Brush with Death

Yesterday, I brushed with death. Today, I’ve forgotten about it, and I’ll do the same thing again. In fact, I’ll do it until I actually don’t just brush with death, I meet it face to face, head-on in a full-collusion I cannot just brush past. That day I’ll die. 

Yesterday, you were driving while texting, today more of the same, you’re cruising down the highway switching songs on your phone. Tomorrow, you’ll be eating a sandwich while driving. The day after that, crossing the street without paying much attention. 

We live surrounded by deadly but well-hidden things that can kill us. Yet, none of them frightens me so much as the force of nature, electricity. At any time, it could burn our houses to the ground or take our life. Yet we rarely think about this, and we treat it as if it were as harmless as water. We plug this into the wall, in and out, all day. We plug cords into power strips that are plugged into other power strips. But in this brushing with death, I was like everyone else. That was until a series of strange events opened my eyes to another world. 

Poe has a story called the “black cat.” This story always comes to mind because it seems to me the message of the story is absolutely correct: there are things in our walls which we have very little conception of. My father went crazy before he died and convinced himself that he was the king of France. He died young hearing voices. He thought dead bodies were stored in the walls of our house. He thought the dauphine was buried alive in our very walls, and my mother had to pull him back from tearing at our walls some nights. One day we didn’t see him; two days later we found his body in the river near the house. I often think of him and fear I have too many of his genes. 

For many years, I’ve known that I cannot live like other people. I cannot get married; I must live alone, and in this loneliness, I often write. My story simply involves a lightbulb that went out while I was trying to work late at night. See, I had been writing about the problems I had perceived in society for over five years. My book was close to 300 pages. I worked on this book every evening after getting home from my job at the bank before I lost it. That night, finding myself completely in the dark and unable to work on my book., I decided it was a sign that I should sleep. 

I did go to sleep but to my surprise the next morning the light bulb was on as if I had left it on all night. 

I didn’t think much of it and I wrote it off to my overdue electricity bill which I had just managed to pay. That was until I found that my lightbulb went off again at approximately the same time as the night before. I was more rested this time and decided to replace the bulb. 

When I replaced it, I found that the metal base of the bulb was all blackened as if it had been burnt. I decided again not to make a big deal out of this at least until the next day. I had the energy to work for another 3 hours. I finally went to sleep close to 2 am and woke up very groggy. My head was still full of what I had been writing. I had been writing about the many insane people who commit crimes and go to prison. It was a familiar subject: my uncle had gone to prison for murdering a man in an insane fit. 

I was awoken two hours later by a sickening heat. A fire had started somewhere in the apartment and when I got out of bed, I barely escaped with my life. I watched the apartment burn to the ground with the other, shocked occupants. 

After spending the night in a hotel room, I returned to the scene of the apartment. While I couldn’t get very close, I noticed a light bulb, a common, ordinary light bulb in the midst of the debris. The news covered the event during the week that followed and it was speculated that it was in fact probably a light bulb that had started the blaze. 

I ended up spending a small fortune on hotel rooms that week and going into deep credit card debt. I was looking for work when the fire occurred and had already been dipping daily into my savings. As odd as it may sound to some, rather than use the lights in the hotel room, I bought cheap candles at the store and matches and wrote no longer on my laptop but on scraps of paper like a madman.  At the end of the week, the light bulb over my bed mysteriously glowed blue. It was only for an instant before returning to yellow. I wondered whether my lack of sleep and the late hour had caused me to imagine this occurrence, but when it happened the next day, I left the hotel, paying with my credit card again, and went to another one. 

At the new hotel, I took out my laptop which I still had with me and I looked up the phenomenon. While I couldn’t tell much about it, I reasoned that since light exists on a spectrum, I could have been seeing a different end of the spectrum. Suddenly, my fingers burned with pain. The keys of the laptop had become like fire. I picked up the device and hurled it out the window where I saw it land on the roof of an adjacent building and--the reader will find it difficult to believe--burst into flames. 

Despite this rationalization about light, I began to suspect that I was going mad or that I was somehow possessed. I had good reason to suspect this after so many odd occurrences. Something had to be done. I thought for a while about how to escape from this conundrum. 

At last, I decided from that day forward not to deal with electricity. I believed, call me crazy, that electricity was some form of necromancy, that the dead were actually speaking to me through my light bulbs in a language I didn’t understand. I believed that by separating myself from electricity, I would cease to be possessed. 

As soon as the thought occurred, I couldn’t get rid of it. In fact, try as I might to shake this theory, it stayed with me and I became irrationally fearful of electricity.  Soon, I left the hotel and decided to live in seclusion. 

I began to spend all my time in a shack at the edge of town. It was merely a few fallen trees that I put together. For years, I lived there.  No one ever saw me but there were rumors that there was a man who lived in the woods at the edge of town and ate rats; in fact, I did eat rats, bats, raccoons, and skunks and any other creature I could lay my hands on. These creatures inspire fear and disgust but to me the disgusting thing was a society that lived with death and corruption so close to itself. 

I thought often of what the town would do to me: they would put me behind bars. I knew that if I were found I would be despised, maybe even put to death. For this reason, if anyone came near me in the woods--some adventurous hiker wondering of the trail, I would run like a frightened animal.

At last, one day they decided to build houses near my shack, thus, expanding their small town. They started by putting up electrical poles far too close to my shack, and then they put more and more of them closer and closer. I retaliated by cutting the wires. Day after day, they put up new wires and I cut them at night.  After days like this, they were deeply puzzled. Then one night a policeman assigned to the poles caught me in the act.  He shot me as I ran and his aim was good. Then he tased me when I resisted him. I was arrested and placed in a jail cell. After searching for and finding my hut, my charges mounted. Finally, I was charged with illegal residence, harm to native animals, and damage to public property. They also believed that despite my altered appearance I resembled a man wanted by all the hotels in the town for debt. 

I languished in prison indefinitely as they debated just how to deal with me. When asked any questions, I simply grunted and balked. I feigned utter madness, hoping that they would give up and release me. It was a foolish idea.  Meanwhile, the electricity was terrible for me. I began to hear voices speaking to me from the light bulbs on the wall. I had never had this before. I cried at night and tore my earlobes until they bled, but instead of moving me, they brought in a doctor who sedated me for hours. And from then on, they dealt with me through sedation. 

Still, even in my sedated state, I heard the voices--perhaps with less agitation then I would have if fully alert.  The voices were the voices that I had known so well in the past. They were my parents, my wife who had died shortly after we married, a school teacher, and so many more. They only repeated one name over and over again, “Joseph.” The sound of that name drove me mad. Why Joseph? Was it Joseph the husband of the Virgin Mary? I’d never been as religious as I was mad, but the idea crossed my mind. Still, the name seemed important to me. It seemed memorable.

Then I remembered why. First, I remembered growing up in a small house, my father gone almost all day, and a family sharing it with us, making the small house even more uncomfortable. I was only three or four at the time. Joseph was the youngest of five boys in the other family. Though he was my age, I remembered finding him and his family repulsive and avoiding contact with poor Joseph who no doubt needed a friend as much as I did. 

One day, it was only the two of us with one of the older boys in another room--probably with a girl now that I remember his history. Joseph was about my age, and God knows why but he took a fork from the drawer with a look of clear purpose and intent and plunged it deeply into a wall outlet with a terrifying grin. I saw every bone in his body light up and then I saw his head and then his entire body slump to the floor like a small doll. Somehow every memory of that moment had been shut out of my brain as if it were too painful until this moment. I screamed from the depths of my being. Yes, that’s all I could remember, yet even that was a gift. I now understood my entire existence, every single problem I’d had; it was all because I was Joseph. I got on my knees and prayed for his soul, prayed for it all to pass, but it continued--the voices did not stop. 

One day my warden announced that we would take a walk around the building for my exercise. I had I think been in prison for about a week. Walking around the building in my handcuffs,, I continued to hear many voices repeating “Joseph.” I knew now that these were people I had met during my life and were now dead, people who wanted something for Joseph, the boy who hadn’t lived but I had become. What do you want? I asked in my heart. I feared that they were calling me to death, punishing me for existing so long after that innocent boy had died. Indeed, the electric fence was simply buzzing with electricity and, therefore, for me, voices. 

I couldn’t take it anymore. That night, driven to desperation, I grabbed my plastic toothbrush and rammed the bristly brushes into the only outlet in my room. I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve. I doubted that the plastic would take the charge, but, immediately, the entire building was plunged into darkness, and a flaming figure appeared. This figure was father fire, it explained. It plunged a deep knife of fire into three of the guards nearest me who were standing as if petrified. Then it broke my prison door. Suddenly, I saw Joseph with the same ghastly grin on his face emerging from behind the flaming figure. He was holding that knife of fire now and it became colder and harder as he walked towards me. When at last he put it in my hand, it was cold, heartless metal. Realizing what was happening, I raced to plunge the knife into the outlet and take my own life--it was a mad urge and one that to this day I cannot explain. But it was too late: strong hands pulled me back, the knife fell from my hand as a sedation needle plunged into the tensed veins in my neck. 

Thus, my story ends. I find myself now on death row awaiting execution.

The End