It had been
nearly twenty years since Angela and I first saw Satan patiently waiting by the
elevator and for the sake of our mental health, we spent most of our young
adult lives never discussing it. Up
until now, I mostly was convinced that I was cursed; I admit that I spent the
majority of those twenty years obsessed and angry over the affair, and wanted
nothing less than a vigilante style battle to avenge what the “Thief of Joy”
had taken from me. After all,
immediately after the elevator episode, I told John (my boyfriend and other
best friend) about the incident only to have to attend his funeral one year
later. For all its fire, this rage never left my so-called therapists’ offices,
and over the years had been reduced to late night alcohol-induced mumblings in
the dark. Angela, on the other hand, had
filed that encounter under the “18 year-old and Ridiculous” tab in her brain’s
central planner. She simply refused to
believe that it was anything more than a generalized creepiness that one
sometimes feels for no apparent reason, and rationalized it away with dinner
not agreeing with her. This, of course,
is the safest, least confrontational way of coping, and Angela (ever since we
were in elementary school) hated
confrontation.
“I cannot
believe we’re back here,” Angela said while surveying the campus as a hawk
might scan a field for a mouse.
“I know,
twenty years feels like forever and just yesterday all at the same time, but
I’m really glad you came,” I said hopeful that Angela could sense my need for
closure, but I just couldn’t quite verbalize it to her yet.
A few weeks
ago, I informed Angela that I would be up near Kalamazoo visiting family and
suggested a long overdue catch up session.
The thought of hanging out with my old friend again was both exciting
and terrifying. Much of this inner
turmoil centered on the fact that I had craved answers to who or what was
behind the Satan episode, but perhaps more importantly, I just wanted Angela to
listen to me. And, while it looked to me
that Angela appeared to have successfully compartmentalized herself into two
kids, a loving husband, and an overreaching suburban-ness, my two decades
revealed a job hopping journey, a collection of beautiful and ugly boyfriends,
and a lack of home ownership. I think I
had a good reason to be apprehensive. I
mean, maybe I was just a touch envious of her ability to tune out the damaging
events from the past. Thinking that a
walk around campus after lunch to some of our old stomping grounds would help
build courage, I was somewhat surprised when Angela so readily agreed.
“Oh god, I
remember this place,” Angela said
while sweeping her arms like an orchestra conductor over the Lawson Ice Arena
building. “We watched some good hockey
games here.”
“You mean
we watched some good hockey asses here,” I said grinning wildly. Both of us burst out into our 18 year-old
style giggles that temporarily put a cover of ease over our reunion. It isn’t always the easiest thing to pick up
a conversation with someone after 20 years even when you’ve spent the first 20
years of your life with them. After
checking the back parking lot sidewalks, I was pleased to find that my initials
were still next to John’s, and had not been erased by newer concrete. In a way, it was if he was still guiding and
protecting me through twisting and wrenching paths much like a Sherpa would for
a mountain climber.
Making our
way to the center of Western Michigan University’s campus, our walk was
punctuated by multiple sighs, laughs, “Oh my Gods,” “Nothing changes,” and
“Everything has changed.” Finally, we
reached the exact center of campus which was marked by a large circular raised
concrete platform surrounded by American and WMU flags.
“Remember
when you ran up on that platform and screamed ‘MOOOOORTAL KOOOOMMMBAT!’” Angela said with her face crinkled up from
laughing so hard. I’m pretty sure she was
remembering my video gamed display of public nuisance from back before we ever had to question our
sanity.
I briefly
entertained the thought about replaying that scene, but couldn't because this
was also the spot where I had finally told John that I loved him. The flags flapping in the wind sounded like
skin being slapped, and I stiffened and recoiled from that circular stage
quickly. The thought of running and laughing in that space felt like
desecration. “C’mon, let’s keep going,
there’s one other place I want to check out before we go drink ourselves
silly,” I encouraged Angela to follow me, which had never been difficult to do.
†
Between
Aikman Hall, which sat atop a steep hill, and Eldridge Hall, was a cement
staircase. Pausing at the bottom, I
looked up the sharply vertical grade.
“Do you
remember these stairs?” I asked in an
overly controlled tone.
“Well, duh,
of course I do! We used to take these
stairs as a shortcut to Aikman to visit John, and his roommate…ummm, what was
his name again…” As Angela consulted her
mental filing cabinet, I became increasingly aware that my good friend was not
responding to the cue before her.
Agitated, I
finally blurted out, “The cat! Remember the cat!”
With this
seemingly misplaced outburst, Angela’s face grew sullen as though the devil
himself had reached into all of her mental files and shredded them like a
potato ricer.
“I have
tried not to remember that.”
†
October 21, 1993
Thursday night
“It’s kinda
warm out here tonight for this time of year.
It feels good to go one more night without a coat,” I said.
“It could
be minus ten degrees out and you’d be all warm and fuzzy inside. You know you should tell John how you really
feel about him sometime before hell
freezes over or something bad happens,” said Angela with the required eye
rolling.
She had a
point. I had been secretly, and
sometimes not so secretly, in love with him since high school. While walking across the fluorescent glow of
the parking lot to the top of the cement stairs, little snippets from our first
date back in 1992 played back in my head like an old film spliced to show only
the good parts. He had taken me to see Sarafina! at the Morris Civic Theater
and was embarrassed by the rusted Dodge Caravan he had to beg his parents to
drive. I remember purposely not wearing my
piercing stilettos even though he was 6’4”.
I liked his tallness and the way it protected and enveloped me like a
warm fleece blanket that comes out of storage during the first snowstorm of the
season.
“Oh my god,
you are smiling like a damned Cheshire…”
Angie stopped mid-sentence, and we were both stunned by what had leapt
out before us.
We had
started down the long flight of stairs when an ink-black housecat leapt onto
the first landing. It had pounced onto
the cement from the left side of the maples and oaks that flanked either side
of the staircase. Instantly, its head
swiveled to meet with our open-mouthed scream-less expressions revealing a set
of yellow puke-tinged pupils that could have bored holes into our skulls. The cat opened its mouth and instead of a
normal hiss heard from domestic felines in distress, a low man-like growl
emerged from deep inside its belly as though the cat was something, or someone,
much larger. Pivoting its head back, the
slick black creature bounded across the rest of the landing and vanished.
Frozen on
the third step down, I became acutely aware of a sharp pain on my left
forearm. Angela’s knuckles had turned
white from their grip, and when we finally looked at each other, I realized
that her lips had also turned a death-like pale closely resembling chalk. At some uncoordinated, yet pre-ordained time,
I grabbed Angela’s arm and half ran half flew down the rest of the stairs. Crossing the first landing by jumping over
it, I hoped we weren’t breaking some supernatural barrier or law by
intersecting the path that that cat was on.
Exploding
through the doors of Eldridge Hall, we rounded the corner to the elevator bay
like a couple of wounded zebras sited by a lion. And, after punching the “up” button a
bazillion times, my breathing finally slowed to just under full-blown asthma
attack proportions. The color had
started to come back into Angela’s face as well.
The Jamaican man behind the front
desk yelled over to us as we were waiting for the slowest elevator on earth, “Ya
mon, you two might want to lay off de nose candy next time you go out.” His deep tobacco soaked laughter was anything
but funny.
Once inside the cinder block cell
style dorm room, I verbally replayed the cat scene with Angela until nerve
fraying waves swept into pure exhaustion.
“It was just some sick feral cat
that’s running around the outskirts of campus.
I’m sure of it.” Angela said this
in such an unsteady tone that it did nothing except fill me with even more
hesitation and doubt.
“It was more than just a cat! If you
really believe that, then why did your lips turn white? Didn’t you see how that thing looked at us? Didn’t you hear that…” I let the last part of that sentence fall
like an asteroid to Earth, very much like something that starts out as a speck
of space dust and then burns into so much more.
“I don’t know what came over
me. I will admit that the cat startled
me, but I’m sure it was nothing more than that.
I’m tired and I’m going to bed now,” Angela said while pointing to her
ear.
This gesture of pointing to her ear
had become code for bedtime between us as once she removed her hearing aid; the
world went truly quiet for her. Ever since
we were seven years old, I had held both fascination and resentment toward that
flesh toned plastic hook draped over Angela’s ear. In a curious way, I was always intrigued by
her ability to flip a switch and practice a kind of selective hearing super power. On the other hand, I hated the fact that
whenever I was around Angela, I became the de facto protector. Seriously, who else was going to warn her
against bad mouthing bastards in the lunch line and fire drill alarms?
Lying with my legs coiled around
the bed sheets mimicking the mattress springs, I stared at the ceiling and
counted my glow in the dark stars I had affixed when we first moved in. The elevator was continuously humming and
many people lived up here on the top floor so there was constant noise coming
from the hallways. Back in our hometown, it was quiet. We didn’t live in buildings with elevators or
screeching teens and twentysomethings. I
want Angela to hear this noise, commiserate with me, and talk about home. Instead, I hear a deep inhalation and a
slight groan of a snore. After several
hours of staring and counting, the elevator stops making its infernal buzzing
and the whole residence hall becomes a pit of silence. I want to scream. I want to wake Angela to “hear” the silence,
but realizing the complete absurdity of this, I remain still. Slipping on headphones, I let The Cranberries
and INXS sing me into dream world. Decades from now, I will fully understand the
beauty in “turning off” the world the way she flips a hearing aid switch, but
right now, tonight, I am scared, nervous, and increasingly lonely. And, I want my best friend to hear me.
†
Present
day
“Look, I know you don’t want to
discuss the stupid cat incident, but there was some information that you never
received. Besides, I’ve been your best
friend for how long? The need to impress
me with your logic and sanity has long since passed,” I said, effectively
alleviating some of the tension that had swollen like a bee sting site.
“What do you mean by information I
never received?” Angela looked incredulous.
“I know you heard the cat make that
weird growling sound, but it’s the sound the cat didn’t make that has been gnawing at me all these years.” I spoke carefully as we made our way to our
old residence hall before rounding out our not so normal WMU reunion. “You remember it was October when we saw it,
and the leaves were mostly down, and fairly thick just under the trees on
either side of the stairs.”
“Yes,” said Angela nodding in
anticipation.
“Well, normally we could hear
squirrels, and God knows what other rodents rustling in the leaves, but that
cat made NO sound when it jumped on the landing. And, even creepier, when it jumped to the
other side of the stairs, there was still NO sound. Angela, I practically gave myself ear strain
trying to listen for the crunching leaves, but there was NOTHING. I’m telling you that that cat was not of this
world. It seemed possessed. It seemed more like a demon or something. I know you don’t want to really talk about
it, I mean, hell, even back then you kept quiet after that night, but I couldn’t.
I know that what we saw wasn’t
natural. It bothered me so much that I told
John about it.”
The finality of that statement was
swift and decisive like an exclamation point or a period at the end of a
sentence. We now found ourselves in the
lobby of Eldridge Hall staring at the elevator that had been used and abused
repeatedly during our time there.
“You’re right; I was too frozen
from that cat’s expression to pay any attention to a lack of sound. And, this
growling that you heard didn’t register the same way for me, but you’re not
crazy. I just didn’t want to remember
that night because it makes me remember the day we saw him just a few weeks later.
Here, actually, right by this elevator.”
Angela’s voice trailed off, and I realized that it would’ve been the
perfect time to say something in sign language.
Unfortunately, the only words and phrases that Angela had taught me were
pick-up lines and swear words, neither of which was appropriate here. I ruminated on how to tell her that most
people thought I was crazy because I was sure Satan was behind not only the
devil-cat, but the subsequent blood clot that travelled to John’s heart the
following year. I wasn’t certain if this
whole reunion had been a giant mistake, or exactly what our friendship needed. What
was clear, however, was the fact that
Angela’s wall had started to crumble.
†
November
14, 1993
“God, that test was brutal,” I
complained while pressing the “up” button multiple times like I always did.
“I know, when I get to the room I’m
gonna curl up and sleep like death,” said Angela.
“At least we don’t have to worry
about any more Biology tests until the final exam, and by that point we should
know everything, right?” I couldn’t keep
a straight face and I knew that even though it was a hard class, it was comforting
to share the pain with my best friend.
“Damn this elevator! Slower than
snail shit!”
“You know pressing the button and
cussing isn’t going to make it get here any faster,” said a young man who had
been waiting patiently the whole time we’d been bitching about Biology.
Startled, we turned around to face
this guy. He was wearing blue jeans and
a pale pink Ralph Lauren shirt with the ubiquitous polo playing pony on
it. His hair was a thick mop of jet
black that had sheen to it from an expert application of hair gel, and what
really set him apart from the other college boys, was his shoes. Made from soft caramel colored leather, his
driving moccasins appeared to be hand-stitched and Italian and completely out
of place in this environment.
Angela made eye contact with him
before I did, and as her lips started turning white like the other night with
the cat, I felt compelled to follow my friend’s gaze. What I saw next would be chiseled into my
brain permanently like commandments on stone tablets.
When his sick, jaundiced eyes
finally locked onto mine, it was as if I had been punched in the solar
plexus. It was almost as if he could
sense that I was the questioning one. I
was the one who would stop his rape-like eyes with every firing of my nerve synapses.
Trying to position myself between his
laser stare and Angela’s frozen form, my feet barely budged. Not only had this man sucked all the oxygen from my system, but gravity had somehow
multiplied and compressed the air around us making my bones feel like steel
bars swimming against a current. And,
just when I felt I couldn’t withstand the pressure a minute more, the doors
slid open. Smirking, the devil man
slinked into the elevator, and purred, “Perhaps you should take the stairs.”
After a brief moment that felt like
years passing, Angela and I regained the ability to move and speak. The lift was quiet and did not whir and ding
to signal that the man had ever left the first floor. Several residents, including a star track
athlete who lived on the fourth floor, gathered in the hall to wait for the blasted
machine. We moved toward the stairwell,
but kept an eye on the group. When the
doors opened again, quickly this time because the elevator car had never moved,
there was no one inside. As the group
began to file into the empty elevator, I grasped Angela’s hand and led her to
the stairs.
“We will take the stairs,” I blurted, aware that Angela was
apprehensive to go anywhere at that particular moment.
“What if that creep is up
there? Was that a man we just saw? God,
this sounds crazy but his eyes looked like that cat we saw a few nights
ago. I don’t know what to do.” Angela’s thought process was flying apart in
slow motion.
I just wanted to get to our room so
I could call John. I’m sure there was
nothing he could do about devil-boy, but I remembered that after I told him
about the cat incident, he walked with me everywhere on campus, especially at
night. And, I knew that as a young,
independent college woman I wasn’t supposed to accept, much less enjoy that
type of behavior, but I did.
When some of the other residents started
up the stairs, I encouraged Angela to follow them. “We can use them as a barrier, but I don’t
know how I’m going to protect Angela if Polo shirt wearing creepo meets us on
the sixth floor,” I thought to myself.
There had been many times over the years where I fought on behalf of
Angela, and many of those times Angela was completely unaware of what was going
on. Back in ninth grade some punk called
Angela “deaf and dumb,” and she didn’t hear him. So, when he started laughing at her for not
hearing his original insults, I became unglued.
I remembered how it felt to punch his face – how my knuckles and fingers
burned while they created black and blue bruises on his eyes –how I had grabbed
his testicles through his khaki pants and pulled and twisted until he crumpled
to the floor – how there were still tufts of his blonde hair in my fingers when
I was pulled off of him by teachers.
But, that was a ninth grade boy, and this was a full grown man who
didn’t subscribe to the regular laws of nature.
Back safely in our room, there was
no sign of the demon. “I guess Satan has
left the building,” I said with nothing but nerves showing.
†
Present
day
“We should start heading back to
the car. My stomach is growling, and I
think we both require cocktails at this point,” said Angela. Her face revealed a mixture of ambivalence and
child-like mischief at the thought of drinking so early in the afternoon.
In a way, I’m glad we had grown
apart because I think had she stuck with me during the years following John’s
death; Angela’s authentic innocence would’ve been damaged like a middle-aged
woman consistently drinking vodka tonics at the wrong time of day. “I agree, we should probably start walking,”
I said, somewhat relieved to exit Eldridge Hall and the heavy baggage it
contained.
There were so many times over the
years that I wanted to reach out to Angela, and re-connect with her the way we
were right now. However, the steady
progression of jobs and boyfriends promoted an ever present procrastination,
and while talking to counselors and therapists was somewhat comforting, I could
never escape the feeling that they were much more interested in the $140.00
that seeped out of my wallet like a puss-filled wound at the end of 75
minutes. Besides, Angela had carefully
crafted a barrier during this time which allowed her a certain amount of peace,
and who was I to punch a hole in that?
“You know, Ange, I’m not sure what
I was hoping to find. When I was driving
over here, I thought I actually wanted to meet up with that demon cat/man again
to confront…to hurt…to…” My mouth could not coordinate with my mind, and all I
could hear was the relentless beating of my feet and heart in a syncopated
mess.
Stopping just a few yards away from
the flagpoles, Angela turned to me, her eyes searching upwards toward the sky
trying to hold back the onslaught of tears.
It was futile. “You lost a lot
more than I did back then,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to be the one to deliver
the worst message of my life. I’m sorry
I stopped watching your back. I’m sorry
I fell apart. I let you down.” I could barely get the words out. Words become so much heavier when lugged
around for so long.
†
November
14, 1994
1:30pm
After performing the ritualistic
key jiggle and twist, the door opened and Angela was standing by the window
looking out over the lower rooftops of Eldridge Hall. I assumed she didn’t hear me open the door,
and so I just started talking loudly. I
was hoping to avoid an awkward moment like we had last year when I had to come
back to the room unplanned, and she in the middle of a marathon blow drying
session. I had stood a little off to the
side of her for at least five minutes debating with myself on how to announce
my presence without scaring the living crap out of her. Finally, after realizing that just standing
there was eerie in its own right, she turned off the blow dryer, looked in the
bathroom mirror, and screamed like a banshee.
“Class was BORING!” I said, loudly.
Angela put her palm to her chest
and took a few deep breaths. Something
was terribly wrong. Angela’s face was
all red and splotchy as though she’d been crying for hours, and when she
finally looked at me, another wave of salt water and snot came flowing
down. Instinctually, I headed over to
comfort her and listen to what I thought was news of one of her grandparents
passing or a family pet. However, some
unseen force stopped me from completing that action.
“There was a blood clot. It went to his heart. John died this morning,” Angela whispered
quickly, getting all the words out as fast as she could before another
wave.
There are moments in your life that
are imprinted so deep within the center of your brain that even diseases like
dementia cannot deafen them like ear muffs on a windy day. Later on I will learn that psychologists and
therapists call it a “flashbulb memory,” but all I know right now is that my
boyfriend, best friend, lover, and protector is gone, and Angela is the
messenger.
†
Present
day
A few weeks later, I was back in
the therapist’s chair recounting the campus reunion and drinking debauchery
with Angela. In half an hour, I had
managed to clarify my closure and offer assurances that I wasn’t always fixing
all of my problems through booze. With
45 minutes left to spare, I leaned back in the squishy wingback and announced
with alacrity that this was going to be out last session together.
“Do you think that is wise? I mean, you’ve made huge progress, and I
can’t help but feel you are simply telling me what you think I want to hear.”
His face tried to remain neutral, but I can smell a drop of pity in an
ocean of good wishes.
“Listen to me now; I am not a
cursed woman. I know this. I’m going to keep my $140.00 and start a
vacation fund so I can visit Angela. I
know that if I should need to talk about seeing a demon cat, she won’t try to
prescribe a bunch of pretty purple pills.” Letting that statement follow me
like a rolling wake, I made my way to the front door of his office.
“Try to be careful,” he said
slightly dejected.
It is much easier to blame Satan
for broken friendships and the death of a loved one than to work through the
grieving process in traditional steps. While
it may appear that I’m running away from troubles once again, this time I
understand that devils travel. More
importantly, I have my friend back, and I am worthy of her ears, at least the
left one anyway.
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