Saving Elijah

Thy bed is lust-stained."
    Othello, now.

    *    *    *

    The door to my office opens and a man whose face I can't see sweeps in and kneels in front of my young patient. Slowly, very slowly, he opens the buttons on her blouse, and kisses her neck, her breasts, removes her clothes, and then his own, his back still to me. He turns and I see his face, a lascivious expression I have never before seen.
    Do I hear the demon laughing? Do I hear a flapping of wings?

    *    *    *

    "You lie!" I screamed. "This is a lie!"
    "Dr. Galligan?"
    The vision burst apart like glass, shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
    And the demon was now lounging on my desk. Back to Seth it was, pink skin, black boots, black leather jacket.
    "You think I lie?" It raised a long finger and pointed at me. "Ask Sam if he didn't meet her in a bar called Thursdays. Ask him if he isn't fucking her every chance he gets."
    "You are trying to destroy me," I screamed with my mouth.
    "Destroy you?" Heidi screamed with hers.
    "You will see the truth now," the ghost demon said. "There is no one for you but me. You are nothing, you are no one, you are mine."
    "Stop it! Please stop." My head was throbbing. I could feel the pulses all over my body.
    "Stop what, for Christ's sake?" Heidi jolted to her feet. "What the hell is going on here?"
    I told her I was sorry, I was coming down with a migraine.
    My patient left, vowing never to come back. Eleven patients now, and falling. That night, as we were getting ready for bed, I asked Sam if he was having an affair.
    He had just taken off his shirt. He stopped, turned, and looked at me, holding the shirt in his hand. "Good God, Dinah, why ever would you think such a thing?"
    "Why were you so late the other day for Elijah's appointment? You kept looking at your watch."
    He threw his shirt at the chair. "What? I was at a meeting that ran long, I had another meeting afterward. What do you think I do all day, play tiddledywinks? Someone has to pay the bills."
    I stared. Someone has to pay the bills?
    "Do you think I don't know that your financial contribution to this household is shrinking fast?" Still shirtless, he sat down on the bed. "To tell you the truth, Dinah, I think it would be better for you, not to mention for your patients, if you took another leave of absence until you get over this— whatever it is. But why in the world would you think I'm having an affair?"
    I sat down in the overstuffed chair. "The demon told me you are." God, what this must sound like to him.
    "Dinah. Dinah. You've got to get some help."
    "Liar," the demon whispered. "He is a liar. That day he was going to fuck her, right after he finished at the doctor."
    "Aren't there pills or something you could take?" Sam said.
    I was hating Sam. Hating the sight of him. Everything about him. Even his new glasses I hated. He'd gotten a pair of those tiny wire-rimmed things. A younger, hipper look. Maybe the demon wasn't lying and Sam really was the boyfriend Heidi obsessed about, and I was the miserable, clinging wife. Not countertransference, the truth. And maybe he wasn't, maybe I had come to this peculiar conclusion because I was desperate and confused and tired and bedeviled. In any case, Sam didn't seem to be making the least bit of effort to understand what was happening to me. He didn't understand at all.
    "There are no pills to get rid of this, Sam," I said.
    "Well, you've got to do something. You are starting to really scare me."

twenty-five

    My computer was demon-poisoned. Anytime I turned it on I might find a message from my tormenter. Like the one I found on a Thursday morning in mid-June when I sat down to work on my column:

    LOVE POTION #66
Extract of romance.
Canned flowers, Valentines, Hallmark.
Pretty poison, potion of his adultery.
Words hang from tree branches by their little necks,
lies like leaves in moonlight,
his lies come back around to haunt her.
Poor Dinah like a tree caught naked and foolish,
with her participles dangling
in the wind.

    I stared at the monstrous little sonnet for a moment, wishing Sam were here so that I could show it to him, which would prove I wasn't crazy. My face burned as I thought of when I'd shown him another computer-generated demon screed. He said that I must have done it myself and just not remembered it. "My memory is fine," I assured him. "I remember every moment of every day." (I didn't mention the visions, which came and went in a flash of time, certainly not long enough to run to my