Is there such thing as evil? Or are murderous people just a product of psychology/environment/upbringing?
I don’t know if wickedness is something like a poison in the air, and some people are more absorbent than others, or if it’s like a drug–you have one taste, and want more, little by little your taste for doing evil deeds grows. Is it like “the force” (dark side)? I don’t know, myself I am pretty anti-violent, so I can’t understand violent urges.
I ask because of what happened at four in the morning yesterday. My husband and I were awakened by the soft shuffling of feet, and I opened my eyes to see the dark silhouette of a man standing in front of our bed.
“Hello?” I murmured, and the man shifted, said “oh, I’m sorry, I’m in the wrong place–I’m supposed to be in the apartment across the street” and as I blinked he was gone and the door shut behind him.
An honest mistake, I thought, as I rolled over sleepily, but my husband jumped up and flipped on the lights. “Where’s my phone–I think he had a knife. Did you see anything? I’m going to call the police–look, there he is outside, he really is going across the street… ” He said, peeping through the blinds.
A knife? A knife? Why did he… I sat up and hugged my knees. My mind flashed back to that month in college I took a $5 self-defense class and accrued a paranoia of men breaking into my apartment at night and “taking advantage” of my vulnerable state.
The 911 operator had him stay on the line as we watched from the window the five police officers walking one at a time from their patrol cars into the apartment across the street. We waited. I turned on all the lights. Soon two of the cops came back to our place and asked a few questions, one fat and mustached, the other built and bald–both with a noticeable air of incredulity. They told us no one had answered the door.
We were both pretty disappointed when they drove off soon after without doing a stake-out or searching other apartments. Even though I myself hadn’t seen a knife (I’m close to blind without my glasses) my imagination had by this point conjured up different explanations, each one more gruesome than the next. About ten minutes after the police left, we heard an engine gun outside and looked through the blinds just in time to see a van peel out of the parking lot, one we’d never seen before.
Soon after, a light in the parallel apartment flicked on and off.
“Well, that means she’s alive, right?” I said, but my husband wasn’t reassured. He started pulling on his pants and shoes.
“Don’t go, please!” I begged.
“I can’t just sit here, waiting,” he said, putting his cell phone in his pocket. “I have to find out what happened. What if she’s hurt?” (“She” as in the girl living in the apartment we imagined had just been attacked by the mad man).
I watched him cross the street, my body muscles rigid with terror. Please come back! The next three minutes I wondered what being a 24-year-old widow would feel like .
Nobody answered the door. Nobody jumped from the bushes to ambush him on his way back.
So the two of us triple-bolted the door and tried to sleep. I felt the world slowly awaken, the sky slowly brighten, the noise of birds slowly getting louder. I slept on and off. Finally around 9 a.m. my husband sat up and announced he was going back to try again. (Hoo boy daylight is so much less scary than the night.)
Anyway. The person living in the opposite apartment was actually a guy. He said the man who’d come into our apartment was an employee of his, and had made an honest mistake, and was apparently pretty freaked out about walking into a stranger’s house at four in the morning.
Ah. A probable explanation. As for the knife? Could have been something else. At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself, because that kind psycho-ness is stuff that happens to other people, not me.
I mentioned this in an earlier blog, how horror and violence and things blowing up and sex and more violence is not really that entertaining for me. Because it actually happens, and it’s pretty freaking un-entertaining for the victims, I’m pretty sure.
But I do admit that being so close to death, (at least hypothetically) does make one re-evaluate one’s life. I love-reevaluating. Although it’s hard to come to conclusions when you consider the murderous thoughts and thoughtless killings that abound in the world.
Where does it come from?
