Moon Palace by Paul Auster

anyone named Kitty. I’ve never met anyone named Kitty in my life.”
    “You’re wearing the same shirt she is. It made me think you must be connected to her somehow.”
    I looked down at my chest and saw that I had a Mets T-shirt on. I had bought it at a rummage sale earlier in the year for ten cents. “I don’t even like the Mets,” I said. “The Cubs are the team I root for.”
    “It’s a weird coincidence,” the stranger continued, paying no attention to what I had said. “Kitty is going to love it. She loves things like that.”
    Before I had a chance to protest, I found myself being led by the arm into the kitchen. There I came upon a group of five or six people sitting around the table eating Sunday breakfast. The table was crowded with food: bacon and eggs, a full pot of coffee, bagels and cream cheese, a platter of smoked fish. I had not seen anything like this in months, and I scarcely knew how to react. It was as though I had suddenly been put down in the middle of a fairy tale. I was the hungry child who had been lost in the woods, and now I had found the enchanted house, the cottage built of food.
    “Look everyone,” announced my grinning, bare-chested host. “It’s Kitty’s twin brother.”
    At that point I was introduced around the table. Everyone smiled at me and said hello, and I did my best to smile back. It turned out that most of them were students at Juilliard—musicians, dancers, singers. The host’s name was Jim or John, and he had just moved into Zimmer’s old apartment the day before. The others had been out partying that night, someone said, and instead of going home afterward, they had decided to burst in on Jim or John with an impromptu housewarming breakfast. That explained his lack of clothing (he had been asleep when they rang the bell) and the abundance of food I saw before me. I nodded politely when they told me all this, but I only pretended to be listening. The fact was that I couldn’t have cared less, and by the time thestory was over, I had forgotten everyone’s name. For want of anything better to do, I studied my twin sister, a small Chinese girl of nineteen or twenty with silver bracelets on both wrists and a beaded Navaho band around her head. She returned my look with a smile—an exceptionally warm smile, I felt, filled with humor and complicity—and then I turned my attention back to the table, powerless to keep my eyes off it for very long. I realized that I was on the verge of embarrassing myself. The smells from the food had begun to torture me, and as I stood there waiting for them to invite me to sit down, it was all I could do not to grab something off the table and shove it in my mouth.
    Kitty was the one who finally broke the ice. “Now that my brother is here,” she said, obviously entering into the spirit of the moment, “the least we can do is ask him to join us for breakfast.” I wanted to kiss her for having read my mind like that. An awkward moment followed, however, when no extra chair could be found, but again Kitty came to the rescue, gesturing for me to sit between her and the person to her copy. I promptly wedged myself into the spot, planting one buttock on each chair. A plate was set before me along with the necessary accoutrements: knife and fork, glass and cup, napkin and spoon. After that, I entered a miasma of feeding and forgetting. It was an infantile response, but once the food entered my mouth, I wasn’t able to control myself. I chomped down one dish after another, devouring whatever they put in front of me, and eventually it was as though I had lost my mind. Since the generosity of the others seemed infinite, I kept on eating until everything on the table had disappeared. That is how I remember it, in any case. I gorged myself for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when I was done, the only thing left was a pile of whitefish bones. Nothing more than that. I search my memory for something else, but I can never find it. Not one