I racked my brain trying to figure out what was happening to my beloved Money Tree. Since I had moved to Washington State, I had fed the plant twice with some organic nutrients that performed miracles in my pot-growing days. Both times I had fed the plant, it loved it, showing its appreciation with lush green leaves, large and wide, spreading like stubby fingers. Each trunk of the plant gave birth to two or three baby new growths. Up until now, my old friend Money Tree had been thriving.

The Shadow Imp Woman

I had been watering this plant the same for 10 years with a pretty simple recipe: Once the first inch of topsoil was completely dry, I’d drench it and not water again until the soil was dry again. The drainage for the plant was as good as it gets, quickly draining even as I’d consistently run a faucet over the soil. I couldn’t imagine that it had anything to do with watering. The leaves were not drooping as they do when they are underwatered. They also did not have that pale yellow color, with tips like thin home-cooked potato chips, as they would have been had I been overwatering. Instead, the leaves were almost decaying, as if being poisoned, soft and wet like a good, moist Backwoods Cigar after you gut it to fill it with green. Stranger yet, chunks of the leaves were being torn off, leaving large shark bite-like imprints in the leaf when the piece would finally disconnect from the plant. I just couldn’t figure it out, and as each leaf began decaying, I prepared myself emotionally to lose my long-time buddy.

One night, I was doing my usual rounds that I do before I shower and then head to bed. I make sure all the blinds are closed, doors locked, and lights off, except for the stove hood light. I make sure to leave that on after I cook dinner, and I leave it on through the night. I tell myself it is because I don’t want to go stumbling around in the dark if I awake in the middle of the night, but a deep part of me knows that’s a lie. In my days of heavy speed usage, I could be awake for anywhere between 3 and 5 days. When you go that long without sleep, strange things happen, and one of those things is an absolute terror to actually go to sleep, and for me, especially in a pitch-black room. Although I have been clean for a long time now, I think that drug paranoia has embedded itself into my brain as some kind of mutated form of PTSD. It’s like Hemingway wrote in one of his early short stories, Now I lay Me:

“I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body.”

– Ernest Hemingway

When I first moved in and started painting—beginning my work in the bedroom—I noticed that the door to my bedroom was installed upside down by the genius who lived here before. To make matters more disgusting, they had cut two circles in the door for a doorknob and lock, but they gave up after installing the latch assembly, and the rest of the door knob was MIA. So, when I took the door off to paint the door jam and trim, I just never put it back on. I liked it open anyway. Having that door constantly open, leading straight into my kitchen, is the true reason why I leave the stove hood light on. It’s a kind of night light as it dimly washes warm light into my room when I am sleeping. Also, it’s not like I needed privacy. I’m the only one here. Well, or so I thought.

As I started off for the shower, the house dark aside from the stove hood’s lamp, slow simmering glow, I looked at the Money Tree with worry and disappointment. Then my eyes found the shadow the tree was casting from the stove hood’s light. It was a peculiar-looking shadow that seemed to crawl across the door that led to the laundry room. And that is when I saw something that, no matter how hard I tried for the next couple of weeks, I could not unsee.

The bizarre shadow on the door was the spitting image of some kind of small, malicious imp woman. Two legs, skinny and gaunt, led to a small torso. Her right arm hung and dangled by her side. But the left arm was curled up, her slender fist under her chin, propping up a face that was a cross between a Zelda Korok and a butchered jack-o’-lantern. What was most iconic was her hair. Pulled up in a long, top pony, and slumped over from her tilted head. The way she crept across the door reminded me of the demonic Golum-like shadow that clicked along my wall all those years ago. I almost felt hypnotized as I stared into her hollow sockets. I rubbed my eyes, hoping it would go away, but the shadow remained the same: observant, curious, and up to no good. As uncomfortable as the thing made me, the intrigue it stirred in me pushed me to leave it there on the door. To move it, all I had to do was move the Money Tree; even an inch would do it. Yet… I didn’t.

The next night, while doing end-of-night rounds, I was sure I wouldn’t see the imp woman’s shadow on the door. The night before, I had been a little sleep deprived and must have been imagining things. But when I clicked the toggle of my desktop lamp off, leaving the stove hood lamp as the only light remaining, there she was. The little imp thing grinning, trying to lead me to her kindness that reeked of falsity. My thoughts started spinning as I stared at her, and if I looked at her for a long while, I would start feeling the old familiar feeling of a mind reeling into madness. But again, I did nothing to rid myself of this shadow. Like the small shadow imp woman on my door, I, too, was curious.

Throughout the next week and a half, I was slowly starting to lose it. Every night, I would have that same bizarre encounter with the shadow imp woman on my door, but every night it grew more severe. And every night, I still left her be. It got so bad that by the second week, I began heavily drinking to sleep and keep my mind from spinning off the rails. Although I was clean off drugs, I felt like I was on them: the spinning paranoia, faint echoes of voices in the head, sharp threatening movements in the corners of the eyes, the feeling that something horrible was going to unfold at any moment. Yet, I could not look away. This little entity had hold of me. And all the while, the Money Tree inched closer and closer to its demise.

One night, I had hit my limit. It began after about a six-pack of Rainier 16-ouncers, and I was just sitting in my house, all lights off except for the stove hood lamp. I sat there on my futon and just stared at the shadow imp woman, she still in her same form with that mad grin on her face and her slim, skeletal frame. My head was spinning, spinning, spinning, on and on. Just shards of sentences whirling around and around. I rubbed my eyes, put my head down, and nearly wept in frustration. When I pulled my head back up, I looked up, hoping she would not be there anymore. She was.

Thoughts began spinning more violently, unleashing a long run-on sentence that erupted throughout my head. Then there were two energies, there in my head. One felt female while the other felt male. There seemed to be tension between these two forces. They argued, a maddening garble that turned and turned in my skull. There were no words. Both sides fervently despised the other, and although I could not hear them, I could feel them, each side obdurate and stubborn to the other. I could feel their glares–their hatred for one another–their egos of superiority. This went on and on, the two forces quiet yet loud, and that steady blabbering of nonsensical rhetoric, churning in my head like a nauseating morning. I hit my breaking point. Enough was enough.

I rubbed my eyes till spots showed, gritted my teeth as I shook my head side to side, and then screamed at the silhouette on my door like Kurt Russel in John Carpenter’s The Thing, right before he throws a stick of dynamite at that… that… Thing: “YEAH, FUCK YOU TOO!” I shouted. My buddy, whom I live with, must have been thrilled at that moment.

Except it was very much less dramatic. Instead of throwing an explosive at my door, bolting outside, and blowing up the house, I simply moved the Money Tree into my kitchen. The little shadow imp woman was gone, and so was the dark energy that emanated from her shaded skin. From that day forth, the Money Tree started to get its health back. Almost immediately, the leaves gained back their green, and tons of baby new growth began sprouting. In just a week or two, the Money Tree stretched skyward, standing almost as tall as me and happy as could be. I was certain that my troubles were over.

The Stove Hood Lamp

This last incident happened just a couple of weeks ago. As usual, I did my nightly rounds to make sure the house was locked up and shut down for the evening. Doors locked, curtains closed, and lights off, aside from the stove hood lamp. As always, I made sure that was left on.

After my shower, I brushed my teeth, put on my sleeping attire, and glanced into my kitchen. All lights in the house were off, all but the deep yellow of the stove hood’s lamp. I hooked left into my room, lightly lit from the hood lamp’s dim orange glow. Once settled in bed, turned on the two side lamps that sit adjacent to each other on each side of my bed, and opened up my current bedtime read. I was revisiting Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and on this night, I opened the book to Chapter 4: Who Has Won to Mastership.

I was swiftly transported to the bleak, bare snowscape of the Yukon, running on a sled pulled by dogs of various brawny breeds, from Skagway to Dawson. A lawless land, where miles meant money to men, and the canine world was governed by tooth and fang. It had been years since I read London, and as I sat on my hand-me-down mattress, the warm glow of my side lamps gently petting the walls around me, I felt my lips curl into a smile. I was enjoying the read, the adventure, the depth that London could take his audience. I could hear the panting of the dogs and the shouting of the men driving them. I could hear the blizzarding wind, muffling the sounds of sled blades slashing through the snow and the pitter-patter of paws sprinting across ice and snow. And as the chapter neared its end, I found myself utterly touched by the story of Dave the dog. Something had gone wrong with the poor pup, but the magnificent creature pushed on, and when he slowed and could not move without a whimper, the drivers pulled him off his reins. But Dave could not stand another dog doing his work, but as London so put it, “… a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it.” Now that’s how you need to write prose, I noted to myself. I read on:

“His strength left him, and the last his mates saw him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of trees. Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowly retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out… but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.”

– Jack London

For that moment, my heart heavy and my cheeks quivering with forecasted tears, I forgot I was reading about dogs. It was so painfully and brutally human. Because isn’t that all of our stories, that is, if they are left to play out long enough? Does not death always come with its revolver and put us all down like a broke-down dog. If it is not sudden demise, it is decades of work that steals away our stubborn bones, or long fought struggles with illness, both of body or mind, or the steadfast promise that old age holds for those of us who hold on long enough. And in that quiet room I call home, in that silent stillness of that lonesome space, I knew what it meant to truly be human.

A tear slithered down my cheek as I placed the book on the right-hand nightstand. Then I clicked the light off.

Panic immediately shook through my body as I was enveloped in pitch darkness. I knew I had left that stove light on. Hell, I rarely even turned that thing off. Someone is in the house, I thought, my heart pummeling the inner surface of my chest plate. My hand knocked a few notebooks and a pen off the nightstand as I fumbled to find the light, my eyes wide with fear. It’s him, I thought. It’s gotta be him.

Last winter, after having too much to drink at a Metal show down on Callow at The Charleston, I had saw an old man hunched over across the street, a shopping cart full of God-knows what, hunkered down and shivering in a blanket. I walked over to the man and offered him a cigarette. I felt for this man, old and abandoned, in the cruel Northwest winter. So, I told him he could come to my house for a warm meal. Looking back, I am not sure if I was trying to help this man or just have someone to hang out with at such a late hour. He seemed nice enough, so I pushed his shopping cart uop the hill back to my house, the man limping alongside me.

Back at my house, I fixed two plates of some disgusting lentil dish I had tried to make earlier that week. Looking at the plate of food, I could not help but think of cat barf. It didn’t taste good either. Even the old homeless man took a bite and left his plate untouched. I continued to slug back beers, not touching my food either. The old man didn’t drink, but he smoked weed. So, I packed up my little one-hitter, placed a jar of weed next to him, and told him to have at it.

Before I knew it, I was pushing the old crazy man out of my house. I was quite drunk, and the man was brandishing a hammer, a toothless grin and a mad look in his eyes.

That’s it!” I said. “Out, old man.” He seemed undeterred by my demand, and at that moment, I thought surely her would bring the hammer down into my skull. Instead, he just smiled at me, a deranged chortle, shaking the hammer back and forth.

“I will be back,” he said. Then he turned around, haggardly, and limped into the shadow, back into the cold night.

As my hand found the small lamp I had knocked off the nightstand, my paranoia eased. I clicked the lamp on. No one is in the fucking house, I assured myself. The only way into this house would be through breaking glass or pounding down doors. Breaking in would not be a quiet affair, and I had been reading in complete silence for the last hour or so. There was no way that crazy old man had gotten into the house. I knew I left that lamp on, though. I had stared at it for a moment after I turned the kitchen lights off, AND it had glowed into my room before I turned on the two bedside lamps. Then it occurred to me. The bulb probably burned out. DUH! I laughed aloud to myself at the ridiculousness of my assumptions. Then I got up and walked into the kitchen.

To my horror, the light bulb had not burned out. Nope. Someone or something had physically turned the knob and turned off the stove hood lamp. For a moment, I just stood there, pale as death, staring at the knob, the remnants of its faded arrow pointing at OFF. Slowly, I pinched the knob and turned the stove hood lamp back on. Then, stunned and slow-like, I walked back into my bedroom and got back into bed.

Why Now?

As I settled myself under the covers, my brain cycloned with frenzy. I tried to close my eyes, but it was no use. Why was all this weird shit happening now? After all the years of traversing the dark shadows of addiction and human depravity, why were these seemingly dark forces here? Now? I had gone the longest I had likely gone in the last decade without hard drugs. My drinking had become somewhat tame, and most of my days were filled with work and routine. These days, a wild night is me, a 12 pack of shit beer, and some music, during which I may slap on some snakeskin cowboy boots I have and my Nicholas Cage pants. In other words, life has significantly mellowed, and I feel at peace with my past and with every new day. So why now? Why was this happening now?

I sat in the half-lit bedroom, pondering all of the strange happenings in just the last 6 months. And I started trying to make sense of them. One incident after another, I went over in my head, and as the gears in my head slowed to a stroll, things started making sense.

Every night, I take 400 mg of QUEtiapine, an anti-psychotic and a super heavy sedative. Family and friends, over the years, have witnessed me sleepwalking as a side effect of this terrible drug. It was not impossible that the disappearing items and the strange things that were happening to my house plants were, quite possibly, being disappeared and tampered with by me; some strange act while in a sedative-soaked sleepwalk. The idea of me sauntering around my apartment, asleep, with scissors, cutting pieces of my plants, or taking cans of bear mace and chopsticks out of the apartment and tossing them somewhere outside was not exactly settling. But it beat the idea of some malevolent entity playing bizarre tricks on me.

What about the sudden decline of the Money Tree, and what seemed like a correlation to that mischievous Shadow Imp Woman on my door? Well, that could have been a mixture of bad sunlight (the sunlight is much better where the plant lives now), a textbook case of pareidolia, and the possibility of some kind of subtle mental breakdown. Case closed, I thought.

“Was this it? Was this the mind slipping? Was I finally losing my fucking mind?”

But the stove hood lamp turning on by itself… that I could not explain away. My thoughts started spinning and funneling into a deep bog of madness. I just could not explain how a light had been turned off, physically, when the only person in the house was me. Was it me? I swore I saw that light on after shutting the kitchen lights off. Had I, in some state of otherness, put the book down, gotten up, walked into the kitchen, turned the stove hood lamp off, then walked back into my room and back to my book, as if nothing ever occurred?

Was this it? Was this the mind slipping? Was I finally losing my fucking mind? I lowered my head into my palms, rubbing my eyes, hoping that I could wipe away the madness. That’s it. You’re losing your… I battled away the thought. Your mind, you’re losing… STOP!  I closed my eyes tightly, trying to focus on the red spots dancing on the inside of the lids. Trying to shake away the fact that sanity may be slipping away.

Suddenly, a part of me that I had never met came alive in my head. It was me, and it wasn’t me. The feeling was warm and comforting, and at one point, divine. A soothing woo sliced through the top-floor turbulence. And as clear as days when the sea winds blow in just right, came a calm and confident voice.

You’re not losing your mind, it said.

You’ve only just begun to find it.