Designing the Demons

Designing the Demons

By D Matthew Phibbs

“And… and what if the reality is precisely that nothing has existed?! Maybe nothing happened to me? I can understand only what happens to me, but only what I understand happens… what do I know about the rest? The rest hasn’t existed. Maybe nothing has existed! Maybe I have merely undergone a great, slow disintegration.”

-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

If I tell you this story, I run the risk of frightening and losing you, but if I don’t, I’ll lose myself and in losing myself lose you anyhow. I still think it happened the way I remember and even if what my roommate told me is really true, it doesn’t matter that much to the story. My roommate told me one night when we were both quite drunk and discussing the specifics of the following story, which I’d never confessed to him before, he says to me , “If you’re on a boat, and you’ve never been on a boat before, and you don’t know that there’s fish in the water, you probably won’t notice the fish in the water. But, if someone points the fish out to you, then you’ll begin to notice them everywhere.” I think this makes sense. Whether or not this is profound or is an adequate description of second guessing what I think I saw, I leave this question up to you. Yes you, the audience.
This all took place in a suburb of southern California, which can be just as weird a place as any. Anyone who says it couldn’t have happened here, obviously doesn’t know how strange it can get out there in the desert with nothing to do but fuck, drink, smoke, and go to the movies.
A lot of people, educated people, logical people, people with degrees in rational fields like biology or psychology or chemistry or law or ordination (round the sheep up for the slaughter), if you were to ask any of these folks if they believed in the existence of extra-terrestrials or not and furthermore, whether they believed that aliens kidnap people in the middle of the night, these people will often respond in the negative. The argument of course goes something like, “the sheer amount of energy it would take to travel from even the nearest star system to Earth is incomprehensible, not to speak of the likelihood of life being allowed to evolve on another plan – “. Blah, blah, blah. Regardless of how far-fetched you, the reader, think Star Trek or The X-files are, I can assure you… no, wait, I can’t assure you, but I will do my best to convince you that I am not just another psychotic with delusions of granjure; my fears are based in realities that I have to cope with nightly.
Now, you, the reader, may or may not be asking the question right now, “How can you prove it?” or maybe even be muttering under your breath right now, “Great. Another UFO nut with a hard on for writing his hallucinations down on paper. So what?” That’s ok. I’m not going to get anywhere if I let remarks like that deter me from telling my story. It’s difficult to distinguish the many forms of the paranormal, much less to truly convey what it is or why it is to be sensitive to things I can only cryptically call “energies” or “ghosts” or “demons” or “aliens”. I think, in order to more fully understand why I have become convinced that I am regularly visited by aliens that I should first start with the demons.
I guess I should probably tell you now, even if it destroys my credibility or trust as an author, I use to smoke a lot of weed in high school. When I say a lot, I mean like pretty much every day from the time I turned thirteen until I graduated at seventeen. Regardless of what you think you know about pot, maryjane, yesca, weed, etc… I will agree with one thing that has been said of it, marijuana is a gateway drug. I will, however edit what this means in the usual sense, to what this means to me. Weed, in my opinion, literally flings opens doorways to the infinite corners of the universe and beyond; passages in the users mind where any one of a billion pleasant or malevolent ‘things’ may pass in to, pass through, or take up residence and remain.
Some people, strangers, who I’ve made mistake of sharing these stories with have been emotionally or psychologically incapable of accepting the possibility that what I have been through, what I’m convinced I’ve been through, may indeed have been true. This is, of course, fine with me. It’s obviously disappointing sometimes because it loses me friends and quickly ends conversations when I see the look flash across the listener’s face that reads “this motherfucker is crazy”. But, back to the weed, what it did to me or what I did to myself.
It was junior year, 2001, it was fall semester and it was homecoming night. I had gone to the homecoming dance with my white trash barbie girlfriend, but she didn’t know how to dance. Pissed off, cause I wanted to dance because that’s what people were supposed to do at dances, I left early with my “friends” jon, matt, danny, and michael. All four of these dudes dealt me drugs at some time. We went to Jon’s apartment on Jason Street. He lived with his mom, or that is to say, his mom lived with him. Jon’s dad had died when his was about ten years old and his mom was a pushover who let him do whatever he wanted. She even let him smoke weed with his friends in their apartment. I always thought this was pretty weird, but took advantage of the situation whenever I could because it was a “safe” place to smoke. His mom was pretty weird too. She would hide in her bedroom upstairs and I rarely, if ever, saw her in the kitchen or the living room.
We were using Matt’s new bong that night. Between the five of us, we smoked a quarter of an ounce of weed, which, if you know anything about weed, you’ll know how much weed that is to consume between five people in a single night.
I remember sitting on the couch watching Jon and Matt play some new BMX game on his Playstation 2 and listening to Hieroglyphics, and then I melted into the cushions and held my breath for what seemed like forver.
When I opened my eyelids, I was what can only be described as upside down and inside out. I could see my body from another POV, but where exactly that POV originated I couldn’t tell you. It was my spirit that I could feel and see was upside down and inside out, like it had been fileted and torn open, then crucified hanging upside down. Something told me to breathe again, and I realized that I’d been holding my breath the entire time, however long that was. Then I noticed the source, the voice which had told me to breathe crouching on it’s haunches six inches in front of me was the fuzzy shadow man.
Now, I’d seen the fuzzy shadow people melt out of the trees by my window at the old house at the top of the hill before, but I’d never seen one close before. I gasped, inhaling for the first time in god knows how long –
And the shadow plunged it’s fist into my solar plexus.
Snapped back into “reality” and puked all over Jon’s carpet in front of the television. All four guys jumping up, afraid of the projectile puke being sprayed as I ran into the nearby bathroom and continued vomiting. Hearing the front door to the apartment slamming, meaning the guys had run outside to get away from the puke. Hugging the toilet, dry-heaving after there was nothing left. Eventually got up and washed my mouth out in the dingey sink. Opening the bathroom door, hearing a crash like a gunblast or a thunderclap. Then the dull thumping of stoners in skater-shoes running up the steps of the stairwell. All of them coming in huffing and puffing, out of breath and shouting. Me standing there asking what fuck is happening. Then Matt saying that a huge blue ball crawling with lightning had appeared in the courtyard where they were smoking cigarettes. It had approached them, this blue thing, slowly and they ran for it. Then it began chasing them and then exploded just outside the entrance to the stairwell, which explained the gun blast.
I don’t remember much else, other than these fragments as I was high, sick to my stomach, and had just been stabbed in the chest by a shadow demon.
Many years later, after telling my friend Matthew this whole story he would tell me, “Once you’ve been introduced to the form, you will see it in everything.” This incident would inform the next four years of my life as I strolled through atmospheres of anxiety, bits of blood trickling out the paranoid wound in the pit of my chest
Now, you might just say, “This kid has watched too many science fiction films” or, “This guys mind has been colored by too many Carlos Castaneda books”, but, in my own defense, how can you say that this isn’t what happened to me? How can I, for that matter, solidly say that my explanation of what happened is the way it really happened? I know that the possibility exists that it was all in my head just like I accept the possibility that I may go to hell one day even though I don’t believe in satan. It is a neither/nor situation, not an either/or and it may also be a both/and situation as well. True and false at the same time. Writing this all down, I have to wonder, did it ever heal? Can I just explain it all away as paranoia?