Basement Monster

(Excerpt from a novella.)

A monster used to live in my basement.

Not the kind you see in movies or comic books. He didn’t drip slime from his mouth or plot to take over the world with conveniently powerful stones or wands. He rarely even left the house.

With his glossy hair and impractically long side-swept bangs, my basement monster looked more like a college hipster than a world destroyer. His face was more pretty than handsome with well-arched eyebrows. He wore a white bathrobe that he claimed was reserved for special members of his people, which I suspected may have been from Bed Bath and Beyond. He got cold easily and stayed wrapped in my brother’s childhood woolen blanket as he read water-stained horror paperbacks he'd scavenged from behind a tower of abandoned computer screens. He would unfurl old rugs and tatami mats and sleep on them, saying that their smell reminded him of his first home. His name was unpronounceable to human tongues, or so he claimed, so I just call him Seni after the dead dachshund whose bed he was sitting on when I found him.

Seni’s eyes were two different colors, one green, the other gray, and he said he had come from Purecell, a world you don’t get to by train or plane but through blank energy doors. He'd spent the past year looking for the right door, but had yet to find his way home. The last one he opened had led to my basement, and he wouldn’t be able to try again for another three months. I was stuck with my pretty monster.

Seni and I made a deal. He built me a house in a place far far away, where no one from this world could find me. I called this place the Green Zone. I had my own sunflower garden, and a short walk away was a 24-hour ice cream stand. There was an outdoor cafe with a veranda overlooking a massive river that dropped straight into a valley. They sold chocolate croissants that were always still warm when I went to go buy them. My house had a 50” television that I never watched but felt good having and a retro phone that was more decoration than usable. The sun set at 10PM each day, fireflies lighting up the gardens in pulses of green, just like the stars.

To enter the Green Zone, Seni had to open a temporary energy door in the wall of my basement. The opening would only last for two weeks at a time, so I would have to return through another blank energy door in the wall of my bathroom in the Green Zone. Seni would be waiting by the door, blanket cloaked over his head, ready to scare me on my way in. I wonder if that was something he'd read in his books.

Two weeks in the Green Zone was just one day in the normal world. A whole year could pass there and less than a month would have passed here. It could be snowing when I left and the gray slosh would not yet be melted by the time I returned. A single year here would mean more than a decade there. I often wondered how much time I could spend in the Green Zone before my parents began to catch on to my strange aging.

In exchange for giving me my own little world, I agreed to take Seni out for a full day once a week. It wasn't a bad deal. He was curious to know what it was like outside, but without a full-time keeper, he was too dangerous on his own. I convinced him to give up his white bathrobe, pilfered some old shirts and pants from boxes of my brother’s high school things, and Seni transformed into a proper 90s boy after he’d slipped on the loose plaid shirt and khaki shorts. The sixth, shaggiest-haired member of N’Sync. He asked why everything was so colorful and I told him the 90s was a more carefree time.

Saturdays were spent in the Green Zone, and Sundays were reserved for Seni. We had a good rhythm going. He picked a place and I would be his wallet and unreliable tour guide for the day. I gave him free city magazines I picked up at the train station and he’d give me his ‘Fun List’ by Friday night. Women and men would often turn to stare as we walked down the street, his arm hooked into mine as if afraid I would try to escape. He was a monster but still a very pretty one. I wondered if people thought he was my prisoner and not the other way around. 

The time in between I’d go to class, go watch a movie, study in the library, sit in freshmen music seminars for my TA gig, go out to dinner with friends, or help my parents download new games for their phone. I kept my weekly dance class at the gym. I practiced Chopin etudes in one of the college music rooms and helped grade freshmen essays for my professor. Life was still as boring as ever. Each day stitched into the next, the same monotone patches. Saturday morning was when I really woke up.

In the Green Zone, my neighbors were a beautiful family straight out of a department store picture frame. The woman was cyborg-statuesque with impeccable posture, always in jeans and sleeveless cashmere sweaters with loose bouncing hair like old school Cindy Crawford. She was often in their garden, smoking cigarettes by the water pump, looking like she was posing for a magazine spread. Whenever I stepped out onto the veranda, wincing at the sunlight like a retired vampire, she would wave to me enthusiastically as if trying to catch the attention of a rare wild cat, her arms impeccably toned. Her husband was taller than her, but not by too much, as if they had agreed on the perfect man-to-woman height ratio before getting married. He always wore a suit despite never leaving the house, and perpetually smelled of freshly baked pie. He liked to collect different novelty pins, a different one pinned to his collar each day. Their clothes were always pristine as if they never sweat despite the mid-day summer heat.

They had a son two years younger than me who looked nothing like his parents with his prematurely gray hair and matching gray eyes, but was still attractive in an otherworldly, I've-returned-from-the-dead-to-serenade-you-with-emo-songs kind of way. He wore black pants and white turtleneck sweaters despite the summer weather as if he too felt no heat. I wondered if his closet was just filled with the same clothes, the left side stocked with a tower of folded black pants, the right side with a line of hanging white sweaters. I was their troll-like neighbor, always in sweatpants and oversized t-shirts, squinting at them behind my thick glasses, yet they treated me like the most interesting person in the world.

One day, as I was watering the sunflowers in my garden, the wife and husband were drinking on their deck and invited me over to join them. Everyone in town had been invited to the opening of a new park in the east end of town, and they were pleased to see someone else skipping.

“Can’t stand the Construction Head,” the mother said, pouring me a glass of their homemade sangria.

“They used to date,” the father whispered loud of enough for her hear. His cheeks were alcohol rosy as he unsuccessfully tried to wink.

"If you call one poorly arranged drive out to the sunflower fields a date," the mother fanned a hand in front of her nose as if smelling something awful. "That clown thinks staring at things together is a good form of communication." 

“Our son went to the open ceremony though,” the father said. “He likes that kind of thing.”

The mother rolled her eyes as she swirled her glass, “That boy never talks, so who knows what he actually likes.”

As I sipped on the homemade sangria that tasted more like orange slices soaked in rubbing alcohol, I asked the family what they did for a living. The wife laughed, her hair bouncing around her face, and the husband followed with his own brand of giggle, his slicked back hair gelled solid. “We don’t do much, but a job’s a job. It’s important to stay essential in the Green Zone,” the husband answered, putting his hand over his wife’s. She smiled lovingly at him like those couples in diamond commercials. She said they manufactured stars. I wasn’t quite sure what they meant. They weren’t quite sure how to explain. We smiled politely and the father poured us all another round. The son eventually returned to the house (from the ceremony I suppose) and fried up a massive omelet that the four of us shared until the sun set. His parents didn't ask him about the ceremony, and he didn't bring it up, as if all three of them knew sometimes some things weren't worth agreeing on. 

Seni never asked about my time in the Green Zone. He preferred to spend his time asking me about things he’d seen in the magazines I’d brought. “What’s Santa Con?” “What do people do at this ‘Great Gatsby Party’?” “Why would someone want to pay $100 to eat raw fish?” “Why is everyone’s teeth so white?” My answers never seemed to satisfy him, each reply opening the gates to five more questions until I had to pretend to have homework and fled back upstairs.

Seni had two favorite things: sweets and numbers. He flipped through my old high school math notes he'd found stacked in basement boxes, circling numbers he liked and crossing out those he didn’t with an old Lisa Frank pencil. If he had the option, I’m sure he could spend hours just playing sudoku and eating Lindt truffles. He didn’t need to eat to live but sweets kept him in a good, quiet-smiling mood. During our first outing, I made the mistake of ignoring his sad sleeve pulling as we passed a crepe truck, and he spent the rest of the day only speaking to me in a language I didn’t understand.

Me: What do you want for lunch?

Seni: Ja som si ka sa