Alan Rykoff’s suicide reveals his obsession with the moon

Alan Rykoff’s suicide becomes more than a death in the family: as Jorja Monatella clears his belongings, she discovers that his recent obsession with the moon echoes a fixation affecting his daughter Marcie, despite the absence of contact that could explain their shared interest. The discovery turns the aftermath of Alan’s death into a troubling new question about what has been happening to both of them.

The Call and the Aftermath

On a Friday afternoon in Las Vegas, Jorja was working at a casino when Pepper Carrafield, the woman with whom Alan had been living, called with the news. Jorja took the emergency call beside the blackjack pit, cupping a hand over one ear against the voices, cards, and slot machines. Pepper told her that Alan had shot himself that morning and asked her to come remove his belongings. The news shocked and sickened Jorja, but she felt no grief; Alan’s selfish and cruel conduct had left her with pity rather than mourning.

As the coroner’s attendants wheeled Alan’s body out through the lobby, Jorja watched it pass beyond the windows. Grief still did not come, but the sight brought a powerful melancholy: sadness for what might have been. The distinction matters. Her response is not absolution of Alan or a denial of what he had done; it is sorrow for a lost possibility, arriving only when his death makes that possibility irretrievable.

The Will and the Bathroom

The practical task Pepper’s call imposed on Jorja became more intimate when she examined Alan’s will. It was a simple, preprinted one-page form, left with Pepper for safekeeping. Alan had named Jorja executor, obliging her to sort through the life he had left behind; more startlingly, he had left his property to Marcie, even though he had once been prepared to deny that he was her father. The bequest made his connection to his daughter impossible to reduce to that earlier denial, though it could not undo the harm of his absence. Pepper expected the estate to be modest: Alan had spent freely, and what remained included a car and jewelry.

The will had been notarized only four days before Jorja read it. That recent date made her suspect that Alan had been contemplating suicide when he arranged his affairs. The document offered no explanation for his decision, but its timing gave the death a forewarning visible only in retrospect: an ordinary form, completed days before the end, now part of the evidence Jorja had to interpret.

Sorting his possessions led her to the bathroom where he had died. The scene was brutally physical: blood covered the beige tile and spattered the shower door, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet; behind the toilet, a dried stain spread across the wall in a pattern like a Rorschach blot. The image suggests a meaning waiting to be read, but supplies no answer. Pepper said that Alan had shot himself twice, first in the crotch and then in the mouth. Jorja could smell the blood, while Pepper complained that the police had left the cleanup to her household. The contrast between Jorja’s recoil and Pepper’s practical irritation sharpens the loneliness of the death: the scene confronts Jorja with its horror, while the person who shared Alan’s home treats it as a mess to be cleared.

The Moon and the Shared Disturbance

Among Alan’s belongings, Jorja found a cluster of objects that changed the meaning of her errand. Six books lay on the nightstand, two visibly marked by the word moon; all six concerned the same subject. On the dresser stood a basketball-sized globe that, when switched on, glowed from within. It was a lunar map, not an earthly one, its craters, ridges, and plains named across the surface. A telescope beside the window completed the arrangement. None of the objects was inherently strange, but together they made Alan’s recent interest look less like a passing hobby than a consuming preoccupation.

Pepper dated that interest to the previous couple of months. Asked whether Alan had dreamed about the moon, she confirmed that he had: the dreams began around late October, though he could never recall their details after waking. His sleep-talking did not have a single emotional register. Sometimes he sounded afraid; at other times he smiled. That mixture leaves the dreams unresolved, neither plainly nightmares nor reassuring visions, while making them part of the mystery surrounding his final months.

The discovery unsettled Jorja because Marcie had also become preoccupied with the moon and troubled by moon-related sleep. The parallel was not simply that father and daughter shared an interest. Each had developed a distinct psychological disturbance: Marcie’s was an irrational fear of doctors, while Alan’s compulsive sexual drive had intensified into an obsession. Jorja understood that Marcie’s phobia had apparently been cured, whereas Alan had faced his worsening condition without comparable help. But the difference between their symptoms did not make their simultaneous onset easier to dismiss.

The chronology sharpened the question. Alan had not seen Marcie for six months, and their last phone conversation had taken place in September, weeks before either became fascinated by the moon. Jorja could identify no contact through which one might have passed the fixation to the other; the shared interest seemed to have arisen independently. She therefore wondered whether they had experienced a shared dream and, if so, how that could have happened. The lunar globe offered a vivid object around which to focus the question, but no explanation. Alan’s death had exposed the resemblance between his experience and Marcie’s without revealing what had produced it.

An Unanswered Cause

Alan’s death leaves Jorja with evidence of a disturbing pattern, not an explanation for it. His escalating sexual compulsion, his moon-focused books and instruments, and dreams that could leave him frightened or smiling all belong to his final months, but the account does not establish what drove him to suicide or how these changes were connected. The resemblance to Marcie’s experience makes coincidence harder for Jorja to accept, yet the apparent absence of contact offers no mechanism for their shared fixation. The episode therefore closes on an unresolved gap: the objects and memories make Alan’s last months newly legible as part of a larger mystery, while his death prevents him from explaining them.