“It’s simple, really—embarrassingly simple, though people always expect something weirder. I got it from my parents. Every time something happens to me—something good, something worth keeping—I slip something in there. A small record of it, almost like keeping a diary—although, god, I could never keep a diary. Diaries are for people who want to be someone who keeps one. This is something far better—this is proof.
“A seashell—the shape of which apparently resembles my face—from a beach my mother took me to. The ticket stub from our first family trip out of town—that’s in there, along with a photograph of us taken by the hotel guy. We’re all sunburnt, squinting and laughing for whatever reason I can’t remember anymore—and I kept them in case I ever forgot we were ever that happy. A napkin covered in an intricate diagram I drew in third grade—for a machine that does who knows what. A participation ribbon from a school sports day where I came dead last in everything but still went home smiling.”
Even as I let my fingers slide down the ornate brass handles, the old wardrobe—dark oak, covered in dust, taller than it needed to be—stood silent in the rather ill-fittingly modern room. I took a step back. Rudy continued.
“There’s a ton of junk in there like that. A huge collection of mindlessly drawn doodles from the margins of old notebooks—that’s in there. A tape with my school performance recorded on it, complete with my parents shouting my name a bit too loudly. A single sock, whose pair I’d lost. Perfect report cards. Movie tickets. Countless illegible notes. You get it, right? Every idea, every little happy accident, every small and mundane thing—archived; given a space. It’s a long tradition now.
“Photographs my father secretly took of me sleeping. Stories my mother told about my life. A cassette tape of my laughter. All the letters that my parents send me—I keep them here. My sister’s last letter—unopened, still sealed. It’s got to be five years old now, maybe six. A lease I never signed, from an apartment I never lived in, for a life I apparently, at some point, almost had.”
He stepped closer to me and gently caressed the side of the wardrobe.
“Battery acid in hard capsules. My passports. My IDs. A copy of my birth certificate. Documents—oh, so many documents. Any official-looking thing that I get in the mail. A bill stamped ‘final notice,’ which I paid eventually, but wouldn’t you agree that the notice is the truer document? A sandwich—an actual sandwich, long past anything you’d call food now. A birthday cake—several birthday cakes actually, given to me over the years, somehow squeezed through the slit. Anything with my name printed on it.
“Without the wardrobe, all the objects would have nowhere to go. Do you understand that these objects come to me endlessly? Do you understand that I realized the purpose of it the moment I was first handed an object by my mother? Do you understand what this wardrobe means to me? Do you understand what opening it would mean? The joy, the tragedies, the successes, the failures—do you realize that the wardrobe contains more of me than myself? Do you understand that this is Rudy? Cut me open into my abdomen, and god knows what you’d see. Open that, and you’d find bones, warm blood, real throbbing organs, along with disgustingly rotten masses filling the cavity that pertain to that name. Do you understand that? Do you understand—”
Rudy stopped as he overtook the face of the unfamiliar man.
“—Anyway,” he said, already turning towards the kitchen. “You want a beer or something? I’m pretty sure there’s some left, unless I used it for something already.”
He didn’t wait to hear the answer. As I sat just a moment longer with the wardrobe, I did what anyone else would do. The door swung open without so much as a creak.
Nothing. Not a photograph, not a letter, not even dust.