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Just a Little Bit More You Need to Know about Spencer Truedove

Because this account of the travails of the amigos is based on a true story and isn’t a work of fiction (or is not strictly such a thing), the cast can’t be reduced to one or two protagonists. The structure of the book must not be left to the whims of the author. Back in the day, four social misfits endured the horrors of Maple Grove. If three or two or even just one of that unfortunate group were to be edited out of this telling of their ordeal, what sense would it make? No sense.

However, the author and his editor and his publisher and the perpetually nervous folks in the marketing department are well aware that studies conducted by major universities (them again) indicate that between 39 and 57 percent of modern readers, who lead busy lives even if to no sensible point, have markedly less patience for character details than did readers in the time of Charles Dickens or, for that matter, in the time of Herman Wouk. Consequently, strategies have been developed to keep all readers, the patient and the impatient, engaged. One strategy is to divide long chapters into two shorter ones, wherever possible, to distract the reader from the amount of character detail and to contribute to the illusion of headlong suspense. That is why the material in this chapter was moved from Chapter Three, where it appeared in the first draft.

Readers can be confident that Rebecca, Bobby, and Spencer will arrive in Maple Grove soon and that, after they have gathered at Ernie’s bedside, this narrative will accelerate through a rollicking series of exciting and terrifying events that might leave you winded if you haven’t been eating the right foods and exercising according to the advice of the fanatics at the National Institutes of Health.

So there was Spencer Truedove in his black outfit with a snap-brim porkpie hat and mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt, piloting his SUV through the vast tedium of the heartland. Earlier, he had told Bobby that he felt as if he were riding a unicycle on a high wire over an abyss. That was indeed how he felt, partly because he feared for the life of his friend Ernie and because that’s how he always felt during and immediately after a conversation with Britta.

What most unsettled him about the woman was her certainty that her every opinion was the spot-on truth and that every action she took was the only action any honest, right-thinking person could possibly have taken. Spencer, on the other hand, never felt confident as to his thoughts about any subject, and when he had taken action, he suspected there were a dozen things he could have done that would have been more appropriate and humane.

He didn’t even know why he had become an artist. As a six-year-old, when the world had seemed immense, Spencer had expected to be an explorer who would discover a huge new continent and name all the states and towns on it—Poopville in the state of North Poop, Poop Beach in Poopafornia, and so forth. It would be a great place to live because the residents would always be laughing their asses off at all the poop jokes. In his early teens, when poop wasn’t the peak of humor that it was for six-year-olds, he adjusted his expectations to the reality that Earth had fully divulged itself to explorers who came before him; the early-Victorian world of mysterious lands and uncharted waters was gone. During Spencer’s school years, anxious to escape the cool kids being shaped into a new generation of corrupt public servants and fanatical cultists of one kind or another, he had taken refuge among the amigos, none of whom gave the slightest thought to their future as adults because they didn’t expect to have one.

That Spencer would become a successful artist was as unlikely as that he would become a circus clown. Here’s how it happened.

Because he’d been held back one year in elementary school, he turned eighteen while still a senior, at which time he received an unexpected inheritance of sixty-seven thousand dollars from his maternal grandmother, who died years earlier but had been secretive about the terms of her will. This is one of those twists of fate we find delightful even when it happens to someone else, although we must keep in mind that it required a premature death; we should take a moment to mourn the deceased.

Spencer might have remained in Maple Grove with his amigos for another few months if Grandma’s bequest hadn’t triggered nightmares so terrifying that he woke screaming. Years earlier, when he was fourteen, his mother had announced that Maple Grove was too bland, stifling, too “managed,” whatever that might mean. She had lost herself, the free spirit she’d once been. She needed to find herself, the vibrant woman she had been or could be—and she left the same day. Spencer’s father then left his wife (and the son who reminded him of her) for a woman who didn’t need to find herself. This is a twist of fate that pleases some of those involved but not all, and we should take a moment to wonder what fate is up to in the long run. Anyway, after having lived alone for years in his dad’s house, he began to suffer horrific dreams in which his parents came back, remarried, and turned their attention to him. He fled.

For four years, the amigos had been supportive of Spencer as his family deserted him. But the other kids in Maple Grove proved to be sharp-tongued predators who recognized that Spencer was a wounded animal; they pursued him with the clever, flaying wit for which teenagers are renowned. With the blessing of his amigos, who would have liked to flee town with him if they had each inherited sixty-seven thousand, Spencer dropped out of school and went to Chicago.

In the Windy City, he rented an apartment and fell into a fugue state, though the second action wasn’t intentional. He woke six weeks later to discover five enormous canvases aswirl with eerie, colorful images that made him question his sanity. By this time, he had forgotten the terrors that he and his amigos had experienced, just as they would forget them as well a few weeks later.

In what might have been yet another twist of fate or perhaps only a coincidence, a young woman who occupied another apartment on the same floor as Spencer’s, Portia Clavus, happened by his unit while the door was open and glimpsed one of his paintings. Portia possessed two degrees from Harvard and knew such inside-art stuff as that Leonardo da Vinci invented the submarine sandwich and that Van Gogh cut off his ear not after an argument with Gauguin but because he had another one that felt redundant. Portia worked in Chicago’s premier gallery and was intent on becoming a big player in the art world regardless of whom she had to destroy in her climb to the top.

Shrieking in ecstasy, she burst into Spencer’s apartment with such enthusiasm that for a moment he thought she had come to kill him. Even when he ceased to fear for his life, he was unsettled by her excitement. Being very young and inexperienced, being modest by nature, and having no idea how or why he had created the paintings in an amnestic state, he couldn’t take Portia’s extreme praise seriously. The more she gushed, the more convinced Spencer became that she was either deranged or a scam artist.

Portia was not deterred by his reticence. She wouldn’t have been deterred if he had threatened her with a meat cleaver. Art was the only thing that mattered to her, art and the fortunes that could be made from it. She pursued Spencer from room to room, haranguing her quarry until she had given him a headache like a sharp object driven into his skull. To be rid of her, he agreed to receive her and her employer at four o’clock that afternoon.

He intended to be gone when the woman returned with Erhardt Dusterheit, who was the owner of galleries in Chicago, Boston, New York, London, and Paris. However, the fierce headache did not relent until 3:50. Spencer had only enough time to wash his sweaty face and rinse the bitter taste of chewed aspirins out of his mouth before the doorbell rang.

Dusterheit was a tall man with a long face. A wide mouth and thin lips shaped a smile as sharp and humorless as the blade of a mezzaluna. Long, narrow nose like the proud bow of a warship cleaving the sea. Pale-gray eyes. Titanium-silver hair. His long ears were almost flat against his head, and a teardrop diamond worth as much as a Rolls-Royce depended from the right lobe. You get the picture.

Whereas Portia had been exuberant at her first sight of the paintings, Dusterheit was silent, like a hawk coasting on thermals, as he moved from one huge canvas to another, spending no more than two minutes with each. His face remained as expressionless as his exquisitely tailored charcoal-gray suit.

Spencer had arrived at the conclusion that Dusterheit would say, “Have a nice day,” pivot on one heel, and leave without any comment about the paintings.

Instead, the gallery owner asked, “What is it you mean to say with these compositions?”

Because he had no idea what he had meant to say, if he had meant to say anything at all, Spencer said, “If there were words to express my intentions, I wouldn’t have expressed them in images.”

Dusterheit regarded him in meaningful silence for half a minute before saying, “The objects portrayed here look like nothing I have seen before, yet they are so dimensional that one senses each of them has a function. How would you describe their function, their purpose?”

Because Spencer didn’t know what the hell they were, he said, “Everyone who views them must follow a unique path to their meaning. Imagine function first. Then you’ll know their purpose. They’re revealed to me, but they don’t come with an explanatory pamphlet.”

“And if they did? Come with an explanatory pamphlet?”

Spencer felt drained. He needed help. He tried to imagine what Bobby the Sham might say. Bobby was a writer. He could bullshit his way out of any jam. “I wouldn’t read such a pamphlet. These objects are mystical in nature. The meaning that anyone else imposed on them would be limited by his power of interpretation. If I listened to him, I’d be robbed of the opportunity to explore them myself and perhaps find the fuller truth of them.”

Following another and more intense silence, Dusterheit said, “Some of these objects actually seem to be entities, organisms.”

“Don’t they?” said Spencer.

“Some might say they find them frightening or even disgusting. What would your response be to that?”

Channeling Bobby the Sham, Spencer said, “That is a danger one faces when interpreting art. One can inadvertently reveal more about oneself than about the work under discussion.”

Throughout these exchanges, Portia Clavus had stood behind her employer and to one side, shifting from foot to foot, chewing on a knuckle, looking as if she might bite off any fingers she felt were redundant. Spencer’s answer inspired her to make a fist and punch the air.

“You have not been to art school,” said Dusterheit.

“Francis Bacon never went, either. He couldn’t even draw. And he’s famous. He’s not the only one. School is for illustrators, not for artists.”

Dusterheit returned to the paintings for five minutes and then said, “I believe I can represent your work to great effect.”

“That would be nice.”

“I believe that by the time you’re thirty-five, you will get half a million per canvas. Before you’re forty, maybe years before, your price will exceed one million.”

“Where do I sign?”

Dusterheit said, “One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You talk too much.”

“I can fix that.”

“The more mysterious an artist is, the more he is in demand. Silence suggests that you know things other people don’t, that you have depths others can never plumb. Silence is sexy.”

Spencer only nodded.

“One additional note.”

Spencer raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Erhardt Dusterheit said, “You need a better look.”

Spencer waited.

“I see you in black.”

Spencer nodded again.

“And a hat.”

Spencer raised his eyebrows once more as a means of inquiring what was meant by “ hat. ”

“There’s such a thing as too quiet,” Dusterheit advised.

Spencer said, “What about a porkpie? Snap-brimmed, round crown, black felt?”

Baring his mezzaluna smile, Dusterheit said, “I like it.”

And so it was that Spencer Truedove became a wildly successful, critically acclaimed artist without any formal training and without any memory of having painted anything. Although otherwise he had enough charm to make a cobra dance without using a flute, Spencer answered most questions about his work with silence accompanied by an expression that was 70 percent compassionate pity and 30 percent intellectual contempt. He did so with such grace that everyone posing a question—everyone but Britta Hernishen—went away satisfied that the artist provided profound yet succinct insight into the meaning of his art.

Year by year, life was good. If there was one thing he wished he could change, it was the dreams. In damp seasons, when the sticky nights were warm but not viciously hot, or when darkness settled through the city with a chill of waning autumn, when the moon was full and ghastly with its shadowed craters but sometimes when no moon graced the sky, without relationship to the spiciness of the food that he’d eaten or the quantity of wine that he’d consumed, terrifying dreams tormented Spencer until sleep could no longer chain him to those hideous visions, whereupon he thrashed up from his sheets and blankets, his heart cold in his breast even as he streamed sour sweat from every pore, hair standing off his scalp and tangled in an Einsteinian bush, his flesh as pale as the pulp of an inedible squash. He woke screaming, and he continued to scream as he scrambled out of bed, sometimes snared by the bedclothes so that he stumbled and crashed to the floor. Even the shock of such a collapse failed to quiet his screams, and he crawled fast across the room in a frantic search for shelter, of which none was to be found, so that he routinely ended his flight sitting on the floor, back pressed into a corner. The night-light with which he always slept provided him no comfort in these situations, and though there was never a monster in pursuit of him, he did not abruptly cease screaming but quieted by stages; the shrill scream became a softer scream, became a wail, became an ululation, became at last a tuneless threnody that faded into ragged breathing.

Of course, he never remembered the dream, though somehow he knew it wasn’t about his parents. He knew intuitively that it was always the same scenario. He also knew the threat around which the dream was built involved something that happened to him and the other amigos back in the day, some horror they had barely escaped.

For whatever reason, though Rebecca died in her dreams, Bobby and Ernie didn’t suffer nightmares, though they endured their own problems. They all knew they had gaps in their memories, gaps dating to their high school years. They made references to this from time to time, though they never engaged in a lengthy conversation about the fact that they all suffered from amnesia, which was an amazing thing when you thought about it. Forgetfulness hadn’t just befallen them; surely someone had wiped their memories. They should want to know who and why. It was as though they shared an unspoken agreement that whatever lay behind that door was best forgotten, even if someone had stolen the truth from them.

Only Spencer continued to experience new episodes of amnesia—the periodic fugue states in which he painted. He had long suspected that the bizarre images on his canvases resulted from a subconscious attempt to remember what the amigos had endured together.

As for the nightmare that afflicted him five or six times a year, maybe that was a small price to pay to keep the door shut on those lost memories.

Now, as the dashboard clock glowed 4:10 p.m., Spencer turned off the interstate and motored down a ramp into Maple Grove. Tree-lined streets. White picket fences. Broad, green, perfectly tended lawns. Victorian architecture. It looked like the town where Barbie and Ken Doll would live together, not in sin, but after being married as certified by a document from the Mattel Corporation, the kind of tolerant and convivial town where Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy could cohabit in cross-species bliss without exciting any locals to commit a hate crime.

Sluiced along by a wave of nostalgia, Spencer wondered why he’d left such an idyllic community, why Rebecca and Bobby hadn’t stayed here with Ernie. His doubt and confusion were short-lived. He knew. He knew why his compadres had left after him, all right. He knew all too well. As lovely as it appeared to be, Maple Grove wasn’t what it seemed to be. Maple Grove was Stepford; it was ’Salem’s Lot; it was serene Santa Mira where giant seedpods from another world were full of weird gooey stuff that was being shaped into replicas of the human citizens.

In fourteen minutes, he arrived at County Memorial Hospital, where Ernie Hernishen lay in a coma, flirting with death.