Strangers

Page 33

Zebediah was surprised by his own sudden interest in stargazing. For most of his fifty years, Zeb Lomack, a professional gambler, had shown little interest in anything but cards. He worked Reno, Lake Tahoe, Vegas, occasionally one of the smaller gambling towns like Elko or Bullhead City, playing poker with the tourists and local wouldbe poker champs. He was not only good at card games: He loved cards more than he loved women, booze, food. Even the money was not important to Zeb; it was just a handy byproduct of playing cards. The important thing was staying in the game.
Until he got the telescope and went crazy.
For a couple of months he used the scope on a casual basis, and he bought a few more books on astronomy, and it was just a hobby. But by last Christmas he began to focus his attention less on the stars than on the moon, and thereafter something strange happened to him. The new hobby soon became as interesting as card games, and he found himself canceling planned excursions to the casinos in order to study the lunar surface. By February, he was glued to the eyepiece of the Tasco every night that the moon was visible. By April he built a collection of books about the moon that numbered more than one hundred, and he went out to play cards only two or three nights a week. By the end of June, his book collection had grown to five hundred titles, and he had begun to paper the bedroom walls and ceiling with pictures of the moon clipped from old magazines and newspapers. He no longer played cards, but began living off his savings, and thereafter his interest in things lunar ceased to bear any resemblance to a hobby and became a mad obsession.
By September, his book collection had grown to more than fifteen hundred volumes stacked throughout his small house. During the day, he read about the moon or, more often, sat for hours staring intently at photographs of it, unable either to understand or to resist its allure, until its craters and ridges and plains became as familiar to him as the five rooms of his own house. On those nights when the moon was visible, he studied it through the telescope until he could no longer stay awake, until his eyes were bloodshot and sore.
Before this obsession took control of him, Zeb Lomack had been a ruggedly hewn and relatively fit man. But as his preoccupation with things lunar tightened its grip, he stopped exercising and began eating junk foodcake, ice cream, TV dinners, bologna sandwichesbecause he no longer had time to prepare good meals. Furthermore, the moon not only fascinated him but also made him uneasy, filled him not only with wonder but with dread, so he was always nervous; and he tranquilized himself with food. He became softer, flabbier,
though he was only minimally aware of the physical changes he was undergoing.
By early October, he thought about the moon every hour of every day, dreamed of it, and could go nowhere in his house without seeing hundreds of images of the lunar face. He had not stopped repapering the walls when he had finished his bedroom in June, but had carried that project throughout. The fullcolor and blackandwhite moon pictures came from astronomy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. On one of his infrequent ventures out of the house, he had seen a threebyfivefoot poster of the moon, a color photograph taken by astronauts, and he had bought fifty copies, enough to paper the ceiling and every wall in the living room; he had even taped the poster over the windows, so every square inch of the room was decorated with that repeating image, except for doorways. He moved the furniture out, transforming the empty chamber into a planetarium where the show never changed. Sometimes he'd lie on his back on the floor and stare up and around at those fifty moons, transported by an exhilarating sense of wonder and an inexplicable terror, neither of which he could understand.
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 felttip 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 longforgotten 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 withand underlying fear ofthe 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 moonfilled 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 sawreally sawthe mess in which he'd been living, a situation previously masked by his allencompassing 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 waddedup and discarded potatochip 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 cleanshaven, 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, sicklylooking skin; a twoweek 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 lizardthings 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 garbagestrewn 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 helpjust 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 moondream 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 snowcovered back yard, 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 he**in 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 longforgotten 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 moondream and, instead of destroying the objects of his obsession, he was recollecting 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 halfsister, Carla, only once called her sisterinlaw 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 windowwall 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."