rented houses for the first time, my father would declaim that this was a place where he could “really get something accomplished.” Soon afterward, he would begin spending more and more time in the basement of the house, sometimes living down there for weeks on end. The rest of us were banned from any intrusion on my father’s lower territories unless we had been explicitly invited to participate in some project of his. Most of the time I was the only available subject, since my mother and sister were often away on one of their “trips,” the nature of which I was never informed of and seldom heard anything about upon their return. My father referred to these absences on the part of my mother and sister as “unknown sabbaticals” by way of disguising his ignorance or complete lack of interest in their jaunts. None of this is to protest that I minded being left so much to myself. (Least of all did I miss my mother and her European cigarettes fouling the atmosphere around the house.) Like the rest of the family, I was adept at finding ways to occupy myself in some wholly passionate direction, never mind whether or not my passion was a rented one.
One evening in late autumn I was upstairs in my bedroom preparing myself for just such an escapade when the doorbell rang. This was, to say the least, an uncommon event for our household. At the time, my mother and sister were away on one of their sabbaticals, and my father had not emerged from his basement for many days. Thus, it seemed up to me to answer the startling sound of the doorbell, which I had not heard since we had moved into the house and could not remember hearing in any of the other rented houses in which I spent my childhood. (For some reason I had always believed that my father disconnected all the doorbells as soon as we relocated to a newly rented house.) I moved hesitantly, hoping the intruder or intruders would be gone by the time I arrived at the door. The doorbell rang again. Fortunately, and incredibly, my father had come up from the basement. I was standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs when I saw his massive form moving across the living room, stripping himself of a dirty lab coat and throwing it into a corner before he reached the front door. Naturally I thought that my father was expecting this visitor, who perhaps had something to do with his work in the basement. However, this was not obviously the case, at least as far as I could tell from my eavesdropping at the top of the stairs.
By the sound of his voice, the visitor was a young man. My father invited him into the house, speaking in a straightforward and amiable fashion that I knew was entirely forced. I wondered how long he would be able to maintain this uncharacteristic tone in conversation, for he bid the young man to have a seat in the living room where the two of them could talk “at leisure,” a locution that sounded absolutely bizarre as spoken by my father.
“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?”
“Not actually, I’m afraid. But I think I comprehend your general principles.”
“Then perhaps you might be interested in making a donation,” said the young man prematurely.
“I would indeed.”
“That’s wonderful, sir.”
“But only on the condition that your principles might be construed, advanced, and propagated as exactly the opposite of what they are.”
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 can 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.”
To 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 barely so, 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 momento 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 showyou. 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 secondhand 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 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 bed
