Strangers

moons, he had reason to believe that Reno was the place where his life had been changed forever and where he would find the key to unlock his imprisoned memories. Those around him laughed, chattered, grumbled about the unkindness of cards, shouted to encourage the rolling dice, but Dom remained cool and alert, among them yet distanced from them, the better to spot any clue to the unremembered events in his past.
        No clue was revealed.
        Each night he contacted Parker Faine in Laguna Beach, hoping that the unknown correspondent had sent an additional message.
        No message was received.
        Each night before sleep came, he tried to understand the impossible dance of paper moons. And he sought an explanation of the circular, swollen, red rings in his hands, which he had watched fade as he knelt in a drift of moons in Lomack's living room. No understanding came.
        Day by day, his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminished, but his unremembered nightmares - the moon - grew worse. Each night, he fought fiercely against the tether with which he moored himself to his bed.
        By Saturday, Dom still suspected that the answer to his night fear and somnambulism lay in Reno. But he decided that he must not change his plans, must go on to Mountainview. If he concluded the journey without achieving satori, he could return to Reno at that time.
        The summer before last, he departed Harrah's at ten-thirty a m. Friday, July 6, after an early lunch. On Saturday, January 11, he therefore followed that timetable, driving onto I-80 at ten-forty, heading northeast across the Nevada wasteland toward distant Winnemucca, where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed a bank in another age.
        The immense unpopulated expanses of land were little different from the way they had been a thousand years ago. The highway and power lines, often the only signs of civilization, followed the route that had been called the Humboldt Trail in the days of wagon trains. Dom drove over barren plains and hills bearded with scrub, through an uninviting yet starkly beautiful primeval world of sagebrush, sand, alkaline flats, dry lakes, solidified lava beds with columnar crystallizations, distant mountains. Sheered bluffs and veined monoliths showed traces of borax, sulfur, alum, and salt. Isolated rocky buttes were splendidly painted in ocher, amber, umber, and gray. North of the trackless Humboldt Sink, where the Humboldt River simply vanished into the thirsty earth, were more streams, as well as the Humboldt itself, and here the forbidding land featured some contrastingly fertile valleys with lush grasses and trees - cottonwoods, willows, though not in profusion. Adequate water meant communities and agriculture, but even in the hospitable valleys, the settlements were small, the grip of civilization tenuous.
        As always, Dom was humbled by the vastness of the West. But the landscape also aroused new feelings this time: a sense of mystery and an unsettling awareness of limitless - and eerie - possibilities. Hurtling through this lonely realm, it was easy to believe something frightening had happened to him here.
        At two-forty-five he stopped for gasoline and a sandwich in Winnemucca, a town of only five thousand souls yet by far the largest in a county of sixteen thousand square miles. Then I-80 turned eastward. The land rose gradually toward the rim of the Great Basin. More mountains peaked on every horizon, with snow far down their slopes, and more bunch-grass appeared midst the sagebrush, and there were genuine meadows in some places, though the desert was by no means left entirely behind.
        At sunset, Dom pulled off the interstate at the Tranquility Motel, parked near the office, got out of the car, and was surprised by a cold wind. Having driven so long through deserts, he was psychologically prepared for heat, though he knew it was winter on the high plains. He reached into the car, grabbed a fleece-lined suede jacket, and put it on. He started toward the motel… then stopped, suddenly apprehensive.
        This was the place.
        He did not know how he knew. But he knew.
        Here, something strange had happened.
        He had stopped here on Friday evening, July 6, the summer before last. He had found the curious isolation of the place and the majesty of the land enormously appealing and inspiring. Indeed, he had become convinced that this territory was good