Apostasis
Afraid of the dark
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” -Anais Nin
I have this thing. It’s a mental thing that has relaxed with age, but was intense when I was younger. It’s this: anytime I have become aware of something I could do that I was drawn to but that also scared the hell out of me- jumping a freight train, hitchhiking, standing up at an open mic, leaning in to kiss- I would perseverate on it and drive myself nuts until I did it. It would make me so angry with myself to confront something I was afraid of doing. I’d chastise myself with calls of “carpe diem”, daring myself. Eleanor Roosevelt’s saying, “Everyday do something that scares you” would pound out its syllables in me like water torture. We humans are pretty unique I guess, in that we can be afraid and do it anyway. But fear can also seize the controls, run the show. I was, in my late teens and twenties, and just like most kids coming of age, on a mission. I needed to be able to trust myself. I needed to know what I could do. I needed to be unafraid of the dark.
I came from a family with several doctors and nurses in it, and parents who had vivid imaginations of the perils I could stumble into growing up. I metabolized countless stories of the calamities that could befall a person. Somehow the people I grew up around seemed to know someone who’d been killed by just about anything you can, or can’t imagine. I came of age trying to buck lose from a kind of paralysis I’d developed, a near agoraphobia. I remember writing on a receipt at age 18 “I want to vanquish this fear.” I sought to create my own rites of passage, there being few clear ritual thresholds left in American consumerist society to mark myself as having officially left behind my boyhood.
And so, of course, I dropped out of college and moved to a bullet-strewn ghetto in South Providence, RI to work at a homeless shelter along with odd jobs to try to learn of what stuff I was made. In those days of the mid-90s, Providence still had vast amounts of abandoned old factory structures, ghosts of a grinding steel age of early mass production, the true cradle of industry in the west, and the pure capitalist dream of expendable workers and vast monopolies. They were of dingy brick, or even older grey stone, with tall smokestacks heaving toward heaven, arched windows in disciplined rows, whose shattered panes rattled in the winds and glowed like hot coals in the fading light of winter’s humorless stare.
I worked by day at the shelter, then after hours as an informal apprentice at a metal shop about a half hour’s bike ride down Broad Street. It was a locale that could be edgy and unnerving even if you weren’t a scrawny white kid from the southern suburbs, as I certainly was. The general neighborhood theme was once summed up by a gang member doing community service at the shelter, on a day I’d walked down the wrong street and consequently found myself holding ice on my blackened eye: “They see somethin’ soft, they make it hard.”
So I biked warily to the metal shop to work each afternoon, and made my way even more warily home at night. It so happened that every afternoon I passed one of Providence’s true architectural gems, a four story derelict factory of stately brick that once produced world renowned silver ware displayed in the most elite homes. One day I explored it with the metal worker who employed me. We wandered through the tattered gates and around the empty corridors, gazing with fascination at the remains of a horse-powered elevator that raised carriages up to the fourth floor. On that day we came across one of the most truly eery things I’ve laid eyes on. A gutted old furnace room on the side of the building contained a sea of doll parts, mostly decapitated heads, starring blankly out of the gloom at us. Hundreds of them. I shivered to imagine what obsessional mind had gathered this mass grave of plastic child parts, and what it could mean to such a person. As we strolled out of the grounds that day the idea lit in my mind to know this place under the cover of night. Why? Because it scared the hell out of me. So of course, I had to do it.
On my appointed night, instead of pedaling home after closing up the metal shop, I routed myself toward the blackened factory. Its windows, like clustered spider eyes, seemed to watch my approach, as though waiting. Bits of metal squealed seesawing music in the wind. Otherwise all was deadly silent. I avoided the doll room and entered the main entrance. There was a grand stairwell, worn slick by a century of worker’s shoes, and creaky at startling intervals. The fact of my profound vulnerability settled on me with a weight like the walls of ragged brick I drew my fingers across for balance. I flicked out my pocket knife, knowing it was laughable as any real sort of weapon, but somehow I felt a little more prepared with a blade in my hand. I arrived one flight up and searched for movement among the shadows of a long room of ancient oiled floorboards, where humming machines once ground through the hours and years of lives. Nothing stirred. My mind conjured a waiting madman, someone listening for me with knife in hand, ready to slash at me through the dark. I thought I saw him at every turn. More stairs, more silence, more shadows. Diamonds of glass shimmering across bowed and splintered floors, stillness. More and more stairs, my nervous system igniting with every creak. And I’d reached the top floor. I took in the whole room, finally feeling certain, with breathless relief, that I was alone. There was no madman. I crept to a fragment of window, and looked out into the dim littered grounds and glowing city streets beyond. I saw faintly my face in the rippled glass. I gazed down at my hand that held a knife. As I turned to make my way back down, I chuckled quietly. The knife welding man in the dark, the one crazy enough to be creeping about this abandoned relic at night… Oh. That was me. I was the one mad enough to be out here in the dark. I was the one I was afraid of.