Dark Entry (Night)
I’ve prepared myself, analyzed, discussed, dissected the evening, and concluded: I shall probably need to get drunk. Experience tells me so.
* * *
When I was in junior high I was a babysitter. Nearly all the girls were; if you didn’t baby-sit your own siblings you baby-sat for your relatives’ or neighbors’ kids. Sitting was the social activity of (non-dating) 11-13 year old girls on a Friday or Saturday night. If you were lucky, the kids went to sleep early, allowing you to spend the rest of the evening watching a movie or MTV or talking on the phone. You called your friends to gossip or to talk about plans for the week or to vent about your horrible parents or for one other reason: because you were scared. Usually my babysitting friends’ phone calls to me began the same way, “Hi I’m calling because the kids are in bed and the entire house is dark so I’m going around turning on all the lights because it’s freaky, you know exactly like in Halloween, okay there the lights are on, that’s better, so how are you?”
I did not call my friends because I was scared. I actually made a point of noting at the beginning on my phone conversations that all the lights were off, I was watching the scariest movie the family owned, and I was just fine. While my proclamations were mostly just my showing off, it was also true that I wasn’t scared. At age 12 the dark didn’t bother me. I had shaken off that childhood fear because I, the highly competitive oldest sibling, had found yet another way of proving how much better I was than my sisters. I sneered at the dark and pitied those with nocturnal phobias. I was strong enough to know that the dark couldn’t hurt me.
This night grrl attitude served me well throughout my teenage-hood and right on into my first couple years of college. I proudly took long walks at night figuring that just in case anything happened, I would claw any attacker's eyeballs out with my keys and send 'em crying home to their mommy. The only time I ever scurried back to my apartment while on a 1 a.m. summer stroll was when I had the misfortune of crossing paths with a baby possum; although the night didn’t faze me, animals did. Plus possums are just plain ugly.
My second to last year of college, I spent the first week of Christmas break partying nightly with my friends. We ventured into the empty dark seeking out a good time through the ice and snow. We loved the night and warmed ourselves with Skyy and cigarettes. Oh yeah, (sarcasm) I was a bad ass, me and my knee-high vinyl boots. I interrupted my partying for a week or so to visit my family for the holidays, and then returned to campus a few days before the quarter started in anticipation of a fricking awesome New Year’s Eve alcohol-fest. Life was good.
I actually had two apartments at that time. I was in the process of moving out of my evil roommate’s apartment and into a house shared with five other people. My dad dropped me off at the evil roommate’s apartment, and right after slipping me the traditional “use this for whatever” $20, he offered to drive me back to the family home that night, then back to campus again the next day. And I almost took him up on it. Because – it felt right. It felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there that night, and everything would be better if I just went home. Like the local air just wasn’t happy with me hanging around. But I didn’t want to leave, because I was a big tough girl who could deal with anything the night air had to throw at me. And I didn’t want to make my poor dad drive all that way again. So I said no, but agreed that I would gather up a bag of things and spend the night at my new apartment, which was much closer to campus and in a somewhat nicer neighborhood.
After my dad dropped me off at apartment #2, I watched a movie, and then around midnight or so I decided it was time to go to sleep. Since I didn’t have any furniture in the new place yet I elected to forego sleeping on the sofa or the floor of my empty (dining-room-turned-bed) room and bunked in my roommate’s room – the bedroom farthest from the front door. I chose this room simply because I got along with this roommate better, and knew she wouldn’t mind. As I was getting ready for bed I heard the girl who lived upstairs head out with god-knows-who - roommate, boyfriend, friends – whoever. They were fairly noisy tramping down the stairs. I’d been warned she was fairly heavy-footed, but a nice girl overall. Then I dove into the fullness of the calm night, and fell asleep.
I woke up to the sound of the doorbell. It was dark outside, but I saw from the alarm clock it was right around 6 a.m. For some reason as soon as I awoke I felt sick to my stomach, and as though my heart would fly right through my ribs and skin. I was terrified. I told myself to calm down, it was just the doorbell, and the girl upstairs had likely locked herself or her friend out. I closed my eyes and wanted to go back to sleep. It wasn’t my problem.
But, I didn’t like the way the doorbell was ringing – incessantly. Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong very very fast, as though it were being abused. The longer and faster the bell rang, the more I could feel myself becoming agitated, and I tried mentally willing my neighbor to find her keys and come inside or do whatever needed to be done to shut the bell up, because I couldn’t stand the noise it was making. And at some point, probably when the banging on the door started accompanying the crying bell, my brain started telling me there was something really, truly wrong, and I needed to get out of there.
This is what was wrong: although there were noises on the bell and the door, it was silent. No one called out asking to be let in, no one cursed her lost keys, no one laughed drunkenly wondering what to do now, and no one at all was in the house besides me. It was as if whoever was at the door was making the noise as a test, just to see what would happen. And, because I lay morbidly dumbstruck in my roommate’s bed, nothing was happening. So the noises went on and on. I felt locked, paralyzed, waiting for someone to come along to pull me out of bed and show me what to do.
And then, the doorbell stopped, the door ceased rattling, and I heard a brand new sound – glass breaking.
Somehow, this new piercing sound freed me. A sense of sleepwalking direction cooled my body, replacing my heart in its cage. I sat up, focusing on a brief list: shoes, coat, purse. It felt as though I was standing outside myself like a teacher, or as if the smart kid who knew all the answers had slipped me a note: shoes, coat, purse. I needed to acquire those items, in that order. That was what I had to do.
It was the middle of winter, freezing outside. At least a foot of snow covered the ground. I was wearing sweatpants and a ti-shirt. I needed my shoes, coat, purse. Once I had these things, I had to accomplish a larger goal: GETOUTOFTHEHOUSE. This new directive came to me not like a neatly written list, but as a roar, reverberating in my skull. I had to get out of the house, and my shoes, coat, purse should come with me.
To get out of the house, I had to get out of the room. To leave the room, I had to open the door. But there was a problem; upon opening the door I would step into the kitchen, which meant possible exposure. I had no idea who was outside the house, or how many people there were. Obviously at least one person was at the front door, but from the that door it was impossible to see anything inside the house, since it only opened into a small air lock and not directly into any of the rooms. However, a wide porch wrapped around the house from the front door to around the sidewall along the back to the kitchen, where there were enormous floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. If anyone stood on the porch near the kitchen, they’d see the bedroom door open and know I was there. I reasoned, though, that so far I hadn’t heard anyone on the porch, plus I knew there was another set of sliding glass doors on the opposite side of the house which led to the tiny front yard and then directly to a fairly busy and well-lit street. So, as I deliberately opened the door I felt confidant that, shoes or no shoes, I could make it into that street before anyone could catch me. See, that was another problem, none of those 3 items I wanted - shoes, coat, purse - were in the bedroom with me.
I opened the bedroom door. There was no one standing near the kitchen. Relief. But by now the sound of breaking glass had been conquered by a dark, more threatening sound –a doorknob being pulled, twisted, pulled.
In a series of moves that probably took me no more than a few seconds to complete but which to me drew themselves out into entire evenings, I did this: jumped forward and made sure the door leading from the airlock into our apartment was dead-bolted, slipped into my shoes, grabbed my purse and jacket which were on the floor next to my shoes, turned and flew though the kitchen out the sliding door across the snowy back yard, over our small fence, and up the street towards the train station, which was just over a block away. It was still dark outside, just before 6:30 am, on New Year’s Eve. I was heading towards the closest phone I could think of, so I could call the police. I had gotten OUTOFTHEHOUSE with my shoes, coat, purse and really wasn’t sure what to do next, but calling the police sounded like a fair idea.
I wonder what the police must have thought of me, the perplexed girl on the phone saying she hated to bother them but perhaps her house had just been broken into, she really wasn’t sure. It was after all very early and I had been sleeping and was now cold and, well, fine really, and felt kind of stupid and lost over the whole thing, but I really didn’t know what else to do. If I recall correctly, the officer was actually a little rude to me, telling me to head back to the house so I could meet the responding policemen there. However, given that I myself didn’t actually believe my house was being broken in to, and had spent the last several moments operating on some kind of bizarre autopilot, I can see why he wouldn’t have lent much credence to what I was trying to explain. Nothing seemed rational at all. I almost believed I was inside a cold, vivid dream. Not knowing what else to do, and feeling as though I should follow the officer’s instructions, I agreed to go back to meet the policemen at the house. But said I was going to wait on the train platform until I saw the squad cars.
And, within only a few moments, there were an awful lot of squad cars. 11 in all showed up – city police and campus police alike. They didn’t show up all at once, but came in 1s, 2s, and 3s until the entire home and all streets nearby were choked with police cars and sirens. The scene appeared both surreal and authoritative; the number of officers overwhelmed me. Realizing that I could hardly be in danger with so many squad cars around me, I turned and ran down the stairs off the train platform, up the street, and back towards the house. As I ran towards the closest policeman, I felt like a stupid silly girl who had caused a lot of trouble just because she had heard noises in the dark. I had no idea what to say. I slowed my run and blurted out “hello.”
“Are you the one who called?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Are your roommates home?”
“No.”
“Does anyone live in the attic?”
“No.” As soon as he said attic the entire world, which had been looking a little fuzzy, slammed into focus like a picture in a viewfinder. Someone was in the attic of my house, where no one belonged. It was dawn on New Years Eve, and I was standing next to an officer who was now giving his coworkers an okay to go inside my house and trap the person in the attic, because there was someone in there. Not even an hour earlier, someone had broken in my house while I was inside of it, and now here I was outside surrounded by policemen and women who were running in to my house to drag that person out. And as another officer came up to me and walked me to his car across the street, where I could be warm and out of the way, I started to cry. Not in a cathartic, sobbing way but where suddenly tears streamed from my eyes without fanfare. I sat in the police car and watched three or four officers lead a tall, dirty, skinny man out of my house that I did not know and had not seen before, and silently cried. I don’t think my cop even realized I was doing it. After a few minutes I composed myself, because I saw no sense in crying. The event was done; I had handled it. Maybe not well, but I certainly hadn’t failed either. Later on a police counselor would gently tell me that I should have just turned on the light, as that would have likely driven the person away. Another officer would tell me that I should have been more direct with the police when I first called so I wouldn’t have confused them. My mother would tell me I should have gotten out of the house sooner and left my shoes, coat, and purse there.
For all the good post break-in instructions, however, the fact still remained that I had handled things just fine. I was safe, nothing in the entire house was stolen, and the police caught a thief. I was in charge of the night, now had even more strength behind my victory over that stupid childhood fear. I had completed a traumatic event and was not much worse for the wear. As my body readjusted to real-time living and emerged from autopilot I finished my tears, and thanked the policeman for helping me.
And yes, later on that night, I had one hell of a time at one hell of a party.
***
But now it is several years later, and I am spending a few nights alone. I live in a wonderful, safe house in a wonderful safe neighborhood. I am an adult, fully self-sufficient, with a strong sense of self and a lingering vinyl-booted desire to prove in some way that I am tougher than you are. But I’ve got this problem. Over the years since the break-in, previous evenings alone have taught me that tonight I will stay awake until exhaustion with as many lights on as I can tolerate, deliberately positioned an easy running distance from one door with my eye glued to another, watching movies and calling friends as I fight off fear and sleep. The knowledge of this fate disgusts me, and I want to squash it. I hate this helpless frightened girl that I am.
Luckily, I have a solution. I’ve analyzed, discussed, and dissected the evening, and concluded: I shall need to get drunk. Then I’ll be able to throw beer bottles at the empty night, feeling pathetically triumphant as I fall asleep in a stupor that replaces safety.
***
And with that, good night. May your dreams be sweet, and your doorbells silent. If you are one of those I call, take pity on me please. The night is early, and the vodka hasn't kicked in yet. I promise some day I shall repay you.
- acr