Page 2 of Going Home in the Dark

However, if the mess was not of her making and was in no way related to her person, Rebecca could be as indifferent to it as if it didn’t exist. One Christmas Eve, when the house staff had been given four days off, an inebriated guest had cast the contents of her stomach across a living room sofa. Rebecca had closed the door on the fragrant chamber and allowed the voluminous upchuck to seep so far into the padding that purchasing new furniture proved to be cheaper than reupholstering the saturated sectional.

So, after the dishes and instruments of breakfast preparation were washed, dried, and stacked in the sink for the attention of a housekeeper, Rebecca headed for the front door. She intended to keep a series of appointments—hairdresser, nail technician, leg waxer. She stepped onto a front porch large enough and properly furnished to host act one of a cocktail party for at least fifty people.

Her candy-apple-red EV waited in the driveway to convey her in style or perhaps disintegrate when its three-thousand-pound lithium battery burst into flames, most likely the former. An acquaintance of hers, a famous director, had barely escaped with his life when his EV terminated itself in that fashion. The next day, he bought two more because, as he said, “My devotion to this technology is the foundation of my faith, and we all need to believe in something.”

Rebecca’s property manager, William Plantagenet, saw to it that the colorful sedan was always charged, immaculate, and waiting where she needed it when she needed it. His name was Ned Farkus before he changed it to be an actor and then failed at acting so crashingly that he considered returning to court to reacquire his birth name. However, there had been nothing about Farkus to recommend it.

As Rebecca settled behind the steering wheel and pulled the door shut, she had the disturbing feeling that something was about to happen that would change the course of her life, something worse than an exploding lithium battery.

[The previous sentence is a flagrant example offoreshadowing, a plot device that creates a pleasant anticipation in the reader. However, as the author, I feel the need to be honest with you, even at the cost of this intrusion, and I’m compelled to acknowledgethat besides contributing to a building atmosphere of menace, Rebecca’s “disturbing feeling” also serves as an effective way to end Chapter One before it grows too long. Studies indicate that modern readers prefer shorter chapters. Before purchasing a novel, they conduct a “flip-through” to sample the prose, consider the readability of the typeface, and be sure the number of chapters promises a quick read. Because Rebecca is rich and glamorous and one of the film-business elite, we expect her to be an insufferable narcissist, but she is a likable, vulnerable person whose “disturbing feeling” concerns us and whose fate matters to us just enough to propel us to Chapter Two, which is shorter than Chapter One.]

2People in Comas

Before Rebecca was able to start the engine of the sleek red EV, her phone issued the signature notes of Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” from the movieMidnight Cowboy. On the screen appeared the name Bobby Shamrock.

“Bobby the Sham,” she said with a tremor of pleasure.

That was what they called him when they were four middle school outcasts, four different varieties of nerds bonded by a shared sense of what was right and true. They had named their little group “the four amigos” in part because they liked that old Steve Martin movie¡Three Amigos!.There was also the fact that each had been courted by cliques of cool kids whose only intent had been not to befriend but to deceive, to set them up for mockery and rejection. As a result, the wordfriendhad acquired a secondary definition akin to that ofdeceiver.For kids of their cruel experience, it seemed inevitable that they would eventually arrive at the superstitious conviction that if they called one another “friends,” they would soon find themselves staggering around with figurative knives in their backs, emotionally bleeding out. “Amigo” meant the same thing, but they had no dire history with that word, and it was fun to say.

Rebecca loved all three of the other amigos, not in a romantic sense, but as some people loved their brothers if they had them.She hadn’t been blessed with any siblings, unless they were half sisters and half brothers fathered by the reckless fool before he plunged from altitude into a garbage barge. Anyway, although Rebecca loved all the amigos, she had a special affection for Bobby Shamrock.

She took the call. “Bobby the Sham! Where are you, sweetie?”

“I was in Tokyo for six months, but yesterday I flew into New York and took a train to Baltimore. This place is as dangerous as Caracas, Venezuela, if Caracas was under attack by extraterrestrial bug monsters. I’m not going to use Baltimore, after all. I’m going to set part three in Atlanta.”

Bobby was a successful novelist, a stickler for accuracy, who traveled incessantly to research locations for his stories, which he wrote during his journeys and which mostly involved a lead character who hopscotched all over the world having adventures.

Rebecca was not convinced that Bobby’s peripatetic lifestyle was actually in the service of his novels. He’d once spent two years careening through Finland, Korea, Italy, the island nation of Tonga, Samoa, Argentina, and Bosnia, but when the novel was published, the entire story was set in a fictional town in Vermont. Rebecca was not a negative person given to imagining desperate motives to explain the behavior of people, but she sometimes worried that Bobby might be running from something.

On the other hand, the making of art was a mysterious process, as she knew well. She would not rule out the possibility that, for someone as creative as Bobby, it was necessary to have intimate knowledge of Finland, Korea, Italy, Tonga, Samoa, Argentina, and Bosnia in order to write well about Vermont.

“If you’re going to be passing through California on your way from Baltimore to Atlanta,” she said, “I’d love to see you. It’sbeen more than two years since I’ve seen you, almost as long since Spencer and Ernie came to visit me. We used to see one another more often. Why don’t we see one another as often as we used to? I miss all my amigos.”

“Miss you, too, Becky. I’m gladEnemiesmade you rich, but I’m glad it’s at an end. You’re better than that. Listen, I talked to Spencer a few minutes ago, and—”

“Well, you know, maybe I’m not better than that. Anyway, pretty soon, the only roles I’ll get are grandmothers and warty witches. For women, this business defines ‘elderly’ as being forty. How’s Spencer doing?”

“He says he’s riding a unicycle on a high wire over an abyss, but I don’t think he means to be taken literally. He’d just heard from Mrs. Hernishen that Ernie’s in a coma.”

Britta Hernishen was Ernie’s mother. Ernie was the fourth of the four amigos, the only one who hadn’t left Maple Grove, their hometown.

“He’s in the county hospital out there,” Bobby said.

A sharp pang of grief caused Rebecca to put one hand to her breast. Her heart was racing. “Oh my God. Sweet Ernie. This totally sucks.”

“I know. Ernie was the best of us.”

“Is,” she said quickly. “Is the best of us.”

“Yeah, right. Is the best of us. I don’t know why I said that. It’s only a coma. People come out of comas and get on with their lives. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“A coma is nothing.”

“It’s something, but it’s not the worst that can happen.”

Bobby said, “I mean, how many people have we known who fell into temporary comas? A lot, right?”

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