Page 13 of Going Home in the Dark

Throughout these exchanges, Portia Clavus had stood behind her employer and to one side, shifting from foot to foot, chewing on a knuckle, looking as if she might bite off any fingers she felt were redundant. Spencer’s answer inspired her to make a fist and punch the air.

“You have not been to art school,” said Dusterheit.

“Francis Bacon never went, either. He couldn’t even draw. And he’s famous. He’s not the only one. School is for illustrators, not for artists.”

Dusterheit returned to the paintings for five minutes and then said, “I believe I can represent your work to great effect.”

“That would be nice.”

“I believe that by the time you’re thirty-five, you will get half a million per canvas. Before you’re forty, maybe years before, your price will exceed one million.”

“Where do I sign?”

Dusterheit said, “One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You talk too much.”

“I can fix that.”

“The more mysterious an artist is, the more he is in demand. Silence suggests that you know things other people don’t, that you have depths others can never plumb. Silence is sexy.”

Spencer only nodded.

“One additional note.”

Spencer raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Erhardt Dusterheit said, “You need a better look.”

Spencer waited.

“I see you in black.”

Spencer nodded again.

“And a hat.”

Spencer raised his eyebrows once more as a means of inquiring what was meant by “hat.”

“There’s such a thing astooquiet,” Dusterheit advised.

Spencer said, “What about a porkpie? Snap-brimmed, round crown, black felt?”

Baring his mezzaluna smile, Dusterheit said, “I like it.”

And so it was that Spencer Truedove became a wildly successful, critically acclaimed artist without any formal training and without any memory of having painted anything. Although otherwise he had enough charm to make a cobra dance without using a flute, Spencer answered most questions about his work with silence accompanied by an expression that was 70 percent compassionate pity and 30 percent intellectual contempt. He did so with such grace that everyone posing a question—everyone but Britta Hernishen—went away satisfied that the artist provided profound yet succinct insight into the meaning of his art.

Year by year, life was good. If there was one thing he wished he could change, it was the dreams. In damp seasons, when thesticky nights were warm but not viciously hot, or when darkness settled through the city with a chill of waning autumn, when the moon was full and ghastly with its shadowed craters but sometimes when no moon graced the sky, without relationship to the spiciness of the food that he’d eaten or the quantity of wine that he’d consumed, terrifying dreams tormented Spencer until sleep could no longer chain him to those hideous visions, whereupon he thrashed up from his sheets and blankets, his heart cold in his breast even as he streamed sour sweat from every pore, hair standing off his scalp and tangled in an Einsteinian bush, his flesh as pale as the pulp of an inedible squash. He woke screaming, and he continued to scream as he scrambled out of bed, sometimes snared by the bedclothes so that he stumbled and crashed to the floor. Even the shock of such a collapse failed to quiet his screams, and he crawled fast across the room in a frantic search for shelter, of which none was to be found, so that he routinely ended his flight sitting on the floor, back pressed into a corner. The night-light with which he always slept provided him no comfort in these situations, and though there was never a monster in pursuit of him, he did not abruptly cease screaming but quieted by stages; the shrill scream became a softer scream, became a wail, became an ululation, became at last a tuneless threnody that faded into ragged breathing.

Of course, he never remembered the dream, though somehow he knew it wasn’t about his parents. He knew intuitively that it was always the same scenario. He also knew the threat around which the dream was built involved something that happened to him and the other amigos back in the day, some horror they had barely escaped.

For whatever reason, though Rebecca died in her dreams, Bobby and Ernie didn’t suffer nightmares, though they endured their own problems. They all knew they had gaps in their memories, gaps dating to their high school years. They made references to this from time to time, though they never engaged in a lengthy conversation about the fact that they all suffered from amnesia, which was an amazing thing when you thought about it. Forgetfulness hadn’t just befallen them; surely someone had wiped their memories. They should want to know who and why. It was as though they shared an unspoken agreement that whatever lay behind that door was best forgotten, even if someone hadstolenthe truth from them.

Only Spencer continued to experience new episodes of amnesia—the periodic fugue states in which he painted. He had long suspected that the bizarre images on his canvases resulted from a subconscious attempt to remember what the amigos had endured together.

As for the nightmare that afflicted him five or six times a year, maybe that was a small price to pay to keep the door shut on those lost memories.

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