I couldn’t sleep.

The images kept going through my head, over and over again, an eternally revolving circuit; a dog chasing its tail. The tinted light from the street seemed to blaze into my tiny room with the brilliance of a noon sun, but it wasn’t the light of illumination, it was the light of revelation. In this light you could see the truth; you could see where the things in the shadows lurked, the ones that fed on fear.

I tried to ignore the book, face down on my nightstand, as I swung my legs out over the edge of the bed. I needed something to knock me out, something to take the edge off the pain.

Knock me out? Profound words as I padded into the washroom and looked at my beaten face in the medicine cabinet mirror. My left eye was swollen shut and my split lip was nearly the size of a sausage. “Cut me Mick, just cut me,” I mumbled in my best Rocky voice. I would have liked to have ripped off my shirt and howled, “Adrian!” but she had left me, but her name wasn’t Adrian it was Ingrid, Ingrid Zoor, a Romanian International student.

At first, I found her name funny. Not funny ha-ha, but in the funny peculiar sort of way. Romanian was a romance language originating in the dust left by the marching sandals of Rome’s legions. So, why the Germanic name? Perhaps it was because they were the one people who had stopped the legions, but Romania?.

She had looked at me as though I was entirely stupid, which, at times, isn’t far from the truth. “The Seven Saxon cities…” she said as though this would solve all questions. My vacant expressions prompted her on. “Transylvania?”

“Oh, Count Dracula, vampires?”

Her lips tightened begrudgingly. “Yes, vampires, witches…and many other things.”

I let it go at that, because I thought she was tugging on my chain. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, she turned to me. There was a cold blue in her eyes, and I knew I was in trouble.

  “You have to make choice,” she demanded, arms crossed. It was definitely an ultimatum. “It’s not natural, for grown men to dress up in tights and go prancing about campus.”

Prancing, that had been the proverbial verb that broke my fragile male ego. I defended myself, nobly, using all the polish of my second year rhetoric class. I pointed out that I also had a mask and a cape and that the tights alone did not a hero make.

 She didn’t like that at all.

“Someone is going to kill you. Where I come from, there are many things, dangerous things that live in the dark.”

I doubted it, but what did I know; I was just a college student having some fun.

“Like Vlad the Drac?” She didn’t get my reference to the kid’s book printed in the 80s. A strange uncle had given it to me as a Christmas gift and I had listened to it until the tape had irreversibly tightened. I would have preferred someone to have read it to me, but I never knew my mom. Maybe that explained my near pathological need to be around women. I would be the first to acknowledge it; I was in desperate need of mothering.

 To me it was a natural vacancy to fill. Girls needed to walk home at night, and the panic stations, although functional, didn’t really give the comfort that a real, warm blooded human being could provide. Harlow’s monkey experiment proved that real comfort came in plush fabric and warmth, not in the hard, mechanics of wire and metal. It was one of the reasons I made sure my outfit was also made out of fleece. Girls liked to get close to fleece. All they had to do was text me and I was there.

 I had even created an app for it, called Major Tom. Just press the little comic version of me and I would get a call. That’s how I met Ingrid. She had thought something had been following her in the bushes, stalking her, and she had pushed her little Major Tom. Later I also found out that we were taking the same mandatory British Literature course.

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“I’m just having a good time,” I pleaded. “When I show up in my red tights and yellow mask, they laugh. Sometimes they’ve just broken up with their boyfriend and they’re pretty upset, other times they just need an escort home from the pub.”

“And you console them?” she asked looking at me suspiciously, “you in your fluffy outfit.”

I can read facial expressions pretty well, and I detected a tightening around her eyes. I knew what this was all about. She was jealous. As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll figure women out. I thought maybe the truth would work here. So, when I told her that I did console them, her response was a swirling tail wind and a slamming door. I never knew Saxons could be so jealous.

My swollen face was a testament to her prophesies that someone was going to try to kill me, well, beat me up anyways. I fingered the eye. “Well, you were right.”

I had gone out all dressed up in my fluffy spandex glory and got jumped by a number of drunken students. I couldn’t tell who they were, but I suspected they were members of one of the College teams. They were pretty tall, so I was thinking, maybe basketball, but since I was pretty short, everyone looked tall. I quickly assumed a ‘grass eating’ position as they pummelled me, laughing and making mean jokes about my height.

“How’s that Major Tom?” said one as he fitted his foot neatly into my ribs.

“Say hello to Ground Control,” laughed another as he sat on my head and farted.

Fortunately my face was buried deep in the grass, but the rotten egg smell still burned.

“Stay away from my girl,” snapped another trying to hit me in the face, which was a trick since I had it firmly pressed into the grass, but he did catch my lip and right eye.

Generally I didn’t hold much weight for Neanderthals like that, and would have, in the light of day, given them some witty retort about having to drag women into his cave by the hair, but now, I had nothing, except pain. Obviously, I had gotten too close to someone’s possession. I doubted very much that guys who went around beating up on people for chuckles knew little about love. It would have gone a lot worse, had not Kam showed up.

“This isn’t over, Major Tom,” yelled one of the attackers as they laughed and whooped victoriously off into the night, but they were running and that was all that mattered, running from Kam.

They were definitely right, it wasn’t over. Short guys like Napoleon and Hitler, never forgot. Not that I was pathologically insane, but they were pretty short, and those two were pretty determined. The one thing we shared was we all had unresolved maternal issues, and that, I could understand.

“Geeze, Jay,” said Kam. “Are you all right?”  He helped me to my feet. Kam was a big Hawaiian, who had come to the College to play football. It had been a great career, but when none of the pro teams drafted him, he had to look for other ways to pay the bills. “Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

He lifted me up and dusted me off. There was concern on his big, broad face. “Listen, can you stand up?”

I knocked his hands away, and nearly fell down. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I lied.

Kam held up his fingers in front of my face. “How many fingers do you see?”

Things were a bit blurry, and I was more than angry. “What do you mean, how many fingers do I see? It’s flipping dark, Kam.”

“Oh, right.” He flipped on his flashlight that was the size of a club and blinded me.

“Kam, I’m all right. I don’t have a concussion, just a cut lip and probably a black eye.”

I could hear Kam sucking on his bottom lip. “Listen, I’ve got my buggy just over there. I’ll give you a ride back to your residence, all right?”

I was about to protest when my knees buckled under me. Getting beaten up was not a great way to maintain one’s self-esteem.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up back at my dorm unable to sleep and perplexed about my present state.  A hail like sound bouncing off glass drew my attention to my small window. My luxurious one bedroom dormitory had only one window, which fronted the back path that ran adjacent to the canal. It would have been nice except for the big hydro pole that blocked most of the view. I went to the window. Sure enough, there were tiny pebbles on the outside window sill. Opening the window, I stuck my head out just in time to receive some grit in my face.

“What the…”

“Sorry,” called up Ingrid.

“What are you doing down there?”

“I saw Kam, he’s worried about you. He told me what happened.”

I felt the burning flush of shame, but shrugged it off. “It’s not as though it’s the first time I’ve been beaten up.” She looked worse than I felt, almost as if she had also been beaten up, but in a different way, like from the inside out. “You could come up.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.” She looked over her shoulder, off into the night, towards the canal. “I came to warn you. It’s going to get worse. You have to stop going out…”

The hurt, the loneliness, the feeling of abandonment made me want to apologize, to ask her up, but when I went to, she was gone. It was as though she had just vanished. Something black and large moved down by the canal. It was almost as though the darkness from the water had taken a breath, expanded and then, like Ingrid, vanished.

 In the moment, and how I felt, I was inclined to believe her warning about the danger.

Tomorrow, I would apologize to Ingrid. Tomorrow, I would put away my super hero outfit, and plead with her to take me back into her strong, Germanic/Romanian embrace.