Strangers

Page 3

Something had frightened her.
She could not remember what it had been.
Gradually the fear subsided, and her breathing! rei!ained an almost regular rhythm; her heartbeat slowed slightly.
She raised her head and blinked her eyes, looking around warily and in bafflement as her tearbluffed vision slowly cleared. She turned her face up until she saw the bare black branches of a linden and a low, ominous gray November sky beyond the skeletal tree. Antique iron gas lamps glowed softly, activated by solenoids that had mistaken the wintry morning for the onset of dusk. At the top of the hill stood the Massachusetts State House, and at the bottom the traffic was heavy where Mount Vernon intersected Charles Street.
Bernstein's Delicatessen. Yes, of course. It was Tuesday, and she had been at Bernstein's when . . . when something happened.
What? What had happened at Bernstein's?
And where was the deli bag?
She let go of the iron railing, raised her hands, and blotted her eyes on her blue knit gloves.
Gloves. Not hers, not these gloves. The myopic man in the Russian hat. His black leather gloves. That was what had frightened her.
But why had she been gripped by hysteria, overwhelmed by dread at the sight of them? What was so frightening about black gloves?
Across the street, an elderly couple watched her intently, and she wondered what she had done to draw their attention. Though she strained to remember, she could not summon the faintest recollection of her journey up the hill. The past three minutesperhaps longer?-were utterly blank. She must have run up Mount Vernon Street in a panic. Evidently, judging by the expressions on the faces of those observing her, she had made quite a spectacle of herself.
Embarrassed, she turned away from them and started hesitantly down Mount Vernon Street, back the way she had come. At the bottom, just around the corner, she found her bag of groceries lying on its side on the pavement. She stood over it for long seconds, staring at the crumpled brown bundle, trying to recall the moment when she had dropped it. But where that moment should have been, her memory contained only grayness, nothingness.
What's wrong with me?
A few items had spilled from the fallen parcel, but none was torn open, so she put them back in the paper sack.
Unsettled by her baffling loss of control, weak in the knees, she headed home, her breath pluming in the frosty air. After a few steps she halted. Hesitated. Finally she turned back toward Bernstein's.
She stopped just outside the deli and had to wait only a minute or two before the man in the Russian hat and the tortoiseshell glasses came out with a grocery bag of his own.
“Oh.” He blinked in surprise. "Uh . . . listen, did I say I'm sorry? The way you stormed out of there, I thought maybe I'd only meant to say it, you know -"
She stared at his leathersheathed 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 nineteenthcentury 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) withornately 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 bigshot 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 fallenaway Christians celebrated Easter and Christmas. And Ginger was one step farther 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 whore 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 silverblond hair, and changed into pajamas and a robe, which was her usual ensemble for a typically selfindulgent Tuesday. She went into the small spare bedroom that she used as a home office, took the wellthumbed 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:
fugue (fyug) [L. fuga, flight]. Serious personality dissociation. Leaving home or surroundings on impulse. Upon recovering from the fugue state there usually is loss of memory for actions occurring while in the state.
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 threeminute 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 longdead but wellremembered 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 fiftytwo.
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 thirtyone 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 twothirty 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 sagebrushstrewn 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 sixthirty 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 checkin 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 gingerjar lamps equipped with threeway bulbs-75, 100, and 150 wattswhich were turned up all the way. There was a frostedglass ceiling fixture, too,
with two bulbs, and of course most of the front wall of the office featured a large window. The motel faced southsouthwest, so at this time of day the declining sun's honeycolored 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 gingerjar 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 fiftytwo 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 sureashellandwithoutadoubt 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 measuredand almost totally definedby 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 oneword description of him. His wiry gray hair was brushcut, revealing slabs of skullbone, and his facial features were clean and appealing, though so squaredoff that he looked as if he had been carved out of granite. His thick neck, massive shoulders, and barrel chest gave him a topheavy appearance. When he had been a highschool football star, the other players called him “Bull,” and during his twentyeightyear 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 threefortyfive. The quality of the daylight had changed. It was no longer honeycolored but amberorange, and the sun was drawing down toward the west.
At four o'clock he got his first checkin, 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.