Page 18 of Going Home in the Dark

Having been bestirred by the word “freak” and the associations it had for him, Spencer was driven to make his point as forcefully as he could. “It’s the hat that Walter White started wearing partway throughBreaking Bad, when he realized he was a bad dude and no one better mess with him.”

“I never saw that series,” Butch admitted. “But like I said, it’s just a hat.”

“It’s not ‘just a hat.’ It’s a meaningful hat. It’s the same style hat Gene Hackman wore when he played Popeye Doyle inThe French Connection.”

Being of approximately the same age, Spencer and Butch probably had similar levels of testosterone, which always explains more than Freudian analysis. When Spencer failed to acknowledge that what he was wearing was merely a hat, Butch apparently decided that he had backed off his initial criticism as far as he could without further retreat reflecting badly on his manhood.“Listen, pal, this isn’t about you, see? It isn’t about anyone who wore the hat in a movie. If Jesus Himself wore it, that would still be a stupid hat.”

Spencer stepped farther into room 315.

If Ernie Hernishen had been dead, which he wasn’t, it would nevertheless have been an offense to his dignity to have taken him from County Memorial in a backless hospital gown. Worse, when he’d been stripped of his street clothes, someone had removed even his underpants. After lowering the collapsible railing, Rebecca and Bobby conspired to roll Ernie to the side of the bed with the intention of sitting him up on the edge, which was when they discovered his ass was hanging out.

Rebecca was not offended by the sight of a bare butt; she had seen others. However, she was distressed by the thought of sweet, shy Ernie being treated so cavalierly. “Why would they have to take his underpants off to figure out why he fell into a coma?”

Bobby said, “Maybe they suspected him of doing drugs, so they were looking for injection sites.”

“Who injects drugs in his own butt? There are a lot of other places that require fewer contortions.”

“Or maybe they suspected foul play.”

“What—there’s a psychotic butt-injector on the loose?”

“I’m just trying to explain the missing underpants. Maybe someone took them as a souvenir.”

“Who would want his underwear as a souvenir, a souvenir of what?”

“Some fan of the songs he’s written. You know, Rebecca, you’re not the only one who’s had strange experiences with kooky fans.”

“I find it hard to believe that you, the author ofThe Blind Man’s Lantern, can’t imagine an explanation better than souvenir underpants.”

“Remember, I woke up in Baltimore and flew commercial. It’s been a long day. Let’s get on with this. They’re going to embalm him whether he has underpants or not.”

“Have a look in the closet over there. Maybe his underpants are with the rest of the clothes he was wearing.”

Rebecca hoped that was the case. They were already swimming in a sea of mysteries. The experiences that had been washed from their memories by an unknown power. The shared sense that a lot of people adrift in comas were a part of their past. The mutual conviction that Ernie wasn’t on the far shore of Death, as he seemed to be, but was still alive even without vital signs. Missing underpants might be a small thing, but right now she felt that one new mystery would be one too many.

The closet was small because people don’t check into a hospital with two suitcases full of leisurewear. Bobby opened the door and after only a moment said, “Everything’s here.”

“The underpants, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Great. Thank God. Go figure. You put them on him, and then I’ll help finish dressing him.”

“We’re in a hurry, the mortician coming and all. This is no time for modesty. We’re all amigos here.”

“Technically, I’m an amiga. I don’t want to see Ernie’s junk. He’s like my brother. No one wants to see her brother’s junk.Maybe one day I’ll have to play a nun in a movie, and how am I going to play a nun convincingly if I’ve seen my brother’s junk?”

Not all artists are affable and benign people, as witness the great painter Caravaggio, who wounded a police officer when he was nineteen and fled from Milan to live in Rome. There, he was arrested on a dozen occasions, often for violent incidents, and in 1606 he killed a man named Tomassoni over a dispute about a tennis game.

Spencer Truedove was no Caravaggio. He knew his art was not as great as Caravaggio’s—he didn’t even know what he painted or why he painted it—and as far as he was able to remember, he’d never killed anyone. He didn’t evenplaytennis. If rude people sometimes vexed him more than should have been the case, he never assaulted them, though sometimes he did confront them. And so he stepped farther into room 315 to speak his mind to the hulking, hairy individual sitting up in bed, with helium-filled foil balloons bobbing in a draft over his mortar-shell head.

“This hat,” said Spencer, “happens to be the style of hat that Sylvester Stallone wore inRocky. There’s nothing stupid about this hat. And your reference to Jesus wearing one is ignorant, not least because the porkpie hat wasn’t invented until seventeen hundred years after Jesus was crucified.”

Even as we disapprove of Spencer’s excessive and possibly even misplaced anger, we can sympathize with his response to Butch’s criticism and use of the word “freak.” There have been in excess of fourteen thousand young-adult novels and TV-series episodes about the evils of schoolchildren bullying other schoolchildren,so we well know that the effects of it endure throughout the lives of the victims. We must respect Spencer’s enduring anguish.

Whether or not Butch had read any of those books or seen any of those TV shows, he evidently possessed enough insight and compassion to reach an approximate understanding of the psychology of the man who had burst into his hospital room with an unusual attachment to his hat. He said, “I forgot about Rocky Balboa wearing a hat like that. Now that I think about it, a lot of real tough guys in the movies have worn a hat like yours. You go ahead and take the wheelchair.”

Nonplussed, Spencer said, “What?”

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