Strangers

mess."
        At last Parker sat down on the edge of a chair. "Find him, and you'll know what's going on."
        "New York is a big place," Dom said. "I have no starting point there. But when I got this first note-this business about the answer to my sleepwalking lying in the past I realized you must be right about this personality crisis being tied to the previous one. The dramatic change I went through on the trip from Portland to Mountainview is somehow connected. If I make that trip again, stop at the same motels, eat in the same roadside restaurants, try to recreate it as exactly as I can… something might turn up. My memory might be jogged."
        "But how could you have forgotten something so major?"
        "Maybe I didn't forget it. Maybe the memory was taken from me."
        Leaving that possibility for later exploration, Parker said, "Whoever the hell this guy is - what reasons would he have for sending these notes? I mean, you've imagined a situation where it's you against Them, some unknown Them, and so this guy is on their side, not yours."
        "Maybe he doesn't agree with everything that's been done to me - whatever it is that I've forgotten was done to me."
        "Done to you? What're we talking about here?"
        Dom nervously turned his glass of eggnog around and around in his hands. "I don't know., But this correspondent… he obviously wants me to know my problem's not psychological, that there's something more behind it. I think maybe he wants to help me find the truth."
        "So why doesn't he just call you up and tell you the truth?" , "The only thing I can figure is that he doesn't dare risk telling me. He must be part of some conspiracy, God knows what, but part of some group that doesn't want the truth to come out. If he approaches me directly, the others will know, and he'll be in deep shit."
        As if it helped him think, Parker ran one hand through his hair several times, mussing it badly. "You make this sound like some all-knowing secret society is on your ass-like the Illuminatus Society, Rosicrucians, CIA, and the Fraternal Order of Masons all rolled into one! You actually think you've been brainwashed?"
        "If you want to call it that. Whatever traumatic episode I've forgotten, I didn't forget it without assistance. Whatever I saw or experienced was apparently so shocking, so traumatic, that it's still festering in my subconscious, trying to reach me through sleepwalking and through the messages I leave on the Displaywriter. It was so damned big that even brainwashing hasn't been able to wipe it out, so big that one of the conspirators is risking his own neck to send me hints."
        After reading them one more time, Parker returned the two notes to Dom, chugged down his own eggnog. "Shit. I think you've got to be right, which upsets me. I don't want to believe it. It sounds too much as if you've let your novelistic imagination run wild, as if you're trying out the plot of a new book on me, something a bit more colorful than you should write. But crazy as the whole thing sounds, I can't think of any other answer."
        Dom realized he was squeezing the eggnog glass so tightly that he was in danger of shattering it. He put it on a small table and blotted his hands on his slacks. "Me neither. There's nothing else that explains both the crazy damn sleepwalking, and my personality change between Portland and Mountainview, and those two notes."
        His face lined with worry, Parker said, "What could it have been, Dom? What did you stumble into when you were out there on the road?"
        "I don't have the foggiest."
        "Have you considered that it might be something so bad… so damn dangerous that you'd be better off not knowing?"
        Dom nodded. "But if I don't learn the truth, I won't be able to stop the sleepwalking for good. In my sleep I'm running from the memory of whatever happened to me out there on the road, the summer before last, and to stop running I've got to find out what it was, face up to it. 'Cause if I don't stop the sleepwalking, it'll eventually drive me mad. That might sound a bit melodramatic, too, but it's true. If I don't learn the truth, then the thing I fear in my dreams is going to start haunting the waking hours as well, and I'm not going to have a moment's peace, waking or sleeping, and eventually the only solution will be to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger."
        "Jesus."
        "I