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 has 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 that, 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 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 anyway, 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 innumberable 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 miraculous 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 upwards, 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 secondhand suit who had visited the house earlier that night.
