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Let’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 jalapeno-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 knew what 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 smelled good, 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 the day, 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. Unable to 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?

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; then he 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? Because his 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 in order 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.