Strangers

surprised by his own sudden interest in stargazing. For most of his fifty years, Zeb Lomack, a professional gambler, had shown little interest in anything but cards. He worked Reno, Lake Tahoe, Vegas, occasionally one of the smaller gambling towns like Elko or Bullhead City, playing poker with the tourists and local would-be poker champs. He was not only good at card games: He loved cards more than he loved women, booze, food. Even the money was not important to Zeb; it was just a handy by-product of playing cards. The important thing was staying in the game.
        Until he got the telescope and went crazy.
        For a couple of months he used the scope on a casual basis, and he bought a few more books on astronomy, and it was just a hobby. But by last Christmas he began to focus his attention less on the stars than on the moon, and thereafter something strange happened to him. The new hobby soon became as interesting as card games, and he found himself canceling planned excursions to the casinos in order to study the lunar surface. By February, he was glued to the eyepiece of the Tasco every night that the moon was visible. By April he built a collection of books about the moon that numbered more than one hundred, and he went out to play cards only two or three nights a week. By the end of June, his book collection had grown to five hundred titles, and he had begun to paper the bedroom walls and ceiling with pictures of the moon clipped from old magazines and newspapers. He no longer played cards, but began living off his savings, and thereafter his interest in things lunar ceased to bear any resemblance to a hobby and became a mad obsession.
        By September, his book collection had grown to more than fifteen hundred volumes stacked throughout his small house. During the day, he read about the moon or, more often, sat for hours staring intently at photographs of it, unable either to understand or to resist its allure, until its craters and ridges and plains became as familiar to him as the five rooms of his own house. On those nights when the moon was visible, he studied it through the telescope until he could no longer stay awake, until his eyes were bloodshot and sore.
        Before this obsession took control of him, Zeb Lomack had been a ruggedly hewn and relatively fit man. But as his preoccupation with things lunar tightened its grip, he stopped exercising and began eating junk food - cake, ice cream, TV dinners, bologna sandwiches - because he no longer had time to prepare good meals. Furthermore, the moon not only fascinated him but also made him uneasy, filled him not only with wonder but with dread, so he was always nervous; and he tranquilized himself with food. He became softer, flabbier, though he was only minimally aware of the physical changes he was undergoing.
        By early October, he thought about the moon every hour of every day, dreamed of it, and could go nowhere in his house without seeing hundreds of images of the lunar face. He had not stopped repapering the walls when he had finished his bedroom in June, but had carried that project throughout. The full-color and black-and-white moon pictures came from astronomy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. On one of his infrequent ventures out of the house, he had seen a three-by-five-foot poster of the moon, a color photograph taken by astronauts, and he had bought fifty copies, enough to paper the ceiling and every wall in the living room; he had even taped the poster over the windows, so every square inch of the room was decorated with that repeating image, except for doorways. He moved the furniture out, transforming the empty chamber into a planetarium where the show never changed. Sometimes he'd lie on his back on the floor and stare up and around at those fifty moons, transported by an exhilarating sense of wonder and an inexplicable terror, neither of which he could understand.
        Christmas night, as Zeb was sprawled on the floor with half a hundred bloated moons hanging over him, bearing down on him, he suddenly noticed writing on one of them, a single word scrawled across the lunar image with a felt-tip pen, where there had never been a word before. The picture had been defaced with a name: Dominick. He recognized his own handwriting, but he could not remember having scrawled that name across the moon. Then his eye was caught by another name written on another poster: Ginger. And then a third name on a third