Alan Rykoff’s suicide is first presented through the news it delivers to his ex-wife, Jorja Monatella, and the practical demands that follow. The call finds her amid the noise of a Las Vegas casino, where shock and pity—not grief—shape her immediate response to his death.

News at the Casino

On Friday afternoon, Jorja is working at the casino when Pepper Carrafield, the woman with whom Alan has been living, calls with news of his suicide. Jorja takes the emergency call at a phone in the blackjack pit, cupping one hand over an ear against the voices, the clack of cards being dealt and shuffled, and the ringing slot machines. The ordinary racket of her workplace surrounds the disclosure: Alan shot himself that morning, about two hours before Pepper called.

Jorja is shocked and sickened, but she feels no grief. Alan’s selfish and cruel behavior, as she understands it, has left her without a reason to mourn him; pity is the only feeling she can summon. The distinction matters to the scene: his death reaches her as a painful fact, but not as the restoration of affection or an uncomplicated bereavement.

Pepper’s urgent request is practical rather than ceremonial. She tells Jorja that the police are at the residence and asks her to come, but clarifies that they do not want to see her: Alan had made Jorja executor, and Pepper wants his belongings removed as soon as possible. The call thus draws Jorja toward the immediate work of sorting through his effects even as she is still taking in the news of his death.

The Scene and the Work of Removal

The task took Jorja from the telephone call into the aftermath. As an elevator opened, uniformed policemen and morgue employees emerged with a gurney carrying a corpse sealed in an opaque plastic body bag. Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa; from another elevator came more officers, including plainclothes detectives, one of whom asked Pepper a few final questions. The procedure around the body was brisk and official, but Jorja’s own assignment was intimate and degrading: because Alan had named her executor, she had to go through the belongings he had left behind.

Halfway down the hall, Pepper opened the bathroom door and complained that the police had left it as they found it. The room made the manner of Alan’s death impossible to treat as an abstraction. Blood covered the beige tile floor and spattered the shower door, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet; behind the toilet, dried blood marked the wall in a pattern likened to a Rorschach blot. The image seems to invite interpretation, as though the scene might disclose the meaning of Alan’s death, but it offers Jorja no answer—only the physical evidence of violence. The account also makes clear that Alan shot himself twice: first in the genitals, then in the mouth. Jorja could smell the blood, while Pepper supplied the details she did not want to hear.

That gruesome sequence turns the executor’s duty into a confrontation with the private collapse behind the official fact of suicide. Jorja loathes having to search through Alan’s things, yet understands that the task must be done. The room’s scattered blood and the body carried away by strangers place death before her as both a material scene and an unanswered question; the orderly work of removal cannot make either aspect easier to bear.

The Moon and the Unanswered Cause

While sorting Alan’s belongings, Jorja found an unexpected clue to the months before his death: he had become interested in astronomy. Pepper said the interest had begun only a couple of months earlier. Asked whether Alan had dreamed about the moon, she confirmed that he had. The dreams began around late October, but he could never remember their details after waking. They were not simply nightmares: Pepper sometimes heard him sound afraid in his sleep, but at other times he smiled.

The discovery troubled Jorja because Alan’s recent history echoed Marcie’s. His compulsive sexual drive and his daughter’s irrational fear of doctors were opposite forms of obsession, and Marcie’s phobia appeared to have been relieved while Alan had received no comparable help. More disturbing still, father and daughter had developed an interest in the moon around the same period. Alan had not seen Marcie for six months; their last telephone conversation was in September, before either had become fascinated by it. Jorja could identify no contact through which one might have passed the fixation to the other, leaving its apparent emergence in both unexplained.

The moon links the suicide to a mystery rather than supplying a motive. Jorja wonders whether father and daughter could have shared a dream, but has no answer; Pepper’s account offers only fragments of sleep, fear, and smiling. The bathroom’s bloody pattern had seemed to invite someone to read the meaning of Alan’s death, yet the new clues do not resolve it. They sharpen Jorja’s fear for Marcie: something had driven Alan to kill himself, and she cannot know what that connection might mean for his daughter.

An Unresolved Pattern

Alan’s death leaves its cause deliberately unsettled. The account moves from the practical obligations of his estate to details that resist explanation: an abrupt change in his behavior, moon dreams he could not recall, and a parallel fascination in Marcie despite the absence of recent contact between them. None establishes what drove him to suicide, and the dream fragments offer no reliable account of what he experienced. Instead, the event changes the question facing Jorja: beyond making sense of Alan’s death, she must consider whether the unexplained pattern also places Marcie at risk.