I have experienced what I term as a near, near death experience. That is to say, I was near someone who nearly died.
It had been a long day at work and I came home to take it easy. My roommate was shooting a short film at the house for one of his classes. I told him that I was just too tired to help, so I would just stay out of the way and stay quite.
I grabbed some food and shut my self in my room. I chowed down and started a movie. The titles came up, the theme song started, and I realized that the noise might interfere with the shooting going on right outside my door. I snagged my head phones and plugged them in.
About two hours later I sat with a full belly and sleepy in front of the glow of my movie. I had about five minutes to go and I planned to zonk out as the credits rolled across the screen. With the head phones on I hadn’t heard much from my roommate and his production but the occasional bump in the floor. The bumps had dissipated for sometime, and I assumed that the shoot had finished for the night or taken a break. It must have been a break because I suddenly heard a bunch of muffled noise through my head phones, but something wasn't right. The noise didn’t stop and there were a lot of voices filtering in.
I peaked out my window. Red and blue lights flashed. A dozen cops stood in my front yard. I sat up and stared at the wall. I sucked air realizing my breath had run away from lungs. My brain started working and the question finally peaked. What the hell had happened?
I knew the cops had no idea I was in my room. How could they? I had the lights off and was being completely quite. I wanted to, no, I needed to find out what was going on, but how was I going to walk out of my room without getting sprayed with mace?
I stepped over to my door and switched on the light. I reached out and touched the door handle. It twisted and the door creaked open. All the lights in the house had been turned on but everything felt eerie. Perhaps it was the squelch from the police radios or the smoke in a can floating around from the movie shoot. Perhaps it was just the adrenalin. One foot at a time I walked into my living room in nothing but shorts and a tee shirt. No shoes, no hat, no wallet. I held my hands palms up out at my sides. I turned the corner. “Hello? Hello?” I looked around the room, nobody. An officer stood in the doorway and called me out to the front porch. I followed orders and stood there. I looked down. My roommate and his friends had their faces in the dirt and cuffs on their wrists.
At that moment I had no idea what was going on and I wondered if my roommate was going to jail. I stood and listened to everyone around me. Slowly the story pieced itself together.
For the short film my roommate had been making he had assumed the role of a man dressed in black wearing a ski mask. One scene required that this man burst in the front door. Well, apparently, one of the well meaning neighbors saw the man in the ski mask going into our house and called the police. A group of police officers were near by breaking up a loud party and one of them stopped by to check out the call.
When they got there, the man in black with the ski mask was standing at the front door holding a very real looking hand gun with a silencer. A very real looking prop gun to be exact.
“Drop it! Drop the weapon!” That was the noise I had heard from my room, but with head phones on I hadn’t been able to decipher it. He did drop it, and thankfully so. Afterwards, the officers would admit had he raised his hand six inches they would have shot him dead right then, right on my front porch.
My hands still shake when I think about it. They shook that night too, but that was on account of the adrenaline. My roommate was put into a police car and the officers continued with their job of questioning everyone. The story slowly began to unfold and the confusion was beginning to clear. The whole thing was a big misunderstanding. I had to make the hard phone call to my roommate’s father that night. Thankfully, by the time his parents showed up the police had let my roommate out of the car and cuffs.
My roommate, my friend, had almost died. He was six inches from death, and I was five feet away. Five feet and six inches and I didn’t even know it was going on. I didn’t even see it coming. I barely heard it. The thing that bothers me the most is that if I didn’t see death coming so close to someone so near, then how will I see it when it comes for me?Does anyone see death coming? Will you see it when it comes for you?