The Exorcist

Part I: The Beginning: Chapter Two

Chapter Two

He stood at the edge of the lonely subway platform, listening for the rumble of a train that would still the ache that was always with him. Like his pulse. Heard only in silence. He shifted his bag to the other hand and stared down the tunnel. Points of light. They stretched into dark like guides to hopelessness.

A cough. He glanced to the left. A gray-stubbled derelict, numb on the ground in a pool of his urine, was sitting up, his yellowed eyes fixed on the priest with the chipped, sad face.

The priest looked away. He would come. He would whine. Couldjya help an old altar boy, Father? Wouldjya? The vomit-flaked hand pressing down on the shoulder. The fumbling in his pocket for the holy medal. The reeking of the breath of a thousand confessions with the wine and the garlic and the stale mortal sins belching out all together, and smothering ... smothering...

The priest heard the derelict rising.

Don't come!

Heard a step.

Ah, my God, let me be!

"Hi ya, Faddah."

He winced. Sagged. Couldn't turn. He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In an absent gesture, he felt at his coat sleeve as if for an unseen band of mourning. He dimly remembered another Christ.

"I'm a Cat'lic, Faddah!"

The faint rumbling of an incoming train. Then sounds of stumbling. The priest turned and looked. The bum was staggering, about to faint, and with a blind, sudden rush, the priest got to him; caught him; dragged him to the bench against the wall.

"I'm a Cat'lic," the derelict mumbled. "I'm a Cat'lic."

The priest eased him down; stretched him out; saw his train. He quickly pulled a dollar from out of his wallet and placed it in the pocket of the derelict's jacket. Then decided he might lose it. He plucked out the dollar, stuffed it into a urine-damp trouser pocket, then picked up his bag and boarded the train, sitting in a corner and pretending to sleep until the end of the line, where he climbed up to the street and began the long walk to Fordham University. The dollar had been meant for his cab.

When he reached the residence hall for visitors, he signed his name on the register. Damien Karras, he wrote. Then examined it. Something was wrong. Wearily he remembered and added "S.J.," the abbreviation for Society of Jesus. He took a room in Weigel Hall and, after an hour he at last fell asleep.

The following day he attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. As principal speaker, he delivered a paper titled "Psychological Aspects of Spiritual Development," and at the end of the day, he enjoyed a few drinks and a bite to eat with some other psychiatrists. They paid. He left them early. He would have to see his mother.

From a subway stop, he walked to the crumbling brownstone apartment building on Manhattan's East Twenty-First Street. Pausing by the steps that led up to the dark oak door, he eyed the children on the stoop. Unkempt. Ill-clothed. No place to go. He remembered evictions: humiliations: walking home with a seventh-grade sweetheart and encountering his mother as she hopefully rummaged through a city garbage can on the corner of the street. Karras slowly climbed the steps. Smelled an odor like cooking. Like warm, damp, rotted sweetness. He remembered the visits to Mrs. Choirelli, his mother's friend, in her tiny apartment with the eighteen cats. He gripped the banister and climbed, overcome by a sudden, draining weariness that he knew was caused by guilt. He should never have left her. Not alone. On the fourth-floor landing he reached into a pocket for a key and slipped it into the lock: 4C, his mother's apartment. He opened the door as if it were a tender wound.

Her greeting was joyful. A shout. A kiss. She rushed to make coffee. Dark complexion. Stubby, gnarled legs. He sat in the kitchen and listened to her talk, the dingy walls and soiled floor seeping into his bones. The apartment was a hovel. Social Security and every month a few dollars from her brother.

She sat at the table. Mrs. This. Uncle That. Still in immigrant accents. He avoided those eyes that were wells of sorrow, eyes that spent days staring out of a window.

I never should have left her.

She could neither read nor write any English, and so, later, he wrote a few letters for her, and afterward he worked at repairing the tuner on a crackling plastic radio. Her world. The news. Mayor Lindsay.

He went to the bathroom. Yellowing newspaper spread on the tile. Stains of rust in the tub and the sink. On the floor, an old corset. These the seeds of vocation. From these he had fled into love, but now the love had grown cold, and in the night he heard it whistling through the chambers of his heart like a lost and gently crying wind.

At a quarter to eleven, he kissed her good-bye; promised to return just as soon as he could.

He left with the radio tuned to the news.

Once back in his room in Weigel Hall, Karras gave some thought to writing a letter to the Jesuit head of the Maryland province. He'd covered the ground with him once before: request for a transfer to the New York province in order to be closer to his mother; request for a teaching post and relief from his counseling duties. In requesting the latter, he'd cited as a reason "unfitness" for the work.

The Maryland Provincial had taken it up with him during the course of his annual inspection tour of Georgetown University, a function closely paralleling that of an army inspector general in the granting of confidential hearings to those who had grievances or complaints. On the point of Damien Karras's mother, the Provincial had nodded and expressed his sympathy; but the question of the Jesuit's "unfitness," he thought, was contradicted by Karras's record. Still, Karras had pursued it, had sought out Tom Bermingham, the Georgetown University president. "It's more than psychiatry, Tom. You know that. Some of their problems come down to their vocation, to the meaning of their lives. Tom, it isn't always sex that's involved, it's their faith, and I just can't cut it. It's too much. I need out."

"What's the problem?"

"Tom, I think I've lost my faith."

Bermingham didn't press him on the reasons for his doubt. For which Karras was grateful. He knew that his answers would have sounded insane. The need to rend food with the teeth and then defecate. My mother's nine First Fridays. Stinking socks. Thalidomide babies. An item in the paper about a young altar boy waiting at a bus stop; set on by strangers; sprayed with kerosene; ignited. No. No, too emotional. Vague. Existential. More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil and much of it resulted from doubt, from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not finally reveal Himself? Not speak?

"Lord, give us a sign..."

The raising of Lazarus was dim in the distant past.

No one now living had heard his laughter.

And so why not a sign?

At various times Karras longed to have lived with Christ: to have seen him; to have touched him; to have probed his eyes. Ah, my God, let me see you! Let me know! Come in dreams!

The yearning consumed him.

He sat at the desk now with pen above paper. Perhaps it wasn't time that had silenced the Provincial. Perhaps he understood, Karras thought, that finally faith was a matter of love.

Bermingham had promised to consider the requests, to try to influence the Provincial, but thus far nothing had been done. Karras wrote the letter and went to bed.

He sluggishly awakened at 5 A.M., went to the chapel in Weigel Hall to secure a Host for the saying of Mass, then returned to his room. " 'Et clamor meus ad te veniat,' " he prayed with murmured anguish: " 'And let my cry come unto Thee...' " He lifted the Host in consecration with an aching remembrance of the joy it once gave him; felt again, as he did each morning, the pang of an unexpected glimpse from afar and unnoticed of a long-lost love. He broke the Host above the chalice. " 'Peace I leave you. My peace I give you.' " He tucked the Host inside his mouth and swallowed the papery taste of despair. When the Mass was over, he carefully polished the chalice and then placed it in his bag. He rushed for the seven-ten train back to Washington carrying pain in a black valise.