Bahram Zaimi - BASEMENT COMMANDMENT. Edited by Rowan Silva

Editor Rowan Silva

© Bahram Zaimi, 2019

ISBN 978-5-4496-1497-1

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

She turned to face 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 the pot’s edge, rolled down, and reached the deep ledge, free-falling all the way down to the old hardwood floor in green and red. Hundreds of tomatoes with gripping, thick green stems covered the wall below the sill. The shower did not stop on the floor, amplifying in number and depth to flood broadly through 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 in waves of green and red. Three days! I planted the seeds just three days ago. Stranger than the rapid growth is the smell: not the type of a vegetable. It goes down into my lungs and reaches the soul, I succumb 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; the wild taste of fresh kill, the red juice fills my mouth, overflowing from the sides of my lips, running to my chin. I enjoy the dripping, red stains on the yellow carpet.

She rubbed her feet against the sofa, the tickle went away. She leaned the nape of her neck on the back of the sofa and looked at the wall right across the living room. Not all mysteries are pleasant. Who painted this wall 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. Walls, floor, doorframes, ceiling, even the old rug under my feet. I don’t think the greedy landlady sneaked into my apartment to give the wall a fresh paint job 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 lie down and rest. There was another smell mixed with the aroma of the tomatoes which didn’t leave her free from thoughts. Normally, she was able to ignore her problems, to skip over them 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; nevertheless, she could waste her life without worry. She gave up on 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 before. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe I’ve mixed it up. He had to change the trend completely. I guess he was right because I remember none of what the eight before had said, but word for word the talk of the last.

‘Consciousness was your enemy for the last twelve years; it removes the problems to allow the comfort of routine, because it cannot stay for long under the surge of inexplicable questions, let alone the benefits that it provides. That being the financial support of Victim Support Organization, and public pity for a presumed rape survivor, the 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 on its wavelength. Words are associated with rigid common sense notions, plausible but not genuine. On the other hand, signs and symbols can float in the mind until they shed light on a real thing.’

‘I can never claim to understand psychology in theory, nor other scientific branches but you forced me to read, and I studied for five months until the last two months when you adopted a new method. Now I lean back on this comfortable sofa and describe my nightmares. I watch you scribble something in your notebook. You have never told me about your writing 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 and skimmed through. No words. Page after page was filled with strange signs and unfamiliar symbols. I looked through the whole thing, even the blank pages until the last. Not a single word.’

‘I was waiting for your curiosity to overpass your ethics. Which symbol did you find the strangest in your mind?’

‘The one on the last page of your notebook, the one that I found after I scanned through 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 aloud; they make a paradox in peoples’ minds. People falsely believe they have found an answer to the question of the purpose of life. Then they follow the narrator stupidly like slaves. 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 the illusion that we know something. I confess that I am master of words; my job requires transforming frightened people who catch a glimpse of the devils of society into 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 within you. I would jeopardize my career to release this wild thing, to deal with 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 the darkness but left me at the border; one half in the darkness, the other in the light. What if someday I wake up with the savage desire of my biology to kill all the people in goddamn Milwaukee?’

‘It would be good the next day when you woke up and remembered the last night’s massacre. You would get out of bed and break the window from the frame. The fresh air would replace the dampness, you would inhale and enjoy listening to the chirping of free birds singing in the 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, narrowing her eyes as if spotting something odd on the white wall. ‘ What are those two nails sticking out of my wall? Who hammered them down there?’

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

She turned on her heel and leaned her side to the white wall facing the 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 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 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 cheap artificial leather sofa fits me to sleep on at night.