Strangers

don't… don't usually cry."
        Corvaisis said, "Don't try to talk until you're ready. I'll tell you about my problem: sleepwalking. And my dreams… about the moon."
        A thrill, half cold fear and half exultation, throbbed through her. "The moon," she agreed. "I never remember the dreams, but they must involve the moon because that's what I wake up screaming about."
        He told her about a man named Lomack in Reno, dead by his own hand, driven to suicide by an obsession with the moon.
        Ginger sensed some vast gulf beneath her, a fearful unknown.
        "We've been brainwashed," she blurted. "All these problems we're having are the result of repressed memories trying to surface."
        For a moment there was a stunned silence on the line. Then the writer said, "That's been my theory, but you sound sure of it."
        "I am. I underwent hypnotic regression therapy after I wrote to you, and we turned up evidence of systematic memory repression."
        "Something happened to us the summer before last," he said.
        "Yes! The summer before last. The Tranquility Motel in Nevada."
        "That's where I'm calling from."
        Startled, she said, "You're there now?"
        "Yes. And if possible, you ought to come. A lot has happened that I can't risk talking about on the phone."
        "Who are they?" she asked in frustration. "What are they hiding?"
        "We'll have a better chance finding out if we all work together."
        "I'll come. Tomorrow, if I can book a flight that quickly."
        Rita started to protest that Ginger was in no condition to travel. In the many-colored light of the Tiffany lamp, George's scowl deepened.
        To Corvaisis, Ginger said, "I'll let you know how and when I'll arrive."
        When Ginger hung up, George said, "You can't possibly go all that way in your condition."
        Rita said, "What if you black out on the airplane, become violent?"
        "I'll be all right."
        "Dear, you had three seizures last Monday, one after the other."
        Ginger sighed and slumped back in the green leather chair. "Rita, George, you've been wonderful to me, and I can never adequately repay you. I love you, I really do. But I've been living with you for five weeks, five helpless weeks during which I've been more like a dependent child than an adult, and I'm just not capable of going on that way. I've got to go to Nevada. I've no other option. I've got to."
        
        New York, New York.
        A couple of blocks farther down Fifth Avenue from the Presbyterian Church, Jack stopped again, in front of St. Thomas's Episcopal Church. In the nave, he stared in fascination at the huge reredos of Dunville stone behind the altar. He met the strangely portentous gazes of the statues in the shadowy niches along the walls - Saints, Apostles, the Blessed Virgin, Christ - and he realized that the primary purpose of religion was the expiation of guilt, to provide people with forgiveness for being less than they were meant to be. The human species seemed incapable of living up to its potential, and some would be driven mad by guilt if they did not believe that a god - be it Jesus, Yahweh, Mohammed, Marx, or some other - looked on them with favor in spite of themselves. But Jack found no comfort in St. Thomas's, no expiation of his sins, not even when he left twenty thousand dollars in the charity box.
        In the Camaro again, he set out to dispose of the rest of the cash from the Guardmaster heist, not because giving it away would salve his guilt; it would not, for redistribution of the funds was not the moral equivalent of repayment. He had too much to atone for to expect to shrive himself of all his transgressions in one night. But he did not need or want the money any more, could not simply throw it in the trash, so giving the damn stuff away was his only possible course of action.
        He stopped at more churches and temples. Some were open, some locked. Where he could gain entrance, he left money.
        He drove down to the Bowery and left forty thousand dollars with the startled night attendant at the Salvation Army Mission.
        On Bayard Street in nearby Chinatown, Jack saw a sign in a second-floor window that proclaimed, in both Chinese characters and in English: THE ALLIANCE AGAINST OPPRESSION OF CHINESE MINORITIES. The place was above a quaint apothecary that specialized in the herbs and powdered roots of