Strangers

Page 8

"Oh, yeah? If I was all that disgusting, why on earth did you ever go out of your way to strike up a friendship with me?"
"Because, you thickheaded booby, I saw through your masquerade. I saw beyond the timidity, saw through the practiced dullness and the mask of insipidness. I sensed something special in you, saw glimpses and glimmers of it. That's what I do, you know. I see what other people can't. That's what any good artist does. He sees what most cannot."
“And you called me insipid?”
"It's trueabout what an artist does and about you being a rabbit. Remember how long you knew me before you found enough confidence to admit being a writer? Three months!"
“Well, in those days, I wasn't really a writer.”
"You had drawers full of stories! More than a hundred short stories, not one of which had ever been submitted to any publication anywhere! Not just because you were afraid of rejection. You were afraid of acceptance, too. Afraid of success. How many months did I have to hammer at you till you finally sent a couple to market?"
“I don't remember.”
"I do. Six months! I wheedled and cajoled and demanded and pushed and nagged until you broke down and started submitting stories. I'm a persuasive character, but prying you out of your rabbit hole was almost beyond even my formidable talent for persuasion."
With an almost obscene enthusiasm, Parker scooped up dripping masses of nachos and stuffed himself. After slurping his margarita, he said, "Even when your short stories started selling, you wanted to stop. I had to push you constantly. And after I left Oregon and came back here, when I left you on your own again, you only continued to submit stories for a few months. Then you crawled back into your rabbit hole."
Dom did not argue because everything the painter said was true. After leaving Oregon and returning to his home in Laguna, Parker continued to encourage Dom through letters and phone calls, but longdistance encouragement was insufficient to motivate him. He'd convinced himself that, after all, he was not a writer worthy of publication, in spite of more than a score of sales he'd racked up in less than a year. He stopped sending his stories to magazines and quickly fabricated another shell to replace the one Parker had helped him break out of. Though he was still compelled to produce stories, he reverted to his previous habit of consigning them to his deepest desk drawer, with no thought of marketing them. Parker had continued to urge him to write a novel, but Dom had been certain that his talent was too humble and that he was too lacking in selfdiscipline to tackle such a large and complex project. He tucked his head down once more, spoke softly, walked softly, and tried to live a life that was largely beneath notice.
“But the summer before last, all of that changed,” Parker said. "Suddenly you throw away your teaching career. You take the plunge and become a fulltime writer. Almost overnight, you change from an accountant type to a risktaker, a Bohemian. Why? You've never been clear about that. Why?"
Dominick frowned, considered the question for a moment, and was surprised that he had not thought about it much before this. "I don't know why. I really don't know."
At the University of Portland, he had been up for tenure, had felt that he would not be given it, and had grown panicky at the prospect of being cast loose from his sheltered moorings. Obsessed with keeping a low profile, he had faded too completely from the notice of the campus moversandshakers, and when the time arrived for the tenure board to consider him, they had begun to question whether he had embraced the University with sufficient enthusiasm to warrant a grant of lifetime employment. Dom was enough of a realist to see that, if the board refused tenure, he would find it difficult to obtain a position at another university, for the hiring committee would want to know why he had been turned down at Portland. In an uncharacteristic burst of selfpromotion, hoping to slip out from under the university's ax before it fell, he applied for positions at institutions in several Western states, emphasizing his published stories because that was the only thing worth emphasizing.
Mountainview College in Utah, with a student body of only four thousand, had been so impressed by the list of magazines in which he had published that they flew him from Portland for an interview. Dom made a considerable effort to be more outgoing than he had ever been before. He was offered a contract to teach English and creative writing with guaranteed tenure. He had accepted, if not with enormous delight then at least with enormous relief.
Now, on the terrace of Las Brisas, as the California sun slid out from behind a band of white jeweled clouds, he took a sip of his beer, sighed, and said, "I left Portland late in June that year. I had a UHaul trailer hooked to the car, just a small one, filled mostly with books and clothes. I was in a good mood. Didn't feel as if I'd failed at Portland. Not at all. I just felt . . . well, that I was getting a fresh start. I was really looking forward to life at Mountainview. In fact, I don't remember ever being happier than the day I hit the road."
Parker Faine nodded knowingly. "Of course you were happy!
You had tenure in a hick school, where not much would be expected of you, where your introversion would be excused as an artist's temperament."
“A perfect rabbit hole, huh?”
“Exactly. So why didn't you wind up teaching in Mountainview?”
"I told you before . . . at the last minute, when I got there the second week in July, I just couldn't bear the idea of going on with the kind of life I'd had before. I was tired of being a mouse, a rabbit."
“Just like that, you were repelled by the lowkey life. Why?”
“It wasn't very fulfilling.”
“But why were you tired of it all of a sudden?”
“I don't know.”
“You must have some idea. Haven't you thought about it a lot?”
“Surprisingly, I haven't,” Dom said. He stared out to sea for a long moment, watching a dozen sailboats and a large yacht as they moved majestically along the coast. "I just now realized how amazingly little I've thought about it. Strange I'm usually too selfanalytical for my own good, but in this case I've never probed very deeply."
“Ah ha!” Parker exclaimed. "I knew I was on the right trail! The changes you went through then are somehow related to the problems you're having now. So go on. So you told the people at Mountainview that you didn't want their job any more?"
“They weren't happy.”
“And you took a tiny apartment in town.”
"One room, plus kitchen and bath. Not much of a place. Nice view of the mountains, though."
“Decided to live on your savings while you wrote a novel?”
“There wasn't a lot in the bank, but I'd always been frugal.”
“Impulsive behavior. Risky. And not a damn bit like you,” Parker said. “So why did you do it? What changed you?”
"I guess it was building for a long time. By the time I got to Mountainview, my dissatisfaction was so great that I had to change."
Parker leaned back in his chair. "No good, my friend. There must be more to it than that. Listen, by your own admission, you were as happy as a pig in shit when you left Portland with your UHaul. You had a job with a livable salary, guaranteed tenure, in a place where no one was ever going to demand too much of you. All you had to do was settle down in Mountainview and disappear. But by the time you got there, you couldn't wait to throw it all over, move into a garret, and risk eventual starvation, all for your art. What the hell happened to you during that long drive to Utah?
Something must've given you a real jolt, something big enough to knock you out of your complacency."
“Nope. It was an uneventful trip.”
“Not inside your head, it wasn't.”
Dominick shrugged. "As far as I remember, I just relaxed, enjoyed the drive, took my time, looked at the scenery. . . ."
“Amigo!” Parker roared, startling their waiter, who was passing by. "Uno margarita! And another cerveza for my friend."
“No, no,” Dom said. “- I”
“You haven't finished that beer,” Parker said. "I know, I know. But you are going to finish it and drink another, and gradually you're going to loosen up, and we're going to get to the bottom of this sleepwalking. I'm sure it's related to the changes you underwent the summer before last. You know why I'm so sure? I'll tell you why I'm so sure. Nobody under goes two personality crises in two years for utterly unrelated reasons. The two have to be tied together somehow."
Dom grimaced. “I wouldn't exactly call this a personality crisis.”
“Oh, wouldn't you?” Leaning forward, lowering his shaggy head, putting all the force of his powerful personality behind the question, Parker said, “Wouldn't you really call it a crisis, my friend?”
Dom sighed. “Well . . . yeah. I guess maybe I would. A crisis.”
They left Las Brisas late that afternoon, without arriving at any answers. That night, when he went to bed, he was filled with dread, wondering where he would find himself in the morning.
And in the morning, he virtually exploded out of sleep with a shrill scream and found himself in total, claustrophobic darkness. Something had hold of him, something cold and clammy and strange and alive. He struck out blindly, flailed and clawed, twisted and kicked, freed himself, scrambled away in panic, through the cloying blackness, on his hands and knees, until he collided with a wall. The lightless room reverberated with thunderous pounding and shouting, an unnerving cacophony, the source of which he could not identify. He scrambled along the baseboard until he came to a junction of walls, where he put his back into the corner and faced out upon the lightless chamber, certain that the clammy creature would leap on him from the gloom.
What was in the room with him?
The noise grew louder: shouting, hammering, a crash followed by a clatterrattle of wood, more shouting, and another crash.
Still groggy from sleep, his senses distorted by hysteria and excess adrenaline, Dom was convinced that the thing from which he had been hiding had at last come for him. He had tried to fool it by sleeping in closets and behind the furnace. But tonight it would not be deceived: it meant to have him; he could hide no longer; the end had come.
From the darkness, someone or something shouted his name-“Dom!”-and he realized that someone had been calling to him for the last minute or two, maybe longer.
“Dominick, answer me!”
Another'shuddering crash. The brittle crack of splintering wood.
Huddling in the corner, Dom finally woke completely. The clammy creature had not been real. A figment of a dream. He recognized the voice calling to him as that of Parker Faine. Even as the residual hysteria of his nightmare subsided, another crash, the loudest of all, generated a chainreaction of destruction, a cracklingslidingscrapingtopplingcrashingboomingclatteringrattling that culminated with the opening of a door and the intrusion of light into the darkness.
Dom squinted against the glare and saw Parker silhouetted like some hulking troll in the bedroom door, the hall light behind him. The door had been locked, and Parker had forced it, had thrown himself against it until the lock disintegrated.
“Dominick, buddy, are you okay?”
The door had been barricaded as well, which had made entrance even more difficult. Dom saw that, in his sleep, he had evidently moved the dresser in front of the door, had stacked the two nightstands atop the dresser, and had put the bedroom armchair in front of it. Those overturned pieces of furniture now lay on the floor in a jumbled heap.
Parker stepped into the room. "Buddy? Are you all right?
You were screaming. I could hear you clear out in the driveway."
“A dream.”
“Must've been a lulu.”
“I can't remember what it was,” Dom said, remaining on the floor, in the corner, too exhausted and weakkneed to get up. "You're a sight for sore eyes, Parker. But ... what on earth are you doing here?"
Parker blinked. "Don't you know? You phoned me. Not more than ten minutes ago. You were shouting for help. You said they were here and were going to get you. Then you hung up."
Dom felt humiliation settle over him as if it were a painful burn.
“Ah, so you did make the call in your sleep,” the painter said. "Thought as much. You sounded ... not yourself. Maybe I should've called the police, but I suspected this sleepwalking thing. Knew you wouldn't want it brought into the open in front of strangers, a bunch of cops."
“I'm out of control, Parker. Something's . . . snapping inside me.”
“That's enough of that crap. I won't listen to any more of it.”
Dom felt like a helpless child. He was afraid he was going to cry. He bit his tongue, squeezed back the tears, cleared his throat, and said, “What time is it?”
“A few minutes after four. Middle of the night.” Parker looked toward the window and frowned.
Following the other man's gaze, Dom saw that the draperies were drawn tight shut and that the highboy had been moved in front of the window, barring entrance by that route. He had been busy in his sleep.
“Oh, Christ,” Parker said, moving to the bed, where he stopped, a vivid expression of shock on his broad face. "This is no good, my friend. This is no good at all."
Holding on to the wall, Dom rose shakily to his feet to see what Parker was talking about, but when he saw it, he wished he had remained on the floor. An arsenal was laid out on the bed: the .22 automatic that he usually kept in his nightstand; a butcher's knife; two other meat knives; a cleaver; a hammer; the ax he used for splitting firewood and which, the last he remembered, had been in the garage.
Parker said, "What were you expectinga Soviet invasion? What frightens you so?"
“I don't know. Something in my nightmares.”
“So what do you dream about?”
“I don't know.”
“You can't remember any of it?”
“No.” He shivered again, violently.
Parker came to him, put a hand on his shoulder. "You better take a shower, get dressed. I'll start rustling up some breakfast. Okay? Then I . . . I think we'd better pay a visit to that doctor of yours as soon as his office opens. I think he's got to take a second look at you."
Dominick nodded.
It was December 2.
December 2-December 16
Boston, Massachusetts
Viola Fletcher, a fiftyeightyearold elementaryschool teacher, mother of two daughters, wife of a devoted husband, a wry and witty woman with an infectious laugh, was silent now and still, lying on the operating table, unconscious, her life in Dr. Ginger Weiss's hands.