Something Out There Wants To Kill Us

I keep it quiet. I have to. I’m so easily distracted that anything I’m listening to becomes something I’m doing. If I’m writing or cleaning my room or paying bills, and there’s music or TV on, I’ll just sit there. Some of you work and write and everything else with movies or music on. Robin shops with earbuds in. Wade works to music turned up, has a second monitor playing movie trailers, plus whatever techie vidcast bullshit interests him on his iPad, while he does his job, for real, on an unrelated computer. Three backlit rectangles, two with audio, plus music, to do his job. Not me. I use music for proofreading. If what I’ve written—beautiful shit like this, just for you—doesn’t go with a soundtrack (lately of Kanye West or Black Keys), then I start again, in silence. TV and movies are my reward. Write for an hour, break for Parks and Recreation.

What I’m saying is: if I’m home alone, it’s mostly quiet. Which means if the shit goes down, I know right away.

Everyone thinks I’m lying about the squirrel that runs across the ceiling periodically. No one else has ever been here in silence, so no one else has heard him. He’s there though, scratching, scritch-scritching, rolling an acorn, tapping, texting, making lunch. I’m not scared of him; he’s mainly there in cold weather, and most of the sounds he makes are identifiable. I see him from time to time, outside, his head sticking out of a hole by the roof, above the gutter. I give him a head shake, “Oh, you”, like he’s part of the opening credits of my sitcom.

One night last week, I worked out for an hour to Metropolitan. I cannot abide the audio on P90x, so I mute it, and watch a movie on another screen. Yes, I had P90x on one screen, and Metropolitan on another. I am two kinds of douchebag, simultaneously. Then, I ate dinner watching 30 Rock. Roughly two hours of my evening soundtracked, and then I shut it down, to spend the rest of the night writing. No scratch, no scritch. I sat still for a second, listening for my squirrel. Nothing but the sound of my fingers on the keyboard, as it is in heaven.

And then, something fell, fell through the entire house, slid down the length of a two-story wall, and hit the floor with a metallic THOOM.

THOOM, everybody.

I walked to the corner, to the never-used fireplace, and put my hands against the wall. I leaned in, for a second, but fell, hard, skin-off-elbow hard, when I was greeted from the other side by growling. I backed away, back up on my feet, a mouthed “the fuck?” propelling me out of the room. I paced the hall for a second, weighing the options: monster, alien, rabies, claws, body-heat-detection, night vision. The options weren’t good. What is it, where is it, how do I get it out, how do I keep it in, I should have taken more risks, I never met Jay-Z and Beyonce.

It started climbing. Claws against metal. Up and up. The sound everyone hates, followed by one worse: sliding back down, against its will. Freddy Kruger’s glove skimming a pipe. The National Weather Service alert. That one Bjork song. When it settled back to the ground, it growled again, more, louder, until the growling transitioned into screaming. It began knocking? Head-butting? It wanted my attention. Under most other circumstances, say, spotted from a safe distance in my car, or in a cute picture on the internet, I would have made him my buddy. I would have called him Buddy. One time I saw a cat under a car on my street. By the time I realized it was a soccer ball, I had already pulled over, gotten on my hands and knees, and greeted it with “Hullo dere.” What I’m saying is, I was ready to make that little guy my new good friend, without considering that it might as easily have been a rat as a cat, or even a possum. And honestly, it took will power for me not to Wilson up the soccer ball and take it home too. I want them all to be my own little wildlife posse, laying out my polos and sneakers every day, helping me get used to the new Radiohead album, finding rumors for me online about the next Batman movie. The monster in the fireplace had other ideas.

This motherfucker. Jeez. Screaming, growling, clawing. People have gone crazy over less. People dedicate their lives to hunting serial killers over nights like this. After another round of climbing the walls, I was climbing them myself. Not to mention: a little scared. Whatever it was, skunk, raccoon, that eight-legged Na’vi rhino, it wanted in. I did what you would do: wedged the recycling bin into the fireplace, and then stacked weights inside it. Then braced it with a barstool. Even if it got the damper open (raccoons have hands!) it wouldn’t be able to get into the room. Although, if the damper opened even a little, he’d be able to see me. So I left the room.

Once I was in my bedroom, with no computer, with insomnia, with just, what, three thousand comics and a couple dozen books, gah, nothing! Bored! I sat on the edge of my bed. As my visitor would climb his way up the wall, I found, to my panic, that the sound filled my bedroom. In between his now normal routine (scratch, scream, growl) I found that I could also hear him breathing. Panting. Wheezing. 3 a.m., in case you were wondering. I had established a routine of my own by this point: pacing, swearing, making that “Oh shit, we almost had a car wreck” noise. One time I was at lunch outdoors with a group of coworkers. The wind toppled the umbrella from a nearby table, toward one of my friends, with me as the only witness. My call to action was “Uhhhhhhh” while pointing as it hit him in the back of the head. I had been making that sound for over an hour. As our breathing synched, I stepped into the hall, closing my door behind me as gently as possible, and tried to stay silent. Maybe if the thing that wanted in didn’t hear anything on my side of the wall, it would fight in the other direction.

When I was a kid, we had a wood-burning stove in our basement. In other words, we had a flue and a chimney, but no fireplace. The only evidence of this, besides in the basement, was in my brother’s room. The cinderblock column of the flue jutted up into his closet, dividing it in two. I was the only one small enough to shimmy between the blocks and the wall. It’s a wonder I never got stuck, playing Han Solo in Carbonite; Batcave; or just Hide in This Little Spot (I was a kid.). I gave it a moment’s thought, identifying with my intruder. It didn’t last long. It’s difficult to sympathize with something once you’ve decided to be terrified of the sound of its breathing, which was easily audible through the door. And of course, it was nothing compared to: growl, scream, scratch, kill.

I was feeling pretty crazed (I live only a couple inches from madness on a good day), watching my life in split screen. I was on one side, distorted, sweaty, bumping into the lens, seeing my own breath; my beastly visitor on the other, climbing the walls, his siblings stretching up from goo-laden pods. Just because I have insomnia doesn’t mean I’m clear-headed. By 3:30 a.m., I might have been wide awake, but I wasn’t alert. Scream, growl, claw, pant? Was starting to mess with my brain a little. Another hour, and I would cross the line between just annoyed, and running into my mother’s room and tearing down the pictures of me she’d drawn, because they’d come to life and started mocking me. Joaquin Phoenix watched footage of my thoughts, clasped his hand to his mouth, and backed away from the TV.

4 a.m., having to be at work in three hours, starving, caffeine-headached, I finally got proactive. With my fireplace fort, I was confident the thing couldn’t get to me, but I also knew I’d never sleep. I’m not a pregnant lady or in a war-torn country, so I didn’t have a bag packed. You guys: have a bag packed. I snuck back into my room as quickly and quietly as I could, and tossed my suitcase and clothes into the hallway. I got dressed for work—no shower—and packed my bag.

I’m aware how dramatic this all sounds. To be clear: this wasn’t the equivalent of, say, a noisy upstairs neighbor, or someone with heavy bass driving down your street, or fireworks on the Fourth. It was those things, plus a car alarm, and the sound your phone makes when you dialed 1 and didn’t have to, translated to snarling, turned up to eleven, and echoing through every room of your house (and head). Which is why I got in my car and drove away.

I got a few blocks away, deathgrip on the wheel, when it hit me: Where the hell was I going? No hotel would check me in at 4 a.m., and even if I was able to get comfortable, I had to be at work in about three hours. I pulled over at a convenience store. No one was there besides me and a cop. I made myself a deal: I’d buy gas, and if the cop was still there when the tank was full, I’d ask for advice. What happens if I call 911 because of a scary animal, for example. Maybe he’d follow me home, and taser it through the wall. I topped off the tank, got in my car, and drove away. The cop was still there.

I went back home and parked out front. I’d left all the lights on. Every time I started to doze off, I’d see the house burning down, or an alien bursting from the wall, or a bullet hitting a balloon in slow-mo (the weirdest shit wakes me up), and bolt upright. I’d scan each window for shadows. Every half hour or so, I’d turn on the car for a bit, listening to the radio and warming up. At 7:30, having not slept since the previous morning at 5:45, I put the car in reverse and left for work. I brushed my teeth in the parking lot (dry, spitting into an empty Redbull can. Ke$ha, call me.). Why didn’t I brush my teeth inside? I’m not brushing my teeth at work; what am I, a sociopath? I told my story to each of my coworkers, careful not to exaggerate in case they compared notes, and careful to keep it funny, lest they think I’m living in some kind of Fisher King/Grey Gardens/Bindi Irwin nightmare. I forgot about not framing my story so that I was the only one receiving sympathy. One of my coworkers said, “That poor thing!” in a way that implied “Oh, spiders are as afraid of you as you are of them!” Yeah, and full of poison. I was worthless at work, contemplating each and every hideous thing that might be happening at home in my absence. For the first time, I was glad Bandit was gone. I couldn’t have brought him to work, and there’s no way I would have left him at home.

By the time I got home, I had reached that dizzy hangover stage of the day after a sleepless night. I was groggy, mush-mouthed and, of course, wide awake. Wade was inside; he’d been at his girlfriend’s the night before. I sent him a text at the height of my panic, but he’d returned to a silent house. “It’s something nocturnal,” I said, reasoning that it would be quiet during the day, and violent if we woke it. Too many years as friends, too few survival instincts, and too many episodes of Jackass resulted in the following: Wade lied down with his head in the fireplace, looking up. He had a flashlight and a poker. I stood out front, holding a blanket. He was going to open the damper. I was going to throw the blanket on whatever jumped out, presumably before it ripped Wade’s face off. The missing element, was, obviously, a flame-thrower. Aliens, The Thing, Whatever Went Down At My Place, all the good movie monsters go down in flames. Wade opened the damper, the end.

Nothing fell out.

Before I got there, Wade had explored outside. It was dark when I was there, okay? It’s not that my friend is more brave. It’s that I was there under different terrifying circumstances. He found a space at the bottom of a wall, near the flue, right outside the spot I’d first heard the noises. I told him about a calling my dad (I don’t remember most of our conversation. I blacked out after, “It’s probably a skunk.”). Wade put a cinderblock in front of the hole, we had a laugh, and that was that. What probably happened: it climbed in, got turned around, confused, couldn’t get back out, started climbing the walls. Since it was in between the siding and the flue, the sounds echoed throughout the house, instead of just in the fireplace. In the morning, it saw sunlight through the hole, and found its original path out. See? It was just as scared as me.

Fuck that.

I finally got some sleep around 1 a.m. (around 44 hours awake, for those of you counting), on the couch, yes, showered. I never slept long. My REM cycle was about as long as it takes to shake a Polaroid into clarity. I was asleep and awake again, just in time to see the image of myself, an alien behind me, ready to stab me in the back with its tailspear. I was hearing things I’d never heard before, and convinced myself that they weren’t my imaginings, but rather things I’d just not been sharp enough to notice before.

I pulled onto my street the next afternoon, and saw that fucker. I pulled over and jumped out of my car, grabbing rocks and chucking them up at the roof. A squirrel—my funny ceiling scratcher—leapt out of the gutter and onto the garage roof. He faced me, his feet spread and his tail spinning. I threw the rest of my rocks, none making contact, and he ran away.

I went around to the hole in the wall. The cinderblock had moved about six inches, and there was—hang on, I have to go puke and then cry—a claw-marked hole dug out, straight back to the wall. So, raccoon? Wolverine? Badger? Person? I banged on the wall all around the hole, and as high as I could reach, periodically jumping back into my karate battle stance (you know the one). Nothing. I pushed the cinderblock back into place, and down, and added a couple bricks and rocks into all the open spaces. I scanned the backyard, walking backwards back into the house.

I had all the time I wanted to write, but didn’t want to risk being in silence. How to know if you’re possibly becoming even more of a pussy? 1. You’re afraid to be home by yourself when it’s quiet. 2. Throwing a rock at a squirrel makes you feel like a hard-ass. I tried to write to loud music, which was hit and miss. Half the time I was just looking for more music. Around ten, I decided to grab some food.

When I got back, a few beers in me, I went straight to the back yard, waving a flashlight. The barricade I’d built was intact, but there were claw marks all around it. I bolted back inside, grabbed another beer, and got online.

Hey, wanna be terrified? Check out how to get rid of wildlife trapped in your home. Basically it’s this: If you don’t live in the country, but a wild animal has found its way into your house anyway? It’s not leaving. It wants to live there, and you have to get a professional to remove it, because it might have rabies, or babies, or both. One of the guides I read suggested having a pet to deter wild animals. A dog in the house, for example. That had never occurred to me. When Bandit died, I was struck mainly by the selfish, emotional implications. I was sad, I was lonely, my feet were cold. Last summer, if you were considering getting a dog, I could have given you a sturdy list of pros and cons. Last fall, the cons vanished. Not having Bandit sucked, completely. Not much has been said about it, but I wish at one point someone would have sat me down and said, “Oh, and you know what else? I bet Bandit was keeping monsters away from the house. You should probably buy a big-ass gun.” The raccoon, or skunk or gremlin that wanted in the house probably wanted in the house last year too. But, it was scared away by the smell of a dog, by barking, and by the tags of ownership Bandit left around the yard and perimeter of the house. Not ready for another dog, and definitely not ready for a gun, I started thinking about things I could spray around the house that might deter pests. My internet searches told me ammonia. Is that in shower cleaner? I have a variety of salsas and hot sauces, but what if forest creatures like things spicy? Vodka? Mouthwash? Red Bull? So many options, but no guarantees. Finally, I just manned the hell up, went outside, and pissed on everything myself. Gotta send these guys a message: just because it’s quiet, doesn’t mean someone isn’t living in here already.

And you can bet it won’t be that quiet from now on.

Comments

[qtip]

oh, oh my. that was to funny. Miss Bandit protecting the house and also having college friends also pissing on the house for protection.