The Man in My Basement (20 page)

“Why did you leave me?” I asked again.

The question surprised her. By her face I could see that she thought the answer was obvious.

“I mean,” I continued. “Did you think that you just wanted to get away from me? That you couldn’t stand one more minute in my company and you just had to leave? Or was it that you were mad at me and wanted to hurt me by making me walk all those miles lost in the woods?”

She thought about the question for a moment, and then a moment more.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was mad. I didn’t want to see you. And I didn’t know what you would be like in the morning all alone out there. When By and Jodie left, it was only you and me. I was afraid, I guess.”

“Afraid that I’d hurt you?”

“I guess.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“I felt guilty. That’s why.”

“Guilty because you kissed me? Or guilty that you left?”

Extine frowned and did not answer.

I stood up and she scrambled to her feet.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have hurt you even in those woods. I’m a safe Negro. You could put a soap bubble in my hand and it’d never even pop.”

Extine liked neither the sound of my voice nor the words that I said.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Yeah. I know.”

I watched her drive away in a convertible Jaguar sports car. I don’t remember the model, but it was expensive, no doubt.

“Charles,” Miss Littleneck called from across the street.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Who was that white girl?”

“Just somebody I met.”

For a long time after she was gone, I thought about Extine. Her presence, her kisses, meant very little to me. Our physical relationship, what little of it there was, was no more than an exercise. I realized that most physical intimacy was like that for me. I liked sex, but it was only a bodily pleasure. It wasn’t an expression of love but just a need, a pleasant moment, sometimes even a chore.

What mattered about Extine was that she sought me out, that she found me. All of the women I had gotten to know after meeting Anniston Bennet had that in common. They made me real by seeking me. It’s not that they knew what they were looking for. Bethany only liked me because I resisted her erotic power. Extine… Extine liked horses, and at the end of a satisfying day in the saddle, she found me at her side. Narciss called me Mr. Blakey. She refused to see the solitary and jobless man who hadn’t accomplished one thing in his entire life.

It wasn’t that she was trying to form me with her blindness. She could only see in me what she needed. But because of the purity of her vision, I changed. I didn’t become what she needed, but the force she exerted on me—the impact of her desire—caused love of a sort. Not the kind of feeling that would bring us together but love still and all.

To a lesser extent I was changed by Bethany and Extine. We had shared a moment of transformation—like in one of my science-fiction novels.

After going through that long tunnel of thought, I emerged realizing that I could now answer Anniston Bennet’s question about love.

I went straight to the cellar and found Mr. Bennet with an erection. You could see the enormous arching contour under his hand-washed prison pants. I imagined that he had been masturbating when I opened the hatch and didn’t have time to calm down. I didn’t ask him about it though. I had more important things on my mind.

“Did you really sell a baby to a man’s dog?” I asked even before perching on the trunk.

I had thought that we would talk about love. I hoped to impress him with my self-realization. But once I understood my own impulses, I found that I was hungry for more understanding.

“Yes,” Bennet answered in an almost silent whisper.

“Did you know about Rwanda before it happened and didn’t say a word?”

“Yes,” he said a little louder. “But that’s different. Everyone knew that it was about to explode down there. Saying words wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t know if anything I could have done would have made a difference.”

“And you stole that painting?”

He nodded.

“…and killed that sergeant?”

He nodded again.

“…and you bought human organs from a man who dealt in that trade?”

Bennet hesitated a moment and then nodded again.

“But you still don’t think you’re a murderer? Even though somebody’s got to die to give up a heart.”

Bennet almost answered that but then swallowed and stayed silent.

“What was your failure?” I asked him.

“I thought you didn’t want to know about that?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I have to. I have to know what I got down here. I can’t be too afraid to ask.”

“Why not, Charles?”

“Because it’s here. I took your money and now I have to know what I sold.”

Bennet’s face was filled with an emotion that I could not decipher.

“It was a device,” he said. “A device that could cause terrible damage if put into the wrong hands. I knew about a youthful indiscretion of a man who had some overseas contacts, influence. We knew each other socially, as chance would have it. But it was through e-mail, anonymously, that I delivered my threat. It wasn’t blackmail exactly because he stood to become a wealthy man with our transaction. But circumstances threw the deal out of whack. It didn’t work out.”

“What circumstances?”

“A case of conscience and subsequent suicide.” Bennet’s words were completely emotionless.

“So he saved his name without giving in to you.” I felt the victim’s triumph.

“He didn’t give in,” Bennet agreed. “But his secret was still leaked. It was in all the papers nine months ago. I had to punish him even though he was dead because there would be other candidates and they should realize that consequences go beyond the grave.”

“You
are
evil,” I said.

“I’m a tool, Charles. A precision tool. A tool of destruction. A tool of the dollar and the euro and the yen. But my actions are not mine alone. All the possibility of the world exists without me. That man would have died anyway. And the target of that device will one day be destroyed. That’s the way of the world. It’s not a question of good or evil. It’s a question of humanity and what is done in that name.”

“Then why put yourself down here?” I asked again.

Bennet’s erection was gone. He winced and grimaced, clutched his hands into fists.

“Don’t you understand yet? I can’t explain it like the instructions to put together a box. It’s powerful stuff. Powerful stuff. Powerful enough to destroy.”

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“No.”

“Will you answer my question?”

“I’ve already answered as well as I could.”

“I don’t believe that. So you either answer me right now or leave or spend four more days in the hole.”

“I can’t leave and I’ve already answered.”

I brought him more bread and condensed milk, which I opened for him since I had confiscated his opener. Then I left him with ninety-six more hours to contemplate his crimes.

A
round that time I started putting money in banks in Southampton, East Hampton, out down in Long Island City. Five hundred dollars at a time in interest-bearing savings accounts. I dated Bethany, Extine, and Narciss three of the four nights that I avoided the hatch behind my house. Extine spent the night wanting to kiss me, but I refrained because I knew that would take her power away. Narciss and I went to see the remastered version of Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil.
Afterward we talked about it and then I drove her home. She asked me to come in, but I said no.

“Don’t you like me?” she asked with excruciating honesty.

“I do, honey. But I’m like an athlete in training. I need all my power to concentrate.”

“Training for what?”

“An examination. A test that Mr. Dent is giving me.”

“What kind of test?”

“Just to see what I know, what I can do.”

“Like an aptitude test?”

“Uh-huh. Just like that.”

Bethany was the biggest problem and the most fun. I took her to the fanciest restaurant we knew, the Captain’s Table in Amagansett. I told her up front that I was going home alone, and she proceeded to spend the rest of the night being all sexy and seductive. Every move of her shoulders set my heart to thrumming.

I kissed her for a long while at her door. But then I told her that I had to get home, that I had an important meeting the next day. And that was no lie.

Every night I sat up late with my ancestors. Leonard, the geeky-looking one, JoJo, the warrior, and Singer, the mask with his lips set into an O. I named them and thought about them. I had made up their characters and histories, but they were real to me.

Singer was a priest. He knew songs all the way back to the first songs. He was from the Congo, I believed, and not related to Leonard, who dealt in slaves, or JoJo, who protected Leonard even though he knew what his brother did was wrong.

I talked with them in earnest for hours. JoJo’s voice told me that death was nothing to fear. Leonard suggested that I get the money while I still had the man locked away and powerless.

Singer I did not understand. His placid face always chanting. I learned the most from him.

I wasn’t crazy. It’s just that my world had disintegrated. Or maybe it was that I never really had a life but hadn’t known it, so I was blissful in my ignorance. Everything began to fall apart when I started talking to Anniston Bennet… No. Before Bennet and I started our talks on evil, when I started cleaning out my cellar… Or maybe it went all the way back to Uncle Brent or before him to when my father died.

I put on a dark suit with a yellow shirt and a splashy red-and-blue tie to go see Bennet. His beard was filling in and his dark eyes were intense. It took him a full five minutes to get used to the light. He had lost weight, and from the smell of the room, I thought he might have had an intestinal disorder.

I didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t my choice, I felt, but his. He could walk free at any time or answer my questions and eat steak.

“Mr. Bennet,” I said.

“Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”

“Are you ready to answer my questions?”

“Don’t you mean am I ready to go home?”

“Not before you answer my questions.”

I thought that there were tears in his eyes, but I wasn’t certain.

“Why do you want to be down here in this cage?” I asked.

“Don’t you see? Haven’t you been listening to me?” he said. “With a word from me, your life could end. Maybe just with a gesture. A sentence could level a city block or blow a jetliner out of the sky. A dream could destroy Philadelphia. A disagreement could throw western Africa into famine for five years. You see it every day on TV, but no one listens. People like me move around, but no one knows our names.”

“Maybe you’re hiding down here,” I suggested.

“I’m not afraid to die, Charles. I’ve truly walked through the valley of death.”

“If you aren’t hiding, then are you afraid of what you might do?”

“There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.”

“I don’t understand. If you feel like you don’t make a difference, then why torture yourself?”

Bennet looked at me with wide frightened eyes. “Don’t leave me in the dark again, Charles. Give me a couple of days with some food and light.”

“All you have to do is answer my question, Mr. Bennet.”

“Give me a couple of days.”

“Could that baby ask you that?”

Maybe I was crazy. I didn’t hate Bennet. I was his employee. Somehow I felt that he was still calling the shots, that he was making up his own mind to starve in darkness four days more. He was tortured behind those black eyes, under that scorched head. I was the tool of his penance.

He was a slaver of souls in the twentieth century. He was a killer and a liar and a thief, but that didn’t matter to me. From what he had said I understood that he was a torturer of black people, but I believed him when he said that it wasn’t out of malice or even intent.

My domination of him came from a personal conflict we were having.
I
didn’t want to be another one of his slaves. I was foolish enough to believe that I could take his money and keep my freedom.

The next four days were spent pretty much as the last. I saw a lady three out of four nights. The first day I went fishing and didn’t catch a thing. The next day I saw Clarance and Ricky together for the first time in months. I picked them up in my car and treated them to drinks at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. We sat in the front room talking about old times and drinking port. Clarance smoked a cigar.

“What’s goin’ on with you?” Clarance asked me in the middle of our talk.

“What you mean?”

“I mean you never answer your phone and we don’t see you. You don’t have a job, but you’re still in your house and goin’ out buyin’ port. Somebody said that they saw you at Curry’s in East Hampton. One guy saw you hitchhiking down the road to Southampton.”

“I don’t know, Clarance,” I said. “Things are changing. You know I haven’t done much with my life and I’d like to change that if I could.”

“What you gonna do?”

I knew the answer to his question right then, when he asked, but I didn’t answer because secrets had become dearer to me than their own content or designs.

The pecan pie was the most unexpected thing that happened while I waited for my prisoner to soften up in the dark. I bought the pie, which was edged in chocolate, at a roadside bakery stand that my mother used to frequent. It was a beautiful pie. The pecans crowded the surface and the crust rose like a collar, leaving ample room for the chocolate edge.

I bought the pie in memory of my mother, but when I got home I carried it across the street to Miss Littleneck. She was delighted and insisted that I come in to share the gift of giving with her sister, Chastity.

The entranceway to the Littleneck home was close and unlivable, I thought. Irene led me up a flight of narrow stairs to a room where the scent of death hovered like incense. In the small bed lay a woman, once black and now gray, the size of a child and wearing a curly brown wig. Her eyes might have been open. Her chest didn’t seem to move. But I knew from the jittering finger of her left hand on top of the blanket that she was still among the living, at least for a little bit and a while.