The cruelty of waiting | Column

It’s like this.

It’s like you know a big, scary guy is going to come hurt you, maim you, take a finger, a toe, possibly more.

You’ll be given a head start, a few bags of dry goods, non-perishables and water. You’ll be given a way to track his movements in real time, but he’ll creep up real deliberate, like Michael Myers crunching work boots across a gulf of snapping twigs. There won’t be anything you can do except run, hide and eat a ton of cheese puffs inside the pot-soaked walls of the last room at the last Red Roof Inn.

The big, scary guy doesn’t just threaten you. He threatens your friends, too, your neighbors, your family. The barista who makes your coffee with the right amount of cream, the mail carrier with the belly and the sideways smile, the guy you‘ve never met who walks past your window with a stooped German Shepherd. All the colors of your life, the shadows and light that fill the valleys and fertilize the fields could be dissolved in one grisly, black night.

At 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. and 11 p.m., your emotions will spike and simmer, wax and wane as you squint at little tracks that have wiggled negligibly and enormously. Each of these predictions will carry immense meaning. Will these bobbles make you safer? Will these bobbles destroy someone else, someone less prepared for the big, bad guy?

Since there’s nothing to do but wait, you’ll sit and wonder if you’ve done enough to outsmart this sick game, enough to fortify yourself against the attack. You’ll wonder if you’ve driven enough miles on the hot highway with your most precious pictures and pertinent papers hidden from the big, bad guy. You’ll wonder if you’ve chosen the right escape path or if he will just laugh and stalk you to your new location.

You’ll go online chronically. You’ll listen to people hundreds of miles away and safe from the ire of the big, bad guy. They’ll decide you’ve made the right choice or the wrong choice, as if they know your own quest more intimately than you do. They’ll say your community leaders have not done enough, that individual people have not done enough. Your politicians will spar over who is helping you fight the big, bad guy best while you swill hot garbage coffee from a lobby filled with scared big, bad guy refugees glued to the wobbling lines on pocket screens.

Worse yet, you’ll wonder if you’ve caused this somehow. Big, existential questions will get caught in your throat, morasses no one can navigate from a bed with jaundiced sheets beside a industrial air conditioner. Did you vote for the right people, the people who believe the big, bad guy is real? Did you buy too many things, eat too much meat, drive too many cars and live in the kind of paved plots of land that the big, bad guy likes? Did you do the things you shouldn’t have done not fully understanding — or willfully ignoring — how they egged on the big, bad guy?

You’ll feel responsible for the your own fate, yes, but also the fate of the mailman and the guy with the German Shepherd and the children scared in back seats and the house cats howling in carriers, and that’s really a lot to take at a Red Roof Inn.

There will be only one good gift that emerges on the run from the big, bad guy. You’ll be so sick of this charade, so tired of this game, that you’ll emerge with a new energy to beat him back. Because you are so, so weary. Because you can’t do this anymore.

And you’ll have help. You’ll look around at the people cycling through the same untenable calculations, eating the same saccharine snacks, trying to calm the same antsy babies and pets, tracking the same wobbly lines on the same websites, and you’ll know one way or another, it all has to end.

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