I didn’t know what happened. I awoke to a chirp, chirp, chirping. It wasn’t the quintessential bird sounds but rather something mechanical. Not mechanical in the sense of gears grinding or what you’d imagine hearing in the underbelly of a ship; mechanical in the sense you’d think this sound was eliminating from a set of computer speakers placed next to your ear on full blast.
In my half-awake stupor it hit me, it was close to Daylight Savings Time. I could never keep it straight: when is it standard time? Savings time? Who knows? I could thank the Congress of 1918 and my shitty high school for not teaching me these things. Regardless of my past regression of knowledge, I knew I never changed the batteries in the smoke detector. Despite the fire department sending out bi-yearly mailings to remind me, the meteorologist preaching on KEBX, and the MLM girl from high school posting about it on Facebook, I never took the battery warning seriously.
Now, as the clock read 12:00 in flashing red lights I realized that not only was my battery chirping but the power must have just went out. Maybe that sudden absence of noise woke me up and not the smoke detector. I’ve been known to ignore things in the past. Maybe the chirping was ongoing for a few days. Know how they say you don’t know the scent of your own house because you’re used to it? Maybe that was what was going on with the chirping.
But no, I do know the scent of my own home and this wasn’t it. The Glade PlugIn my ex-girlfriend made me buy was still being refilled religiously. I was never an addictive man, maybe gambled a bit too much once sports betting became legal in my state, but I was addicted to the cashmere woods scent that SC Johnson kept chemically pumping out. But this smell in my nostrils now, it wasn’t cashmere wood. It was burning wood, burning plastic; the smell that I smelt as a little boy when I would go to the hair salon with my mother.
All of the sudden it just hit me; the fucking house is on fire and I was laying in bed like a domestic silk moth in my cocoon of cheap cotton duvet. The same duvet that I probably bought at Walmart or some other corporate hellscape store. The same store where the local highschool kids who thought they were suburban rednecks met up with the other highschool kids who adopted the gang lifestyle and reenacted their own version of West Side Story.
I leapt out of bed, the red flashing of my bedside clock now meshing with the yellow, red, and orange flashing of flame. The heat I attributed to the portable heater actually emanating from my closet now engulfed in the same colors of fall leaves, campfire, and the billowing black smoke I associate with Harry Potter when Voldemort disappears in the movies.
It felt like a dream but I knew it wasn’t.
The heat was real.
The lights were real.
The smells were real.
The fear was real. It was that primal fear where you know something very wrong is happening and you know in theory how you should escape but since you’ve never experienced it, you just panic.
I knew stop, drop, and roll from that DMX internet meme. I knew put the wet stuff on the red stuff. I knew stay low to the floor so you don’t suffocate. None of that applied right now. I was full of fear while I felt nearly fearless.
Then, darkness. I knew it couldn’t be right as just one blink ago the room was emblazoned in the glow of licking flames.
One more blink.
One more.
One more.
Still darkness. Pure darkness. The black you see when you have all of the blinds closed, blackout curtains over those blinds, and are wearing that $300 sleep mask that 2 Chainz wore on YouTube.
Then, light.
The white pure light of morning. Not quite the empyreal light of Heaven but the white light of a spring morning.
The white light of waking up basked in warm sunlight.
The white of oncoming headlights when you’re frozen in the middle of the road.
Those lights are getting closer.
Getting brighter.
Aren’t stopping.
I’m not a deer but I know what it feels like.
The pureness gone, the evangelical feeling gone. Pain was back. Pain was right. Pain was good. Intrusive thoughts of pain washed over me like that warm pure sunlight.
This couldn’t be happening. Was this heaven? Was this death? Was this me seeing the light? Does life not flash before your eyes?
Another blink.
It’s dark again.
Not the pure suffocating darkness from before. This dark was different.
This was the dark of night. This was the dark of waking up at 4am to leave for vacation so you can beat the traffic. This is the dark that hunters welcomed as they trudged to their treestand in the early morning hoping to shoot the catch of their lifetime. The catch that would put some meat in the fridge to balance out the everrising prices of beef in this economy.
The darkness of my home was now so familiar. This was the darkness I would expect when I wake up in the middle of the night to empty my bladder. I know every inch of my house and can walk around in this darkness. Even with the smallest amount of moonlight fighting its way through the storm clouds and in through my double pane, energy efficient windows I could find my way around.
The fire must have just been a bad dream. The acrid smoke, the flames licking my clothes hanging in the closet, the walls, the door, the faux wood floor must have all just been the nightmare that woke me up.
Out of fear, out of an instinctual worry, I reached to my bedside lamp to illuminate my room in 1500 lumens of cool white light so I can rest my mind that I’m safe before I try and fall back asleep.
One turn of the knob, two turns of the knob, and finally a third and I realized that the power must really be out. I subconsciously knew this. That is why my clock was flashing in my dream but now was dark displaying only the plastic digital clock housing and protruding buttons on top to tune in the radio. That primal worry again, something was wrong. This time I knew it’s not just a combination of my nightmare mixing into reality. This is real.
Thanks to Chris and Ryan McGarty for creating the iPhone flashlight app. This was my saving grace to ease my mind so I could fall back into my slumber. My phone must have fully charged before the power outage. I didn’t even know it was supposed to storm, nothing from that same meteorologist that kept warning about dying batteries.
The storm was like no other. We don’t get hurricanes in the part of the country I’m from but we do get some bad thunderstorms. This was different. There was no lighting. No flashing to illuminate what I couldn’t see beyond my phone flashlight.
I could feel the heaviness in the air. The heaviness of the millibar change in the atmosphere during a storm. The heaviness was like carbon dioxide leaking from a soda fountain and ramming itself straight into my lungs. The heaviness of the same pain and worry I felt before. The heaviness of realizing that my flashlight is illuminating charred ruins. The Ikea furniture, once constructed with haphazard directions and an allen key now charred and in heaps of ash on the floor. The white, cordless blinds that hung over my windows now missing slats, hanging by a loose screw, tattered and broken. The heaviness of realizing the windows beyond those blinds were spiderwebbed, cracked, leaking in air.
The heaviness of realizing I must be in a different dimension.
I thought to myself that I must be hallucinating, still worked up about my fiery dream.
I quickly unlocked my phone and opened the internet app. I had full service, full bars. It still told me I’m connected to AT&T. Weather app; still showing my current location. Map app; still showing my current location.
The stocks app; still showing the downright abysmal market I was following so closely at work that afternoon. They say there is a bear and bull market. This market wasn’t just a black bear that got spooked. This market was a hungry polar bear. The investors harp seals that can’t get off of the ice to submerge themselves quick enough to escape certain, tortuous death.
Now moving to the hallway, my phone screen was just illuminating my face. I could tell the destruction is still real. Not just the aftermath of fire but the aftermath of devastation. The aftermath of whatever war Bethesda predicted in Fallout. I fell, scrambled, lunged down the hallway toward the front door. The bile rising in my throat as I realized that I have just been dropped into a nuclear end.
Nothing of this making any sense. The internet working but my house in ruins. My phone fully charged but the power being out. The chime of a FaceTime. Wait. The chime of a FaceTime?! It’s from the same ex-girlfriend that made me buy the PlugIn. As much as I loathed her I needed familiarity in this world that seems so familiar but so apocalyptical. My thumbs moved without thinking. Swiping right to answer the FaceTime like I’m trying to find my next Tinder match.
Brightness.
Birds chirping.
The satisfying sound of the ice swirling in whatever coffee-like concoction is in the clear cup with the green logo.
Sights and sounds that seem so impossible are right there on my screen.
It’s clear she didn’t know she FaceTimed me. The phone in the wristlet hanging precariously. The clasp threatening to open sending her phone plummeting toward the concrete sidewalk. Her voice, clear, crisp, chipper. The type of voice that you would expect to hear from a comforting hospital nurse. The type of voice you would expect to hear from your encouraging priest after a confession.
A voice telling her friends how she sent me straight to Hell.