Free Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism by Jennifer Percy Page B

guess.” Brian shot him.
    The dead Iraqi man came to North Carolina and choked Brian while he slept and demanded an apology for the killing.
    He told April. She said do whatever the Iraqi man said to do. Brian apologized but the dead man wouldn’t listen. Join me on the other side, the man said.
    Caleb read the article slowly, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at me.
    “This is the same thing that visited me.” He pointed his finger at it. “Everything,” he said. “From how it’s talking to him. To how his friends think he’s talking to himself. To how he thinks he needs to die. I’ve heard the story thousands of times. It’s no different than mine. A lot of guys I’ve worked with, you would never get this out of them. Never. You talk about this and you’ll lose your career. You’ll never go back to combat. You’re the crazy guy. Your wife won’t believe you.”
    “You don’t think hallucinations are a part of PTSD?” I asked.
    Caleb switched the chew from one side of his mouth to the other. He looked to the side, waved to the waitress.
    “I know this is gonna sound crazy to you,” he said, leaning forward, getting close to my face, “but this isn’t PTSD.”
    The room was full of the smell of grease, the sound of air-conditioning. I watched him chew, the way his jaw muscles flexed to the size of walnuts. He wiped sauce from his teeth.
    “This thing,” he said, “this big, black thing—it can come after anyone. It can come after you and kill you and it will try to destroy you. It’s no joke.”
    The Black Thing.
    He said it does not represent anything and that it’s like nothing we know here in this world. He said it’s not a metaphor because there are no metaphors for this kind of evil. It was shadow. It was death. It was the gathered souls of all his dead friends.
    “Do you know when it’s coming?” I said.
    He put his hands out on either side of him, palms flat as if he were trapped inside a box. “I’ll be in a room just like this one,” he said, “and all at once the windows will go dark. And then the Black Thing just sort of seeps in.”
    •  •  •
    When Caleb returned to Georgia in 2005, he started seeing the chopper’s tail number—#146—everywhere. He went out for Mexican and received $1.46 in change. This was his last bit of cash. So he figured he might as well try for a Lotto ticket. Its number: 146, bought at 1:46 in the afternoon. He won five hundred bucks. At night he woke to see the clock flash 1:46.
    Caleb and Krissy ended their relationship. She couldn’t take all the waking up at night, all the talking to Kip and the Black Thing, or the way they wrestled.
    Caleb didn’t own much, a few suitcases and a toolbox. He carried a piece of the blown-up chopper with him, salvaged from the Hindu Kush. A black rectangle, printed with the words Evil Empire in white letters. He’d kept it in the garage.
    An old friend, an army guy named Ryan living near Atlanta, rented a room to Caleb for cheap. They’d known each other since seventh grade.
    Ryan deployed to Iraq and Caleb stayed home. Aimless and unemployed and consumed by memories of the dead soldiers, most days he spent on the couch, watching television and drinking beer with Ryan’s stepfather, a Lakota Indian named Wombly.
    Wombly was a big guy with loose black hair that fanned his breasts. One day Wombly raised his beer in the air and said, “Who’s that dead guy that keeps following you around?”
    It was the first time anybody had seen Kip. Caleb thought Kip was just PTSD. “You see him too?” Caleb said.
    Wombly sucked beer from the rim of his can. The ghosts annoyed him, floating around the television. “And who’s that handsome boy?”
    He described Major Reich’s blue eyes, the wedding ring. Al Gore’s mustache. Sergeant First Class Muralles. Master Sergeant Tre Ponder. All of them.
    Wombly invited Caleb to a sweat lodge in the woods. There were other Indians there and they all sat naked