Page 72 of Going Home in the Dark

Yes. He understood. He would never disobey. He thought he better say he loved her and ask her to kiss him goodnight.Of course you love your mother, Ernest. Stating the obvious is tedious. People are animals, and even many lesser animals exhibit affection between the offspring and their parents.Without kissing him, she turned off the lamp and crossed the room by the hall light that came through the open door. She pulled the door shut behind her.

Lying in the dark, shivering uncontrollably, Ernie listened to his mother as she set about some labor downstairs. The muffled howl of a vacuum cleaner rose from the study. Quiet. After a while, the door that slammed seemed to be the one between the house and garage. Quiet. Again the door slammed. The rattling noise was familiar, but he didn’t identify it until it stopped; thenhe realized it had been the erratic wheels on the flatbed gardening cart that Mother used to move bags of fertilizer, new plants, and tools around her half acre of flowering gardens. Quiet again. Later, the cart was on the move once more. The door between the house and garage slammed again. In time, the garage door rumbled up on its tracks. The car started. She pulled outside. The garage door rumbled down. She drove away.

For the first time ever, Ernie was home alone.

He sat up and switched on the lamp. He could hear the monster breathing under the bed. Ernie held his own breath to hear better, and the monster held its breath, too. The monster was very sneaky. Ernie thought he should go downstairs and look around, but Mother would know what he had done. Mother knew everything. She knew for sure that she didn’t want to be called “mama” or “mom.” Using those words was big trouble. He remained in bed.

The nightstand didn’t hold a clock. Clocks had no significance for him. As yet, minutes and hours were the same, just words. He had recently grasped the concept of “today” and “yesterday,” although “tomorrow” was a fuzzy notion. When referring to anything that had happened in the past, he always said it had happened “last night.” Last night was a busy place, especially considering what had just happened last night. He wished Hilda Merkwurdig were here, but when she had a day off, it was the whole day and the night, too. He was determined not to fall asleep while alone in the house. He fell asleep.

When he woke—or half woke—with lamplight close but shadows all around, his mother was standing over the bed. She looked tired. Darkness beyond the windows. The house very quiet.Do you remember what happened last night, Ernest?Becausehis entire life was “last night,” he told her that everything, just everything, had happened last night. Mother sat on the edge of the bed. She said,This is what happened last night. I made macaroni and cheese for dinner. There were vegetables and you didn’t want to eat them, but I made you or you wouldn’t get dessert. Dessert was a scoop of vanilla ice cream with sliced, fresh peaches on top. After that I read you a story about a boy who could fly, but his dog couldn’t fly, so the boy gave up flying. You very much liked the story, but I said it was stupid. Then you went to bed.Ernie almost reminded her that she hadn’t made dinner of any kind and that he’d gone to bed hungry. However, although he couldn’t yet tell time, he knew how long his punishment would last for mentioning such a thing. Very long.

She told him the lie about last night, and then she made him tell it over and over, in one mangled version or another. Each time he fell asleep, she shook him awake and forced him to go through it again. At last, Mother got up from the edge of the bed and turned off the light and told him to go to sleep. He woke once, and though the room was pitch dark, he felt her standing there, heard her soft breathing, and he knew she was staring down at him, as if she were able to see without light. He wondered what she was thinking, and then he decided he didn’t want to know. He went back to sleep and dreamed that his mother was under the bed and breathing softly so that he wouldn’t hear her.

In the days that followed, no one came around to ask about the man who claimed to own the sun. Ernie gradually forgot that such a person had really been there. Instead, he remembered him as the father in the story about the boy who could fly. Long before Ernie could read a clock and tell time, he had entirely forgotten the tall man and the flying boy and the earthbound dog.

Now, lying in the dead space behind the foldaway bed, he wished this memory had never returned to him. Once you recalled that your mother murdered your father and got away with it, you didn’t have many choices about the direction your life would take after the acquisition of such knowledge. He knew that he had not recovered the memory on his own, that whoever placed him in suspended animation had dredged it out of his subconscious or from even deeper realms. And now the interior voices—male and female, which came to him from other than his ears—acknowledged responsibility. They apologized in sincere, soothing voices. The project, they explained, required that they know everything there was to know about the attitudes and fears and joys of every subject they studied. It was unfortunate that Ernie had to remember such things as this for the project to succeed, but that’s how it had to be. Some of the wisest human beings often said of unpleasant developments, “It is what it is.” Even if they said that so often you wanted to smack them, it was nonetheless true.

Ernie will certainly learn the identity of the entity that placed him in suspended animation and why, but it is most unlikely that he—or any of us—will understand by what mechanism or strange power his memory could be stimulated and ransacked in the fashion that we have just witnessed. We should not be disappointed if that one element remains unexplained. There are many, many things in life of which we have no understanding, such as why the universe goes on forever and why time does not occasionally run backward; it just is what it is. Apologies are herewith extended to the reader for the way in which this chapter interrupted the general narrative flow with long paragraphs of dense prose, but it seemed essential that this dismaying information be conveyed inorder for you to better understand Ernie and his mother, Britta. A separate and heartfelt apology is herewith offered for the inevitable sadness inspired by the discovery that Ernie’s father was murdered long ago and that Ernie therefore will never have a chance to know him. Until this chapter, the story has been intended to be highly amusing—and is likewise structured for that purpose in what follows—but for this one interlude, deep melancholy could not be avoided. It just is what it is.

41The Plagueby Albert Camus

The three amigos did not depart County Memorial at a run, but neither did they simply amble out of the building as if they had nowhere to go and weeks to get there. Spencer could feel things coming to a head.

As they clambered into the Genesis, Bobby in back and Rebecca riding shotgun, they were afraid, as they had been since arriving in Maple Grove the previous day. However, the primary cause of their fear had changed. Initially, their biggest fear was that Ernie was dying and a piece of their hearts with him, but when they realized he was not dying, their greatest fear was that, by embalming him, a mortician would kill him. Once they had stashed precious Ernie in a window seat, where no mortician might find him, their greatest fear became that Wayne Louis Hornfly would behead and eat them. In the interims between those big fears, there were many causes for lesser terror: the half-formed naked men in the church basement, the living molts that had been shed by some slime monster they had never seen, Britta Hernishen, the Nelsoneers, and more. Now, though all those things bubbled in their minds, a witch’s stew of frights, the terror that preoccupied Spencer and also his friends was the possibility that they would die from a mysterious and disgusting disease.

From the back seat, Bobby declared, “What’s happening to Butch and Jim James and Pastor Larry’s brother, this terrible thing—it’s maybe like Camus.”

“What’s camus?” Spencer asked as he drove out of the parking lot, for he was a man of images rather than words.

“Not what. Who. He was a famous French writer.”

Rebecca said, “He wrote a classic novel titledThe Plague.”

“What kind of plague starts on the big toe?” Spencer wondered.

“It might sound absurd,” Bobby said, “but Aldous Blomhoff is dead from it.”

“Butch and Jim Jamie James might not be the only people in town who’re infected,” Rebecca suggested. “Remember how each of them was ashamed of the way his big toe looked? They didn’t want us to see their toes.”

Bobby got her point at once. “There could be people all over town, hobbling around in the privacy of their homes, embarrassed for a doctor to see their toes, hoping they’ll heal on their own or with maybe this or that ointment.”

“Meanwhile, they’re rotting from the toe up.”

“Or something worse than rotting.”

“What could be worse than rotting?”

“Dissolving,” Bobby said.

Rebecca shook her head. “Rotting is worse.”

“Now that I think about it, I agree.”

“The smell,” she said.

Their minds were racing along such parallel tracks that they began to finish each other’s sentences.

He said, “Oh my God, what if—”

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