The Thing in the Basement

The Thing In The Basement:

The paneling was not quite straight. It looked straight, the black lines atformerly-fashionable almost random intervals, some of the lines thick, some of them thin, all of them separated by sheaths of wood or near-wood (it looked like wood but was probably particle-board, which was a type of wood, maybe, but notreally wood. It can't be wood if it's just sawdust compacted into a shape that lookslike wood.)That was how I felt at the end. Like a person ground into sawdust but thensmashed back into the shape of a person. And the paneling! Why was that bothering him? You wouldn't notice that it was not straight, not unless you looked closely, wherepictures hung, to see that if the picture was level (maybe they weren't?) thepaneling was crooked. Maybe it wasn't, maybe the pictures were crooked and thepaneling straight, but the whole effect, once you noticed it, was to give you thefeeling that things were a little off-kilter. Well, give

you

the feeling that things were a little off-kilter. A

little!

HA! They were a

lot

off-kilter.That's why I killed myself. It wasn't the sawdust feeling. It wasn't even the ThingIn The Basement. It was because I finally realized that everything just wasn'tright.But I shouldn't kid myself, or you. The Thing In The Basement had a lot to do with it. What the Thing In The Basement gives, the Thing In The Basement takes away.One way or another.

It wasn't always like that. At first, we didn't even know about the Thing In theBasement. When we first found the house, I couldn't believe it. Melissa and I had beenlooking for a house for almost a year. I didn't make very much money, and wehad even less once she became pregnant. I spent all of my time worrying about it. All of the time I didn't spend at my job as a copy editor of a series of local papers. Which was becoming more and more, because (I told myself) we needed themoney and because (I told Melissa) they needed me at the office, since I didn't want her to feel like she was the cause of the problem. She wasn't.I would sit, sometimes, at my office, late at night, proofreading a story about atown board meeting, and wonder whether I should even go home. I'd wonder,sometimes, whether I couldn't just go drive the car into the lake.Then I'd shake it off, go home, we'd eat dinner, and go house hunting.So when we pulled up at what would become our house (it's not like it's ruiningthe surprise to tell you we bought it... I wouldn't kill myself in a rental house, youknow), and looked at it, I didn't think there was a chance in hell we could affordit.The realtor was just getting out of her car behind us. "Isn't it lovely?" shehollered.It was. It was a nice-looking house, a little Cape Cod house (and why are CapeCods called that when they're located in the Midwest?) with dormer-type windows and a landscaped front lawn that had enough grass to let you know it was a lawn but enough flowers to let you know that you wouldn't be doing a lot of mowing.The realtor saw my gaze. "The flowers are perennials. They don't require a lot of care." There were tall trees throughout the front (and back) yard, providing shadeand showing low, level branches that would easily hold up a tire swing or a treefort.Melissa just stared, enraptured. "I hope we can afford it," she said under her breath.

We can't.

I thought. I didn't see how we ever could. This might be a waste of time.Then I stepped on the lawn, at the same time as Melissa. I saw her eyes light up."Oh, Jude, it's

perfect,

don't you think?"See? See what can happen? That wasn't a mistake. Melissa knew (like I did) tonot make a big deal about the house because the realtor will use that against you.

But she told me later that she couldn't help it. We would be in our first night inthe house, a few weeks later, eating pizza over a cardboard box that served as ourkitchen table, and she would explain that she had overflowed with happiness themoment she'd stepped onto the lawn.I didn't. I hadn't. When we stepped onto the front lawn I thought I was going tocry. I almost did. But I held it in and it passed. We went into the house. The previous owners had left it empty. The realtor didn'tknow where they'd moved to. She'd had the house on the market only a shorttime; she thought their lawyer had called and listed it.If only all we would be dealing with was a lawyer.The bedrooms, three of them, were small but nice. The rest of the house wassmall but nice, too. I won't bore you. I didn't notice the paneling that first timethrough -- didn't notice for a long time. The paneling was in a den, which had been added onto the back of the house and was somewhat recessed or sunken in,so you stepped down from the kitchen and into the den.I did notice the wall in the kitchen. I noticed because first, when I stood next to it,the hair on my body stood up like it will during an electrical storm. And I noticed it because it's not that common to have a brick wall in your kitchen,especially an 8' tall, 4' wide brick wall made of red brick that doesn't match any of the other brick in the house."Do you like that?" The realtor asked, noticing me looking at it.I shrugged. "Seems a little out of place," I said. When I touched the brick, my fingers tingled."I think it bricked over a fireplace. Would you like to see the backyard?" We walked out through the den into the backyard, where a small vegetable garden was overgrown with weeds and what might have been a zucchini plant. Melissa walked back to the fence with the realtor. I looked around. No firewood orfirewood pile. No coal shoot.No basement windows. I looked at the roof. If they'd bricked up a fireplace, they'dtaken out the chimney, too. When we went back in, I went over to the brick area again. This time, I felt thesadness again, but not as strongly."Does it have a basement?" I asked."We don't discuss the basement of this house," said the realtor. She turned and