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5

Funny

There was nothing funny about what happened to Ernie Hernishen that summer when all the amigos were thirty-five; actually, it might be more accurate to say that, regardless of how amused other people might have been, Ernie would not have laughed uproariously about anything that happened to him. Perhaps he could have avoided a coma and worse if, like his beloved amigos, he’d left Maple Grove after high school or earlier. However, Ernie was a gentle soul, shy and self-effacing. He lacked the ambition that drove Rebecca, Spencer, and Bobby to rise to the top. He was a small-town guy with a big heart, a humble soul with modest dreams. He would have been happy enough if only he had married the girl next door, fathered the 2.2 children per couple that were needed to sustain the human race, become a librarian, and spent his life in a labyrinth of books.

Unfortunately, the only girl next door to the Hernishen house was Wanda Saurian. When Ernie was twelve and Wanda was fifteen, she murdered her parents, stole the car, and ran away with Randy Docker, her twenty-year-old psychopathic boyfriend. Together they embarked on a five-state killing spree, after which she was not suitable to be the wife of a librarian.

Even if Wanda had refrained from wholesale slaughter and saved herself for the younger boy who yearned for her, Ernie’s dream of being the primary authority at the Maple Grove Public Library would have been beyond his reach. By that fateful summer when Ernie was thirty-five and terrible things happened to him, Alma May Wickert had been the town’s librarian for an astonishing sixty years. She cherished her power and guarded her job with such ferocity that no one dared seek her position or force her into retirement; thus she remained emperor of the stacks for yet another nine years. At the age of ninety-four, she perished in her sleep from what Dr. Sweeny Feld called “spontaneous mummification,” though the physician was known to imbibe to excess at times and to have a macabre sense of humor.

Curiously, the library burned down on the night of Alma May’s death. Voters eventually declined to fund a new one for pretty much the same reason that they wouldn’t fund a buggy-whip factory or an encirclement of massive catapults to protect the town from invading barbarians. The city council unanimously agreed with Mayor Susan Glow that even before a new library could be designed and built, artificial intelligence would transform the world, and everyone would have a personal robot to read stories to them, making it unnecessary to engage in the onerous chore of reading to oneself.

Consequently, even if Ernie had survived the year when he was thirty-five, he could not have become the town librarian when the town had no library. This is not the place to reveal whether Ernie came out of his coma and lived; maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. These immediate pages are for the purpose of introducing the fourth of the four amigos so that readers—or their robots—will understand who all the principal characters are, thus allowing the wheels of the narrative to turn faster from this point.

We must consider how extraordinary it is that all four of these people, although social outcasts in their youth, became outstanding successes in their chosen fields, Ernie Hernishen no less than the others. He was just eighteen when he wrote his first song, “The Girl Next Door Is to Die For,” which Garth Brooks came out of retirement to record; it spent eleven weeks as the number one country song in the USA, even crossing over to rise to number two on the pop charts. That was of course quickly followed by “Mama, Don’t Teach Me Your University Ways” and “Three Friends and One Dog Are All I Need,” which were also enormous hits for different country artists. If the amigos endured some torment or terror in their youth, some ordeal they had been made to forget, perhaps the stress and trauma of the experience had driven them to become achievers, to gain social position and a measure of power as defense against whoever or whatever had so profoundly shaken them back in the day.

Unlike his pals, Ernie shrank from the prospect of celebrity, as if being known was asking for trouble. Although he could play the piano, the guitar, the fiddle, and the ocarina, he had no desire to perform his songs in public. The stage did not call to him. Life in the spotlight had no appeal. When he wasn’t writing an astonishing number of memorable and often haunting songs, he pursued solitary interests, some of which he found puzzling and even inexplicable.

He was not puzzled by his love of nature, of which there was plenty to be found in and around Maple Grove. He enjoyed long walks in the woods. He could spend hours studying wildflowers in a meadow, recording their infinite variety with his camera. He became such an avid bird-watcher that he was able to name most of those he saw.

Because nature seemed vulnerable to him, he took a major role in stopping a highly promoted new landfill on a thousand acres a few miles outside town, where a hundred thousand tons of worn-out solar panels were to be buried along with undisclosed thousands of cumbersome burnt-out wind turbines. His activism had led to unannounced visits by Britta, his mother, who insisted that his priorities were foolish.

On one occasion, popping into his kitchen while he was peeling potatoes for dinner, Britta said, “Sustainability. Renewables. A cleaner way. What about this don’t you understand, Ernest?”

“Solar and wind aren’t sustainable.”

“Do you think the sun is soon to go out? Will the wind never blow again?”

“You have to calculate the immense amount of steel and copper and concrete, historic amounts, and the—”

She cut him off by taking the potato peeler out of his hand. She held it beyond his reach, as if he were five years old and being denied a lollipop. “Tell me, have you started smoking something potent, Ernest?”

“You know I don’t smoke.”

“Is that so?”

“I think it’s a terrible habit.”

“Is that what you wish me to believe?”

“Well, it’s true. I don’t smoke. I never have.”

“What is it you claim not to smoke, Ernest?”

“How can such a question be answered?”

“Do you bake it into cookies?”

“It? It what?”

“Are you really as naive as you pretend, Ernest?”

“I’m not naive, just confused. You always leave me confused.”

“Is that the kind of thing you tell people about your mother, that I reliably confuse you?”

“Please give me the potato peeler.”

“As naive as you are, you’re liable to harm yourself.”

“People don’t harm themselves with potato peelers.”

“Is that your position, Ernest?”

“It’s not a position. It’s a truth.”

“How interesting you would say such a thing. How revealing.”

“Revealing of what?”

“What about mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms? People don’t hurt themselves with mushrooms, either. How could I hurt myself with a mushroom?”

“What exotic mushrooms have you consumed recently?”

“I don’t care much for mushrooms, Mother.”

“Do you know what a cactus button is, Ernest?”

“I guess it’s what closes up a cactus shirt.”

“Mescaline, Ernest. Those who succumb to primitive forms of music sooner than later become lost in such things as mescaline.”

“If I can’t have the peeler, I’ll finish the potatoes with a sharp knife. If I cut off a finger, it won’t be my fault.”

“Ernest, do you understand the source of your anger?”

“I’m not angry. Just hungry.”

“Your father passed his anger down to you.”

“I never knew my father.”

“He was handsome but ignorant. He thought he could tame me. When I wouldn’t leave the university and wallow in ignorance with him, he couldn’t bear to live as a shadow in my light.”

“What does that mean—‘as a shadow in my light’?”

“If you had furthered your education, you would understand such things. Here is your potato peeler.”

“Dear God, a miracle.”

“Ernest, there’s no point speaking to God. You might as well have a conversation with a rock.”

“I know the feeling,” Ernie said, returning to the potatoes.

“I ask only that you keep your strange environmental views to yourself and cause me no further embarrassment in the community. By the way, it would behoove you to eat fewer potatoes and more lean protein.”

In spite of Britta, Ernie understood his passion and concern for nature and why he expressed it as an activist. However, he could not explain his obsession with novels about characters who suffered from amnesia or eradication of memories by brainwashing. He’d read hundreds of such stories with fascination. A professional book scout occasionally found a few of the hundreds of similar novels that were out of print, and Ernie at once pored through those also. He reread the better books three or four times. His collection of movies on the same subject had inspired repeated, sometimes obsessive viewing.

And so it was that on a Tuesday evening, before anyone knew that Ernie had fallen into a coma (because he had not yet fallen into a coma), he was in his study, sitting in the white-and-brown cowhide-upholstered armchair with polished bull-horn headrail. Two walls were brightened by James Bama paintings of cowboys and horses that had graced the covers of paperback books by famous Western novelists, and on the other two hung a variety of guitars beautified by exquisite inlays of exotic woods. This large study contained no desk, but a piano stood ready. Three more armchairs were draped with colorful Pendleton blankets that complemented the Navajo rug.

Sometimes Ernie wrote songs here, composing the lyrics first and then working out a melody on the Steinway. Most recently he’d completed “They Don’t Have No Antidote for Love at Walgreens.” Currently, he was engrossed in a gunslinger novel about sheep men versus cattlemen in the 1800s. This edition contained the original text; Ernie refused to purchase revised editions that had been rendered into gibberish by aggressive “sensitivity readers” and published for semiliterate mobs with the hope they might read it instead of burn it either symbolically or literally.

Ernie found good Westerns to be highly entertaining, although characters with amnesia or suffering a fugue state were rare in the genre. The closest thing to a person like that in the present novel proved to be a schoolmarm who was by nature forgetful but accurate with a six-shooter.

After he read the final page and sighed with contentment and saw it was 6:10 in the evening, Ernie ambled into the kitchen with the reasonable expectation of heating a bowl of homemade vegetable soup and making a grilled cheese sandwich. After all, this was not the first occasion on which he’d undertaken to prepare dinner. With almost two decades of culinary accomplishments behind him, he had every reason to suppose he would again succeed at feeding himself.

But it was not to be.

The door between the hall and the kitchen featured a porthole-style window and swung freely on pivot hinges, like a door serving a restaurant kitchen. As was Ernie’s habit, he stepped briskly across the flush threshold, allowing the door to reverse its momentum and arc shut of its own accord. He took only two steps into the room before an unusual smell halted him no less abruptly than if he had walked into a glass wall.

Artists of many disciplines have a highly developed olfactory sense and respond dramatically even to subtle odors that most people cannot detect or of which they take only transitory notice. Writers and songwriters and musicians are among the gifted in this regard, actors and dancers and painters not so much, least of all film directors and mimes and those who make origami animals. By far the artists most sensitive to smells are sculptors; no one knows why, though this matter is the subject of hundreds of scientific studies conducted at prestigious universities.

Although Ernie Hernishen was a talented songwriter rather than a sculptor, the subtle but unusual aroma in the kitchen impacted him on a profound level deeper than any psychological strata that Freud could have imagined even in his cups, where perhaps the great doctor spent much of his productive time. This smell was mysterious yet familiar, sweet even as it was savory, alternately aromatic and malodorous, simultaneously attractive and repellent. Ernie crossed the kitchen, following the scent, as helpless to resist as if the columella between his nostrils had been snared by a fishhook and the line were being reeled in. This is not to imply that the experience was painful, only that the odor was a summons that could not be resisted. If it had been painful, Ernie’s agony would be described here so vividly that the reader would cringe, shudder violently, and become nauseous.

Ernie found himself at the cellar door without being aware that he’d set out to reach it. An instant later he found himself at the foot of those stairs, in the windowless realm under the house. His obsessive reading of novels with a certain exotic plot element—which is not a reference to Westerns—had prepared him to recognize that “finding himself” at a place without any memory of how he had gotten there was an example of either micro amnesia or a brief fugue state.

As he stood in the darkness, unable to move, paralyzed by some power he couldn’t name, Ernie realized he should be afraid. Yet he was not afraid. He was patient, overcome by a sense that he had a purpose to fulfill and that, when he’d done what was wanted of him, he would experience a satisfaction unlike anything he had known heretofore. It was as though the alluring scent that had drawn him into the cellar was also conveying to him a tranquilizing fragrance to ensure his docility until whatever had been planned for him began to occur.

The cellar lights came on.

This was the primary mechanical room for the house. Furnace. Water softener. Electrical panels. Featuring LED fixtures between the ceiling joists, the space was better illuminated than the realm under the serial killer’s house in The Silence of the Lambs , though there were still shadows befitting a cellar, contributing to the kind of atmosphere that lovers of slasher films find stimulating.

In the grip of a power unknown, Ernie ceased to be able to move his body, but he remained capable of turning his head left and right to the usual extent, which allowed him substantially more than a 180-degree field of vision. If he was able to see three-quarters of the room, which is likely but not verifiable to the extent that detail-obsessed readers of a persnickety nature might prefer, then the person who turned on the lights must have been in a ninety-degree arc immediately behind him.

Although Ernie’s fear response remained suppressed, he was quite capable of imagining that the person looming over him was armed with a shotgun or a scythe. Or behind him might even be an orangutan trained to commit murder, as in the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe. Yet because of the tranquilizing effect that bespelled him, even those grievous suspicions couldn’t excite terror in Ernie.

He could hear no slightest movement.

He could smell no cologne or body odor or exhalation of garlic breath, only the strange scent that had him in its thrall.

No voice—either sinister or welcoming—spoke of his fate or about anything else, for that matter.

Suddenly, released from paralysis, he moved toward one of three steel doors as it swung open to receive him.

The man who built this place, Dwight Fry, fancied himself a survivalist. The cellar was larger than the footprint of the house above it. The rooms that extended under the surrounding yard had concrete walls. The thick steel doors hung on concealed barrel hinges. Fry stocked those three big chambers with enough food to last him and his young wife, Bambi, for thirty years. Tragically, just before their move-in date, Bambi informed her husband that she intended to divorce him in order to marry the entrepreneur who had sold them several tons of freeze-dried vacuum-packed food. Already on edge because the Armageddon that he had foreseen was less than a month away, Dwight went over the edge and tried to kill his wife with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. The weapon proved more unwieldy than he anticipated, which gave his bride time to retrieve the Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special from her purse and place a perfect triangle of .38-caliber rounds in his chest and abdomen. Bambi claimed self-defense and was not prosecuted. Ernie Hernishen bought the house, Armageddon supplies and all.

Disposing of several tons of freeze-dried food was a daunting task that Ernie chose not to undertake or oversee. He left it in the three rooms where Dwight stashed it. Having no skill with firearms and no desire to learn, he figured that if the end of the world came to pass, the contents of those chambers would be his gift to the post-Armageddon mutants and barbarians in return for their kindly not eating him.

Now, in the thrall of the mesmerizing odor, as lights came on in the food vault ahead of him, he began singing one of the songs that he’d written—“She Stole My Heart and My Visa Card.” In spite of the title, it was an upbeat number. He thought he sounded happy as he sang, and he wondered how long that would last.

When he stepped into the well-stocked room, he stopped singing and stared at what awaited him. The walls were lined with fully laden metal shelves to a height of eight feet. In the center of the space, a table-high island of low drawers with a butcher-block top allowed a spacious walkaround. Lying face up on this four-foot-wide ten-foot-long formation was his doppelg?nger, in the very same clothes that he wore. This Other Ernie appeared to be sleeping.

Just as the One and True Ernie began to be concerned, his twin on the butcher block faded away as if it had been a mirage. Ernie realized that the phantom figure had been a placeholder intended to show him what position he was expected to take.

He clambered onto the table and stretched out on his back and gazed at a ventilation grille in the mottled-gray concrete ceiling.

A voice issued from the grille. It was rather like that of Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies. “Listen to me, boy. Great is my frustration. Greater still is my anger. Greatest of all is my determination. I will probe your brain for answers.” The unseen speaker laughed merrily. In a pleasant voice, he said, “Just joking. There will be a little coma, but you’ll be okay. I’m pretty sure.”

“Funny,” said Ernie, although he was not in the least amused. He was instead using the word as a synonym for “ curious, ” for “ weird, ” for “ what the hell, ” for “ uh-oh. ”