However, as I descended the stairs into my father’s basement, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy’s basement. Even before I reached the bottom of the stairs, that underground place imposed upon me its atmosphere of ruin and wreckage and of an abysmal chaos that, I was thankful to discover, I still found captivating. And when I saw the state of things down there, I was overcome with a thrilling awe that I had never experienced before.
Everything around me was in pieces. It looked as if my father had taken an ax and hacked up the whole apparatus on which he had once placed all his hopes of accomplishing some task that only he cared to envision. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling, all of them chopped through and dangling like vines in a jungle. A greasy, greenish liquid was running across the floor and sluicing into the basement drain. I waded through an undergrowth of broken glass and torn papers. I reached down and picked up some of the pages savagely ripped from my father’s voluminous notebooks. Meticulous diagrams and graphs were obscured by words and phrases written with a thick, black marker. Page after page had the word “IMPURE” scrawled over them like graffiti on the walls of a public toilet. Other recurring exclamations were: “NOTHING BUT IMPURITIES,” “IMPURE HEADS,” “NOTHING REVEALED,” “NO PURE CONCEPTION,” “IMPOSSIBLE IMPURITIES,” and, finally, “THE FORCES OF AN IMPURE UNIVERSE.”
At the far end of the basement I saw a hybrid contraption that looked as if it were a cross between a monarch’s throne and an electric chair. Bound to this device by straps confining his arms and legs and head was the young man in a secondhand suit. His eyes were open, but they had no focus in them. I noticed that the greasy, greenish liquid had its source in a container the size of a water-cooler bottle that was upended next to the big chair. There was a label on the container, written on masking tape, that read: “siphonage.” Whatever spooks or spirits or other entities that had inhabited the young man’s head—and my father appeared to have drained off a sizeable quantity of this stuff—were now making their way into the sewer system. They must have lost something, perhaps grown stale, once released from their container, because I felt no aura of the spectral— either malignant or benign—emanating from this residual substance.
I was unable to tell if the young man was still alive in any conventional sense of the word. He may have been. In any case, his condition was such that my family would once again need to find another house in which to live.
“What happened down here?” said my sister from the other side of the basement.
She was sitting on the stairs. “Looks like another one of Dad’s projects took a bad turn.”
“That’s the way it looks,” I said, walking back toward the stairs.
“Do you think that guy was carrying much money on him?”
“I don’t know. Probably. He was here collecting for some kind of organization.”
“Good, because Mom and I came back broke. And it’s not as if we spent all that much.”
“Where did you go?” I said, taking a seat beside my sister.
“You know I can’t talk about that.”
“I had to ask.”
After a pause, my sister whispered, “Daniel, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”
I tried my best to conceal any reaction to my sister’s question, even though it had caused a cyclone of images and emotions to arise within me. That was what had confused me about the police detective’s body. In my imagination, I had always pictured a neat separation of parts. But it was nothing like that, as I have already pointed out. Everything was all mixed together. Thank you, Elisa. Despite her adherence to my mother’s strict rule of silence, my sister always managed to give away something of what they had been up to.
“Why do ask that?” I said, also whispering. “Did you meet someone like that when you were with Mom?”
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“You have to tell me, Elisa. Did Mom… did she talk about me… did she talk about me to this person?”
“I wouldn’t know. I really wouldn’t,” said Elisa as she rose to her feet and walked back upstairs. When she reached the top step, she turned around and said, “How’s this thing between you and Mom going to end? Every time I mention your name, she just clams up. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“The forces of an impure universe,” I said rhetorically.
“What?” said my sister.
“Nothing that drives anybody makes any sense, if you haven’t noticed that by now. It’s just our heads, like Dad’s always saying.”
“Whatever that means. Anyway, you better keep your mouth shut about what I said.
I’m never telling you anything ever again,” she finished and then went upstairs.
I followed my sister into the living room. My father was now sitting up on the sofa next to my mother, who was opening boxes and pulling things out of bags, presumably showing what she had bought on her latest trip with Elisa. I sat down in a chair across from them.
“Hi, baby,” said my mother.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, then turned to my father. “Hey, Dad, can I ask you something?” He still seemed a bit delirious. “Dad?”
“Your father’s very tired, honey.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just want to ask him one thing. Dad, when you were talking to that guy, you said something about three … you called them principles.”
“Countries, deities,” said my father from a deep well of depression. “Obstacles to pure conception.”
“Yeah, but what was the third principle. You never said anything about that.”
But my father had faded out and was now gazing disconsolately at the floor. My mother, however, was smiling. No doubt she had heard all of my father’s talk many times over.
“The third principle?” she said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke in my direction. “Why, it’s families, sweetheart.”