Interview with the Exorcist

The one about talking to a real exorcist. Dispatch 26 begins with a conversation already underway. On the other end of the phone is Father Simone Lialtino, an exorcist—and this is not their first conversation. What follows is less an investigation of the supernatural than an unsettling attempt to understand what possession might mean to someone who has actually confronted it. The narrator asks practical questions. How does an exorcism work? What would convince a skeptic? Levitation seems almost reassuring in its obviousness. The more disturbing stories are quieter: memories of things that never happened, unfamiliar voices emerging from familiar people, intimate knowledge that should be impossible to possess. As Father Lialtino describes what he has witnessed, the narrator repeatedly retreats toward psychology—only to encounter details that refuse to follow him there. The conversation gradually becomes personal. Memories of a grandmother altered by illness blur the boundary between someone being changed and someone seeming to disappear altogether. Then the priest unexpectedly turns the questions around. What does the narrator himself want out? What purpose does worry serve? And how many things do human beings carry inside themselves simply because they have mistaken their presence for identity? At its center, Interview with the Exorcist explores possession in a broader and more intimate sense. A thought can occur within us without telling the truth about who we are. Fear, worry, grief, and other unwanted inhabitants may enter quietly and remain because we have forgotten they ever arrived. By the time the call ends, nothing supernatural has been proven or disproven. The room has simply grown colder, the dogs have been called closer, and one unsettling possibility remains: not everything happening inside us necessarily belongs to us.