Page 47 of Going Home in the Dark

As Rebecca offered caring though unnecessary directions, her amigos manhandled Ernie across the deployed bed and into the niche behind it. Throughout this operation, Spencer marveled that a famous painter, a movie star, and a bestselling author should be moving an apparently dead man from one hidey-hole to another while stalked by slime monsters and Britta Hernishen. This is not to say that Spencer believed this was the kind of thing that plumbers, carpenters, and electricians did. He was not a snob who looked down on those who earned a living in one skilled trade or another. His astonishment had nothing to do withclass. He would have been no less amazed if he and his amigos had been unemployed, without meaningful careers, and on the public dole. As incredible as it all seemed, there was no denying that this was the kind of thing that could happen to you if you were raised in a picturesque small town in the flat vastness of the Midwest.

When Ernie was lying on his back in the deep recess, his arms crossed on his chest, like Dracula waiting for the sun to go down, Spencer used a handle on the footboard to lift the cantilevered base, triggering the automatic mechanism that drew the bed upand swung it backward. It disappeared into the wall, the paneled underside matched to the wood paneling around it.

The amigos stood there for a long moment, smiling at the wall, pleased by their handiwork. No one unfamiliar with the house and coming into this room for the first time would know there was a bed here and a songwriter in suspended animation closed up with it, no matter how suspicious they might be.

“Now what?” Rebecca asked.

“Pastor Larry,” said Bobby.

“We’ve got to interrogate the shit out of him,” Spencer said.

“Why didn’t we do that twenty years ago?”

“Maybe we did, but the memory of it has been erased.”

“Have you noticed that we’re recovering our memories just when we need them?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t seem natural and spontaneous. It seems like we’re being manipulated.”

They stood in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to be manipulated, but nothing happened.

Spencer wasn’t surprised that nothing happened. All their lives, millions of bureaucrats spent countless hours gaslighting the public, trying to make people believe one lie or another. Millions more in large corporations spent billions of dollars to manipulate consumers into spending extravagantly on things they didn’t need. But then some terrible crisis arrived, some catastrophe that people couldn’t handle without help, and all the gaslighters were in Tahiti, sitting on the beach, manipulating nothing more than rum cocktails, pretending they never heard of us.

This might sound cynical, and Spencer was not for the most part a cynical person, although he had some capacity for cynicism, having spent years in the fine-arts business. We will notinterrupt him at this critical juncture in his quest to understand his past, but if we did, he might tell us that we should not expect help from those who insist they love humanity and want to save it, for they are virtue-signaling phonies who are indifferent to or hate everyone except those in their immediate circle, which means salvation in times of trouble is up to you and those who love you, as it always has been and always will be.

On consideration, it’s more likely that Bobby Shamrock, being a word guy, would have said all that. Spencer surely believes the same thing. However, being a visual artist, he expresses and shapes his philosophy in a montage of images; he would perhaps need weeks to create those while we waited.

“Pastor Larry,” Bobby said again.

“Let’s go get him,” Rebecca said.

As they moved toward the second-floor hallway, someone called out from downstairs. “Spencer? Is that really you I saw? Spencer, dear boy, are you up there?”

Recognizing the voice, Spencer knew that he and his amigos were in a pickle.

27A Neighborly Visit

An almost infinite series of half-hour television sitcoms have revealed much about American families and life in the suburbs. For example, Americans are extraordinarily funny, communicating in swift exchanges peppered with clever one-liners. Wives are smarter than their husbands, but the goofball guys mean well. Every illness has been eliminated in the suburbs. Judging by the evidence on TV, one must assume that deaths are rare, though once in a while someone disappears and is never spoken of again; stranger still, on rare occasion a child or neighbor is replaced by an entirely different person with the same name, and everyone conspires not to notice.

Having been a city dweller all his adult life, only one thing about contemporary suburban and small-town existence depicted on TV irritated Spencer: how seldom neighbors knock first, how boldly they show up in your house and join a conversation. Many cities were so crime-ridden and such hotbeds of mental illness that if someone entered Spencer’s Chicago home unannounced, he would assume the individual had violent intentions and would deal with him or her accordingly, even if it was a neighbor.

After all these years, he recognized the man at the foot of the stairs. Mr. Thornberry, a tall avuncular person known to everyone as Thorny. “What’re you doing here, Mr. Thornberry?”

“What areyoudoing here, Spencer? I saw you drive into the garage, and I said to myself, ‘By golly, he must be coming home to live.’ Are you coming home to live? That would be so grand. Everyone on the block would be so pleased. You belong here, Spencer. We all remember you with your cowboy hat and water pistol, riding around the yard on that stick with a pony’s head.”

Descending the stairs hesitantly, with his amigos close behind, Spencer said, “How’d you get in? I locked the door to the garage.”

“Got a key, of course. Back when the house became yours, you called the service company all the way from Chicago to have them maintain the place, but you forgot to tell them to give me a key.”

“I didn’t forget. I—”

“Why, sure you did, son. But I got one from them soon enough. They mow the lawn each week, do a walk-through twice a month, tend what needs fixing, but they can’t be here all the time. I’m their eyes and ears. No vagrant is going to break in and set up camp, not on my watch. Bless them, they need shelter, and maybe they don’t mean to ruin a place with their drugs and raggedy-looking unwashed dogs, man and dogs alike peeing wherever they want, but they for sure do some ruin. They come in from outside Maple Grove, but we make sure they don’t stay long.”

Spencer stepped off the stairs and into the foyer, one hand held out, intending to ask for the key. Thorny mistook this for an imminent handshake, reached out, bypassed the hand, and gathered Spencer into a bear hug.

The front door opened and two women entered, each bearing a casserole. The tall, bony one said, “Heavens to Betsy, itisyou, spitting image of your daddy, God forgive him for all he’s done.”

The short, heavy one said, “You’ve turned out handsome enough to be a lounge singer, Skunky.”

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