A sort of yellow fog occluded my vision, and when I awoke fully and shook the exhaustion from my eyes, there before me in Beckett’s lap sat the child, now older by some months. He looked closer to two than to one year old, and when he smiled, eight teeth appeared in his bright red mouth.
“So that we may have no further interruptions to your saga,” Beckett said, “perhaps it would be wise to find some nourishment for this young bucko. Would you have any Melba toast in the larder? Or they seem to favor dry breakfast cereal in the shape of life preservers. Circles of bananas. Cold Spaghetti-os. Any morsel, really, small enough to be picked up by tiny fingers but soft enough to avoid choking if swallowed whole.” He whispered an aside. “They feel independent at this age if they feed themselves, matteradam if they make an unholy mess. Would you have some tidbit about the place?”
I informed him that a search of the pantry would be necessary.
Beckett addressed the toddler directly. “What do you say, young man, some num-yum-num in order?”
“Soightenly,” the baby said.
I bowed to his wishes and backed out of the bathroom.
Grateful for the silence and emptiness of the hallway, I paused with my hand on the doorknob and considered my predicament. Although this had long been my home, it felt like a strange land in which strange things had been happening all night, ever since I found myself naked and bleeding on the floor. No, before that, strange things from the moment I arrived home to discover the seven bicycles splayed across the front yard. Or perhaps even earlier? I tried to remember the last normal thing to have happened, retracing my steps past that homecoming, but memory failed me. All I could truly recall was waking in the middle of the night and finding my way to the bathroom.
The doorknob jiggled in my hand, so I let go and hurried downstairs to look for some food for the baby. At the bottom landing, I glanced to the right and saw that everything had changed in the living room. The white walls had been painted sea green and the decor had morphed from my rather traditional Stickley to a sleek fusion of styles, the lines vaguely art deco but the furnishing a mixture of Japanese-Italian-Southwestern-Zen ethos, favoring a kind of modern simplicity. It all looked like some interior decorator’s misguided vision of the future. Instead of the old television, there stood a panel thin as glass, but flexible to the touch. Worst of all, my books were missing. There was not a volume to be seen, not even The Poetics of Space. It looked like a wasteland.
More formal and austere than before, the dining room bore only the faintest traces of my design, and the kitchen appeared to have been dropped directly from the spaceship of an anal-retentive species of aliens. Gone were the rustic cabinets, the bread on the counter, the booze collecting dust, and the cookie jar molded into the shape of a mermaid that my brother had acquired on some Caribbean vacation. Stainless-steel cabinets and appliances in brushed nickel gave the room cleanliness and order, but the immediate effect was mitigated by the sensation of having wandered into a morgue. What lurked behind those closed metal drawers? It all looked sterile and dangerous. I opened the cupboard in the area where the cereal had once been stored, but the freakish designer who had made over the outside of the room had carefully catalogued and labeled the foodstuffs into clear plastic containers. The cheese crackers were filed beneath the challah and above the chutney. Alphabetized. Talk about measuring one’s life out in coffee spoons (between the cocoa and the corn chips). Imagining the baby might be thirsty after his snack, I fished around in the gigantic fridge and poured a half glass of skim milk. I also remembered that the cat was about the house somewhere, and I left a saucer of water on the floor. Not wanting to wake anyone, I softly called for Harpo, here kitty, kitty, but no meow echoed back. Cats are notoriously independent and cannot always be bribed, like dogs, with food. I shut off the lights and made my way through the strange rooms to the upstairs landing.
The urge to peek in on them was too strong, so I softly elbowed open the door to my bedroom, just a skosh, enough to see the three bodies remaining on the bed. Two of the women groaned slightly at the disturbance and tangled themselves together in a knot, and the third had not moved all night, if indeed the night can be said to have passed at all, but she remained still, her face to the wall, and her hand resting on the swell of her hip. For a moment, I watched the rise and fall of her breathing, and not wishing to disturb her sleep, I left the room as quietly as I had arrived. The floorboards groaned at my tread, and the bathroom door flew open suddenly, flooding the space with light.