Strangers

Page 46

Each night he contacted Parker Faine in Laguna Beach, hoping that the unknown correspondent had sent an additional message.
No message was received.
Each night before sleep came, he tried to understand the impossible dance of paper moons. And he sought an explanation of the circular, swollen, red rings in his hands, which he had watched fade as he knelt in a drift of moons in Lomack's living room. No understanding came.
Day by day, his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminished, but his unremembered nightmaresthe moongrew worse. Each night, he fought fiercely against the tether with which he moored himself to his bed.
By Saturday, Dom still suspected that the answer to his night fear and somnambulism lay in Reno. But he decided that he must not change his plans, must go on to Mountainview. If he concluded the journey without achieving satori, he could return to Reno at that time.
The summer before last, he departed Harrah's at tenthirty a m. Friday, July 6, after an early lunch. On Saturday, January 11, he therefore followed that timetable, driving onto I-80 at tenforty, heading northeast across the Nevada wasteland toward distant Winnemucca, where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed a bank in another age.
The immense unpopulated expanses of land were little different from the way they had been a thousand years ago. The highway and power lines, often the only signs of civilization, followed the route that had been called the Humboldt Trail in the days of wagon trains. Dom drove over barren plains and hills bearded with scrub, through an uninviting yet starkly beautiful primeval world of sagebrush, sand, alkaline flats, dry lakes, solidified lava beds with columnar crystallizations, distant mountains. Sheered bluffs and veined monoliths showed traces of borax, sulfur, alum, and salt. Isolated rocky buttes were splendidly painted in ocher, amber, umber, and gray. North of the trackless Humboldt Sink, where the Humboldt River simply vanished into the thirsty earth, were more streams, as well as the Humboldt itself, and here the forbidding land featured some contrastingly fertile valleys with lush grasses and treescottonwoods, willows, though not in profusion. Adequate water meant communities and agriculture, but even in the hospitable valleys, the settlements were small, the grip of civilization tenuous.
As always, Dom was humbled by the vastness of the West. But the landscape also aroused new feelings this time: a sense of mystery and an unsettling awareness of limitlessand eeriepossibilities. Hurtling through this lonely realm, it was easy to believe something frightening had happened to him here.
At twofortyfive he stopped for gasoline and a sandwich in Winnemucca, a town of only five thousand souls yet by far the largest in a county of sixteen thousand square miles. Then I-80 turned eastward. The land rose gradually toward the rim of the Great Basin. More mountains peaked on every horizon, with snow far down their slopes, and more bunchgrass appeared midst the sagebrush, and there were genuine meadows in some places, though the desert was by no means left entirely behind.
At sunset, Dom pulled off the interstate at the Tranquility Motel, parked near the office, got out of the car, and was surprised by a cold wind. Having driven so long through deserts, he was psychologically prepared for heat, though he knew it was winter on the high plains. He reached into the car, grabbed a fleecelined suede jacket, and put it on. He started toward the motel . . . then stopped, suddenly apprehensive.
This was the place.
He did not know how he knew. But he knew.
Here, something strange had happened.
He had stopped here on Friday evening, July 6, the summer before last. He had found the curious isolation of the place and the majesty of the land enormously appealing and inspiring. Indeed, he had become convinced that this territory was good material for fiction, and he had decided to stay a couple of days to familiarize himself with it and to brood about story ideas suitable to the background. He had not left for Mountainview, Utah, until Tuesday morning, the 10th of July.
Now, he turned slowly, studying the scene in the fastfading light, hoping to prick his memory. As he turned, he became convinced that what had happened to him here was more important than anything that would ever happen to him, anywhere, as long as he lived.
The diner, with its big windows and blue neon sign, was at the western end of the complex, detached from the motel, surrounded by a large parking lot to accommodate longhaul trucks, of which three were in attendance. The entire length of the singlestory white motel was served by a breezeway sheltered under an aluminum awning that glistened darkly with a wellkept coat of forestgreen enamel. The west wing had ten rooms with glossy green doors. It was separated from the east wing by a twostory section that housed the office on the first floor and, no doubt, the owner's quarters on the second. Unlike the west wing, the east wing was Lshaped, with six rooms in the first section, four in the shorter arm. Dom kept turning and saw the dark sky in the east, the interstate dwindling into that gloom, then the immense and uninhabited panorama of shadowed land to the south. More plains and mountains lay in the west, where the sky above was streaked crimson by the sunset.
Moment by moment, Dom's apprehension grew, until he had turned in a complete circle and was looking once more at the Tranquility Grille. As if in a dream, he moved toward the diner. By the time he reached the door, his heart was hammering. He had the urge to flee.
Steeling himself, he opened the door and went inside.
It was a clean welllighted place, cozy and warm. Delicious odors filled the air: French fries, onions, fresh hamburger sizzling on the griddle, frying ham.
In dreamlike fear, he crossed to an empty table. A ketchup bottle, a squeezebottle of mustard, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and an ashtray were clustered in the center. He picked up the salt shaker.
For a moment he did not know why he had picked it up, but then he remembered sitting at this very table the summer before last, his first night at the Tranquility Motel. He had spilled a bit of salt and had reflexively cast a pinch of it over his shoulder, inadvertently throwing it in the face of a young woman approaching behind him.
He sensed that the incident was important, but he did not know why. Because of the woman? Who had she been? A stranger. What had she looked like? He tried to recall her face but could not.
His heart raced without apparent reason. He felt as if he were on the brink of some devastating revelation.
He strove to recall additional details, but they eluded him.
He put the salt shaker down. Still moving dreamily, shivering with unfocused anxiety, he crossed to the corner booth by the front windows. It was unoccupied, but Dom was sure that the young woman, having blinked the salt out of her eyelashes, had come here that other night.
“Can I help you?”
Dom was aware that a waitress in a yellow sweater was standing beside him and had spoken to him, but he remained spellbound by the tantalizing ascension of some terrible memory. It had not swum into view yet, but it was rising, rising. The woman out of his past, whose face remained a blank to him, had sat in this booth, radiantly beautiful in the orange light of the sunset.
“Mister? Is something wrong?”
The young woman had ordered dinner, and Dom had gone on with his meal, and the sunset had faded, and night had fallen, and- No!.
The memory swam out of the deeps, almost broke through the murky surface into light, into his consciousness, but at the last moment he recoiled from it in panic, as if he had seen the horrible face of some monstrously evil leviathan streaking toward him. Abruptly not wanting to remember, refusing, Dom loosed a wordless cry, stumbled back, turned away from the startled waitress, and ran. He was aware of people staring, aware that he was making a scene, but he did not give a damn. All he cared about was getting out. He hit the door, flung it open, and rushed out under a postsunset, black, purple, and scarlet sky.
He was afraid. Afraid of the past. Afraid of the future.
But afraid mostly because he did not know why he was afraid.
Chicago, Illinois.
Brendan Cronin was saving his announcement for after dinner, when Father Wycazik, with a full belly and with a glass of brandy in hand, would be in his best mood of the day. Meanwhile, in the company of Fathers Wycazik and Gerrano, he ate a hearty dinner: double portions of potatoes and beans and ham, disposing of a third of a loaf of homemade bread.
Though he had regained his appetite, he had not regained his faith. When his belief in God had collapsed, it had left in him a terrible dark emptiness and despair, but now the despair was gone, and the emptiness, though not entirely filled, was shrinking. He was beginning to perceive that one day he might lead a meaningful life that had nothing to do with the Church. For Brendanfor whom no temporal pleasures had been as enticing as the spiritual joy of the Massthe mere contemplation of a secular life was a revolutionary development.
Perhaps his despair had lifted because, since Christmas, he had at least journeyed along from atheism to a qualified agnosticism. Recent events had conspired to make him consider the existence of a Power that, though not necessarily God, was nevertheless above nature.
After dinner, Father Gerrano went upstairs to spend a few hours with the latest novel by James Blaylock, the fantasist whom Brendan, too, found interesting, but whose colorful tales of bizarre fantasy creatures and even more bizarre human beings were too imaginative for a hardnosed realist like Father Wycazik. Adjourning to the study with Brendan, the rector said, "He writes well, but when I'm finished with one of his stories, I get the peculiar feeling that nothing's what it seems to be, and I don't like that feeling."
“Maybe nothing is what it seems to be,” Brendan said.
The rector shook his head, and his gray hair caught the light in such a way that it looked like steel wire. "No, when I read for entertainment, I prefer it in big, solid, heavy blocks that let you grapple with the reality of life."
Grinning broadly, Brendan said, "If there's a heaven, Father, and if I somehow manage to get there with you, I hope I'll have a chance to arrange a meeting between you and Walt Disney. I'd love to see you convince him that he should've spent his time animating the collected works of Dostoevsky instead of the adventures of Mickey Mouse."
Laughing at himself, the rector poured their drinks, and they settled into armchairs, the fallen priest with a glass of schnapps, his superior with a small brandy.
Deciding there would be no better time for his news, Brendan said, "If it's all right with you, I'll be going away for a while, Father. I'd like to leave on Monday, if I can. I need to go to Nevada."
“Nevada?” Father Wycazik made it sound as if his curate had just said Bangkok or Timbuktu. “Why Nevada?”
With the taste of peppermint schnapps on his tongue and the scent burning his sinuses, Brendan said, "That's where I'm being called ' Last night, in the dream, though I still saw nothing but a brilliant light, I suddenly knew where I was. Elko County, Nevada. And I knew I must go back there in order to find an explanation for Emmy's cure and Winton's resurrection."
“Back there? You've been there before?”
“The summer before last. Just before I came to St. Bernadette's.”
Upon leaving his post with Monsignor Orbella in Rome, Brendan had flown directly to San Francisco to carry out a final assignment from his Vatican mentor. He stayed two weeks with Bishop John Santefiore, an old friend of Orbella. The bishop was writing a book on the history of papal selection, and Brendan came laden with research material provided by the monsignor in Rome. It was his job to answer any questions about those documents. John Santefiore was a charming man with a sly dry wit, and the days flashed past.
His task concluded, Brendan was left with two weeks to himself before he was required to report to his superiors in Chicago, his hometown, where he would be assigned as curate to some parish in that archdiocese. He spent a few days in Carmel, on the Monterey Peninsula. Then, making up his mind to see some of the country that he had never seen before, Brendan set out on a long drive eastward in a rental car.
Now, Father Wycazik leaned forward, brandy snifter clasped in both hands. "I remembered about Bishop Santefiore, but I'd forgotten you drove from there to here. And you passed through Elko County, Nevada?"
"Stayed there, at a motel in the middle of nowhere. Tranquility Motel. I stopped for the night, but it was so peaceful, the countryside so beautiful, that I stayed a few days. Now I've got to go back."
“Why? What happened to you out there?”
Brendan shrugged. "Nothing. I just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple books. Watched TV. They have good TV reception even way out there because they've got their own little receiver dish on the roof."
Father Wycazik cocked his head. "What's wrong? There for a moment you sounded . . . odd. Wooden . . . as if repeating something you'd memorized."
“I was just telling you what it was like.”
"So if nothing happened to you there, why is the place so special? What will happen when you go back there?"
“I'm not sure. But it's going to be something . . . incredible.”
Finally revealing his frustration with his curate's obtuseness, Father Wycazik put the question bluntly: “Is it God calling you?”
"I don't think so. But maybe. A slim maybe. Father, I want your permission to go. But if I can't have your blessing, I'll go anyway."
Father Wycazik took a larger swallow of brandy than was his habit. "I think you should go, but I don't think you should go alone."
Brendan was surprised. “You want to come with me?”
"Not me. I've got St. Bette's to run. But you should be in the company of a qualified witness. A priest familiar with these things, one who can verify any miracle or miraculous visitation-"
"You mean some cleric who has the Cardinal's imprimatur to investigate every hysterical report of weeping statues of the Holy Mother, bleeding crucifixes, and divine manifestations of all kinds."
Father Wycazik nodded. "That's right. Someone who knows the process of authentication. I had in mind Monsignor Janney of the archdiocese's office of publications. He's had a lot of practice."
Reluctant to disappoint his rector but determined to proceed in his own fashion, Brendan interrupted: "There's no visitation involved here, so there's no need for Monsignor Janney. None of this has an obvious Christian significance or source."
“And who ever said God isn't permitted to be subtle?”
Father Wycazik asked. His grin made it clear he expected to win this argument.
“These things could all be merely psychic phenomena.”
"Bah! Claptrap. Psychic phenomena are just the nonbeliever's pathetic explanation for glimpses of the divine hand at work. Examine these events closely, Brendan; open your heart to the meaning of them, and you'll see the truth. God's calling you back to His bosom. And I believe a divine visitation is what this may be building toward."