Four-thirty in the afternoon on a Friday in a quiet if uncomfortably warm office space atop a four-story building. This is not a school, a playground, or a deserted trail wherein the transient or marginal hold territorial advantage. The era wherein my mind was ever on the alert for the intrusions of the wild is well behind me, I complacently think. I have no tense readiness in my chest, my limbs, my mind. I have no flexed startle response to unfurl at the sound of disquiet. Work is scheduled neatly from one hour to the next. The spaces in between are fixed within easy parameters. A genteel, professional atmosphere prevails amongst others who have likewise arrived and long settled into civilized existence.
At home, away from the office which is suburbanly-situated, I feel nature’s playful and unthreatening incursion. Squirrels chase one another at dawn, scratching away upon rooftop tiles, acting like naughty children on Christmas morning. At night, an owl hoots with a haughty attitude and watches stolidly from a high tree. At some other time of day, woodpeckers thrash their bullet-hard heads against wood and sometimes pause, unperturbed, because their heads play a different game than mine, and have some manner of airbag behind the eyes to absorb impact. Ducks fly down upon a nearby pool, appearing to dive bomb one another, separating runts from leaders, creating havoc, but eliciting little more from me than, “hey, get over here…you gotta see this!” It all seems like a delightful spectacle until the eye catches sight of a less welcome visitor, a long-tailed rodent that scurries away like the other creatures do, but with slightly greater knowledge that its presence is somewhat more hateful and stirring of disgust.
It isn’t nice to think this of any creature, one of God’s creatures, after all. But it’s not quite the same as the mustering of rage or fear that arises from human provocation. Recently, a friend of mine received a sobering, zeitgeisty lesson from one of his daughters, straight from the frontlines of feminine trauma. It seems that a casual discussion of day-to-day life yielded an earnest question about whether women might prefer aloneness in the woods with a grizzly bear in proximity versus the same scenario with a stranger man. The daughter said the latter scene would be more unnerving, and added a touch of duh to her commentary when her father expressed surprise. The rationale was logical; that is, historically evidence-based. The daughter had never been assaulted or harassed by a stranger bear, she asserted, implying a woman’s norm. The father was disturbed yet galvanized, and moved to an empathetic awareness of women’s physical vulnerability in this world. As is my wont, I poked a hole in the message (having heard this second hand), pointing out complicating factors: of course, this fear of men versus bears bears being taken seriously by men, but what also bears observation are the flaws involved in comparing apples and oranges, as women generally do not get their intimacy needs met by, ahem, bears, so there is little emotional conflict involved in keeping a distance from them. Yes, that situation in the woods, like many, is dangerous. But most situations are dangerous in part because of the desires that place us there.
Exceptions? Hard to say. My destined-to-be-misunderstood-by-someone point presumes a heteronormative baseline, plus a belief in the inherent agency that people (okay, children excepted) feel in this world. Wait…is that view…humannormative? Am I overlooking the power that children exert over adults, as in what actually happened to me a week or so ago? I don’t get my intimacy or professional (mostly) needs met by adolescents currently, but that didn’t stop a pair of them from penetrating my complacent and privileged silo and giving me a lesson in…something. See, that’s the thing with animals and kids—neither of whom use words when exhibiting their natures—for what they have to teach me is not intended per se, but instead merely unleashed. I didn’t ask them to loiter in the hallways of my office building, looking for someone to harass or assault. And the boys in question on the fateful day I’m about to describe were not cute, as far as I was concerned.
It started, as I started with my retelling here, around about four-thirty in the afternoon when a rather diffident-looking boy of about fifteen walked before one of the windows to my office suite. This was unusual because to do this the boy was traversing a pathway that runs around the perimeter of the building’s top floor level and is only about a foot-and-a-half wide around the stretch that surrounds my office. As he passed, he made no eye contact with me and seemed impassive, as if he’d simply lost his way and was looking for a proper exit. I thought little of it and proceeded with my then telehealth-heavy day which often has me looking into my computer monitor and sometimes above it to gaze out of my window, mostly to see bucolic sights stretching towards the hills, and ever so rarely to see someone—if so, typically a building workman—navigating this narrow path, attending to some repair job or other.
When the boy disappeared from view, I shook my head, briefly distracted and bemused, if not quite amused, and then I went about my business. But within the hour I felt a commotion beyond my office door in the hallways. Someone or thing was scurrying about, creaking the sturdy boards beneath the well-carpeted floors. If it could talk, the foundation would say, we’re not used to this, but we can take it. At that moment, I thought I could take it also, because it hadn’t yet impinged upon me. That changed moments later when I heard and felt a violent rapping upon my office door. Someone was banging their fists upon its mid-riff. Were they alerting me to an emergency? Was it an assailant looking to crash through the barrier and do me harm? Was it ICE coming to get me? Actually, only that third possibility did not occur to me in that fleeting spell of inquiry. Amidst the shock of intrusion, my head spun around and then back again to my computer screen, to the nonplussed expression of my meeting visitor, who apparently had not heard the noise. Did you hear that? I asked. He shook his head uncomprehendingly. That added to my disbelief. Had it really happened? I excused myself momentarily, went to door, opened it, and looked about the hallway, which was foolish if indeed this was a violent assault still in process.
Nothing. The hallway was empty, the miscreant gone. At the end of a long stretch, a door at the far corner was ajar, revealing the escape, plus a warning: the intruder was still around. They could come back, do what they just did, again. What did they want? What had I done to deserve this? It’s interesting to note how fear and guilt mingle in such moments, as if random incidents are an indictment from the cosmos, yielding a Hitchcockian turn of events. In the realm of the unconscious, which encompasses all, such incidents have meaning. Actually, nothing is random. Everything is purposeful, I’m reminded. Crazy thought, I then self-reproach. Moments later, with my poise recovered, I resumed the meeting with lighthearted references to the inexplicable interruption—my fellow meeting participant still as undisturbed as he’d been throughout. Such privilege, I now envied, to be so undisturbed.
It will have seemed an aberrant event save for what happened the next day. This was worse. This time, a visitor was in my office, sitting opposite me, and adjacent to the window that looked onto and past that thin slice of pathway through which my intruder—soon to seem like my stalker—had snaked his way by. This time, there was no scurrying footwork rumbling beyond my door and through the hallways, heralding a violent assault upon my office. This time, the intruder appeared in the corner of the window like an intent spy performing a reconnaissance of his latest mischief. His beady, rat-eyes poked into the frame of the window, meeting mine as I immediately caught glance of him. He darted backwards, just like a rodent that sees itself being seen, that then must retreat to its dark hole. “Excuse me”, I will have muttered to my visitor who, just as in the previous instance, had not seen a thing out of the ordinary. It was as if others were simply not destined for whatever lesson I was being taught.
I opened my door, again inspecting the space in the hallway, though looking to see now what could be done—what might be done differently this time. Soon, after the current meeting, I’d make a call, alert the property manager that a problem exists in the building: we have intruders, stalkers, something like that, and something must be done! I nervily resumed my meeting, informing my visitor of the truth but reassuring that no danger existed…as far as I knew. We ended a few minutes earlier than scheduled with my offer to escort the person—a woman who may or may not fear bears, rats, men, or adolescents—to the parking lot. This belied somewhat the prior reassurances, but the gestured was appreciated. What a nice, understanding man I am. Upon my return via an elevator, I calculated that I had spare minutes in which I’d could make that call to the landlord and level my complaint. Exiting the lift, I turned left and rounded the corner to the stretch that led to my office suite. There in the short distance I saw a lithe, floppily t-shirted figure stood before my door, his fists raised. Then he launched them against the hard wood, matching the ferocious sound and impact of the day before. “Hey”, I yelled, and then dashed towards him. Without turning fully, the youth spun to his left and leapt towards the fire escape door that was four feet across from my office. By the time I’d slipped through the same gap, he and his conspirator—the beady-eyed boy who had performed the spying task minutes earlier–were already two-thirds down the staircase, cackling excitably. I stopped at the second landing and barked a profanity, feeling bold yet suddenly restrained. Who am I kidding? What would I do even if I did catch them up?
I plodded back up the one flight of stairs, catching my breath and nursing the feint twinge in my middle-aged right knee. Time for a phone call. No more messing around. My sense of entitlement was further emboldened when moments later I was speaking to a property manager who took the call as if summoned from a magic lamp. She was sympathetic yet restraining a guffaw. Kids? I felt her wanting to say, reminiscently. She advanced a theory, suggesting the mischief-makers were from the family therapy agency on the second floor: teens who were enrolled in that program were meant to sit patiently in waiting areas, and behave. Who are we all kidding, we were both thinking? Still, decisive action would be taken and an officious finger would be duly wagged at the boys in question via the agency that held the mooted responsibility. With my voice calmed and my heart no longer pounding with indignant rage, I thanked my landlord’s agent for the adult attention that would restore my world to its much-earned (not “privileged”) order.
Now the episode is over. The villains are gone and the disturbance has passed, swept back into an unconscious narrative that will dissolve until ducks, squirrels, possibly rats and men and bears, come to resurrect it. What protests exist that stir from the cracks, taking revenge and flipping the scripts of who or what has power, if only for a hot minute of time.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 