To reach the attic, one must pull on a string that releases the door and a set of stairs that descends nearly to the floor. An ingenious contraption from another era of home engineering, but with two important drawbacks: one must use a stepladder or chair in order to reach the string, and one must step off the ladder before pulling the string for the attic steps come down quickly and without warning. I grabbed a chair from my brother’s room, remembering how he wrapped his feet around the chair’s legs as he worked at his desk, but forgetting the sliding stairs, which hit me square in the chest and knocked me on my keister and sent the chair clattering across the hall. I expected someone to come rushing to my aid, but there was no reaction other than a muffled “Keep it down!” from Beckett behind the bathroom door, doing God-knows-what with the four women. I picked myself up and climbed the stairs to the attic.
There was a light waiting for me that threw shadows but brightened all but the corners of the eaves, and the musty room smelled faintly of fried steak and hot metal. A persistent hum increased in volume whenever I stood still. Hunting for the source of that white noise would have taken all night and easily obsessed me, but fortunately, I thought more about my predilection for obsessive behavior rather than the noise itself and hit a plateau of absurd self-reflection where I could quit thinking altogether. Amid the clutter, some clues existed that would help me piece together a rational explanation for how I ended up this way, a long-forgotten artifact that would illuminate the recesses of my mind, but my immediate purpose was to find a patch for the hole in the floor. Against the far wall rested a framed lithograph, a gift from a girlfriend—Sita is her name, I am pleased to remember. We bought it on a date to a Gustav Klimt retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. The poster was just large enough to cover the hole, but as I slid it across the opening, I chanced to spy on the bathroom below. It was empty. There was nobody inside. No Marie, no Alice, no Jane, no Dolly, and old man Beckett had disappeared. Nothing to be done. I poked my head through the opening and scanned all four corners and over the shower curtain. Even the baby was gone. For the first time since falling, I felt utterly bereft. Sometimes there is nothing more terrifying than being alone in your own house. I checked my watch and then carefully positioned the poster to cover the hole. No light shone from below. If possible, I was even more alone with my thoughts.
I hurried to the staircase and backed down the steps, hopping from the final one, and paused at my bedroom door to determine whether the sleeping beauties had also deserted me. The tangle of limbs and bodies had diminished to just four sets. Three of the women opened their eyes in the sudden light, and the fourth still showed her back, not having moved all night. I quickly retreated in hope that they would all go back to sleep. My fingers wrapped around the cold doorknob brought back memories of Christmas mornings when my brother and I would sneak out of bed, check if my parents were asleep behind their closed door, and then tiptoe out of their room, carefully turn the knob so that it would not so much as click, and then tramp down into the living room, turn on the strings of shiny lights on the tree, and stare at our toys and presents till well past dawn. In the stillness of those moments filled with hope and anticipation and goodwill, my brother and I were never closer. We waited with patient excitement for Mr. and Mrs. Godot to arrive, sleepy-headed, but caught, too, by the surprise of their own deep and holy joy. So many years later, the doorknob in my hand brought them back, if only in the instant before I let go.
The hallway rugs muffled the sound of my bare feet, and I was able to sneak as quietly as smoke to the bathroom door and press my ear against the surface. A woman’s laughter rose and trailed off, and a low voice said something funny that made all the women howl. I could not decipher their actual words, so instead I began alternately to worry that they were speaking about me and to regret missing out on all of the merriment. I knocked twice and entered.
Caught in the middle of their party, they all turned to face me. Marie stood on the edge of the bathtub, towering over the others arranged in front of her as though an audience to an impromptu demonstration. She seemed to have just stopped shimmying, so I deduced she had been performing the voodoo dance. I launched my question full force: “Where were you?”
“We have been here,” Beckett said, “waiting for you. The question is: where were you?”
“You know very well I went to the attic to fix the hole. I found an old poster from Sita that covered the whole thing—”
“The hole thing?”
“No, the whole. Whole, with a W.”
“The hole in the whole?”
“When I looked through the opening, there you weren’t. Not where you were supposed to be. Nobody at all in the bathroom.”
Dolly interrupted. “Perhaps we stepped out.”
“To powder our noses,” said Jane.
“Or maybe,” Alice suggested, “you went down the wrong hole.”
Marie took the conversational baton. “Right, like a fifth dimension.”
“You have a point,” the old man agreed. “If there can be a crack in time, why not a hole to some other space?”