He raised his bushy eyebrows at the latter. “Smashing. On your way back, you may want to throw on some clothes.”
The shock of again meeting my supposedly departed father, even an enervated version of the man I remember, made me forget momentarily that, except for a wristwatch, I was naked. On the hook screwed into the door hung a white robe, a constellation of fine red spots sprayed along the collar and one shoulder. I put it on and reflexively checked the time. It was 4:52 A.M. when I stepped into the hallway and out of the light and hum of the bathroom and into the darkness, which immediately compressed the visual stimuli that had set off the firing synapses. My mind cleared. With nothing to see and little to think about, I quite nearly forgot my purpose.
“I’ll take that whiskey neat,” the old man bellowed from behind me.
Cinching my belt, I moved ahead through a house as quiet as a grave. At the top of the stairs, I stopped and listened, and faraway came a sigh from someone asleep, so delicate it may not have been a sound at all, but only the thought or memory of a whisper from some other point in time and some space beyond the walls or perhaps within the walls themselves. I could not tell whence it came, so I delayed my trip downstairs and sought its source. Three rooms flanked the balustrade. Two bedrooms and a tiny office where the drafting table and drawings lived. The sigh might have been a puff from the computer, putting itself to sleep, but when I opened the office door, the room appeared just as usual in mad disarray, heaps of paper, rolls of plots and plans. On the dear computer, blank and quiet, a dark apple rested like a shut eye. I ran my palm along the edge of the desk, furring my fingertips with a coat of dust. Another sloughing noise crept through the walls, and I dashed over to the adjoining spare room, threw open the door, and discovered them.
The setting full moon cast a halo upon the bed. Some trick of mind allowed me, in that diffusion, to see with vivid clarity the fumble of colors and patterns, a swirl of quilts and coverlets of the most outrageous hues and designs. But I had forgotten, until that very moment, the strange naked women hidden beneath the fabric. They appeared at once and altogether, a floating cloud, flower and flesh, jumbling of limbs, hands, a bare breast, the curve of a hip, a half-dozen bare arms, skin and hair of assorted hues, some beribboned with garlands, others loose and unbound. Lips, faces at odd, unnatural angles. Eight women in a tangle, pretzeling bodies at rest. All but one of their faces were turned my way. One pair of eyes opened. Another blinked in my direction. The patterns on the blankets shimmered like colored glass in a kaleidoscope, stirring to life. The colors moved like a wave, the blankets parted like the sea. Another woman cracked alert and stared at me, caressed the shoulder of her neighbor as if to wake her, and I stepped back from the threshold and quickly shut the door. Someone sighed again, but I was not sure if this time it was not me.