Fear

It’s easier when you’re young, when fear can still be delicious. Think about the ancient, sacred rite of campfire tales. You and your friends sit around a flaring, crackling fire, conjuring ghosts and ghouls and monsters; you tell each other in hushed tones about noises in the woods – the crunching of leaves, eerie wails, words whispered just beyond understanding – and the darkness around you enters within, pounding, threatening to burst through your chest and eardrums. Then the story is done and the throbbing darkness recedes, leaving you terrified, exhilarated, replete with satisfaction. You can think of yourself as brave then for not trembling or jumping at every little sound as the tales were told, or begging that the stories end. When you are a child, you have the luxury of playing at fear, particularly when your childhood was more or less uneventful and you were raised by parents who kept you safe and free from harm. 

But then you grow up, and one bright day, you are walking down the street with your own son Matt, only half listening to his six-year-old chatter, your mind on the list of grocery items your wife has just texted you to pick up on the way home. You hear him call to you, “Hey, Dad! Dad!”, and you realize he has fallen behind you. You turn and see him pausing before a store window, pointing at some video games displayed within. Your eye is caught by an old woman shuffling up the street towards you, looking down at Matt, and the instant you notice her smile the side of her head leaps off in a gush of crimson, chasing the shattered fragments of the store window as they fly inwards in a thunderous crash. You hear a loud pop! pop! pop! from the street and the sound of more glass bursting, and you find yourself lying face down at the bottom of a stairwell to a basement door, eyes shutting away the light, burrowing your head into your arms. You hear screams and yells and more pops and dull booms, and then the slamming of car doors and the screeching of tires, and then the keening of sirens in the distance, coming closer, becoming shrill and maddening. The screams continue, from several quarters, and after an eternity in the darkness, a flicker of a memory rouses you: you have a son; he was with you.

By sheer dint of will, you open your eyes, unlock your frozen limbs, and drag yourself up the four steps to peer into the street. You see Matt still standing where he had been, on a slick of blood, the old woman lying prone at his feet. His tiny body is enlarging, sucking in air like a bellows, then blasting it out in a piercing, wrenching howl. His cheek is spotted red, his face contorted in complete and utter terror. You try to stand up but fail, and so can only start crawling towards him. A flash of dark blue rushes past him and jumps through the open, broken window – and Matt is gone. A gargling, guttural moan escapes you, and another dark blue shape suddenly appears, looking down at you. You see his face mouthing words, but though you hear the sounds, their meaning will not settle in your churning mind. He lowers himself on one knee, puts a hand on your back, stays beside you as he scans the street, his drawn pistol pointing to the ground.

More sirens, and other figures in a lighter blue come running up, and they crouch around you in a circle, and more hands are touching you, prodding you. They bring you to your feet and guide you towards red trucks with flashing lights. You can barely feel your legs beneath you as you stagger forward. In time, Matt is brought to you, wrapped in a blanket, smudges of blood still smearing his face, and you find yourselves clinging to each other desperately, wailing into each other’s ears, the two of you a single creature convulsing with fear and grief.

Speech and wit return to you, in fits and starts, and the putting together of the story begins. Words begin registering again; you hear them from the police, the emergency personnel: bank robbery, automatic rifles, shootout, multiple fatalities. And you start speaking your words, telling your story, what you can piece of it; first to the police, then to the doctor at the hospital, then to your tear-stricken wife, who cannot let go of her tight embrace of Matt. And then you tell it to Dr. Johansen, in weekly sessions in a cozy room with dark, paneled walls, with sunlight streaming in through the slits of green, Venetian blinds.

* * *

Dr. Johansen has reassured me over and over that my reactions on that bright day were perfectly normal, and I have come to believe it, for the most part – though I am still apt to start at sudden noises, my throat still constricts whenever I walk past store windows, and I sometimes still imagine I see flashes of contempt in people’s faces – in my wife’s, most painfully. Matt is doing fine; the currents and eddies of childhood and a blessed forgetfulness have long swept him away from that street, so that the memory of it has no more hold on him than a story of ghosts and goblins. I in my adult circumspection am denied this solace.

It’s a little death, isn’t it?, fear: a touch of oblivion that foreshadows the void awaiting us in the end. Before the fear you are yourself; but while it has its grip, you are gone. You disappear. And you tell the stories afterwards to try to come back to yourself, to find yourself again. Sometimes it is not so easy. Before that day, I was sure of who I was: a devoted husband, a good and decent man – and most of all a loving father who would give his life for his son in a heartbeat. Since that day, I have lived with fear's bitter aftertaste in my tongue, knowing this is not true.

(May 2012)