The Bat, The Elevator, And The Storm

Newsletter 2023-07-03

Jul 03, 2023

[There’s no audio version this week. I wrote this newsletter in a moving minivan with four kids while my wife drove. It wasn’t exactly an ideal environment for recording.]

It started, as most adventures do, with a text about a bat. I might not be the first person you tell when you get engaged or land that big promotion, but I should definitely be your initial point of contact if a flying mammal invades your home. My friend, Seth, is living the bachelor life back in our shared hometown in Illinois. Being unattached enables him to do cool things like hide a well dressed taxidermy bear in his living room so I could later present it as a surprise gift/guest of honor at my brother’s wedding. If your friend won’t stash a large, dead omnivore for you for months at a time, they’re not really a friend at all. Unfortunately, that freedom comes with a price. Seth had to face his bat alone, which is why he kept me updated. If he died, I was supposed to alert his next of kin. I was there with him in spirit, even if I was secretly rooting for his winged nemesis. If the bat killed Seth and took over the house, I would have a cool new bat friend. I bet it would let me hide all sorts of taxidermy.

Seth was playing an Xbox game called Vampire Survivors when the flying monstrosity appeared. It swooped in from the kitchen and proceeded to fly, as Seth described it, in an unusual and suspicious manner. I’m not sure what his point of reference was. I’ve never heard someone say, “The bat in my kitchen is behaving in a completely normal, bat-like fashion.” We once had a bat in our kitchen. It was actually in our entire house, but that’s the room where I finally cornered it. It definitely flew in a jerky pattern, mainly because you can’t orbit in huge symmetrical ovals in a house full of tiny rooms. Also, I suspect the constant noise in our house messed with its echolocation. Forget using sound to pathfind. It’s so loud here, I can’t even hear myself think.

The bat circled Seth’s bachelor pad with aggressive randomness. After a few passes, Seth closed it in the spare bedroom. When he went to check on it later, the door was stuck. Seth claims the humidity made the door swell, but the bat might have been a vampire who cast a protection spell. Also, Seth might not have tried very hard to open it because he didn’t want a showdown with a cornered bat. Instead, he called animal control. They were busy but promised to call him back, then never did, as a standard operating procedure at any government agency. He finally got them to send someone out four days later. By then, he was told that this was no longer a case for animal control. A bat trapped in a room for four days without access to food or water was almost certainly dead, unless it really was a vampire, in which case it was dead to start with and just maintained the status quo. Instead of an animal control officer, they sent out an animal handling technician, which is a nicer way of saying professional carcass scooper. I have a new dream job.

Naturally, the guy showed up as a world-ending storm hit town. He opened the door to the second bedroom, which was now magically unstuck due to the drop in humidity or because someone who actually wanted to open the door made the slightest effort to get in. The bat was nowhere to be found. The animal handling technician searched for an hour. There was no sign of it in the attic, nor were there any bat droppings there or in the spare bedroom. The window was closed. Of course, if the bat were actually a vampire, it could have turned into a man, opened the window, and then closed it. Or maybe there was never a bat at all. Perhaps the real bat was the friends we made along the way.

Seth reported all this to me while I was at the doctor’s office with my nine-year-old, Lucy, for her annual physical. The doctors and nurses act like they’re checking on her, but they’re really checking on me. They repeatedly ask if there have been any changes in my household like I’m going to slip up and admit that I built a meth lab in the basement. Everyone knows meth labs actually go in the RV out back. My cell reception was spotty inside the hospital, which is built like a bunker for obvious reasons. Those reasons all have to do with barricading it from the outside world in the event of the zombie apocalypse. I got Seth’s final updates as I approached the elevator to go home. He warned me that the storm in which his bat disappeared was past his house in Illinois and was heading toward me in Indiana. I looked out the windows. It was already here.

Through the glass on the fourth floor, I watched what looked like a hurricane. Seth described the storm as short and intense. I thought maybe we could wait it out. I checked the radar. The red blob was as long as the state and twice as wide. I don’t have that kind of patience, or any kind of patience, really. It could have been the smallest storm in the world and I still would have decided to go home. I shooed Lucy and Waffle into the elevator and hit the button for the first floor. It started going down.

With a violent jerk, it stopped. The LED panel that listed the floor said one and then two and then one again. It froze at one. Both kids whimpered. I hit the button to open the doors. Nothing happened. I waited a few seconds. We were stuck. I questioned every decision I’d ever made. Actually, just the one where I chose not to use the bathroom before I got on the elevator. A toilet had never seemed so far away. I hit the emergency call button.

Someone picked up right away. They asked where I was. I wasn’t sure how detailed they wanted me to get. Did they mean what part of the building, or what state? I found it hard to believe the hospital would have its own emergency elevator response unit. If they did, it would raise some red flags about how often these things break down. I started to describe our general situation. Then the elevator moved.

It took us from somewhere in between floors one and two to floor three. The doors opened. We all jumped out. The person on the elevator emergency line was still talking. I wasn’t sure about the proper etiquette for that situation. I didn’t want to stay in there and politely end the call in case the doors closed on me and didn’t let me get out again. I also didn’t want them to dispatch the fire department if there was no emergency after all. After a split second of indecision, I opted not to get back into the scary metal box. The person on the other end of the line probably assumed I ran out of oxygen and passed out. I know how to make a dramatic exit.

The guy who summoned the elevator to the third floor was very confused. He didn’t expect to see three people charge out like we were fleeing a burning building. He was an older dude with a cane and an orthopedic boot on one foot. I warned him not to get into the elevator. He disregarded my advice. He didn’t think he could make it down the stairs on his own, and I didn’t offer to carry him. My mother taught me not to give piggyback rides to strangers. He and his wife disappeared in the elevator of doom. The little girls and I hunted for the emergency stairs. The storm raged on.

It took us a few minutes to find our way out. Our hospital has added approximately nineteen new wings in the past few years, giving it a floor plan that resembles an M.C. Escher painting. The helpful maps hanging on the wall were strictly aspirational. After several wrong turns, we found ourselves in the ground floor lobby. We ran into the guy in the boot. He reported that the elevator worked, although it made some deeply unsettling noises. Maybe it’s close to the breaking point. Maybe it’s haunted. Whatever the issue, it wasn’t my problem any more. I just had to get the kids home before the entire town blew away.

We sprinted across the parking lot and dove into my van. The worst of the wind was over. The damage had already been done. The drive home looked like we were passing through a war zone. There were branches down everywhere. In the park, huge trees had snapped in half. A block from home, a giant oak toppled over and smashed a residence. Days later, my eleven-year-old, Mae, told me it’s where her friend’s grandma lives. Mae and her friend hung out there all the time. Luckily, her friend’s grandma was unharmed, and Mae was an hour and a half away at scout camp. Consequently, she has a huge fear of both storms and elevators. Had she been trapped between floors with us in the middle of that catastrophic downpour, she never would have slept again.

Meanwhile, Seth went to the emergency room on the advice of the dead animal scooper. He said that bats can bite you in your sleep without waking you up or leaving a mark. Also, they can carry rabies, which makes them not the best house guests. The tech was less worried about the risk of Seth turning into a vampire, even though that should have been his top concern. Don’t believe the Twilight propaganda. The undead are ugly, blood-sucking monsters, not attractive teens looking to hook up with the plain girl in class. After a three-hour wait, Seth saw a doctor who said he needed a multi day series of rabies shots just in case. The bad news is he got a bunch of painful injections because of a bat that may or may not even exist, but the good news is he’s now immune to rabies for three years. The next time he sees an animal foaming at the mouth, he can totally play with it. That opens the door to a whole new branch of taxidermy.

Two miles away, my parents didn’t need any rabies shots, but they did lose power for three days. In Indiana, we kept the lights on and didn’t get attacked by any bats. We had to settle for getting trapped in elevators and having the occasional house crushed by falling nature. It was an eventful storm. Thankfully, we had the big, dead ash trees in our yard taken down last year. Otherwise, I’m positive they would have toppled in this storm. Far away at scout camp, Betsy and Mae spent the same storm hiding under a tarp in a ravine. It was the kind of day that childhood traumas are made of. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s an entire scout troop around to hear it, I assure you they all make a sound.

In better news, I received the author copies of my upcoming children’s book, You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl. It’s uplifting, it’s adorable, and it’s hardcover, which makes it twice as useful as my other books for smacking away attacking bats. If you have a kid, know a kid, or are even vaguely aware that kids exist, please consider picking up a copy. Pre-orders really help me out. Also, every time you add it to your cart, a pterodactyl gets its wings. Snag it here.