Call of Duty: Ghosts (in Zoe's apartment)
There are times when life imitates art imitating life- or something like that. Then, there are times when your own stupidity becomes your worst enemy. Although I like to think the situation from last night possessed a certain je ne sais qua of the former, the latter situational assessment may be more accurate.
It was about 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday night and my significant other (let’s call him Mark to protect his identity) was playing some Call of Duty on the couch while simultaneously enjoying a snack.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Fighting Pakistani terrorists in the slums of Peshwar,[1]” was his reply as he intently reloaded a magazine and cleared what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse.
“Well, while you’re doing it, would you please mind not eating potato chips directly off the glass table?” I asked, nicely.
“A plate’s just a barrier between my food and my mouth,” he replied, executing a shot that prompted outrage from the 12-year-olds he was playing against.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t put stuff on the glass table. It’s expensive and you’ll scratch it.”
“It’s fine, I’m done,” he muttered, tossing the controller on the glass table, clearly frustrated because he had just been killed by his opponent, a 35-year-old man living in his mom’s basement.[2]
“Are you going to log off?” I asked.
“No, I might want to play in the morning before work.”
“Ah yes,” I replied. “I wouldn’t want your little friends to think that you had gone missing. They might put an Amber alert out for you.”
We went to bed at about midnight. I had checked all the doors and made sure they were locked. I thought I heard a few sounds, but figured they were coming from the apartment upstairs.
By 1 a.m., I was dozing off when I heard a clatter from the living room.
“Mark! Wake up!” I hissed, reaching for my cell phone in case I needed to call 911. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he asked, clearly displeased with being awoken in the middle of the night.
We lay there in silence for a few minutes and heard another series of soft clicks.
“That,” I whispered, clearly getting more nervous.
“It was probably just the blinds.”
We waited and then all of the sudden, we heard what appeared to be a louder clatter from the living room.
“Yeah, I heard that,” he said, clearly alarmed as well.
At this point, my heart was racing. Mark is an Army ranger who had served in Afghanistan and even he was scared. He pulled out his .45, loaded the clip, and chambered a round, heading to the bedroom door.
I reached for the .9 mm just in case I had to back him up. I started to assume the flank position (hey, he’s not the only one who plays Call of Duty), but he motioned for me to lay low.
“Wait here,” he whispered.
With impressive speed and agility, he yanked open the door and strategically pointed his weapon in an arc, clearing the living room as he had done many times when killing Nazi zombies. I had expected to hear gunshots and find a dead crack head on our couch, but everything in the living room was as we left it.
With skills that would put Elliot Stabler to shame, he proceeded to kick in the bedroom and bathroom doors as he looked for the perpetrator. Nada.
Finally, we returned to bed. At about 3 a.m., just as I was about to doze off, we were awoken by the sound again.
Click-click-click
“Did you clear everywhere?” I asked, intently.
“Yeah,” he replied, reaching for his gun again.
“Under the beds? In the closets?”
Realizing that I was not crazy, as he had also heard the sounds, he repeated the process of clearing every nook and cranny in our small condo, including under the bathroom sink, just in case the Keebler elves were up to no good.
For the second time that night, we returned to bed, clearly hopped up on too much adrenaline to sleep.
“We need to install a more serious security system on the porch, with motion sensors and everything.”
“With laser beams? Like Congo?” I asked, very seriously. (At the time, I was considering hiring a full personal security detail just so we could sleep.)
He finally fell asleep, but I couldn’t. I kept hearing the noises. As the mind does when it’s the middle of the night, I began having less-than-sane thoughts.[3]
Now I am not one who believes in ghosts. If ghosts were real, my grandma would yell at me from the Other Side every time I sat on the couch in a wet swimsuit or left the refrigerator open. However, logic doesn’t apply in the middle of the night in the dark.
‘It’s clearly a poltergeist,’ I thought to myself at 3:45 a.m. ‘I’m gonna set up a video camera, and the next thing you know, I’ll become possessed and then kill Mark in his sleep. Just great. We don’t know what happened to the people who lived here before us. They told us they moved to Sante Fe, but probably died in an exorcism gone wrong.’
At 4:15 a.m., I tried to rationalize with myself. Maybe someone was breaking in, but they were the slowest thieves in the world.
Were they stealing our DVDs one-by-one?
Click-clat…crash!
I sat bolt upright in bed looking at the door, cell phone in hand. No longer was I interested in speed-dialing 911, but Googling “How to cast out a poltergeist.”[4]
‘Yep, definitely a demon in the living room. Probably playing on my iPad right now.’
By 4:30, I was wide awake and ready to go put in our 30 day notice to the apartment complex. I mentally prepared the letter in my mind.
‘Dear Bridges Management,
We are vacating the premise because it is haunted. We understand that we will not get our deposit back. May God have mercy on your souls.’
When Mark’s alarm went off at 5 a.m., I sat up in bed and started getting dressed.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“The gym. It’s not haunted there,” I replied, lacing up my sneakers.
(Look, if a demonic possession is what it takes to get me to work out, then so be it.)
I hesitantly opened the door, expecting to see all of our worldly possessions gone or pea-green slime coating our Crate and Barrel wine rack. Nope. Everything still remained as we left it.
I walked out into the living room and heard the noise again. It wasn’t coming from the porch door like I thought, but instead the entertainment center. I stood in front of it, looking at the speakers, thinking there might be a wiring malfunction. Nothing.
I heard the sound again, but this time it was coming from behind me.
On the glass table.
No. F***ing. Way.
Apparently, someone forgot to quit his game. All night, his avatar was being shot at, causing the PlayStation remote to vibrate on the glass table, echoing throughout the apartment and causing the sounds that terrorized us for six hours.
I showed this to Mark, both of us sharing in the shame that a small piece of metal had caused us to lose a night’s sleep (and contemplate calling an exorcist).
We sat on the couch and watched the remote vibrate, our embarrassment increasing with every shake of the controller.
Finally, Mark spoke up.
“I think its funny that I used my Call of Duty skills against a very serious enemy apparition. Really, when you think about it, Call of Duty saved our lives.”
“Oh yeah, that was awesome,” I replied, not even trying to hide my sarcasm. “Congratulations, you went all one-man Seal Team Six on that remote. I feel so secure knowing that we’re probably safe from the Keurig as well.”
By this time, the light was starting to peek through the windows and I knew any attempts to go back to bed would be futile. Peacefully free from demons, I turned on the TV and dozed off for about ten minutes before waking to hear Bill O’Reilly yelling at a screen shot of Nancy Pelosi.
Well, maybe there are worse things than hearing demons in the middle of the night.
Satan no longer speaks through song lyrics...he uses the PS controller...
[1] Peshwar is in Pakistan? See, video games can be educational…
[2] I don’t know this for a fact, but come on….we can be fairly certain….
[3] Usually those less-than-sane thoughts include wondering what an ex boyfriend is up to. They are usually appeased by Facebook stalking him and realizing that not only does he have a receding hairline, but a wife who may or may not be a post-op tranny.
[4] Salt and sage.