The Man in My Basement (13 page)

“Oh. But the city is so crowded, so overwhelming.”

I laughed in a knowing way. “Sometimes I’m crowded and overwhelmed just living in my own head.”

Who was it talking? Not me. At least I didn’t think it was me. Whoever it was, Narciss seemed to like him. She smiled and pinched my baby finger with her forefinger and thumb.

I left there, making a beeline to Bethany’s apartment.

She answered the door and we fell into each other’s arms, not wasting a single word.

When our passions were satisfied, she lay against my chest and started crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I wait for this every day,” she sobbed. “I love you, Charles. But you don’t care.”

“There’s a lot going on right now, honey. A lot that I can’t talk about yet.”

“You got a girlfriend?”

“No. Not that. It’s inside my head. My head.”

“Will you stay with me tonight?”

“I have to go.”

“To her?”

“To who? I’m not going to anybody.”

“If you aren’t going to anyone, then why do you have to go? Don’t you like being with me?”

“I can’t explain it, Bethy,” I said and then stood up from the bed. I still had a half-hard erection. Bethany stroked the hard-on lightly underneath and it jumped at her touch. But I put on my pants anyway, being careful not to do any damage to myself with the zipper.

“If you go now you can’t come back,” she said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t really care.

She didn’t follow me from the bedroom. Her roommate, Robin Talese, was sitting in the living-room chair. I wondered if the chubby white girl had listened to our hollering out love earlier on. From the way she was staring at my crotch, I was pretty sure that she had.

“Where have you been?” Anniston Bennet shouted when I returned to the cellar at about 10:00 that night.

“I had car trouble,” I said. “Flat tire outside of Bridgehampton. Sorry.”

I handed him a Kentucky Fried Chicken four-piece meal that came with a biscuit, corn on the cob, cole slaw, and a root beer. The large paper cup wouldn’t fit under the bars, so I creased it and poured the soda into a squat glass he’d used for lunch.

“You can’t leave me down here all day without a meal,” Anniston said in an angry but soft tone.

“You want out?” I asked. “You can leave anytime.”

He didn’t have an answer to that.

“You want the light to eat by?” I asked.

“Please,” he said.

I left without sweating for the first time. And I slept the whole night through.

T
he next ten days passed as one. Every day was the same as far as I was concerned. I delivered Bennet’s meals at regular intervals. I pumped out his toilet twice and gave him books. I never spoke to him except to answer specific questions, and he was pretty quiet most of the time.

Sometimes I’d come into the room after he’d gone to the toilet. The smell was bad and I’d leave as soon as I could. The air was pretty dead in there, so I opened the hatch twice a day to freshen up the place with an electric fan.

For my part I dressed in my father’s clothes and went down to Curry’s, an East Hampton bar where tourists and summer residents went to mingle and get drunk. I met people there and joked around and drank beers. Not too much drinking. Just enough for a buzz. There were some nice white girls there who liked me, but I always went home alone.

I received two letters in that time. One was from Bethany apologizing for how angry she got at our last meeting. She understood, she said, that I was under stress and that we didn’t have the kind of relationship where she could make demands. She hoped that I would understand how strongly she felt about me and that I would call soon. The words she used were different but that’s what she said.

The other letter was actually a postcard. It was Narciss saying that she was looking forward to our dinner and asking when I would answer my phone.

I kept those letters on the windowsill next to my bed, beside the passport masks that I had standing there.

Many nights I would imagine some Senegalese or Congolese sailor on a Portuguese ship, carrying his mask to a new land. A black man, infinitely darker than me, with bright whites in his eyes, making his way to a world his people had never even imagined. And when he saw America, he jumped ship. The white people feared him as the devil, so he probably took on a Shinnecock bride. He came out to just about where I was now and built a life that most people never even suspected.

Between my make-believe ancestors and the women who loved my shadow, I was happy. Drinking and masturbating and feeding my prisoner three times a day. Wearing my father’s clothes (sometimes even using his name) and pretending that I was a summering lawyer or stockbroker. Life meant nothing, but I was having a good time.

And then, two days before Anniston Bennet had agreed to leave, I went down to serve his dinner.

“Will you let me have a whiskey?” he asked mildly.

“Sure,” I said. I was feeling flush and generous. Why not give the convict a snort?

I went to the house and returned with a bottle and a glass.

“I don’t really want to drink alone,” he said. “Here, you use the clean glass. I’ve got one from lunch.”

I poured the whiskey for both of us and then sat on the large trunk used to deliver his books.

“It’s pretty odd being locked up down here,” he said. “It’s great for reading. You can really concentrate if there’s no phone or messages or radio. I mean, I don’t even know what’s gone on in the world for almost two weeks. But I know about the Renaissance as if it happened this morning.”

He was the same man who came to my door two months before. Friendly and humble in his gestures. He didn’t fool me this time, but I was fascinated by the show.

“Tell me, Mr. Bennet…”

“Yes, Mr. Dodd-Blakey?”

“Doesn’t anybody miss you? Don’t you have a mother or wife or good friend who you play golf with on Saturdays? Isn’t somebody asking where you are?”

“Does anybody wonder about you, Mr. Dodd-Blakey?” His demeanor changed just that quickly. Suddenly he had an insight to my soul. My heart gave a quick gallop and I groped for an answer. But I needn’t have worried.

“I mean,” he continued, “we all disappear sometimes. We have to go to the toilet or sleep, go to work or down the street for some bread. It might take five minutes or ten. It might be overnight. Sometimes you forget to call or have to stay an extra day. Sometimes you fall in love with someone else or have an accident. One day you die.”

He smiled knowingly, toasting me with his glass. I joined him in the drink and then poured the second round.

“One day you just don’t come back,” he said. “People are worried at first. They make calls to the police and hospitals. They hire detectives. They lose sleep. Some people are so close to their loved ones that they’d die without them. But most of us don’t. Most of us adapt. We recognize thirst. We go to the toilet and close the door for privacy. We eat. New lovers and friends take the place of those we miss. People die every day, Mr. Dodd-Blakey. We live in the valley of death. That’s our heredity.”

“But you aren’t dead, Mr. Bennet. You’re alive and locked up in a cage in a stranger’s basement. You aren’t in love or lost or the victim of some car crash or mugging. You’re in a hole in the ground reading books and farting out cornflakes.”

Bennet laughed. I poured two more drinks and relaxed. In the back of my mind I worried about letting my defenses down against this crazy white man, but then I thought to myself,
He’s locked up; what can he do to me?

“But I could be dead,” he said. “Just like the man who goes away to prison, I’m gone from the lives of my peers. Anathema and death are the same thing. Most people don’t want to go to prison or even to know about it. They don’t want to go to the toilet with you or witness your fear. No one wants to watch you starve or bleed or suffer in any mortal way. We can’t help but to see ourselves in one another, and what we want to see is beauty and life.”

“You don’t sound like a businessman, Mr. Bennet. You sound more like a philosophy teacher.”

“I don’t teach,” he said. “But I’m not what you would call a businessman either. I’m a specialist.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, in reclamations.”

“That’s right.” He smiled. “But the word has a different meaning than one might think.”

“Like what?”

“Suppose,” he said, “you knew that there were diamonds in the ground somewhere in Montana. Diamonds. Fabulous wealth. But worthless unless you could retrieve them. As worthless as dirt.”

“Get a mining company going and dig,” I said.

“But you’re not quite sure where they’re located. You have the knowledge to go looking, but you don’t know who owns the land. Maybe it’s government land, maybe an Indian reservation. Maybe some old communist has it. You don’t know.”

“That’s why they have corporations,” I said. “You go into business with somebody and take your share.”

“But you don’t know who to go into business with. You don’t know where the diamonds are, and if you let the word out, people will start looking on their own. If they have your knowledge, then they don’t need you.”

It made sense and I nodded. The whiskey tasted rich. I smacked my lips.

“No,” Anniston Bennet said. “The diamonds only exist for the man who has imagined them. They only exist for the man who knows and who can realize their extraction. That’s where I come in. Through various means I locate the wealth and then acquire the property that contains it. I’m paid handsomely for every step, and then I receive a stipend based upon the value of my reclamation.”

“But it’s not really something reclaimed,” I argued. “It belonged to someone else and you took it. It’s more like stealing.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Knowledge is the only true prerequisite for ownership. If you don’t know something, then you can’t work with it. There are only two things that are important in ownership. The first, like I said, is knowledge. The second is the ability to exert control over the wealth. Seize the day. That’s what I do.”

“So you work in Montana?” I asked in a doubting tone.

He smiled at my insight. I was proud of his attention and embarrassed by my pride.

“No,” he said. “America has been picked clean. There’s no wealth here. Not in its natural state, at any rate. There’s no meat on the bone. I mean, I guess there’s some potential. I’ve been playing with the idea of real estate and graveyards. That’s one natural resource that could give up a few bucks.”

I poured the glasses full. I drank and experienced a certain tipsy joy, but it wasn’t just the liquor. I was in the presence, I believed, of a kind of mastermind, a Moriarty or Iago. A man who had been across the line of lies that defined good and evil for most normal folks. I mean, we all say at some time or other that politicians are crooks or that the rich are the best thieves. But no one seems to really know how they cheat and steal. It always comes as a surprise when some politician has taken money. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to see sometimes when a crime has been committed even when it’s been proven and documented. But Mr. Bennet could explain the arcane practices of the rich and powerful, and he was willing.

“So you spend your time making up schemes,” I prompted. “Figuring out where to
reclaim
something nobody has found yet.”

“No. Most resources are already known. There’s uranium in some third-world countries. Other natural deposits or labor that’s dirt cheap. The usual question is the cost of extraction. How much do I have to put in compared to what I can pull out? No. I don’t have to find lost treasure. The companies come to me as a kind of consultant when they want to get in on the ground floor or, more often, when they want to keep a good thing.” Bennet clasped his hands under his chin as if he were preparing to pray.

“It’s a complex world, the one in which we live,” he said. “The elements of power—greed, public opinion, applied wealth, hunger, the natural distrust between groups, and the quirks of politics and current events—must be dealt with in such a way that you and your tribe are able to end up on top. Sometimes it’s simple. A million dollars in a military bag or toward both sides in a political campaign can yield hundreds of millions. You never have to worry about your commitment to a side or ideology. Your ideology is always the same. It’s amazing,” he said, looking up at me in wonder, “how a girl-child of eighteen can get a senator or prince to the conference table.”

“Do you kill people too?” I asked. God bless whiskey, I say. Four shots and I knew no fear.

His look was both stern and startled. His left eye quivered; his shoulders hunched slightly.

“Life,” he said, “has little to do with progress. More often than not men make the decisions that lead to their own deaths. They delegate, hate, stay when all the signs say go. Mostly they’re unwilling to make a deal. And they’re almost all forgotten. No better remembered than a cockroach who succumbs to a poison that you set down under the pantry six months before.

“Did you kill the Kurds in Iraq? Was Roosevelt guilty of the gassing of the Jews because he refused to bomb the camps or the rails leading to them? What about God at the River Jordan using Moses as his word?”

It was a good enough answer for me. Even leaning toward drunk, I didn’t want the details.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we all have some blood on our hands. If America does something, then the people do it too. That’s why they call us Americans.”

It was a lame attempt to end what my question had started. I believed every word that Anniston Bennet had said, and I didn’t want to hear any more. He smiled, understanding my discomfort.

“Could you bring me down some detergent?” he asked. “I’d like to wash out my uniforms. They’re starting to smell.”

I went up to the house and brought back a cupful of soap flakes. I also brought a flatish and wide aluminum bowl that slid neatly under the locked cage door. He thanked me and I left quickly.

The moon was out that night, and I watched it for a long time. Well, I didn’t watch as much as I looked. Because my mind was not on the moon but back in the basement, hearing things that were something like ancient secrets that had been revealed coincidentally in my presence.