By June Martin
When he was a teenager, Junior spent many of his days in the basement of the family home, away from the criticisms that flowed endlessly from Senior, so when he woke up and felt the concrete floor and the clammy air, he first thought he was fifteen years old and recovering from a bout with a bit too much stolen liquor rather than the truth: he was thirty-five and had woken up in a room he'd never seen before. While most of his body was on concrete, his cheek pressed into an orange and brown checkerboard rug. There was a twin bed in one corner, a sink and toilet in another. Cinderblock walls with no decorations; no windows. The smell of air that has spent too long in the basement.
Junior's back ached as he rose. A shower head and a drain in a third corner of the room, and nothing in the fourth. Between it all, only blank walls lit by fluorescents. Something was missing, but Junior was too groggy. He must have drank too much the night before, and he just wanted to get home. But the last thing he remembered was heading to a dreaded evening at Senior's post-divorce apartment to admire the brick fireplace that Senior had just built, and he never would've gotten drunk around his father. He'd sort it all out later. His bare feet were cold on the concrete floor. Bed in one corner, toilet in the other. Where had his shoes gone? Empty corner, shower corner. Walls in between. All Junior needed to do was leave and get his bearings, then everything would be fine. Bed, toilet, shower, empty. Walls in between.
Only after a few circles did he trust his eyes: there were no doors, no stairs, no windows, nothing. Finally he looked up at the ceiling, past the lights, and saw a wooden trap door. He shouted, "Hey! I'm down here!"
Footsteps clomped above him. Impatient heavy steps that he knew all too well. By the time the hinges on the trap door creaked and the ceiling opened up, Junior wasn't surprised to see his father's customary frown and glare. He was wearing a heather gray sweatshirt. Senior always wore some variation on that and khaki pants, out of a desire to reduce the need for decision-making in the morning before work.
"Dad, help me up."
"If I could, I wouldn't need you to tell me to do it."
"What?"
"You're stuck down there, I'm stuck up here. Something's strange going on." Senior's eyes left Junior, as if to look at the horizon, but there didn't look to be any natural light in the room above either, just more fluorescents.
Junior said, "Don't fuck with me right now. We're near your apartment, I'm sure, so there's the hardware store down the street where I worked that one summer."
"Half of that one summer. You got fired. I can't get you any rope."
"Why not?"
"What does it matter why not? I'm telling you I can't and I'm a man of my word. Shut up and stop complaining. You are where you are and you'd best get used to it. Here." Senior knelt down by the trap door, and Junior raised his arms, preparing to jump up and try to grab his father's hands and be hoisted up out of the nightmarish little room, but Senior didn't reach for Junior. Instead, he lowered a basket with a few snacks and toiletries. Junior leapt towards Senior's hands anyway, but the ceilings were so tall and Junior's legs so weak that he didn't even come within a foot of contact.
Senior said, "Stop fooling around and hold your hands out or this'll spill on the floor and you'll have nothing."
"Shut up. Shut up, shut up and let me out of here. If I don't get out of here now, I'm gonna get out later and you're going to pay. You hear me, old man? You're going to pay."
"Speak to me with respect. I'm your father. We're in this together." With that, Senior dropped the basket on Junior's head. It inflicted only a bit of pain and tumbled to the ground, scattering jerky, chips, soap, and bottled water. Another basket followed, its contents wrapped in brown paper with a note that read "for Senior." While Junior clutched his head, the door above him shut with a thud.
Kidnapped by his own father. Trapped in a basement with no way out, no clue how he got there, and no discernible motive. Senior didn't even like being around Junior very much—he'd made that abundantly clear leading up to when Junior moved out in his mid-20s—so why did he imprison him here?
Junior screamed at the trap door, stomped his feet, smacked his hands against the wall, anything that might make some noise outside and call the attention of someone who could intervene because otherwise he was about to die.
A muffled voice, recognizable by its gruffness, responded to Junior's cacophony. So Senior had something to say, probably angry that Junior was responding to imprisonment in a way that was reasonable, but inconvenient for Senior. The voice just said "Hey" over and over again, and seemed to be coming from below.
Below! There might be a way out hidden beneath the hideous rug. Junior pulled it to the side, with a bent-over shuffle, sending pain radiating through his lower back. However he'd been smuggled into this room hadn't been kind to his body. The carpet's moving boundary soon revealed the wooden frame and brass handle of a trap door. Senior's voice below seemed much closer. If he could get from above to below, then Junior would be able to do the same. Maybe after finally delivering a punch directly to the old man's nose for putting him through this.
When Junior cracked it open, there was his father, staring up at the opening, eyes wide in shock. For some reason, he'd changed into a charcoal gray sweatshirt.
Senior said, "Junior, it was you?"
Junior poked his head down. A twelve-foot fall could end up hurting him, but if he dangled himself and then dropped, it wouldn't be as bad as plummeting from the full height.
"Son, let me out of here. I'll tell the police to take it easy on you, that it was a mistake."
"You're going to call the police? On me? You think they're going to look at me, trapped in this fucked-up prison you built, and decide it's my fault? I'm going to get out of here, I'm going to tell everyone, and they're going to believe me for once." Junior crouched and poked his feet through the opening, and lowered himself down.
"I have to call the police. It's only right, after what you've done."
As Junior lowered himself, Senior clawed at his legs, trying to climb up past him. A stronger man would've been able to carry the weight, but Senior's constant admonition that Junior needed to work out and take care of himself always went unheeded in favor of better entertainment. For every other moment in his life, Junior had never needed physical strength, but this time, without it, he fell. Senior hit the concrete with a thud and a groan. Just as Junior was about to hit the ground, the rug rolled up on its own to reveal the trap door beneath; the door opened its dark mouth.
Junior was swallowed and the door closed above him. He was in total darkness; he was in pain. Heat and sharpness and bolts of sourceless agony wracked his body.
When it ended, he was again lying on the rug, again groggy and disoriented. Not long after, his father opened the door and complained about the injury to his hip from the fall. Junior rose to his hands and knees and spit some blood on the rug, but the oranges and browns of the design absorbed it so completely that once Junior blinked, he couldn't find the mark he'd left.
The louder his father yelled at him, the more determined Junior was to ignore him. Senior went looking for satisfaction in every corner of his life and tossed it aside as meaningless whenever he got it, so Junior wasn't inclined to offer him any.
The rug swam in front of him. That was probably a concussion, not the rug, but the more Junior looked at the rug, the more he hated it, and the more he hated it, the more his hatred drowned out the noise of his father above.
Junior jumped to his feet. Blood rushed away from his head and took with it his vision. Amid the static, he trusted his hands. Once they found the corner of the rug, he whipped it to the side in one burst of power that connected his entire body from feet to spine to fingertips in a perfect curving line. Another trap door faced him. The reveal quieted Senior.
Junior looked up, and laughed while he spoke. "Where the hell did you bring me, huh?"
"I don't think you should open that."
"Why not? You have another victim down here?"
"I don't know what's in there, but when you get to my age, you've seen a great many things and you start to learn when not to pull on a thread."
"Hand me some rope, and I'll leave the thread."
Senior just shook his head. The superiority of it all, like Junior was just bumbling his way through life, like no idea that came from someone younger could be worth anything. Junior crouched, and flipped the door open. In the room beneath was his father.
Junior scratched at his three-day scruff, and tried to understand what he was seeing. From above him, his father asked, "What's in there?"
"You think I'm going to fall for some mirror trick? I'm not an idiot." Junior flopped onto the ground beside the opening, letting Senior peek down at his own handiwork.
From both the lower and upper room, his father screamed. Deep, wet screams that left no doubt in their wake. With each one, the bricks in the walls lurched forward or snapped backward at random, leaving inky gaps of impossible space between them. It looked like escape, though Junior didn't know what it was he was escaping into. He leapt into the darkness, and another scream jumbled the bricks; simultaneous pains crashed together at his stomach and he couldn't know if his eyes were closed or open, if he was conscious or alive.
When he did finally open his eyes, the wooden square on the ceiling greeted him again. The rug's bristles grazed the backs of his hands and the room smelled like sweat. Each palm was decorated with red crescent moons from his fingernails. If this was hell, he'd expect not to have lasting wounds. Though Junior couldn't say why he thought hell would spare him that. Either way, this wasn't what he thought dead would feel like; it hurt more, for one.
He opened the door to the lower room. His father was curled into a ball. Barely holding back sobs, Senior said, "A son shouldn't torture his father. I don't know what you've done. I don't know. I don't care. But I want no part of it."
"Come on. You think I could do this? How did I get another you? How did I make it hurt so bad?"
Senior had a black eye and bloody gums. Like he'd rolled a couple dice to select from a random set of maladies. "When you were little, I told you that you could do anything you set your mind to. It wasn't my fault you never set your mind towards anything but smoking pot and trying your damndest to get your high school girlfriend pregnant."
"My high school– who cares? She got an abortion, we broke up. No one's mad about the things you're mad about, no one even cares. If you died today, everyone would just talk about how mad you got. We'd all be relieved."
"Maybe I was right. I don't know why you'd set your mind to this. You're a waste, son." Senior yelled, "Blood, sweat, and tears went into raising you and I'd take them all back if I could."
Junior threw a can of tomatoes at Senior, but missed and bounced off the concrete with a heavy thunk. He threw another, missed again, but hit the center of the floor, and earned a much softer impact. There was a trap door there, too. Senior was hiding it, maybe there was a limit to this hell, a way out that Senior was withholding to punish Junior. "Tell me what's beneath you. Or I'm going to be exactly the bastard you think I am."
Senior shook his head and stood in the center of the room, his long, bony arms spread wide as if his body could block Junior's inquiry. Senior said, "I'm not supposed to tell you. Like you're not supposed to tell me."
"Yeah, but I showed you. It's you up there." Junior jerked a thumb behind his back toward the trap door, and then it felt like he'd chewed on a rock. He spit out some blood and a molar. Junior dropped the molar into the lower room and Senior caught it. "That's not too bad. Look, if you tell me, it'll only cost you this much."
"No. There are rules and there are consequences. I am not breaking the rules just so you can satisfy whatever sick urge of yours got us here."
"Is it another you down there? Is it just you going in both directions forever?"
Senior's lip twitched. He stared at Junior like a man staring down a charging bull.
"Is it me? Are there two of me?"
Senior's knee bent inwards and he fell to the ground so fast and with such a resounding thud that if it weren't for the heavy breathing, Junior might've thought Senior had died. He'd gotten his answer anyway, so he closed the trap door. No need to run the risk of creating another connection between the upper and lower rooms and putting Senior through that again.
So it was a pattern. A father above and below, and a son below the lower father. When the upper Senior opened the door to pass down some food, he had a rash on his neck. Junior asked, "There's another me above you, right?"
The violent coughing fit that overtook Senior confirmed that the pattern went both directions. Escape wasn't going to happen going upward or downward, since it was impossible to tell how long the chain stretched in each direction, and Junior's last attempt to pass to another room had gone too poorly to repeat.
Whenever Junior slept, he considered that a night passing; days stretched out as he thought about the alternating chain that he'd been made a part of. First, it was the terror of contemplating the immense: though he didn't know for sure, Junior had a hunch that it didn't end with the copies of him on top and below. Once that fear became a familiar companion and no longer staggered him, he wondered a bit about metaphysics, but got nowhere. Obviously this had something to do with his relationship with his father, but the concrete walls offered no clues as to whether they were dead and in hell or trapped by a ghost or had fallen into another dimension.
Thinking about the nature of the chain was more productive. Considering each alternation between himself and his father to be like the rotation of 180 degrees from one link to the next, he thought about a chain that had three flat links in a row. The chain would break in half, with the flat link in the middle detaching completely. Junior needed to become the flat link. He needed to become his father.
His father was a distinctively simple man, so it would be easy enough to look like him. In the cracked mirror above the sink, Junior first shaved off his meager beard, then all the hair on his head. Senior had an overall smooth appearance to match the way his mind rolled down the paths of least resistance, never stopping to wonder if the world was otherwise than how he was told when he was a child. Shaving complete, the resemblance was uncanny: Junior looked exactly like Senior did when Junior was a little kid, minus the ability to loom above a child. Back then, Junior had believed that Senior's rigidity was a result of having the world figured out.
Unfortunately, Junior's death metal t-shirt clashed with his father's face, and there was no change of clothes anywhere in the basement. Before Junior could resolve this strange dissonance, the trap door above opened up.
"Here's some more food. You better be rationing this. None of that binge and starve nonsense."
"Hey dad, gimme your shirt."
"It's the only one I have."
"Yeah, I know. Give it to me."
"You've got a shirt, I've got a shirt. That's fair."
"Well, you can't have mine. That wouldn't work. I need yours."
Senior lowered the food to Junior, then closed the trap door above without another word. Junior yelled some fruitless invective at the ceiling, then opened his trap door to deliver the lower Senior's share of the food. Senior swept the floor with a broom.
"Hey old man. Where'd you get that broom?"
Senior looked at the broom in his hand as if it was the first time he'd ever seen it. "It was provided for me. It's only right to keep this space tidy for whoever owns it."
"Don't do favors for them, they trapped us here," Junior said.
"We don't know that. You be careful about your assumptions. They'll make an ass–"
Junior walked away from the hole while Senior finished his trite admonition and returned with Senior's food for the week, lowering it into the hole, but before the food could make it even a foot past the opening, Junior stopped.
"Hey, give me your shirt."
"It's the only one I have."
"Yeah, and if you don't give it to me, you're not getting any of this food."
Senior looked up at the food, then clasped the broom handle with both hands and pressed it to his chest. "Then I'll starve."
"Don't be stupid, why would you starve instead of giving me the damn shirt?"
"It's your decision to take my food away. Don't pretend it's mine." With that, Senior turned his attention back to the floor.
Junior pulled the package of food back up. This time there were several cans in there. Vegetables, beans, soup. He bounced the can in his hand a few times, then threw one at Senior. It hit him in the lower back. The old man's arms rose to guard his face like he was a boxer, and he spied at Junior from within.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Give me the shirt." A can of green beans bounced off Senior's shoulder.
Senior shook his head, and Junior threw each can harder than the last until one hit Senior's knee, and he crumpled to the floor. The volley of cans came to an end once Junior ran out of ammunition, and though Senior was curled up on the ground and shaking from the pain, he still hadn't agreed to surrender his shirt.
Junior crouched above the hole, the square on his ceiling looming above him. He said, "If you don't give me the shirt, I'll make sure your door is open when the dad above me opens it up next."
"No, not that. Not again."
"Don't make me do it. Just give me the shirt."
Senior rose to his knees. As he pulled the sweatshirt up, his eyes were wet, but he never allowed the tears to breach the borders of his eyes. A frown carved itself deeper and deeper onto his face. It looked less like sadness and more like a confrontation with the world in front of him. Senior balled up the sweatshirt and threw it overhand. It missed Junior and landed with a soft rustle next to him. With the transaction complete, Junior kicked the trap door shut.
With the shirt on, he looked just like his father. But nothing happened. He walked around the room, complaining about Junior's lack of cleanliness. Nothing happened. He yelled and screamed at Senior, in the fashion that Senior had yelled at him in the past, he ruthlessly criticized every aspect of the construction of the basement. Tirade after tirade flowed out of Junior's mouth, complaining about how soft everyone was these days and how no one knew how to work anymore and even numerous specific critiques of Junior, with the hope that the old man's hatred for his son was the key aspect of his personality. Still nothing. Days and weeks went by as Junior descended deeper and deeper into the mind of his father with nothing to show for it except for a cleaner basement prison.
One day, Junior noticed that the rug had gotten dirty. Junior folded the rug over itself and tried to beat it free of dust. Escape or imitation didn't occur to him as he did it, instead his motivation was simple: even if this room was his prison, it was also his home, and had to be cared for a certain way. It was only right.
With that thought, both trap doors flung open. He levitated towards the ceiling, but was simultaneously pulled downward. It was as if he was stretched thin and compressed into a single point, rising through the higher rooms and free falling through those below. Each one of those rooms was empty now, and the slight changes between each one flickered like a strobe light as he sped through them: a different rug here, a different spot for the bed there, none were quite the same. His passage accelerated, and it became hard to see the details of change rather than just its motion.
Every one of the thousand, hundred thousand, million, uncountable and endless traversed rooms all superimposed upon each other like they were a thick stack of film cells sitting on top of a powerful light. All of his experiences in each of the rooms, all of the schemes and attempts to wring escape out of his father or the walls came together and Junior couldn't help but laugh at the futility of it all. No cheap tricks could have worked, but there was beauty in repetition, even in repeated horror. Junior saw that now, saw the grace of the well-worn groove created by a daily trickle of water.
As the rooms multiplied, the lines of every object became as thick and hairy as a caterpillar. In all of the rooms he was present, his father was present, two outlines drawn so thick the boundaries of each one obscured the other's. Junior was pulled through those twin outlines like thread through the eye of a needle. Pain and joy suffused every part of his body simultaneously; nostalgia and anticipation mingled as the moment wavered between past and future. Everything, everything, everything had led to this perfect unity.
Light stung Junior's eyes. He was sore, his hands had again received wounds from clenching his fists too tight. Above him, the blurry image of his father intruded on the white ceiling. No trap door; Senior was just standing above Junior. It was alright. They'd gotten through it together, in the strange way they'd gotten through everything. Junior smiled, ready to greet his father and start over as equals, but he didn't get a chance to speak before Senior, shirtless and covered in bruises, swung a brick at Junior's skull and shattered him.
June Martin is the author of the novel LOVE/AGGRESSION and short stories in X-R-A-Y, BULL, New Session and other publications. She was a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow.
This story previously appeared in an eBook exclusive edition of Typebar Magazine in 2024.