Night Devourings: A Case Study

Dusk divides the comfortable, familiar, daylight city from one of darkness and shadow and mysteries and secrets. During the day, you can walk the streets, smile at your fellow man, pick up fresh apples at the fruit stand, but a magazine, sit in the park, discuss the weather with weary travelers on the subway. At night, you can buy a drink at the bar, dance with strangers, obtain certain services, meet future lovers, lift wallets, lose all your money at poker, chew on cheap cigars, laugh, cry, cut the throats of poets too moonstruck to notice.

Dusk divides two entirely separate cities, though they occupy the same place. The same inhabitants have different personalities, day or night. One girl might go to school in the day, joke with friends, strive and learn and maybe make something of herself; at night, she’ll lock herself behind a deadbolt and a chain, study with the lights turned dim, the television loud enough to drown out the sounds that invade through the thin walls. One guy might, in daylight, work in an office, flirt with the girl in accounting, drink fancy coffees, smoke cigarettes, follow the local team, and argue politics over lunch; at night, he’ll change his fancy Italian shirt for something black, sharpen his knives, listen to the girl singing at the club, and dream of following her home. He might never use those knives, but he’s got them, just in case.

The parks become dangerous at night. Where children frolic carefree and innocent, night brings out the pushers and the pimps, the junkies, the bums, the maniacs, the predators, the vigilantes.

There are people, you may know some, who believe they can live on both sides of dusk, that their daytime lives and their nighttime lives are in some way interconnected. And maybe, in another place, a town a hundred miles away, in some place where night brings out the stars, maybe there they might be right. But here, in this city, they are wrong. Everyone’s schizophrenic, or else they’re delusional. The question isn’t really whether you live differently under the yellow light of sodium vapor than under the glaring blazing sun; it becomes a question of which of this personalities is dominant.

Most of us balance these inner selves rather well, and some with an envious artful flare. Some, however, fall too deeply into one or the other. Because it’s easier, they typically fall to the night.

And the night willfully takes them.

Look at one William Barnes. He works the nightshift. Although not unusual, this is not a giveaway of someone who’s fallen. He gets home shortly after dawn, tired and beaten and somewhat depressed. He drinks a full glass of milk before going to bed, and then sleeps until most of us are sitting down for supper.

At night, he prowls. He wanders the streets, methodically, making an effort to crisscross the city in a logical pattern. When he finds an open window, or a girl on her mobile phone, or a guy too preoccupied with losing the race against the falling sun, William Barnes will then listen. He’ll take notes. He follows, tracks, establishes a pattern. He works four night a week, and even those nights he takes some time to shadow his new friend. He learns what he can, following a single subject for perhaps a month before making his move.

He bumps into the person, casually, perhaps at a bar, perhaps on the street in front of their apartment, the 24 hour laundry, the library, wherever. He initiates conversation. Brief, sometimes, or hours of words. He pretends to know things about which his subject knows. He inserts random asides that make the person a little nervous, a little wary, and then laughs and jokes and points out how absurd it is that two total strangers could have so much in common and meet so randomly.

William Barnes likes the idea of chaos. Cause and effect are difficult concepts, except in practice.

He keeps records. There’s a little black book for every woman and every man he’s befriended this way. He begins tracking their on-line lives, becoming friends on Facebook and Twitter, linking in, acquiring drunken pictures and graduation pictures.

He learns enough that, if he wanted, he could become that person.

Then he starts changing things. He’ll rearrange pictures on his subject’s bookshelf while they’re out grocery shopping. He’ll leave copies of horror novels on their bedside tables. He’ll fill their fridge with empty Chinese food cartons and steal their milk. Little things, mostly. Inconsequential things. He’ll comfort his friend, suggest alcohol, gremlins, ex-lovers, ghosts. Then, quite regularly, he’ll decide it’s time to change, to give up his weird habits, to surrender himself to whatever formal retribution awaits.

That, of course, is the night he arrives at the subject’s house with his deceased father’s Smith & Wesson M&P. It makes him feel like a gunslinger. And he likes the thunder it makes when he pulls the trigger.