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People 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 movie Midnight 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 word friend had acquired a secondary definition akin to that of deceiver. 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’s been 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 glad Enemies made 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?”

“A lot,” she agreed.

“That’s what I sort of thought. But the funny thing is ...”

Sitting in her red EV, staring at her herringbone-patterned brick driveway, Rebecca waited for Bobby the Sham to specify the funny thing about comas. When the silence endured long enough for her to begin hungering for a second breakfast, this one without kale, she asked, “What funny thing?”

“Maybe a better word is ‘peculiar.’”

“You’re the writer. I leave the word business to you.”

“The peculiar thing about all those people who’ve fallen into temporary comas is ... hard as I try, I can’t name one of them other than Ernie.”

As Rebecca dwelt on that peculiarity, a bird settled on the hood ornament of her vehicle just long enough to decorate it with a large dollop of guano before winging away.

She said, “I can’t name any, either. Isn’t that ...” She was about to say weird , which was just a synonym for peculiar , so she said, “... puzzling? It sort of seems to me, too, we’ve known a lot of people who’ve fallen into temporary comas, but I can’t name one, either.”

Although three thousand miles separated them, they shared an intimate and thoughtful silence until Bobby said, “So maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we haven’t known a lot of people who’ve fallen into temporary comas.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange we’d share the same delusion about people in comas? Did Spencer tell you how Ernie ended up comatose? Was he sick? Did he drop off a ladder and hit his head?”

“Spencer just told me Ernie was in a coma, critical condition. Spencer is driving down there from Chicago. He’ll be in Maple Grove this afternoon. I’m flying out from Baltimore in an hour. Ernie’s alone and vulnerable, Becky. We have to be there for him.”

“Alone?”

“And terribly vulnerable.”

“But he’s got Britta.”

“Britta Hernishen?” Bobby sounded incredulous. “You’d trust her to keep Ernie alive?”

“She’s his mother.”

Bobby was as silent as if the line had gone dead.

“For heaven’s sake, Bobby, she’s a professor. She teaches a class on the value of ethics in literature. She donates hours and hours of her time to Save the Alligators and other causes.”

“It’s Maple Grove,” Bobby said.

“So?”

“Do you really trust anyone in Maple Grove other than Ernie?”

“What does that mean?”

After a silence, Bobby said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Do you know?”

She frowned. “How would I know what you mean when you don’t know what you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Rebecca quoted the town’s motto. “Maple Grove is ‘picture-postcard perfect.’”

“Is it really, Becky?”

Following an uneasy silence of her own, she said, “That’s certainly how I remember it. Picturesque and boring.”

Such lengthy pauses now separated their responses to each other that it seemed as if Bobby might have fallen into a coma out there in dangerous Baltimore.

At last he said, “How perfect could Maple Grove have been with comatose people strewn from one end of town to the other?”

She considered his question as though mulling over an issue of profound philosophical importance. “Don’t you think maybe ‘strewn’ is hyperbole, since neither of us can remember a single comatose person before Ernie?”

Perhaps Bobby translated his reply into Chinese, from Chinese into Hebrew, and from Hebrew back into English before he finally said, “Memory is a funny thing.”

“I’m not laughing here.”

“I mean, isn’t it possible, if you feel a thing happened, feel it intensely, it could be true even if you have no memory of it?”

“You mean like a repressed memory.”

“Repressed or erased.”

“Who could erase our memories?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “We can try to figure it out when we meet up in Maple Grove.”

“I guess I’m going there.”

“Of course you are. For Ernie. For Spencer. For me. For yourself. The four amigos.”

She said, “We’ve always known that one day we’d be going home again—haven’t we?”

“Yes.”

“How? How did we know?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to us back in the day?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s going to happen to us now?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know.”

Sliding off the hood ornament and oozing across the sun-warmed car metal, the dollop of guano seemed to be a portent, an omen, full of chalky-glistening-slimy symbolic meaning, though Rebecca wasn’t able to interpret it.

Having been nominated for an Emmy five times during the run of Enemies , and having won twice, Rebecca possessed that special kind of confidence that also comes to ambitious car salesmen when they rack up enough deals to receive a plaque decorated with a small golden wheel and be named the Employee of the Month, or to a real estate agent similarly honored during the brokerage’s biannual banquet at Golden Corral. Now she tapped that well of confidence, seeking to wash away the dread that seeped into her like sludge from a broken sewer pipe, and she said, “There’s no reason to be scared. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

From out there in Baltimore, Bobby the Sham said, “I’m sure you’re right, although ...”

“Although what?”

“Although that’s what the blonde with the pixie haircut said.”

“What blonde with a pixie haircut?”

“I don’t think she had a name. In Shriek and Shriek Again , she said that same thing just before Judyface cut her head in two with a chain saw.”

“Oh. Yeah. Her. That was the opening scene. The script just called her ‘Victim Number One.’”

“Well,” said Bobby, “she didn’t have a backstory or a future, so a name would’ve been superfluous. Spencer and I are staying at the Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel. It’s nice. Four stars. We could book you under a name less famous than yours.”

“Not necessary. I’ll have Maud make reservations using her name and credit card.” Maud Pucket was her personal assistant. “I’ll be there by this evening if not sooner.”

“Love you, amigo.”

“Love you, Bobby.”

“Let’s do this for Ernie,” he said.

“For Ernie, mi amigo,” she said.

She didn’t want to go home again, because it wasn’t home. Her inattentive mother had moved to Miami. The grandparents who raised her, Charlie and Ruth, had retired to Palm Springs. She had always been an outsider in Maple Grove. The town itself didn’t inspire even a mild flush of nostalgia. In fact, an intuitive wariness arising from some dark knowledge buried deep within her subconscious warned her off the town whenever she thought of returning there even to see Ernie, which was why he always came to visit her instead.

Inevitably, Rebecca thought of Thomas Wolfe, who had written You Can’t Go Home Again , a massive tome that fell on an unexpecting public in 1940 and was at once said to be a classic of American literature. A film director of Rebecca’s acquaintance, a man with numerous hits to his credit, had spent nine years trying to mount the novel as a movie, almost as long as he spent unsuccessfully trying to mount Rebecca. Although he had been nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three, he wasn’t able to get the project green-lighted at any studio or otherwise raise the financing, not when he had a script that was a faithful adaptation, not when he reconceived it as a rock-and-roll musical, not when he found a way to give the story a science-fiction edge, and not even when he introduced a terrifying parallel plot about flesh-eating zombies. The title was even more prophetic than the novelist could have known: You can’t go home again, and you can’t even make a movie about not being able to go home again.

Yet Rebecca was going to try to go home again. For Ernie.