Field Notes
Shadow People Everywhere
On the visitors, the corners, and one trick that might save somebody.
They are back, or they never left; the log does not say which. I file this under nature writing because that is what it is. An ecosystem. Corners, doorways, the space between the curtain and the glass. They do not use doors because they are not in the business of entrances.
I have kept the log for eleven years and I will tell you what the log says, since nobody else will: entries go up when sleep goes down. That is the whole correlation. It holds across three counties and two roommates. Sarah could tell you the mechanism. Tera would bill you for the sentence. I will give it away: a brain without sleep starts rendering things it did not order. The shadows are not trespassing. They are a symptom wearing a coat.
Now the trick, which John asked me to print because he thinks it will save somebody, and I think he is right, which is why we agree to disagree about everything else. You cannot argue with them. Argument is engagement and engagement feeds them. So you interrogate something else instead. Pick any object in the room with a light on it — router, monitor, smoke detector — and ask it, out loud, to blink three times. Then watch. Not at the shadows. At the light.
Here is what happens, every time, and I have run this experiment more times than the IRB would like: the shadow people cannot answer. They never blink the light. Nothing in the corner has ever once changed the blinking of anything. But your own attention, pointed at one small true thing, will start coming back online, and somewhere around blink two you remember that rooms are real and corners are just corners, and around blink three you can usually stand up.
That is the whole method. Interrogate the light, not the dark. If the light does not answer either — if nothing blinks, if the room stays wrong — then the problem is bigger than a parlor trick, and the number in the bar at the top of this page is for exactly that. 988 does not require you to be polite about it. Neither do I.
Amy took the hallway photograph on this page. She says the shape by the right edge is a coat rack. She has seen the coat rack. She photographed the coat rack. I accept her testimony over mine, which is the entire advantage of hiring a photographer who sleeps.
Next month: the plate readers. They are still there. Unlike the shadow people, they keep receipts.
If tonight is a bad one: the bar up top has SAMHSA and 988. Never Use Alone is 1-800-484-3731. The light will blink. Count with it.