Nightspace
He’s there when I get up to go to the bathroom. Crouched with a big knife behind the shower curtain. Or standing in plain sight on the cold tile. He waits, breathing silently, as I stumble in, turn on the light, lift my eyes up to the toilet and the task at hand, and then finally turn around to see the flash of metal screaming down.
I’m 49 years old, which means two things: I shouldn’t be scared of the dark. And staying in bed is not an option.
On the battlefield, your danger increases with your exposure time, but that’s not why the walk back is the hardest part. I’ve been a sitting duck from the moment I stepped out of my bedroom. But he has an exquisite sense of timing, something I like to think we have in common. If I were an axe murderer waiting for hours inside a bathroom, I too would count off a few extra beats until my prey was almost back to his bedroom, when he must surely be thinking he’s safe.
Still, I soldier on each night. In recent years, I’ve become so brave that sometimes I don’t even rush back to bed. Instead, I indulge an entirely different neurosis and go to the front door to check for the third time that it’s locked–even though I’m well aware of how this will delight any irony-loving slasher who is already inside the apartment!
As I have matured, so has my demon. He’s longer a kidnapper (I grew up in the 80s) who could be stymied by the sight of a blanket all the way over my head, as long as I made sure he couldn’t see my tiny breathing hole. I would fall asleep imagining him standing over me a few hours later, dejectedly muttering, “Never mind, he’s already suffocated.”
These days, he’s more likely to be a fascist thug, probably tipped off by the FBI about the dangerous potential of my writing. I should feel a trickle of pride–at least someone sees it! Instead, I stand over the bowl ruminating over the many ways I would fail to protect my family from a home invasion.
As a kid, I eventually knew that this was some sort of game coming from my anxious mind, but that didn’t help once the lights were out. Of course it didn’t. There’s no way my brain was going to dispense with evil kidnappers and expose me to the gaping, endless peace of a dark and quiet home in the middle of the night. Towels hanging on their racks. Appliances humming through their wires. My little world, existing seamlessly without me.
It’s always different when I come out because I can’t sleep. Flipping on lights and tv remotes, splashing onto the couch with an exaggerated sigh, the frustrations of insomnia are compensated with feeling my conquest over the nightspace. But when I go to the bathroom with eyes half open, I’m trespassing through the without-me realm. I know I look different here — faded, maybe translucent.
Being middle aged means no longer lying in the dark, afraid to find what’s waiting for me beyond the bedroom door. Instead, it’s lurching upright and thudding my feet on the floor before I even remember that there’s something I’m supposed to fear. Then I look for him in the dark, the knife-wielding killer. I check the walls on the way to the bathroom as if he’ll be hanging there in a frame, and I’ll feel a tug of nostalgia when I see him.
But I always look down before I pass the mirror. I tell myself I’m afraid I’ll see a monster behind me.
