The radio towers are talking about bodybags and underground bunkers in a deep soothing voice like an 1940s ad for menthol cigarettes and if I wanted to disbelieve them I don't know that I could but I don't want to disbelieve them, I can only wait for the details and admire them as they come, fear I've known longer than the word afraid, that I devour every word and crackle of... a free psychic on the dial spelling out my doom four hours a night, and I'd feel more of a fool for turning it off than I do for believing.
They say forty miles away the Russians are playing games inside of a mountain. They say there's a dungeon where all the missing children go. They say that solving the wrong math problems can get you killed if you're not careful. They say the demons are in charge and I keep on listening with eyes wide open, wondering about the sinister intent behind every burst of white noise.
And some people say we listen to these spooky stories because we need easy answers for why we're lost, jumbled and sore. That behind every tale of mind control, blood ritual and alien laboratory there's a faith in the goodness of our species that's as much legend as Merlin or the apocalypse that's always just a few days away. The faith we would have the kindness for life to be an action we are proud of and for death to be a tragedy we're ready to face when it comes, if it weren't for the damn Illuminati ruining it for everyone. And in a room without windows, or around skeptical friends, I know you don't have to look for ugliness beneath the black ink on a classified document, there is nowhere you can go where it isn't and most of the time it is as taken for granted as the turning of the colors of a stop light, always here but never remembered.
Tonight, people who know my name, whose couches I've slept on sleep on government cots as punishment for the crime of trying to help someone else, or letting their lives be their own. And before those cots were their beds, those cots were a bed for someone else and I knew it and so did you but still we looked for atrocities in the shadows. Doom is everywhere, doom and misery and the floorplans to them, under construction, breaking ground, opening it's doors and sometimes it is full of sirens and shouts but just as often the only sound is the sound of a person sucking in ambitions that they want but will never get as they chug on through their lives... the saddest stories don't end with bloody death but a long life ahead with nothing in it to look forward to for the rest of your days. There would still be terror and heartache and injustice printed proudly on the front page of the paper if black helicopters had never taken to the skies.
But they have. I've seen them, along with light formations in the sky that can't be explained, unmarked vans, haunted places making dashboards flash at random while engines fail, camcorders turn to fuzz and horns honk in old Confederate morse code, anonymous phone calls coming with silence and a click five seconds later, more dread than I can handle when I think of the Satanic conspiracy stories of the 80s and pass by DIA. Every town's got a building with a snipers nest that you gotta show ID to enter, where even the people that work there don't know what's being done, and every town's got scary stories spreading tongue to tongue, that have never been put to ink. Kids like me throw rocks at the fences just to hear what the alarms sound like and watch the the tinted windowed vehicles run by, we ask the wrong questions and fill in the blanks from the awkward silences and uncertainty we get in response to draw a picture of terror as violent as movie screens in the summer time. It's not like we need things to be scared of. Our eyeballs and heads make sure those will show up anywhere, as long as it's like any place we've been before, a family arcade, an office park at night, a strip of spas and sunglass stores. Nah, we'd just rather think of the evil with texture, the enemy it'd be an adventure to battle. A courtroom is such a boring place for your future to hit the propellers of the greater good of society. Evil endings grip on in the most mundane places, condos and bungalows and apartment complexes that look like parking garages, office buildings and factories and Wal Mart aisles and schoolyards, wedding chapels and hospital beds, parole offices and DHS offices and tax offices and home loan offices and land auctions and bankruptcy court and retirement communities where the stories come to collect: all the places to puny and plain to have any business bringing a human to their knees. In the holes inside of a mountain, behind the electrified fence, inside the boxcars of trains with military clearance, where the UFOs go to dock... there is danger free of friendly excuses, paperwork and framed pictures of eagles with motivational quotes, a danger it's no insult to die in battle with. If there was nothing in the shadows, maybe we would need to make something up anyways. But there is.