Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard. The line from the nursery rhyme attended my way past the closed doors on the upper floor, and down the darkened stairway, but when I reached the bottom landing, the rest of the ditty had escaped my mind, and furthermore, I had forgotten the reason for my journey. Perhaps it was the bump to my coconut, or perhaps the visits from these strange people with their twisted histories had jarred my short-term memory, or perhaps events from long ago now jostled with contemporary thought, but the purpose of my presence in that spot at that hour had vanished. As often when searching for a missing item—my wallet or watch or keys—I tried to reason my way out of confusion by going back in time.
Our memories are best recalled by the houses of our lives. My parents’ home, where my brother and I were raised, holds within its walls the memories of childhood, and any attempt at reconstructing my younger self also requires rebuilding that home in my mind. As a boy, I used to sit for hours at my father’s desk in his study and draw. My mother would leave these huge sheets of brown paper, the kind you get at the post office for wrapping parcels, maybe four feet long. So that the edges wouldn’t curl, I’d stack building blocks to hold down each end. Every day after school, I filled every inch of that space. One time I drew a whole city block. Every window and door, all the bricks perfect and in place. Or I would make a map of invisible countries, mystery cities. Lay out where the park would be, the baseball stadium, all the roads and bridges. Later, as a college student and then as an intern and junior associate, I lived in a series of apartments, boxlike studios or once a charming pied-à-terre, but those cells were not conducive to anything but a few hours’ sleep. When my brother and I bought this house to share, I had at last some dreamscape. Attached to this house are the reveries of a woman. Even now I can picture her here, moving like a phantom through the labyrinth of rooms, gracing the space with her laughter. At rest on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, her feet beneath the curled and napping cat. Drying her hair in the kitchen after being caught in the rain. Surrounded by constellations of fireflies on a warm night in June. I have everything of her but a name. Where is she now, and what has become of her? Who is she? For that matter, who are these strangers in this space? The possibility that the man who met me in the bathroom is the ghost of my father seems less and less likely, and if not, then who is he and what does he want?
Something to eat, of course. The old man was, at that moment, upstairs with Dolly and Jane doing who knows what. But I remembered: he was hungry and wanted his dinner. The cobwebs cleared, I paused at the front door, the kitchen to my left, and to my right the living room sat like a tomb. The cat cried out softly, so I poked my head around the corner to see him atop the television, the end of his tail a perfect circle around the LED clock. With a kiss I beckoned him, and he came straightaway, arching his back and rubbing against me in a comforting manner. I picked him up and walked to the kitchen.
The second line came to me: To fetch her poor dog a bone. I switched on the light and the room radiated in stark clarity. Someone had come in during the middle of the night, in the interim between this and my previous visit, and had cleaned the joint, a thorough scrubbing, the countertops glistening, the stovetop sparkling, and every appliance, breadbasket, knife rack, and all else neat and ordered, giving the kitchen an artificial quality as if a model one or a prop set for the stage or a photo shoot. Behind the facade of cupboards and cabinets, all was bare, not one box, bag, or can of food, not so much as a spice jar or box of baking soda. The refrigerator, too, had been emptied and sanitized. “Sorry, puss,” I told him. “When she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so her poor doggie had none.”
The cat mewed hungrily. I scooped him in my arms and headed for the basement where I kept an additional store, canned goods, coffee, tea, and a freezer filled with food that did not normally fit in the pantry or the cupboards. Under the weak light of a hanging bulb, the room was dim but reassuringly recognizable: the washer and dryer, the stack of old design and architectural textbooks and other mementos of my former life, and on the table next to my toolbox and odd pieces of wood sat the surplus foodstuff. I spied a can of tuna and pocketed it for the cat. A dizzying array of canned soups and fruits and vegetables rose in a pyramid. “What did the old man want?” I asked myself. “Not turtle soup, but something else …”
“Slumgullion,” said the cat.
Without hesitation, I began to scan the labels. “Never heard of slumgullion—” And then it occurred to me that the cat should not have spoken. He crouched among the pears and beans in the normal, catlike manner, his ears pricked as if listening. His tail twitched under my scrutiny. “What did you just say?”