BASEMENT COMMANDMENT. Edited by Rowan Silva

BASEMENT COMMANDMENT
Bahram Zaimi

Sitting on a sofa one night, she discovered some of the things in her apartment do not belong to her. Terrified of seeing alien objects in her apartment, a mirror bigger than her bedroom, a painting with no painting on it, a never opened window, she decided to go out. The clue is in the survival struggle of life and death in basements where gods of underground rule.

BASEMENT COMMANDMENT

Bahram Zaimi

© Bahram Zaimi, 2019

ISBN 978-5-4496-1497-1

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

1

Seeds

She turned her face to the window. The tomatoes were ripe and crimson. She had planted the seeds in a rectangular flowerpot fitted wall to wall of her wide windowsill. The plant had overflown over the pot edge, rolled down, and reached the deep ledge, and then a free fall all the way down to the old hardwood floor in green and red. Hundreds of tomatoes having gripped thick green stems were covering the wall below the sill. The shower had not stopped on the floor, amplified in number and depth to flood broad in the living room.

She thought, “Wasn’t it yesterday that these colorful invaders were still on the windowsill? They have stealthily night crawled the hardwood, overcome the thick margin of the yellow carpet, flooding fast to my bare feet on the carpet as if aimed to sink me into waves of green and red. Three days, I planted the seeds just three days ago. Stranger than the rapid growth is the smell, not of the type of a vegetable. It goes down into my lungs to get into the soul, succumbing me to a devilish temptation of the wild. The aroma floats in the air of my apartment, I see souls dancing around me, sometimes in flesh. I bite; a wild taste of fresh kill, the red juice fills my mouth, overflows from sides of my lips, runs to my chin. I enjoy the dripping, red stains on the yellow carpet.”

She rubbed her feet over the sofa, the giggle went away, leaned nape of her neck on the back of the sofa and looked at the wall right across the leaving room. “Not all mysteries are pleasant. Who had painted this wall in white? As long as I can remember, five years ago when I could afford to rent this miserable apartment, everything was yellow, the color that I hate on the walls, floor, doorframes, ceiling even the old rag under my feet. I don’t think the greedy landlady have sneaked into my apartment to give the wall paint as a surprise gift to me. I don’t hate white, I fear it.”

She wanted to put her leg on the long sofa to stretch and then lay down and rest. There was another smell mixed with the aroma of the tomatoes which didn’t let her free from thoughts. Normally, she was able to ignore her problems, to jump over and forget her bad memories. This was a technique, which her eight psychotherapists had taught her in over eleven years. The plausible technique did not solve the problem, none the least she could waste her life without worrisome. She gave up the idea of resting on the sofa, with so many thoughts whirling and wandering around in her mind it was not possible.

She blamed, “It was his fault, the ninth one, or I should say the first psychoanalyst because of the method he chose for me after the failure of treatment of the eight psychotherapists. On the other hand, maybe not, I have mixed up. He had to change the trend completely. I guess he was right because I remember none of what the eight said, but word by word of the last.”

“Consciousness was your enemy for the last twelve years, it removes the problems to reach you to the comfort zone of routines because it cannot stay for long under the surge of inexplicable questions; let alone the benefits that it provides: financial support of Victim Support Organization and public pity on a presumed rape survivor by common assumption.”

“But I have been suffering for twelve years. I cannot remember anything; all I remember is blankness. I have spent these years in fear of something hidden behind a white flash.”

“Nothing is behind white, it is in the white.”

“Why do you always speak in codes?”

“It is the language of the subconscious and we must communicate with its wavelength. Words are associated with some rigid common sense notions, plausible but not genuine. On the other hand, signs and symbols can float in mind until shed light on a real thing.”

“I can never claim to understand the psychology in theory nor other scientific branches but you forced me to read, and I had studied for five months until the last two months that you have adopted a new method. Then I leaned back to this comfortable sofa and describe my nightmares, I saw you scribble something on your notebook. You have never told me about what your writings or your diagnosis. I was deadly curious to read the notebook waiting for a moment of your distraction. It happened a few days ago. While you were busy on the phone in the waiting room, I took it, paged, no words. Pages after pages were filled with strange signs and unfamiliar symbols. I paged the whole, even the blank ones until the last page, not a single word.”

“I was waiting for your curiosity to overpass the ethics. Which symbol did you find the most strange in your mind?”

“The one on the last page of your notebook, the one that I found after I paged all the blanks. I did not know what it was.”

“Words have no meaning; they just block our search for identity with a false satisfaction of understanding. Just look at them, each is a combination of meaningless letters. You put them in a row to make sentences and then narrate the combination loud; they would make a paradox in people’s mind. People falsely believe they have found an answer to the question of what is the purpose of life. Then they stupidly follow like slaves the narrator. The invention of words changed the direction of progress in the wrong way. We should have found ourselves in a wordless world. Now we live in an illusion that we know something. I confess that I am master of words; my job requires transforming the frightened people who caught a glimpse of the devils in the society to obedient zombies who work quietly, pay endless mortgages, stay in and accept the meaningless loop of social life. I have acquired quite a respectful career in that. There is something precious though dangerously wild down there in you. I would rather jeopardize my profession to release this wild thing to deal with the society, to find its own way, which is inherent in your biology. The strange symbol on the last page was of a woman inside a wolf.”

“You have dragged me out of darkness but left me at the border, one half in the darkness the other in the light. What if someday I wake up with a savage desire of my biology to kill all people of the goddamn Milwaukee?”

“Then it would be a good day when you wake up the next day and remember the last night massacre. You would get out the bed; break the window out the frame. The fresh air would replace the dampness. Inhale and enjoy listening to the chirping of free birds singing in snowfall.”

She wiggled on the sofa and leaned forward saying to herself, “And now the wall in front of me is all white.” She leaned forward, narrowed her eyes as if spotting something odd on the white wall. “What are those two nails stuck out on my wall? Who had hammered down them there?”

There were two nails aligned four feet apart, three feet below the ceiling. She stood on her feet, stepped forward, fixed her eyes on the nails, and placed her hand on the wall close to one of the nails. Could smell the paint, it was fresh. Raised her other hand, stretched her index finger to touch the nail but refrained, afraid if some frightening image might electrify into her brain.

She turned on her heel, leaned her side to the white wall faced to opposite direction of the window. “A kitchen with some second or maybe third-hand appliances: an oven, broken, a refrigerator, noisy rather than cold. A bedroom or shall I say a small windowless dog den in which hardly a single bed could fit. Who had condemned and sentenced me to this twelve-year misery? I have become twenty-two and my only job qualification is how to get a support allowance for the next month. Thank god, at least I could afford to buy a long sofa a month ago. It is not as comfortable as the natural leather one at the psychoanalyst’s office but at least my artificial cheap leather sofa fits me to sleep on it at nights.”

2

The Window

Frustrated with the discovery of her misery, she turned her body faced to the window, stared, the only one in her apartment; had never been opened for the last five years. She walked toward the window, barefooted on the stems on the floor, careful not to smash the tomatoes. The sill was deep. There was a bunch of tomato plant in her way to reach her hand to the brass handle. She leaned forward to the ledge trying to avoid bursting any of the ripe tomatoes on her new dress, had bought especially for the psychoanalysis sessions. Her fingers reached the handle, pressed it down, the lock was too stiff to yield. She pushed her body more, a ripe tomato burst, the red juice flowed down her white skirt, and penetrated through it on her body, she felt the cold wetness. “God damn window,” She cried out. “Why should I care, today was my last session, I don’t need the dress.” She leaned fully to the bush, grabbed the handle tight in her hand, pressed the handle down. It broke but still the window was jammed into the frame. “God damn Milwaukee,” She pounded the frame of the window hard with her palms. The wooden side doors broke with a loud sound, one of the doors startled out together with its frame. They fell down in the backyard of the building, the sound of smashing glasses, she heard. The other door was swindling half connected to one hinge of the broken frame, going back and forth. “Wow,” She was amazed, did not expect so much power. After a few swings, the other door and the frame attached to it fell down the vacant backyard.

A landscape appeared in the broken rectangle, “Why do I hate this city? Where did this hatred come from?” The wind of the suburb of the city brought a damp cold air of the Michigan Lake inside. She said, “Ugly green flatness, thank god I cannot see the lake, it should have been even uglier. Surely I don’t belong to this area; I should have been born somewhere else.” Then she looked up at the night sky, “Some clouds, I wish snowfall hides all the land.”

She left the window, walked back over the plant to the carpet, rubbed her feet, and smeared the red color to the yellow. She took off her dress and threw it on the bed, went to the wall closet in the bedroom, without attention took a dress hanger out the rack and came back to the living room. She looked at the dress on the hanger; it was a one piece, semi-transparent. She had recently bought it to start tennis training. “I will never wear it. How can I pay back the price with my credit card while my only income is a pitiful 400$-weekly victim support?” She said to herself while turning the hanger back and forth, staring at the dress.

“What should I do now that the sessions have been over with his conclusion that I am cured? I would not be eligible to receive any money. Now I am Jobless and without any work experience. He did not exactly use the wording that I was cured, ‘You are subconsciously cured, all you need is to remove the blockage in your consciousness.’ He ended the sessions unexpectedly, left me alone just after seven months of his unique type of therapy, expecting me to solve the complication of the meaning of his words all by myself.”

She ended the dress observation. “Why not wear it; I am not going out now, surely not with this dress after that horrible thing happened to me twelve years ago.” She pulled up the skirt; it was light as a feather, putting it on felt as if there was nothing on her body.

“The shame I feel is a desire to see you.” She stood facing a huge wrapped object, which had been placed between the sofa and the frame of the entrance door, inclined to the wall. A huge mirror, she had bought a few days ago in the morning of her last session. “I wonder why I bought such an expensive mirror and so big that I had to give the same amount of its price to two strong men to carry it up the stairs. Guys uploaded and placed the mirror at the entrance door while struggling to carry it in, they said exhaustedly,”

“Ma’am, have you ever considered if the mirror would fit in the elevator’.

“There was an extra charge for carrying it up the stairs, five stories. I didn’t have any answer to their next question when the overtired men asked me,

“Ma’am, are you sure if the mirror can pass through the apartment door?”

“I opened the door, the space was not enough. They had to remove the wooden frame off the wall. The mirror was carried into my leaving room. I could read their next question that Ma’am why the hell do you need such a big mirror for such a pitiful dueling? Their modesty stopped them asking.”

“I guess they felt sorry for me because they put back the doorframe, plastered it to the wall for free. They leaned the mirror to the wall and opened the thick cardboard wrapped around it except the last thick paper over the surface of the mirror due to my loud objection. It is strange, I was afraid if they would see me in the mirror. In the end, a hefty price for something now I am standing in front of it.”

She took one step further and stood in front of the wrapped mirror. “Why did I buy a mirror as big as a king-sized double bed; bigger than my tiny bedroom?” Looking at the wrapping, she remembered her psychoanalyst’s answer to the question.

“To see yourself in full, of course.”

“It’s much bigger than me.”

“You feel it is not. That is the reason I am going to end our sessions, inform the Victim Support Organization of your total recovery. I can read in your worried face that you are not ready. Let me explain. Twelve years have passed; you have become a complete woman with no trace of a ten-year-old girl in you. You cannot hide this tall and strong body behind a child anymore. Two months ago, I noticed an odd phenomenon, which dared me to refrain the routine of molding the zombie disposition on you; when I noticed that your true biology has started to reveal itself out the hideout.”

“Don’t say whether I am a werewolf or an alien.”

“Those are stories that we fabricate in response to complicated phenomena. Two months ago, your smell changed, the tiny glands in some specific areas of your body instigate some peculiar sort of odor. As a result, I concluded your nature is very different from normal people. I have exclusively adopted a new method for you with the emphasis on analysis rather than treatment. This was my hypostasis: no treatment of the so-called trauma was possible since there was no trauma at all. The tax money has been wasted on you just to waste your life in vain.”

“And that is why you started to draw signs and symbols in your notebook instead of writings.”

“Exactly, the two pathways of smell receptors end to an isolated, primitive part of the brain with no connection to language as they were evolved way back any speech abilities.”

“What is the purpose of my new smell?”