Zeb Lomack's Lunar Obsession

Zeb Lomack’s Lunar Obsession is the consuming fixation that transforms Zebediah Lomack, a professional gambler, from a man who lives to stay in a card game into a prisoner of the moon. What starts as an apparently harmless interest grows into an all-encompassing compulsion: he abandons gambling, covers his home with lunar images, and becomes increasingly afraid of the very object he cannot stop watching. On Christmas, his struggle to destroy the images brings a buried memory back—and ends in his suicide.

From pastime to obsession

The fixation begins the summer before last. Toward the end of August, Zeb goes onto the back porch of his comfortable little house to watch the moon and stars while drinking Coors. In mid-September, he buys a Tasco 10VR refracting telescope and books on amateur astronomy. The new interest surprises him because, for most of his fifty years, cards have held nearly all his attention. He plays poker in Reno, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, and smaller gambling towns, including Elko and Bullhead City. Winning money matters less than remaining in the game; cards, rather than women, alcohol, or food, are what he loves.

For a couple of months, the telescope remains a casual hobby. Then, by the following Christmas, Zeb’s attention has shifted from the stars to the moon. He begins canceling casino trips to study the lunar surface. By February, he is at the telescope every night the moon is visible. In April, his collection of books about the moon exceeds a hundred volumes; by the end of June, it reaches five hundred. At the same time, he covers his bedroom walls and ceiling with moon pictures. He stops playing cards and lives on his savings. The story marks a decisive change here: an activity that once fit around his life has become the organizing force of it.

A house remade in the moon’s image

By September, more than fifteen hundred books about the moon are stacked throughout Zeb’s small house. He spends his days reading about it or staring at photographs until its craters, ridges, and plains become as familiar as the rooms he inhabits. At night, he studies the moon through his telescope until he can no longer stay awake, leaving his eyes sore and bloodshot.

The images spread beyond the bedroom. Zeb buys fifty copies of a three-by-five-foot color poster, a photograph of the moon taken by astronauts. He covers the living room’s walls and ceiling with them, even taping posters over the windows. He removes the furniture, turning the room into a planetarium with one unchanging display. Sometimes he lies on the floor beneath the repeated moons, caught between exhilaration and terror. The room makes the fixation visible and inescapable: there is no ordinary view left, only the same lunar face repeated around him.

His habits and physical condition change along with his surroundings. No longer exercising, he eats cakes, ice cream, frozen dinners, and bologna sandwiches because he has no time to prepare proper meals. He grows softer and heavier, though he barely notices. The moon brings him not just wonder but unease, and he uses food to calm himself. By early October, he thinks about the moon every hour, dreams about it, and encounters its images throughout the house. Even his sense of time begins to fail: when he later finds the refrigerator nearly empty, he cannot tell when he last shopped or ate.

Dread, the names, and the missing past

On Christmas night, while lying beneath the posters, Zeb sees a name written across one of the lunar images: Dominick. He recognizes his own handwriting but cannot remember writing it. On other posters he finds Ginger, Faye, and Ernie. He cannot place Dominick, Ginger, or Faye; he knows people named Ernie, but none is a close friend. Still, the names feel bound to a past he cannot reach. He senses that these people mattered greatly and that remembering them is connected to his sanity and survival.

The discovery intensifies the fixation’s contradictions. The moon is both the subject he compulsively studies and something he fears; he wants to look away, yet feels pulled toward the images. As an old memory begins to rise, his fear grows until he sweats and shakes. He leaves the poster-filled room, driven by nervous hunger, and finds almost no food in the refrigerator. That brief shock makes him recognize that he is sick and confused and needs help. But asking for it carries its own terror: his father was institutionalized after suffering delirium tremens, and Zeb fears that his own mind might be flawed and that he, too, will be locked away.

Failed resistance and the final revelation

Zeb decides to put the house in order before seeking help. He retrieves his Remington 12-gauge shotgun, loads it, and places it on the kitchen table as an unspoken condition of his plan: if he cannot escape the moon’s pull, he may kill himself rather than be committed. He begins carrying his books outside to a barbecue pit in the snow-covered yard, determined to destroy them. The urge to return to studying the moon feels as demanding as addiction, but he tries to resist by concentrating on the four names.

His efforts turn into a grim repetition. After carrying two or three hundred volumes to the pit, he prepares to burn them and discovers that he has instead carried them back into the house, where they lie damp with snow and ash. He tries again, only to realize that he is moving the books away from the pit rather than toward it. In the moon-dream, the act intended to break the obsession reverses itself and renews it. When the snow’s reflected light draws his gaze up to the sky, he recognizes the moon and believes he is doomed.

A cloud briefly crosses the moon and interrupts the trance. Zeb rushes indoors, but the house offers no refuge: even with his eyes shut, he feels as if the pictures give off light and their roundness can be sensed in his hands. He tears them from the kitchen walls, then opens his eyes and is captured by the lunar images again. His attempts to destroy the books and posters cannot hold against the fixation.

At the final crisis, Zeb reaches the shotgun and struggles to pull its trigger with his hands, then braces it and uses his bare toe. As the moon’s imagined influence draws his attention back to the walls, the swelling memory at last breaks open. He remembers the summer before last, the four named people, a young priest, others, Interstate 80, and the Tranquility Motel, along with the moon. The narrative leaves uncertain whether he cannot stop his foot or whether the recovered memory itself contributes to his decision. The shotgun fires, killing him. His lunar obsession thus ends not with a successful escape from its images, but with the return of the history that had been taken from him.