Strangers

Page 45

“Go to the police. It's their job to help.”
Ginger shook her head. "No. The police are slow, too slow. Most of them are overworked, and the rest are just bureaucrats in uniforms. My problem's too urgent to wait for them to solve it. Besides, I don't trust them. Suddenly I don't trust authorities of any kind. The tapes Pablo made of our sessions were gone when I took the police back to his apartment, so I didn't mention them. I spooked. I didn't tell the cops about my fugues or about how Pablo had been helping me. I just said we'd been friends, that I'd stopped by to have lunch and walked in on the killer. I let them think it was an ordinary
burglary. Sheer paranoia. Didn't trust them. Still don't. So the cops are out.“ ”Then find another hypnotist to regress you-"
“No. I'm not risking any more innocent lives,” she repeated.
“I understand. But those are the only suggestions I have.”
He shoved both hands into the deep pockets of his overcoat. “I'm sorry.”
“No need to be,” she said.
He started to turn away, hesitated, sighed. "Doctor, I want you to understand me. I served in the war, the big war, with some distinction. Later, I was a good ambassador. As head of the CIA and as a senator, I made many difficult decisions, some that put me in personal danger. I never backed away from risk. But I'm an old man now. Seventysix, and I feel older. Parkinson's. A bad heart. High blood pressure. I have a wife I love very much, and if anything happens to me, she'll be alone. I don't know how well she'd deal with being alone, Dr. Weiss."
“Please, there's no need to justify yourself,” Ginger said. She realized how completely and quickly their roles had reversed. In the beginning, he had been the one full of reassurances and absolution; now she was returning the favor. Jacob, her father, had often said that the capacity for mercy was humankind's greatest virtue, and that the giving and receiving of mercy formed a bond unbreakable. Ginger remembered Jacob's words now because, in allowing Alex Christophson to allay her guilt and in trying to allay his, she felt that bond.
Apparently, he felt it, too, for although he did not stop trying to explain himself, his explanations became more intimate and were offered now in a tone of voice that was less defensive and more conspiratorial. "Quite frankly, Doctor, my reluctance to get involved is not so much because I find life infinitely precious but because I am increasingly afraid of death." As he spoke, he reached into an inside pocket and withdrew a notepad and pen. "In my life I've done some things of which I'm not proud." Holding the pen in his palsied right hand, he began to print. "True, most of those sins were committed in the line of duty. Government and espionage are both necessary, but neither is a clean business. In those days, I didn't believe in God or an afterlife. Now I wonder.... And wondering, I'm sometimes afraid." He tore the top page from the pad. "Afraid of what might await me after death, you see. That's why I want to hold on to life as long as I can, Doctor. That's why, God help me, I've become a coward in my old age."
As Christophson folded and passed to her the slip of paper on which he had been printing, Ginger realized that he had managed to put his back to all of the remaining mourners before he had removed the notepad and pen from his coat. No one could have seen what he had done.
He said, "I've just given you the phone number of an antique store in Greenwich, Connecticut. My younger brother, Philip, owns the place. You can't call me direct because the wrong people may have seen us talking; my telephone might be tapped. I won't risk associating with you, Dr. Weiss, and I won't pursue any investigation of your problem. However, I have many years of broad experience in these matters, and there may be times when that experience will be of help to you. You may encounter something you don't understand, a situation you don't know how to deal with, and I may be able to offer advice. Just call Philip and leave your number with him. He'll immediately call me at home and use a prearranged codeword. Then I'll go out to a pay phone, return his call, get the number you left with him, and contact you as quickly as possible. Experience, my peculiar kind of malevolent experience, is all I'm willing to offer you, Dr. Weiss."
“It's more than enough. You're not obligated to help me at all.”
“Good luck.” He turned abruptly and walked away, his boots crunching in the frozen snow.
Ginger returned to the grave, where Rita, the mortician, and two laborers were the only people remaining. The velvet curtain around the grave had been collapsed and removed. A plastic tarpaulin had been pulled off a waiting mound of earth.
“What was that all about?” Rita asked.
“Tell you later,” Ginger said, bending down to pick up a rose from the pile of flowers beside Pablo Jackson's final resting place. She leaned forward and tossed the bloom into the hole, on top of the casket. "Alay hasholem. May this sleep be only a little dream between this world and something better. Baru(Th haShem."
As she and Rita walked away, Ginger heard the laborers begin to shovel dirt onto the casket.
Elko County, Nevada.
On Thursday, Dr. Fontelaine was satisfied that Ernie Block was cured of his disabling nyctophobia. “Fastest cure I've ever seen,” he said. "I guess you Marines are tougher than ordinary mortals."
On Saturday, January 11, after only four weeks in Milwaukee, Ernie and Faye went home. They flew into Reno on United, then caught a tenseat commuter flight to Elko, arriving at eleventwentyseven in the morning.
Sandy Sarver met them at the airport in Elko, though Ernie did not immediately recognize her. She was standing by the small terminal, in the crystalline Winter sunshine, waving as Ernie and Faye disembarked. Gond was the palefaced mouse, the familiar slumpshouldered frump. For the first time since Ernie had known her, Sandy was wearing a little makeup, eye shadow, and lipstick. Her nails were no longer bitten. Her hair, always limp and dull and neglected in the past, was now full, glossy. She had gained ten pounds. She had always looked older than she was. Now she looked years younger.
She blushed when Ernie and Faye raved about her makeover. She pretended the changes were of little consequence, but she was clearly pleased by their praise, approval, and delight.
She had changed in other ways, as well. For one thing, she was usually reticent and shy, but as they walked to the parking lot and put the baggage in the back of her red pickup, she asked lots of questions about Lucy, Frank, and the grandchildren. She did not ask about Ernie's phobia because she knew nothing of it; they had kept his condition secret and had explained the extension of their Wisconsin visit by saying they wanted to spend more time with the grandchildren. In the truck, as Sandy drove through Elko and onto the interstate, she was downright garrulous as she spoke of the Christmas just past and of business at the Tranquility Grille.
As much as anything, Sandy's driving surprised Ernie. He knew she had an aversion to fourwheel travel. But now she drove fast, with an ease and skill Ernie had never seen in her before.
Faye, sitting between Ernie and Sandy, was aware of this change, too, for she gave Ernie meaningful looks when Sandy maneuvered the pickup with special fluidity and audacity.
Then a bad thing happened.
Less than a mile from the motel, Ernie's interest in Sandy's metamorphosis was suddenly displaced by the queer feeling that had first seized him on December 10, when he'd been coming home from Elko with the new lighting fixtures: the feeling that a particular piece of ground, half a mile ahead, south of the highway, was calling him. The feeling that something strange had happened to him out there. As before, it was simultaneously an absurd and gripping feeling, characterized by the eerie attraction of a talismanic place in a dream.
This was an unsettling development because Ernie had supposed that the peculiar magnetism of that place had been, somehow, a part of the same mental disturbance that resulted in his crippling dread of the dark. His nyctophobia cured, he had assumed that all other symptoms of his temporary psychological imbalance would disappear along with his fear of the night. So this seemed like a bad sign. He did not want to consider what it might indicate about the permanency of his cure.
Faye was telling Sandy about Christmas morning with the grandkids, and Sandy was laughing, but to Ernie the laughter and conversation faded. As they drew nearer the plot of ground that exerted a mesmeric attraction on him, Ernie squinted through the sunstreaked windshield, possessed by a sense of impending epiphany. Something of monumental importance seemed about to happen, and he was filled with fear and awe.
Then, as they were passing that beguiling place, Ernie became aware that their speed had dropped. Sandy had slowed to under forty miles an hour, half the speed she had maintained since Elko. Even as Ernie realized the truck had slowed, it accelerated again. He looked at Sandy too late to be certain that she also had been temporarily spellbound by that same portion of the landscape, for now she was listening to Faye and watching the road ahead and bringing the pickup back to speed. But it seemed to him there was a strange look on her face, and he stared at her in bewilderment, wondering how she could share his mysterious and irrational fascination with that piece of quite ordinary land.
“It's good to be home,” Faye said as Sandy switched on the rightturn signal and steered the truck toward the exit lane.
Ernie watched Sandy for an indication that she had slowed the truck in answer to the same eerie call that he felt, but he saw none of the fear that the call engendered in him. She was smiling. He must have been wrong. She had slowed the truck for some other reason.
A chill had taken residence in his bones, and now as they drove up the sloped county road and turned into the motel lot, he felt a cold damp dew of sweat on his palms, on his scalp.
He looked at his watch. Not because he needed to know the time. But because he wanted to know how long until sundown. About five hours.
What if it wasn't darkness in general that he feared? What if it was a specific darkness? Perhaps he had quickly overcome his phobia in Milwaukee because he was only mildly frightened by the night out there. Perhaps his real fear, his deep fear, was of the darkness of the Nevada plains. Could a phobia be that narrowly focused, that localized?
Surely not. Yet he looked at his watch.
Sandy parked in front of the motel office, and when they got out of the truck and went around to the tailgate to get the luggage, she hugged both Faye and Ernie. "I'm glad you're back. I missed you both. Now I'd better get over to the diner and help Ned. Lunch hour's started."
Ernie and Faye watched Sandy as she hurried away, and Faye said, "What on earth do you suppose happened to her?"
“Damned if I know,” Ernie said.
Her breath steaming in the cold air, Faye said, "At first, I thought she must've learned she's pregnant. But now I don't think so. If she was pregnant and overjoyed about it, she'd have told us. She'd have been bursting with the news. I think it's something . . . else."
Ernie pulled two of the four suitcases out of the back of the truck and stood them on the ground, surreptitiously glancing at his watch as he put the bags down. Sundown was five minutes closer.
Faye sighed. “Well, whatever the cause, I'm sure happy for her.”
“Me, too,” Ernie said, lifting the other two bags out of the truck.
“Me too,' ” Faye said, affectionately mimicking him as she picked up the two lightest suitcases. "Don't play cool with me, you big softy. I know you've worried about her almost like you used to worry about our own Lucy. When you first saw the change in Sandy back at the airport, I was watching you, and I thought your heart was going to melt."
He followed her with the two heavier bags. "Do they have a medical term for a calamity like that, for a melting heart?"
“Sure. Cardioliquefaction.”
He laughed in spite of the tension that knotted his stomach. Faye was always able to make him laughusually when he needed it most. When they got inside; he would put his arms around her, kiss her, and convey her straight upstairs and into bed. Nothing else would be as certain to chase away the fear that had popped up in him like a jackinthebox. Time spent with Faye was always the best medicine.
She put her two bags down by the office door and fished her keys out of her purse.
When it had become clear, early on, that Ernie was likely to have an exceptionally swift recovery and that they would not need to stay in Milwaukee for months, Faye had decided against flying home to search for a motel manager. They simply kept the place closed. Now they needed to unlock, turn up the thermostat, clean away the accumulated dust.
A lot of work to be done . . . but still enough time for a little horizontal dancing first, Ernie thought with a grin.
He was standing behind Faye as she put the key in the office door, so fortunately she did not see him twitch and jump in surprise when the bright day was suddenly claimed by shadows. They were not actually plunged into darkness; a large cloud merely moved across the sun; the level of light dropped by no more than twenty percent. Yet even that was sufficient to startle and unnerve him.
He looked at his watch.
He looked toward the east, from whence the night would come.
I'll be all right, he thought. I'm cured.
On the road: Reno to Elko County. Following the paranormal experience in Lomack's house on Tuesday, when countless paper moons took orbit around him, Dominick Corvaisis spent a few days in Reno. On his previous journey from Portland to Mountainview, he had stayed over to research a series of short stories about gambling. Recreating that trip, he passed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in "The Biggest Little City in the World."
Dom wandered from casino to casino, watching gamblers. There were young couples, retirees, pretty young women, middleaged women in stretch pants and cardigans, leatherfaced cowboys fresh from the range and softfaced rich men on junkets from far cities, secretaries, truckers, executives, doctors, excons and offduty cops, hustlers and dreamers, escapees from every social background, drawn together by the hope and thrill of organized games of chance, surely the most democratizing industry on earth.
As during his previous visit, Dom gambled only enough to be part of the scene, for his primary purpose was to observe. After the storm of paper moons, he had reason to believe that Reno was the place where his life had been changed forever and where he would find the key to unlock his imprisoned memories. Those around him laughed, chattered, grumbled about the unkindness of cards, shouted to encourage the rolling dice, but Dom remained cool and alert, among them yet distanced from them, the better to spot any clue to the unremembered events in his past.
No clue was revealed.