Lomack's Reno is the setting for Zebediah Lomack’s descent from professional gambler and amateur stargazer into a Christmas-night crisis driven by an overpowering fixation on the moon. The city connects his familiar circuit of gambling towns to the private rooms of his home, where telescope, moon pictures, and a loaded shotgun become parts of a struggle over memory, sanity, and survival. The crisis turns on a sudden return of what had been taken from him: memories of Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, the Blocks, Interstate 80, and the Tranquility Motel.

Setting and Background

Zebediah’s life in Reno belongs to a working gambler’s regional circuit. For most of his fifty years, he traveled among Reno, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, and smaller gambling towns, including Elko and Bullhead City, playing tourists and local poker hopefuls. Cards mattered to him more than women, alcohol, food, or even the money he won; what mattered was remaining in the game. This established identity makes his sudden turn toward the night sky a sharp departure from a life organized around play and familiar routines.

The change began during the summer before last. Toward the end of August, Zebediah started sitting on the back porch of his cozy house, watching the moon and stars while drinking Coors. In mid-September he bought a Tasco 10VR refracting telescope and a couple of books on amateur astronomy. At first, the practice appeared to be an innocent new interest. The narrative marks the telescope, however, as the point after which his fascination became an obsession and the ordinary domestic setting began to hold a threat he could not control.

The House and the Lunar Fixation

On Christmas, the crisis is concentrated inside Zebediah’s house. He has covered rooms with pictures of the moon, and the images make the domestic interior feel less like shelter than an environment organized around the object of his fixation. He resolves to remove the pictures before midnight and places a loaded shotgun on the filthy kitchen table, intending to use it if he cannot rid himself of the lunar material. The pictures are not merely reminders: during the episode, he experiences them as if they could exert a physical pull on him, even when his eyes are shut.

A cloud passing across the moon briefly breaks the spell while Zebediah is outside, coatless in the freezing December night, staring upward. The interruption lets him recognize his exposure and run back toward the house. He slips in the snow and falls again on the porch steps, but reaches the kitchen and begins tearing the pictures from the walls. Indoors, however, offers no protection. Even without looking, he feels the images’ imagined light and roundness; the house has become an extension of the fixation rather than a refuge from it.

The shotgun waiting on the kitchen table makes the domestic space the center of an immediate life-or-death choice. Zebediah first tries to use it while standing, then braces it with both hands, removes a shoe and sock, and reaches the trigger with his bare foot. His fear of being committed to an asylum, as his father had been, briefly gives him strength to resist the moon’s pull. Yet the images draw his attention back just as he is pressing down on the trigger. The scene’s danger is shaped by the house’s arrangement: the moon-covered walls command his gaze, while the table holds the means of suicide.

Memory, Crisis, and Narrative Significance

The Reno scenes make the moon fixation both a private affliction and a point of return to a larger suppressed history. In the moment when Zebediah looks again at the pictures and the trigger is under pressure, his swelling memory suddenly breaks open. He recalls the summer before last and names Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, Faye, Ernie Block, Interstate 80, and the Tranquility Motel. The remembered places and people restore the missing context around his present terror; the motel, in particular, returns with the force of a recognition that his obsession has been bound up with something he cannot remember.

That recovery changes the scene at the instant it threatens to end. The narrative does not present the house as the source of an explanation, but as the place where the missing past resurfaces amid the moon pictures and the loaded gun. Its ordinary objects acquire opposing functions: the pictures intensify the compulsion, the shotgun embodies the immediate danger, and the returning memories interrupt the movement toward suicide. Lomack's Reno thus anchors a personal crisis in a particular home while connecting it to the shared events at the Tranquility Motel and the journey along Interstate 80.