WATCH YOUR HIDE FOR THE WOMEN IN WHITE: an excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Occoquan, VA -

Windows started tremblin’ with a sonic boom, boom . . . A cold girl will kill you in a darkened room – Jim Morrison

 What is the opposite of Men in Black? Don’t overthink it, eh? There you go, bubba, you nailed it: Women in White.

So . . .

It was the middle of November, a comprehensively worthless part of a worthless month, and I was sitting in a fake Italian joint in the cutesy microtown of Occoquan, Virginia. Animated soccer was flickering on the boob tube behind the bar in front of me. The US men’s soccer team was pistol-whipping the Mexicans in the colossal slab of concrete that is Azteca Stadium and this has a stranglehold on the attention of everyone in the restaurant, including all six bartenders.

My dog was moored at my feet and was wearing a poutish expression. He is too old for people food—that most prized possession of all warm-blooded creatures—so he was laying a passo-aggro guilt trip on me.

I coaxed a kid wearing an apron to fetch me a bottle of anything with bubbles in it and he alerted one of the bartenders who passionately ignored him.

The US men’s soccer team hadn’t beaten the Mexican team in Mexico since they had orcs and wood dwarves in their starting eleven, so the bug-eyed raptness was merited, however I wanted a goddamn beer. It had taken an hour to drive twenty miles to this kooky little hamlet and there is no beer on this planet or any other that is more satisfying than the post-driving beer.

I left five bucks to cover the basket of bread and butter that I had demolished with Beyond Thunderdome panache and walked outside to a honked-out crowd of fellow day-trippers (it was some half-ass holiday, and every six-figures Harley Davidson cosplayer in the mid-Atlantic region had come here to do seemingly absolutely nothing aside from clog up the sidewalk). I immediately noticed a weird whirring sound. I turned around and behind me idling down the skinny street was an eggshell-white NASA-looking SUV thing with a pretty brunette at the wheel. She stared at me like I was her dead twin as she rolled past me. My dog was a steadfast connoisseur of the outré himself and displayed high alertness at the sight and sound of this weird vehicle. The thing had no license plates, and I swear I got an audio whiff of Golden Earring’s Twilight Zone as it whirred up the street.

Later when getting back to DC, while stopped in a turning lane near the Lincoln Memorial, I looked in the rearview and saw the same weird vehicle stopped behind me in the lane next to me—and seemingly the same brunette at the wheel. The vehicle was about two car-lengths back, but there were no cars between us and no reason to keep such a distance. I took my eyes off it for a second or two and looked again and it was gone. I surveyed my surroundings for it, but it was nowhere upon nowhere upon nowhere. It could not have made a U-turn and sped off in the other direction because there was a low barrier in the median, nor were there any side streets that it could have turned off on. I am certain I had seen the thing and my still cannot summon an adequate reason for its disappearance.

I did not have supper that night. Why was this woman in white driving a weird white vehicle a la Atari’s Moon Patrol follow me back to DC and pull a Copperfield on me? I had gone to Occoquan for no legitimate reason other than to squander a few hours and cast around the Occoquan River for a little bit.

Later that week, I would at once gain more insight into strangeness and become even more baffled. I was driving up to Silver Spring, Maryland for band practice—I sing and drum in a local DC two-piece rock outfit called Public Figures—and I had pulled off in a little commercial drag of leafy Chevy Chase, Maryland to nab a coffee and, voila!—the same weird vehicle was parked there in front of the little café.

I walked in but there is no sign of the brunette I had seen at the vehicle’s helm the other day. It was nearly noon, but I ordered a coffee anyway, and I was fortifying it with an attack dose of cream and Splenda when I spy the brunette emerging from a hallway where the bathrooms are. She looks like she had jumped out of Cannonball Run—white jumpsuit, cascade of wavy brown hair, huge sunglasses . . .

She walked right up to me and said, “Where’s your pooch?”

“He’s home, probably snoozin’ for a bruisin’,” I said, displaying a coziness that surprised even me.

She laughed and said, “Do you live down in . . .” It was clear she had never said the word Occoquan aloud before either.

“Nah, I was just there screwin’ around for a bit. I live in DC.”

It might have only been for a literal quarter of a second, but I swear the lady’s eyes momentarily went completely black. Her face responded to my change of expression: one seized by bafflement.

She said, low, slowly, and in a brand-spankin’ new voice, “There are things that exist and events that occur only because you fear them. If they were not summoned by your fear, they would remain forever latent.”

I said nothing and just looked at her. I took a sip of my coffee, which was at once super burnt and not at all hot.

“Just about as grody as you thought it might be?”

“Yeah, and then some.”

She turned and started walking away. “Anybody who orders a cup of coffee at noon on the dot deserves what they get.” She paused at the exit and turned around and said, “I’ll see you around, Van.”

“Not if I don’t see you first,” I responded, as she was already three feet out the door.

Only when pulling into the driveway of our practice place did I realize I had never told the strange brunette my name.

I have yet to see her or her strange little eggshell-white vehicle again.