Basement Lullaby

Boston, Massachusetts

May 1991

Mike knows this place. His old apartment on Boylston Street, near the music school he’d attended. He knows the art on the walls, the guitar in the corner. He knows the woman in bed next to him is not his wife.

She turns over and smiles. It’s Doreen.

“I am having the strangest experience … ,” Mike says.

“Still?” she says with a playful lilt.

“I think I might be floating through time.”

Doreen stares at him, blows a red ringlet away from her eye. “You are so weird.”

“Is this the part where you say, ‘I like weird’?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to. You make me want to go off script.”

She kisses him, then gets out of bed. Her thin body, her light skin, the freckles: things he’d seen once, many years before, and thought about a hundred times since.

She’d come to the show last night and found him afterward at the bar. She hadn’t remembered him, and she hadn’t seemed at all embarrassed by it.

“You were older,” Mike had said, aware that he’d had too much to drink. “We were way different. I was a nerd. You were—you were older. We didn’t know each other, but I knew who you were.”

“Huh,” she’d said, and offered him a baggie. “Maybe we should go back and fix it.”

Now she’s showering in his apartment.

“Did we talk about my imaginary friend last night?” Mike asks.

“Hmm, maybeee.” Her voice is muffled by the shower and the closed door, but the apartment is small, so they can hear each other well enough. “Was it a dragon?”

Mike sits up and reaches for the guitar. “Ha! Different conversation, I guess. He was just a kid.”

“Boring.”

“Nah, he was great. We were fugitive recovery agents! The Monsoon and the Cyclone!”

“Better.”

“Yeah, we’d hunt down bad guys like the Son of Sam and the notorious Griffin Brothers in the woods behind my house. I was the kick-in-the-door guy. He was more cautious.”

She gargles loudly and spits. “The Cyclone was the cautious one?”

“Yeah, except for one time. He went in first, and I never saw him again.”

“Tough day.”

“Weird day.”

“Oh yeah?” She is scrubbing her hair now.

Mike strums a chord, wonders if he should say it. “You were there.”

“Me?”

“Mm-hm. You were there in an old abandoned house, with a dude and a box of wine.”

The shower thumps off. She appears in the doorway, dripping wet. “Are you still tripping? Where the hell are your towels?”

“Behind the door.” The door closes.

Her voice is muffled again. “Keep going.”

“You must have been in eighth grade. You were with a kid named Scott.”

The door swings open, exhaling steam and Doreen, one towel around her midsection and another on her head.

“Scott Messner?”

Mike bobs his head, keeping his eyes on hers. He’s feeling a little anxious suddenly.

“Ew,” she says. “What were you doing there?”

“Just playing in the woods with my imaginary friend.”

Doreen drops the towel from around her midsection. “Yeah, we were definitely into different things.”

Mike looks at his fingers on the frets. “Mm. I never saw him again after that.”

Silence as she puts on jeans and a bra.

“You want to get some lunch?” he says.

“I can’t. I have to go get fired. You can’t either.”

“Why?”

“You told that guy to come to your apartment today, in an hour.”

“Who?”

“That manager guy from last night. I think you were drunker than I thought. Sorry, I wouldn’t have given you mushrooms if I’d known. Anyway, you told him to come over at one.”

“Oh. Why are you getting fired, I mean?”

She laughs. A single, high-pitched note. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I started a kind of side project in the archives, and the dean didn’t like it. He’s going to tell me all about it today. Should have saved some mushrooms.”

“And he’s going to fire you for it?”

“No. I’m not tenured or anything, but he can’t actually fire me for that. He’s just going to can me from my basement curator role. It was self-appointed, so it’s a bit of an overreach.”

Mike strums a few chords as she brushes her teeth with his toothbrush.

“You should see that basement,” she says.

“At MassArt?”

“Yeah, it’s nuts. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, mosaics. Ironwork, wood carvings, drawings, and animation cels.”

“Anything good?”

“That’s a dumb question.”

Mike is unsure if that means it is all good or none of it is good. He remembers last night when she referred to some of his lyrics as “transparent” and one of his guitar solos as “wilting.” He assumed those were compliments, but now he’s wondering.

She continues. “Thousands of projects. Hundreds of thousands of hours of work. And all that creativity. Think about all that imagination, visualization, and realization. All just hanging out down there in boxes and cabinets. All packed away and perfectly preserved. They’ve got these industrial dehumidifiers running all the time. You can feel them sucking all the moisture out of you. Do you know where my wallet is?”

“On the table.”

“Shit. Play a cheaper bar next time. So, I started arranging things. Like an anti-museum. I stacked paintings into weird columns, so all you can see are the frames. I draped tarps over the sculptures and left little pieces poking out. I set up spotlights so they only shine where the art isn’t.”

“That sounds extraordinarily creepy,” Mike says. “What was the plan?”

“To have an exhibition of dead art. I was calling it Mass Grave. It wasn’t about the individual pieces, though. It was about how artists pour themselves into things, then discard them.”

The random chords begin to gel into a new melody.

“The dean wasn’t into it,” she says, standing by the door. “Don’t ever do that.”

Mike stops playing. “Discard things?”

“Yeah. It’s wrong.”

“I think,” he says, looking up, “I think I wrote a song about this.”

She cocks her head to the side and gives him a crooked smile, her hair a wild, red, glorious mess.

“Rad,” she says. “Play it for me after I’m gone.”

She leaves. There’s a note beside the bed that’s hard to read. It’s written in a spiral and covered with illustrations. Mike has to spin it to read it. It says:

I think I belong here. Don’t you?

Mike plays and sings a song he doesn’t remember writing.

He knows it’s called “Basement Lullaby,” and then he realizes two things: He doesn’t belong here, and something is wrong upstairs.