There are times when life imitates art imitating life- or
something like that. Then, there are times when your own stupidity becomes your
worst enemy. Although I like to think the situation from last night possessed a
certain je ne sais qua of the former, the latter situational assessment may be
more accurate.
It was about 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday night and my significant
other (let’s call him Mark to protect his identity) was playing some Call of Duty on the couch while simultaneously
enjoying a snack.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Fighting Pakistani terrorists in the slums of Peshwar,[1]”
was his reply as he intently reloaded a magazine and cleared what appeared to
be an abandoned warehouse.
“Well, while you’re doing it, would you please mind not
eating potato chips directly off the glass table?” I asked, nicely.
“A plate’s just a barrier between my food and my mouth,” he
replied, executing a shot that prompted outrage from the 12-year-olds he was
playing against.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t put stuff on the glass table. It’s
expensive and you’ll scratch it.”
“It’s fine, I’m done,” he muttered, tossing the controller
on the glass table, clearly frustrated because he had just been killed by his
opponent, a 35-year-old man living in his mom’s basement.[2]
“Are you going to log off?” I asked.
“No, I might want to play in the morning before work.”
“Ah yes,” I replied. “I wouldn’t want your little friends to
think that you had gone missing. They might put an Amber alert out for you.”
We went to bed at about midnight. I had checked all the
doors and made sure they were locked. I thought I heard a few sounds, but
figured they were coming from the apartment upstairs.
By 1 a.m., I was dozing off when I heard a clatter from the
living room.
“Mark! Wake up!” I hissed, reaching for my cell phone in
case I needed to call 911. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he asked, clearly displeased with being awoken
in the middle of the night.
We lay there in silence for a few minutes and heard another
series of soft clicks.
“That,” I whispered, clearly getting more nervous.
“It was probably just the blinds.”
We waited and then all of the sudden, we heard what appeared
to be a louder clatter from the living room.
“Yeah, I heard that,” he said, clearly alarmed as well.
At this point, my heart was racing. Mark is an Army ranger
who had served in Afghanistan and even he
was scared. He pulled out his .45, loaded the clip, and chambered a round,
heading to the bedroom door.
I reached for the .9 mm just in case I had to back him up. I
started to assume the flank position (hey, he’s not the only one who plays Call of Duty), but he motioned for me to
lay low.
“Wait here,” he whispered.
With impressive speed and agility, he yanked open the door
and strategically pointed his weapon in an arc, clearing the living room as he
had done many times when killing Nazi zombies. I had expected to hear gunshots
and find a dead crack head on our couch, but everything in the living room was
as we left it.
With skills that would put Elliot Stabler to shame, he
proceeded to kick in the bedroom and bathroom doors as he looked for the
perpetrator. Nada.
Finally, we returned to bed. At about 3 a.m., just as I was
about to doze off, we were awoken by the sound again.
Click-click-click
“Did you clear everywhere?”
I asked, intently.
“Yeah,” he replied, reaching for his gun again.
“Under the beds? In the closets?”
Realizing that I was not crazy, as he had also heard the
sounds, he repeated the process of clearing every nook and cranny in our small
condo, including under the bathroom sink, just in case the Keebler elves were
up to no good.
For the second time that night, we returned to bed, clearly
hopped up on too much adrenaline to sleep.
“We need to install a more serious security system on the
porch, with motion sensors and everything.”
“With laser beams? Like Congo?”
I asked, very seriously. (At the time, I
was considering hiring a full personal security detail just so we could sleep.)
He finally fell asleep, but I couldn’t. I kept hearing the
noises. As the mind does when it’s the middle of the night, I began having
less-than-sane thoughts.[3]
Now I am not one who believes in ghosts. If ghosts were
real, my grandma would yell at me from the Other Side every time I sat on the
couch in a wet swimsuit or left the refrigerator open. However, logic doesn’t
apply in the middle of the night in the dark.
‘It’s clearly a
poltergeist,’ I thought to myself at 3:45 a.m. ‘I’m gonna set up a video camera, and the next thing you know, I’ll
become possessed and then kill Mark in his sleep. Just great. We don’t know what happened to
the people who lived here before us. They told us they moved to Sante Fe, but
probably died in an exorcism gone wrong.’
At 4:15 a.m., I tried to rationalize with myself. Maybe
someone was breaking in, but they were the slowest thieves in the world.
Were they stealing our DVDs one-by-one?
Click-clat…crash!
I sat bolt upright in bed looking at the door, cell phone in
hand. No longer was I interested in speed-dialing 911, but Googling “How to
cast out a poltergeist.”[4]
‘Yep, definitely a
demon in the living room. Probably playing on my iPad right now.’
By 4:30, I was wide awake and ready to go put in our 30 day
notice to the apartment complex. I mentally
prepared the letter in my mind.
‘Dear Bridges
Management,
We are vacating the
premise because it is haunted. We understand that we will not get our deposit
back. May God have mercy on your souls.’
When Mark’s alarm went off at 5 a.m., I sat up in bed and
started getting dressed.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“The gym. It’s not haunted there,” I replied, lacing up my
sneakers.
(Look, if a demonic possession is what it takes to get me to
work out, then so be it.)
I hesitantly opened the door, expecting to see all of our
worldly possessions gone or pea-green slime coating our Crate and Barrel wine
rack. Nope. Everything still remained as
we left it.
I walked out into the living room and heard the noise again.
It wasn’t coming from the porch door like I thought, but instead the
entertainment center. I stood in front of it, looking at the speakers, thinking
there might be a wiring malfunction. Nothing.
I heard the sound again, but this time it was coming from
behind me.
On the glass table.
No. F***ing. Way.
Apparently, someone
forgot to quit his game. All night, his avatar was being shot at, causing the PlayStation
remote to vibrate on the glass table, echoing throughout the apartment and
causing the sounds that terrorized us for six hours.
I showed this to Mark, both of us sharing in the shame that
a small piece of metal had caused us to lose a night’s sleep (and contemplate
calling an exorcist).
We sat on the couch and watched the remote vibrate, our
embarrassment increasing with every shake of the controller.
Finally, Mark spoke up.
“I think its funny that I used my Call of Duty skills against a very serious enemy apparition. Really,
when you think about it, Call of Duty
saved our lives.”
“Oh yeah, that was awesome,”
I replied, not even trying to hide my sarcasm. “Congratulations, you went all
one-man Seal Team Six on that remote. I feel so secure knowing that we’re
probably safe from the Keurig as well.”
By this time, the light was starting to peek through the
windows and I knew any attempts to go back to bed would be futile. Peacefully
free from demons, I turned on the TV and dozed off for about ten minutes before
waking to hear Bill O’Reilly yelling at a screen shot of Nancy Pelosi.
Well, maybe there are
worse things than hearing demons in the middle of the night.
 |
| Satan no longer speaks through song lyrics...he uses the PS controller... |
|
[1]
Peshwar is in Pakistan? See, video games can be educational…
[2] I
don’t know this for a fact, but come on….we can be fairly certain….
[3]
Usually those less-than-sane thoughts include wondering what an ex boyfriend is
up to. They are usually appeased by Facebook stalking him and realizing that
not only does he have a receding hairline, but a wife who may or may not be a
post-op tranny.
[4]
Salt and sage.
