Strangers (4 page)

She stared at his leather-sheathed right hand where it gripped the brown paper bag. He gestured with his other hand as he spoke, and she followed it as it described a brief, small pattern in the chilly air. The gloves did not frighten her now. She could not imagine why the sight of them had thrown her into a panic.

“It’s all right. I was here waiting to apologize. I was startled and…and it’s been an unusual morning,” she said, quickly turning away from him. Over her shoulder, she called out, “Have a nice day.”

Although her apartment was not far away, the walk home seemed like an epic journey over vast expanses of gray pavement.

What’s wrong with me?

She felt colder than the November day could explain.

She lived on Beacon Hill, on the second floor of a four-story house that had once been the home of a nineteenth-century banker. She’d chosen the place because she liked the carefully preserved period detail: elaborate ceiling moldings, medallions above the doorways, mahogany doors, bay
windows with French panes, two fireplaces (living room, bedroom) with ornately carved and highly polished marble mantels. The rooms had a feeling of permanence, continuity, stability.

Ginger prized constancy and stability more than anything, perhaps as a reaction to having lost her mother when she was only twelve.

Still shivering even though the apartment was warm, she put away the groceries in the breadbox and refrigerator, then went into the bathroom to look closely at herself in the mirror. She was very pale. She did not like the hunted, haunted look in her eyes.

To her reflection, she said, “What happened out there,
shnook?
You were a real
meshuggene,
let me tell you. Totally
farfufket.
But why? Huh? You’re the big-shot doctor, so tell me.
Why?
”

Listening to her voice as it echoed off the high ceiling of the bathroom, she knew she was in serious trouble. Jacob, her father, had been a Jew by virtue of his genes and heritage, and proud of it, but he had not been a Jew by virtue of his religious practices. He seldom went to synagogue and observed holidays in the same secular spirit with which many fallen-away Christians celebrated Easter and Christmas. And Ginger was one step further removed from the faith than Jacob had been, for she called herself an agnostic. Furthermore, while Jacob’s Jewishness was integral, evident in everything he did and said, that was not true of Ginger. If asked to define herself, she would have said, “Woman, physician, workaholic, political dropout,” and other things before finally remembering to add, “Jew.” The only time Yiddish peppered her speech was when she was in trouble, when she was deeply worried or scared, as if on a subconscious level she felt those words possessed talismanic value, charms against misfortune and catastrophe.

“Running through the streets, dropping your groceries, forgetting where you are, afraid when there’s no reason to be afraid, acting like a regular
farmishteh,
” she said disdainfully to her reflection. “People see you behaving like that, they’ll think for sure you’re a
shikker,
and people don’t go to doctors who’re drunkards.
Nu?
”

The talismanic power of the old words worked a little magic, not much but enough to bring color to her cheeks and soften the stark look in her eyes. She stopped shivering, but she still felt chilled.

She washed her face, brushed her silver-blond hair, and changed into pajamas and a robe, which was her usual ensemble for a typically self-indulgent Tuesday. She went into the small spare bedroom that she used as a home office, took the well-thumbed
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary
from the bookshelf, and opened it to the F listings.

Fugue.

She knew what the word meant, though she did not know why she
had come in here to consult the dictionary when it could tell her nothing new. Maybe the dictionary was another talisman. If she looked at the word in cold print, it would cease to have any power over her. Sure. Voodoo for the overeducated. Nevertheless, she read the entry:

She closed the dictionary and returned it to the shelf.

She had other reference volumes that could provide more detailed information about fugues, their causes and significance, but she decided not to pursue the matter. She simply could not believe her transient attack had been a symptom of a serious medical problem.

Maybe she was under too much stress, working too hard, and maybe the overload had led to that one, isolated, transient fugue. A two-or three-minute blank. A little warning. So she would continue taking off every Tuesday and would try to knock off work an hour earlier each day, and she would have no more problems.

She had worked very hard to be the doctor that her mother had hoped she would be, to make something special of herself and thereby honor her sweet father and the long-dead but well-remembered and desperately missed Swede. She had made many sacrifices to come this far. She had worked more weekends than not, had forgone vacations and most other pleasures. Now, in only six months, she would finish her residency and establish a practice of her own, and nothing would be allowed to interfere with her plans. Nothing was going to rob her of her dream.

Nothing.

It was November 12.

3

Elko County, Nevada

Ernie Block was afraid of the dark. Indoor darkness was bad, but the darkness of the outdoors, the vast blackness of night here in northern Nevada, was what most terrified Ernie. During the day he favored rooms with several lamps and lots of windows, but at night he preferred rooms with few windows or even no windows at all because sometimes it seemed to him that the night was pressing against the glass, as if it were a living creature that wanted to get in at him and gobble him up. He obtained no
relief from drawing the drapes, for he still knew the night was out there, waiting for its chance.

He was deeply ashamed of himself. He did not know why he had recently become afraid of the dark. He just
was.

Millions of people shared his phobia, of course, but nearly all of them were children. Ernie was fifty-two.

On Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving, he worked alone in the motel office because Faye had flown to Wisconsin to visit Lucy, Frank, and the grandkids. She would not be back until Tuesday. Come December, they intended to close up for a week and both go to Milwaukee for Christmas with the kids; but this time Faye had gone by herself.

Ernie missed her terribly. He missed her because she was his wife of thirty-one years
and
his best friend. He missed her because he loved her more now than he had on their wedding day. And because…without Faye, the nights alone seemed longer, deeper, darker than ever.

By two-thirty Friday afternoon he had cleaned all the rooms and changed the linens, and the Tranquility Motel was ready for its next wave of journeyers. It was the only lodging within twelve miles, perched on a knoll north of the superhighway, a neat little way station on a vast expanse of sagebrush-strewn plains that sloped up into grassy meadows. Elko lay over thirty miles to the east, Battle Mountain forty miles to the west. The town of Carlin and the tiny village of Beowawe were closer, though from the Tranquility Motel Ernie had not a glimpse of either settlement. In fact, from the parking lot, no other building was visible in any direction, and there was probably no motel in the world more aptly named than this one.

Ernie was now in the office, working with a can of wood stain, touching up a few scratches on the oak counter where guests signed in and checked out. The counter was not really in bad shape. He was just keeping busy until customers started pulling in from Interstate 80 in the late afternoon. If he did not keep his mind occupied, he would start thinking about how early dusk arrived in November, and he would begin to worry about nightfall, and then by the time darkness actually came, he would be as jumpy as a cat with a can tied to its tail.

The motel office was a shrine to light. From the moment he had opened at six-thirty this morning, every lamp had been burning. A squat fluorescent lamp with a flexible neck stood on the oak desk in the work area behind the check-in counter, casting a pale rectangle on the green felt blotter. A brass floor lamp glowed in the corner by the file cabinets. On the public side of the counter was a carousel of postcards, a wall rack holding about forty paperbacks, another rack full of free travel brochures, a single slot machine by the door, and a beige sofa flanked by end
tables and ginger-jar lamps equipped with three-way bulbs—75, 100, and 150 watts—which were turned up all the way. There was a frosted-glass ceiling fixture, too, with two bulbs, and of course most of the front wall of the office featured a large window. The motel faced south-southwest, so at this time of day the declining sun’s honey-colored beams angled through the enormous pane, giving an amber tint to the white wall behind the sofa, fracturing into hundreds of bright erratic lines in the crackled glaze of the ginger-jar lamps, and leaving blazing reflections in the brass medallions that ornamented the tables.

When Faye was here, Ernie left some of the lamps off because she was sure to remark on the waste of electricity and extinguish a few of them. Leaving a lamp unlit made him uneasy, but he endured the sight of dead bulbs in order to keep his secret. As far as he knew, Faye was not aware of the phobia that had been creeping up on him during the past four months, and he did not want her to know because he was ashamed of this sudden strangeness in himself and because he did not want to worry her. He did not know the cause of his irrational fear, but he knew he would conquer it, sooner or later, so there was no sense in humiliating himself and causing Faye unnecessary anxiety over a temporary condition.

He refused to believe that it was serious. He had been ill only rarely in his fifty-two years. He had only been laid up in the hospital once, after taking a bullet in the butt and another one in the back during his second tour of duty in Vietnam. There had never been mental illness in his family, and Ernest Eugene Block was absolutely sure-as-hell-and-without-a-doubt
not
going to be the first one of his clan to go crawling and whimpering to a psychiatrist’s couch. You could bet your ass on that and never have to worry what you would sit on. He would tough this out, weird as it was, unsettling as it was.

It had begun in September, a vague uneasiness that built in him as nightfall approached and that remained until dawn. At first he was not troubled every night, but it got steadily worse, and by the middle of October, dusk always brought with it an inexplicable spiritual distress. By early November the distress became fear, and during the past two weeks his anxiety grew until now his days were measured—and almost totally defined—by this perplexing fear of the darkness to come. For the past ten days, he’d avoided going out after nightfall, and thus far Faye had not noticed, though she could not remain oblivious much longer.

Ernie Block was so big that it was ridiculous for him to be afraid of
anything.
He was six feet tall and so solidly and squarely built that his surname was equally suitable as a one-word description of him. His wiry gray hair was brush-cut, revealing slabs of skullbone, and his facial features were clean and appealing, though so squared-off that he looked as if
he had been carved out of granite. His thick neck, massive shoulders, and barrel chest gave him a top-heavy appearance. When he had been a high-school football star, the other players called him “Bull,” and during his twenty-eight-year career in the Marines, from which he had been retired for six years, most people called him “sir,” even some who were of equal rank. They would be astonished to learn that, lately, Ernie Block’s palms got sweaty every day when sunset drew near.

Now, intent upon keeping his thoughts far from sunset, he dawdled over the repairs to the counter and finally finished at three-forty-five. The quality of the daylight had changed. It was no longer honey-colored but amber-orange, and the sun was drawing down toward the west.

At four o’clock he got his first check-in, a couple his own age, Mr. and Mrs. Gilney, who were heading home to Salt Lake City after spending a week in Reno, visiting their son. He chatted with them and was disappointed when they took their key and left.

The sunlight was completely orange now, burnt orange, no yellow in it at all. The high, scattered clouds had been transformed from white sailing ships to gold and scarlet galleons gliding eastward above the Great Basin in which almost the entire state of Nevada lay.

Ten minutes later a cadaverous man, visiting the area on special assignment for the Bureau of Land Management, took a room for two days.

Alone again, Ernie tried not to look at his watch.

He tried not to look at the windows, either, for beyond the glass the day was bleeding away.

I’m not going to panic, he told himself. I’ve been to war, seen the worst a man can see, and by God I’m still
here,
still as big and ugly as ever, so I won’t come unglued just because night is coming.

By four-fifty the sunlight was no longer orange but bloody red.

His heart was speeding up, and he began to feel as if his rib cage had become a vise that was squeezing his vital organs between its jaws.

He went to the desk, sat down in the chair, closed his eyes, and did some deep-breathing exercises to calm himself.

He turned on the radio. Sometimes music helped. Kenny Rogers was singing about loneliness.

The sun touched the horizon and slowly sank out of sight. The crimson afternoon faded to electric blue, then to a luminous purple that reminded Ernie of day’s end in Singapore, where he had been stationed for two years as an embassy guard when he had been a young recruit.

It came. The twilight.