The dream could start in any conceivable way, but it ends the same. An empty corridor, I’m all alone, and suddenly that ineluctable feeling of eyes on me. I’m being watched - no worse - I’m being followed, by some unnameable darkness that wants to get me. I try to run, but my limbs are like lead. It’s closing in - I can’t turn backwards to see it - I open my mouth to scream, and no noise comes out.
I wake up shouting and thrashing in the middle of the night, my dreaming mind rebelling against the paralysis of my sleeping body. I’ve had these dreams since I was five years old at least.
Darkness moves easily between metaphor and fact. We contrast the Dark Ages with the Enlightenment to express the movement of superstition to reason, ignorance to wisdom, chaos to order. But darkness is also what we literally cannot see and therefore cannot judge. When we are afraid of the dark, are we afraid of the unknown, or is there a quality in darkness itself that menaces us? We sleep in darkness, and it’s thus the fertile ground for the illogic of dreams. Darkness is both the hidden libido and the precondition for acting on it.
We live only half of our lives in the light. To the remainder, we consign that which is inscrutable, contradictory, strange. All those things we need to squint to make out, the figure at the edge of our vision that fills us with partial recognition and dread. Truth in the dark is different from truth in the light. It passes through shadow and sublimation, and it’s therefore more horrible and more beautiful.
*
Early Saturday morning on January 4, the end of a late evening, I set off to walk the short distance home from a party. It was a dry and bitter winter night. I was the only one out. I’d gone no more than a block or so when I heard footsteps. I turned to see three men. They were slightly fanned out, maybe fifteen yards behind me and five feet apart from one another. Their mouths were covered, but I could see their eyes, and they were heavy on me. I broke into a run. They did too.
The subsequent events are slightly jumbled in my mind as is always the case when the adrenaline spikes. First of all, I knew that they would catch me. I was about half a mile from home, and I wore heavy tyrolean shoes and a long coat that restricted my movement. It was because I felt the futility of my struggle that I turned around to shout “Fuck you!” as loudly as I could. This line was readily supplied - it’s typically what I’m shouting when I wake up from the nightmare. As I turned, a green light flittered about my eyes. A scope? A laser pointer? I’d wonder this afterwards. In the moment, the meaning was one and the same: I’d been seen, I’d been identified, and the forces of darkness were coalescing out of the night. A huge palm was flexing all around me. I ran in a dead sprint.
Then, I was at well-lit Milwaukee Avenue, and they were no longer right behind me. I couldn’t keep up the sprint, but I took a fast jog south of the train tracks and into my neighborhood. I cut into a side street, and I ducked past the first house I saw with an open gate. As I huddled in its backyard, I listened as I imagine all prey animals do, with the fine hairs of my eardrums measuring the barometric shifting of the night. The back gate was loose, and it swung eerily open and shut on rusty hinges. Beyond it, I could see the Blue Line tracks. I heard nothing except the wind.
Did I stay there for five minutes? Ten? At a certain point, it was time to leave. I crept from behind the house, saw that the coast was clear, and ran the remaining distance home. I tripped and tripped up my back steps. I fumbled with the lock - I just couldn’t get it to turn. The next day, I’d discover that I’d somehow snapped my bike key in my hurry. I got inside, and my dog was waiting for me, thumping her tail like all was well. I immediately shut off every light, camouflaging my home in darkness lest they notice the one apartment guilty with light.
*
I couldn’t fall asleep for a while that night. I lay on my bed, my heart and breathing refusing to settle. I left a voice message for a friend, and I was surprised to hear the quiver in my voice. I felt other than my body, displaced by the strangeness of what had happened.
There was no sense of victory, no relief. If anything, it was like I hadn’t actually gotten away unscathed. I felt some black mark on my person, as if my escape was trivial and ultimately temporary. I’m sure this was because of the circumstances - the fact that it was the witching hour, and I was alone; the sheer confused desperation of it all. There were no cameras (I would learn) that recorded the events on Wood Avenue between 2:30 and 3AM that night. It was almost as if it were just one more nightmare.
The lesson I’ve told myself since childhood: when my time comes, I’ll be slow, I’ll be weak, I’ll not be able to save myself.
*
I read the novel Prophet Song last year. It’s about the disintegration of Irish society into a theoretical fascist police state. It’s the kind of dystopian novel I’ve been reading my whole life, but for some reason this one seemed different. It felt real, like the kind of thing I’ll look back on in ten years or three with grim recognition. It’s about, among other things, the sensation of the familiar world growing unfamiliar. Your neighbor becoming your enemy. The recognizable liberal-democratic society slipping between your fingers like so much melting ice. It asks the question: when the worst is happening, but hasn’t yet fully ‘happened,’ will you know to run? Will you be able to get out? Our dreams tap into the hidden black current underneath the world. Maybe our nightmares train us in case of the worst - an inoculation against a future and not-yet specified terror.
My attackers were not representatives of a fascist police state. More likely, they are the victims of our present fascist police state, poor Chicagoans shaking down my own post-gentrification neighborhood for whatever crumbs remain for them. But the lizard brain is not able to make such distinctions. There is only fear, fight or (my preferred method) flight, and whatever that thing is that is most defiant and ready at the drop of a hat to shout “fuck you!” to any and all comers.
I expected defeat, but I still escaped. In the crucial moment, I was, in fact, ready. But they left me with a sense of precarity, a revelation of some latent violence, that I haven’t been able to shake. I think what I’m realizing is that it’s been there all along.
*
When a dog bites or is bitten by another dog, the stress chemistry stays elevated for 72 hours. This is what I thought about the following days, as I checked my 6 every time I went outside, when a door opening in my periphery caused me to flinch.
A man goes by on a scooter while I’m running, and he lets out a low hoot as he passes. There’s another man partially hidden the shadow of the bridge in front of me. I cross to the other side. I take an unexpected turn at the next intersection. I wonder how long this will last.
I feel as if some substrate, some agar, has leaked out of the world. It’s not a presence of fear, only an absence of certainty. I imagine this is just a tiny taste of how many people - those who’ve known war or who’ve endured migrations or persecution - feel all the time. Maybe it’s how my attackers feel going about their lives.
*
One of my jobs is working with high schoolers to help them get into college. In many cases, I help wealthy families ensure that their children access the wealth and prestige that is guaranteed by elite universities. In the theoretical analysis, I lubricate social reproduction. I’m not sure, but I’d hazard a guess that my attackers were teenagers. I call them men, but probably they were boys. They certainly do not have anyone ensuring their access to wealth and prestige. In a perverted sort of way, maybe they saw me the way my paying clients do: someone who can help them achieve a better position in a deeply tilted world.
The brilliant but under-appreciated Chuck Palahniuk novel Rant shows a vision of a bifurcated society. Affluent “Daytimers” lead recognizable middle-class lives, but the poor “Nighttimers” must abide by a strict curfew. In this oppressed class, “Party Crashing” is popular, a sort of demolition derby on city streets. I think Palahniuk captures well how such libidinal forces always find expression. Sometimes, it’s art. Often, it’s some kind of violent or anti-social behavior. But darkness has a liquid physics - it must always flow. The rules of daylight - the hoarding of wealth, the subjugation of the oppressed, what some call ‘social violence’ - will always seem natural to the Daytimers. But the true character of a society shines darkly.
On the morning of January 4, darkness condensed into the forms of three boys who emerged from the night with ill intent. But they were not the darkness - the darkness merely found expression in the menace of their footsteps. Who knows in what ways it had already menaced them. Darkness is never external - it is something we share. We are always implicated in darkness. When the green laser flashed in my eyes, the fear I felt was the sudden knowledge that darkness is a mirror; the abyss that looks back.
If this seems rather abstract, it’s because I only understand it abstractly. Something happened when I was alone one night that frightened me greatly without harming me materially. There is a certain poetry to it, strange as it is to say - the flashing green light, the trial of the sprint, the gate-beneath-the-train-tracks creaking in a city both vacant and full of menace. Because I wasn’t mugged, because I wasn’t physically hurt, all I have are these strangely symbolic flashes of memory. It left me with an odd sense of significance, the way that prophets and oracles have always required sacrifices, invoked dangerous forces, for the gift of wisdom. I know something now that I didn’t know before.
We are in a dark time, and I believe it will get darker. When I say society is sick, I speak of the gross inequalities and casual cruelty that characterizes the existence of masses of people. Maybe those boys weren’t in it for my money - maybe they wanted to extract some other punishment out of me. Who knows in what way I am a symbol for them. My fear is that we will all turn into each other’s whipping boys, lashing the darkness out of our own hearts by striking not those who deserve it, but those who are merely nearby.
Because some people do deserve it. Some people profit off of darkness. Some people - not very many, but some - would have us live our whole lives in it. Until we can come to understand that, more fires will burn, and the soot will gradually darken the day for everyone.