Strangers (9 page)

Dom shrugged. “Nobody that I’m aware of.”

“I don’t like this. You could’ve cut yourself, maybe badly.”

“That’s not what scares me the most.”

“So what scares you the most?”

Dom looked around at the other people on the terrace. Though some had followed Parker Faine’s bit of theater with the waiter, no one was now paying the least attention to him or Dominick.

“What scares you the most?” Parker repeated.

“That I might…might cut someone else.”

Incredulous, Faine said, “You mean take a butcher’s knife and…go on a murdering rampage in your sleep? No chance.” He gulped his margarita. “Good heavens, what a melodramatic notion! Thankfully, your fiction is not quite so sloppily imagined. Relax, my friend. You’re not the homicidal type.”

“I didn’t think I was the sleepwalking type, either.”

“Oh, bullshit. There’s an explanation for this. You’re not mad. Madmen never doubt their sanity.”

“I think I’m going to have to see a psychiatrist, a counselor of some kind. And have a few medical tests.”

“The medical tests, yes. But put a hold on the psychiatrist. That’s a waste of time. You’re no more neurotic than psychotic.”

The waiter returned with more nachos, salsa, a dish of chopped onions, a beer, and a fifth margarita.

Parker surrendered his empty glass, took the full one. He scooped up some of the corn chips with generous globs of guacamole and sour cream, spooned some onions on top, and ate with an appreciation only one step removed from manic glee.

“I wonder if this problem of yours is somehow related to the changes you underwent two summers ago.”

Puzzled, Dom said, “What changes?”

“You know what I’m talking about. When I first met you in Portland six years ago, you were a pale, retiring, unadventurous slug.”

“Slug?”

“It’s true, and you know it. You were bright, talented, but a slug nonetheless. You know why you were a slug? I’ll tell you why. You had all those brains and all that talent, but you were afraid to use them. You were afraid of competition, failure, success,
life.
You just wanted to plod along, unnoticed. You dressed drably, spoke almost inaudibly, dreaded calling attention to yourself. You took refuge in the academic world because there was less competition there. God, man, you were a timid rabbit burrowing in the earth and curling up in its den.”

“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 thick-headed 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 true—about 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 long-distance 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 self-discipline 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 full-time writer. Almost overnight, you change from an accountant type to a risk-taker, 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 movers-and-shakers, 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 self-promotion, 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 U-Haul 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 low-key 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 self-analytical 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 anymore?”

“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 U-Haul. 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 undergoes
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 clatter-rattle 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 chain-reaction of destruction, a crackling-sliding-scraping-toppling-crashing-booming-clattering-rattling 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.