His personal assistant was Morrison Dunn, as I vaguely remembered him, greeted me at the front door and ushered me silently into my quarters. It wasn’t exactly like the quarter of a room I had; more of a quarter times four by comparison, and he left me to freshen up. The wake was to be held the day after, he told me, and I had ample time to readjust myself to my surroundings. Those were his exact words and the Morrison Dunn I remembered was an exact person in almost every way possible, my friend told me. Whilst Morrison Dunn held a vacant youthful face, my old friend had somehow aged rapidly in the past few years.
Hearing nothing but my clumsy footsteps on the mansion’s polished wooden floors, I filled the Victorian antique bathtub, stumbled almost half of the bath salt inside, and went for a long dip. It had been a tenuous flight; I was asleep most of it but I remembered how tired I felt. It was as if I was never out of consciousness at all, cerebrally drifting somewhere beyond space and time, and yanked gracelessly back to Earth for some unfinished business.
I felt half of my self returned after a long bath and decided to eat breakfast in my quarters, finishing what was left of the magazine article. It was not of any great importance but I had to get it out of the way. Morrison Dunn left me the whole morning alone and assigned a Miss Calandra Pierce to attend to me. I told her I only needed Internet connection for my unfinished work and some food to go with it. I was told the mansion had a wi-fi account to my name, my password would be the name of my first pet, and my breakfast would come in fifteen minutes. I wasn’t told what kind of breakfast it was and Miss Pierce disappeared the way Morrison Dunn did, just as brisk and in less than two bats of an eyelid.
Speaking of pets, my late mother (may her soul rest in peace) told me I had a knack of collecting unwanted animals. As a child I grew up having what my late father (bless his good old soul) called a peanut gang of a zoo. I had a badger who had a missing claw; a rabbit with a clawed out eye (did the badger claw the rabbit, I wonder?); a few cats whose tails were all bent in irregular angles; a mongrel with a bad patch of fur that kept falling off year after year; a family of squirrels that ended up nesting on my late mother’s favorite tree and constantly stole from her barrel of assorted nuts and home-dried fruits; a billy goat that wandered into our vegetable patch (apparently it had a horrible sense of direction and could never walk in a straight line); and a goose that had a strong liking for puddles yet stayed clear away from my late father’s fish pond. All those years of collecting and burying pets out of old age, I never once named any of them until I entered university some two thousand miles away from my hometown. That was the time I met my old friend and the first time I ever named a pet, a stray gray-striped cat we all lovingly called Bob Babbit III, or Bobbit for short.
I told my old friend of all these things from my childhood years and his reply was, “So you’ve collected me too,” laughing as he did, his unusually clear aquamarine eyes twinkling in the morning sun. But we shared so many friends between us and I thought nothing of it until that morning, recollecting Bob Babbit III or Bobbit for short, thinking that maybe we were all a peanut gang of friends, a strange assortment of people put together by the simplest of circumstance for a purpose beyond our comprehension.
Then again, I remembered there was nothing physically or mentally wrong with Bobbit. I had kept him with me for many years after graduation and one Sunday morning I found him breathlessly stiff, curled up in the kitchen corner by the trash. Seeing him there nearly broke my heart and I wondered if my old friend would do the same thing to me.
