Someone Broke Into My Bedroom With A Gun In the Middle of the Night

Four things that will be important later

1) I slept naked.

2) I had the loft bedroom, and it had a balcony that looked down into the living room.

3) We didn’t lock our front door regularly, and always kept the window open for our outside cat.

4) I wear glasses. And my eyesight’s complete shit without them.

-

4:00 am

It’s 4 am. The downstairs living room light switches on. Since I am a light sleeper this wakes me out of REM and puts me just below the surface of awake, but I’m still mostly out of it. I grumble a bit and shut my eyes tight.

I know my roommate Jason (not his real name) is at home, sleeping in his downstairs bedroom. But roommates Wendall and Cody are both out of town. So although my first thought is that one of them has just come home late, with my sleepy brain I realize that this would be quite unexpected since it would mean that a trip had been cut short.

4:10 am

My confusion turns to frustration that the light has not been shut off yet. I rise and peek around the parachute down into the living room. But all I see is a blurry wash like watercolors in a rinse cup. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses, and they’re somewhere on the ground beside my mattress. But I don’t need them, I just want to shout down to someone to hit the light.

No one hears me, or no one cares to respond.

I’m about to put on some pajamas to go down and do it by myself when I hear some commotion.

4:11:00 am

Two blurry figures emerge into the living room. One of them is Jason. The other I don’t recognize at all. All I can tell is that he’s a big dude, with black hair, and he’s got something in his hand that he’s waving around.

They’re shouting at each other. Jason yells something like, “You need to leave! You need to get out of here!” The other guy (I still haven’t put it together that he’s a home invader) is shouting back, but his words are slurred and indecipherable. Later I would find out that he was extremely drunk. So he’s waving the object around wildly, sometimes toward me, sometimes at Jason.

By this time he’s noticed that I’m watching from the balcony.

4:11:20 am

Suddenly I see Jason smack the guy across the face. Although I’m still half asleep, I think, “Holy shit.” Bold move. Then it hits: this intruder has a gun. The thing he's waving around is a gun. I duck back into my bedroom.

4:11:30 am

I hear thundering footsteps on the staircase that leads up to my room. I rush to lock my bedroom door, which I do just in time. A huge force pounds against it.

“Get up!” I hear the unfamiliar voice shout. The door bangs again and, despite the lock, splinters easily open.

In he comes.

4:11:45 am

Almost completely blank in my memory.

4:11:55 am

I’m running down the stairs, naked as the Lord made me, not wearing my glasses. Suddenly I see Jason at the bottom of the stairs. He tosses me a t-shirt and says, “Put this on!” I climb into the arm holes and pull it up around me like shorts. I remember that it was a white shirt with some kind of graphic on it, and very soft.

I hear the thundering steps just behind me.

Out the front door. Jason goes right. I go left.

We live on the top floor of the three-story apartment complex. I scurry down to the ground as fast as I can. I can feel the invader behind me.

4:12:15 am

Out in the apartment complex parking lot, I run toward one of the other buildings where a friend of mine lives. I find myself screaming, “Help me! Help me!”

In my mind the guy is right behind me, and still has his gun.

But…

The reality is that he never followed me down the apartment complex steps and he not been carrying a gun when he broke into my bedroom. Jason had in fact disarmed him before they had even entered the living room. Drunk as a skunk, the invader had actually dropped his pistol and Jason had picked it up. At that point the guy took out his phone and started waving it through the air as if it were a gun, spouting some crazy bullshit about how it was a secret, special Military phone that was in fact very dangerous. And when it had looked like Jason had punched the dude in the face, what he’d actually done was pistol-whipped him. Then, when we had both booked it out of the apartment, the invader had tried to steal one of our bikes and pedal away. But our neighbors, having heard the commotion, had already dialed 9-1-1 and the cops arrested the invader before he could even hop on the bike, which he was likely too drunk to ride anyway.

So I made it to my friend’s apartment where I dialed the police and waited for them to meet me and take me back to the parking lot.

I sat in a cop car for an hour or two while the officers collected statements, and then I gave mine, and then, with dawn breaking, I went back up to the apartment.

First thing’s first: go upstairs to put on my damn glasses.

The Scene of the Crime

When I finally fished them off the carpet and put them on, I saw it:

My bedroom was destroyed. My bookshelf was smashed to pieces, my books were everywhere, my clothes were everywhere, the beside lamp was broken and on the floor. I looked over my own body: I was covered in cuts, scrapes and bruises. I had a sudden flash of memory, of being grabbed by the arm, and yanked this way and that across the room like in some kind of infernal dance, that unfamiliar voice shouting get up, get downstairs. But the memory quickly vanished. My brain was like, “One thing at a time, guy.” It would be a while before I could really piece together what happened. I now understand that this is a trauma response.

Back downstairs, now in actual clothes, I took a look at the living room: there were blood and bullets on the floor, and things were pretty disheveled. When Jason had pistol whipped the invader, he’d drawn insane amounts of blood. Jason is a strong dude, and the butt of a pistol can do a lot of damage against a skull. Somehow the invader (who, I would later note in court, was a huge guy) was still able to rush up the stairs with considerable speed and bust into my room.

And the bullets? Jason must have emptied the clip. I actually don't know. Sometimes I wonder if I even saw bullets. Maybe I saw something else shiny littering the floor and mistook them for bullets.

I have often wondered what I would have done in that situation. Instead of emptying the gun and using it as a blunt force weapon, would I have simply shot the intruder and ended the experience? And when the guy bounded up the stairs toward the defenseless roommate in that bedroom, would I not have at least then considered deadly force?

These are questions I can’t answer. I am glad I don't have to, and I am glad that Jason didn’t shoot the intruder.

Authenticity

I want to talk about the twenty seconds in the parking lot. The twenty seconds that I was running, mostly naked, shouting “help me!” and fully believing that a man with a gun was chasing me.

I have never experienced this state of mind before or since. I don’t know very much about psychology, so I am going to have to avoid using terminology and jargon and instead try to qualitatively explain what I was feeling and why I think it could be described as “authenticity.”

I’ll begin with my state of mind. Of course it was dominated by fear. Not any kind of mindful fear, not any kind of weighing the risks, or considering the outcomes, or devising courses of action to avoid the outcome.

No, it was more of an "atmosphere of thought," for lack of a better phrase. I felt alert, my heart was pounding, my brain was lighted up, and my mind was extremely clear. There was one prevailing thought: run as fast as you can.

And what was I not thinking about? My self.

Anattā

All sense of personality, identity and self were left up in my bedroom. As if to drive home the symbology I was (almost) naked, without even my glasses. I was reduced to a mere body with exigence and purpose. Run, danger, run, danger, run, danger.

The Pali word anattā is used by Buddhists to talk about the idea, which is important in Buddhism, of the tenuousness of selfhood. The word basically means “non-self.” It contends that our identities are illusory, comprised of ever-changing variables each of which may easily dissolve and be replaced. What we call the self is like a river. We conceive of it as coherent and contiguous and even give it a name, and yet the actual stuff that makes it up is always changing. A river is metaphysical, and so is your self. No one would say that a river thereby is unreal, and Buddhists (mostly) avoid claiming that there actually isn't a self: just that it is illusory and extinguishable.

Stripped of all of the things that comprised my self, running through that parking lot, I had unwittingly (and unwillingly) become a “stream enterer.” This term refers to someone who has given up the first three “fetters” that the Buddha described, namely self, ritual, and indecision.

So

So if authenticity means being yourself in the face of an absurd world that is trying to stop you, then paradoxically, by observing and experiencing (and in such an intense and immediate manner) the transitory nature of my self, I was being more authentic than I ever had been before.

I was aware.

Specifically, I was aware of three things:

1) The cliche “life is fragile” is extremely accurate.

2) None of what I "have" was ever "mine" in the first place.

3) Life is good.

First, life is fragile. At any point someone can decide for you that your time is going to end.

If there is a twist to this story, it’s this: the home invader was actually our downstairs neighbor. A veteran dealing with all kinds of trauma, he’d gotten himself blackout drunk, went upstairs with his gun and let himself in. I recall passing him on the stairs plenty of times and he always seemed like a nice enough dude. But he was struggling with issues that no one knew about. So in a sense, he was being authentic too that night. But he was no stream enterer. He was seeking to increase suffering.

Second, none of what I call my own is really mine in the first place.

We came into the world naked, we leave it naked. This is, in my opinion, the essence of anattā. We develop our selves during the course of a life just like we accumulate possessions, money, and relationships. But we enter and leave as blank slates. By failing to understand this we are setting ourselves up for unnecessary fear of loss.

Third and finally, life is good. The passionate, intense emotion that I felt running down that parking lot can be expressed by the words "I don’t want to die." At first glance this might seem like the opposite of Buddhist teaching: to cling to life. But although I am just a layman, I don’t think that Buddha taught us to want to die. If we find ourselves born into a life, we should want to live so that we can strive to become better people and help others become better too. The Buddha himself, according to legend, put off his death and ultimate attainment of Nirvana several times when he felt that he still had work to do. You can love life without clinging to the transitory.

Where Authenticity Begins

This was the story of what I learned when I was running for my life.

Everything you have, all the possessions, ideas, hopes and dreams that you carry with you can be taken away in a moment. But if it can be taken away, maybe it was only ever on loan in the first place.

And whatever authenticity ends up looking like for you, realizing this simple truth is where it must start.