Anonymous letters to Dominic

The Anonymous letters to Dominic are two unsigned messages that make Dominick Corvaisis’s private symptoms seem to have acquired an outside witness. The first tells him to search his past for the source of his sleepwalking; the second consists only of the words “The moon.” Their arrival gives him a possible direction for understanding his troubles, but not a trustworthy guide: the authorship remains unknown, and the clues on the envelopes alternately invite and frustrate his suspicion that he sent the messages himself.

The messages and their arrival

The first note reaches Dominick Corvaisis among his mail at The Cottage, a longtime restaurant in Laguna Beach, California. He has just received an advance copy of his first novel, and the excitement of seeing the book gives way to a jolt when he finds a plain white envelope with no return address. Inside is a single sheet bearing two typewritten sentences: “The sleepwalker would be well-advised to search the past for the source of his problem. That is where the secret is buried.” The note does not identify its sender or explain what past event it means. It offers a direction, not an account of the secret.

The note’s physical and verbal plainness sharpens its intrusion. There is no signature, no explanatory letter, and no return address. Dominick reads the sentences repeatedly; the paper rattles in his hand as a tremor passes through him, and the back of his neck turns cold. What unsettles him is not merely that a stranger appears to know about his sleepwalking, but that the message treats the condition as a problem with a buried source. The wording converts a private disturbance into something that might be investigated—and implies that someone else knows enough to point him toward it.

A possible message from himself

The envelope provides no clear way to identify its route. Its postmark is double-struck and badly smeared, leaving Dominick unable to tell whether the note was mailed in Laguna Beach or elsewhere. During the afternoon he reads it perhaps a hundred times. After leaving the restaurant, he sits in his car with the advance copy of his novel forgotten beside him and rereads the message several more times. He is anxious enough to take Valium from his jacket pocket, but stops before swallowing it. If he is to consider what the note might mean, he decides, he needs a clear mind; for the first time in weeks, he refuses the chemical escape.

His uncertainty quickly becomes a question of authorship. Only three people know about his sleepwalking: Dominick himself, Parker Faine, and Dr. Cobletz. He has ruled out Parker and is certain Dr. Cobletz did not send the letter, leaving himself as the apparent remaining possibility. Rather than continue to Parker’s house, he goes home. In his study he types the note’s two sentences on the IBM Displaywriter and prints them. He then uses the three additional printwheels he owns, alongside the machine’s original options, to make four comparisons, labeling the resulting copies PRESTIGE ELITE, ARTISAN 10, COURIER 10, and LETTER GOTHIC.

The comparison does not clear him. The Courier 10 sample appears to match the anonymous note perfectly. This is a concrete reason to suspect that he could have produced it, not proof that he did. The investigation makes his own equipment part of the mystery: a familiar machine can reproduce the message, but it cannot establish who used it or when. The first letter therefore leaves Dominick caught between two possibilities—that someone has penetrated his secret or that his own unexplained behavior has extended into the act of sending himself a warning.

The second note: “The moon.”

Later, while pacing through his house with the first note, Dominick notices that he has not collected the day’s mail. His home mailbox is a curbside receptacle set into a brick column; because he keeps a post-office drawer in town, ordinary correspondence rarely arrives there. Under the mercury-vapor streetlamp, he finds advertising flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards, and another plain white envelope without a return address. He carries it back inside and opens it on the way to his study. The sheet contains just two words: “The moon.”

The brevity makes this second message more disturbing, not less. Dominick knows that no one else knows he has repeatedly typed “the moon” on his word processor. The note does not explain the phrase or connect it explicitly to the earlier instruction to search the past, but its precision links the anonymous correspondence to another private detail. Its arrival also changes the nature of the question. The first note could conceivably have been a warning written by someone aware of his sleepwalking; the second appears to reach into a fixation he believed was known only to himself.

The postmark and the unresolved sender

At first, Dominick had not checked the second envelope for a postmark. Once indoors, he finds it stamped from New York City and dated December 18, the Wednesday of the previous week. He had been in Laguna Beach, California, during that period, about three thousand miles away from the mailbox from which the letter was sent. The distance persuades him that he could not have mailed this message to himself from that location, and he extends the same suspicion to the other strange note, whose origin remains obscured by its smeared postmark.

The postmark narrows one possibility without answering the central questions. It does not disclose who sent the messages, how that person learned about the sleepwalking or the repeated words, or why the first envelope’s postmark is unreadable. Dominick is left with a geographical clue and no practical direction for pursuing it. He can no longer comfortably treat the letters as a joke or as evidence that he has secretly written to himself, yet he has no identified correspondent to question.

Significance

The two letters work as a paired intrusion into Dominick’s private life. The first turns sleepwalking into a call to investigate the past; the second names the moon in a way that seems to confirm an outsider’s access to a thought he considered entirely his own. Their differences matter: one contains an explicit instruction and an unreadable postmark, while the other offers only a phrase but carries a legible origin and date. Together they deepen the mystery without resolving it.

The correspondence also makes uncertainty tangible. A plain envelope, a typewritten page, a smudged stamp, a matching typeface, and a second postmark are all things Dominick can inspect, compare, and reason about. None supplies the missing sender. The first note can be reproduced on his own machine; the second appears to rule out his having mailed it from where he was. Thus the letters give him evidence enough to disturb his assumptions, but not enough to replace them with an explanation. Their decisive effect is to make his secret feel shared while leaving the identity and purpose of the person who shares it unknown.