The Man in My Basement (19 page)

I felt a drop of sweat as it went down past my left ear.

“But then I had to wait too long for you to come back, and the blood lust drained away.” He sat in his red chair. “It’s dark in here, you know. Black, actually, and the air gets thick when you don’t open the door.”

He passed the fingertips of both hands lightly over his eyebrows, then looked up at me. “You made me think about the things I came here to pay for. You made me wonder about the life that I thought I could repent. Little Malo from northern Uganda. A small chest of diamonds in Rwanda. There were tens of thousands there. But Malika, I think her name was Malika, was just one.

“You know, I’ve walked past death so many times that you’d think I’d somehow end up dead like that, but I haven’t. Maybe I went a little crazy. I know a man in Connecticut who is willing to kill anyone anywhere in Africa or South America. He says he won’t kill in this country or Europe, but life down south is open season for him. I know a man in the kidney business and another one who deals only in hearts.”

“Is he black?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The assassin.”

“Yes. Yes, he is. But that doesn’t matter. He could be a white man. The fact is that he has become an individual, a man who takes actions solely from his own decision. Just like me, he is what he makes of himself. Maybe one day he’ll fall apart too, but that won’t matter either. You can never take back your life.”

I didn’t believe Bennet. His sorrow and self-pity, I thought, were a trick somehow. The only thing I couldn’t figure was what he had to gain by fooling me now.

“Are you ready to go?” I asked.

“No.”

“What you mean, no? You want another four days in the hole?”

He clasped his hands in front of his face as if in prayer and said, “I haven’t done anything else wrong.”

“What do you want from me, Mr. Bennet?”

“One time I walked into a room in Amsterdam wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants and changed the future of a nation” was his reply. “I once gave a nine-month-old infant as a present to a man’s dog. The man wanted to see if the myth of wolves raising men could be true. I walked through a city of the dead, in Rwanda, guarded by soldiers who were paid in dollars. Everywhere men and women had lain for so long that their bones had softened and they had become deflated bags of maggots. I retrieved enough money in diamonds to rebuild a nation, but instead I took those jewels and put them in a titanium box in the Alps.

“I’m still a bookkeeper behind enemy lines. Do you understand that, Mr. Dodd-Blakey?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What did you do while I was down here?”

“I learned to ride horses and I got drunk and I got laid.”

“Did you hear me screaming?”

“Sometimes. Not much though. You sounded like a moose who got stuck in some briar about a mile or so from here.”

“Did you worry that I might die?”

“Some.”

“Did you worry that I might kill you for treating me like that?”

“No,” I lied.

“Have you ever watched a child being murdered, Mr. Blakey?”

I shook my head and squinted.

“I once made ten million dollars because I was willing to deliver one million to a man hiding from the communists in Nicaragua. That’s the American way.” He laughed.

“Why are you here, Mr. Knosos?”

“Last summer I had a deal fall through.”

I had gotten up to the gate and now I was shaking, too afraid to go further.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think I need to know this.”

“Let me stay a little bit longer, Charles,” Anniston Bennet said. “You can take away the books and just feed me bread and water if you want. You can keep the lights off all the time, but please don’t ask me to leave here.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No. No, I’m not crazy at all. As a matter of fact I’m very sane. That’s because I stopped for a minute and looked around and saw what it was that I was doing. All of a sudden I realized what was happening, what I had done was so, so…”

“…evil,” I said, thinking that I was finishing his thought. “You realized that you were evil?”

Bennet was rubbing his fingers along the rough surface of his chin, considering my words.

“No, and yes. What had happened was evil. The child torn apart and half devoured by a dog in the night. Procuring a heart or a kidney for a man who I might need as a business contact one day. The act is evil.” Bennet’s face contorted to grapple with the concept he was explaining. “Yes. And my actions were also evil, criminal. But it was not me; it was the world around me. Not me but the commerce and the language of our world.” He scooted up to the edge of his plastic chair and held his hands out separately, pinching the fingers together. “Death and starvation are integral parts of our language system, our form of communication.
Do what I say or else. Do your job or you’re fired.
These words carry consequence. To avoid pain we comply. Or we don’t and then we die. Our logic is evil, so the smartest and the most successful are devils. Like me. I am a good citizen and the worst demon. I realized it when a deal fell through. I failed and I had a dream and in the dream, I had done the right thing—failing.”

“And so you’re punishing yourself because you did good?” I asked.

He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. I did the right thing and the whole world, my whole world, fell apart. I realized that the fact of my failure was good in one way. But even though thousands may have been spared, that is not important. In order for man to survive as a species, there has to be people like me. People have to die for others to produce. The deaths are wrong, but the continuation of the world is more important.”

“So then you have been doing the right things. So there’s nothing wrong with you. And if that’s true then why would you feel that you need to be punished?”

Bennet sat back in his chair with all the certainty and fear of a despot awaiting his long-overdue execution.

“I was arrested once in Uganda. There was no trial; I was just taken to prison. I was beaten and tortured”—he leaned forward to indicate the scars on his shoulder —“and then left to contemplate my sins in a small cell. Pain is a part of life and I’ve always accepted the fact of death. But the time I spent in that cell, though I hated it while I was there, was like a gap in the thoroughfare that had been my life. Like the road just stopped and then there was a forest. A black forest, thick and dark, with no promise at all.

“My life stopped in that cell. And my worst enemy was everything that I knew. The blood work I’ve done. It was the worst experience I ever had. As the days went by, I got sick on the magnitude of what I had done. When they released me, I had to be hospitalized. I gashed my own thigh with a bayonet so that no one would realize how precarious my mind had become.

“As bad as that time in prison was, I wanted to go back—to face the evil and accept the accusations in my own mind. That’s why I came here. I had no idea that you’d do the dictator one better by turning out the lights.

“I came here hoping to make a statement to myself. To isolate and punish the part of me who sees the evil. The only real way to be punished is to recognize and pay for your deeds. But when I was in that darkness, hating you, I saw everything all over again. I remembered checking the situation in Rwanda every day for over a year. We knew it was going to blow up down there. And then I remembered walking along the streets of the dead. In the darkness here, I can almost feel them. My own body odors are reminiscent of the smell of death. I could understand how the sweat and gasses become stronger when you die and then they leak out of you. And it’s so dark and your heart is still beating, but death might be like that.

“I could not have stopped the massacre of the people there. I could not have changed the history set in motion centuries ago. And if I tried I would have lost all my power. I would have become like an ant under the foot of another man like me.”

“I still don’t get it, Mr. Bennet. Why here? Why me?”

“At first it was just a joke. Not a joke on you, Charles. I like you. You have a lot of potential. I chose you so that Anniston Bennet, the whitest white man that I could think up, would be jailed by a black man who really was a blue blood in American history. But then, when I got to know more about you, it seemed that you were my opposite in many more ways. You have done very little with your life, haven’t you? No profession, no job. You have never completed one project. You’ve never made a woman pregnant or voted, as far as I can tell. You quit school.

“Your whole life could be called a failure. Every second up until this moment has been wasted. But still you are truly innocent while I, who have changed the course of nations, am not worthy to call you friend.”

There was a fanatic tone to Bennet’s words. Because of this I didn’t pay much attention, at that moment, to the insults he gave me. Later on, after he was gone, I thought about what he had said. There wasn’t much that I could disagree with. He was evil and I was a failure; maybe that was the difference between the good and bad people of the world.

“Can I stay?” he asked again.

“What do you expect to get out of staying down here?”

“I just don’t want to leave yet, Warden. I need a little more time to think about all this.”

“It sounds like you got it all figured out already,” I said. “To save the world or whatever, you’ve got to be a badass.”

“The words I say to you are just words. But the child I sold into death, the corpses I robbed—these are the truths that I can no longer avoid. I have to make peace with them. I have to make peace with them or I’ll go crazy.”

You’re not too far from that already,
I thought to myself.

“Just another week,” he said. “Just seven more days.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Thank you, Charles. Thank you,” he said.

I
brought him breakfast and didn’t unlock the cage, so he could stay for at least the day. Maybe I’d free him that evening—that’s what I thought.

He wanted to talk more, but I refused. Just the few hints at the violence and pain he had caused set off a shaking inside me. I wandered around the floor of my house; then I tried to read a book. My mouth was producing too much saliva, and I had to swallow and spit continually. I had gas pains relieved only by foul-smelling farts. My fingers and toes felt numb. My teeth hurt at the gums.

I was scared to death. I felt like a man riding an avalanche; it was only a matter of time before I’d be plowed under and crushed.

I wanted my mother or father. Even a bad word from Uncle Brent would have been a relief from my fears. I went to the liquor cabinet but couldn’t stomach the idea of drinking.

Finally I sat down on the floor in the middle of the living room and closed my eyes. It was something I had done when I was a small boy. When everything got too exciting, I’d sit on the floor and think about the shadows on my eyelids. On a sunny day the darks and lights, the blues, grays, and reds that appeared behind closed eyes were like the ocean. I imagined myself as a little octopus, seeing the sea world and feeling safe because I had so many arms. Sometimes I’d make up little songs, humming a tune about nothing and floating in the ocean among fishes and sea kings.

I had crossed over from turmoil to childish ecstasy by the time the doorbell rang. I don’t know how long I had been sitting, but my feet were asleep and it was painful and slow for me to rise. I didn’t know how long the bell had been ringing either, but it stopped before I could hobble to the front door. I remember laughing at my exaggerated limp.
Like an old man,
I thought. And for some reason that made me happy.

She was headed back down the front stairs. Across the street, Miss Littleneck was watching.

“Extine,” I called out.

The woman with the big blond hair hesitated a moment and then turned around.

“Hi,” she said. “I came over to say that I was sorry.”

She was wearing jeans and a button-up blue-cotton blouse that didn’t cover her midriff. Both articles of clothing were tight. She had yellow rubber flip-flops on her feet and a yellow-and-white scarf around her neck.

Just thrown together,
Uncle Brent’s voice said in my memory.

“Come on in,” I invited. She accepted with a bowed head.

“How did you find where I lived?” I asked Extine in the breakfast nook next to the kitchen. I had poured her some apple juice, which she wasn’t drinking.

“Petey said that he knew a guy who knew where your house was,” she answered.

Petey was the regular bartender at Curry’s. Somebody in town must have recognized me.

I was struck and scared by her appearance at my door. It’s not that I cared about Extine finding me, but I realized that my feeling of invisibility was false. People did see me. They knew when I passed in the street. My actions were noted no matter how small I thought I was.

“So I decided,” she continued, “to come over and apologize for leaving you out there like that.”

“Why did you leave me?” I asked.

“Jodie and By left and I told them that I would drive you home. They were mad at me because they thought I slept with you, and Byron and Sanderson are friends. I don’t know. I guess I got mad at you. I thought that you had taken advantage of me…”

“I passed out,” I complained. “And then you left me without a ride.”

“You put your hands on my breasts and jerked me by the arm,” she countered. “I thought you were going to rape me.”

“I don’t remember,” I said. And I didn’t. “I remember kissing you. I remember that. But I thought that that was okay. I thought you liked it.”

“That doesn’t mean I wanted your hands all over me.” She was getting angry. I could see that she was deeply bothered.

“I’m sorry, Extine,” I said. “It was a bad mix—whiskey and horsehair. Please accept my apology. You know I didn’t want to make you mad.”

“Okay,” she said as if it was the apology she had come for. “And I’m sorry too, about leaving you out there with no way to get home.”