successfully performing the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger had
been panicked by the sight of water swirling into a drain, but she could
not imagine why. Damn it, why? She desperately wanted to understand.
Papa, she thought, I wish you were alive, here to listen, to help.
Life's nasty surprises had been the subject of one of Papa's little
sayings that Ginger had once found amusing. When anyone fretted about
the future, Jacob would shake his head and wink and say, "Why worry
about tomorrow? Who knows what'll hit you today?"
How true. And how utterly unamusing flow.
She felt like an invalid. She felt lost.
It was Friday, December 6.
5.
Laguna Beach, California
When Dom went to the doctor's office on Monday morning, December 2, in
the company of Parker Faine, Dr. Cobletz did not recommend immediate
diagnostic procedures, for he had only recently given Dom a thorough
examination and had seen no signs of physical disorder. He assured them
there were other treatments to be tried before jumping to the conclusion
that it was a brain disorder that sent the writer scurrying upon errands
of fortification and self-defense inhis sleep.
After Dom's previous visit, on November 23, the physician had, he said,
become curious about somnambulism and had done some reading on the
subject. With most adults the affliction was short-lived; however, in a
few cases, there was a danger of it becoming habitual, and in its most
serious forms it resembled the inflexible routines and pattern-obsessed
behavior of worst-case neurotics. Once habitual, somnambulism was much
harder to cure, and it could become the dominant factor in the patient's
life, generating a fear of night and sleep, producing profound feelings
of helplessness culminating in more serious emotional disorders.
Dom felt he was already in that danger zone. He thought of the
barricade he had built across his bedroom door. The arsenal on the bed.
Cobletz, intrigued and concerned but not worried, had assured
Dominick-and Parker-that in most instances of persistent somnambulism,
the pattern of nocturnal rambling could be broken by the administration
of a sedative before bed. Once a few untroubled nights had passed, the
patient was usually cured. In chronic cases, the nightly sedative was
augmented with a diazepam compound during the day when the patient was
plagued by anxiety. Because the tasks that Dominick performed in his
sleep were unnaturally strenuous for a somnambulist, Dr. Cobletz had
prescribed both Valium during the day and a 15 ing. tablet of Dalmane,
just before slipping under the covers each night.
On the drive back to Laguna Beach from Dr. Cobletz's offices in
Newport, with the sea on the right and hills on the left, Parker Faine
argued that, until the sleepwalking stopped, it was not wise for Dom to
continue living alone. Hunched over the steering wheel of his Volvo,
the bearded and shaggyhaired artist drove fast, aggressively but not
recklessly. He seldom glanced away from the Pacific Coast Highway, yet
he gave the impression, through the sheer force of his personality, that
his eyes and attention were fixed constantly and entirely upon Dom.
"There's plenty of room at my place. I can keep an eye on you. I won't
hover, mind you. I won't be a mother hen. But at least I'll be there.
And we would have plenty of opportunity to talk about this, really get
into it, just you and me, and try to figure how this sleepwalking is
related to the changes you went through the summer before last, when you
threw away that job at Mountainview College. I'm definitely the guy to
help you. I swear, if I hadn't become a goddamned painter, I'd have
become a goddamned psychiatrist. I have a knack for getting people to
talk about themselves. How about it?
Come stay with me for a while and let me play therapist."
Dom had refused. He wanted to stay at his own house, alone, for to do
otherwise seemed to be a retreat into the same rabbit hole in which he
had hidden from life for so many years. The change he had undergone
during his trip to Mountainview, Utah, the summer before last, had been
dramatic, inexplicable, but for the better. At thirty-three, he had
finally seized the reins of life, had mounted it with a flourish, and
had ridden into new territory. He liked the man he had become, and he
feared nothing more than slipping back into his dreary former existence.
Perhaps his somnambulism was mysteriously related to the previous
changes of attitude that he had undergone, as Parker insisted, but Dom
had his doubts that the relationship was either mysterious or complex.
More likely, the connection between the two personality crises was
simple: The sleepwalking was an excuse to retreat from the challenges,
excitement, and stress of his new life. Which could not be allowed.
Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and
Dalmane as Dr. Cobletz had prescribed them,
and tough this thing out.
That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by
Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the
correct decision. Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did
not. Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate.
Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently. Before beginning
drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five
nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn
hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.
Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less
disturbing than they had been. He no longer gathered up weapons, built
barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut. On both occasions, he
merely left his Beauty rest for a makeshift bed in the back of the
closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and
nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.
Thank God, the worst seemed past.
By Thursday he had begun to write again. He worked on the new novel,
picking up where he left off weeks ago.
On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good
news. Two prepublication reviews of Twilight in Babylon had just come
in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even
better news: Bookseller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by
the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to
grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was
now being raised again. They talked for almost half an hour, and when
Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.
But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been
either a turn for the better or the worse. Every night that he had gone
walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest
detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed. Then, Saturday,
he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him
fleeing through the house in somnambulistic panic, but
this time he
remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the
end.
In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a
half-glimpsed bathroom, everything blurred. An unseen man shoved him
against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the
porcelain bowl. Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on
his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own. He felt rag-limp,
and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling.
A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into
the sink. He could not speak. He could not draw breath. He knew he
was dying. He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but
he did not have the physical resources to take flight. Though his
vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the
chrome-plated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches
from the bottom of the sink. It was an old-fashioned drain without a
mechanically operated stopper. The rubber plug had been removed and set
aside, somewhere out of sight. The water was running, spewing out of a
faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin,
whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down. The
two people pouring him into the sink were shouting, though he could not
understand them. Around and down ... around.... Staring hypnotically
into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain,
which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its
reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down
into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there,
something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away He woke,
screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was
at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from
that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He
grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.
Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to
the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim
and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.
The room in his nightmare had not been this room. Dominick washed his
face and returned to the bedroom. According to the clock on the
nightstand, it was only twotwenty-five A. M.
Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real
connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing.
However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his
sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.
In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his
dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might
discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him.
Then he would be better able to deal with it.
Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to
that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top
drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one
tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn't hurt.
He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas
Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the
Chivas, and returned to bed.
He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now,
he'd be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious
aberration, and he'd wonder how he'd allowed it to get the better of
him.
Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the
gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling,
a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard
himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard
himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest
even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.
"The moon," he whispered thickly. "The moon, the moon."
He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push
sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon? "The
moon," he whispered again, and then he was gone.
It was three-eleven A. M., Sunday, December 8.
6.
New York, New York
Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the
fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.
At one o'clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the
East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the
private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in
with the receptionist and was given a visitor's pass.
tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building's period.
There were two small Ertd originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with
neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s' look.
It was too damn luxurious. The Ends were unnecessary. A hundred other
economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was
important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep
the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of
all typesmiddle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the
long-term comatose both young and old-but they all had two things in
common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they
were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.
Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place
in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically
brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge
expenditures of tax money, New York's institutions, like public
institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had
to accept for a lack of alternatives.
If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not
have been able to pay the sanitarium's exorbitant monthly charges.
Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.
Carrying his visitor's pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to
the fourth of six floors. The hallways in the upper levels were more
reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been. Fluorescent lights.
White walls. The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.
At the far end of the fourth-floor hall, in the last room on the right,
lived the dead woman who still breathed. Jack hesitated with his hand
on the push-plate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a
deep breath, and finally went inside.
The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco,
either, but it was very nice, resembling a medium-priced room at the
Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white
mantel; a deep hunter-green carpet; pale green drapes; a green
leaf-patterned sofa and a pair of chairs. The theory was that a patient
would be h
appier in a room like this than in a clinical room. Although
many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier
atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.
The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a
dramatic contrast to everything else. But even that was dressed up with
green-patterned designer sheets.
Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.
Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his
wife's cheek. She did not stir. He took one of her hands and held it
in both of his. Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex,
remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.
"Jenny? It's me, Jenny. How are you feeling today?
Hmmmmm? You look good. You look lovely. You always look lovely."
In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone
who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air
upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed. Perhaps
only Jack could say that she was still lovely-and mean it. She was not
the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she
had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.
Her hair was not glossy any more, though still thick and the same rich
chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the
men's cologne counter in Bloomingdale's, fourteen years ago. The
attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.
He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her
skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity. He could