In my last year of college, my boyfriend and I decided to go on a road trip. Our plan was to seek out the most rural out of the way places in America. We decided to not bring any maps, removed the GPS from the car, and left our phones at home. The only things we brought with us were a compass and a book on how to navigate using the stars.
As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to escape the safety of civilization. About a month into our trip, we had almost died of thirst, were chased by a drug dealer’s pet bear, and met at least three people who may have been serial killers.
But the most disturbing incident during our trip didn’t happen in the woods or forgotten ghost towns. Ironically, it happened in a place that was the closest to civilization as we had gotten since our trip started.
We were driving down a rural road wondering where we were going to camp for the night. The last town we hit was thirty miles back and the only road sign we saw was rusted and illegible. The road was so badly maintained that it looked more like a dirt trail at places. My boyfriend and I debated whether to turn back or not because if it went on like this, we would run out of gas if we didn’t get a flat first. But the thing was we had already come so far that to turn back was as big of a gamble as to keep going.
And then something happened beyond our most optimistic expectations. This shitty pothole filled path suddenly became a perfectly paved asphalt road. And then about half a mile down there was a restaurant. This in of itself wasn’t odd. We had passed through entire ghost towns with standing buildings, some even with dishes on tables as if people had left in a hurry. But what was weird about this place was how new everything was.
I felt what Hansel and Gretel must have felt when they saw the witch’s cottage in the middle of the woods. As my boyfriend and I walked across the parking lot, we speculated on what we would find. He said the place will be totally deserted, and the cars in the parking lot were stage props. I said the staff were running a human meat factory and we were the next victims.
The reality was disappointingly ordinary. What we found was your typical roadside diner. From the general chatter, the other ten or so customers were, like us, just travelers passing through.
*
We had just ordered when I heard a loud pop and the sound of glass breaking. I looked around to see a man running across the dining area and through the swinging doors that led to the back kitchen area.
The glass on the front door the man had come through was shattered. The loud pop we heard was a bullet hitting the glass. It seemed that somebody had shot at him as he came running into the restaurant.
In a matter of seconds, the restaurant was surrounded. It was like a movie where the SWAT team moves in from out of nowhere in perfect coordination. There were twenty or so armed men (women?) with guns spread out in the parking lot. There was an official look about them but no insignia to indicate what they were. So let’s just say they were some kind of guards.
The way the restaurant was set up was that the entire front of it was plate glass. From the parking lot you can see every table in the dining area. All the staff had rushed into the kitchen after the man had ran in there, so the only people left out front were the customers. We were completely silent as we took turns staring at each other. Because whatever was happening in the kitchen, there was no doubt the guards were aiming their guns at us.
I felt as if I had fallen into the twilight zone. Shouldn’t the guards be trying to get into the kitchen? Shouldn’t they be trying to make some kind of contact with us? Why were they aiming their guns at us?
There was something so off about the situation that I could not accept it at face value. I remember thinking to myself, this is a movie. They’re shooting a hidden camera reality show that pranks unsuspecting passersby or something, anything.
But here’s the thing: even to my untutored eyes, those guns looked real.
What the fuck was going on here?
My boyfriend and I were sitting near the windows and next to us were a family of five, a man and a woman and three kids. Ours were the only two tables that had a straight line of sight to the back kitchen area so we could just about see into the kitchen if the swinging doors opened. This didn’t strike me as relevant at the time, but later I did think about it, a lot: the layout of the tables and who was where and who could see what.
The standoff lasted maybe twenty or thirty minutes. During this time the noise from the kitchen was getting…strange. I remember hearing a dog when the man first ran into the kitchen, and didn’t think much of it at first. Maybe it was bring your dog to work day, maybe it was the cook’s dog and the intruder surprised it. I’m sure there are regulations about keeping animals in a working kitchen, but who was going to care out here in the middle of nowhere?
My second thought was that this dog (if it was a dog) must be fighting the man who had ran into the kitchen. Because I had a fear of dogs from an unpleasant incident in my childhood, my instinctive reaction was to sympathize with the man. But as the noises continued, I began to think the dog was not winning this fight.
The dog sounds were not just getting louder, but extremely expressive. I had never heard a dog scream before, but I was sure this dog was screaming. Not just screaming but as if it was trying to say something. The noises had the cadence of human speech. It was as if this dog or whatever it was understood the concept of talking but only lacked the appropriate physical organs to do so. At one point I began to be confused whether I was hearing a dog or a man or both.
By this time I was actively sympathizing with this dog. I wondered what the other people in that kitchen were doing to leave this animal to the mercy of what must have been a violent psychopath. Because anybody who can cause a dog to make the kind of noise I was hearing couldn’t be sane.
And then the doors to the kitchen burst open. Before somebody pulled it closed again, I remember seeing an actual dog, or rather, the face of a dog hanging in midair like a Dali painting. It was one of those things that you remember from the chaos of the moment before your brain had the time to process what you’ve seen into something rational and acceptable.
When the noise in the kitchen finally stopped, the guards from the parking lot came into the restaurant. Most of them stayed in the dining area, and a few went into the kitchen area. A server came out and put up the Closed sign.
*
They kept us there for hours. People were angry but also scared and that kept us from outright rebellion.
Flashbacks of missing people documentaries kept pushing themselves into the front of my mind. I didn’t want to give in to my fears, but at what point do you throw in the towel and admit to yourself things are not going to be okay?
Finally they hustled us one by one into a storage room in the back. They asked us a lot of questions, like how did we get there, who we were, why we were there, and so on. They even took our fingerprints and drew our blood. They treated us like criminals without ever showing us their credentials or telling us on what authority they were acting. They could have been outlaw vigilantes for all we knew.
We were “escorted” out of town by one of the guards’ vehicles. As we drove, we saw on the two sides of the road chain linked fences with sentries posted every hundred feet or so. The odd thing was that there was nothing discernible on the other side of the fence as far as the eye could see. What in hell, I thought to myself, did we stumble into?
The guards left us as where the paved asphalt ended, so all that was left were the cars of the restaurant customers. There were six or seven cars in all. We kept driving for another mile or so, and then one of the cars pulled over to a stop and so did the rest of us.
*
We got out of our cars and stood at the side of the road. A woman said, “Did anybody see its face?”
What struck me right off was that she said “its face” instead of “his face.” And the other thing was her voice, which was very low and husky but not hoarse, rather unusual. Her name was Cynthia. She and her husband and three kids had the table next to me and my boyfriend at the restaurant. Theirs were the only other table besides ours that had a straight line of sight into the kitchen.
I shook my head. I had only seen the man’s back as he ran into the kitchen.
Her husband said, “Shut up Cynthia.”
She looked round at the rest of us and said, “It wasn’t a man.”
When she said that it was like somebody flipped a light switch in my head. It was like a stray piece of puzzle had suddenly found its place, but the finished picture made even less sense than before.
Somebody said, “What was it if it wasn’t a man?”
Cynthia became hesitant, as if she was holding something back. She said, “I’m not sure.”
And her husband was saying under his breath “shut up shut up shut up” over and over again, staring at the ground the whole time. He just didn’t look right to me, and the kids looked scared. I had the distinct feeling this guy wasn’t the steadiest boat on the seas even under normal circumstances.
I said to Cynthia, “Do you want to come with us?”
When I said this, she came over to where I and my boyfriend were standing. She stood next to him, their arms almost touching, and for a moment they were both looking at me. I had a feeling of Deja vu as if I had seen all this before, which at the time I put down to exhaustion. Because how can you see something again when you’re seeing it for the first time?
“You can bring them,” I said to Cynthia, meaning the kids. “We have space in the car.”
She shook her head and said, “You’re sweet, but I can’t.”
*
No matter how well you know somebody, you can never really know them.
I started dating my boyfriend in senior year and it was one of those whirlwind romances I had only read about in books. He was older, a graduate student, and was the TA for a class I took back in freshman year. So there was an illicit flavor to our relationship that gave it an extra tang, at least to my thinking.
He was very good looking, had dark hair, dark eyes and this extremely clear smooth skin. He was bit of a pretty boy, looked like an ad in Seventeen magazine. At the same time he was really quiet, a total introvert, which made him seem very mysterious to me.
And he was, or at least he seemed to be, really really into me. Like to the point where it was way too much. If I texted him, he would text back within minutes. He walked me to all my classes and would be waiting there when I got out. He had his own off campus apartment, and he turned one of the spare bedrooms into a study so I didn’t have to go to the library. His life seemed to revolve around me, and looking back, that was a major red flag. But I was bubbling with college kid hormones and I was blinded by lust. In my head I called him Prince Charming.
We went on our ill fated trip a couple of months after we met. At the time, I believed that it was my idea. But afterwards, when I had thought about it more carefully, I began to think it was actually his idea. Or rather, he had put it into my head and made it seem like it was my idea.
During the course of the trip, my Prince Charming turned out to be a grade A asshole. Like he would have us hiking ten miles each way to get water for no good reason. Or I would wake up in the middle of the night and he wouldn’t be there, and when he finally showed up, he would be like he went to get “supplies” or some similarly inane excuse.
After what happened at the restaurant, I was like we need to go to the police, we have to tell somebody what just happened to us. I was going crazy but he was so so so calm. Just looking at him made me feel stupid. Like it got to the point where I was questioning my own sanity, wondering if we both went through the same thing.
When he finally spoke, he said going to the police would be a problem because his car wasn’t insured and he had been driving with a suspended license, which I did not know. But, he said, it was ultimately my call whether we go to the police or not.
I couldn’t believe he was worried about something as mundane as a suspended license after what had happened to us. But I too had misgivings about going to the police. I had pink hair, facial piercings and tattoos, and I had no illusions about how I would look to a bunch of cops. I would win their crazy bitch of the year award hands down. And while my boyfriend looked clean cut enough, there was the suspended license issue.
So we ended up not going to the police.
We drove to the closest airport and got the next plane home. We broke up a couple of days after that.
Later I found out from a friend that he had left grad school because the professor who was his PhD advisor was fired for research misconduct.
*
I kept asking myself, what if we had not stopped at the restaurant that day? What if we had taken some other road? What if we had been there on another day?
All the random turnings we took in the trip that brought us to that particular place at that particular time, that was fate because it could have so easily not happened at all. It’s like flipping heads a hundred times out of a hundred. It could happen, but it shouldn’t, and that one time it does, you know something’s going on.
But some things that seem improbable or impossible are exactly that.
Or what if the rational explanation is even more insane?
*
Years went by and I got married, had kids. I did all the normal things that normal people did, and from the outside at least everything seemed fine.
One night I couldn’t sleep and was obsessively scrolling and clicking through the nether regions of the internet when I saw an anonymous article on some forum about an (unnamed) psychology professor and his research assistant who ran a series of illegal experiments on human subjects.
One of their experiments was to subject individuals to some type of traumatic incident or unexplained phenomena. The point of the experiment was to determine the effects of secrets on individuals and communities.
Such as to what extent could a person or group of people keep a secret without being kept under a continual state of duress? If somebody decided to tell the secret, would they be believed or written off? How many people would have to tell for the revelation to gain traction? What is the tipping point when an outrageous tale becomes plausible? When and why do communities begin to believe?
Many subjects of the so called experiments did not know they were participating in an experiment. The experiments were mainly funded by a shell company with connections to the big hedge funds. There were allegations of abuse, fraud and assault against the professor and his research assistant both of whose whereabouts are currently unknown. The last sighting of the pair was in Champagne, France where the professor was said to own a chateau…
*
I looked up my ex-boyfriend’s academic advisor on the internet. It seemed that at one point he had millions in research grants and one of the best funded labs in the country. But all that was years ago, dating from before he left the university.
There were pictures of him on the internet from past conferences and other professional events, and it was with a feeling of shock when I saw his face. It was that feeling of Deja vu again, but this time there was no mystery. I had seen him on campus before with my ex-boyfriend though I had not known who he was then. He was extraordinarily handsome, but his face was almost mask like in its blankness of expression. It was a face anybody would have remembered, and I couldn’t recall a single man from that day at the restaurant who looked like him.
But if the professor wasn’t there that day, then my theory was a flop. Because who would go to such lengths to set up an elaborate hoax like that and not stick around to watch it go down?
I mean, it’s ridiculous but I honestly didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.
*
A couple of weeks later I had a dream. In the dream my boyfriend was walking with a man, I couldn’t see who, and I was walking behind them. And as we were walking, the sky got darker and darker. The light became this brownish gray, like a sepia toned photograph. The shadows were strange, almost as if they were backlighted, like in an eclipse.
My boyfriend and this man stopped and I stopped too, and then the man started turning around, except in super slow motion like in a film. He was turning around and as he was turning around I was thinking: no no no no no no no no. . . And then he was facing me, and I realized that he was actually a she, a woman.
I knew that woman. I had seen her before.
And I woke up, screaming.
*
It was him, the professor. He was there that day at the restaurant sitting at the table next to us wearing women’s clothes with a fake husband and kids, pretending to be a wife and mother. He and that woman Cynthia were one and the same person.
After a lot of searching, I finally found a video of him giving a presentation at a conference, and it was eerie. For a man, you would have said he had a very nice telephone voice. It was low and kind of rough, kind of husky. When that voice came out of somebody who was presumably female, it was unsettling. It made you sit up and take notice. And I remembered Cynthia’s voice because it was so distinctive, it amounted to an identifying characteristic like a facial birthmark.
And the professor couldn’t have not known that. He could have talked in a falsetto or not talked at all that day. But he talked and he made sure I heard him. I think up until that point I still held out some slight hope that I was mistaken, that there was no way this man and a woman travelling with her husband and kids were one and the same person. But when I heard the professor’s voice, it was game over for me. It was her voice. He was Cynthia.
My gut feeling is that he was deliberately drawing attention to himself, to his voice. He wanted me to figure it out, and he wanted to know what I would do once I did.
*
I never told anyone what happened to me, not even my husband.
And I guess if I’m right about all this, and I think I am, then their so called research is a success of sorts. No matter what kind of messed up shit you do to people, they’ll keep their mouth shut. And if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because nobody will believe them anyway.