From time I like to take a break from chronicling Western civilization’s collapse and share a story that reminds us there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in presidential politics. Contra the experts on campus and cable news, our understanding of the world is far from complete.
I had a friend in college who grew up in the next town over. Though I might not call him a skeptic, he kept a level head and was always more enamored of natural phenomena than abstract conjecture. His life’s dream was to be an astronomer, and he didn’t usually go in for the Art Bell stuff.
Except for this one time.
Late one night–it must have been sometime around the turn of the millennium–we were driving in his truck along a lonely road cutting through a narrow river valley between moonlit bluffs on our right and a dark strip of woods on our left. Picture the scene from Stand by Me where Wesley and co. are standing on the train tracks and facing the river, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the terrain. Now picture it in the small hours with the moon riding high.
We were heading to his folks’ place, chatting about the sorts of ephemera that occupied much of our time back then: anime, D&D, imported Saturn games, when he threw me a major curve ball. Pursuant to nothing in the conversation thus far, he sprang the following story on me.
My friend had grown up in one of those odd neighborhoods you find beyond the outskirts of medium-sized Midwestern towns. It was past the suburbs but not quite out in the country, a ten-minute drive from civilization along that two-lane river road. That may not seem remote, but if you’d been in the car that night, and my friend had dropped you off on the roadside, you could’ve looked in every direction and not seen an electric light burning.
Years before, this was the early 90s, my friend had been spending the night at a classmate’s house on one of the first weekends of the school year. They were in junior high at the time, when my friend’s classmate had lived a block from the house we were driving toward. As preteen boys of the era did, they’d amused themselves with Nintendo games and comic books well into the evening before repairing to the living room for the season premiere of Saturday Night Live.
They’d found the man of the house already ensconced in his worn recliner in front of the TV. My friend’s buddy’s dad hailed from the ranks of blue collar Boomers pulling down six figures in today’s money at a local factory long since closed. You may have met the type: fond of trucker hats, always had dirty hands, but there was a five-year-old Corvette in the garage. He worked long hours in hot, noisy conditions and had a generally low tolerance for youthful exuberance. He seemed to have it in for my friend in particular, so both boys had sat quietly on the earth-tone-plaid-sofa-with-afghan that they’d issued every homeowner in the 80s.
My friend had been sitting at the end of the sofa nearest the big picture window–as far from his buddy’s old man as possible. He told me he didn’t remember why or exactly when, but at some point during a commercial he’d glanced out that window.
The flicker of the console TV and the dim glow of the old man’s stand lamp had been the only light sources, mitigating the mirror effect of looking through a window in a lighted room at night. Only the moon, filtered through clouds and obstructed by tree limbs, had lit the sleeping landscape. My friend hadn’t been able to see the white strip of gravel road fronting the yard. He’d barely been able to make out the trunk of the old tree standing right in front of the house.
But thanks to the backlit clouds, he’d seen the shape hunched on the branch twelve feet from him.
The house was a split-level job like all the others on the street, so the living room window was a good ten feet above grade–right in line with the lowest tree branch. My sober, analytical friend insisted that something had been perched on that branch that night. Circumstances hadn’t allowed him a good look at it, but he said it was dark and about the size of a toddler with a weird hunched posture. The arms had seemed unnaturally long compared to the other body proportions. But what really made an impression on my friend was the thing’s face. Even though it had been turned to one side, he’d seen that its eyes and mouth emitted bright neon green light.
Fear had wrestled with curiosity in my friend’s head, and curiosity had won. He’d kept staring at the self-luminous goblin until, with shocking suddenness, it had turned and stared back.
My friend remembered nothing of his interaction with the anomalous entity from that point forward except for its blazing green eyes and mouth, the latter of which gaped wide as if screaming. Yet he recalled no sound emerging; only terrible green light.
He next recalled dimly hearing his buddy’s dad growl, “What the hell is your spaz of a friend looking at?” His buddy had shaken him, and when he’d turned back to the room, Kevin Nealon was wrapping up Weekend Update. The whole encounter had seemed to last only a few seconds, but he estimated he must’ve been locking eyes with the thing for almost ten minutes.
My friend recounted how he’d dreaded looking back out that window, but as befit a delver into nature’s secrets, he had indeed looked again. There’d been nothing; only shrouded moonlight seeping through tangled branches.
The boys had called it a night after that. As my friend had lain on plaid cushions under an ugly afghan that late Saturday night in the early 90s, his buddy had asked him what he’d seen.
“Nothing,” my friend had said. “I just spaced out.”
He said he hadn’t confided that story to anyone until he told me those years later.
The rest of the drive passed uneventfully, though I couldn’t help glancing at the tree line every couple of minutes. We passed the rest of the night discussing our course loads, swapping anecdotes about the anime con we’d attended a couple weeks before, and rummaging through my friend’s vintage Transformers collection.
That night passed into day, and the days ran into years. Somewhere along the way, my friend sank into the rainbow-hued heart of Clown World, his dreams and potential unfulfilled. We still exchange the odd text now and then.
Like everyone in the last few generations, my friend grew up being told anything was possible if he applied himself, only to be sabotaged by a rapidly degrading society, a system that couldn’t care less, and an elder generation unable to grasp the largely hidden opposition he was up against. You could make the case he ended up where he did because of the bad hand he was dealt. Then again, most people reading this were at the same table with the same dealer.
If you hung out with our crowd back in those days when the plans laid against us quietly passed the point of no return, you’d have liked my friend. But you’d probably have noticed a subtle distance, as if he was never fully there, even if the two of you were in the midst of a rousing conversation about Warhammer 40K.
I started wondering that night. Sometimes I still do.
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