‘As I said at the door, sir,’ the young man said, ‘I’m going around the neighborhood telling people about a very worthy organization.’
‘Citizens for Faith,’ my father cut in.
‘You’ve heard of our group?’
‘I can read the button pinned to the lapel of your jacket. This is sufficient to allow me to comprehend your general principles.’
‘Then perhaps you might be interested in making a donation,’ said the young man.
‘I would indeed.’
‘That’s wonderful, sir.’
‘But only on the condition that you allow me to
challenge
these absurd principles of yours – to really put them to the test. I’ve actually been hoping that you, or someone like you, would come along. It’s almost as if a fortuitous element of intervention brought you to this house, if I were to believe in something so preposterous.’
So ended my father’s short-lived capitulation to straightforwardness and amiability.
‘Sir?’ said the young man, his brow creasing a bit with incomprehension.
‘I will explain. You have these two principles in your head, and possibly they are the only principles that are holding your head together. The
first
is the principle of nations, countries, the whole hullabaloo of mother lands and father lands. The
second
is the principle of deities. Neither of these principles has anything real about them. They are merely impurities poisoning your head. In a single phrase – Citizens for Faith – you have incorporated two of the
three
major principles – or impurities – that must be eliminated, completely eradicated, before our species can begin an approach to a pure conception of existence. Without pure conception, or something approaching pure conception, everything is a disaster and will continue to be a disaster.’
‘I understand if you’re not interested in making a donation, sir,’ said the young man, at which point my father dug his hand into the right pocket of his trousers and pulled out a wad of cash that was rolled into a tube and secured with a thick rubber band. He held it up before the young man’s eyes.
‘This is for you, but only if you will give me a chance to take those heinous principles of yours and clean them out of your head.’
‘I don’t believe my faith to be something that’s just in my head.’
Until this point, I thought that my father was taunting the young man for pure diversion, perhaps as a means of distracting himself from the labors in which he had been engaged so intensely over the past few days. Then I heard what to my ears was an ominous shift in my father’s words, signifying his movement from the old-school iconoclast he had been playing to something desperate and unprincipled with respect to the young man.
‘Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest that anything like that was
only
in your head. How could such a thing be true when I know quite well that something of the kind inhabits this very house?’
‘He is in every house,’ said the young man. ‘He is in all places.’
‘Indeed, indeed. But something like that is very much in this particular house.’
My suspicion was now that my father made reference to the haunted condition – although it barely deserved the description – of our rented house. I myself had already assisted him in a small project relevant to this condition and what its actual meaning might be, at least insofar as my father chose to explain such things. He even allowed me to keep a memento of this ‘phase-one experiment,’ as he called it. I was all but sure that this was the case when my father alluded to his basement.
‘Basement?’ said the young man.
‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘I could show you.’
‘Not in my head but in your basement,’ said the young man as he attempted to clarify what my father was claiming.
‘Yes, yes. Let me show you. And afterward I will make a generous donation to your group. What do you say?’
The young man did not immediately say anything, and perhaps this was the reason that my father quickly shouted out my name. I backed up a few steps and waited, then descended the stairway as if I had not been eavesdropping all along.
‘This is my son,’ my father said to the young man, who stood up to shake my hand. He was thin and wore a second-hand suit, just as I imagined him while I was eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. ‘Daniel, this gentleman and I have some business to conduct. I want you to see that we’re not disturbed.’ I simply stood there as if I had every intention of obediently following these instructions. My father then turned to the young man, indicating the way to the basement. ‘We won’t be long.’
No doubt my presence – that is, the
normality
of my presence – was a factor in the young man’s decision to go into the basement. My father would have known that. He would not know, nor would he have cared, that I quietly left the house as soon as he had closed the basement door behind him and his guest. I did consider lingering for a time at the house, if only to gain some idea of what phase my father’s experimentation had now entered, given that I was a participant in its early stages. However, that night I was eager to see a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood.
To be precise, my friend did not live in the
bad
neighborhood where my family had rented a house but in the
worse
neighborhood nearby. It was only a few streets away, but this was the difference between a neighborhood where some of the houses had bars across their doors and windows and one in which there was nothing left to protect or to save or to care about in any way. It was another world altogether . . . a twisted paradise of danger and derangement . . . of crumbling houses packed extremely close together . . . of burned-out houses leaning toward utter extinction . . . of houses with black openings where once there had been doors and windows . . . and of empty fields over which shone a moon that was somehow different from the one seen elsewhere on this earth.
Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries. Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bedsheets in place of curtains. Finally, after prolonged contemplation, the miracle of a soft and wavering glow would be revealed inside the house.
Not long after my family moved into a vicinity where such places were not uncommon, I found one particular house that was nothing less than the ideal of the type of residence, so to speak, I have just described. My eyes became fixed upon it, held as if they were witnessing some miraculous vision. Then one of the bedsheets that covered the front window moved slightly, and the voice of a woman called out to me as I stood teetering on the broken remnants of a sidewalk.
‘Hey, you. Hey, boy. You got any money on you?’
‘Some,’ I replied to that powerful voice.
‘Then would you do something for me?’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Would you go up to the store and get me some salami sticks? The long ones, not those little ones. I’ll pay you when you come back.’
When I returned from the store, the woman again called out to me through the glowing bedsheets. ‘Step careful on those porch stairs,’ she said. ‘The door’s open.’
The only light inside the house emanated from a small television on a metal stand. The television faced a sofa that seemed to be occupied from end to end by a black woman of indefinite age. In her left hand was a jar of mayonnaise, and in her right hand was an uncooked hot dog, the last one from an empty package lying on the bare floor of the house. She submerged the hot dog into the mayonnaise, then pulled it out and finished it off without taking her eyes from the television. After licking away some mayonnaise from her fingers, she screwed the lid back on the jar and set it to one side on the sofa, which appeared to be the only piece of furniture in the room. I held out the salami sticks to her, and she put some money in my hand. It was the exact amount I had paid, plus one dollar.
I could hardly believe that I was actually standing inside one of the houses I had been admiring since my family moved into the neighborhood. It was a cold night, and the house was unheated. The television must have operated on batteries, because it had no electrical cord trailing behind it. I felt as if I had crossed a great barrier to enter an outpost that had been long abandoned by the world, a place cut off from reality itself. I wanted to ask the woman if I might be allowed to curl up in some corner of that house and never again leave it. Instead, I asked if I could use the bathroom.
She stared at me silently for a moment and then reached down behind the cushions of the sofa. What she brought forth was a flashlight. She handed it to me and said, ‘Use this and watch yourself. It’s the second door down that hall. Not the first door – the second door. And don’t fall in.’
As I walked down the hall I kept the flashlight focused on the gouged and filthy wooden floor just a few feet ahead of me. I opened the second door, not the first, then closed it behind me. The room in which I found myself was not a toilet but a large closet. Toward the back of the closet there was a hole in the floor. I shone the flashlight into the hole and saw that it led straight into the basement of the house. Down there were the pieces of a porcelain sink and commode, which must have fallen through the floor of the bathroom that was once behind the first door I had passed in the hallway. Because it was a cold night, and the house was unheated, the smell was not terribly strong. I knelt at the edge of the hole and shone the flashlight into it as far its thin beam would reach. But the only other objects I could see were some broken bottles stuck within the strata of human waste. I thought about what other things might be in that basement . . . and I became lost in those thoughts.
‘Hey, boy,’ I heard the woman call out. ‘Are you all right?’
When I returned to the front of the house, I saw that the woman had other visitors. When they held up their hands in front of their faces, I realized that I still had the shining flashlight in my hand. I switched it off and handed it back to the woman on the sofa.
‘Thank you,’ I said as I maneuvered my way past the others and toward the front door. Before leaving I turned to the woman and asked if I might come back to the house.
‘If you like,’ she said. ‘Just make sure you bring me some of those salami sticks.’
That was how I came to know my friend Candy, whose house I visited many times since our first meeting on that thrilling night. On some visits, which were not always at night, she would be occupied with her business, and I would keep out of her way as a steady succession of people young and old, black and white, came and went. Other times, when Candy was not so busy, I squeezed next to her on the sofa, and we watched television together. Occasionally we talked, although our conversations were usually fairly brief and superficial, stalling out as soon as we arrived at some chasm that divided our respective lives and could not be bridged by either of us. When I told her about my mother’s putrid European cigarettes, for instance, Candy had a difficult time with the idea of ‘European,’ or perhaps with the very word itself. Similarly, I would often be unable to supply a context from my own life that would allow me to comprehend something that Candy would casually interject as we sat watching television together. I had been visiting her house for at least a month when, out of nowhere, Candy said to me, ‘You know, I had a little boy that was just about your age.’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he got killed,’ she said, as if such an answer explained itself and warranted no further elaboration. I never urged Candy to expand upon this subject, but neither could I forget her words or the resigned and distant voice in which she had spoken them.
Later I found out that quite a few children had been killed in Candy’s neighborhood, some of whom appeared to have been the victims of a child-murderer who had been active throughout the worst neighborhoods of the city for a number of years before my family moved there. (It was, in fact, my mother who, with outrageous insincerity, warned me about ‘some dangerous pervert’ stealthily engaged in cutting kids’ throats right and left in what she called ‘that terrible neighborhood where your friend lives.’) On the night that I left our rented house after my father had gone into the basement with the young man who was wearing a secondhand suit, I thought about this child-murderer as I walked the streets leading to Candy’s house. These streets gained a more intense hold upon me after I learned about the child killings, like a nightmare that exercises a hypnotic power forcing your mind to review its images and events over and over no matter how much you want to forget them. While I was not interested in actually falling victim to a child-murderer, the threat of such a thing happening to me only deepened my fascination with those crowded houses and the narrow spaces between them, casting another shadow over the ones in which that neighborhood was already enveloped.
As I walked toward Candy’s house, I kept one of my hands in the pocket of my coat where I carried something that my father had constructed to be used in the event that, to paraphrase my irrepressibly inventive parent, anyone ever tried to inflict personal harm upon me. My sister was given an identical gadget, which looked something like a fountain pen. (Father told us not to say anything about these devices to anyone, including my mother, who for her part had long ago equipped herself with self-protection in the form of a small-caliber automatic pistol.) On several occasions I had been tempted to show this instrument to Candy, but ultimately I did not break the vow of secrecy on which my father had insisted. Nevertheless, there was something else my father had given me, which I carried in a small paper bag swinging at my side, that I was excited to show Candy that night. No restrictions had been placed on disclosing this to anyone, although it probably never occurred to my father that I would ever desire to do so.