IT'S FICTION MONDAY
Every Monday, here, will now be FICTION MONDAY. To kick things off, I'm going to serialize my new story,
THE DOOR
Illustration by Douglas Ferrin ©2014
He
could see the crumbling stone wall with its dirty little four-paned window
reflected in the floor of the basement.
That meant water again. “Not
again,” Bon mumbled and he felt around for the light switch. Somehow he had never acquired a physical
memory of where that stupid switch was.
He always reached too high, too low, not far enough in. “Whatever,” he said a little too loud for his
own emotional comfort, the thought shooting through his head that now he was
talking to himself. He had thought that
kind of behavior started only when you got old – Bon was 27. “Shit,” he said just after he had finally
found the switch and clicked it on. The
“shit” was not only about the extent of the water, which went from wall to
wall, but also about talking to himself.
“Txhaaa,” he breathed. “Stupid
house.”
It was a “furnished” rental – a big
old long, narrow brick house in Germantown, Philadelphia. Cheap.
Falling apart. He was always
embarrassed when he brought people over, although most people his age thought
it was cool he had this big old place to himself. It wasn’t cool. It was drafty and lonely and too far from
Center City. In winter (thank God it was
Spring now), the rooms he never used got the hottest from a clanky old radiator
system installed “Before The War,” his landlord had told him, though Bon
thought it was probably the First World War, not the Second. Maybe his landlord had meant the Civil
War. The house was old enough. His bedroom was freezing, so sometimes he
slept in the dining room because it was always sauna bath hot. “Dining room” was a floor plan kind of name
rather than a name that denoted actual use: it had an old top-opening freezer whose
motor chugged when it ran (which was always because it was so fucking hot in
there), a beat up Victorian sofa and armchair with matching rips and carved
claw feet. It did have a long table that
had once been painted, although now the paint, what appeared to be lead white
now turned yellow, only remained in mottled bits around the tops of the legs
and here and there around the edge of the table top. Once he had put a bag of groceries on it and
it had wobbled so badly it seemed it would topple over. He had never used it again.
“Christ,” he said, starting down the
stairs, which creaked under his slender weight.
There was a sump pump down there but it had previously spit the water
out so close to the house that it had seeped right back in. Last Summer Bon had guiltily put an extension
on the hose running outside from the pump and had pointed it toward the
neighbor’s house (that also had basement water problems), hiding the hose with
slabs of glittering, quartzite stone, the standard rock along what had, in
George Washington’s day, been a pretty valley on the Wissahickon
Creek. Now it was semi-ghetto.
He
had to splash his way twenty feet or so to where the pump switch hung loose on
the wall. The cloth covered wiring was
as old as the radiators and the pump sat perhaps an inch above the water on an
unsteady wood block (once the water had been so high it had half covered the
pump). The pump also sparked when he
turned it on. Electrocution was a
reasonable expectation, Bon believed. No
doubt Bon was right. Feet drenched, he
got to the switch and, scrunching up his face for what he divined would one day
be his inevitable death, flipped it up.
Still alive, he let out a sigh as the pump slowly chugged into life.
Next
to the switch was that door. The house
was built like a row house (although there were four feet separating the houses
on his street); the switch and the door were at the narrow end of the house
that faced its back, not its front. If
it had been on the front wall it might have made sense, perhaps leading to a
once existent utility tunnel, maybe a stairway to a hatch opening onto the
sidewalk. But there were no services
that came in the back – gas, electric, sewer, water, cable, all from the front. He had opened the door a few times, and there
was nothing there but a packed dirt wall.
It wasn’t even bricked up, as he expected it might have been if
something had been closed off.
He
stood looking at the door. He was
starting to hate the house; he had hated the house all winter, but now he was really starting to hate it. He, too, had thought it was cool when he had,
thinking the place was a steal, almost greedily signed a year lease. Thank God the year would be over in two
months. It had been a long year.
“Pbhhwew,”
he blew, shaking his head at the absurdity of the door – the whole ugly setup -
rolling his eyes, then turning away and splashing toward the stairs. “Pbhhwew,” he said again, looking back at the
door. The bottom of the door was under
water but he thought he saw light down there, as if coming through the little
slice of space at the bottom of it. No
way. It was just light on the little waves
his feet and legs had kicked up. But he stopped
and kept looking and when the little waves were gone the light was still there. “No way,” he said, not caring anymore if he
were talking to himself. Then he
realized he didn’t care anymore and he was afraid he was giving up, caving in
to this loser of a house, maybe starting to feel like a loser himself. Like his across-the-street neighbor Ted, who
still lived in his mother’s house, the house he had grown up in, whose mother
was long dead. Actually Ted had gone
away to be a hippie and had moved back when he was forty or so. Ted had silver hair and a skanky beard and was
always either shaking or drunk. At first
Bon didn’t believe it when Ted had told him that he had played with the 60’s
and 70’s band Sweet Molly, had played at Woodstock, but Bon had looked it up
and it was true. Which made Ted more
pathetic. Ted made Bon feel pathetic. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he murmured,
hitting himself mentally for yet again talking to himself.
After
he was convinced that the light really seemed to be coming from under the door,
or else some truly weird trick of the light and water were going on, he
splashed over and yanked it open. He was
blinded by brightness, his eyes having gotten used to the dimness of the
basement. “Whoa,” he said, as water
poured out onto a low stone step then onto asphalt. As his eyes adjusted to the daylight, he saw
a row of mopeds and motorcycles parked on what he could now see was a
sidewalk. Across the street were
shops. A sign on one said, “Spa Jean de
Beauvis”. The architecture looked
familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it.
He stepped out, was almost pushed out, by the water, onto the walk, then
stepped away to dryer land. “Whoa,” he
said again, looking around, then back at the door, which was now dark green and
closed, although a little water still trickled out from under it. He rushed back to the door and tried to yank
it open – it wouldn’t. He yanked
harder. He banged on it. He yanked.
He banged again. Then he heard
footsteps and noticed no more water flowed from under the door. It opened.
An elderly woman with an apron answered.
“Monsieur?” she said with a look of impatience. “Qu’est-ce que je peux pour vous?”
“I
live here,” he said. I mean, the water –
where am I?”
“Vous… vous Américains, toujours en
expectant qu’on peut comprendre ce que
vous dites . Mais qu'est-ce que vous voulez?”
Bon
peered over her shoulder into what seemed like an enormous, well-kept house, a
large curving staircase behind the woman.
From inside another voice said, “Annette? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” Annette turned and said, “Chez pas, Madame, ce Monsieur a frappé, j’ai répondu, il est apparemment un
Américain…”
“Américain?” the other voice said with apparent interest,
as a pretty thirty-something woman, smartly dressed in a deep blue, knee-length
dress, approached from behind Annette.
In a thick French accent she said, Annette stepping aside, “Uh, ‘ow may
I ‘elp you Monsieur?”
Bon
stared at her, utterly disoriented.
“Monsieur?”
she repeated.
“I,
uh…. My basement,” he said.
“Basement?”
“See
this water?” Bon held out his hand to
show the water, that now flowed down the gutter of the street. “It came from my basement. This door….
I…”
“Alors,”
the woman said. “I don’t understand
you.”
“Madame?”
said Annette. Bon had forgotten she was
there.
“Ah
oui. Ça va. Tu peux continuer.”
“Madame,”
said Annette as she hustled away, apparently busy with other things. The woman looked back at Bon questioningly.
“I…
I’m not sure I understand,” Bon said.
“’Ave we met? Do I know you?”
“No, no, I don’t think so. This was my house, I mean, my basement…
sous-sol,” he said, beginning to remember his spotty French.
“Zis ees not a ‘sous-sol,” the woman said half smiling, her brow creased in
dramatic confusion.
“I see that, I…. I, uh, may I have a
look at your basement?” said Bon, peering around the woman.
“Monsieur,” she said, “Zees ees my
‘ome.” She looked down at his soaked
shoes and pants. “You are perhaps, ‘ow
do you say, dangereux?”
“Me?
Dangerous? No, no, not at
all. I was in Philly… Philadelphia,
then…. Where am I? What street is this?”
“Where are you? You are Sérieux?”
Bon was silent, didn’t know what to
say.
“Zees is Paris, Rue Sommerand. In ze sixieume.”
“Paris? Really?”
“Really,” the woman said with a tone that said only an idiot wouldn’t
know that this was Paris.
Bon let out a deep breath. He felt dizzy. “What am
I going to do?” he mumbled, beginning to believe he had actually gone through
the door, that door, into another
land.
TO
BE CONTINUED NEXT MONDAY
©2014 Douglas C. Ferrin
All rights reserved
All rights reserved
