I can hear him in the house. Ben.
He’s in his bedroom playing something on his iPhone. A spooky riff of electric organ. One of those weird electronica groups.
When we closed our criminal hacking operation down, Tabs slipping the flash drive back into her pocket, the two of us strolling back down past the clueless librarian and out the door, we followed the rules for once and said nothing.
Outside, where the sharp chill seemed to squeeze all the air out of me, Tabs said, “That was some fucked-up dream.”
There was something else fucked-up: The files seemed to stop there, right after that session. We’d had to sit through all the boring ones where pretty much nothing happened, then after Krakow finally puts Ben under with that hypnosis stuff and things get interesting—nothing. A brick wall.
“I have crazy nightmares too,” I said softly. Like I wanted Tabs to hear me and didn’t.
Ben’s dream had hit a nerve.
The locked closet.
Feeling trapped in a closet is a symbolic manifestation of the patient’s powerlessness, Krakow had written. His sister is missing, his family in crisis and his trauma unacknowledged. He is, in a sense, trapped in a living nightmare, which manifests itself as a sleeping one. Fire is almost always a representation of great anger—anger at his perceived powerlessness. This anger has previously sought its expression in fighting with classmates, destroying his sister’s bed, and now in this very specific and recurrent nightmare.
“Why would the files just stop like that?” I asked. “He said they were going to start with Ben’s dream. Where’s the rest?”
“Fuck yeah—I want my money back. It’s like yanking Netflix episodes midstream.”
We stood for a minute blowing on our hands, our breaths commingling in a single wet cloud, as if we were wordlessly forming a secret pact. A secret pact about secrets.
Keeping them and solving them.
When I opened the door to the basement, I was hit with a musty belowground smell, the kind of stink I associate with dead things.
I descended the steps in slow motion. The light at the top of the stairs was thin and piss-colored, no match for the fathomless black of the basement.
When I made it off the bottom step, something smacked me in the face. A cobweb? Or worse . . . a real spiderweb? Ben might hate snakes—for me it’s spiders. If you’ve ever seen a close-up of a spider’s crazy eyes, you’d understand—like looking in a kaleidoscope where one picture morphs into eight.
I’d run into a light cord—it was swinging back and forth like a metronome.
I pulled on it.
The basement was half-finished.
The floor was faded linoleum, but the walls were gray pockmarked concrete. If it was heated down here, it was hard to tell. I could see my own breath.
Along with other things.
It looked like a garage sale with no customers. For good reason—like who’d buy this stuff? A collapsed Ping-Pong table. Two deflated footballs sitting on top of a torn volleyball net. Mildewed boxes piled high with household crap. Mounds of old clothing.
A big rust-colored boiler emitted deep belching sounds, and a table off in the corner was littered with tools—screwdrivers, hammers, and pliers that seemed to have been untouched in years—like some kind of museum exhibit: SUBURBAN DAD’S WORK TABLE, CIRCA 2000.
There was a basement closet to the right of the boiler.
The one Ben was locked in, in his nightmare.
My legs refused to go there. Walk over to that closet, I commanded, chop-chop, but they were suddenly on strike.
It was Mr. Hammered’s fault.
He was lying down on the job again. Ignoring my explicit instructions and letting two psychopaths back onto the premises.
They used to make me walk into the closet myself.
Stuffing their faces with Domino’s pizza. Laughing at some stupid sitcom on the kitchen TV.
You know where to go . . .
A million times worse than them dragging me there—kicking, screaming, crying, pleading . . . No, please, no, Mother, no—which is what used to happen before I learned that making them madder meant I’d be locked in longer.
You know where to go . . .
Into a closet whose door would always lock shut behind me—sometimes not right away, not till they’d taken their sweet time polishing off a slice, or until their show ended. Standing there waiting for that click of the lock and stupidly praying it wouldn’t happen. That I wouldn’t end up trapped in a place so dark I couldn’t see my own hands clawing at the door. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep much anymore—because being covered in darkness is being trapped in a closet I can never get the fuck out of.
You know those World War II photos that are always turning up on TV? Grainy black-and-white shots of Nazis forcing Jews to dig their own graves—the ones they’d soon be lined up and machine-gunned into. Those awful photos show up on TV too. But it’s the ones taken before all those bodies lay naked and bullet riddled that made me nauseous. The Nazis exerting power that was total, complete, casual—shots of them grabbing smokes and cracking smiles while doomed Jews shoveled away in the background.
You know where to go . . .
Why use force when you can use fear?
I felt it now—it refused to go away. Just got stuffed in a basement smelling of dead things—and sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, you still had to walk down the stairs and face it.
The closet seemed five miles away.
Like I’d need to be some kind of power walker to get there—those bags of bones you see every four years in the Olympics who move like herky-jerky marionettes on speed.
Then I thought: This is Ben and Jenny’s closet. Not yours.
There are no sacks of moldy potatoes sitting in it. No Jobeth in there either.
And suddenly, I could move.
But when I opened the closet door, I found myself searching for scratch marks. The ones caused by a little girl’s fingernails. The ones I’d counted . . . forty-one, forty-two, forty-three . . . before I’d finally taken off for good.
They belonged to a different closet door.
In a different house. Belonging to a different girl.
None here.
The sickly fluorescent lighting only penetrated so far—I could make out the edges of bunched hung clothing, but I couldn’t tell what kind. The closet reeked of old person’s smell.
I flicked on the flashlight app on my phone.
I didn’t know why I’d walked down here or what I was looking for. Dreamscapes, I guess.
Poisonous snakes?
An eight-year-old Ben huddled against the door?
No, Ben was upstairs listening to music.
I think I just wanted to see the closet of Ben’s nightmare with my own two eyes. His nightmare. And mine.
Consider it anticlimactic.
It was a basement closet filled with closet stuff.
The kind of musty-smelling crap—old raincoats, faded blouses, a Boy Scout uniform (Ben’s?) that wouldn’t have made it into the Goodwill bins Mother and Father dressed me from—if you were willing to believe the just-resurfaced Jenny, that is, which Hesse and Kline weren’t.
Not anymore.
We need answers and sooner or later we’re going to get them.
Yeah, me too.
There was an orphaned black glove on the floor. A ripped scarf. An old leather belt coiled up in the corner.
That’s all.
Except for . . . those.
Those . . . what?
I didn’t know. I had to kneel down—something you don’t really want to be doing in a basement, any basement, but especially this one—and eyeball them up close.
I’d thought they were shadows at first. Black puddles where the door met the closet floor.
Except when I moved the door, they stayed where they were.
The black flaked off in my fingernails. The kind of thing Lysol can’t do squat about: spilled OJ, scuff marks, piss—the crap I had to wipe up when they stuck me on juvie hall KP.
This wouldn’t be listed on the Lysol bottle.
Black and crusted particles of wood.
Scorch marks, I think you’d call them.
You know—the stuff that’s left behind after a fire goes out.