I was probably five or six when the basement incident took place: old enough to know taking a leak back behind the communal building was not appreciated, but young enough to still mostly get away with it. I was squatting there in this little corner, behind Larissa’s garden and underneath her balcony, my shorts and underpants around my knees, watching a stream of urine run in yellow-tinted rivulets over dense dirt toward a pigeon carcass which, having undoubtedly been dragged there by one of Larissa’s feral cats, had just barely begun to stink. When I was done, I carefully sidled out from behind the wet spot crowned by tuft of clumpy feathers, and then from out of the little alcove. It was such a narrow and low space that I had to exit it completely before being able to pull my shorts back up, but it was still preferable to running up to our second-floor flat, to the old toilet that leaned against a old tub beneath a single dim lightbulb and only served to exaggerate the darkness of, well, everything. I often had - have - nightmares of lying in this tub, being forced to take a bath, and realizing that the water had turned green and slippery in my fingers. Sitting in pondscum I would be paralyzed by the knowledge that at the bottom of the tub lies my dog, dead, decomposing, and if I move my feet even an inch, it would disintegrate and its molecules would coat my body, and I would only urinate the congealed blood of the dog for the rest of my life.
Yes, I must have been five or six, before my neuroses were noticed and aggressively discouraged, and after the dog had committed suicide off the second-floor balcony onto the concrete pathway in front of Larissa’s modest garden, while I was relieving my bladder in that little alcove. I felt the thud of the dog’s collision with the ground, but it made no other noise: I could still hear Larissa talking to the other women with sagging skin and bad breath and no respect for my privacy, all sitting in the front courtyard, bathrobes about their elbows and tits loose in old white cotton bras. I was still squatting, urine still dribbling out of me and to the ground. I was still facing the breathtaking stillness of the dog, and the voices seeping from the open courtyard to every crevice of the building were still carrying notions about which neighbor boy I would marry when I was nineteen and ready to have little babies of my own. They named boys about 11 or 12 years of age, who lived in the next building over, and enjoyed driving their fathers’ motorcycles, smoking their fathers’ cigarettes, and pointedly not socializing with the younger children.
Our pair of squat, two-story apartment buildings are this village’s claim to being a full-fledged town, but the new corrupt government takes no more care of them than the old one. They threaten you with the possibility of sliding forgetfully off the benign hill-like elevation atop which they have been plopped, cradled by a road full of potholes to the east and a filthy pond to the west. You can watch the sunset over the pond, the reflections of the sun on the water illuminating post-war desolation and slowness and decay. You can swing on the arms of the weeping willows lining the pond: they bend, but do not break, like the people of this twin hive. These people tend to their disappointing rows of unimpressive gardens, and return home from grueling workdays to the beds on which their friends and relatives lay dying not a decade past. There is a basement where these people store anything that would be in the refrigerators, if there were any working units left, but there were not, they were repurposed as rabbit-pens, near the courtyard full of gossiping pigeons and gossiping women. If you walk away from their ceaseless clamour about what a fertile couple some neighbor boy and I would make, away from the pulsating masses of copulating rabbits stuffed into their rusted prisons, if you walk toward the pond and then turned right, you will soon be in the marsh, among the goats and piles of bricks and industrial debris.
This post-apocalyptic wonderland was where the older boys most often went to smoke their fathers’ cigarettes, sometimes riding their fathers’ motorcycles, though it really was not very far at all. Now, I went there, too, searching for a treasure. Having extracted a beautiful piece, rough and metallic and angular, I carried it slowly and deliberately past an angry but tired goat. I offered it to one of my assigned potential beloveds as he stood on the edge of the meadow, a little ways away from his friends, pissing on a rock. He laughed at me, zipped up his pants, and went to rejoin his group. As he walked away, I made another attempt to lure him, as the women had joked I ought to be doing: “let’s go play hide and seek,” I yelled, “in the basement,” I yelled even louder. Without looking to see if he had even turned around, I ran to the basement, to Larissa’s cache of beets and potatoes, squeezing myself between the sacks of vegetables. I calmed my breath and grew more quiet. If he was playing, I would have heard him counting off, but instead, to my right, I heard heavy breathing that was not mine, I heard shushing, I heard Larissa’s voice: “ready or not, my sunshine, my darling sunshine, here he comes.” The sounds that followed were so wet that I could swear I was at the bottom of a pile of rotting catfish, partially gutted, their cold, infinitely long whiskers hanging so loosely that I tried to stop breathing altogether, in case one of them slips into my mouth and I can never get it out again.
But, of course, I could not hold my breath forever. I heard the familiar smack of Larissa’s mismatched slippers, one ker-plunking on her tough sole much louder than the other, which dragged along the ground. She placed something on her pile, on me, effectively, and it was warm and bloody. Weeping and moaning spread along the damp floor like a low, sulfuric fog: “my baby, my little baby, my God, forgive me!” I needed air, I could not stop breathing, I could not stop the endless tendril of a gutted catfish from slipping down my throat and pulling chunks of acidic dog-hair from my belly through my mouth onto the ground.
Larissa used to love to tell stories, but she tells nothing about this incident. I am told she was washing the sick off me for hours. I am told that, for days, I refused to stand - though I distinctly recall being unable to stand, I recall being propped up against things, and falling, hard, hitting my head and falling asleep again. I am told it was weeks before I stopped soiling myself, and months before I would utter words. Those words were to Larissa, and they had all the sincerity and determination of a child wronged: “why did you kill my dog?” She does not like telling this story because when I said this, all the ugly gossiping women tied up their robes and left the courtyard, shaking their heads.
I am neither five nor six now and I do not much care whether Larissa does or does not like telling this story. It is my story. I have endured a life sentence of inquisition, trying to understand what it was that happened in the basement, why it left me so scarred. Larissa is the only one who knows me to have been scarred well before the incident, scarred the way a cracked mirror is scarred with the inevitability of shattering. I had refused to speak to her before, anticipating her terrifying omniscience, but now it is the last chance. She is a dry breathing carcass who has yet to offer me an answer. I take her hand into mine, she opens her eyes, sees me, withdraws the hand. The mummy face looks away and tiny puddles of moisture begin to form in its dark cavities; when I lean in to speak with her, I can see these newly formed pools of water teeming with tadpoles. “Why did you kill my dog?” “My sunshine, my darling sunshine, there never was a dog.”
Submitted April 17, 2016 at 11:18PM by worrydoll http://ift.tt/2693Skl nosleep
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