Page 40 of Going Home in the Dark

At the desk by the window, Spencer Truedove was working on his hat. Because black felt attracted lint and was sometimes targeted by birds, he traveled with a small cleaning kit in a zippered leather case. The hat needed to be perfect, because it was more than just headgear. The hat was the logo of his brand as surely as the logo of Apple Inc. was an apple with a bite out of it. WhenAmerica Artmagazine published a long, adoring article about Spencer’s work, they hadn’t put one of his paintings on the cover, as was their custom, but instead used a photograph of his porkpie hat.

However, the hat wasn’t merely a logo. The hat meant much more to him than that. He was more attached to his hat than anyone could know. Helovedthe hat. And why shouldn’t he? Hissuccessful career proved he was somebody, but the hat and the rest of his outfit was what made it hard for anyone to say he had a bland personality. Even before his mom and dad abandoned him, they paid little attention to him. When he was nine, he had overheard his father talking with a neighbor who was also a drinking buddy. His father said, “I think maybe that boy is from Mars. His mother has this big personality—everyone says so—and I’m damn sure I’m colorful in my own way, but Spencer is about as colorful as a peeled turnip. He fades into the walls. Three or four days can go by when I forget he lives with us.” Well, if that was true, those days were gone. Everyone had to acknowledge that a man who wore a porkpie hat at all times, both outside and indoors, a man who didn’t take it off to eat or make love, was eccentric. Eccentricity was perhaps the primary measure of personality. Eccentric people were noticed, by God. They didn’t fade into the walls. Bland people don’t have photographs of their hats on the cover of a national magazine. Spencer’s famous hat was no less important to him as was being a multimillionaire.

He had just finished restoring the hat to its full glory but had yet to put it on his head when the recovered memory shared by Bobby and Rebecca became Spencer’s as well. The downside of this development was fear and a sense of violation; his mind had been invaded. The upside was the convenience of this sharing; at their forthcoming breakfast, Bobby would not need to tell his amigos all about Wayne Louis Hornfly, which would have ensured that, as they listened rapt, their food would have gone cold.

When the vision of the past faded away, Spencer got up from the desk and put on his hat and regarded himself in the mirrored doors of the closet and adjusted the hat. He opened the door of room 212 and stepped onto the second-floor promenade of themotel precisely as Bobby stepped out of room 210 and Rebecca stepped out of room 208. It was as if they were engaged in a choreographed sequence and the band would now strike up and they would proceed to the diner while dancing and singing. They just walked.

23Breakfast at the Precipice

The Spreading Oaks Diner was warmly lighted. Every surface was clean, if not by Rebecca’s standards, certainly by the standards of 99 percent of customers, who—make no mistake about it—were clean themselves. In addition to booths, in one of which the amigos sat, the chrome-legged tables and chairs dated from a decade when manufacturers knew how tables and chairs should be made; they looked as if you could drive over them in a tank and only the tank would need to be repaired.

On the long counter that provided stools for lone customers, homemade cakes and pies rested on pedestals, under glass lids, as if they were sacred objects. The air was redolent of brewing coffee and a mélange of mouthwatering aromas.

Bobby didn’t want to be back in Maple Grove, but if hehadto come home for Ernie, it was better to be here as an adult than as an adolescent. Back in the day, he would never have eaten in this diner because two of the teachers who ate here—the football coach and the shop instructor—could be just as snarky toward nerds as any kids who were part of the in-crowd. It was good to have grown up.

“I would love to paint this place,” Spencer said, “capture the sense of timelessness.”

“Why don’t you?” Bobby asked.

“Well, I can only paint when a fugue state overcomes me, which is only when I’m in my studio. And you might have forgotten, but I can’t draw worth a damn.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, sweetie,” said Rebecca as she polished the table with a wet wipe.

A waitress named Flo took their order, and they ate breakfast (technically the second for Bobby, who always ate as if famished, yet never gained an ounce). All that needs to be said about the food is that it was delicious, providing fats and sugars in a multitude of forms.

“He was probably lying about not being from another planet,” Spencer said when they had puzzled aloud over other aspects of the recovered memory.

“I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “He was concealing things, but he didn’t seem like a liar. He maintained direct eye contact, and what hedidsay seemed to be consistent. The guy had this quality, very ... earthy. Besides, a visitor from another galaxy wouldn’t have a name like Wayne Louis Hornfly.”

“It sounds like a serial killer,” Rebecca said as she used a wet wipe to clean a smear of egg yolk from her empty plate. “They usually have three names with a certain rhythm to them. Judyface’s real name was John Willard Ironfork.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Wouldn’t an extraterrestrial be named something like Baldar or Klaatu or Yoda?”

“Maybe,” Spencer suggested, “he’s an extraterrestrial who wants to be an Earth-style serial killer.”

Bobby shook his head. “He doesn’t want to be any kind of human being. Remember, he really, really hates humanity.”

Spencer took that to be confirmation of his theory. “There you go, then. He passes for human in order to be a serial killer and waste as many of us as he can.”

“Doesn’t that sound too convoluted to you?” Rebecca asked as she polished the flatware that she had used. “Stay focused on the details of what he said. Who or what are Alpha and Beta? What is Alpha doing on the third floor of County Memorial? Back in the day, did we ever look into that? I don’t think we did.”

“What’s to look into?” Spencer asked. “Alpha, Beta, third floor. There’s nothing to look into. There are no specifics.”

Bobby never got impatient with his amigos. Even after all these years, it was still only the rest of humanity that irritated him. With affection, he said, “Okay, okay. Listen, guys, we can’t just wait around for another recovered memory to tell us what to do. We all know what we have to do.”

“Visit Pastor Larry,” said Spencer, “and interrogate the shit out of him.”

“I’m good with that,” Rebecca said, putting away her package of wet wipes. She appeared, at least to Bobby, as if she were becoming less obsessive, because she didn’t want to stay at the table until Flo took the dishes away, allowing her to wipe the table again. She said, “But before we brace the reverend, I think we should check on Ernie. He’s been in that window seat more than twelve hours.”

“He’s okay. He’s either in suspended animation or dead,” Bobby said. As previously established, he was the least sentimental of the amigos, but it must be understood that he was nonetheless a good and caring person.

They left a 50 percent tip for Flo because she was the kind of woman they would have liked to have for a mother, paid for breakfast at the cash register up front, and stepped outside into a kind of hell.

24What Is Literature?

The sun a golden ball in the east, the sky hanging clear blue overall, and the sweet clean air seemed to promise a lovely day—but in an instant, the promise was shown to be a lie.

In a severely tailored black suit that featured a matching waist-length cape, black shoes with one-inch heels, and a burgundy cloche hat with a black band, Britta Hernishen was approaching the diner as the amigos exited it.

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