Page 71 of Going Home in the Dark

“Oh, gosh almighty, I know whoyouare. Everybody in the world knows whoyouare.”

“I’m an actress,” she said, and the Sham at once offered his hand, provided his first name, and said, “I’m a writer.”

Spencer said, “And I never told you, I’m a painter, an artist.”

Dazzling Jim by taking his hand again and holding it in both of her hands, Rebecca said, “So, what are you?”

“What am I?”

“What work do you do?”

“I’m head of human resources.”

“That’s a big job, Jim.”

“There’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s not that big a job.”

She squeezed his hand. “I like it when an important man is also humble. I’m very attracted to that. What company, Jim?”

“Company?”

“What company is lucky enough to have you as head of human resources?”

“It’s not a company exactly. It’s more of a nonprofit research facility. Darn if you aren’t even more beautiful in real life than you are on TV and in the movies.”

“That’s so sweet. I’m never going to forget how sweet you are, Jim. We just—”

He interrupted. “You can call me Jamie. ‘Jim’ is for business, ‘Jamie’ for friends. Your eyes are amazing.”

Nodding, smiling, she said, “Listen to me, Jamie. I want you to focus. Can you focus for me, Jamie? No? Okay, don’t look at my eyes, Jamie. Look at my nose. Can you look at my nose? Good. All right. Now focus for me. What is the name of this nonprofit research facility where you’re head of human resources?”

“The Keppelwhite Institute. Dear God, I could just look at you all day.”

“No you can’t, Jamie. Not possible. You take care of yourself and have a good life.”

She let go of his hand. With her amigos close behind, she split the scene.

40Let’s Not Forget Ernie

Ernie Hernishen decided he would never become accustomed to being without a heartbeat, without the need to breathe, without a need to ingest or excrete—and still be able to think and not go crazy. This had to come to an end soon. Without sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing (except for the internal voices that comforted him), he was a creature of pure thought, limited to writing country songs, pondering the larger questions of existence, and vividly reliving key moments of his past. Furthermore, these long-forgotten rekindled memories were often strange because they were experiences recorded as perceived by an innocent child and interpreted now by a worldly adult.

Currently, the memory that returned to him was one of events he didn’t even know had occurred, a dramatic conflict and resolution that he couldn’t have understood at the time. However, having been recorded in some deep convolution of his brain, all the details of the incident came back to him, almost as unpleasant as a jalapeño-rich Mexican dinner revisiting in the form of acid reflux.

He was one month short of his third birthday. He could wash and dry his own hands and dress without help. He could prepare a bowl of cereal by himself. The only cereal Mother would allow him to have was a gritty Swedish brand, whatever “Swedish” meant. It smelled like straw and tasted like dusty wood; he knewwhat dusty wood tasted like because he still sometimes liked to chew on furniture, and Hilda Merkwurdig—the nanny and housekeeper—often neglected the dusting. He could speak and be understood half the time, and he was able to carry on a conversation of three or four sentences. He had been potty trained for almost a year and had stopped wetting the bed three months ago. He no longer sucked his thumb, because doing so resulted in his mother sitting down with him to engage in long conversations in which she described the grisly things that would happen to him if he didn’t start acting more like an adult. He was really coming along in the world.

On the evening that now rose out of his memory, it was Hilda Merkwurdig’s day off. Ernie was sitting alone at the kitchen table, applying crayons to the pages of a drawing tablet, producing images that looked to him like dogs and cows and trains and farmers growing tastier cereal grains, though to everyone else they were meaningless scribbles. The doorbell rang. He was not interested in visitors; they were always professors from the college, people who made him wish he were able to change into a dog and run far away. Besides, he had no idea what a professor did, though from what he had seen so far in his short life, they didn’t do interesting things like drive tractors and trains. More than a few smelled funny, too. Mother said the smell was “weed,” but Ernie thought it smelled like his Swedish breakfast cereal as it had smelled that time when the milk he poured on it turned out to be sour.

After a few minutes, a strange man entered the kitchen, closely followed by Mother. The man was interesting because he didn’t look like a professor; he was tall and looked like the stars of shows on the TV that Hilda Merkwurdig watched. He smelledgood, too. The man stood looking down at Ernie and smiling, but there were tears in his eyes that didn’t match the smile. The man said, “Look at you, just look at you,” so Ernie tried as best he could to look at various parts of himself, although he couldn’t see much of his own face.

Mother was not happy. She was never happy the way some other people were happy, and now she looked as if the tall man had pounded her toes with a hammer and as if she intended to do the same to him only harder. She said some things to the man that Ernie couldn’t understand, and the man said something about sticks and stones. Gradually, Mother’s angry expression went away, and she got that scarier look that came over her whenever she sat Ernie down for a long talk, as if she were gazing at a bug and deciding how to deal with it.

The man said something about “my sun.” Mother said, the sun was hers—“my sun, only mine.” The words “my” and “mine” were critical to Ernie because, when spoken, they established limits regarding what could be taken from him or done to him. The crayons were “my crayons,” and the stuff in the mug next to the drawing tablet was “my hot chocolate.” The bed he slept in was “my bed,” which was important because the space under the bed belonged to the monster that lived there; as long as Ernie didn’t violate this arrangement by crawling under the bed, the monster was obliged not to climb on top of the bed with him. Hearing the word “my” repeatedly coupled with the word “sun” confused Ernie because he had thought the sun belonged to everyone. If his mother owned the sun, as she claimed, then the day must belong to her. If the day belonged to her, who owned the night? You would think the person who owned the night would be a lot scarier than the person who owned the day. So if Mother owned theday, Ernie hoped that he would never meet whoever owned the night. When Mother and the man got loud with each other, Ernie bent closer to the big tablet and drew harder than before, so hard he broke some crayons. He selected other colors and drew with them; when they broke, too, he made pictures with the fragments.

Mother and the man left the kitchen and went to her study so that she could give him a “payoff,” whatever that was. He promised that when he had the payoff, he would “never come back into your life.” They were in the study only a few minutes when the man cried out—not loudly, but different from how anyone had ever cried out in Ernie’s experience. Following his cry came a solid thud simultaneous with a clatter, as if someone had fallen into something and knocked it down.

Although he was tired of drawing, Ernie continued to draw because he didn’t know what else to do. He was afraid to leave the kitchen and go elsewhere in the house, though he didn’t quite know why he was afraid. He couldn’t go outside at twilight with darkness coming, not alone, not until he knew who owned the night. His mother returned and said it was bedtime. It didn’t feel like bedtime; there was still some light at the windows, and he was not at all sleepy. However, he rarely disobeyed his mother—that she knew about.Have you forgotten what the punishment is for disobedient boys, Ernest? Must I refresh your memory, young man? Is that your position, Ernest—that you need to have your memory refreshed?Ernie didn’t need to have his memory refreshed. She didn’t even need to ask that question on this occasion. He followed the hall, passed the closed door of her study, and climbed the stairs to his room. He changed from his day clothes into pajamas and used the potty and washed his hands and brushed his teeth and climbed into bed, but he didn’t turn down the nightstand lamp. Unableto sleep in full darkness, he always set the three-way lamp at its dimmest level. Tonight, he left it bright.

His mother came to his room and stood looking down at him. She said that no man had been to the house earlier. When Ernie said he had seen the man, Mother repeated that no such person had been to the house. He must never say that anyone had come to the house this night. She explained that if Ernest didn’t obey her on this point, the punishment would be far greater than any he had earned before, worse than anything the monster under his bed had ever thought of doing to him.When I’m done punishing you, Ernest, you’ll be crying like a baby. You’ll cry for hours and hours, and when you finally cease crying, I will bind your wrists and ankles and shove you under your bed, to see what pieces of you a monster finds foul-tasting and spits out. Have I made myself clear, Ernest? Do you have a clear picture in your mind of what will happen to you if you disobey me on this most important issue? Are we, as they say, on the same page?

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