A layer of hastily-scrawled notes in fading yellow chalk coats the low ceiling. Thirteen black-and-white televisions light the room. There are no windows here. The winding strings of christmas lights obscuring the roughly hewn walls are unplugged and dark. The room’s only other light fixture stands bulbless in the corner. Several mirrors, large and small, reflect the colored static light from the televisions around the large space, making the room’s dimness vaguely less perceptible. Even in the tenebrous darkness, this room clearly houses a lot of activity.
Though there are four comfortable chairs, they sit piled in the corner, showing how infrequently people sit down here. The high countertops are littered with wires and circuits. A stack of cardboard boxes contains six wooden bowls, and about thirty unopened speakers. Two shelves stand against a wall. The taller one, which almost reaches the low ceiling, contains a single stack of papers, two VCRs, and sixty-four cans of diet coke. The shorter shelf, at about waist-height, has three levels. The lowest sits empty, the middle overflows with wires, and the top holds a row of VHS tapes. Two television sets, both unplugged and dark, stack atop the shelf. On the adjacent wall stands another high shelf, this one filled completely with old records. Puzzlingly, the room contains no record player.
The water stains on the dirty red carpet indicate that the room often floods. As such, all of the furniture, including the shelf units, is lifted three inches above the ground on thick wooden blocks. Against the wide brick chimney that divides the room from the rest of the basement stands a high wooden table. It is empty but for a stack of CDs, three blue paint rollers, and a brown wooden speaker. The back of the speaker has been removed, and one can see that its bowels have been replaced. One of its sides has three brightly-colored buttons, the sort used on arcade machines. The blue and red ones are apparently functionless, but the green one rings a doorbell nailed to the bottom of the wooden table to ring.
Thin copper pipes run along a worn wooden beam on the ceiling. Near the room’s shortest wall, they turn and move toward the middle of the room, where they disappear into a hole torn in the plaster ceiling. Under the hole is a shiny grey drum set. Unusually, the large bass drum has a pedal on the outward-facing side, apparently to allow the room’s inhabitant to play while standing in the middle of the room. A severely water-damaged stack of sheet music has been planted against the wall near the drums. The ink runs across the pages, making the music illegible.
Occasionally the exposed plumbing issues a loud hiss, bringing attention back to the world above this subterranean grotto. It is a rude awakening from the sequestered sanctum, isolated by covered windows from the passage of time.