Strangers (36 page)

Christmas night, as Zeb was sprawled on the floor with half a hundred bloated moons hanging over him, bearing down on him, he suddenly noticed writing on one of them, a single word scrawled across the lunar image with a felt-tip pen, where there had never been a word before. The picture had been defaced with a name:
Dominick.
He recognized his own handwriting, but he could not remember having scrawled that name across the moon. Then his eye was caught by another name written on another poster:
Ginger.
And then a third name on a third poster:
Faye.
And a fourth:
Ernie.
Suddenly anxious, Zeb stumbled around the room, checking the other posters, but he found no more names.

In addition to being unable to recall writing those words, he could not think of anyone he knew named Dominick, Ginger, or Faye. He knew a couple of Ernies, though neither was a close friend, and the appearance of that name on one of the moons was no less mysterious than the three others. Staring at the names, he grew increasingly uneasy, for he had the odd feeling that he
did
know them, that they had played a terribly important role in his life, and that his very sanity and survival depended on remembering who they were.

Some long-forgotten memory swelled in him like a steadily inflating balloon, and intuitively he knew that when the balloon popped he would recollect everything, not only the identities of these four people, but also the origins of his fevered fascination with—and underlying fear of—the moon. But as the memory balloon swelled within him, his fear grew as well, and he began to sweat and then to shake uncontrollably.

He turned from the posters, suddenly terrified of remembering, and lurched out to the kitchen, driven by that gnawing hunger that was always occasioned by thoughts that made him nervous. He wrenched open the refrigerator door and was startled to discover that the shelves were bare. They held dirty bowls and empty plastic containers in which food had been kept, two empty milk cartons, an egg carton with one broken and dried egg. He looked in the freezer, found only frost.

Zeb tried to remember when he had last been to the supermarket. It might have been days or weeks since his most recent shopping expedition. He could not remember because, in his moon-filled world, time no longer had any meaning. And how much time had passed since his last meal? He vaguely remembered having some canned pudding, but he was not clear whether that had been earlier today or yesterday or even two days ago.

Zebediah Lomack was so shocked by this development that his mind cleared for the first time in weeks, and when he looked around the kitchen, he made a strangled sound of disgust and fear. For the first time he saw—
really
saw—the mess in which he’d been living, a situation previously masked by his all-encompassing fascination with the moon. Garbage covered the floor: discarded cans sticky with fruit juice, slimy with traces of rancid gravy; empty cereal boxes and a score of drained milk cartons; dozens of wadded-up and discarded potato-chip bags and candy wrappers. And roaches. They squirmed, scuttled, and jigged through the garbage, raced across the floor, climbed walls, crouched on counters, and lurked in the sink.

“My God,” Zeb said in a voice that was hardly more than a croak, “what’s happened to me? What’ve I been doing? What’s
wrong
with me?”

He put one hand to his face and twitched with surprise when he felt a beard. He had always been clean-shaven, and he had thought he shaved just this morning. The wiry hair on his face sent him in a panic to the bathroom, where he could look in the mirror. He saw a stranger: filthy, matted hair hanging in tangled clumps; pale, soft, sickly-looking skin; a two-week beard crusted with food and dirt; wild eyes. He became aware of his body odor: His stink was so rank that he gagged on his own aroma. Apparently, he had not bathed in days, weeks.

He needed help. He was sick. Confused and sick. He could not understand what had happened to him, but he knew that he must go to the telephone and call for help.

But he did not go immediately to the phone because he was afraid they’d say he was hopelessly insane and would lock him away forever. Like they had locked away his father. When Zebediah was eight, his father pitched a terrible fit, ranting and raving about lizard-things that were crawling out of the walls, and the doctors took him to the hospital to dry him out. But that time, unlike before, the DTs had not gone away, and Zeb’s dad had been institutionalized for the rest of his life. Ever after, Zeb had been afraid his own mind might be flawed, too. Staring at his pale face in the mirror, he knew he could not call for help until he made himself presentable and straightened up the house; otherwise, they would lock him up and throw away the key.

He could not bear to look at his reflection long enough to shave, so he decided to deal with the house first. Keeping his head down to avoid seeing the moons, which exerted a tidal force on him as real as the true moon’s effect on the seas, he scurried into the bedroom, opened the closet, shoved the clothes aside, located his Remington .12-gauge and a box of shells. Head bowed, fighting the urge to look up, he made his way to the
kitchen, where he loaded the shotgun and put it on the garbage-strewn table. Speaking aloud, he made a bargain with himself:

“You get rid of the moon books, tear down the pictures so this place don’t look so crazy, clean the kitchen, shave, bathe. Then maybe you’ll get your head clear enough to figure what the hell’s wrong with you. Then you can get help—just not while things are like this.”

The shotgun was the unspoken part of the bargain. He had been fortunate to rise briefly out of the moon-dream in which he had been living, shocked to his senses by the lack of food in the refrigerator, but if he drifted back into that nightmare, he could not count on being jolted awake again. Therefore, if he could not resist the siren song of the moons on the walls, he would quickly return to the kitchen, pick up the shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.

Death was better than this.

And death was better than being locked up forever like his father.

Now, in the living room once more, keeping his eyes on the floor, he began to gather up the books. Some had once boasted jackets with photos of the moon, but he had clipped those pictures. He hefted an armload of them and went outside to the snow-covered backyard, where there was a barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks. Shivering in the crisp winter air, he dumped the books into the pit and headed back to the house for more, not daring to look at the night sky for fear of the great luminous body suspended in it.

As he worked, the urge to return to the study of the moon was as intense and demanding as the hideous need that forced a heroin addict to return again and again to the needle, but Zeb fought it.

Likewise, as he made trip after trip to the barbecue pit, he felt that memory of some long-forgotten event continuing to swell within him:
Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie…
Instinctively, he knew that he would understand the cause of his fascination with the moon if only he could recall who those four people were. He concentrated on the names, trying to use them to block out the alluring summons of the moon, and it seemed to work because soon he had disposed of two or three hundred volumes in the barbecue pit and was ready to set them ablaze.

But when he struck a match and leaned down to light the pages of a book, he discovered the pit was empty. He stared in shock and horror. Dropping the matches, he raced back to the house, threw open the kitchen door, stumbled inside, and saw what he had been most afraid of seeing. The books were piled there, damp with snow, smeared with wet ashes from the pit. He had indeed disposed of them, but then the lunacy had taken him again; under its spell and without knowing what he was doing, he had carried every volume back into the house.

He began to cry, but he was still determined he would not wind up in a padded room. He picked up a score of books and headed back toward the barbecue pit, feeling as if he were in hell and condemned, for eternity, to the performance of this frantic ritual.

When he figured he had filled the pit again, he suddenly realized he was not carrying books
to
the place of burning but away from it. Again, he had drifted off into his moon-dream and, instead of destroying the objects of his obsession, he was re-collecting them.

As he headed back toward the house, he noticed how the crust of snow glimmered with a scintillant, reflected light. Against his will, his head came up. He looked into the deep and nearly cloudless sky.

He said, “The moon.”

He knew then that he was a dead man.

Laguna Beach, California

For Dominick Corvaisis, Christmas was usually not much different from other days. He had no wife or children to make it special. Raised in foster homes, he had no relatives with whom he could share a turkey and mincemeat pie. A couple of friends, including Parker Faine, always invited him to join in their festivities, but he declined, for he knew he would feel like the proverbial fifth wheel. However, Christmas was not sad or lonely. He was never bored by his own company, and his home overflowed with good books that could fill the day with delight.

But this Christmas Dom could not concentrate to read, for he was preoccupied by the mysterious mail he had received the previous day and by the need to resist the urge to pop a Valium. Though he had been afraid that he would dream and walk in his sleep, he had taken no Valium yesterday and no Dalmane last night. He was determined to avoid any further reliance on chemicals, though he continued to crave them.

In fact, the craving became so bad that he emptied the pills into the toilet and flushed them away, because he did not trust himself. As the day wore on, his anxiety rose to the level he had experienced before he had begun drug therapy.

At seven o’clock Christmas night, Dom arrived at Parker’s rambling hillside contemporary and accepted a glass of homemade eggnog with a cinnamon stick in it. The burly painter’s beard, usually bushy and untamed, was neatly trimmed, and his mane of hair was newly cut and combed in honor of the holiday. Though he was more conservatively groomed and more subdued in dress than was his habit, he was every bit as ebullient as one expected him to be. “What a Christmas! Peace
and love reigned in this house today, I tell you! My cherished brother made only forty or fifty nasty and envious remarks about my success, which is not half as many as he lets loose with on a less blessed occasion. My sainted half-sister, Carla, only
once
called her sister-in-law Doreen a bitch, and even that might be considered justified in light of the fact that Doreen started it by calling Carla a ‘brainless New Age crackpot full of psychobabble.’ Ah, truly a day of fellowship and caring! Not one punch thrown this year, if you can believe it. And Carla’s husband, though he got plastered as usual, did not throw up or fall down a flight of stairs, as in past years, though he did insist on doing his Bette Midler imitation at least a dozen times.”

As they moved toward a grouping of chairs by the window-wall overlooking the sea, Dom said, “I’m going on a trip, a long drive. I’ll fly to Portland and rent a car up there. Then I’ll retrace the journey I took the summer before last, from Portland down to Reno, across Nevada and half of Utah on Interstate 80, then to Mountainview.”

Dom sat down as he spoke, but Parker remained on his feet, very still. The announcement pleasantly electrified him. “What’s happened? That’s no vacation. That’s not a route you’d take for pleasure. Are you sleepwalking again? Must be. And something’s happened to convince you this is related to the changes you underwent that summer.”

“I haven’t begun sleepwalking again, but I’m sure I will, probably tonight, because I’ve thrown the damn drugs away. They weren’t curing me. I lied. I was getting hooked, Parker. I didn’t care because it seemed that being hooked was better than enduring the things I did while sleepwalking. But now all that’s changed because of these.” He held up the two notes from his unknown correspondent. “The problem’s not just within me, not just psychological. There’s something stranger at work here.” He gave the first note to Parker. His fearful state of mind was betrayed by the sheet of paper, which shook in his hand.

When the painter read it, he looked baffled.

Dom said, “It came in the mail yesterday at the post office. No return address. There was another note delivered to the house.” He explained about having typed the words “the moon” on his word processor hundreds of times in his sleep and about waking from a dream with those same words on his lips, then passed the second note to Parker.

“But if I’m the first one you’ve told about this moon thing, how could anyone have known enough to send such a note?”

“Whoever he is,” Dom said, “he knows about my sleepwalking, maybe because I’ve gone to a doctor about it—”

“You’re saying you’re being watched?”

“Apparently, to a degree. Periodically monitored if not constantly
watched. But while the monitor knows about my sleepwalking, he probably doesn’t know about my typing those words on the Displaywriter, or that I woke up repeating them in the night. Not unless he was standing beside my bed, which he wasn’t. However, he indisputably
does
know that I’ll react to ‘the moon,’ that those words’ll frighten me. So he must know what lies behind this whole crazy mess.”

At last Parker sat down on the edge of a chair. “Find him, and you’ll know what’s going on.”

“New York is a big place,” Dom said. “I have no starting point there. But when I got this first note—this business about the answer to my sleepwalking lying in the past—I realized you must be right about
this
personality crisis being tied to the previous one. The dramatic change I went through on the trip from Portland to Mountainview is somehow connected. If I make that trip again, stop at the same motels, eat in the same roadside restaurants, try to re-create it as exactly as I can…something might turn up. My memory might be jogged.”

“But how could you have forgotten something so major?”