Strangers

been him, you'd have buried me in the stuff."
        She started walking again, and Pablo said, "Stop. Wait, Ginger. The man who threw salt over his shoulder - tell me what he looks like."
        "Young," she said. "Thirty-two or thirty-three. About five-ten. Lean. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sort of handsome. Seems shy, sweet."
        Dominick Corvaisis. No doubt about it.
        She began to move again. Pablo stayed at her side until, realizing she was about to sit in the restaurant booth, he guided her gently to the sofa. She sat back on it and looked out a window, smiling at her private panorama of Nevada plains washed in the light of a dying sun.
        Pablo watched and listened while Ginger exchanged pleasantries with the waitress and ordered a bottle of Coors. The beer was served, and Ginger pantomimed sipping it while she watched the sun fade. Seconds ticked past, but Pablo didn't speed her through the scene because he knew they were approaching the crucial moment when her real memories gave way to phony ones. The event - the thing that she saw and should not have seen - had transpired around this time, and Pablo wanted to learn everything he could about the minutes leading up to it.
        Twilight arrived back there in the past.
        When the waitress returned, Ginger ordered a bowl of the homemade vegetable soup and a cheeseburger with all the trimmings.
        Night fell out there in Nevada.
        Abruptly, before her food had been served, Ginger frowned and said, "What's that?" She looked out the imagined window, scowling.
        "What do you see?" Pablo asked, chained to his inconvenient vantage point in present-day Boston.
        A worried look came over her face, and she stood up. "What the devil is that noise?" She looked toward other people in the restaurant with a puzzled expression, and she spoke to them: "I don't know. I don't know what it is." She suddenly tottered sideways and nearly fell. "Gevalt!" She reached out as if supporting herself against the side of a booth or table. "Shaking. Why's everything shaking?" She jumped in surprise. "It's knocked over my beer glass. Is it an earthquake? What's happening? What is that sound?" She stumbled again. Now she was frightened. "The door!" She started to run across the living room, though in her mind she was heading toward the exit from the restaurant that, in reality, she had long ago departed. "The door," she cried again, but then she stopped abruptly, swaying, gasping, shuddering.
        When Pablo caught up with her, she dropped to her knees and hung her head. "What's happening, Ginger?"
        "Nothing." She had changed in an instant.
        "What's that noise?"
        "What noise?" The robot voice again.
        "Ginger, damn it, what's happening in the Tranquility Grille?"
        Horror was on her face, but she merely said, "I'm having dinner."
        "That's a false memory"
        "Having dinner."
        He tried to make her continue with the crucial memory of the frightening thing that had been about to happen. But at last he had to accept that the Azrael Block, behind which her memories were repressed, took form when she had been running for the restaurant door, and it did not end until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt Lake City. In time, he might be able to chip it down to smaller dimensions, but enough had been accomplished for one day.
        At last they were making real headway. They knew that on the night of Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger had seen something she had not been meant to see. Having seen it, she had almost certainly been detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where someone had used sophisticated brainwashing techniques to conceal the memory of that event from her and thereby prevent her from carrying word of it to the world. They had worked on her for three days-Saturday, Sunday, and Monday-releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.
        But, in God's name, who were these omnipotent strangers? And what had she seen?
        

    2.
        

    Portland, Oregon
        
        Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel room near the apartment house in which he had once lived. Rain was falling hard, and the air was cold.
        Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room, alternately staring