Unknown figure in the night

 I won’t ask what the story means, as signified or as signifier, as sound or as matter, as spirit or as stone, I won’t look for anything to understand or explain, I won’t seek further ramifications. I woke up in the middle of the night in an average two-story house in the suburbs, I walked downstairs and opened the front door and walked outside for no apparent reason, I felt the cold chill hit me as soon as I stepped out, a slight wind, the sound of a dog barking in the distance, a trickle of water, a car turning on a few blocks away… Then, from the absolute darkness on the other side of the street, I heard the voice of a girl speaking to me, a young woman, an apparition, thin, small, breathy, beckoning… I couldn’t make out her specific words but I gathered she was asking for help, or maybe I only imagined her need for help, maybe I only heard what I wanted to hear; my first impulse was to be kind, to be a savior, to reach out and somehow fix the unknown problem… but then I thought of other possibilities that this unexpected situation could imply; this meeting could also be perilous, some kind of trap, a deadly con for others to read about later on social media and shudder. I determined for myself that her first objective should be to prove her good intentions towards me, prove she was not a potential danger, not a ghost or a demon, not a thief or a murderer, not a decoy or a witch, prove that she was only what she seemed to be; a vulnerable girl in need of help wandering alone in the cold darkness of a quiet American suburb… She moved closer towards me, ever so slowly, I couldn’t see her very well in the shadows, I could only barely see her walking barefoot on the asphalt, a white dress, bare shoulders, long blonde hair, wide open eyes… She was asking for the name of this street, the name of this city, my name, a name, any name… I wondered if her motives could really be to help me in some way, could she be some mysterious kind of guide, a kind of powerful angel materializing here at my door, ready to offer assistance; or maybe she was just a helpless girl, a frail young woman in danger asking for help, a lost human being, set adrift in the isolated agglomeration of a modern American city, a figure of sadness, pity, just what she seemed to be and nothing more… Was she harmless and in need of help? How does one prove that? How can one convincingly show that one doesn’t pose a threat to others? What are the true intentions that hide under so many layers of shadow? Secret machinations, evil plans, shocking twist waiting around the corner, lethal left shoe ready to drop… I am a thousand miles away from any kind of clear understanding, I am alone in the darkness outside my home and I need to decide, this is where future worlds collide and days can become dark or light depending on what path you take; this is the crucial spot where choices are meant to happen; if a stranger asks for help, if they really ask for help, they may have my number, they may take my name, they may have anything they want; if it is really a stranger and help is really all they want, I will do whatever it takes… I told her to come closer so we could talk and she did, slowly and gently, slowly enough that I still felt comfortable as she moved across the street, slowly enough that my imagination could still swirl with possibilities going in every possible direction… I didn’t look for anything to understand in what she said, in what I barely imagined that she was saying, I didn’t ask what her story meant, I didn’t know enough to ask proper questions, I simply waited quietly for her approach. “In the past, long before your time, long before the world you have known throughout your life, they depicted me as blind or blindfolded, long white cloth wrapped around my deep white eyes…” I could faintly see her lips move through the heavy shadows that surrounded me and her thin soft voice only barely carried through the dark silence that was almost as loud as a never-ending hum, a deep drone alive with tantalizing subtle detail, scattered implications… I imagined her looking at me with a kind smile, an invitation to a new and secret friendship, a welcoming glance to let me know I was safe and there had never been anything to worry about… “With the blindfold, they meant to emphasize my complete disregard for the virtuous or the powerful. They wanted to make it clear that I have no favorites, that I never pick a side before its time.” I imagined her with hair the color of the sun, flowing in the wind around her shoulders, a burst of light in between the shadows, trembling, a hint of color over a black void, a slender fish swimming among ominous black waves… “My right and left hands they used to represent good and evil. And they acknowledged that I was the source of both.” I imagined taking hours to die beneath a slab of concrete, a long and desperate death after hours of regret and self-recrimination, surrounded by laughter and jeers, the repeated knocking of final judgments sealing my fate, banishing all possibilities of rescue… What did I do that led to this? What did I do to deserve this? “At times, I had wings, to show that I am fleeting, that I won’t stay with you for long… even when it seems that I am yours, I’m just about to vanish…” I imagined the icy water of a river as it closed over my head, a sudden final clarity showing me where to find my mistakes and what led me to make them, what I could have done differently, what I should have said, where I could have walked, who I could have talked to… During the last few days before this fateful night I had hit a wall, an insurmountable barrier in my ongoing work; I had disrupted my efforts through inattention, laziness, sheer stupidity; I had lost my precious chance, and these come so rarely and fly away so soon…  I was alone in this situation I found myself in, this had become painfully clear, nobody was coming to rescue me, nobody would offer any kind of help or advice, either they couldn’t understand the situation well enough or they were far too removed to care… All I had left to do was to stay calm and watch the last ironic moments of the show, look how he destroys himself, look how he allows everything he has worked on to die a slow painful death… I had to calmly watch the final act, a kind of bemused spectator observing how I slowly fell apart, how I slowly became nothing, pure nothingness, impeccable in its sheer absence… I decided that I didn’t want to be present to see that; it would happen anyway but I refused to sit in the audience and watch it unfold; so I closed my eyes to avoid the play that was coming, to avoid all that had led up to this, the hard consequences, the near silent resolution… After some time had passed in a kind of pregnant living silence, a promise never fulfilled, cold and soft and subtle, I stood up, I looked around me, there was the chair, a wall, some books, a bed, a TV, I was still alone, completely alone, I was still without help or recourse, but everything was coming back, little by little, ever so slowly but it was coming, that which I had lost was on its way back, it was only a matter of holding on long enough for the gateway to once again fly open… For about a month I had been working on developing a state of pure solipsism - in this vibrant chamber, you simply acknowledge that you are the creator, the primary source of all creation, everything you see, everything around you for as far as you can see and farther, everything has been made by you. How can one do so much in one day? one second? How can my creative will extend so far beyond my sight? Beyond my consciousness? I saw it all as a vast communications grid binding all of life together, the galaxies, the stars, the birds, the rocks, my fingers, the light passing through my window, the floating dust, a vast network of creative impulses swirling around itself, breathing with intricate melodic desires, beating in a symphonic complex polyrhythmic statement of forbidden needs, deep fundamental demands… I had always been the creator, I have always been, it is self-evident, it is understood; once that door opens it is hard to close, it is so difficult to return to being what you were once, only yesterday, only last week… Everything that is happening, anywhere and everywhere, is my doing, a mirror of my unconscious will, a private design I could never remember composing, a swirl of simple determination extending into a web of ever more complex specificity…  How is it possible that suddenly I can see it all so easily? So clearly? When did I begin walking on this road? Where does it lead? Is there someone waiting at the end? Am I coming up on some kind of crossroads? All phenomena that I have ever encountered works on a multi-input basis, so many mouths, so many ways to feed them, so many ways to sing, so many melodies wrapped fluidly around each other, all operating far beyond currently known physical laws, integrated circuits based on ethereal chords of silver light… I can’t be anything other than the creator, to think anything else is ludicrous, inconceivable, inherently wrong by definition; I became convinced of this through long sessions of self-hypnosis, carefully planned deep inductions mixed with droning music and rhythmic chanting, a long and careful descent into madness… Here I found a warm resting place of certainty, a chamber whose only feature was to make sense and to stay that way. One hundred years ago, they would have said I was possessed by the devil, a creature of darkness had tempted me into this secret conceit and now I was trapped in a state of fanatical incoherence…  or they would have said I was a heretic, misunderstanding simple teachings meant for calm sane minds and turning them into monstrous irrational beliefs that could only overflow into dangerous transgressions… they would say that anything that now happens to me is my doing; if I am punished, I brought it upon myself, if I am killed, I asked for this final penalty, if I am tortured, it is the only true way to save me from eternal despair, I have brought it all upon myself, I have asked for whatever I am about to receive… A few decades ago, they would say I was a communist, a subversive, an ideological rebel bent on destruction, an arrogant fool who believes they know how the world should work and is ready to do anything in order to fix it, ready to break the system of relations in order to find a new reality that fits my idealized final eternal state and returns the world to its intended purpose… “Everything you see,” I would have said, “you have created. Humans have built this world that we inhabit. And we can change it all if we wish to do so. It is up to us… we can change it all from the ground up. It is our responsibility to try, it is our right to do everything within our capabilities.” Now, they will say that I am an irrational dissenter against modern society, simply insane, psychotic, divorced from simple and obvious reality and deserving of exile, to be put in a cage and forgotten until I prove that I am better, until I show that, once again, I understand, until I acknowledge and remember what I should never have forgotten… Only insane people believe that they have always been the creator and they can’t be anything other than the creator, only insane people work towards placing themselves in this self-referential chamber and lock the door behind them so there’s no way to escape, no obvious way to return to once obvious normality… I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured her blindfolded, a white cloth wrapped around her eyes, tied behind her head and pressing against her golden hair; I pictured wings flowing out from her shoulders, fluttering in the cold wind which seemed to grow stronger as she moved closer; her right and left hands were raised towards the stars, an ancient pose of invocation, showing a complete disregard for simple modern human conventions… She was not normal, it came in a sudden flash, this was not a normal meeting between two normal people in the middle of the night, an hour when people don’t come out of nowhere and start walking towards you eager to talk, when people don’t start simple conversations for the sake of making small talk, this was deeply strange, this was something otherwise… I didn’t have the words to describe it, I didn’t have a way to understand it, to pinpoint it as a specific event within the expected schemes of modern human behavior… When I saw that her hands were raised, I knew that this was unlike any other meeting between two people, this was a night unlike any other night… One hundred years ago, they would have said she was possessed by the devil, fundamental evil emanations flowed through her every manifestation and were bound to contaminate everything and everyone around her if left unchecked… I should run inside and close the door and cross myself to ward against her coming; I should close my eyes and pray feverishly and run to make sure that all other doors of the house were also closed and all the windows were tightly shut… Now they would call her insane, a dangerous mad person wandering in the night in search of some kind of understanding, someone to help her make sense of so many questions that swirl around endlessly inside her head, answers and questions bouncing on top of each other in an eternal loop… If it had been daylight, maybe she would have been just another face in the crowd, a pretty woman with nothing in particular to say, a shopper in a mall wandering from store to store, a friendly face at the coffee shop, maybe I would have stood there listening to her mutterings, waiting for the next set of coded instructions, trying to make out what to do next and how to do it, how to approach the next curve on the road, what questions to ask, how to listen… With a sense of relief and deep existential terror, I understood that to her I was also a mirage; she was dreaming me as I emerged from the shadows, I was the strange ghost that she was invoking with all her might, I was a projection of her unspoken drives, I was the unknown figure in the night, I was both a threat and a promise, I was the living darkness… I sat down on the threshold looking up towards the street; she was still moving, she was still getting closer, closer and closer… I suddenly became aware that I had never seen this place before, this place which had seemed so familiar just moments ago, this street, this house, it was all unknown, all brand new, I was completely surrounded by strangeness… If I am the creator, I must have seen everything already, I must have made it myself and I would hold on to some kind of memory, some kind of knowledge, but this was all mysterious, drastically uncanny, alien yet vaguely familiar, both at once… I stood up to look at the tall white walls of the strange house in which I found myself, what I had assumed to be my home; I looked at the painting hanging just beside the door, a simple statement in bright red letters: “Remember, you are God, you have always been God…” Did I put that there? Did I paint it? I looked through a small window facing the street, cut green grass, a tall tree with white leaves and thin branches, a plastic toy laying on the grass, a piece of paper dancing in the wind… I wanted to see everything outside through the frame of this small window; a dark blue car parked along the curb, a no parking sign slightly bent by time… then I walked inside and the new impressions multiplied, everything in this house was as unfamiliar as what I had seen outside; a long narrow stairway leading upstairs, a wooden division in a wide square room, a tall red candle on a small round table, a puppet hanging from a nail… Up on the second floor, I stepped into a wide circular room, lit from beneath by soft white light; someone was inside this room but I couldn’t see them, someone was waiting on the other side… I felt an intense pressure, so much pressure to step out, to turn around, a strong tendency for me to forget what I was doing in that particular room and to continue walking, to find myself back at the door, back where I started, facing the street and waiting for her to cross… By stepping into this room, I was moving against the current, I was changing the story but the story had its own momentum, its own forward moving force… “Everything you see,” she said, and I could hear her now as if she was standing right behind me, talking close to my ear, “you have created. You have made all of this. As strange as it may seem. As unfamiliar as it may be, this is all your doing.” I went to sit on a corner in the vast living room, I insisted on a process of careful discovery, I wanted to understand this house, to understand how it came to be here, and I wanted to step into that place that was seemingly forbidden, that circular room bathed in soft white light… Who was there? Why was there so much resistance when I tried to step through that particular door? But again, I felt the tendency to leave, to step back outside to where I imagined that she was still waiting, still slowly walking towards me across the street… I realized I had never learned the history of this place, I didn’t know how I came to be here or how this house had come to be here in the first place; who put it here, who designed it, what was its purpose? I insist again, I make a huge effort and walk back up the stairs, I want to enter that circular room that I glimpsed only for a moment, I insist, I move against the current, it takes all my strength, it takes a will that I am not sure I understand, a rush of fiery determination, I don’t know where it’s coming from, I don’t know how I invoked it just now, I insist and I insist again and again and again… and suddenly, without warning, I become lucid. “Everything that is happening,” she says, “is your doing. All of it. The house, the painting, the candle, the light, the night outside, the cold wind and me… me, most of all.” Most of the tantalizing depths in all the many stories I remember reading or writing have been completely unconscious, a creation of dark forces beyond my reach, blind intentions, blind design; I never knew what they meant, I didn’t know their hidden purpose and I would never know, I would never have full satisfaction… I finally decided that this was a special night, a night to do something very different, something unexpected, something I wouldn’t usually do and I might never do again… With a sense of hesitant relief, of utter, complete humiliation, I surrendered to the maelstrom of strong winds that surrounded me, a tornado of accumulated desire, stronger than me, stronger than my wishes or fears, stronger than my will… I found myself a thousand miles from her, far enough that I could only barely hear her thin little voice anymore, a few notes of languid melody, a word here, a sigh, a single breath… Worlds had collided and the elements that made my story had vanished.
The days after our meeting were dark and cold; I found that there was no further need for outside pressure, no need for assurances or contradictions… I had given her my number, I had given her my name, she knew where to find me, sooner or later she would come back. There was no need to wait impatiently, there was no need to even think of her, there was no need to try to call; she was on her way, she knew where I lived, she knew where I was hiding, she knew I would still be here when she arrived… I understood even then that she was only a mirage, always had been an illusion; I was only dreaming when she came to me; she was a ghost to scare small children, a story to be told around a fire to banish with laughter and songs after screams of delighted fright, a tale to be repeated and then forgotten for years, entire lifetimes… I would never ask what this story meant, as signified or signifier, I had nobody to ask, I had nowhere to look for an answer, I would not look for anything to understand, I would not wait or long for a clear and final resolution, I would not gather my thoughts to find a single explanation, a diagram of intertwined concepts softly landing on a final point… It was only a story and stories like this mean nothing, go nowhere, they never end and they never arrive at a satisfying final act.