Page 13

13

Sudden Enlightenment in a Parking Lot

A kittenish breeze played through the sunny summer evening, chasing wisps of litter across the pavement, fluttering the leaves of the rows of maple trees that leaned their shadows eastward across the parking lot.

As Rebecca strode ahead of the wheelchair, she marveled at how adult she felt. Chronologically and biologically, she had been an adult for many years, but she realized that until now she had not felt like one because she had never matured psychologically. She’d taken upon herself the role of an adult and had acted the hell out of it, just as she had been a nurse in the Shriek series, just as she had been Suzy Pepper, a wunderkind stock analyst and exuberant slut, in Enemies. Her opinions regarding the issues of the day had been adopted to match the opinions of the vast majority of people in the entertainment industry. Only now, having successfully spirited Ernie out of the hospital, did she understand that she didn’t know what she really thought about anything and therefore hadn’t become a fully rounded person. For the first time, she felt that she had the capacity to make wise decisions and take decisive actions without relying on the guidance of agents, business managers, image consultants, issue advisers, and the other gurus with which movie stars were barnacled. She realized that until now she had given no thought to the meaning of life or the mystery of existence. She supposed she had gotten stuck in adolescence because of the events erased from her memory, but she understood now that the negligence of her libidinous mother and her grandparents’ constant efforts to infantilize her had lasting consequences with which she must deal if she were to survive the current crisis.

The foregoing might seem like an absurd amount of enlightenment to crash through Rebecca while she crossed sixty yards of a parking lot, and the reader might think this kind of thing happens only in fiction. In fact, the author can humbly attest that such moments befall us in real life. During a cross-country trip in July of 1989, I was driven to my knees by massive enlightenment while fueling my car in Flagstaff, Arizona, at an off-brand service station with the unlikely name of Terrible Herbst.

And so, as Rebecca led the way, Bobby the Sham followed with the wheelchair. He was still so rattled by his close encounter with the ominously silent Michael Z, he didn’t want to transport Ernie Hernishen in his rental car. “If I get pulled over by a cop, I won’t pass inspection. I need to calm down. If you put that security guard in a room for six hours with the people who fostered me, the only thing you’d hear is stifled coughs and farts. People that quiet creep me out.”

Of course even in the process of her personal enlightenment, Rebecca understood and didn’t even slow down as they passed Bobby’s rental car. She knew that when he was an infant, the Pinchbecks had taken him into their home and fed him and clothed him, but hadn’t raised him. It had been like living with ghosts who drifted silently through the days as if lost between worlds.

“If the Pinchbecks were still alive,” he said, “I wouldn’t go to visit them while we’re here. I swear I wouldn’t. Those people made me crazy.”

Spencer had driven his own Genesis SUV from Chicago. He was reluctant to accommodate his songwriter friend. “If he loses control of his bowels and bladder, I’d have to junk the car.”

“He isn’t going to lose control,” Rebecca said. “He’s not in a coma. He’s in some kind of stasis. I’ll take him in my car.”

As Bobby piloted the wheelchair to Rebecca’s rental, he said, “Are we really sure Ernie’s not dead?”

“Yes,” said Spencer at once, even as Rebecca said, “Hell yes, we’re sure.”

Bobby looked sheepish. “Okay, yeah, right. We’d feel it if he was dead, know it psychically, spiritually, somehow, some way.”

“We’re still the four amigos,” Rebecca declared.

“Amigos now and forever,” Spencer said.

Ernie’s head lolled to one side, but that was merely gravity at work, not a nod in recognition of the abiding friendship and mutual defense treaty to which the amigos had long ago sworn allegiance.

Bobby and Spencer muscled Ernie from the wheelchair and into the front passenger seat, dropping him only once in the process and managing to wrestle him off the blacktop with Rebecca’s assistance. He was loose-limbed, like a big cloth doll stuffed with dry beans. When he was in the car, the safety harness held him more or less erect.

As Spencer took back his porkpie hat and fitted it to his head, he made a small sound of satisfaction similar to the thin whimper of delight that might escape a dog when it found a missing toy and was able to paw it out from under a sofa.

When Rebecca closed the car door, Ernie tipped to the right as far as the harness would allow, knocking his forehead against the window. Although his eyes remained closed, his pale face was like that of an exotic fish pressed to the wall of an aquarium, curious about the awkward, ambulatory creatures beyond the glass.

Through all of that, vehicles cruised slowly by as the drivers searched for convenient parking spaces, and a few people passed on foot. No one stared directly at the trio struggling with a limp man at the open door of the rental car, but warily noted it with their peripheral vision. Neither did anyone slow down as though to offer help or otherwise intervene.

After all, this was America midway through the third decade of the twenty-first century, which often seemed to be an alfresco asylum where one out of four individuals was an impassioned but tedious neurotic. Another one in four was likely to be a flat-out lunatic who would tear your face off for the offense of being somewhat satisfied with yourself and your life. It was best to pass through every day as if you were a tourist in Jurassic Park: Stay in the electric tram; do not make loud noises; in a crisis, remember stillness is essential because the T. rex can recognize you as prey only if you move; expect something to go terribly wrong at any moment.

They were staying at the Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel, where they would rendezvous later, but trying to stash Ernie there, moving him from room to room to elude the housekeepers in the morning, was not an option that Rebecca could approve. That was like the action in an English farce, which would never work in the United States, where humor was increasingly viewed with deep suspicion by federal law-enforcement agencies.

Applying the plotting ability of a successful novelist, Bobby said, “There’s only one place that makes sense. We have to take him back to his house.”

“Really?” Spencer said with a note of disbelief. “Are you serious? His own house?”

Spencer Truedove had a sensitive nature. However, he possessed zero ability to recognize deception, duplicity, and chicanery in others because he had no capacity himself to deceive or betray. He wasn’t as sweet as Ernie Hernishen. No one was. But Spencer was an honest and forthright soul who was perpetually surprised by the radical life-changing decisions of others. Even before her sudden enlightenment, Rebeca understood this naivete was why Spencer had failed to anticipate that his mother would go to New Orleans and become Constanina, that his father would divorce her and marry the stripper, Venus Porifera, or that his dad and Venus would buy the strip club, convert it into the tax-exempt Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation, attract four hundred parishioners who were devout degenerates, and leave Spencer to live alone, at fourteen, in the former family home on Mayfield Avenue. Therefore, Rebecca wasn’t surprised that Spencer failed to see the wisdom and cunning of stashing Ernie in his own home.

“It’s one of the first places they’ll look,” Spencer objected. “Especially if they think they were wrong to declare him dead, that maybe he’s alive and walked out of the hospital on his own.”

Rebecca was not in the least dubious, because she had starred in productions with grossly improbable twists in the storylines that were nonetheless well received by viewers. As the gentle breeze flounced her brunette wig and the oblique sunlight made gemstones of her blue eyes behind the phony eyeglasses, she said, “If they go to his house, it’ll be a quick search, calling out to him, glancing in rooms. They aren’t going to look in places like an old steamer trunk or a freezer.”

Aghast, Spencer said, “We can’t put Ernie in a freezer.”

“We can if we unplug the thing and throw out what’s already in it and jam the latch open so he can escape easily if he comes back from ... from wherever he is.”

Considering that Spencer was an avant-garde artist praised by critics for producing incomprehensible images of a unique and often disgusting nature, he was being surprisingly close-minded about the freezer. “No. I won’t be party to putting Ernie in a freezer.”

“So we slide him under a bed,” Rebecca said.

Bobby said, “Or stand him upright in a broom closet and brace him so he doesn’t fall out.”

“Or lay him in a guest room bathtub,” Rebecca suggested, “and pull the shower curtain shut.”

Bobby said, “Sit him up in a corner of the attic and pile junk in front of him.”

“No, no, no,” Spencer objected. “It’s summer. It’ll be hot in the attic, very hot.”

Rebecca said, “You know, Spencer, Ernie’s not in a coma. He isn’t even breathing. He won’t know it’s hot. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. We’ve seen this before.”

“We have? When? When have we seen someone not just in a coma, someone in suspended animation?”

“Back in the day,” Bobby said. “Rebecca’s right. I can almost remember. There wasn’t just one. There were eight or even ten of them lying on their backs, lined across the floor. Wasn’t it in a basement?”

“A church basement,” Rebecca remembered.

Spencer blanched. “Tell me it wasn’t the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation?”

“It wasn’t,” Bobby said. “It was ...”

Rebecca said, “At the corner of Cunningham Avenue and Winkler Street.”

“Saint Mark’s,” said Spencer. His eyes widened as if he were waking from a long sleep. “The Lutheran church. Ten bodies side by side on the floor. But what were we doing there? None of us is a Lutheran.”

“When Ernie was twelve,” Rebecca said, “he started going to services at Saint Mark’s just to irritate his mother. He was still going when we were amigos.”

“He was in the church choir,” Bobby recalled. “It embarrassed the hell out of Britta that he was in the choir.”

They stood there in the hospital parking lot, gaping at one another, waiting for the moth-eaten wool of their memories to be fully repaired. No additional details returned to them. They still had more holes than fabric.

“Britta,” said Spencer. “That’s another problem. She might be the executor of Ernie’s estate, and if she isn’t, she might take it upon herself to act as if she is. She’s likely to go there tomorrow if she isn’t there already.”

“Whoever’s the executor,” Bobby said, “the estate can’t be settled quickly, especially when Ernie has disappeared. Hiding him there is still less risky than anywhere else. We can tuck him away so no one is likely to find him.”

Rebecca considered the hospital’s architecture, as sleek and unconventional as that of a richly endowed museum housing the most tedious of modern art. The massive Keppelwhite Institute rose behind it, ominous in scale and style, as though the architect must have intended to create a structure so intimidating it would inspire in the locals a superstitious aversion that would discourage them from wondering too much about what happened inside its walls.

A hundred and eighty degrees from those buildings, on the far side of the street, lay a residential neighborhood pretty much like the others in Maple Grove. The Victorian houses, with a few Georgian residences, were well maintained. The homes were shaded by oaks and willows, by sycamores that would clothe themselves in bright yellow when autumn came; the trees were flourishing and perfectly shaped, as if a third of those with jobs in this town must be employed as arborists.

Rebecca realized that Maple Grove was more remarkable than just picture-postcard perfect. The place was unreal. In fact, though the town had been unusually attractive when the amigos had been growing up here, it had matured until it resembled the ideal environment of a Disney theme park. If you paused to consider the unlikelihood of this perfection, the unblemished prettiness felt, in its way, as creepy as the institute. It was as if the Keppelwhites had chosen this unlikely location to establish their project not just because of the cheap land, low crime, and clean air, but also because the place was a locus of some strange regenerative power.

“You feel it?” Spencer asked.

The breeze carried the enticing aroma of steaks barbecuing on a charcoal-fired grill.

“This place ... It’s aware,” said Spencer.

“It’s something,” she agreed, though she could not put a word to it, at least not the word he had used.

“Who’s aware?” Bobby asked.

Spencer fanned his face with his hat. “Not who. What. Not the people. The place itself. Or something.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Bobby said.

“Neither do I.” Spencer returned his hat to his head. “But I think I once did.”

“Look at the cars,” Rebecca said, surveying the vehicles around them. “They all look like they were washed and waxed an hour ago.”

“Was it always like this?” Bobby wondered.

“It’s more like this now than it was like this back then, though it always was somewhat like this,” said Spencer, who might have expressed his feelings better if he’d been able to draw them.

“In books and movies,” Bobby said, “people who stumble on a strange town or come back to one, people who realize something’s weird about the place—they tend to wind up dead.”

As one, the three amigos turned to stare at Ernie in the rental car, with his pale face pressed to the window, seeming as insensate as carrion.

“Not all of them wind up dead,” Rebecca objected. “That’s not the way Shriek or either of its sequels ends.”

Maybe it was dread that transformed Bobby’s leading-man face into the face of a best-buddy character played by a supporting actor who was haunted by the prospect of mortality and unlikely to make it through act two. He said, “All three Shriek films ended with just one survivor, and it was always you.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for calling them ‘films.’”

“I’m nobody’s snob.”

“Art is art is art regardless of the package it comes in,” said Spencer, no doubt intending to be supportive. “If we’re going to put Ernie in a freezer or somewhere, we better get a move on before they come looking for him.”

They departed in a caravan of three vehicles.