The Other World

I had an essay in Romanticon last month titled “Notes on The South.”

When you are looking for the lost will in the old mansion, you tap, inch by inch, along the beautiful mahogany wainscoting, or along the massive stonework of the cellarage, and listen for the hollow sound. Then upon hearing it you seek the secret button or insert the crowbar. I had tapped and had heard something hollow. —Robert Penn Warren

In my elementary school at Halloween there wasn’t a haunted house, but there was something called the Space House. It took place at night. We came in and the hallways and bathrooms and classrooms we knew from the daylight world of school were totally transformed—filled up a foot or two with fluffy white stuffing, black-lights, elevators, portals to other universes and strange creatures with ray guns and visors coming up to us and grabbing us, throwing us into elevators and the elevators shook and when they spit us out we’d be in a different level.

It was disorienting, enchanting and strange, it blew our little minds. When I came back on Monday morning I couldn’t look at the fluorescent-bulb lit tile hallways and low-pile carpeted classrooms the same way anymore.

I had seen they were CHANGEABLE.

Everything in the apparent world, it turned out, was CHANGEABLE.

What I had known as a “normal school” and was “my life” at night could be an entirely different place.

The discovery of the other side of the mall and the fairgrounds was like that. Once you saw the other side, you could no longer see the day-lit normal world the same way, you saw how everything exists on two levels, a secret world and an exterior world.

A second time I realized this—I was having a sleepover at my friend Ryan’s house and we were watching Saturday Night Fever and I started feeling very weird and wrong. His bedroom was done up like a New York City apartment, fake bricks and Pulp Fiction posters on the wall, I don’t know how or why he got his parents to pay for it but they did. Ryan was a real character, a charming kid, an actor who he lied a lot about hacking the nuclear codes like in WarGames, he made up stories about himself that made him seem like the main characters in his favorite movies.

He loved violent adult movies that I felt were too old for us like True Romance and From Dusk til Dawn but his favorite movie aside from Pulp Fiction might have been Saturday Night Fever. We watched it up in his upstairs playroom, his extra room behind his bedroom. His bedroom had a fake peephole, just like a real NYC apartment.

The movie just felt wrong to me—it was grainy, people were violent and crude, I hated their outfits, I hated the way they talked and fought and dangled each other off bridges, the whole grim urban reality of their lives seemed horrible compared to our sunny suburban streets and cozy houses and little ponds and parks. I know Ryan wanted their city reality but I wanted the reality that we actually had the cozy reality we lived in.

I hate 70s movies to this day. I hate the way people in Seventies movies are always saying “eyyyyy Donna! Look at dis fucking fairie!” and then doing graffiti or joining the CIA or riding motorcycles or having some violent roadway accident zooming in on the mangled face at the end while the Bee Gees plays or if not the Bee Gees some burnt-out 60s band that’s gone into their Katmandu Captain Beefheart experimental phase, OH MY GOD its bleak, I shiver a little bit when someone suggests watching a Seventies movie, I watch it, I can tolerate it I’m an adult, but I’ve never not been left with a residue of depression about how ugly life can be afterwards.

As all the think pieces taught us and all the Marxian economists talking about the “neoliberal turn” taught us, everything bad in the world came out of the Seventies. But all the aboveground data and social history don’t seem to capture how truly bleak it was in the way that movies like Saturday Night Fever do, or Taxi Driver, or Rocky. I’ve seen them all I don’t like any of them.

Anyway, during the movie at Ryan’s house I started feeling real sick and weird, I threw up a lot in the bathroom and his mom got worried about me. I had a fever and his mom put me to bed on the top bunk, but I was so sweaty and fevery and everything got weird and I couldn’t sleep and vomited and felt thirsty all night. Ryan slept, but his mom was worried, but I didn’t want to worry her and I couldn’t sleep so around 5 or 6 AM I quietly left their house and walked the three blocks down the dawn, lovely streets with the songbirds and sweetness and that warm gentle morning light coming through the pines back to my house and back at my house my parents were worried and wondered why I was coming home as they were waking up but then I put myself to bed and then it happened there—the Crevice opened up and swallowed me.

It was like I had been resisting something so hard, had been pushing against something that wanted to take me into the other world, it wanted to suck me up and eat me and I had been holding it together then I couldn’t resist anymore and it took me—took me down into the springs of the bed and I couldn’t breathe and I was shaking uncontrollably. I went way down below the bed through the floor of the house into the soil and heard the planets like big marbles bash together and the sound was deafening and horrible and painful and awe-inspiring, like Gods doing god-stuff, and when I came to I was uncontrollably shaking and my arm was limp and I was screaming and then I went back down, then the ambulance was arriving.

It was my first grand mal seizure, they didn’t know what brought it on but it shook me like seeing the eye of God or seeing the aeons or seeing God-the-liar, the false-God I don’t know, I felt like demons had crawled all over me and the devil had dragged me down and I never ever wanted to go there again, but having been there I was CHANGED by the experience and some experiences are so horrible that you don’t want to be changed, you don’t want to be altered, you want to stay the same and keep control. Loss of the self and body as we know it, the land of the dead... I lost control of my body and my mind and it was not only that, that alone would be fine, but I saw that there was a hidden world buried inside of this one and that was the most frightening part.

You feel that your bed and the floor below your bed and your body are solid reliable things, but when you realize they are not Solid, they are fungible and they can eat you at any moment, it changes your relationship to Solid Ground and the seeming outward stability and predictability of this world.

The doctors did things in the hospital trying to figure out what was going on, they put needles in my spine and ran me through the machines. Then they sent me home, my parents were confused, my brother was too young to understand what was going on but he must have seen something was wrong because my mother was crying and the ambulance men were rushing me out on a stretcher and into the ambulance.

At that time, in that place and ambiance, the theory was that flashing video games were causing young people to have epilepsy. But Ryan and I had not been playing video games and there had been no flashing in Saturday Night Fever, but I played video games other times sometimes, in my brothers room, I played all the old video games, and they had some flashing, but after the event they told me to stay away from flashing lights and video games, but the seizures which came late never seemed to be caused by flashing lights really but because of what was going on in society at that time and what my parents and the doctors said I became afraid of flashing lights and flashing in video games and especially of strobe lights just in case, that they would wake up the thing that had taken me down.

About a week later, the doctors ordered that I needed to go get an EEG, sleep deprived. My dad stayed up with me all night, he was so tired, we just stayed up all night we didn’t talk too much, I whined that I was tired and afraid and tried to take little naps but dad kept prodding me to keep me awake and kept himself awake and at dawn he rewarded us with going to get donuts and got himself a coffee obviously, he loved me and stayed up all night for me it wasn’t the first time or the last time and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have at the time, he was a gentle thoughtful man, and we went into the doctor’s office, me having had hot Krispy Kreme donuts, the Krispy Kreme red sign was on which meant the donuts were hot and I needed them as a reward for the journey through the night, and at the doctor’s office the people parted my hair and put cold suction cups all over my head like I was a lab monkey and watched my brain move through a tiny little black and green screen, a kind of brain monitor, but they couldn’t find anything.

I had more seizures, they came at unpredictable times, it was almost like I could feel something alien building up within, something that wanted to come out of my body, a foreignness, and I would try to repress it and hold it in but eventually it would take me. I would try to be lying down when it took me. It wasn’t the same, and I didn’t know until much later, but it was almost like an orgasm, but an orgasm you can feel coming is like something of pleasure, you can feel it propelling toward you like a train of pleasure, this was more like something coming toward you filled with terror and dread that was going to kill you and you could feel it wanted to take you.

The seizures seemed to come when I was feverish, it was like a block started to be push on top of me, it happened one time on the yellow school bus, a field trip on our way to Old Salem—it was so cold outside and the bus windows wouldn’t close and the cold air was coming in the tops of the windows and my teeth were chattering I couldn’t stop them from chattering and I held myself and I was so hot, then I lost control and rolled onto the floor of the bus and no one noticed and when I came to I got back up in the seat and my teeth started chattering uncontrollably again and Old Salem was so frightening that day, so cold with all these people in old outfits like townspeople, churning butter and making coffee on old stoves and pounding anvils, we were far from Raleigh and I couldn’t wait to get back home, Winston-Salem seemed sad and evil and cold to me.

Even as I write this and I re-feel these feelings, I feel afraid, I monitor my body, I want to keep tabs on my body, keep it in check, since I don’t know what made it come the first time around I never know when it will come again and its been gone for so long and I’ve been free for so long but I always feel like its hibernating inside me, sleeping, and could come back at any moment, almost like a Djinn or a demon, that if i focus too much on it or re-feel it again, then it could come again and that scares me.

Years later, Halloween came, an early Halloween with my friend Dan and we walked home from school kicking huge piles of red and brown and yellow leaves, the coffee at Barnes and Noble tasted better than it ever had, it went straight to my brain and I felt like I could do and be anything, the world was ahead of us. We had the future ahead of us. Halloween stores were popping up all over town, and a huge haunted house appeared in the parking lot of the mall and one night Dan wanted to go.

We walked from his house through the woods past the glowing Barnes and Noble and out to the big parking lot where the haunted house had appeared like a carnival overnight. I didn’t want to go in. We paid and went inside and in there there was lights and disorientation and chainsaw men and dead girls popping out us and everything felt upside down, I didn’t know where I was and had no sense of myself, all I had was a sense of fear and that anything could happen, people and hands grabbed onto my legs and arms from unseen corners, and when we got out, I was hyperventilating, I didn’t know where we were and Dan tried to calm me down but I had to just get a grip in the parking lot. Then nothing happened.

And that was good. God. Because if something was going to happen, it should have happened then and there, but nothing happened. But it came back to me once again. Places had two sides. A visible side and another side. Like the elementary school. Like the tunnels under our high school. Like my bed, the haunted house had a secret life that people couldn’t understand. Necessarily.