Under the Floor

Under the Floor

He put his back against the moldy brick and started on his own years.

Ten years under the floor as a child.

There was nothing sorry in it. He did not complain and he did not feel for himself. He gave the 10 years in the dark in the voice of a man describing a job he went to every day.

"I could hear you running around over my head before I could read," he said. He learned his letters off the old books my father dropped down the garbage slot for him to bag up.

And he talked about the two years he spent working at the foundation wall with a broken steel spoon, taking the lime out a piece at a time until he had a vent hole through to the grass outside, so he could get night air.

My father kept four snap traps under the kitchen and had me check them Saturdays from the time I was 10. In five years not one of them was ever sprung, and the bait went every week. The sounds under the floor came mostly between two and four in the morning, a dragging and then a long stop, and my mother called it rats and bought more traps.

On the north side of the house a band of grass along the foundation stayed dead, about 14 inches wide. My mother reseeded it twice and it came up thin and went brown by June. Food left the kitchen on no pattern I could find, half a loaf, a jar of peanut butter, four eggs out of a dozen, and I was the one who got asked about it. I understood all of it at 9:20 that night, sitting six feet from him.

Then Ethan stopped. He looked at me and went on in the same voice.

"We've met, James. A lot of times."

His voice got harder in the closed air.

"Do you remember the things out of your childhood that you kept, and then explained to yourself the way a dreamer explains things?"

I kept my mouth shut.

"The plate of honey cakes on your desk, the year you were 12."

Ethan came up off the wall and said it again, word for word.

"You decided your mother carried it up to your room in the middle of the night."

"She didn't. She was downstairs that night with her stomach, and it had her on the floor."

"I came up through the hatch and set the plate on the desk while you were asleep with your head down on it."

I moved the chair back an inch. The leg caught on a board and I left it there.

"The portrait with the eyes torn out. The one in the frame shoved under your bed, the year you were 12."

Ethan went on. The dark brown eyes took in what light there was.

"I drew that."

"And do you know why I took a rusted nail to both eyes on it?"

He came a little closer. His voice went down.

"It's you. I put the nail through the eyes because I didn't know what color your eyes were."

"I was never close enough to see you."

I looked down. Both my feet were flat on the floor and set square to the boards, and my hands were folded on my thighs the way his were.

"The eyes you caught once through the vent hole down at the base of the wall."

"The four yellow wooden Parcheesi pieces on the floor at the foot of your bed."

"The noise in the walls you decided was rats."

Ethan smiled.

"All of it was me."

"I've been close to you every one of the 31 years since."

I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and shouted at him.

"Then what about the night of October 17? The night 31 years ago, when they died."

"What happened in that house? Who killed them?"

Ethan stopped talking. He stopped at exactly that point. He looked at me and there was nothing in his face.

"That part you have to remember yourself, James."

His voice went down as far as it would go.

"If I tell you what happened that night, you'll file it as one more thing GhostInk made up."

"You'd believe me, and it would cost you nothing. I don't need you to believe me. I need you to remember it."

"Why?"

I got it out with both hands closed hard on the edge of the seat.

"What do you actually want? What were the manuscripts for? You want me to settle something for you?"

Ethan got up off the old mattress. He was thin, and he stood straight in the dark down there.

"I don't need you to settle anything."

Ethan looked into my face and put it down short.

"I need you to write."

"Our parents got one thing right. You're the one who writes it down."

"Anything that happens in this world, if you don't put it on paper, it didn't happen."

He took one step toward the wood table.

"Dr. Kessler gave his whole life to a thing that doesn't exist. What he did, the ones in New Jersey, the ones out on the Hudson flats, and the Calloway girl. If you don't write it down, every one of them comes off the record."

"I want you to make it exist."

Ethan put a hand in the pocket of the work jacket and came out with a glass bottle the size of a little finger, with a clear liquid in it.

He didn't come any closer and he didn't hand it over. He bent down and set the bottle on the floorboards, in front of the toe of my shoe.

"This is the opposite of what's in Emily's bottle."

Ethan said it barely above a breath.

"It'll clear out the suggestion compound they put in you. I'm not telling you to take it. I'm leaving it here."

He turned and went toward the small side door that opens on the narrow way out behind the basement.

With his hand on the rusted iron handle he stopped for a second. He didn't turn around.

"Don't worry about Michael anymore."

"He took his commission off your blood for 20 years and kept his mouth shut to do it."

His hand was still on the handle and the light from the floor gaps came down across the back of it. There was a scratch there, three inches, running from the second knuckle toward the wrist. It had been on him when he sat down two hours earlier. It was still wet.

"Write, James. Finish the last book."

The wood door came to without a sound. No bolt went over. Nobody went after him. Ethan went out into the dark the way a man walks out of a book I wrote.

I sat where I was in the dark basement.

Time went by. The strips of light from the floor gaps moved across and came to rest on the small glass bottle standing alone on the boards.

I stayed in the chair a while and then got up. I went to the side door and put my hand flat against the wood without opening it, and then I came back and sat down again. My watch read 11:06. I counted the strips of light overhead twice and got seven both times.

I picked the bottle up off the boards. It held about a teaspoon of clear liquid, no label, a cork in it instead of a cap. The glass was warm in my hand, warmer than the room, and it stayed warm the whole time I held it. I set it back down on the same board and wiped my palm on my jeans.

I went back through the whole two hours.

Then one small thing came up out of it and stayed.

In those two hours, Ethan had not put a hand on anything in that basement.

Not the water glass on the table, not the arm of the wood chair, not the brick wall at his back, not the edge of the table. His hands had stayed folded on his thighs the whole time.

And when he left...

I went back over the last of it, him at the side door. Before he turned the iron handle, Ethan pulled the cuff of the work jacket down over his hand.

Once he was outside, he used that same cuff to wipe the handle off, lightly, without stopping.

He did it the way a man does a thing he has done for years.