Every marriage has its watershed moments, whereby a life long relationship is defined...
Scarey Noises
Scarey Noises was a drinking game which was very popular at college frat parties during my uninspiring academic career. The participants would draw straws, and the schmuck with the short straw was blindfolded and tied to a tree. Then the rest of us withdrew a short distance, and took turns trying to make the victim scream, cry, crap his pants or otherwise express fear. If the victim survived your turn, you had to drink. If you got a reaction, the victim had to drink and the game started over.
We came up with lots of Scarey Noises during our short infatuation with the game. Clanking chains and electric knives were always good for a laugh. I had a gift for psychological warfare and almost always won. The only real rule was no touching the victim, you had to win by noise alone. Kind of a stupid game, in retrospect, but what frat party drinking game isn’t rooted in stupidity? At least this one got us out into the fresh air.
I was thinking about Scarey Noises last night, after being awakened about 3 am by a low, raspy creaking. The first time I’d heard that noise in our new home it had caused me no end of terror, as I’d imagined stinking, slime-coated monstrosities slithering ravenously from the back yard pond, drawn by the smell of the warm, living, good-to-eat humans now occupying the house. The first time I had ever heard that creaking, I spent what seemed like hours lying ramrod-stiff in my bed, literally paralyzed with terror. I finally ventured forth, armed with a high heeled bedroom slipper, only to discover that our pet hamster had discovered his new - and noisy - exercise wheel. I menaced him with the two inches of heel in my hand, the poofy end of my neon-bright fuck-me pump sticking to my clammy palm. The hamster continued his circular race to nowhere, happily oblivious to the crazy woman armed with the hot pink footgear standing over his cage.
The scariest of all Scarey Noises are those that awaken me out of a sound sleep. Some do it suddenly and loudly while other types of noises slowly infiltrate my dreaming mind, pulling me up from the depths of sleep so gradually that I am unaware of actually crossing the boundary between nightmare and reality. Until I experienced the ultimate in Sudden and Loud awakenings, I was convinced that the infiltrators were the worst of the two. Infiltration noises, those sly and subtle sounds that ease my sleeping mind slowly into wakefulness, generally leave me thrashing helplessly in my bed, bound by my own sheets and blankets as securely as we bound our long ago Scarey Noises victims to those rough and isolated trees.
My conclusion about frightening nighttime noises was wrong. The worst of all nightmarish awakenings that I ever experienced was of the sudden and loud variety, and it happened to me several years ago. The time was about 3 am, and oh how 3 am seems to be my own particular Witching Hour, when ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night gather around my bedside to menace my sleep.
This particular night I think I would have welcomed a nice monster to battle, instead of the faceless horror that awakened me. At least with a monster a girl has a chance, if she can ram the heel of that fuck-me pump into its single bloodshot eye she can make it to the flame thrower - or the fire extinguisher if it’s a cold-sensitive monstrosity - and go all Rambo on its ass. The thing that woke me that night, though, was no foe small enough to be vanquished with a high-heeled shoe and a rapid temperature change. What awakened me was Armageddon, Annihilation and Newfangled Fire & Brimstone, all in one instantaneous package. I was rousted from my slumber by Thermonuclear Warfare, and the bomb had already detonated.
Obviously anybody reading this is fully aware that there has never been a Thermonuclear War, and my oh so patient reader is also cognizant of the fact that, since I am sitting here writing my story, I was probably not flash fried as I bolted upright in bed with my heart pounding and my bladder, thank you Jesus, not emptying its contents all over my bed. Really, that latter is quite a feat, especially considering that I was petrified with the most absolute terror I have ever felt and had consumed mass quantities of Diet Pepsi as we stayed up late watching the news the previous evening.
My husband Mike and I are not huge news watchers, per se, but I know of few people who weren’t glued to their television sets or radios or computers or some form of media input that week. My brush with death occurred in the wee hours of September 14th, in the year 2001. This was less than three days after the terror attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and killed thousands of innocent people, about 30 miles from where we lived.
There’s no real need to rehash September 11th. Everybody has a 911 story, they are all important, they are all riveting, and they are all poignant. Ours was one of the better ones. My best friend was an office worker in the towers who just happened to be late for work that morning. She emerged from the subway beneath the Trade Center to find a milling crowd of fellow office workers babbling about a bomb scare and heading for the exits. She went with the flow, happy for the bomb scare that covered her tardiness, and, upon hitting the street, saw what was happening and ran like Hell. Having had her life saved because she was late for work, she swore a solemn oath to never be on time again.
My husband managed to get out of Manhattan with relative ease and we were able to watch the towers fall over and over that night in our own bed. I felt very blessed by the escape of the two people I love most in the world, and regarded the level of post-traumatic stress I suffered subsequent to the attacks as a personal affront, getting myself through it by vigorously chastising myself for my own weaknesses.
Anyway... scary noises and nuclear warfare. In the days after the fall of the towers I went to work as usual, but evenings were spent glued to the news and swapping conspiracy theories. A student of history, my husband is great at coming up with more and more unsettling theories and scenarios.
We turned off the television at 11:30 on the 13th, after watching the Daily Show. Kissing Mike goodnight, I curled up against his warmth and drifted off, visions of a smirking Junior Bush banished by Mike’s arm around my waist and a purring cat with the unlikely name of Myron hogging most of my pillow.
I was awakened by light, a flash so prolonged and brilliant that it illuminated our bedroom even through the lowered shades and drawn curtains. It jerked me bolt upright in bed, Mike still snoring blissfully to my right and the cat wide awake and staring on my left. In the unnatural and almost blinding brightness I could see that the animal was terrified, and I scooped him to my chest, clutching him to me with my ‘tech grip’, the one armed clutch that pins a cat in place and keeps his cute little paws from becoming razor-tipped shredding machines.
The light lasted for several seconds, then abruptly winked out, leaving behind absolute darkness and an equally blinding red afterimage seared on my retinas. “Oh fuck, they nuked the city,” I said, or maybe I just thought it really loud. “The dumb bastards nuked the city and I looked at the fucking flash and went blind.”
I reached out towards Mike, trying to calculate how far away Manhattan was from our small Long Island house - not far enough by a long shot - and attempting to figure out how many seconds we had until the firestorm swept over us. I gripped Mike’s shoulder to shake him awake, knowing that if there were any way out of this, any possibility of survival at all, he would find it. We had never been in a jam that he couldn’t fix, and I reached for him knowing that if anybody could fix the end of the world, it would be Mike.
As my fingers closed over his shoulder the rumble began, a huge and loud roaring so intense that the house shook around us, jolting Mike out of sleep and causing Myron to press his body and face against me. The cat was shaking and I kissed the top of his head as I asked Mike, “Did those crazy bastards just nuke us?”
For a long moment the roaring went on, then cut off and silence descended. Mike and I stared at each other, and it dawned on me that I could see, and that we should probably get moving, and that even if we did get moving it was too late. For all of our talk on the subject, we hadn’t moved out of New York after all. We had been caught flatfooted, asleep at the switch, and within seconds we were going to be flash fried, no doubt very painfully, with millions of others who hadn’t moved out of New York, history’s largest ever order of people flambee, and the last fast food dinner I would ever think about or give a shit about.
Just then the light flashed again, not quite as long or as bright, and was answered seconds later by another roar of sound, also not as overwhelming. A moment or two later, we heard and saw another flash, then two more. “Thunderstorm,” we both said, then stared at each other and began to laugh. I hugged poor Myron close once more, then released him from my death grip. He stalked to the edge of the bed, the picture of ruffled feline dignity, and sat with his back towards us, where he began to groom himself, pausing now and then to glance dismissively back at the two of us as he cleansed his fur of the evidence of still more human stupidity.
In the midst of our laughter, Mike paused and stared at me. “Were you actually waking me up?” he asked me, incredulity in his tone.
“I thought we were being nuked,” I answered. “Of course I was freaking waking you up ”
“Darling.” He was still staring at me. “Dearest. Sweetheart. Love of my life. Why in the Hell would you wake me up when we were about to die an agonizing death in flames?”
“I knew you’d get us out of it,” I answered promptly. “And if you couldn’t, at least we’d go together.”
“Love. Wife. She whom I worship.” His tone was too patient.
Uh oh, this was going to be bad.
“In the future...” he continued.
“Yes dear?”
“In the future. Should the world, or even our immediate vicinity, be about to end in fire and brimstone and other painful things and I happen to appear as if I am about to sleep through it?”
“Yes dear?”
“LET ME FUCKING SLEEP! ”