Strangers

problem. Like bed-wetting.
        Wearing blue pajama bottoms, bare-chested, slipperless, he shuffled across the living room, down the short hall, into the master bedroom, and into the bath. In the mirror, he looked dissipated, a libertine surfacing from a week of shameless indulgence in a wide variety of sins.
        In fact, he was a man of remarkably few vices. He did not smoke, overeat, or take drugs. He drank little. He liked women, but he was not promiscuous; he believed in commitment in a relationship. Indeed, he had not slept with anyone in - what was it now?-almost four months.
        He only looked this bad - dissipated, wrung-out - when he woke and discovered that he had taken one of his unscheduled nocturnal trips to a makeshift bed. Each time he had been exhausted. Though asleep, he got no rest on the nights he walked.
        He sat down on the edge of the bathtub, bent his leg up to look at the bottom of his left foot, then checked the bottom of his right foot. Neither was cut, scratched, or particularly dirty, so he had not left the house while sleepwalking. He had awakened in closets twice before, once last week and once twelve days prior to that, and he had not had dirty feet on those occasions, either. As before, he felt as if he had traveled miles while unconscious, but if he actually had gone that far, he had done it by making countless circuits of his own small house.
        A long, hot shower soaked away a lot of his muscle discomfort. He was lean and fit, thirty-five years old, with recuperative powers commensurate with his age. By the time he finished breakfast, he felt almost human.
        After lingering with a cup of coffee on the patio, studying the pleasant geography of Laguna Beach, which shelved down the hills toward the sea, he went to his study, sure that his work was the cause of his sleepwalking. Not the work itself so much as the amazing success of his first novel, Twilight in Babylon, which he had finished last February.
        His agent put Twilight up for auction, and to Dom's astonishment a deal was made with Random House, which paid a remarkably large advance for a first novel. Within a month, movie rights were sold (providing the down-payment on his house), and the Literary Guild took Twilight as a main selection. He had spent seven laborious months of sixty-, seventy-, and eighty-hour weeks in the writing of that story, not to mention a decade getting himself ready to write it, but he still felt like an overnight success, up from genteel poverty in one great leap.
        The once-poor Dominick Corvaisis occasionally caught a glimpse of the now-rich Dominick Corvaisis in a mirror or a sun-silvered window, saw himself unguarded, and wondered if he really deserved what had come his way. Sometimes he worried that he was heading for a great fall. With such triumph and acclaim came considerable tension.
        When Twilight was published next February, would it be well received and justify Random House's investment, or would it fail and humiliate him? Could he do it again-or was Twilight a fluke?
        Every hour of his waking day, these and other questions circled his mind with vulturine persistence, and he supposed the same damn questions still swooped through his mind while he slept. That was why he walked in his sleep: he was trying to escape those relentless concerns, seeking a secret place to rest, where his worries could not find him.
        Now, at his desk, he switched on the IBM Displaywriter and called up chapter eighteen on the first disk of his new book, as yet untitled. He had stopped yesterday in the middle of the sixth page of the chapter, but when he summoned the document, intending to begin where he had left off, he saw a full page where there had been half. Unfamiliar green lines of text glowed on the word processor's video display.
        For a moment he blinked stupidly at the neat letters of light, then shook his head in pointless denial of what lay before him.
        The back of his neck was suddenly cool and damp.
        The existence of those unremembered lines on page six was not what gave him the creeps; it was what the lines said. Furthermore, there should not have been a page seven in the chapter, for he had not yet created one, but it was there. He also found an eighth page.
        As he scrolled through the material on the disk, his hands became clammy. The startling addition to his work-in-progress was only, a two-word