daniella and jeremy: a story of possession

extra material from my 2019 novel Daniella (no background knowledge necessary; no need to fear spoilers)

Jeremy:

We had to make pamphlets about our dream career in eighth grade. It was the fall of 2001, right after I learned about the Twin Towers. Of course I chose to research being a marine. In my bedroom, I kept a big American flag that I bought at the mall with my dad. When I grew up, I was going to defend my country in Afghanistan.

I remember being in school when it happened. I was in my math class in the morning. Our teacher stopped the lesson and turned on the TV. I saw smoke and fire coming out of one of two towers that I didn’t recognize. “It’s the World Trade Center,” our teacher explained. She told us terrorists had also attacked it in the 90’s.

I went to English class. By then, both towers were on fire. He rest of the day, some of our teachers turned off the TV’s and tried to do their lessons. Others canceled their lessons and just let us watch what was happening in New York. One teacher told us thousands of people were going to die. I kept hearing adults talk about terrorists. Some parents started picking up their kids early. Some kids said the country was being invaded. Some kids said maybe our school would blow up next.

I walked home from school with my friend Andrew. We didn’t say anything the whole walk. We were cutting through a subdivision. Big green yards and two-story houses that almost all looked exactly the same were on either side of the road. I remember it was a sunny day with a mostly blue sky.

I got home and my mom had Fox News on. Both the towers were gone now. I saw the videos on repeat of them collapsing to the ground. I saw people screaming and running in the streets. I saw people sprinting away from an expanding cloud of dark grey smoke. Firefighters and police officers and workers and tourists were dead.

My dad came home from work a couple hours after I got home. I saw him in his suit holding his briefcase. “Find Afghanistan on a map, Jeremy!” he shouted at me. “Because it won’t be there pretty soon!”

A few months later, I was making my pamphlet about becoming a marine. I asked my dad if he thought we’d still be fighting in Afghanistan when I graduated high school in 2006. He said probably not. “It’s going to be a very easy war,” he told me. “We are basically fighting a bunch of tribesmen.”

Still, in my pamphlet, I described how I’d be fighting the Taliban in the mountains one day. I researched details about different campaigns where they killed a bunch of terrorists. I watched the news whenever they were talking about a battle. It was around then that I bought the flag at the mall.

“I’m going to die in a ball of fire,” I told my English teacher.

She told me no, you won’t. The war is going to be over by then. Afghanistan is a very weak country, she said.

“I hope we get another war, then,” I said.

“You shouldn’t hope for that,” she said.

I got excited any time a marine commercial came on while I was watching TV. I watched them in their gear doing their training. I saw them in their crisp professional uniforms and hats, moving their rifles in unison. I thought about how one day I’d be able to tell people that I was a marine. I thought about how people would thank me.

I watched hours and hours of war movies in my basement. Enemy at the Gates, Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan. I watched the old movies like Patton, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Day. I imagined myself in wars from different times… trapped in the streets of Somalia shooting at a bunch of Africans, landing on a beach in France killing Germans, deep in a jungle bayonetting a bunch of crazy Vietnamese people running at me through the trees.

There were scenes that have always stuck with me. A group of Americans in We Were Soldiers were huddled together in a jungle. The screams of charging Vietnamese troops growing louder. They were completely surrounded. “Gentleman, prepare to defend yourselves,” said their captain. That will be me one day, I thought.

A group of Americans were trapped in a building in Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down. A huge hoard of Africans were hooting at them and shooting at them and throwing things at them. I imagined I was firing bullets at those attackers.

Behind Enemy Lines: A Serb guy in a tracksuit was chasing an American pilot, Owen Wilson, who’d been shot down in Bosnia. I pretended I was him while I watched.

I imagined myself in my marine gear, shooting at terrorists wearing exotic robes and hats. They were taking over our school and holding hostages. But they hadn’t found me. I stole a gun from one of them. I killed them all. The girls fell in love with me. I saved one of them - Daniella, the hottest girl in the school, I thought - from being raped. The man had taken off all her clothes and he was about to put his penis inside of her when I shot it off. He was lying on the ground bleeding out while she ran to me naked. She hugged me tightly. After I gave some interviews to the press, we had sex.

I woke up a lot in the night my freshman year of high school. Sometimes I was paralyzed. I was lying on my side, looking toward the window. A bright light was shining at me from the dark on the other side.

They came nearly every night and took me away. Tall, slender, naked Greys. They opened my window and walked into my bedroom. They surrounded my bed. They injected me with liquids. They made me float out the window into a ship.

I went on the Internet to find out if it was happening to others. I made a username on a forum for victims of alien abductions. People told almost the same story as me.

It kept happening to me. Sometimes I woke up naked, even thought I’d gone to sleep wearing my pajamas. Sometimes I woke up with cuts on my body that hadn’t been there the night before. Sometimes I woke up asleep on the bathroom floor or asleep on a couch in the basement. I figured out where my dad kept his rifle in case I ever needed it to defend myself and my family.

Once in the middle of the night, I woke up naked outside in the backyard. I was lying near the bushes and trees that separated my backyard from someone else’s. For a few moments, I was shivering, but otherwise I couldn’t move. I was on my back in the cold grass, with my arms and legs sprawled out as if I’d fallen. I looked up at the stars and watched the blinking UFOs move across the sky. Once I could get up, I ran back inside. I sprinted up the carpeted stairs and into my bedroom, where the windows were wide open and a chilly wind was blowing across my bed. My comforter and my pillows were on the floor. I closed the windows and sat on my sheets, too stunned to put my clothes back on, even forgetting for a moment that I was naked.

Around Christmas of freshman year, I went to Andrew’s birthday sleepover party. A bunch of other boys were there and we played a round-robbin NCAA football tournament on his Xbox. We would eat snacks and chat while watching two people play the current match-up.

I didn’t study much in high school. I spent my weekday free time chatting on AIM with my friends and finding new websites and forums about aliens. My report card was full of D’s and C’s.

Toward the end of 10th grade, Andrew sent me links to websites explaining that demons had been visiting the Earth for thousands of years. The “aliens” haunting me, he said, were demons sent by the devil. He told me I should start reading the Bible and praying every night before I went to bed. He sent me the sounds of people screaming in Hell. He said they had been recorded by Russian geologists exploring a volcano.

Andrew got frustrated when I told him I hadn’t been reading the Bible. He told me I had sacrificed myself to the devil. He told me that one day, I’d serve the demons abducting me. We stopped speaking sometime in the summer before 11th grade. I didn’t hear from him again until Christmas.

I spent a lot of time in AIM chat rooms with Erica, Daniella, Nathan, Benjamin, and Andrew (before he denounced us as satanic). I wrote often to them about the Greys. I shared links with them about how the government had the remains of dead aliens and spaceships, about how there was an agreement between the aliens and the CIA that allowed the Greys to operate freely around the Earth.

I hung out a lot with Daniella and our mutual friends that fall of eleventh grade. She always showed up late with Nathan. They were often especially giggly and cuddly with one another. Daniella would stop in the middle of sentences, forgetting what she was talking about, asking us what it was she’d just said. “Wait, wait,” she’d say. And then she’d throw her arm around Nathan and sink her face into his hoodie.

All my middle school fantasies about saving Daniella from a rape came back to me. Except now I imagined it was Nathan trying to rape her. I’d kill him and save her and she’d have sex with me. I remember meeting them one night at the elementary school playground. I watched them sitting next to each other in the grass. While the rest of our group talked and laughed, I just stared at her and Nathan. In my head, I replayed those scenes of me shooting off Nathan’s balls just as his penis was about to go inside her.

Most of all, I wished I was the one leaving these gatherings early with Daniella. I wished I was the one who had her head on my shoulder and her giggles in my ear. I wondered if they were doing drugs or something. Erica often said, with a disappointed sigh after they left, that she thought they might be high. I wished I were the one smoking weed or whatever with her. I promised myself that if an opportunity to be with her ever came, I’d do whatever she told me to do.

After Nathan died, I didn’t see Daniella for a couple months. Erica, the only person in contact with her, said that we just needed to give her time.

When she rejoined the group during the spring of our junior year, I found myself hanging out alone with her more often. We were both going to be in Germany the coming summer. She often called me and asked me to come pick her up. She’d tell me to drive her around town. We went to the park. We went to coffee shops where I’d order hot chocolate and she’d order a black coffee. We met people in parking lots who gave her ecstasy and cocaine and weed.

I thought a lot about telling her that I liked her. I came close a couple times while we were sitting in a parking lot eating Taco Bell in my car. But my heart would be beating so fast. I’d start breathing harder. The thought of saying it out loud made me nauseous. I’d come close to blurting it out, and then I just couldn’t even move my lips to do it.

Daniella was different after losing Nathan. She had become more assertive and aggressive. She seemed like she was constantly high; it was always a different type of high. She was developing a tendency to order people around. She would get angry when things didn’t go the way she wanted.

I did whatever she said. I bought her pints of ice cream at the grocery store and drove them to her house. I would go buy her new toothbrushes and deliver them to her bedroom. Sometimes, Benjamin told me to stop doing so many things for Daniella. He felt like she was taking advantage of me.

She spent a lot more time alone. Sometimes, she’d isolate herself for a whole weekend in her bedroom. She had a fridge and a freezer and a coffee maker in there. She kept her door locked. She told me she was studying her magic books. Once, her dad let me into the house, and I walked up the stairs to her bedroom late at night to deliver her a Coca-Cola. Animal Collective was playing on her stereo. Her desk was full of loose-leaf papers with writings and drawings and charts on them. A massive star chart was opened up on the floor. Various notebooks laid open across her bed; her frantic handwriting filled the pages. A line of cocaine was on her dresser. Books sat in tower on the carpet around her desk chair; some of them were open around her computer. On her computer screen, I saw she had paused a porno she was watching.

“Thank you,” she told me, taking the Coke. “You can go.”

She closed the door on me and left me alone in the hallway. I heard her lock it.

Her dad stopped me in the driveway.

“Thank you for what you’ve been doing for her,” he told me. “She isn’t the same.”

I wondered if he’d ever seen what I just saw. I wondered if he knew about the drugs.

I imagined her often up there in her bedroom, watching porn and studying magic and doing drugs until the sun rose.

She said sometimes that she could feel Nathan’s spirit trying to contact her. She told me that she thought she’d foreseen his death in her dreams. She said she was researching ways to communicate with him. She told me she didn’t tell these things to Erica because she was afraid Erica might think she was crazy.

“She’s a rationalist,” Daniella said. “She only believes in science.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

I remember the first time I went to her house when her parents were gone.

We went up to her bedroom. She sat at her desk and turned some music on iTunes on her laptop. Animal Collective played on her speakers. I looked around while she typed messages to somebody on AIM. She had her own bathroom. She had a mini-fridge. I’d never seen someone with so many books in their bedroom. She had novels from the 1800’s that I didn’t think anyone actually read, but she said that she did. She had books in German. She had books about magic.

“Finished,” she said, referring to the messages she’d been sending. She twirled her desk chair to face me. Her fingers lingered on the bulky digital camera on her desk.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her.

She shrugged. I felt my breath accelerating again. I needed to tell her, but I couldn’t.

“Have you ever thought about filming yourself like, doing stuff?” she asked suddenly.

I hesitated. “What?” I asked.

“Like, masturbating,” she said. “Or hooking up with somebody.”

I couldn’t think of what to say. I just slowly shook my head.

She looked at her digital camera. “I made a sex tape once,” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“I did,” she said.

I wanted to ask where it was. I wanted to ask who it’d been with.

“I deleted the file,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

She sighed. “Child pornography laws,” she said. “Did you know it’s illegal for us to have videos of ourselves doing sexual stuff?”

I shook my head.

“Actually, I still have the file,” she said. “But no one will ever find it. It’s child porn, technically. Yes, we’re 17. But technically, we’re children.”

I was overwhelmed with jealousy of Nathan. It had to have been him.

“Well,” she said, laughing. “Actually, I’m just kidding.”

“Really?” I asked.

She laughed again. “Of course,” she said. “But I want to film myself one day.”

We sat quietly for a while. I looked at the books on her shelf about magic. She had a collection of books about spellcasting.

“I’ve been reading a lot about astrology and numerology,” she said, noticing where I was looking.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said.

“Do you believe in that stuff?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. She opened her window and lit a cigarette. She sat up on her desk so she could blow the smoke directly through the screen.

“Really?” I asked.

She laughed.

“Do you really think that, like, stars and stuff can affect us?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She paused to take a drag. “It’s not that. It’s that everything is a part of a whole. Everything is correlated. Where the stars are when you’re born matters because everything in the universe is correlated.” She paused again to smoke some more. She smoked very fast. “There are currents of forces and energies surging through the world that affect both you and the stars at once. Magic is about harnessing those forces for our own ends.”

“Is that in one of those books?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“But what kind of magic?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know yet.” She finished the cigarette and dropped it into a can of Coca-Cola. “I’m making my own spells,” she said.

“Your own spells?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m going to find a way to connect with Nathan,” she said.

She went to a safe next to the fridge and opened it up. She sat down criss-crossed in front of it. She pulled out a big strap-on dildo. She pulled out an electric dildo. She pulled out a butt plug. She lined them up on the carpet. She looked at them for a while as if she’d forgotten I was there on her bed. I had no idea what to say.

“These are some tools,” she said.

“Tools?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“For what?” I asked, immediately feeling stupid.

She smiled. “There are powerful elixirs in this world,” Daniella said. “I’ve read about what they are. They are elixirs correlated and associated with some of the most powerful creative energies produced by the human body. The energies that create life itself.”

“Energies?” I asked.

She nodded. “Energies,” she said. “And what can create life can also destroy life.”

She opened the fridge. At first, it seemed empty. The first two shelves were empty. Then I noticed jars on the top shelf. Some of them had red contents. Others had white contents.

“I’ve been stock-piling elixirs,” she said.

That can’t really be what I think it is, I thought, staring at the jars in the fridge.

Suddenly she stood up. She took off her pants and underwear. She pulled some sort of clear cup out of her vagina. She poured its bloody contents into an empty jar. She closed the jar, put it in the fridge, then put another type of cup into her vagina. She put her pants and underwear back on and sat down. “It’s called a mooncup,” she explained. She closed the fridge. “I’m collecting elixirs,” she said.

She stood up and gave me a jar. “You can do it here or in the bathroom, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll wait right here at my computer.” She sat down at her desk, logged in, and started typing. She was back on AIM.

I just stayed there on the bed for a moment, looking back and forth between the jar and Daniella and my crotch. Minutes went by without her acknowledging me.

And then I remembered the promise I’d made to myself. That if I ever had a chance like this, I’d take it. But still I didn’t move. She’d told me I could do it here… right in front of her…. Did she mean that? And would it turn into something more, if I was right next to her masturbating on her bed?

I wasn’t sure. I kept sitting on her bed. I unbuckled my belt as loudly as I could, intentionally clinging the metal parts together. She still didn’t react. She just kept typing on her computer. So then I unzipped my pants, in spurts so it would be as obvious as possible. Still, she just kept typing messages on AIM and puffing at a cigarette. Was she really not going to stop me?

I pulled my pants and underwear down slowly, until my erection was completely out and unhindered. Still she didn’t look at me when I started to touch myself. But I looked at her. I looked at the whole shape of her body as she lit up another cigarette and blew the smoke out the open window.

Soon I was lying on my back on her bed, stroking myself quickly while she typed and smoked. I heard all the sound effects of AIM - the doors opening when people signed on, the doors shutting when they signed off, the notifications of incoming messages. Was she really not going to even look at me?

I gasped. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stop the orgasm. Then she looked over at me. “Collect it, collect it,” she urged me. “Quick, stand up!”

I stood up from the bed, still stroking myself. I suddenly felt embarrassed and turned away from her. With my back to her, I held the jar under my erection and watched the ejaculate pour into it. I felt her breath on my neck as the final drops fell into the jar. She reached around my waist and took it from my hand.

I watched her seal the lid and put the jar into the fridge.

I kept standing there with my pants down. My erection wasn’t going away.

“Do you want to have sex with me?” she suddenly asked.

“Yes,” I said, again stroking myself.

“Soon,” she said. “But it has to be a part of a ritual I am planning.”

“A ritual for what?” I asked, still masturbating.

She smiled. “There’s someone who needs to die.”

“Who?” I asked, stroking myself.

She exhaled some smoke. “Cameron,” she said.

“You’re going to kill Cameron?” I asked, suddenly even more turned on. Cameron - the one who bullied Nathan every day in the hallways and in his classes. The one who was still walking around calling people “faggots” all day. It made sense to me.

“Yes,” she said. “We will kill him. But no one will know. No one will be able to prove it.”

I kept masturbating while she sat at her computer, smoking a cigarette and watching me. As soon as I was finishing again, she brought me another jar. She got down on her knees and captured the semen for me. Her face was just inches away from my penis; her cigarette was dangling from her lips.

“Time for bed,” she said afterward, putting out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray on her desk by the open window. “I’ll be in touch.”

I drove home and masturbated two more times. I thought about her up there in her room, with her drugs and her jars of menstrual blood and the spells she’d created. I fell asleep in a state of ecstasy.