A low, mocking purr issued from deep inside him like the gears and cogs of a clock. I redoubled my search for slumgullion, but it obviously was not there, so taking a can at random, I held it up for his consideration, but the cat looked first at it and then at me with a blank and incurious stare, and I began to feel a little foolish for thinking that cats could read. With a flick of the wrist, I turned it round to look at the label: cream of mushroom.
“Ick,” said the cat. “Try the mulligatawny.” His lips—do cats have lips?—did not move as the syllables exited, and he seemed to be communicating telepathically in a high feline voice that sounded vaguely Australian. Clearly it was the cat talking and not merely the echo of my imagination.
“How did you do that?”
Once again, he adopted a passive mood, and his expression remained sphinxlike. I found a family-sized can of Trader Joe’s Mulligatawny Soup and then went to the freezer for a package of heat-’n’-serve naan to accompany it, and with a nod to Harpo, I went back upstairs to the kitchen to heat the meal. A few minutes into the preparation, the cat followed me into the room, creeping underfoot in expectation. The soup bubbled in the pot and the oven timer ticked off the minutes till the bread was hot. “What is it, boy? Cat got your tongue?” The bell dinged, and I fished out the tuna in the pocket of my robe. I opened the tin and plopped the whole mess into a dish and set it on the floor for him. Loading three bowls and three spoons on a tray, along with the pot of soup and a basket of bread, I swept it up on my hand and shoulder like a waiter to bring dinner to my guests.
“Thanks for your help,” I called out over my shoulder.
“Thanks for the tunafish, mate,” Harpo said.
Breathless and stiff from the heavy load, I arrived at the bathroom to find the threesome waiting patiently. They appeared just as I had left them, the old man bundled into the terrycloth robe, and Dolly and Jane in their nightgowns, composed and unruffled, as if they had merely taken a brief stroll in my absence. Dolly and my father still had the third eye drawn on their eyelids, and Jane had bound her wild braids into a single coil held in place by another rope of her hair. Her long elegant neck lay bare. Tattooed along the left side was a small Chinese dragon, its fanged mouth open beneath her ear as if to strike. Drawn to the scent of chicken and curry, the three crowded around and triggered for me a wee bit of claustrophobia. No logical place existed for me to lay down my burden, so I covered the sink with the tray and lifted the lid to the pot of soup. “I hope you all like mulligatawny.”
“Excellent,” the old man said.
I asked, “Would you not be more comfortable dining in the dining room? Perhaps the kitchen, which is now spotlessly clean?”
Dolly ladled a heaping bowl while Jane attacked the naan, tearing a piece in half and shoving the warm bread into her mouth. With the wiggle of a crooked finger, the old man bade me come closer. We huddled under the open window. “A word, bucko, if you don’t mind. It’s not me that wants to eat in the bathroom, but the girls. They’re allergic to cats. If I’m not mistaken, there’s one of them beasts on the premises.”
“Harpo? How did you know?”
“Have you ever heard of an aura, mac? Every living thing has a wave of energy they carry with them. As much a living part of you as your skin or your hair. Or in the case of a cat, its fur. And as you move through the world, you shed bits and pieces—”
“Like dandruff? Or cat dander? Many people are allergic to cat dander.”
“More like the scent of a woman who just left the room, or the memory of a person brought back upon hearing some old love song. The sound of mandolins, or Proust’s madeleines, or the taste of boyhood in a peach ice cream cone. The ineffable essence. The cat’s been here.”
“Well, he doesn’t shed.”
“The aura you leave behind is not the same thing as forensic evidence.”
The discussion of the cat reminded me of our conversation in the basement, and the old man seemed a likely source for explanation. “But the cat can talk,” I said. “He recommended the mulligatawny. What do you think of that?”
The old man peeled back the window curtain and looked intently at the black night. “I think there’s something wrong in your head.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you have said all night.” In fact, the knock on my nut could explain a great many of the events of that early morning as an elaborate sequence of hallucinations, from the man with feathers in his mouth to the talking cat to the mystery of 4:52. I stole another peek at Dolly and Jane, both barefoot in their diaphanous nightgowns, seated face-to-face in the empty bathtub, eating curry soup. The dragon on Jane’s neck had changed positions, so that now the head pointed to her bosom and the tail wound round her ear. The women appeared real enough. And the man with his back to me, who peered out into the fathomless night, he seemed quite solid. I tapped him on the shoulder to confirm my suspicions, but I may have hit bone for he felt hard as stone and fixed as a statue. When he finally acknowledged my persistence, he spoke as if suddenly remembering a broken-off conversation.