Insomnia (8 page)

‘Sit quiet for half an hour before bedtime and listen to classical music,’ he said out loud. ‘Buy some Depends for those troublesome calls of nature.’

He startled himself by laughing at the image. The laughter had a hysterical edge he didn’t much care for – it was damned creepy, as a matter of fact – but it was still a little while before he could make himself stop.

Yet he supposed he would try Hamilton Davenport’s suggestion (although he would skip the diapers, thank you), as he had tried most of the folk remedies well-meaning people had passed on to him. This made him think of his first
bona fide
folk remedy, and that raised another grin.

It had been McGovern’s idea. He had been sitting on the porch one evening when Ralph came back from the Red Apple with some noodles and spaghetti sauce, had taken one look at his upstairs neighbor and made a
tsk-tsk
sound, shaking his head dolefully.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Ralph asked, taking the seat next to him. A little farther down the street, a little girl in jeans and an oversized white tee-shirt had been skipping rope and chanting in the growing gloom.

‘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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.