Dwelling Solo RPG Session 6: The Triple Dungeon Feature
BASEMENT
The Remember prompt in the basement sees the narrator flash back to his most self-destructive nights — and the last time he ever sees AB, who has haunted the narrator in previous rooms.
Remember
I chanced across her one last time in the waning days of the crew.
Rick and I had started off at The Divine Antler, hitting it pretty hard. Some little hustler from Nebraska had gone to the bathroom with most of a gram and handed Rick back a baggie with almost nothing in it then just walked off like she was dropping the car keys at the valet.
“You’re welcome, help your fuckin’ self!” Rick shouted after her. “That’s the second time she’s done that shit.”
We only had a couple key bumps left by the time we got to RiNo and went down the steps into the party at the garden-level condo. I guess you can’t sell it at markup if you call it a basement.
I didn’t like showing up light to find Sig. Sig never mentioned blow, never bought it, never asked for it, was always gleaming on a crest of it, would do any amount you’d put in front of her for any amount of time.
I was her boyfriend, so it was my job to keep those copper eyes flashing with the right fuel mix. The deal was I kept her high so I could show her off. I kept me high so I wouldn’t think too much about the deal.
But I felt wrong-footed. Rick was unflappable, I don’t know how he managed to go even harder than I did and never act like a shorted-out wire. One of the reasons I liked abusing drugs with Rick was because I felt like he fit with me in that overlap between the hardcores who had nothing going on except those parties and the people, us, who could get torn up and still keep our white-collar jobs even if it meant washing our faces at 7 a.m. on no sleep and going right under the fluorescents for nine hours with our skin peeled off.
We spotted Sig and threaded through to her. I clasped her around her waist and passed off the ravaged little baggie. She had the pro party reflex, scooped it without moving her eyes off of me or looking down.
I kissed her neck and she purred and I lingered there so everybody could see me do it. Even some of my friends, too loose, too late at night, would look at her and say some extremely out-of-pocket shit like I wasn’t standing there. Letting all that slide was part of yet another tacit contract that required everybody to be off their faces about half the week.
“I was just trying to tell them about what you said on the phone the other night…” I swear that at some point she’d trained her blink reflex to go at 1/3 normal human speed. “Them” was a group of three dudes, six of whom I think were DJs. “…about when you were in that meeting?”
“‘Like farting in an empty coliseum…’” They loved it. She had ways of showing me off, some kind of glamor-for-vocab trade, I guess. I told the story of the meeting, then started telling it again. The Party Sphinx was in the circle too, just listening and looking amused in a lazy, intelligent kind of way. He always looked innocuous and wholesome in his blazer and jeans, thin hair swept back. Rick told me once about what went on at his house and it was almost enough to make me rethink my whole shit at the time.
“OK, I just hit up my guy, except we gotta get to Lakewood,” Rick leaned in to tell me.
“Lakewood?” Fuck, my whole chest crashed. “Cory’s here, we talk to him?”
“Let’s be real, Jayce,” he said, squeezing my shoulder in a brotherly way. “You gotta catch him before he goes on tilt, look at him.” I couldn’t argue. He was over against a wall, mouth moving to start one word that never came out, just pawing at his girl.
“I’m too fucked up. You’re too fucked up.” This was a bit of theater. Rick was never too fucked up to get his tan SUV to the connect. Supernal powers parted the seas for that craft.
Sig had drifted away, but I could track her by her loud and vacant laugh. My eyes locked on to a group of three girls near a couch. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Which one?” Rick was already tracking my eyes.
“The little Asian brunette with the glasses.” I said, looking at the ground so I wasn’t gaping. “Ricker, that’s her. That’s fucking her. What kind of planet am I on here…”
“That’s the girl you always talk about? Goddamn dude, that’s nice. You must have been pretty handsome back then.”
I looked back up. She was smiling at me, dimpling and shining, motioning me over. Come sit by me. She stood to hug me and I wrapped all of her and seized because I had a wheelbarrow full of hurt and wonder to dump out and inspect together, but that wasn’t her way.
She was on one of her optimistic upswings and none of that mattered. It had never even happened. She was back in an undergrad program and out with some fellow students on the couch whose faces I couldn’t see. Rick drifted over and we all talked and before long, AB made it simple: She’d drive us.
AB would sometimes talk about hurting herself and sometimes she’d do it before she’d molt again. Part of the new skin was often a cute late-model Japanese compact, which she’d keep spotless in and out.
Rick was being diplomatic in the back seat and chatting her up because it looked like everybody was getting what they wanted. She had that sun in her voice. I’d caught her in the sweet spot of a reemergence.
Having her at the wheel, the city looked bright and safe again. She dressed and drove carefully, telling us about her semester in Oaxaca, magnetic in her delight. She talked about living there someday and I knew that was unlikely, but didn’t want to be left behind, either.
I was going through her zip CD case, looking for something I knew because I was a DJ, too, just the kind that liked to lord it over small, captive groups on an impromptu basis.
She pulled us into a big gas station by Auraria Campus, dovetailing in with a surge of people in mint Avalanche jerseys.
“See?” She took my arm in the parking lot and gently and pointed to a glass box on the edge of campus. “That’s where I go for my history classes and that little weird street there, that goes down to the student center…”
“There?”
“No! By that tower…”
“There?” I trailed my hand around aimlessly at the sodium vapor ceiling of the town.
“Noooo, silly, c’mon…” she laughed and scrunched her smooth face until she had me pointed in the direction of a campus food court and told me about the three places she liked best. Rick got out and drifted to the edge of the parking lot with his phone and a smoke.
AB needed gas. And money for gas, $100. I went to the ATM and pulled out $200 on a cash advance and gave her half. She bought an immense sheaf of scratch tickets and did a small prepay for Pump 4 with whatever was left. I had enough left for the general defense fund plus the baggie, so I didn’t linger on it.
Arjun strolled back over to meet us at the car. “OK, we’re headed to a place out on Mississippi.”
AB piloted us to a strip mall as directed by Rick. The mall and its pokey businesses were dark except for a locals’ basement bar in its anchor property. Rick got out to go find his guy. AB’s cute little car was wedged in between two larger ones at the darker end of the lot, a screen of scraggly juniper bushes in front.
“Will you hold my hand?” The request was cheery. I did and she kissed me once in between updates on her little sister.
Rick was several minutes gone, so she asked me to take her to the corner for a drink. Def Leppard was on the speakers and there was a booth just for us and the crowd felt like somebody’s holiday living room post-big meal.
She sipped on a 7&7 and did her scratch tickets. I attacked a Guinness and a Jaeger and then another Guinness and a Jaeger and asked her why she reappeared tonight, still trying to dump the wheelbarrow, wasn’t this like we just resumed a life where we could hang out and not worry about being cool, every time she showed up it’s like there was this pocket of happiness.
A text came in from Sig: WHERE DID U GO
“Hold on,” she stopped tearing through the tickets to put her chin up in the air, her face calm and intent as she grabbed a bar napkin and mopped off my upper lip. “All better!”
“You know what’s crazy do you know the one thing that stopped us from getting back together in ’96…”
PHONE: ?
“…and you called like nothing had happened and I remember I asked you ‘Why?’ when you said you wanted to come over, that was after I almost lost my job because I couldn’t get off the couch…”
PHONE: ???
“…and I caught fire, you just said so matter-of-fact, ‘I want to come over and do you,’ and I just went all to pieces and the pieces caught on fire and I knew I had to save myself and there was only one thing I could do because I had to defend myself and not let you back in, I was so torn up…I took the cordless into the bathroom, I halfway there just hearing your voice…”
PHONE: TEXT ME BACK
“…somehow in between I got myself off while you were trying to talk me into a visit, I still remember the sound on the tile, we had that octagonal black-and-white tile and I the second I, like, heard that splat I knew I was in the clear and that’s when I had the strength to say ‘no.’”
“That’s some incredible game you have there, Jayce.” I hadn’t noticed Rick standing right by the booth.
PHONE: were going
AB’s mouth went round and her face shot through with delight: “I won $300!”
We did some rails in AB’s car and headed back for the other basement. Rick told me his connect brought his four-year-old kid with him in the car.
If you ever want to quickly square the difference between having your heartbreak in the room and wanting to show off the old heartbreak to the next heartbreak, my advice is to just be extremely high.
We talked the whole way back downtown. Rick interviewed us about everything that had happened since high school.
AB got us back to RiNo easily, but there was no parking; the party had doubled or tripled in size. Rick tried to navigate her onto a corner of dirt right in front of a stop sign.
“I’m not driving up over a curb, you’re crazy.”
“Just pretend you’re at a concert or a big festival, you get wiggle room in this situation,” Rick advised.
“Naw, we’re not wiggling like that.” She got us on a proper curb five blocks away, chin up and focused.
It was all coming together. I somehow had them both, the chic set and my suburban girl. After our stroll I introduced AB to several people and promised everybody too much and told them too much. It was time to loop Sig in on this perfectly congruous social network I had in my head.
AB and Rick stayed outside and I swept through the inside. The high hat from the house music drilled right through my ear and wobbled my confidence. I crammed sideways through the room once, twice, found one of the remaining DJs.
Sig had left with the Party Sphinx, he said. Rick left with the last of our buy. I left with AB. We walked the five blocks back to her car and started the long ride out to Aurora.
Her little sister and her fiancé were asleep on a couch in front of a massive TV showing the DVD selection menu for Lord of the Rings. They woke up and joshed with us just the same as if we’d wandered in on a Saturday afternoon 15 years ago. It was like a painting waving back at you; my intake of yayo was out of balance with the alcohol intake. I needed the sedative of her skin.
AB took me through the kitchen and down to her basement. Sometimes back in the day I’d get hints about the other ABs in that cuddly frame. She asked me if I wanted to see the video she made of her playing with herself earlier that day. I didn’t, but I tried when she offered to lay back in the laundry all over her bed — that detail was also new to me and even more shocking somehow — and just give me all the things I was too shy to ask for in my teens and twenties.
I couldn’t take them. The emotions and arousal were extreme. The hardware was uncooperative and dawn came and I had to burn out what was left of my throat smoking and trying look normal in their front yard while my cab came, and that was another $52 on the card.
My private bowl of the city night turned the color of an institutional band shell. I composed the first of 22 texts I’d send Sig that morning.
I didn’t hear from her for 72 hours.
Next: The Basement Conjuring
