Page 8 of Going Home in the Dark

“I have not yet made my revelation. Now I will. My son, Ernest, has fallen into a coma, and his doctor says he will most likely die within twenty-four hours.”

Spencer’s voice broke. “Ernie and I, we’ve been through so much together. We’re brothers. I love Ernie.”

“I’m aware you and Ernest, as well as those two other social outcasts, were very close, the amoebas and all that business—”

“Amigos,” Spencer corrected.

“—but you are not brothers, Spencer. Ernest emerged from my loins, but you did not.”

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“If you do so again, please specify that explicitly.”

“Yes, ma’am. Listen, I’ll be there later today. We shouldn’t lose hope. We can’t. Never ever lose hope.”

“I am a realist, Spencer. I find life becomes intolerable when we embrace false hope, and there is no other kind.”

“We are not going to lose Ernie,” he insisted. “In spite of what the doctor said, most people come out of comas and go on with their lives as if nothing had happened.”

“Most?”

“Maybe ninety percent. Ninety-five percent.”

“Where did you get that statistic, Spencer? I know you didn’t get it in art school, let alone in a medical school.”

“Well, I guess, you know, I’m just speaking from, like, personal experience.”

“You’ve known a lot of people who’ve been in comas?”

He almost responded in the positive, but he bit down on theyesbefore he could speak it, because he realized that he wasn’t able to name anyone he’d known who had suffered through a coma.

Into his silence, Mrs. Hernishen said, “Have you been in a coma yourself, Spencer?”

Into his subsequent silence, she inquired, “May I ask you yet another question?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When you are in your studio, creating your works of ... art, is there a particular substance that gives you the inspiration and energy to paint the kind of things you paint?”

“Substance?”

“Yes. Substance.”

“Coffee,” he said. “I drink a lot of coffee.”

“This substance that you call ‘coffee,’ might I call it by another name if I were to see it and smell it?”

“Well, I guess someone of your generation might call it java, but I think you’d still call it coffee.”

“That’s what you think, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Twenty minutes later, when Spencer set out from Chicago on the long drive to Maple Grove, he wore a snap-brim porkpie hat of black felt, a black denim shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, black jeans, and black boots. He owned multiples of that outfit and seldom wore anything else. He expected to be dressed the same when he arrived at his destination, but if he were instead wearing a three-piece summer suit or costumed like a pirate of the Caribbean, he wouldn’t be surprised. If by then his white Genesis had been transformed into a pumpkin drawn by white mice, he wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Nothing surprised Spencer. The how and why of a great many things mystified him, but he was incapable of astonishment. Life had taken him places he could never have imagined, by a route he could never retrace; years earlier, he’d decided that planning the future was futile and that the wisest course was just to go with the flow.

4Bobby the Sham

On the flight out of Baltimore, Robert Shamrock suspected that some of his fellow passengers—several extensively tattooed men with shaved heads and gold nose rings, who wore T-shirts emblazoned with satanic messages or images of flaming-eyed skulls, men whose teeth were in some cases filed into points and whose tongues had been surgically divided to resemble the forked tongues of snakes—might not be ideal traveling companions in a crisis. Indeed, he didn’t believe he was unkind to wonder if a few of this colorful contingent might be capable of fomenting a crisis of their own during which everyone aboard would die in a spectacular fashion. Because Bobby the Sham was fair-minded, many women these days disturbed him as much as did any men. He was uneasy about two lovelies dressed in black leather; green hair, painted faces, and contact lenses that transformed their eyes into mirrors might not have been enough to alarm Bobby if they had not been whispering and giggling together continuously.

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