Moon images in Zeb Lomack's home

The moon images in Zebediah Lomack’s home are both the visible architecture of his obsession and the means by which his erased past breaks back into awareness. As he covers his rooms with lunar pictures, they transform his house into a space he cannot escape; when names begin appearing on their surfaces, the images connect his private fixation to Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, Faye, Ernie Block, and the forgotten events at the Tranquility Motel.

From pictures to an inhabited lunar world

By September, Zebediah Lomack’s collection of books had grown to more than fifteen hundred volumes, stacked throughout his small house. He read about the moon, studied photographs of it for hours, and watched it through a telescope until he was too tired to stay awake. The pictures made the distant object familiar, but familiarity did not make it safe: the moon drew him with wonder and filled him with unease. His home gradually became an environment organized around that attraction, rather than a place from which he could simply observe it.

The transformation accelerated through the pictures themselves. After covering his bedroom, Zebediah continued repapering the other walls with lunar images from astronomy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. On an infrequent trip outside, he bought fifty copies of a three-by-five-foot color poster made from an astronaut’s photograph. He used them to cover every wall and the ceiling of the living room, and taped them over the windows. Moving the furniture out left the chamber like a planetarium whose display never changed. Images that might ordinarily be glanced at had become the room’s entire visible world.

That enclosure made the pictures more than a record of an interest. Zebediah sometimes lay on the bare floor beneath the repeated moons, overcome at once by exhilaration and terror. The emotional contradiction matters: the images promise an experience of wonder, yet their abundance makes that wonder oppressive. Their repetition turns a familiar picture into an inescapable presence, while the covered windows shut out the ordinary outside world—including the actual night sky, which he also fears looking at.

The names written across the moon

On Christmas night, while lying beneath the posters, Zebediah noticed that one image had been marked with a single word: Dominick. He recognized his own handwriting but could not remember writing it. A second poster bore the name Ginger, a third Faye, and a fourth Ernie. He searched the remaining pictures but found no further names. The marks were legible and apparently his, yet their making had disappeared from his memory.

At first, the names offered no explanation. Zebediah could not think of anyone he knew named Dominick, Ginger, or Faye; he knew two people named Ernie, but neither was close to him. Nevertheless, the names produced an uneasy sense that these people had mattered profoundly, and that remembering them was somehow bound up with his sanity and survival. The images therefore acquire a second function: beyond surrounding him with the object of his fixation, they bear signs that point toward a history he cannot consciously reach.

The scene turns the pictures into a surface on which memory becomes visible before it becomes intelligible. Zebediah cannot explain the handwriting, recognize the people, or yet identify the missing events. But the names begin an internal recollection he experiences as a memory swelling toward an inevitable break. As that pressure grows, so does his fear. The lunar images do not simply decorate the setting for a recovered memory; their marked surfaces provide the first concrete clue that his obsession and the missing past are connected.

Attempts to remove the images

When the names unsettle him, Zebediah resolves to clear the house before seeking help. He keeps his head lowered to avoid the posters, retrieves a Remington 12-gauge shotgun and shells from his bedroom closet, and places the loaded weapon on the kitchen table. His plan is to discard the moon books, tear down the pictures, clean the kitchen, and make himself presentable. The shotgun is the plan’s unspoken alternative: if the lunar pull takes hold again, he intends to kill himself rather than be confined as his father had been. The images have become so potent in his experience that he treats escape from their influence as a matter of life and death.

He carries armloads of books into the snow-covered backyard and deposits them in a barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks. Though he tries to concentrate on the names written on the posters, the compulsion to return to lunar study remains intense. After several trips, he has put two or three hundred volumes in the pit and is ready to set them alight. But when he strikes a match, the pit is empty. The books have returned to the kitchen, wet with snow and smeared with ashes: during an unremembered lapse, he carried them back into the house.

The same reversal recurs as he tries again. He believes he is moving books toward the pit, then realizes he is carrying them away from it and restoring the collection. The episode gives the images a force expressed through Zebediah’s actions and perception, without establishing that the pictures literally move or act independently. Their hold is registered in his repeated loss of control: he tries to remove the objects that sustain his obsession, but his own actions undo the attempt. The names remain a competing focus, a way of directing his attention toward the people whose identities might explain the past.

The image, the moon, and the recovered past

The struggle reaches its crisis when reflected light on the snow draws Zebediah’s gaze upward to the night sky. He recognizes the moon, and the sight threatens to pull him back into the trance. A cloud briefly crosses it, interrupting the pull long enough for him to become aware that he is outside without a coat in the freezing December night. He runs indoors and tries to tear down the pictures with his eyes shut, but even then he feels their imagined light and roundness. When he opens his eyes, the familiar lunar body captures his attention again.

Back in the kitchen, Zebediah tries to use the loaded shotgun to avoid the fate he associates with his father’s institutionalization. As he struggles to keep his gaze from the posters, the swelling memory finally breaks open. He remembers the summer before last, Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger Weiss, Faye, Ernie Block, the young priest, other people, Interstate 80, and the Tranquility Motel. The recovered list places the names from the images within a shared, suppressed history; it also restores the lunar fixation to a chain of events rather than leaving it as an inexplicable private compulsion.

The shotgun fires, and Zebediah dies. The images have not supplied him with a safe route out of the obsession: the attempt to resist their pull ends at the moment the memory they helped announce returns. Their significance lies in this double role. They make the house a sealed environment of repetition, then carry the first surviving signs of a past Zebediah had forgotten. What begins as a room full of pictures becomes, at the climax, a visual register of both the force of the fixation and the names that lead back to the Tranquility Motel.