A Secret for Only the Brave

If you value your own safety and always err on the edge of caution, I implore you to stop reading at once! Be off with you, for your own good, and don’t ever read another line.

From the sound of your silence, I shall proceed:

Now that those of you who remain have all chosen to dance with the devil (and I certainly wish you the best of luck, for I will certainly have nothing to do with the outcome!), I shall consider myself absolved of any concern as to the veracity of my effort in communicating to you the dangers manifest in the following words. This document contains a brief account of an experience related to me by a man who, since meeting me, has fallen gravely ill, so much so that his sight has left him for greener pastures and he remains quite unalterably mute (though, for better and a bit for the worse, his writing mind and penmanship are remarkably acute, and quite worth their respective form of audience, though bleak are the stories from his ageing imagination). As I heard his account, I took careful note of the characteristics of the peculiar man in the story as he was described in the told unfolding of events, and I urge you now to do the same as I recall them for you in the most objective representation any honest translator can manage:

A man tells me that he goes to work every day, seven days a week, as a Security Officer and CCTV Technician, responsible for monitoring and maintaining the closed circuit surveillance system in a 250-unit luxury apartment building. This job is his life as he lives in a small domestic-type alcove adjacent to the security suite, and a loose, 24-7 shift on-call had never given him reason to complain, certainly also not because of the freedom it gave him to set his own schedule and move in and around the building with ease. A heavy wind of trouble, however due, had never blown through the apartment complex, and nobody noticed the black swan perched on the eaves at sunrise.

One evening, as the nightlife crowd outside was shifting from dinner dates to more melodic interests, the Security Officer woke from a late afternoon nap and rolled his eyes over the series of surveillance monitors just as a tall, strikingly handsome man rolled through the revolving door. As he approached the front desk, I’m told, a large stone bird carved out of limestone separated from the wall behind him where it presided over the exit, and plummeted down to the entryway floor, slicing straight down through the doorman’s shoulder on its way. All of this the Security Officer witnessed on the screen. The doorman survived, but unable thereafter to manage any heavy bags or doors, for sure.

What’s more, as has been relayed to me, after the tall man had finished with the front desk, the hotel’s software system immediately started flickering, misbehaving, and eventually had to be shut down to finally clear the line of repeated, unrequested, outgoing emergency service calls. Thereby untethered to his security office, and unassisted by any video feed with the whole system being compromised, the man then tells me, he stalked through the hotel floors trying to find that tall, mysterious man. Not quite sure what to even ask him, the Security Officer started to worry about whether or not confronting him was a wise idea. Perhaps there was something about this tall man, something unspeakable, and sinister, and visually betrayed by his striking appearance and physical confidence. Perhaps coming across him would constitute a proximity breach, and something might come off, or transfer, or infect! him if he came too close, like it seemed to have done for the doorman and receptionist in the front lobby. The Security Officer then tells me that he abandons his plans and then attempts to evacuate the building as soon as possible, his heartbeat throbbing behind his eyes, all the while avoiding where the tall man might be at every cost.

To curtail the rest of the story, this man spent the next six days hiding in various rooms of the hotel, perpetually looking over his shoulder, deathly afraid of accidentally crossing paths with that terrifyingly handsome tall man. It wasn’t until two weeks after that (two weeks spent, undoubtedly, poring over video recordings from the various camera feeds in the front lobby, analyzing every possible frame for as much visual data as possible) that the Security Officer finally mustered up the courage to track down and confront the tall man in the park that stretches along the Welkin River. How he figured out when I would be sitting on that bench, I doubt I will ever know. Perhaps it was his lucky day. Well, perhaps that was crass of me, I apologize.

Needless to say, he found that tall, handsome man he was looking for, and he told him everything that he had seen, everything that had happened, his theories about how it all worked out, and the sleepless week he spent evading his unknowing foe, as well as the trail of misery and desperation he found along the way, all the while as I sat there listening in complete silence. I heard all of this, true, though it wasn’t entirely novel information, and I told him, “Thank you for letting me know,” just as I told the thousands of others who have tracked me down to give me the same message over the years. The man responded with nothing, so I departed from him there.

This all begs the question, then, as to whether or not my delivery to you of the dangers of reading this, and your acceptance and participation therein constitutes a form of interaction between us. Either way, I wish you luck! Though I must admit, I can’t possibly have any influence on the outcome of what may befall you now.

@SmldrngNrclpsy #WRTGPRAC