Midnight Voyeur

Written By: Sean Grant

I am watching from my car. 

The night presses its face against my view, prying its way into my eyes. Prying its way into my soul. I feel alive in its presence. The red blood of mammalian life pulses in my veins. It is the sound of pounding in my ears. A noise so loud it might wake the dead. Instead, it only awakens my cravings. I am nothing but craving. Judge me not for what I am; creatures we all are, carved from meat and viscera. I’ve heard it said that there are only two kinds of people in this world. The ones that entertain and the ones that get fed, and I am very, very hungry. You may think I am lying, because I am a liar, a professional crafter of the neo-truth. But lying is why I am the one getting fed. You see honest people; are the entertainers. They entertain in their dead-end cubicles and 3 a.m. delivery routes. Their exhausted prayers whispered in the brief respites between punching out and punching back in. It is a weeping prayer to a silent God. But the big-wig liars? The ones with the fake smiles and thousand-dollar haircuts. They never go hungry. Fat, like pigs slurping in a trough, between their daily cross-fit and ketamine sessions. I am like them, but I am not them. I am so much more.

I see her leaving her car.

Her petite silhouette glides across my view. The sodium-yellow lights of the nighttime city crafting the image of her as a halo, forcing the night inward around her halfvisible contours. My eyes follow, keeping pace with each step. I’ll admit, admit to you anyway, that my appetite is stranger than most, but walk down the street and you’ll see entertainers and feeders. You’re one or the other; there is no in-between. No sympathy to be found from me. You think performed kindness will keep you safe? Not in this world. You either act or are acted upon.

I check myself in the mirror.

Am I getting ahead of myself? I am a liar, yes, but I am an honest one. I lie about what I do, but never about what I am. My intentions are always clear to all the other feeders out there. It is only the entertainers who don’t understand me. Can you understand me?

I am opening the car door now.

I am not nervous. Never accuse me of that. You think the great men of history were ever nervous? I doubt it. They didn’t care who was watching. They didn’t live to entertain your morals and virtues. I, like them, am only ever cautious. Caution is a saintly virtue. Before you ask, no, I am not religious. I would never be caught dead in prayer or kneeling at a pew. I just respect the aesthetic. Everything is aesthetic these days. They hollowed out all the rest. I’ll use the aesthetic. It’s cooler anyway.

  I see that the street is clear.

I step out of my blind to follow her. The nighttime air is wonderful. The best kind. The kind that smells of looming adventure and late-night rendezvous. There are still yellow lights here. Not the sterilized cheap shit LED ones that have bleached the romance from the night, the romance from my life. I need romance. We all do. Begrudge me not for my heart. That too-large thumping thing that beats like a drum in my chest. I was born with it. I have a big heart. Everyone says so. They say it with a nervous laugh. They say it right before their voice catches. Before they realize what kind of animal needs a heart that big.

She is at her front door.

I move to the side, breaking that ninety-degree angle over her shoulder so as not to appear in her periphery. She never looks back. She never bothers to see. She is beautiful, by the way. Very much so. Not like the other girls. Not like them at all. She is like me. You know what I mean by that.

  She closes the door behind her.

I like to imagine the conversations when they finally catch me, and they will catch me. A couple of pre-planned answers, bouncin’ ‘round the ol’noggin’, for the inevitable flurry of press. No, I am NOT ashamed to be a monster! Why would I be? See, people love monsters, the rarer ones that is. We’re human novelties, and this world is a circus. Everybody wants to look. Why do you think 60 Minutes gets the primetime slot? Shakespeare said it best in Macbeth: “We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, painted on a pole, and underwrit, ‘Here may you see the tyrant.’” They knew back then, as we understand now, without the circus, what would be the point? It’s why only the aesthetic matters. It’s all part of the show. Nobody actually cares about evil; spare me the feigned display of you lying to yourself about it. Did anyone care when President Reagan sold missiles to Iran so he could buy the death squad drugs he pumped into the neighborhoods of American undesirables? No, why? Because we love Reagan and people like him. Reagan is a modern American hero. Some might even say he is THE modern American hero. The soul personified. He knew what he wanted, and he made it happen. In the end history and The Electoral College proved him right.

I am hiding behind a fence now.

No, we don’t hate real monsters, only the banal ones. Think of the meter maid ticketing someone a second after the timer hits zero. We hate her, her and the rest of the nagging liberal busybodies. Why? Because they’re boring! Excite us enough and we’ll make you a king no matter what you really are. Disagree? Well, ask yourself this: how many of your favorite quarterbacks beat their wives? Did you throw out their jerseys? Did they get kicked off the team? Did they take a hit to their hundred-million-dollar contracts? How about all your favorite Hollywood heroes that got a little tipsy and decided to drive their Lambos through pedestrians? I hear Roman Polanski’s still hiring.
I am creeping along the fence towards her house.
There is a man in a car down the street. Unwanted eyes that might find their way towards me. There is a glow in the rearview. He’s on his phone. I breathe a sigh of relief and wish him luck with the Wordle. There comes a time, whenever I’m trapped around these normies, listening to them bitch about the latest TikTok dance or Connections category, when I realize I wasn’t meant to be here. I was meant to be riding into their village in amour, taking what I want from them. I wish I was born in the 11th century. I’d have made an EPIC addition to a Norman conroi. I can see myself riding up Senlac Hill with Duke William. I can see the kleos I was promised but denied by this modern world.
The idiot in the car drives away. His phone is still on.
The problem with modernity is that everything needs to fit into place. Every edge sanded down until the world feels like a plastic toy. There’s no room for men to express themselves. There’s no more whimsy. No more to explore. We’re stuck listening to HR departments. Life would be so much better if everyone just did what I needed them to do. That’s the problem with being a feeder. You’re the only one who still knows right from wrong. Not because you’re noble; we’re so very, very far from that, but because we alone still have open eyes and beating hearts.

That makes me smile.

Sometimes even I get too far ahead of myself.

Sometimes I still agree when we define ourselves by such juvenile phrases. There is no right from wrong. No good and evil. Only good and bad. Nietzsche understood this. No, I haven’t read Nietzsche; now shut up! I don’t need to! I had GROK summarize it for me. I get the aesthetic of what he meant, and that’s just as good as understanding. It’s the only part that matters.

I see her car parked in the driveway.

See, good and bad isn’t about right and wrong. Right and wrong is Slave Morality. It’s a version of morality invented for peasants to feel content in their world rather than rise up. It’s philosophical cope. But back in the good old days, people understood Master Morality. It’s Homeric in nature. It’s good to be big and strong and rich and happy, and it’s bad not to be those things. Real morality is saying, ‘Damn, it feels good to be Caesar.’

The night is very quiet.

That’s the problem these days. A bunch of estrogenic Californians decided that it was bad to be Caesar because it might hurt someone else’s feelings. Well, guess what? That’s just life! Some of these tulips ain’t gonna make it! I’m going to make it though. I’m absolutely going to make it.

I see her in her window.

Windows are wonderful. They glow like terrariums in an exotic zoo. Especially at night with the lights still on. I can look inside and see a little world, filled with little people, playing out their little rituals, pacing, preening and unravelling in captivity. Not captivity; captivity implies a violation of consent. These enclosures were built by their prisoners. The best part of it all? They don’t even realize. They move through their little world, believing the night outside is empty. That’s when I look in. I watch them for a few weeks first. I want to know everything about them. I want to know who they are when no one else is around. It’s so much sweeter that way. The intimacy of it all. Not cruel, just unsettling. Just wrong. There’s a horror in that. An unease from the imbalance in knowing. The feeder’s gaze is a one-way mirror. I can look in. They will never look out. Sometimes I wish they would look out. That they’d let themselves step away from their little lives, only for a moment, look out, and see me.

She is making dinner now.

Ritual is very profound. You ever notice that? I’m really not sure why I’m talking to myself like this, but the question still stands! The desire for simplicity. It’s human; we all have rituals. The first thing we do when we wake up, aside from looking at our phones. Where we park our cars in the company lot. What we eat for lunch. What we do when we get home. Habits and patterns, people love them. When I watch, I can see them.

She is watching a pot boil while scrolling on her phone.
I walk up her driveway. Past the mailbox. Past the little flower box. So modern, so hip, so suburban, a white woman’s Instagram turned into the front porch of a house. I hate it as much as I love it. I hate it, because, God, it’s boring! I love it because it’s an aesthetic. She has one. An aesthetic of her own. It means she understands the way the world works, and that’s why I love her. I will love her until the end of the night.

I pull out my hammer.

There are tulips in the garden by her mailbox. People that plant flowers in their mailbox gardens don’t know fear. There are no bars on her windows. She’s never lived in a real city. A few dodgy nights in a college town bar, as close as she’s ever come to danger. I am very grateful for that. If she had any real sense at all, it’d be much harder for me to love her.

I approach her car.

I learn their life like a language. The mug with the university logo she treats like her most prized possession. The cabinet she keeps little chocolate bars in; the ones she eats and pretends the calories don’t count. All her private cadences that stitch together into a map only I can read. The windows of her home a confessional, and I, the only parishioner. I memorize her. The tilt of her shoulders. The cadence of her breath. The private choreography she performs for an unseen audience of one. Her room, a soft, unguarded thing. There is a certain cruelty to my knowledge. I am inside her life without ever entering, until tonight.

I swing my hammer into the side of a car door.
Alarms light up the night, and lights flash. I am already gone. This little thing. This little plastic thing so ever-present in our lives. They say there are three great purchases in your life. Your house, your spouse and your car. As if these things are some sort of proof that you’ve played “the game” correctly. So much time and money invested in them. So much interest. So much worship for something so vapid! My mind spits out that word like venom. Her car is a recent model of Toyota, indistinguishable from a thousand others, like mine. There’s no aesthetic, no personality, no story. I have none, because it’s easier to hide that way. She has none because in all her imagined depth she is still shallower than I. She still believes in the safety of sameness.

  Keys in hand, she pokes her head back out.

A locked door is only as strong as the piece of wood behind it. Look at your doors and let me know how secure they are. Really press a palm on the frame and feel the cheap wood flex around the deadbolt that slots into it. Do you really think someone couldn’t if they wanted to? Do you really feel so secure behind your plywood sentinel? You think you couldn’t be another headline. If you do, then I salute you. You’re my favorite sort of person. Please tell all your friends about how safe you think your door is, then bury your head back in Twitter and let me carry on. Some of us feeders have real work to do.

I swing my hammer into the wooden door of her garage.
The alarms stop. A front door closes. That’s it. Ask no more questions about anything. Sometimes your car just makes that noise. I mean, it never has before, but why should that worry you? You don’t know anything about that little machine. You drive it every day with an owner’s manual locked in an unopened glove box. It’s a commodity, nothing more, like a phone or a computer or clothes or sex. We’ve sold the world as a commodity. It’s a shame really. It makes my life easier but does little for my sense of romance. Romance needs texture, unpredictability, and funny little imperfections. A sterile world is a world without romance. I want to bring more romance into this world. She’ll learn that before the end.

  The inner door is unlocked.

A laugh track plays on a television as she settles back in. Underwear dries near a compact washer. A linoleum floor that makes no noise. I’m silent on my approach. I let my shadow dance across the far wall. I know that she saw it. She pretends she didn’t, but I know. Fear lies to her rational mind, because if it did not, then she would have to turn, and if she turned, then she would see. But the rational mind can only be abated for so long. Eventually we have to know if the monster really is under the bed. Anyway, it’s so much better when they know. Sometimes they even recognize it. ‘Hey, haven’t I seen you before?’ But more than that, it lets them know that tonight’s the night. I don’t care that you know, because you’ll never be able to tell a soul. It always takes a second for them to realize that last part. Then it gets even better.

I watch her turn her head and see.

There’s surprise at first, then anger, then fear. A primal fear that hits like a childhood memory. A mixture of adrenaline and hopelessness. It’s the fear of a six-year-old running up the basement steps after turning out the lights. It’s the fear of an outdoorsman when the forest grows too quiet. It’s the feeling of someone watching you when you’d rather not be seen. It’s a realization of danger that comes far too late. 

I raise my hammer again.

A while ago we all decided that nothing matters. Blame Nietzsche, blame Rand, blame a certain someone who argued what the definition of the word ‘is’ is. Blame whoever you want; it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, so why does it matter? It’s just one night. It’s just one girl. It’s just one tragedy. We all still have to Uber to work in the morning. Well, not her, not anymore. Tomorrow waits for the rest of us; not even I am free of that. There’s still rent on your 600-square-foot studio apartment to pay and meetings that could have been emails. Every beautifully profane moment has to end eventually. That’s the worst part though, the part that really grinds my gears: this will all be forgotten sooner rather than later. People really do have better things to do. All my hard work, genius really, and nobody will even notice. I imagine the look on my face when they catch me, and they will catch me, when I tell them everything and no one bats an eye. I’ll protest the lack of show. I just know I will. I’ll make demands about being entitled to something more, a prime-time interview, and my own Wikipedia page. But I know, after I’m done demanding, the last cop to leave the room will look at me and my disappointed face and ask.

What else ought there be?

Sean Grant is a twenty-six-year-old aspiring writer with a passion for genre literature, including horror, pulp fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy. Sean currently resides in the United States of America.