Her father will tear the door from its hinges and scatter Fritz in pieces. Compton will appear with a knife.

But: the sound, in her mouth, of the name given him at Baptism. Her body. How can Fritz abandon her?

 

[Infestation by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, Eastover Press, 2023. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment]

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JOSEPH BATHANTI

BIONOTA JOSEPH BATHANTI is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. 

The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. 

He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. 

His volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, from Louisiana State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.