Pazuzu Requests a Correction

I’ve been called many things in my nearly three thousand years. Bringer of storms. Lord of the southwest wind. Son of Hanbi, king of the evil wind spirits. Most of these names I earned.

But a child possessor? That was Hollywood’s doing.

I arrived eleven minutes early. The address was an apartment building in Brooklyn. The doorman looked up as I walked in.

“You must be here for the fourth floor.”

“What gave me away?”

He took a long look at my wings. “Lucky guess.”

He buzzed me up.

The apartment had been converted into a recording studio. I walked past framed photographs of previous guests. I recognized a few: Bigfoot, Medusa wearing sunglasses, and a vampire named Colin Robinson. I felt better about agreeing to this interview.

I carried a folder with copies of my letters to Warner Bros. and a laminated essay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lamination is a modern invention I absolutely adore.

The recording room was about the size of a tomb, which I mean as a compliment. Two chairs faced a pair of microphones. A camera stood on a tripod, and a young man sat behind a computer, watching the sound levels.

The interviewer was putting on her headphones when I came in. She looked about thirty, with a big smile and a mop of curly blonde hair.

“I’m Poppy Pilgrim,” she said, standing to greet me.

“Miss Poppy. A pleasure.”

“Just Poppy is fine.”

“Of course, Miss Poppy.”

She offered her hand. I looked at it until she put it down.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I know you don’t usually give interviews.”

“I’ve been trying to get the press to listen to me for fifty years.”

She laughed. I hadn’t intended to be funny.

She asked if I was ready. I told her I’d been ready since 1973.

The red light came on.

“Welcome to episode fifty-three of Yes, They’re Real. Today, I’m joined by a guest who’s been trying to get Hollywood’s attention for more than fifty years. Most of you probably know him as the demon from The Exorcist.”

I leaned forward too quickly and brushed my mouth against the microphone. A sharp pop came through the speakers.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The movie. The Exorcist.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with it. That’s precisely the problem.”

“That’s how most listeners know you.”

“I’m not from The Exorcist. I predate movies. People in Nineveh were hanging my image in their bedrooms centuries before Hollywood existed.”

“And scaring away Lamashtu,” she said.

“You’ve read about her?”

“Quite a bit, actually.”

At least she’d done some research.

“Then perhaps this won’t be a complete waste of time.”

She smiled. “Should we start over?”

“I think that would be wise.”

When the red light came on again, she tried a different introduction.

“Welcome to episode fifty-three of Yes, They’re Real. Today, I’m sitting down with Pazuzu.”

Much better.

“So,” she said, “when did all this start?”

“December 26, 1973. A Wednesday.”

She looked surprised.

“I went to the movies,” I explained.

I’d heard about the novel when it came out in 1971. I didn’t read it, but I heard enough to know I wasn’t pleased. Then they made the movie. I wanted to see what they’d done with my likeness.

The line went around the block. A group of college kids ahead of me were trading stories about an advance screening that had supposedly gotten so intense someone fainted. They seemed delighted.

The film opened in northern Iraq, at an archaeological dig. I know the area quite well, and I was interested to see what they’d found.

And there I was, towering against the sky, wings spread, one arm raised. I recognized the pose immediately. The lighting was very flattering.

Perhaps the filmmakers had done their homework. I settled back, expecting to hear something about Lamashtu and my work protecting mothers and newborns.

Instead, we went to Georgetown.

There was a young girl, about twelve, and some very unpleasant things began happening in her bedroom.

“I’ve seen it,” Poppy said.

“Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“The pea soup?”

“Don’t,” I said, “say pea soup to me.”

I want to be fair. I’ve done things in my career that I’m not proud of. There was a matter involving locusts, several ruined harvests, and a good deal of wailing. I accept responsibility for that. There was also a village near the Euphrates, although accounts of what happened there have been greatly exaggerated.

But there’s a difference between agricultural devastation and what happened to that child’s bedspread. Agricultural devastation has dignity. Villages brought to their knees. Nobody’s ever had to burn the bedspread.

Then a face flashed on the screen, apparently supposed to be mine. The thing looked as though someone had dipped its head in a sack of flour. White skin, red-rimmed eyes, and the expression of something that had just looked in the mirror.

They’d already shown my perfectly respectable statue. Why couldn’t they have used that?

I began pointing out the other mistakes, quietly at first. The head doesn’t turn that way. Nothing’s head turns that way. And I’d never use that sort of language in front of a priest.

The woman beside me asked me to be quiet.

A gust of wind came down the aisle and blew her popcorn into the laps of the people in front of us. It was an unfortunate coincidence. Theaters are drafty.

I stayed until the end. I’d paid three dollars for my ticket, and I intended to get my money’s worth.

When the lights came up, a man in front of me turned to his wife. “Well, that’s the Devil for you.”

The Devil. They’d slandered me, and then they’d given someone else the credit.

“It’s streaming everywhere now,” Poppy said. “The whole film.”

“Wonderful. Three thousand years of existence, and I’m available on demand.”

Poppy glanced down at her notes. “So what did you do?”

I opened my folder and pulled out the first letter.

“January 2, 1974. To the president of Warner Bros. Pictures. I requested a ninety-second correction before every screening. I drafted it for them, to save them the trouble.”

I wrote to the New York Times, Variety, the Vatican, and William Peter Blatty. I rewrote Mr. Blatty’s letter eleven times. I wanted to be firm without being unkind. I’d flipped through his book in a bookstore once. He’d at least spelled my name correctly.

Then, in 1977, they made a sequel. I wrote fourteen letters that year. They brought up the locusts. I won’t discuss that film further.

“Didn’t you ever think about handling it yourself?” she asked.

“You mean possessing a studio executive?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I considered it. Briefly. In 1981. But I recognized that it would only reinforce the stereotype. One must rise above.”

She made a note. “Did Warner Bros. ever respond?”

I took out their reply on studio stationery. It thanked me for my interest in Warner Bros. productions and included a coupon for discounted admission.

The coupon had expired in March 1975.

“Nobody of consequence acknowledged anything until 2014.”

I handed her the laminated essay. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had published an article explaining how ancient Mesopotamians used amulets bearing my image to protect mothers and newborn children from Lamashtu. It also acknowledged that The Exorcist had given people a very different impression of me.

“Forty-one years,” I said. “An institutional acknowledgment, at last.”

Poppy looked through the pages. “Did they consult you?”

“I’ve been in correspondence with a great many institutions.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“That’s the answer I’m giving.”

One night, a manuscript happened to blow open to a useful passage in a curator’s office.

Old buildings are drafty.

After the article appeared, I visited the museum. I’ve worn many human faces over the centuries. That day I went as Pierce Brosnan, whose appearance I’d always admired. This attracted more attention than I’d intended.

I stood near a display of amulets when a young man pointed at an image of me.

“Hey, it’s the Exorcist guy.”

I exhaled through my nose.

The young woman with him started reading the information. “Wait,” she said. “He was supposed to protect people.” She read a little more. “Huh. He was protective.”

I nearly introduced myself.

I remembered a woman in Nineveh who’d hung my image next to her newborn daughter’s cradle. The child had been born too early, and her mother had spent three nights awake beside her, afraid to close her eyes. I kept watch until the child was strong enough to cry without stopping for breath.

The woman thanked me every morning. I hadn’t thought about her in centuries.

I stood in the museum for a while after the young couple left. Then I went home.

Poppy turned another page. “Have you contacted Universal about the newer movies?”

“Universal?”

“They’ve been involved in the recent films.”

I’d been writing to Warner Bros. for years.

I made a note.

She set the essay aside. “Let’s talk about your history. You were associated with the southwest wind?”

“Yes.”

“And disease. Some ancient texts associate you with fever and plague.”

“I object to the word plague.”

“What word would you prefer?”

“Unfortunate atmospheric consequences.”

She looked at me over her notes. “That’s a remarkably convenient way of putting it.”

“I’ve had a very long time to consider my terminology.”

“You say you protected women and children from Lamashtu.”

“I did. She feared nothing but me.”

“But you frightened everyone else, too.”

“That was hardly my fault.”

“Just because you protected people from Lamashtu doesn’t mean you were harmless, does it?”

“You’re looking at this the wrong way, Miss Poppy.”

“Am I?”

“Consider a guard dog. Its job isn’t to be pleasant. Its job is to keep something worse from getting in.”

“All right,” she said. “But guard dogs don’t usually destroy entire villages.”

She checked her notes. “There’s an account here of an entire village destroyed by a storm.”

“Which village?”

She gave me the name.

I remembered it. Unfortunately.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Did you destroy it?”

“Entire is an exaggeration.”

“How much of it?”

“Records from that period are notoriously unreliable.”

“You’re the one who was there.”

“Some of those people had it coming.”

Poppy put down her pen.

“Did the children?”

I didn’t answer.

I remembered the village. More than I wanted to. There had been children. Afterward, I saw a small sandal in the mud near the well.

“Pazuzu,” she said, “isn’t it possible that Hollywood got the details wrong without getting your reputation entirely wrong?”

I looked down at the folder. For fifty years, I’d been asking people to consider the facts. Now that someone was doing precisely that, I found the experience unpleasant.

What happened next is a matter of public record.

According to the recording, I began shouting in a dialect that hasn’t been spoken since Nineveh fell.

The microphones squealed. The lights blinked. A hot, dusty wind tore through the windowless room. My letters flew off the table. Poppy’s headphones hit the wall. The camera tripod toppled, but the camera kept recording.

The sound engineer ducked under his desk.

When the wind stopped, papers were everywhere. Poppy was sitting very still, her curls twice their usual size.

The only document left on the table was the Metropolitan Museum essay.

Lamination. As I said.

She picked her headphones up off the floor, put them back on, tried to smooth down her hair, and leaned toward the microphone.

“We’ll be right back,” she said, in exactly the same warm voice she’d used to introduce me.

“That was an accident,” I told her.

“Sure.”

“I’d like that to be made clear in the episode.”

“Oh,” she said, “it’ll be in the episode.”

The interview went online nine days later.

At first I was pleased. Ten thousand views. A hundred thousand. Two million. By the end of the week, more people had heard my name than at any time since 1973.

Then I saw what they were sharing. Nobody cared about my explanation of the amulets or the history of Lamashtu. They were watching the windstorm.

Someone had added the words ENTIRE IS AN EXAGGERATION across the bottom of the video.

That phrase is now a meme. I’ve seen it everywhere. I haven’t received a penny.

People started buying little copies of my statue and putting them on their desks. To keep away bad vibes, they wrote. Protecting my energy.

Poppy sent me a link to one of these posts. Technically, you’re a protector again, she wrote.

I spent the next few weeks considering retirement.

I watched the clip more times than I care to admit. I looked worse with each viewing.

Once, I stopped it just before the windstorm and listened to her question again.

“Did the children?”

I still didn’t have an answer I liked.

A few of my letters had gone missing after the interview. The sound engineer had framed one. The rest are stacked on my desk beside the Met essay and a printout of the meme someone slipped into my mailbox.

I had it laminated too.

Then this morning I read that another Exorcist film was being made. New director. New cast. My name was in the second paragraph.

I took out a fresh sheet of paper and addressed it to the chairman of Universal Pictures.

Dear Sir,

It’s come to my attention that you intend once again to defame me. Be advised that if you proceed, I’ll personally see to it that your crops

I crossed that out.

He doesn’t have crops.

I started writing on a new sheet of paper.

Dear Sir,

I’m writing on behalf of an ancient and much misunderstood protector of mothers and children regarding a matter of historical accuracy. I enclose, for your reference, a publication of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That was better. Firm, but reasonable.

I signed my full name, including all my titles, and sealed the envelope.

I’ve never possessed a child in my life.

Studio executives, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly difficult to resist.