Box showed up at the office for me. Eight by six by six. I knew what it was. I had to sign for it. ITAR restricted, dangerous as gun parts or a nuclear bomb. The box stayed shut while I was at work and kept that way until the late hours of a March evening when the streetlights were on and the houses made no noise. It was a full moon with some cloud cover that night though I wouldn’t know how important this was for a first impression until well after the fact. Inside the box was a curiosity of the sort that only arrives in the calloused hands of a young man who doesn’t pay rent; a PVS-14, green phosphor, Carson housing. It came in a big green pouch with a medieval apparatus called a skull crusher that clamped the thing to your head and as I figured this contraption into place I saw myself in the mirror, black hair and finasteride cheeks and nylon straps forcing everything out of order. I looked retarded. Pushed my tongue to the roof and still looked retarded. The chin cup strap thing made me look like I was chewing on something. Thick rimmed glasses (non-prescription, just saw them on a surplus site) evened it out to some kind of GWOT aesthetic, albeit still a stupid one. That was fine though because this was for night use. I pulled one of the adjustment straps down tight and a buckle forced itself into my temple.
When you live by yourself in a house for a while and don’t talk to people you start to get a funny distortion around the edges of what life’s really like for the hoi polloi. I’d been alone for time immemorial and I was a kestrel on a string. Gnawed clean through the cord but still wasn’t sure where I could fly or not without getting sniped. The first few months were alright and I pissed them away doing nothing on the digital boob but eventually stimulus gets tiresome, friends get married, accounts get banned. I had nothing to do and that urge to touch never stopped, it was just sedated. Started to get funnier and funnier ideas in my head. Questioning the chains as it were. A week ago I sat across from this lady during one of the boardroom presentations- she was Dutch, early 30’s, recently married. Wore a tight jacket and she was under the gun, nervous. Nipples poking through the cloth as she gabbled on in her stupid doodly accent. I could see her thighs were a little flabby, a bit veiny, but they looked soft as all get-out and she could maintain eye contact in the way only a woman with a husband could.
I was ten years younger than her but I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to put my tongue on her neck and feel a rapid heartbeat through her carotid artery, stick my hand up her pencil skirt and bite down hard. Nobody in the room, a big knockoff cocobolo slab with a score and four idiots, none of them could have stopped me. Her husband couldn’t have stopped me. I could pop his head like an overripe watermelon with a gorilla clap. The world’s your oyster when you’re still real. I felt the hunger riding in me, violent bursts of blood pressure that made my teeth tingle, hands twitch. Had me muttering to myself. So full of life and energy that it had to be expelled somehow. These kinds of impulses were knocking at my head like blast beats and I needed to get outside more but there’s not a whole lot you’ll discover hitting the pavement if the world around you’s just a commuter car prison transport shuttling back and forth. There must be excitement with deniability. I already couldn’t sleep most nights and came in to work at eleven. She got pregnant a few months later and the kid's due to come out soon.
I began to walk around “town” at night. I live in a miniature suburb that’s adjacent to a bigger development that keeps developing. Coastal real estate always is worth something and when enough Cathayan wealth or Hindoo elephant gold comes rolling in the old-timers realize mighty quickly that Flarda’s an awful lot more appealing with an extra five hundred thou in the bank. Fuck the kids. Grandson’s already halfway to being a nut slicer. May as well live it up so when Granddad dies Nonna can find herself someone nice in life’s dusk. The main grift though is the colleges. Four of them going up. No idea where these students come from but they’re all staggered in waves like a tower defense game. You build out ethnic comfort food places, maybe make some signs billingual, wipe up that revenue like bread crust sopping up the last bit of curry in the slop bowl. They feel like an aquarium and we’re supposed to be the fish, bobbing in and out of little plastic ferns and a diver in an old timey suit and a coral castle. It’s all fake, it’s Disneyland, but these people seem to really take it seriously given how much money gets funneled into it. Once the lights are out it’s as sterile as a surgical table. You only see just how fake the engineered hustle and bustle is at one in the morning. I think the ambient speakers flat out play crowd ambience noises most days. Ghost sound footsteps and indiscernible chittering. Maybe it’s just the drywall reflecting sound.
Anyway, the problem is that my local police department runs a tight ship. They know who pays their supervisors and mayor and such. Big builders. There’s cops crawling around running tightropes. They actually have guys watching public security cameras. I flipped one off not long ago going into a parking structure and I was met at the top floor by a patrol car and a guy who kept asking the same questions over and over. “You a student here?” “What are you really doing around here?” “Walking?” “Really?” “You’re really walking?” It’s a psychological pressure tactic meant to stick a screwdriver into gaps in your story. I’m stone cold autistic so he couldn’t get shit. Still made a show of radioing in my name to his boyfriend back at the station. I asked for a ride in his car down to the bottom and he told me to walk. I didn’t want to be seen in places of light after that. But nowhere else would be suitable to roam. I wanted to see without being seen.
At one o’clock in the morning and with my heart racing in anticipation, I stepped out into my microsize backyard and dug bare toes into the astroturf. Three-quarters to a full moon with low clouds. It was already bright outside but once the tube was lit, heaven erupted into a blunderbuss spray of stars and a mighty smear that I recognized, awed, as the Milky Way. Visible to the aided eye. The moonlight poured down around me, unavoidable, inescapable, drowning in the green-white false light as my bare eye struggled to comprehend what was going on. I looked left and right, stared down at my hands as the shadows from the trees bounded in and out of my grasp and I heard a queer sound; that of children, children at play, laughing and giggling somewhere from the ravine below that howled with nocturnal windchill. I tried to view the source and only found the river that coursed through reflecting holy flashes from the sky, rippling with the current and the wind, and as I listened closer to the sounds that snatched through the rush I realized that the sounds of joy were the cackling of coyotes spirited along the breeze.
I had to walk. A surplus greatcoat and some Salomons and my houserobe were all I needed. The chill, humidity, sent trembles up my hairy calves and my jaw was locked shut as I flipped the deadbolt on my front door and began my descent down to the local jogger’s trail (not an euphemism). Distant turbochargers popping echoed about as wetbacks two miles out raced around potholed toe-gay; all BMWs, low trim and plastered with hentai bumper stickers. The age of ricing out domestics passed long ago and in these days we were still handing out stimulus loans like candy, so if you’re already living outside the law it may as well be ‘la vida loca’. Uninsured. The light is something I can’t understate and I keep coming back to it because it really, truly, sincerely is beautiful to witness. My eyes are fucked up and I don’t see light normally. It comes in as crosses. Crucifixes or X-stars. The lens helps fix this distortion but it’s still there, only diminished, and every lamppost and star and the moon and its inverse shadows splayed out on the pavement and every reflective surface all had this brilliant aura, a hue of white light color corrected to an emerald green. I couldn’t imagine how fantastic the world would look in a place without artificial light. Going AWOL in Afghanistan just staring at the stars. I have never been in the military.
The world itself was beautiful because it was empty. It was Edenic. The garden, untouched. I walked along the trail and saw it totally empty of signs of man. It had a road, fences, benches, all the bits of civilisation, but because nobody was there it was like we’d all been raptured or blown to pieces in a nuclear war. It felt post-post apocalyptic. I was walking around on spectate mode, floating through empty fields, seeing how nice everything could be without stinking rolling balls of biomass and sweat and Bluetooth speakers. I sat on top of the concrete bench, squatting on top with my robe and coat draped around me. The moisture wicked up into my boxers. It felt cathartic.
I touched on the earlier problems with the place I live in, but the part I saved until now is a descriptor of the lovely people that inhabit it. My county is a cloaca gentium horror shit nightmare populated by an infinite quantity of procedurally generated flavors of gentile-cattle hybrids. It was Brazil 2, only somehow worse. Brazil with ultra inflated prices. This is awful for myriad reasons other people more clever and eloquent have stated to you in dull tangents, but the part that has caused me much psychic injury is the overall ugliness of the people. They’re fucking hideous. The majority of people possess an inborn ugliness of their souls that retches out and coats themselves like oil bursting from the desert, coating the dunes in ebon ichor and putrefying everything it comes in contact. It bursts from them with a violent pressure, their weak and flabby bodies unable to contain this foulness, and they hock it up and coat the walls, floors, any clean surface with as much of their taint as possible. It washes away with the rains and coats over with gentle blankets of dust, but the illness remains. It seeps into the soil and it permeates the heart of those forced to bear witness to this corruption of the good. In my shadowy garden I could see the outline of the real and this reflection of what was once real pierced me with a dagger. I have been deprived of beauty for my entire life. Wearing the lens only showed me how different the world could be. I couldn’t bear to come back home, but I had to, sulking and slow walking like a child scolded for staying past late. My eye saw purple illusions dancing in my eyelid as I tried to sleep.
After that magic night the upgrades kept rolling in. Panoramic bridge, surplus ACH helmet with a proper mount and a 100rd bag of 165-grain .308 projectiles stuffed into the pouch on the back to counterbalance the weight. Big red wool cloak and barefoot shoes. I considered going thermal but there were too many false positives plus you couldn’t see through windows. Lot of people don’t know how moonlighting works, nor their light transmission when silhouetted. We’re all so instinctive that we think walls of glass count for safety. I was blowing off work worse than ever with raccoon eyes and unmet KPIs but my false life in light meant nothing compared to the joy that a clean, cold, lunar world gave me every single night. Eventually, I stopped showing up completely. They didn’t seem to care. I hadn’t been opening my letters for some time, nor checking my bank account. I’d spend days just squatting next to the little duck pond along the hiking trail, watching the rippling reflecting water in green hues like some tropical oasis. Mountain Dew pits. It was nice. On overcast nights I’d have supplemental IR and I found the familiar paths turn to an eerie ambiance as rolling oceanic fog combined with heavy cover and missing moonlight to turn my routes into a blinding march through humid chills. There were bouts of primeval terror at distant snapping branches and I felt both apex predator and quarry- any man that would encounter me under these terms I’d have dead to rights, but even with my smell aided by the wet air and my hearing sharpened by poor sight any wild puma would have me pulped in a half second. It was thrilling gripping my pistol as I tramped about in the green-grey sea of fog, finally emerging back at my front porch as Odysseus returned.
One day I found a new light emerge along the westerly trail. It hovered some feet up and the pine trees around obscured its origin, a weird waving dot like a firefly. I flipped up my eyes and the world was rendered in blacks and purples, but the light still remained; it wasn’t infrared and it seemed like some manner of fire. I restored my vision and crept closer, moving off the trail and into a dangerously covered forest floor, my feet shuffling and disturbing the needles and pine cones and twigs for fear of unseen voids. A scent of smoke began to invade my perception and I paused to take it in; it was tobacco, undoubtedly, and I drew my pistol. I’d never killed anyone before, but if today was the day I put down some homeless bum camping out near my home I’d feel no remorse. I crept closer and closer to the floating point until it cut out of sight, then back in as I swayed back and forth. I was under a deck of some sort, trespassing a backyard. Looking up showed me something utterly impossible.
I saw a beautiful girl. Pale legs and well-formed calves rose up into a willowy frame clad in hot pants and a utilitarian bra, long arms and narrow shoulders with spindly fingers that tapped along a crude-cut railing and clutched a lit cigarette. Her bust was near-nonexistent and her neck narrow, forming up into a head that sprouted up like a morel from forest floor. Wavy long hair in a dark color, a petite and pointy nose, full lips, eyes obscured. She was like a forest nymph of some kind shackled to this structure. I’d made a hell of a ruckus getting over here but she seemed totally calm and on closer inspection I saw she was wearing wireless earbuds. Could be music, perhaps just white noise or some damping tune. She was helpless and senseless. This bothered me intensely. The beauty of the night that she’d clearly chosen to experience came from the slow and gentle reawakening of the senses. Seeing, hearing, smelling. She’d cauterized her ears for what, some idiotic lo-fi hip hop livestream? I wanted to shout at her, scare her a bit so she’d stop invading my space, but I couldn’t help but hold my tongue. There was still choice in entering my lonely lunar realm. She went out of her way to do it. If I spoke now, this world of mine would be utterly shut out to her. There could be a possibility that she was like me. I’d have to see. I needed to go. I slowly crawled on my hands and knees back to my trail and my safe routes, waving my head gently back and forth as my eyes drank in her silhouette and the thimble dance of her smoke.