About four years ago I was walking home from a friend's place at 2 AM. I lived in a neighborhood where this was perfectly normal. It was a nice area, well-lit, quiet.
I was about halfway home when I noticed a man on the other side of the street.
He was dancing. Or something like dancing. He moved in wide, sweeping arcs across the sidewalk, arms out, head thrown back. No music. No phone. Just moving in this wide, fluid pattern by himself, in the dark, at 2 AM.
I slowed down to watch him. He was moving toward me — or not toward me specifically, just in my direction, the natural direction the sidewalk went. I figured he was drunk or having some kind of episode.
Then he saw me.
He stopped. He was maybe forty feet away and across the street. He turned and looked directly at me. And he smiled.
I don't have a good way to describe the smile other than to say it was too large. Not in a deformity way. In a commitment way. The way you smile when you are performing smiling for someone who cannot read faces.
He started moving toward me. Not dancing anymore — just walking, directly toward me, maintaining that smile, not blinking that I could see. I crossed to the other side of the street. He adjusted course. Still smiling.
I started walking faster. He started walking faster.
I ran. He ran.
He was fast. Faster than he should have been given that he was moving with this strange backwards-leaning gait, head still thrown back, arms still slightly out. Running at me with his face turned up toward the sky like he was trying to catch rain, smiling at something above his own head.
I cut through a parking lot and hid between two dumpsters. I stayed there for twenty minutes without moving.
When I came out, the street was empty.
I took a cab home and called my friend to tell him what happened. He asked what the man had looked like and I described him and my friend said: "Someone else I know saw the same guy last week. Different street."
I don't walk home that late anymore. It's not because I think the city is dangerous. It's because every time I'm out at night and someone's moving funny on the other side of the street, I have to know whether they've seen me.
And whether they're smiling.