Strangers

secured it with adhesive tape, a barrier between rope and flesh to prevent abrasion. He was no longer using an ordinary all-purpose line but a hawser-laid nylon rope, only a quarter-inch in diameter but with a breaking strength of twenty-six hundred pounds. It was expressly made for rock- and mountain-climbing.
        He had switched to the sturdier rope because, on the night of December 28, he had slipped his previous tether by chewing all the way through it while asleep. The mountaineering rope was fray-resistant and nearly as impervious to teeth as copper cable would have been.
        That night in Portland, he woke three times, wrestling furiously with the tether, perspiring, panting, his racing heart's accelerator floored beneath a heavy weight of fear. "The moon! The moon!"
        

    3.
        

    Las Vegas, Nevada
        
        The day after Christmas, Jorja Monatella took Marcie to Dr. Louis Besancourt, and the examination turned into an ordeal that frustrated the physician, frightened Jorja, and embarrassed them both. From the moment Jorja took her into the doctor's waiting room, the girl screamed, screeched, wailed, and wept. "No doctors! They'll hurt me!"
        On those rare occasions when Marcie misbehaved (and they were rare, indeed), one hard slap on the bottom was usually all that was required to restore her senses and induce contrition. But when Jorja tried that now, it had the opposite effect of what she intended. Marcie screamed louder, wailed more shrilly, and wept more copiously than before.
        The assistance of an understanding nurse was required to convey the shrieking child from the waiting area into an examination room, by which time Jorja was not only mortified but worried sick by Marcie's complete irrationality. Dr. Besancourt's good humor and bedside manner were not enough to quiet the girl, and in fact she became more frightened and violent the moment he appeared. Marcie pulled away from him when he tried to touch her, screamed, struck him, kicked him, until it became necessary for Jorja and a nurse to hold her down. When the doctor used an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes, her terror reached a crescendo indicated by a sudden loosening of her bladder that was dismayingly reminiscent of the fiasco on Christmas Day.
        Her uncontrolled urination marked an abrupt change in her demeanor. She became sullen, silent, just as she had for a while on Christmas. She was shockingly pale, and she shivered constantly. She had that eerie detachment that made Jorja think of autism.
        Lou Besancourt had no simple diagnosis with which to comfort Jorja. He spoke of neurological and brain disorders, and psychological illness. He wanted Marcie to check into Sunrise Hospital for a few days of tests.
        The ugly scene at Besancourt's office was just a warmup for a series of fits Marcie threw at the hospital. The mere sight of doctors and nurses catapulted her into panic, and invariably the panic became outright hysteria that escalated until, exhausted, the child fell into that semicatatonic trance from which she needed hours to recover.
        Jorja took a week of sick-leave from the casino and virtually lived at Sunrise for four days, sleeping on a rollaway bed in Marcie's room. She didn't get much rest. Even in a drugged sleep, Marcie twitched, kicked, whimpered, and cried out in her dreams: "The moon, the moon…" By the fourth night, Sunday, December 29, worried and weary, Jorja almost needed medical attention for herself.
        Miraculously, on Monday morning, Marcie's irrational terror simply went away. She still did not like being hospitalized, and she pleaded aggressively to go home. But she no longer appeared to feel that the walls were going to close in and crush her. She remained uneasy in the company of doctors and nurses, but she did not shrink from them in horror or strike them when they touched her. She was still pale, nervous, and watchful. But for the first time in days, her appetite was normal, and she ate everything on her breakfast tray.
        Later in the day, after the final testing had been completed, while Marcie was sitting in bed eating lunch, Dr. Besancourt spoke with Jorja in the hall. He was a hound-faced man with a bulbous nose and moist, kind eyes. "Negative, Jorja. Every test, negative. No brain tumors, no cerebral lesions, no neurological dysfunction."
        Jorja almost burst into tears. "Thank God."
        "I'm going to