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“We’ve had an inkling,” Rebecca admitted.
The horse said, “Bobby, you travel the world incessantly, never settling down. You’re fleeing from something, but you don’t know what.”
“I know now,” Bobby said. “From Hornfly. From Beta. I can put that behind me now.”
“You, Rebecca, always scrubbing things because what happened left you feeling unclean. Not because youshouldfeel unclean, but because you couldn’t remember and therefore imagined worse things than what really happened. Spencer, why do you wear that black hat twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?”
With something akin to affection, Spencer patted the crown of his hat with one hand. “It’s part of my image, makes me memorable. Without it, I’m the kind of person who fades into the furniture.”
“Okay, then,” the horse said, “that had nothing to do with me repressing your memories. It’s because your father endlessly told you that you were as plain as white bread, with a personality less interesting than that of a squash. I’m not to blame for that. I feel much better about myself. But please get rid of the hat. Your dad was a jackass. He still is—a jackass in prison.”
Ernie said, “What about me? What are my neuroses?”
“You don’t have any. You’re the sweetest, most uncomplicated soul. Your memories are not colored by negative emotions. But you have allowed yourself to become a mama’s boy—and she’s one really bad mama. You need to get away from her and stay away. Sell your house, leave Maple Grove, live near your amigos, and write your wonderful songs.”
“Will you come visit?” Ernie asked. “Maybe not as a horse, at least not such a big horse. That would be awkward. Maybe a bird?”
“Neither I nor Beta has any power to control our avatars beyond this place where we have grown,” the horse said regretfully. “But if from time to time you get an emoji that is a smiling fungus, you’ll know who sent it.”
Rebecca stepped closer to the horse and smoothed a hand along its magnificent neck. “Why is it that you speak of yourself as ‘I’ and ‘me,’ while Beta says ‘we’ and ‘us’?”
“Beta is a fascist-communist fungus that favors collectivism. I am a fungus with a great respect for freedom. We will be contesting over Maple Grove for a long time—another reason you don’t want to be here. Beta will be destructive. Although I will do my best to beconstructive, I will no doubt make mistakes. My brain does not weigh two and a half tons, as the institute estimates, but two and a third tons. We grow slowly. I am embarrassed to say it will be two hundred sixty years until my brain weighs two and a half tons. I believe I have thus far done the right thing by making this town crime-free, but because my brain is not yet as big as it should be, I suspect I have inspired too intense a feeling of community among the residents in the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane.”
“You might be right about that,” Bobby said.
“However,” Rebecca assured Alpha, “in general you’ve done a great job.”
“A spectacular job,” said Spencer and Bobby simultaneously.
“No one could have done better,” said Ernie.
The horse lowered its head, humbled by praise. “Ah, shucks.”
From a bowl of fruit on the kitchen island, Rebecca plucked an apple and offered it.
Whatever Alpha fed on, it didn’t feed on apples, and it didn’t feed itself through an avatar. However, the amigos and the fungusunderstood this was a gesture that symbolized many things, in fact too many to start listing them all at this late point in the story. Suffice it to say the horse that wasn’t a horse ate the apple that definitely was an apple. Rebecca didn’t take further fruit from the bowl, because one symbolic apple was enough to make her point.
This seemed to be the ideal moment for the amigos to flank the horse and hug it goodbye, whereupon it would become fungus sludge once more and return to Alpha by way of the sink drain.
Evidently it was not the ideal moment, after all, because the horse had something more to say. “My dear friends, if you remain in town beyond tomorrow, Beta might find a way to harm you. It’s always scheming. Beta turned evil eight thousand years ago, and it’s not likely to join an evil-fungus redemption program. Besides, there isn’t any evil-fungus redemption program. I’ll keep you safe for twenty-four hours, which is all I can be sure of. Have a wonderful dinner at Adorno’s and a good night’s sleep at Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel, but hightail it out of here by tomorrow afternoon. I have already given the institute a cure for the lethal toe fungus with which Beta afflicted them, but you never know what will come next.”
Nowthe amigos flanked the horse and hugged it. The magnificent equine avatar became fungus sludge once more and returned to Alpha by way of the sink drain, leaving the friends emotionally exhausted.
Ernie suggested that they sleep here rather than at the motel. He had enough bedrooms to accommodate them.
That invitation allowed them to walk to Adorno’s as they had often walked the picturesque streets of Maple Grove when they had been young and nerds. So that they could fully enjoy the beauty of the town, itstillremained afternoon, with everything bathed in golden light, the Victorian architecture of the houses conveying a comforting sense of stability and timelessness.
50Amigos
Sixteen months later, in Southern California, the sun rose and set as the tables of rotation and revolution of the Earth predicted it would. By that Thanksgiving, all was normal in the lives of the amigos. In the late morning, Ernie and Spencer drove to Rebecca and Bobby’s house, where they intended to spend the day preparing a feast for their dinner. The four lived within ten minutes of one another.
On this occasion, no one who has followed their story should be expecting monsters of any variety or any degree whatsoever of life-and-death drama. That is of no interest to them now, for they are among the fortunate who have gotten past the monsters of childhood and arrived at a place where they can be themselves without having to explain themselves, where they can know themselves without being discouraged by what they know.
The great novelist Thomas Hardy (cited earlier) would not have found much material in this simple gathering, although he had possessed a generous, kind heart that allowed him to appreciate the value of friendship and the joy to be found in common things. Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried in Dorsetshire, in that landscape and among those people he had celebrated in his writing.
Robert Shamrock—Bobby the Sham—would one day be interred in just one place. It would not be Maple Grove. The amigos expected to live for decades yet, but they had taken inspiration from some of the residents who lived at the end of Harriet Nelson Lane; they purchased enough grave plots to accommodate them and however many loved ones they were likely to build lives with in years to come.
Throughout their childhood and adolescence, they dreaded going home in the dark to houses where no one lived with them or where those who lived with them were no less strangers than would be any nameless and solitary figure met on a windswept plain or on a dock at night in some port on the far side of the Earth. Friendship is a kind of love, and even on nights when one of the amigos is alone, they live in the light of their friendship. At the end of our days in this world, each of us goes home in the dark, to what we cannot know. The prospect of that journey is fearsome, but if we have loved and been loved, we do not go alone. We go with the memory of light and those who shared it with us, and if our hope is not misplaced, we go from light into light. See, no monsters.