Page 15 of Going Home in the Dark

The flight was smooth. The Gulfstream V touched down like a pinfeather floating to the ground on a windless day. The airfield, which lay six miles outside of town, provided a 2.2-mile runway and had been constructed primarily to serve the Keppelwhite Institute, a world-class facility engaged—as you might expect—in mysterious research projects. The Keppelwhite had inexplicably been established on the southern edge of bucolic Maple Grove when the four amigos had been in their first year of elementary school.

A rental car awaited Rebecca. It was a little thing and silly looking, as if a dozen clowns might suddenly burst out of it. She didn’t recognize the name of the maker. The interior smelled funny. She used one of the packets of sanitizing wet wipes that she carried in her purse to scrub significant portions of the interior. Then she drove the car into Maple Grove in spite of the smell.

The building that served as County Memorial Hospital was in conflict with the quaint character of the town: charmless in-your-face ultramodern; far larger than the population of this primarily agricultural county warranted; a sprawling, glittering, imposing, and somehow sinister structure.

Of course, this sixty-acre complex wasn’t merely a first-rate infirmary but also the aforementioned medical-research center. It rose behind County Memorial like a gigantic structure designed and erected by showboat extraterrestrials for the purpose of mocking the meager achievements of humanity. The Keppelwhite Institute had been built with nine hundred million dollars donated by James Alistair Keppelwhite and his wife, Wilamina “Willy” Keppelwhite, principal stockholders of Keppelwhite Pharmaceuticals, Keppelwhite Chemicals, Keppelwhite Essential Substances, and not least of all Keppelwhite Neotech. They hadalso built a thousand superb homes to house the institute’s scientific staff and their families in a stylish company neighborhood.

The ongoing research expenses were shared by the Keppelwhite Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the EPA, the CIA, a Department of Defense black-ops pool, Zippy’s Healthy Juice Bars, which might have been a front for an entity of questionable intent, and a major Hollywood talent agency that declined to be named. The variety of contributors suggested the Keppelwhite Institute must be a public-private enterprise encompassing the political, military, health-care, high-tech, and entertainment sectors of the economy, a combination of interests that should have alarmed a broad swath of the media, local politicians, and town residents. But of course no one cared about anything other than the tides of money that washed through the community because of this mysterious operation.

As Rebecca parked in front of the hospital and stared at the massive complex rising behind it, she realized how peculiar it was that neither she nor any of her dear amigos had heretofore stopped to wonder if their problems were somehow related to this place. Their certainty that someone had erased portions of their memory, the bad dreams they suffered, Spencer’s fugues, Rebecca’s own obsession with keeping surfaces clean, Bobby’s almost frantic need to travel, Ernie’s conviction that nature was frighteningly fragile and his interest in novels about brainwashing and amnesia—could all of it, every weird thread, lead to the Keppelwhite Institute? Was their failure to wonder about the place evidence that they had been manipulated psychologically to discourage them from considering that possibility? Yes, maybe, but wasn’t that a conspiracy theory? Wasn’t it too pat? Maybe. Probably. They still might want to discuss it when they were together. Later. Right now, all that matteredwas Ernie in his coma. Once Ernie was better, they could look into the issue of the institute. Maybe get together over Christmas and really dig into the subject then. Or in the spring.

Before getting out of the car, she took precautions to ensure she was less likely to be recognized and repeatedly asked for her autograph to the amusement of her amigos. She also hoped to guard against being kidnapped and held in a cellar by a crazed fan who wanted to read aloud his screenplay for a fourthShriekfilm. Makeup artists on her TV show had often told her that she looked different but also, strangely enough, prettier without makeup than with it. So she vigorously rubbed a series of wet wipes over her face. Because she was known for her shaggy midlength blond hair, she put on a shoulder-length brunette wig. She had perfect vision, but a pair of glasses with clear lenses and tortoiseshell frames completed her transformation.

Rebecca felt like an idiot when she was incognito, especially if she was recognized anyway. The keen-eyed fans usually recommended improvements to her disguise—a set of crooked teeth, warts glued on with spirit gum, fake radiation scars, and inevitably a Judy Garland mask. They were well-meaning, but she was as embarrassed as if she had been caught preparing to rob a bank.

At 4:42, she got out of the car and went into the hospital.

9Ernie’s Moment

Room 340 in County Memorial was similar to countless rooms in hospitals all over America. Speckled gray-and-blue vinyl flooring. Two white walls. Two pale-blue walls. A window offered a view of a world full of promise to those who would be healed and released, though it provided little of value to those who would die here.

Ernie was lying on his back with the head of the bed slightly raised, trailing a supplemental oxygen line that led to a clip on his nose, an intravenous drip line that connected a suspended bag of glucose to a catheter in one arm, and various leads conveying information about his heartbeat, lung function, blood pressure, and blood-oxygen level to a monitor with a big screen. From the screen issued periodic beeps, short-lived but ominous tones, and a musical trilling sound as if the primary purpose of this complex machine was to lure small birds to it. Ernie did not look good.

Spencer, Bobby, and Rebecca hugged one another, but they didn’t at first speak, so intense were their feelings.

Bobby Shamrock was weak-kneed with shock at the paleness of Ernie’s face, with concern that his amigo might be in pain or afraid. At the same time, he was overcome by a bitter sense of the unfairness that a gentle soul like Ernie should suffer. Bobby was also oppressed by the particular distress that was a forerunnerto grief when one couldn’t quite yet admit that the worst might happen.

No doubt Rebecca and Spencer felt similar things. But every person was different and experienced his or her unique salmagundi of competing emotions. Bobby could have tried to imagine what else his amigos were feeling. However, as a writer, that was something he did with too much of his time, puzzling through the emotions of people in his stories, trying to understand them, to figure out what the hell they were going to do next and why. Enough was enough. He knew whathefelt, and he would have to be satisfied with that.

He for sure wasn’t going toaskRebecca and Spencer how they felt. Although that had once been a caring question, it had been made illegitimate by an infinite gaggle of clueless reporters who had thrust their microphones toward hapless witnesses to ask,How did you feel when you saw the bridge collapse and carry the train with all its passengers into the abyss? How did you feel when the terrorist cut your brother’s tongue out with a dull knife? How did you feel when you saw your wife and baby swept up into the tornado as if they were just more lifeless debris?Most of the time, you didn’t need to know the finer details of anyone’s raw emotions; a general impression of what they must be feeling was enough to allow you to communicate without triggering a psychotic breakdown in one of them. Besides, if a guy was thinking something inappropriate, he wasn’t going to answer your tornado question by blurting out,That was the best damn day of my life! Now I don’t have to burn the house down with them in it to collect on the life insurance.

The room had been furnished with two straight-backed chairs for visitors. A nurse brought a third. She smiled at Bobbyand winked, as if the third chair had a special meaning for her and him.

Women were always winking and smiling at him, touching his arm or shoulder for no reason. When the amigos were fourteen years old, in ninth grade, and just becoming amigos, Rebecca had declared that Bobby the Sham possessed charisma. He had been upset when she said it. She hadn’t been coming on to him. The four of them were equally terrified of sexuality and scornful of kissy-face starry-eyed hold-my-hand chocolate-and-flowers romance. More than scornful. Scathing. Contemptuous. Rebecca’s statement was shocking because she hadn’t even been pretty in those days. She’d hardly been presentable. She cut her own hair as though in a fit of anger at herself, wore no makeup except mascara that made her look tubercular, wore shapeless clothing, and in general looked as if she lived in a dumpster. Who could have imagined that she was capable of perceiving charisma or accusing a boy of it? Even if she had been as gorgeous as she was now, fourteen-year-old Bobby would have taken no less offense at the slander. He did not want charisma; he did not have it; he would not accept it even at gunpoint. He insisted on being as big a nerd as the rest of them, no less a loser than they were. For a week, he proved his true nature by producing fragrant farts until the unfair accusation of charisma was withdrawn.

If the smiling, winking nurse hadn’t brought the third chair, if instead she had taken away the two that were already in Ernie’s room, Bobby and Rebecca and Spencer wouldn’t have noticed. They were still in the initial period of reverent distress about Ernie, when it felt wrong to sit down or speak more than a few whispered words or consult a phone for email or texts that might have come in during the walk from the parking lot. In this adjustmentphase, it seemed they ought to look at only Ernie and the screen that reported his vital signs, while brooding on the fragile nature of life.

They had been doing that for less than two minutes when the pulsing and spiking lines on the monitor stopped pulsing and spiking, the numerical readouts went to zero, and the monitor alarm sounded. Ernie had flatlined.

10The Worst Happens, Then Worse

A doctor, three nurses, and a young man on a career path that could not easily be determined crowded around the bed, working with dramatic flair to bring Ernie back to life. The paddles of a manual defibrillator were applied—“Clear!” the doctor announced—and then again, and a third time. “Clear! Clear!” An injection of something or other was administered, followed by an injection of something else. Eyelids were peeled back, stethoscopes were applied, and other actions were taken with an air of urgency shared by everyone, quite like a scene from an episode ofGrey’s Anatomy, though without the strain of troubled personal relationships and extreme sexual tension among those laboring so heroically on this resuscitation team.

Ernie did not share their urgency. Eventually his stillness quieted those attending him, and a professional sadness overcame them. As they disconnected their patient from all the devices that had failed to keep him alive, they favored the gathered friends with compassionate so-it-goes looks and with murmured condolences. Then they went away to save someone less determined to be deceased.

Tears gathered in Rebecca’s eyes. They were genuine tears, not conjured with a tear stick or a slice of onion, not the product of superior acting talent (though she had a little of that). She lovedErnie, her amigo, and the sight of him lying there as white as the bedsheets was intolerable. However, her tears did not spill down her cheeks, and she didn’t sob, because suddenly she knew that Ernie was not really dead.

“He’s not really dead,” she whispered at the very moment that Bobby and Spencer whispered the same words, as if they were a Greek chorus informing an audience of a significant dramatic detail that everyone needed to know but that the action alone might not have properly conveyed.

No word other thanstupefactioncould describe their fraught expressions. In a case like this, the apt definition ofstupefactionis usually the second entry in most dictionaries—“overwhelming amazement,” stunned disbelief of an emotionally charged nature.

“Back in the day,” Bobby recalled, “the people we knew who were in comas, they just woke up. Didn’t they just wake up? I sure don’t remember them dying,thenwaking up. I don’t like this seeming-to-be-dead phase. Especially when it’s Ernie.”

More bewildered than his amigos at having heard himself declare Ernie was not dead, Spencer said, “People in comas? I don’t ... Ididn’tremember people in comas until you mentioned them. I don’t remember who they were, or where or why. But, by God, therewerepeople in comas, weren’t there? More than a few of them.”

Rebecca went to the door and closed it, lest they be overheard. “On the phone this morning, Bobby and I were remembering people in comas. We don’t know who they were or why they were in comas, but we encountered more than a few of them back in the day. I can sort of see them, you know, in my mind’s eye. They were creepy.”

Just then everything got creepier when the door opened and Britta Hernishen entered the room.

---