Habibi

As a young boy growing up in Los Angeles, I am entered by The Exorcist late one night after all the adults in the house have fallen asleep. I watch the film kneeling on the thick, red carpet, my face inches from the screen: the screaming girl and dying priest, the spinning head and bloody mouth, the room so cold that everyone’s breath shows. The volume is just loud enough that I can feel the distorted bass of the devil’s voice in the bones of my throat.

As a young boy growing up in Cairo, my father watches exorcisms. His uncle drives him through the deserted countryside to nameless churches lit by chandeliers covered in generations of sand. One by one, the possessed lie on stone floors in front of altars as chanting priests circle and then hold them down.

Years later, my father tells me that some of the possessed were dragged through the desert for miles by their families. I imagine what it’s like to thrash under crucifixes, the nightmare of becoming undone. My father’s devil stories curl around my neck. They are a form of strangulation. I ask him once why his uncle would take him to exorcisms, and he says, “Back then, all we had to do for fun was the radio.”

During the course of such exorcisms, the priest tortures the devil, and the devil eventually leaves because he can’t take it anymore. My father explains that at an exorcism’s end, the devil wants to exit violently through the possessed person’s eyes, blinding them. The priest orders him (the devil, to me, is male) to leave through the possessed person’s toes instead, because the toes are no big deal. When the priest succeeds, red crosses bleed through the feet of the possessed and soak through their socks.

My father and his uncle would stay afterward and help wash the church floor. My grandmother stopped buying my young father white shoes because of all the pairs he brought home bloodied. My father is seventy-five now and only wears gleaming white shoes.

In The Exorcist, Linda Blair — who plays the young, bedeviled Regan MacNeil — lies in bed, wrestling with the demon inside her. She projectile vomits. Her head spins. She curses at her mom. All under a pale-yellow blanket. The blanket imprints on me, and its memory places me at the foot of her bed, breathing in her green breath as she thrashes, her hands tied to the bedpost. Whenever the power goes off and I’m suddenly left in the dark, or whenever I think I see someone hidden behind the drapes, I see that pale-yellow blanket spread across her writhing body, her face blanked out and slashed open.

Pazuzu, the demon in The Exorcist, was voiced by Academy Award winner Mercedes McCambridge, who was then fifty-seven years old and whom Orson Welles had called “the world’s greatest living radio actress.” To add dimension to the demon’s voice, sound mixers recorded all of McCambridge’s dialogue in four different tones. In the final film, Pazuzu’s voice is a braid of those four tones, overlaid with both a Vatican recording of a young girl shrieking in Latin during her exorcism and the sound of screaming pigs being herded for slaughter.

For a sound to produce an echo, there must be at least fifty-five feet between its source and the listener. A normal house is too small to generate an echo. The house I grow up in is indeed normal in the way that many overcarpeted houses are: the faucet that drips, the darkened rooms lit by birthday candles, the father always taking photos. But our house is abnormal in that everything that happens inside it is explained as the work of either God or the devil, either a miracle or a curse. In the house I grow up in, Pazuzu’s voice echoes.

From a young age, I am taught that the devil is always chasing me and that my job is to keep running, to take communion because it offers protection, to confess my sins because it keeps me pure. One fumble and I am his. I dress in my best clothes for church and hold my hands up in the air when I pray, like antennae magnifying the transmission. My mother teaches me that if I ever stray from God, it is a sign that the devil is inside me. Whenever I question my belief in God, this inverted knot of an idea rolls my thoughts the way a storm can roll a ship until it overturns.

Because I’m gay, I have to run the fastest. I pray from my marrow. Did the devil make me gay or did God? The agony of having to run for my life from someone I can’t see is that I never know when I’m ahead, or if I’m ever ahead at all.

I’m scared to write about the devil because writing is a form of incantation, because naming a thing is the first step in manifesting. I’m forty-five years old now and thought that time had diluted the fear, but writing about him exhumes it. It’s taken me four months to get the first page down. I work on it a little bit, then work on something else, then pretend to work on something else. But I keep returning to this essay, or it returns to me. It haunts me, and I haunt it back.

My father was left-handed until his family noticed. The left hand is the devil’s, they said, for reasons that no one could reasonably explain. They made him learn to write with his right hand, and he did so quickly because he feared staying left-handed, as though at any moment the devil could take him over and put him to work. But my father never forgot to write with his left hand. He tells me that if he’s ever in a meeting that isn’t going his way, he’ll start writing with both hands until it does.

There is no Exorcist without McCambridge’s voice. I can hear its guttural rumbling and twisted reverb long after the sound it produces stops. I think impersonating the devil is the most reckless thing a mortal can do, so I start reading about her. I’m trying to figure out whether she was brave or senseless, and I read the following from an article called “A Look Inside William Friedkin’s The Exorcist” by Seth Hansen:

When I’m eleven, the neighbor girls visit with their Ouija board and explain how it works. I think, This is a terrible idea. How could this be sold in toy stores? To children? They make me put my fingers on a corner of the planchette and ask a question. I wonder, Am I opening a portal to hell? But I also don’t want them to laugh at me. After a long stretch of seconds, I press hard on the planchette and ask, “Are we alone right now?” The planchette slowly drags to the word: NO. Even though it’s my house, I stand up and flee. I’m not shocked by the answer. I’ve known it this whole time. Years later, my father will tell me that he saw one of the neighbor girls drunk at the supermarket in the middle of the day. I tell him the Ouija board story. He says, “See. The poor girl had no chance.”

As a child, I believe that the pale-yellow blanket keeps the devil inside Regan MacNeil, that it keeps him pressed close against her body. I stop sleeping under the covers. On the night I watch The Exorcist, I do the math and decide to never sleep under my blanket until I die. It isn’t worth the risk. No matter how cold I get, I sleep on top of the bed, uncovered. Exposed to the light of the Lord.

As a young boy, I ask my father why the devil wants to blind someone when he leaves them. My father says, “He is the devil. He is a very, very bad guy.”

In graduate school, on a random night after I get into a fight with my secret boyfriend, an evil spirit enters my bedroom while I’m trying to sleep. I feel a dark thing staring down at me from next to the bed. I can’t open my eyes, and my ears ring like slot machines dumping quarters. I can feel my heartbeat in my neck. I can’t move, no matter how loud I scream backward into my brain. And then he disappears. This happens for enough nights that I start sleeping on the couch, hoping that he is confined to the bedroom. But he follows. I start sleeping on the floor encircled by my Bible, some icons, and a crucifix, as though they will throw him off my scent. But night after night, he finds me. I invite the priest from my new church over to bless my apartment. I think about what cookies I’ll serve him.

The priest walks around every room in my apartment, praying from a small black leather book with gilded page edges. I shadow him, trying to scan what he’s softly mumbling for the words devil, demon, Satan, et cetera. But all I hear is the word blessing repeatedly, which seems too anemic to lift any curses. I ask him for a prayer of protection, and he says, “As long as you believe in God and take communion, you don’t need it.” I tell him about the dark visitations, and he says, “It’s nothing, just some bad dreams.” Over a plate of Milanos at my small kitchen table, I tell him that I’m gay, and since I’m new to his congregation, I thought he should know. He says, “You’re lost.” I tell him that I’m not and that it’s final, that I’m done trying to change. He again says, “You’re lost.” As he leaves my apartment, he stops at my bedroom door and makes the sign of the cross.

On the Sunday after the apartment blessing, I’m standing in line for communion. When it’s my turn at the altar, I kneel, tip my head back, and open my mouth for the priest to place it on my tongue. Holding the Eucharist, he leans down close to my ear and whispers loudly for me to wait in the back of the church after mass. He doesn’t give me communion, but I keep my mouth open. He shoos me off the altar with a flick of his head. I’m confused but also not, because I know exactly why this happening. I take my place at the back of the church. My blood warms and my spine empties. The yellow blanket flashes. I close my mouth.

In 1984, about a decade after The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge was cast as Thelma in the national tour of the play ’night, Mother. The play has only two characters: Thelma, an aging mother, and Jessie, her despairing, chronically ill daughter. The first scene opens with a routine domestic conversation about garbage bags and Hershey’s bars, during which Jessie abruptly asks Thelma, “Where’s Daddy’s gun?” Confused and assuming it’s for her daughter’s protection, Thelma helps Jessie find it in the attic. As Jessie comes down the attic ladder, she says, “I’m going to kill myself, Mama.” She explains that she is tired of always feeling pained and that she is done with hoping for different. Over the course of the play, Thelma tries her best to dissuade Jessie from killing herself. At one point she says, “How can I get up every day knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive, and I couldn’t do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?” The play ends with the sound of a gunshot offstage.

After everyone has filed out, the priest and I stand in the back of the church. Looking down at the red, well-worn carpet under the half-glow of dimmed chandeliers, he says, “I can’t give you communion because you’re not trying to repent.” I don’t argue or push back. I just nod a lot, tell him that I get it. He says, “I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing or not. But I just can’t give it to you.” Whenever I’d imagined this moment happening, this reckoning, there were always pitchforks and a pyre, crowds of people spitting. I didn’t think it would be this quiet, this soft. He says, “It wouldn’t be right.” The words are hard for him to get out. I try to comfort him by repeating that I understand, by seeming unfazed. I try to make it all go down easy. I think that he’s a good man trying his best to do what he feels is right, and then hate myself for having this thought. This is the last mass I ever attend. I am skinned of my religion. Now I am all flesh.

In November of 1987, John Markle, Mercedes McCambridge’s only child, was fired from his prestigious accounting firm when it was discovered that he’d been committing fraud through his mother’s account. In an attempt to settle the matter and keep it private, Markle and the firm tried to set up a repayment plan with McCambridge, but she refused, saying that she had done nothing wrong and was, in fact, owed money. On November 6, 1987, Markle shot dead his wife, Christine (age forty-five), and his daughters, Amy (age thirteen) and Suzanne (age nine), before turning the gun on himself. I read all of his obituaries. One of them published the long, handwritten letter that he left behind for his mother: “Initially you said, ‘Well, we can work it out,’ but NO, you refused. . . . You called me a liar, a cheat, a criminal, a bum. You said I have ruined your life. . . . You were never around much when I needed you, so now I and my whole family are dead — so you can have the money. . . . ’Night, Mother.”

My father tells me that on the way to the exorcisms, his uncle would stop at a butcher he knew. His uncle would have the butcher slaughter a calf and then cut out its liver. They’d slice it thickly, cover it in lemon juice and salt, and eat it off the cutting board. My father says that the brilliance of its taste wasn’t just about its freshness. He says that it was about tasting the organ at the animal’s body temperature. “Maybe your shoes got bloodied at the butcher’s?” I ask him. He says, “You still don’t believe me.”

Mercedes McCambridge wouldn’t have kept priests by her side if she didn’t believe there was a risk. Did the devil reap what McCambridge sowed in that recording booth by slaughtering her family? This is the kind of question only I would ask, because in the Christianity I know, everyone eventually pays for what they’ve done. What price will I pay for writing about him? What unseen horror is barreling toward me? In her 1981 autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, McCambridge writes: “If I have to climb into heaven on a ladder, I shall have to decline the invitation.” Besides Pazuzu’s dialogue, these are her most memorable lines, interpreted as a chic kind of heresy. If you keep reading further down the page, though, you see that she’s merely describing her difficulty with ladders. She writes: “Going up is sheer agony, and going down is impossible.” McCambridge uses heaven to measure a fault in her body. I use heaven to measure the ladder. My belief in God wavers. It goes in and out like a channel losing reception, but all I know to do is climb.

I am sitting next to my father in my parents’ unnecessarily formal dining room at the end of dinner. Everyone has left the table except for him and me. We’re surrounded by plates of half-eaten shish kebabs and empty bottles of Corona. I tell my father about the dark visitations. About how when the devil comes for me, I can’t move or speak. About the noise I hear and the terror I feel. He’s a doctor and starts going through the differential. It’s not MS or delirium, he says. It’s not seizures or schizophrenia. He tells me that I have sleep paralysis and that it’s common, that it comes from stress. I say, “Are you sure, Dad? It feels like he or something or someone is right there.” He puts his hands on my throat and gently feels for lymph nodes. I say, “It’s like he’s right next to me. Right next to the bed. It’s more than stress, Dad. I know stress.” He wraps his hand around my wrist and checks my pulse. I say, “This is evil. It’s something evil.” He asks if anything is going on with me, if I’m under a lot of stress right now. I tell him about how I wake up with blood in my mouth from grinding my teeth, about infected nail beds that I keep biting. I tell him that I just don’t feel right. My father says, “God is always with you. Don’t ever worry. DON’T. This is nothing, habibi. He is always with you.” I want to trust him, but I don’t. It’s so easy for him to believe in all of it. In the pearly gates and the water into wine. In the kingdom to come. But I only believe the parts about fire and gore. Those are the parts for me. They’re mine.

I type this paragraph with my left hand. And it’s taking a long time to get the sentences out. This is the hand of the devil typing. And it’s taking too long. I type quickly to get this part over with. This is the adult version of sleeping on top of the blanket, a way of minimizing my exposure to risk. My left hand is a planchette dragged against the board. The poor girl had no chance. I’m waiting for something to happen: a door to slam or the lights to flicker, a cold spot to form in the center of the room, any sign that he’s here. I’m kneeling at the altar, my head pulled all the way back, my mouth broken open and left empty. Are we alone right now? The thing about being a Christian faggot is that, like a calf living behind a butcher shop on an unnamed road to a far-off church somewhere in Egypt, I’m always waiting for the knife to come down, for the blood to spill.