What I carried with me, contained in a squat little jar inside the paper bag, was a by-product, one might say, of the first-phase experiment in which I had assisted my father not long after we moved into our rented house. I have already mentioned that, like so many of the houses where my family lived during my childhood years, our current residence was imbued with a certain haunted aspect, however mild it may have been in this instance. Specifically, this haunting was manifested in a definite presence I sensed in the attic of the house, where I spent a great deal of time before I became a regular visitant at Candy’s. As such things go, in my experience, there was nothing especially noteworthy about this presence. It seemed to be concentrated near the wooden beams which crossed the length of the attic and from which, I imagined, some former inhabitant of the house may once have committed suicide by hanging. Such speculation, however, was of no interest to my father, who strongly objected to the possibility of spooks or spirits of any kind or even the use of these terms. ‘There is nothing in the attic,’ he explained to me. ‘It’s only the way that your head is interacting with the space of that attic. There are certain fields of forces that are everywhere. And these forces, for reasons unknown to me as yet, are potentiated in some places more than others. Do you understand? The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic. Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space. These are not real things. Nonetheless, they are
indicative
of real forces, animating and even creative forces, which your head only conceives to be some kind of spook or who knows what. You are going to help me prove this by allowing me to use my apparatus in the basement to siphon from your head that thing which you believe is haunting the attic. This siphoning will take place in a very tiny part of your head, because if I siphoned your whole head . . . well, never mind about that. Believe me, you won’t feel a thing.’
After it was over, I no longer sensed the presence in the attic. My father had siphoned it away and contained it in a small jar, which he gave to me once he was through with it as an object of research, his first phase of experimentation in a field in which, unknown to other scientists who have since performed similar work, my father was the true Copernicus or Galileo or whomever one might care to name. However, as may be obvious by now, I did not share my father’s scientific temperament. And although I no longer felt the presence in the attic, I was entirely resistant to abandoning the image of someone hanging himself from the wooden beams crossing the length of a lonely attic and leaving behind him an unseen guideline to another world. Therefore, I was delighted to find that the sense of this presence was restored to me in the portable form of a small jar, which, when I cupped it tightly in my hands, conveyed into my system an even more potent sense of the supernatural than I had previously experienced in the attic. This was what I was bringing to Candy on that night in late autumn.
When I entered Candy’s house, there was no business going on that might distract us from what I had to show her. There were in fact two figures slumped against the wall on the opposite side of the front room of the house, but they seemed inattentive, if not completely oblivious, to what was happening around them.
‘What did you bring for Candy?’ she said, looking at the paper bag I held in my hand. I sat down on the sofa beside her, and she leaned close to me.
‘This is something . . .’ I started to say as I removed the jar from the bag, holding it by its lid. Then I realized that I had no way to communicate to her what it was I had brought. It was not my intention to distress her in any way, but there was nothing I could say to prepare her. ‘Now don’t open it,’ I said. ‘Just hold it.’
‘It looks like jelly,’ she said as I placed the jar in her meaty hands.
Fortunately, the contents of the jar presented no disturbing images, and in the glowing light of the television they took on a rather soothing appearance. She gently closed her grip on the little glass container as if she were aware of the precious nature of what was inside. She seemed completely unafraid, even relaxed. I had no idea what her reaction would be. I knew only that I wanted to share with her something that she could not otherwise have known in this life, just as she had shared the wonders of her house with me.
‘Oh my God,’ she softly exclaimed. ‘I knew it. I knew that he wasn’t gone from me. I knew that I wasn’t alone.’
Afterward, it occurred to me that what I had witnessed was in accord with my father’s assertions. Just as my head had been haunting the attic with the presence of someone who had hanged himself, Candy’s head was now haunting the jar with a presence of her own design, one which was wholly unlike my own. It seemed that she wished to hold on to that jar forever. Typically, forever was about to end. A nondescript car had just pulled up and stopped in front of Candy’s house. The driver quickly exited the vehicle and slammed its door behind him.
‘Candy,’ I said, ‘There’s some business coming.’
I had to tug at the jar to free it from her grasp, but she finally let it go and turned toward the door. As usual, I wandered off to one of the back rooms of the house, an empty bedroom where I liked to huddle in a corner and think about all the sleeping bodies that had dreamed there throughout innumerable nights. But on this occasion I did not huddle in a corner. Instead, I kept watch on what was happening in the front room of the house. The car outside had come to a stop too aggressively, too conspicuously, and the man in the long coat who walked toward the house moved in a way that was also too aggressive, too conspicuous. He pushed open the door of Candy’s house and left it open after he stepped inside.
‘Where’s the white kid?’ said the man in the long coat.
‘No white people in here,’ said Candy, who held her eyes on the television. ‘Not including you.’
The man walked over to the two figures across the room and gave each of them a nudge with his foot.
‘If you didn’t know, I’m the one who lets you do business.’
‘I know who you are, Mr Police Detective. You’re the one who took my boy. You took other ones too, I know that.’
‘Shut up, fat lady. I’m here for the white kid.’
I took the pen out of my pocket and pulled off the top, revealing a short, thick needle like the point of a pushpin. Holding the pen at my side and out of sight, I walked back down the hallway.
‘What do you want?’ I said to the man in the long coat.
‘I’m here to take you home, kid.’
If there was anything I had ever known in my life as a cold, abstract certainty, it was this: if I went with this man, I would not be going home.
‘Catch,’ I said as I threw the little jar at him.
He caught the jar with both hands, and for a moment his face flashed a smile. I have never seen a smile die so quickly or so completely. If I had blinked, I would have missed the distressed transition. The jar then seemed to jump out of his hands and onto the floor. Recovering himself, he took a step forward and grabbed me. I have no reason to think that Candy or the others in the room saw me jab the pen into his leg. What they saw was the man in the long coat releasing me and then crumbling into a motionless pile. Evidently the effect was immediate. One of the two figures stepped out of the shadows and gave the fallen man the same kind of contemptuous nudge that had been given to him.
‘He’s dead, Candy,’ said the one figure.
‘You sure?’
The other figure rose to his feet and mule-kicked the head of the man on the floor. ‘Seems so,’ he said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ said Candy, looking my way. ‘He’s all yours. I don’t want no part of him.’
I found the jar, which fortunately was unbroken, and went to sit on the sofa next to Candy. In a matter of minutes, the two figures had stripped the other man down to his boxer shorts. Then one of them pulled off the boxer shorts, saying, ‘They look practically new.’ However, he stopped pulling soon enough when he saw what was under them. We all saw what was there, no doubt about that. But I wondered if the others were as confused by it as I was. I had always thought about such things in an ideal sense, a mythic conception handed down over the centuries. But it was nothing like that.
‘Put him in the hole!’ shouted Candy, who had stood up from the sofa and was pointing toward the hallway. ‘Put him in the goddamn hole!’
They dragged the body into the closet and dropped it into the basement. There was a slapping sound made by the unclothed form as it hit the floor down there. When the two figures came out of the closet, Candy said, ‘Now get rid of the rest of this stuff and get rid of the car and get rid of yourselves.’
Before exiting the house, one of the figures turned back. ‘There’s a big hunk of cash here, Candy. You’re going to need some traveling money. You can’t stay here.’
To my relief, Candy took part of the money. I got up from the sofa and set the jar on the cushion beside my friend.
‘Where will you go?’ I asked.
‘There are plenty of places like this one in the city. No heat, no electricity, no plumbing. And no rent. I’ll be all right.’
‘I won’t say anything.’
‘I know you won’t. Good-bye, boy.’
I said good-bye and wandered slowly home, dreaming all the while about what was now in Candy’s basement.
By the time I arrived at the house it was after midnight. My mother and sister must have also returned because I could smell the stench from my mother’s European cigarettes as soon as I took two steps inside. My father was lying on the living-room sofa, clearly exhausted after so many days of working in the basement. He also seemed quite agitated, his eyes wide open and staring upward, his head moving back and forth in disgust or negation or both, and his voice repeatedly chanting, ‘Hopeless impurities, hopeless impurities.’ Hearing these words helped to release my thoughts from what I had seen at Candy’s. They also reminded me that I wanted to ask my father about something he had said to the young man in the second-hand suit who had visited the house earlier that night. But my father’s condition at the moment did not appear to lend itself to such talk. In fact, he betrayed no awareness whatever of my presence. Since I did not yet feel up to confronting my mother and sister, who I could now hear were moving about upstairs (probably still unpacking from their trip), I decided to take this opportunity to violate my father’s sanctions against entering the basement without his explicit authorization. This, I believed, would provide me with something to take my mind off the troubling events of that night.
However, as I descended the stairs into my father’s basement, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy’s basement. Even before I reached the bottom of the stairs, that underground place imposed upon me its atmosphere of ruin and wreckage and of an abysmal chaos that, I was thankful to discover, I still found captivating. And when I saw the state of things down there, I was overcome with a trembling awe that I had never experienced before.
Everything around me was in pieces. It looked as if my father had taken an ax and hacked up the whole apparatus on which he had once placed all his hopes of accomplishing some task that only he cared to envision. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling, all of them chopped through and dangling like vines in a jungle. A greasy, greenish liquid was running across the floor and sluicing into the basement drain. I waded through an undergrowth of broken glass and torn papers. I reached down and picked up some of the pages savagely ripped from my father’s voluminous notebooks. Meticulous diagrams and graphs were obscured by words and phrases written with a thick, black marker. Page after page had the word ‘IMPURE’ scrawled over them like graffiti on the walls of a public toilet. Other recurring exclamations were: ‘NOTHING BUT IMPURITIES,’‘IMPURE HEADS,’‘NOTHING REVEALED,’‘NO PURE CONCEPTION,’‘IMPOSSIBLE IMPURITIES,’ and, finally, ‘THE FORCES OF AN IMPURE UNIVERSE.’
At the far end of the basement I saw a hybrid contraption that looked as if it were a cross between a monarch’s throne and an electric chair. Bound to this device by straps confining his arms and legs and head was the young man in a second-hand suit. His eyes were open, but they had no focus in them. I noticed that the greasy, greenish liquid had its source in a container the size of a water-cooler bottle that was upended next to the big chair. There was a label on the container, written on masking tape, that read
SIPHONAGE
. Whatever spooks or spirits or other entities had inhabited the young man’s head – and my father appeared to have drained off a sizeable quantity of this stuff – were now making their way into the sewer system. They must have lost something, perhaps grown stale, once released from their container, because I felt no aura of the spectral – either malignant or benign – emanating from this residual substance. I was unable to tell if the young man was still alive in any conventional sense of the word. He may have been. In any case, his condition was such that my family would once again need to find another house in which in live.
‘What happened down here?’ said my sister from the other side of the basement. She was sitting on the stairs. ‘Looks like another one of dad’s projects took a bad turn.’
‘That’s the way it looks,’ I said, walking back toward the stairs.
‘Do you think that guy was carrying much money on him?’