Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Stranger

I'm sorry baby
Your dreams never come true
But your nightmares maybe

Minuit

I find this disturbing.

I remember growing up in the late 70s/early 80s at school, hearing the 'Stranger Danger' mantra at school and vague warnings about adults trying to lure children into cars with lollies. Never, ever, ever get in a car with someone you don't know. Run! It was never really explained exactly what Very Bad Things would happen to us if we got abducted, so of course we tended to imagine the worst. At least, I know I did. It was a scary time in my life for other reasons - religion, family, and nuclear war all lining up for a piece of my sanity.

I suppose as an adult I've got fairly blase about this stuff, since child abuse by family and trusted caregivers rather than in-broad-daylight abduction by outright strangers has saturated most of the headlines since the 1990s. There's been a sort of assumption - at least in my conscious mind - that it really doesn't happen here, or not anymore, and maybe that the Stranger Danger scare in my childhood years was just an urban myth, a few big cases blown out of all proportion, and then a fiction publishing sub-industry of grim 'serial killer' police procedurals solidifying the Twisted Lone Psycho myth into a sort of 1990s/2000s morality play.

But I don't think my subconscious ever really forgot. I mean, I know it didn't. The idea of just getting snatched out of the blue haunted me for years, and is still there, pretty much. And I guess I never did grow up that much, since I still can't really parse out in my head just what kind of dynamics are going on in a situation like that.

And now, three times. In my city. My safe, ordinary, boring city. Three times a child at or near school (the same school, even) has been accosted, in a situation right out of the Stranger Danger 'duck and cover' scenario that seemed so laughable. In each case, it seems the kid was smart enough to run and get help.

I don't know why this creeps me out as much as it does. Why it bothers me more than the horrific cases of domestic violence to children that have happened in NZ recently. The whole betrayal of trust from family thing is one of the most basic fears there is - why doesn't it reach me like this does?

Maybe it's because I grew up feeling unsafe in my own head, and my gut's take on it is that danger from family is bad, but it's something you can get to understand, predict, live with. It's not good, but you can cope, for some factor of coping. You build structures of emotional walls, segregate the weirdness, keep it under control. You go into combat mode, lock down hard, go quiet and cold and precise inside, and do what needs to be done. The true realisation of the damage, the aftermath, comes later in life, when you look back at what you should have had and what you got instead. What you are.

But violence out of nowhere is just weird and leaves you shocked, gasping, no place to turn and no-one to come and save you. You don't even have that inner smirking voice saying you silly silly person, you knew that was coming didn't you. You should have been smarter, harder, older.

No, I think more likely it's because I used to think the world was a scarier place than it turned out to be, so flashes of seeing that some of those old fears weren't entirely wrong leave me sweating. What if all the others turn out to have been true too? And after all the emotional work I've gone through to try to get away from them?

It's like finding out that the bogeyman was real, after all.

Stranger.

You know who he is. Your parents talk in hushed voices about him when you're around. But never quite hushed enough that you can't make out the words, here and there, no matter how much you wish you couldn't. The words are how he finds you. He's that dark figure beside your window. You see him crouch in the bushes. He loves bushes. He's wearing dark clothes, loose fitting. There's a hood over his head. You can't quite make out the face - and you never will. He has a van. Maybe it's an unmarked van. They don't have unmarked vans in this country, but the Stranger lives in the country of dreams, and there he is the police. Kids who see him - who get seen by him - who meet those black holes he has for eyes - they just vanish, and don't come back. Ever.

And no matter how you try not to think about it, each night as you fall toward sleep, you feel him out there. Waiting.

He doesn't ever have to move. He just stays there, night after night, in that dark shadow in the bushes beside the window beside your bed. You know he's not really there but it doesn't help. You know you don't want to, but you won't have a choice. Because he's like gravity. Sooner or later, you're going to come to him.

Everyone does, in the end.