Alan Wake
A few of you may think it’s strange that I never followed up on that potential near-incident I had back in late August. I suppose I just haven’t felt like talking about it. I dealt with it, though. I had to deal with it right away. I remember waking up the following afternoon with William curled up around me, me on my side and him over the covers tucked in behind me with his arm heavy around my waist. The gorgeous initial blank slate of first waking up spared me any memory of the fear the night before, for a few seconds, at least. The air around me felt calm and almost completely white, maybe eggshell, and very hazy, and my whole body was relaxed and I snuggled back into William’s arms and then the memory of the night before lit up in the little theater of my mind once again, and I realized why his touch felt so heavy and sad. "I haven’t wanted to leave your side,” he moaned out and extended more of his body over me, crushing me. I let myself be crushed, just relaxed into it. He seemed a lot sadder about the potential near-incident than I was. I was just kind of somber, emotionally exhausted, languidly accepting. I had some cereal and sat staring off into space on the couch for a while, and then he took me out to lunch to try to get my mind off things. The day had a certain fatigued and pensive quality to it, but I was glad to be out and letting some light and late summer air into my thoughts.
As one could guess, I did not go for a walk that evening, but I certainly didn’t want to give up my sanity walks completely, so the following day, I nervously suited up and went out for an early evening promenade, while there was still daylight. A part of me was frightened and hesitant, so I compromised with it and held my pepper spray can in my hand for the entire duration, my index finger on top of the lid, very close to the trigger. I didn’t go near the back trails, out where those three men had been, just circled around the more public walking areas a few times for about an hour and came back. I did this a couple more times, within the next few days, pepper spray and all, but then I had a craving to walk out and see the spot where I ran into the woods. Perhaps to align the dark fast-paced memory from a few nights before with its calmer (then-)current reality, or maybe just to see in front of my eyes one of the spots that had been haunting my psyche. I entered the trails from the opposite direction and walked around a few curves and forks, passed the terrace where the party had been going on that night, and stood atop the hill overlooking the “scary path”, the trail through which I’d entered the woods to get away from those potential predators. As I looked down, I had this irrational and overwhelming feeling that the three men were gathered and waiting for me just beyond the opening of the path. My heart raced and my spine felt like it was quivering on the inside, made of jello.
Quite strangely, though, this intense fear was coupled with a growing curiosity; some odd force inside me was drawing me to the place I feared most. As I stiffly, cautiously walked over there, my mind kept picturing the three men gathered and waiting for me with expressions of anger and thirst for revenge worn on their faces and blunt weapons held in their readied hands. My heart pounded even faster and harder, but I could not stop myself from slowly making my way to the end of the path. As I neared the spot where the shade from the canopy of trees could no longer obscure me, I stopped and took in the full scope of my environment– and there was absolutely no one in sight. I looked behind me and in every direction around me, and then peered thoroughly through the windows of the few parked cars in the distance, walked along the sidewalk a bit to see for myself that no one was hiding in between the parked cars, so there would be no question in my mind, and when I found I was alone, I walked over to that same area where the men had seemed to begin to approach me a few nights before. My heartbeat had not slowed in the least bit, and I wasn’t able to take more than a step or two without whipping my whole body around to make sure they had not suddenly come out from nowhere, or nowhere visible to me, and begun surrounding me again. But I still made my way through, turning around terrified to make sure I was safe and then taking two or three more steps, and repeating, until I was around the far bend. I was to repeat this process during every one of my frequent walks for about a month, choosing to walk just as the sun was about to go down rather than in the soft and solitary romance of dark night. Eventually, the sun began to set at around 5 p.m., so walking in daylight was no longer feasible. I just readjusted my course a bit to not be in as many vulnerable positions, and continued watching my surroundings on all sides of me vigilantly everywhere I went.
A peculiar, though understandable, phenomenon occurring through this time and for quite a while after was that as I walked, many street lights, trees, mailboxes, erect signs, and generally upright objects in my peripheral vision looked exactly like people walking toward me– more specifically, looked like figures resembling those men who came toward me that night– but only for split seconds at a time. I would begin to feel nervous every time my mind played this trick on me, but as soon as I turned toward the figures and focused my eyes on them, they would cease to appear in motion to me and look very distinctly like the inanimate objects they really were. And each time I saw what they really were, I calmed down completely. This happened about a dozen times per walk for about two to three months, then petered down to just two to four times per walk. Now, I am relieved to say that the distortions have completely stopped.
These distortions of objects looking like people coming toward me reminded me of this video game I frequently watched William play on the xbox 360 a few years ago, called Alan Wake. About a writer who travels with his wife to a lovely rural town reminiscent of Twin Peaks, where he wakes up to find his wife missing, seemingly abducted, and evidence that he’s written a novel he doesn’t remember writing, one whose scenes keep coming true in his real life, one by one. The action of the game was sort of repetitive, I remember, stretch after stretch of him running through the woods at night with ax-men and murderous birds attacking him in the darkness. Shining his flashlight on them weakened them greatly, as they were really just possessed shadows, but naturally, his flashlight batteries went out every couple of minutes. Under large standing lights, he was safe from all.
Just like in this video game, the moving figures I saw so frequently would lose their power over me as soon as the clarity of my focused eyes, like the light from the flashlights in the game, descended upon them.
I remember being pleasantly surprised by the ending song o
f one of the chapters of the game, a Nick Cave song that’s always made me laugh hysterically: