Another Visit From the Shadow People

In my last account of the Shadow People, I mentioned the fact that Saskatoon seems to have perhaps a bit more than its share of wackadoodles. I also mentioned the fact that I appear, of late, to have become a wackadoodle magnet. In this second account, I document a slice of human behaviour that was not only surreal in its overall weirdness, but which played, ironically, off my own midlife-crisis-generated paranoia. The following might best be read while listening to the theme from “The Twilight Zone”…

Wackadoodle 2
We’d returned from an enjoyable vacation in Vancouver, and the second I set foot at the Saskatoon airport, the feeling of weirdness returned. Two weeks away from this place, and one can see the difference. I’ll admit, I was feeling paranoid as hell, and for the purposes of this story, it’s important to keep that in mind. I stayed indoors for a day and a half.

The next night, I needed to make a very short trip downtown to pick up Maya from work. I got into my car, and got onto the street. Slowly, 40 to 45 klics, keeping an eye open for traffic. There was none. It was another Sunday night, and very little going on. I moved slowly into the downtown core. Take it slow, I told myself, Saskatoon has weirdness in it. Yes, again I’m being melodramatic, but it’s how I was feeling that night.

I picked up Maya from where she works, and started home again. Very little traffic as we crossed the Broadway Bridge. We stopped for the light at Main.

A horn sounded, four or five cars away. Someone yelled at someone else. Someone else yelled back. “Sounds like another road-rage,” my wife commented. “Yes,” I said, my stomach tightening. I hunkered down and stared straight ahead, hoping whatever violence might erupt stayed with the participants. Only a few blocks to go.

The light turned, and we moved on. We got onto 8th Street, where not much was happening at all. We turned right, alone, onto Clarence Avenue. No one else on the street, the entire way down Clarence. We passed a temporary illuminated sign placed there by the police. “YOUR SPEED:” it read, “44 km/h”.
We turned off Clarence onto our street. Just a few more blocks to go.

Suddenly, a car was right behind us—and I do mean right behind, tailgating dangerously. Here we go, I thought. And we’d almost made it, too. I felt the urge to speed up, to get him off our tail, and decided not to anyway. Let him pass if he wanted to. If he bumped us, it wouldn’t be me paying. We turned at last into our driveway, and the car behind us sped on.

As we got out of the car I saw the other vehicle make a u-turn at the end of the block. Great—someone from our very own street. We used to have such nice neighbours. A bizarre image entered my mind: what if he came back, and stopped to accuse us of something we didn’t do? I nearly laughed out loud. Preston, old boy, I thought, you really ARE getting paranoid.

The car came back. The driver lowered his window.

“Hey,” he called to us, “are you staying in for the rest of the night?”

I shaded my eyes against the streetlight. In the dim light, I thought I recognized my new next-door neighbour. “Yes,” I told him. “What’s up?”

“You’d better do just that,” the man ordered, obviously trying to sound like a cop. I instantly realized this wasn’t my neighbour, nor anyone I’d seen in my life. “I just clocked you doing 89. You’d better stay in tonight.”

The world lurched beneath my feet.

It’s rather hard to describe the whirlwind of thoughts and notions that swirled into and out of my mind in the next two seconds. Suffice to say, it was almost like the gods had read my very thoughts, and decided to play a twisted practical joke. It was, in fact, so bizarre a coincidence that I thought at first I thought I’d heard him wrong. And still might, were it not for Maya at my side to hear him too.

“Boy,” I might have responded, “are you barking up the wrong tree.” But I was still too steeped in the surrealism of the moment. There’s coincidence, and then there’s this.

“... uh …,” I responded instead. “…Er…”

“You’d better take care how you drive.” The man rolled up his window, glared at us, and moved his car slowly past our house. He took care for us to see him checking out the house and yard, soaking all of it in. Ominous. As slowly as he pulled away, however, it was still too fast for me to recover. By the time I thought of grabbing his plate number, to pass on to the real police, he was already too far away.

Back into his Shadow World.

We all have shadows in our own lives, and sometimes even the actions of the most obviously lost and confused Shadow People can cut through to our own insecurities. No doubt this poor soul was dealing with his own frustrations with the behaviour of his fellows, frustrations I can identify with. I’ve often felt like doing exactly as he did that night, just nailing someone verbally (and I’m grateful it was only that) for their anti-social behaviour—and doing 89 on a city street at night would certainly qualify as that. The difference, I suppose, is that I don’t—I try, through my own feelings of righteous anger, to contain myself.

And if ever I do begin to act like a guardian of the world, if I ever do start berating my fellow drivers for their actions…I hope I maintain the presence of mind to at least pick out the right vehicle.