Insomnia Read online

  'It means you're looking folded, spindled, and mutilated,' McGovern said. He used one thumb to tilt the Panama back on his head and looked more closely at Ralph. 'Still not sleeping?'

  'Still not sleeping,' Ralph agreed.

  McGovern was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he did so in a tone of absolute - almost apocalyptic, in fact - finality. 'Whiskey is the answer,' he said.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'To your insomnia, Ralph. I don't mean you should take a bath in it - there's no need of that. Just mix a tablespoon of honey with half a shot of whiskey and hook it down fifteen or twenty minutes before you hit the hay.'

  'You think?' Ralph had asked hopefully.

  'All I can say is it worked for me, and I had some real problems sleeping around the time I turned forty. Looking back on it, I guess that was my midlife crisis - six months of insomnia and a year-long depression over my bald spot.'

  Although the books he'd been consulting all said that booze was a vastly overrated cure for sleeplessness - that it often made the problem worse instead of better, in fact - Ralph had tried it just the same. He had never been much of a drinker, so he began by adjusting McGovern's recommended half-shot dosage down to a quarter of a shot, but after a week of no relief he had upped the ante to a full shot . . . then to two. He woke up one morning at four-twenty-two with a nasty little headache to accompany the dull brown taste of Early Times on the roof of his mouth, and realized he was suffering his first hangover in fifteen years.

  'Life's too short for this shit,' he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.

  2

  Okay, Ralph thought now as he watched the desultory mid-morning flow of customers in and out of the Red Apple across the street. Here's the situation: McGovern says you look like shit, you almost fainted at Lois Chasse's feet this morning, and you just cancelled the appointment you made with Ye Olde Family Physician. So what next? Just let it go? Accept the situation and let it go?

  The idea had a certain Oriental charm - fate, karma, and all that - but he was going to need more than charm to get him through the long hours of early morning. The books said there were people in the world, quite a lot of them, who managed very well on no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. There were even some who got along on only two. They were an extremely small minority, but they did exist. Ralph Roberts, however, was not among their number.

  How he looked wasn't very important to him - he had a feeling that his matinee-idol days were well behind him - but how he felt was, and it was no longer just a matter of not feeling good; he felt horrible. The insomnia had begun to pervade every aspect of his life, the way the smell of frying garlic on the fifth floor will eventually pervade an entire apartment building. The color had started to drain out of things; the world had begun to take on the dull, grainy quality of a newspaper photograph.

  Simple decisions - whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example - had become difficult, almost agonizing. In the last couple of weeks he had found himself coming back to the apartment from Dave's Video Stop empty-handed more and more often, not because there was nothing at Dave's he wanted to watch but because there was too much - he couldn't decide if he wanted one of the Dirty Harry movies or a Billy Crystal comedy or maybe a few old Star Trek episodes. After a couple of these unsuccessful trips, he had plopped himself down in this very wing-chair, almost crying with frustration . . . and, he supposed, fear.

  That creeping sensory numbness and the erosion of his decision-making capabilities were not the only problems he had come to associate with the insomnia; his short-term memory had also begun to slip. It had been his practice to go to the movies at least once and sometimes twice a week ever since his retirement from the printshop where he had finished his working life as the bookkeeper and general supervisor. He had taken Carolyn until last year, when she had gotten too sick to enjoy going out anywhere. After her death he had mostly gone alone, although Helen Deepneau had accompanied him once or twice when Ed was home to mind the baby (Ed himself almost never went, claiming he got headaches at the movies). Ralph had gotten so used to calling the cinema center's answering machine to check showtimes that he had the number by heart. As the summer went on, however, he found himself having to look it up in the Yellow Pages more and more often - he could no longer be sure if the last four digits were 1317 or 1713.

  'It's 1713,' he said now. 'I know it is.' But did he know it? Did he really?

  Call Litchfield back. Go on, Ralph - stop sifting through the wreckage. Do something constructive. And if Litchfield really sticks in your craw, call somebody else. The phone book's as full of doctors as it ever was.

  Probably true, but seventy was maybe a little old to be picking a new sawbones by the eenie-meenie-minie-moe method. And he wasn't going to call Litchfield back. Period.

  Okay, so what's next, you stubborn old goat? A few more folk remedies? I hope not, because at the rate you're going you'll be down to eye of newt and tongue of toad in no time.

  The answer that came was like a cool breeze on a hot day . . . and it was an absurdly simple answer. All his book-research this summer had been aimed at understanding the problem rather than finding a solution. When it came to answers, he had relied almost solely on back-fence remedies like whiskey and honey, even when the books had already assured him they probably wouldn't work or would only work for a while. Although the books did offer some presumably reliable methods for coping with insomnia, the only one Ralph had actually tried was the simplest and most obvious: going to bed earlier in the evening. That solution hadn't worked - he had simply lain awake until eleven-thirty or so, then dropped off to wake at his new, earlier time - but something else might.

  It was worth a try, anyway.

  3

  Instead of spending the afternoon in his usual frenzy of backyard pottering, Ralph went down to the library and skimmed through some of the books he had already looked at. The general consensus seemed to be that if going to bed earlier didn't work, going later might. Ralph went home (mindful of his previous adventures, he took the bus) filled with cautious hope. It might work. If it didn't, he always had Bach, Beethoven and William Ackerman to fall back on.

  His first attempt at this technique, which one of the texts called 'delayed sleep', was comic. He awoke at his now-usual time (3:45 by the digital clock on the living-room mantel) with a sore back, an aching neck, no immediate idea of how he had gotten into the wing-chair by the window, or why the TV was on, broadcasting nothing but snow and a soft, surflike roar of static.

  It was only as he allowed his head to roll cautiously back, supporting the nape of his neck with a cupped palm, that he realized what had happened. He had intended to sit up until at least three o'clock and possibly four. He would then stroll off to bed and sleep the sleep of the just. That had been the plan, anyway. Instead, The Incredible Insomniac of Harris Avenue had dropped off during Jay Leno's opening monologue, like a kid who's trying to stay up all night long just to see what it's like. And then, of course, he had finished the adventure by waking up in the damned chair. The problem was the same, Joe Friday might have said; only the location had changed.

  Ralph strolled off to bed anyway, hoping against hope, but the urge (if not the need) to sleep had passed. After an hour of lying awake, he had gone back to the wing-chair again, this time with a pillow propped behind his stiff neck and a rueful grin on his face.

  4

  There was nothing funny about his second try, which took place the following night. Sleepiness began to steal over him at its usual time - eleven-twenty, just as Pete Cherney was giving the following day's weather forecast. This time Ralph fought it successfully, making it all the way through Whoopi (although he almost nodded off during Whoopi's conversation with Roseanne Arnold, that evening's guest) and the late-night movie that came on after that. It was an old Audie
Murphy flick in which Audie appeared to be winning the war in the Pacific pretty much single-handed. It sometimes seemed to Ralph that there was an unspoken rule among local TV broadcasters which stated that movies telecast in the small hours of the morning could only star Audie Murphy or James Brolin.

  After the last Japanese pillbox had been blown up, Channel 2 signed off. Ralph dialed around, looking for another movie, and found nothing but snow. He supposed he could have watched movies all night if he had the cable, like Bill downstairs or Lois down the street; he remembered having put that on his list of things to do in the new year. But then Carolyn had died and cable TV - with or without Home Box Office - had no longer seemed very important.

  He found a copy of Sports Illustrated and began to slog through an article on women's tennis he'd missed the first time through, glancing up at the clock every now and then as the hands began to close in on 3:00 a.m. He had become all but convinced that this was going to work. His eyelids were so heavy they felt as if they had been dipped in concrete, and although he was reading the tennis article carefully, word for word, he had no idea of what the writer was driving at. Whole sentences zipped across his brain without sticking, like cosmic rays.

  I'm going to sleep tonight - I really think I am. For the first time in months the sun is going to have to come up without my help, and that isn't just good, friends and neighbors; that is great.

  Then, shortly after three o'clock, that pleasant drowsiness began to disappear. It did not go with a champagne-cork pop but rather seemed to ooze away, like sand through a fine sieve or water down a partially clogged drain. When Ralph realized what was happening, it wasn't panic he felt, but sick dismay. It was a feeling he had come to recognize as the true opposite of hope, and when he slipper-scuffed his way into the bedroom at quarter past three, he couldn't remember a depression as deep as the one which now enveloped him. He felt as if he were suffocating in it.

  'Please, God, just forty winks,' he muttered as he turned off the light, but he strongly suspected that this was one prayer which was not going to be answered.

  It wasn't. Although he had been awake for twenty-four hours by then, every trace of sleepiness had left his mind and body by quarter of four. He was tired, yes - more deeply and fundamentally tired than he had ever been in his life - but being tired and being sleepy, he had discovered, were sometimes poles apart. Sleep, that undiscriminating friend, humankind's best and most reliable nurse since the dawn of time, had abandoned him again.

  By four o'clock Ralph's bed had become hateful to him, as it always did when he realized he could put it to no good use. He swung his feet back onto the floor, scratching the mat of hair - almost entirely gray now - which curled through his mostly unbuttoned pajama top. He slid on his slippers again and scuffed back to the living room, where he dropped into the wing-back chair and looked down at Harris Avenue. It was laid out like a stage set where the only actor currently on view wasn't even human: it was a stray dog moving slowly down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park and Up-Mile Hill. It held its right rear leg up as much as possible, limping along as best it could on the other three.

  'Hi there, Rosalie,' Ralph muttered, and rubbed a hand across his eyes.

  It was a Thursday morning, garbage-pickup day on Harris Avenue, so he wasn't surprised to see Rosalie, who'd been a wandering, here-and-there fixture in the neighborhood for the last year or so. She made her way down the street in leisurely fashion, investigating the rows and clusters of cans with the discrimination of a jaded flea-market shopper.

  Now Rosalie - who was limping worse than ever this morning, and looked as tired as Ralph felt - found what looked like a good-sized beef bone and trotted away with it in her mouth. Ralph watched her out of sight, then simply sat with his hands folded in his lap, gazing out on the silent neighborhood, where the orange hi-intensity lamps added to the illusion that Harris Avenue was nothing but a stage set standing deserted after the evening performance had ended and the actors had gone home; they shone down like spotlights in a perfect diminishing perspective that was surreal and hallucinatory.

  Ralph Roberts sat in the wing-chair where he had spent so many early-morning hours lately and waited for light and movement to invest the lifeless world below him. Finally the first human actor - Pete the paperboy - entered stage right, riding his Raleigh. He biked his way up the street, tossing rolled newspapers from the bag slung over his shoulder and hitting the porches he aimed at with a fair degree of accuracy.

  Ralph watched him awhile, then heaved a sigh which felt as if it had come all the way from the basement, and got up to make tea.

  'I don't remember ever reading about this shit in my horoscope,'he said hollowly, and then turned on the kitchen tap and began to fill the kettle.

  5

  That long Thursday morning and even longer Thursday afternoon taught Ralph Roberts a valuable lesson: not to sneer at three or four hours' sleep a night simply because he had spent his entire life under the mistaken impression that he had a right to at least six and usually seven. It also served as a hideous preview: if things didn't improve, he could look forward to feeling like this most of the time. Hell, all of the time. He went into the bedroom at ten o'clock and again at one, hoping for a little nap - even a catnap would do, and half an hour would be a life-saver - but he could not so much as drowse. He was miserably tired but not in the least bit sleepy.

  Around three o'clock he decided to make himself a Lipton Cup-A-Soup. He filled the teakettle with fresh water, put it on to boil, and opened the cupboard over the counter where he kept condiments, spices, and various envelopes containing foods which only astronauts and old men actually seem to eat - powders to which the consumer need only add hot water.

  He pushed cans and bottles around in aimless fashion and then simply stared into the cupboard for awhile, as if expecting the box of soup packets to magically appear in the space he had made. When they didn't, he repeated the process, only this time moving things back to their original positions before staring in again with the look of distant perplexity which was becoming (Ralph, mercifully, did not know this) his dominant expression.

  When the teakettle shrieked, he put it on one of the rear burners and went back to staring into the cupboard. It dawned on him - very, very slowly - that he must have drunk his last packet of Cup-A-Soup yesterday or the day before, although he could not for the life of him remember doing so.

  'That's a surprise?' he asked the boxes and bottles in the open cupboard. 'I'm so tired I can't remember my own name.'

  Yes, I can, he thought. It's Leon Redbone. So there!

  It wasn't much of a joke, but he felt a small smile - it felt as light as a feather - touch his lips. He stepped into the bathroom, combed his hair, and then went downstairs. Here's Audie Murphy, heading out into enemy territory in search of supplies, he thought. Primary target: one box of Lipton Chicken and Rice Cup-A-Soup packets. If locating and securing this target should prove impossible, I'll divert to my secondary: Noodles 'n Beef. I know this is a risky mission, but--

  '- but I work best alone,' he finished as he came out on the porch.

  Old Mrs Perrine happened to be passing, and she favored Ralph with a sharp look but said nothing. He waited for her to get a little way up the sidewalk - he did not feel capable of conversation with anyone this afternoon, least of all Mrs Perrine, who at eighty-two could still have found stimulating and useful work among the Marines at Parris Island. He pretended to be examining the spider-plant which hung from the hook under the porch eave until she had reached what he deemed a safe distance, then crossed Harris Avenue to the Red Apple. Which was where the day's real troubles began.

  6

  He entered the convenience store once again mulling over the spectacular failure of the delayed-sleep experiment and wondering if the advice in the library texts was no more than an uptown version of the folk remedies his acquaintances seemed so eager to press upon him. It was an unpleasant idea, but he thought his mind (or the force be
low his mind which was actually in charge of this slow torture) had sent him a message which was even more unpleasant: You have a sleep-window, Ralph. It's not as big as it once was, and it seems to be getting smaller with every passing week, but you better be grateful for what you've got, because a small window is better than no window at all. You see that now, don't you?

  'Yes,' Ralph mumbled as he walked down the center aisle to the bright red Cup-A-Soup boxes. 'I see that very well.'

  Sue, the afternoon counter-girl, laughed cheerfully. 'You must have money in the bank, Ralph,' she said.

  'Beg pardon?' Ralph didn't turn; he was inventorying the red boxes. Here was onion . . . split pea . . . the beef-and-noodles combo . . . but where the hell was the Chicken and Rice?

  'My mom always said people who talk to themselves have Oh my God!'

  For a moment Ralph thought she had simply made a statement a little too complex for his tired mind to immediately grasp, something about how people who talked to themselves had found God, and then she screamed. He had hunkered down to check the boxes on the bottom shelf, and the scream shot him to his feet so hard and fast that his knees popped. He wheeled toward the front of the store, bumping the top shelf of the soup display with his elbow and knocking half a dozen red boxes into the aisle.

  'Sue? What's wrong?'

  Sue paid no attention. She was looking out through the door with her fisted hands pressed against her lips and her brown eyes huge above them. 'God, look at the blood!' she cried in a choked voice.

  Ralph turned further, knocking a few more Lipton boxes into the aisle, and looked through the Red Apple's dirty show window. What he saw drew a gasp from him, and it took him a space of seconds - five, maybe - to realize that the bloody, beaten woman staggering toward the Red Apple was Helen Deepneau. Ralph had always thought Helen the prettiest woman on the west side of town, but there was nothing pretty about her today. One of her eyes was puffed shut; there was a gash at her left temple that was soon going to be lost in the gaudy swelling of a fresh bruise; her puffy lips and her cheeks were covered with blood. The blood had come from her nose, which was still leaking. She wove through the Red Apple's little parking lot toward the door like a drunk, her one good eye seeming to see nothing; it simply stared.