I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost
immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand
why he was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I
remembered: Shawn had been his older brother, too.
In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the
subtle, nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested
that perhaps the situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was
not possessed. Perhaps I was not evil at all.
I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the
memory of my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if
Tyler confronted my parents—really confronted them—they would
force him to choose between me and them, between me and the rest of
the family. And from Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me.
—MY FELLOWSHIP AT HARVARD finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle
East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright. It took some effort, but I
managed to hide from Drew how poorly I was doing, or at least I
thought I did. I probably didn’t. He was, after all, the one chasing me
through his flat when I awoke in the middle of the night, screaming
and sprinting, with no idea where I was but a desperate need to escape
it.
We left Amman and drove south. We were in a Bedouin camp in the
Jordanian desert on the day the navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Drew
spoke Arabic, and when the news broke he spent hours in conversation
with our guides. “He’s no Muslim,” they told Drew as we sat on cold
sand watching the dying flames of a campfire. “He does not
understand Islam, or he would not do the terrible things he’s done.”
I watched Drew talk with the Bedouins, heard the strange, smooth
sounds falling from his lips, and was struck by the implausibility of my
presence there. When the twin towers had fallen ten years before, I had
never heard of Islam. Now I was drinking sugary tea with Zalabia
Bedouins and squatting on a sand drift in Wadi Rum, the Valley of the
Moon, less than twenty miles from the Saudi Arabian border.
The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the
last decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had
changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it
transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? I