Ernie Block's phobia of darkness

Ernie Block’s phobia of darkness shapes his life as a disabling fear, but the novel complicates its apparent treatment: after rapid improvement and a doctor’s declaration that he is cured, Ernie again reacts to darkness on returning to Nevada. His experience distinguishes the visible symptom from the unresolved significance of a particular place, leaving recovery both measurable and uncertain.

The Phobia and Its Early Improvement

When Ernie and Faye Block arrived in Milwaukee on December 15, his fear had become a central fact of his life. The change in setting and the warmth of being with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren seemed to ease some of its force. Faye noticed a new spring in his step and more genuine good humor in his smile. That relief did not mean the phobia had disappeared: Ernie remained afraid of darkness, though he was much less terrified than he had been in Nevada.

Six sessions with Dr. Fontelaine also appeared to help. The treatment reflects the doctor’s approach to phobias: rather than requiring the patient to uncover an underlying psychological cause, therapy addressed the symptoms through desensitization. The account explains that this approach treated symptoms as the disorder itself in many cases, and that treatment could bring relief in weeks or months. For a minority of patients, these methods did not work, and longer treatment or panic-blocking medication might be needed. Ernie, however, improved so quickly that even the optimistic Dr. Fontelaine found his progress astonishing.

Faye took an active part in supporting him. She read about phobias and shared unusual examples that made his fear seem less isolating and, by comparison, more understandable. On an evening walk, she talked about the author John Cheever’s fear of crossing high bridges. Ernie listened with interest, but the conversation could not divert his attention from nightfall. As the shadows lengthened, his grip on Faye’s arm tightened until it would have hurt without her heavy clothing between them.

Supported Exposure in the Dark

The walk was part of Flooding exposure therapy, the third time the couple had undertaken the exercise. Dr. Fontelaine’s modified method divided confrontation with the feared stimulus into three stages. In the first, Ernie spent fifteen minutes in darkness with Faye beside him and accessible lighted places nearby. They moved from one streetlamp’s pool of light into the next stretch of darkness, stopping at each illuminated sidewalk so that he could collect himself before continuing.

The method gave the walk a clear structure: Ernie was not left alone, and the darkness was approached in intervals rather than as an unbroken ordeal. The treatment relied on panic eventually subsiding, with the expectation that enduring the fear could help the mind adapt to it. Dr. Fontelaine considered unmodified exposure potentially cruel and risky, so the supported sequence was intended to make the confrontation more manageable.

The planned next stages would increase the challenge. After additional sessions, Ernie and Faye were to walk together somewhere without streetlamps, with Faye carrying a flashlight to provide a temporary respite when he could no longer tolerate the darkness. In the final stage, Ernie would walk alone in a completely dark area. The account presents these steps as a future course of treatment, not as experiences he had already completed.

On their return from the walk, Ernie managed six of the seven blocks before bolting for the light inside the house. His panic was plain beneath the streetlamp: his eyes looked wild and his breathing was already fast. Faye reminded him to control it; he nodded and began taking slower, deeper breaths. He still hissed through clenched teeth as they left the light, and he did not finish the journey on foot. Even so, six blocks represented more than he had managed before, and Faye could recognize genuine progress in the effort.

A Cure Declared, Then Questioned

Faye initially hoped that this pace meant Ernie would complete the stages weeks, perhaps months, ahead of schedule. That same speed unsettled her. She wanted the nightmare behind them, but his unusually rapid improvement made her wonder whether the change would last. Her concern was not a denial of the progress: it arose because the apparent recovery seemed so complete and so quick that she could not trust it without reservation.

On Thursday, Dr. Fontelaine judged Ernie cured of disabling nyctophobia, calling it the fastest cure he had seen and attributing his toughness to his Marine background. Ernie and Faye left Milwaukee on Saturday, January 11, after four weeks there. They flew to Reno and continued by commuter plane to Elko, arriving late in the morning. The doctor’s conclusion thus came just before Ernie returned to the place associated with his earlier fear.

Less than a mile from the motel, the sense of improvement was interrupted. Ernie again felt drawn toward a particular stretch of ground south of the highway, the place that had affected him on December 10 while he was driving home from Elko with new lighting fixtures. It seemed to call to him and to hold the promise that something strange had happened there. The feeling was both absurd to him and difficult to resist, like the attraction of a talismanic place in a dream. His interest in Sandy Sarver’s changed appearance gave way as the possibility of an impending revelation took hold.

Nevada and the Limits of the Apparent Recovery

Ernie had assumed that this strange attraction belonged to the same mental disturbance as his fear of darkness, and that curing the phobia would make the other symptom vanish too. Its return therefore troubled him. He wondered whether his fear had never been of darkness in general, but of a particular darkness: the night on the Nevada plains. He considered whether a phobia could be so narrowly tied to a region and feared that the Milwaukee treatment might have helped only because he had been less frightened by darkness there.

As the pickup reached the motel, Ernie watched the time not because he needed the hour, but because he wanted to know how long remained until sundown. There were about five hours. This small act turns the return of the symptom into a concrete measure of apprehension: the doctor had declared him cured, yet Ernie was already counting down to night in Nevada.

In a later scene, another woman urges Ernie to use the breathing technique Dr. Fontelaine taught him and proposes a walk outside once he is calm. Ernie refuses, shaking his head, and she reassures him that the darkness will be no different from Milwaukee’s. The episode shows that the fear remains active even after the earlier declaration of cure. Dom, hearing Ernie’s name, connects it with the moon pictures bearing names in Zebediah Lomack’s living room in Reno. The phobia’s return therefore intersects with the wider mystery surrounding the motel witnesses, while leaving its cause unresolved. Ernie’s recovery is neither simply disproved nor securely established: he has shown that he can endure darkness with support, but the Nevada setting and the memory attached to it expose the limits of a cure defined only by symptom relief.