Insomnia Chapter 1
1
About a month after the death of his wife, Ralph Roberts began to suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life.
The problem was mild to begin with, but it grew steadily worse. Six months after the first interruptions in his heretofore unremarkable sleep cycle, Ralph had reached a state of misery he could hardly credit, let alone accept. Toward the end of the summer of 1993 he began to wonder what it would be like to spend his remaining years on earth in a starey-eyed daze of wakefulness. Of course it wouldn’t come to that, he told himself, it never does.
But was that true? He didn’t really know, that was the devil of it, and the books on the subject Mike Hanlon steered him to down at the Derry Public Library weren’t much help. There were several on sleep disorders, but they seemed to contradict one another. Some called insomnia a symptom, others called it a disease, and at least one called it a myth. The problem went further than that, however; so far as Ralph could tell from the books, no one seemed exactly sure what sleep itself was, how it worked, or what it did.
He knew he should quit playing amateur researcher and go to the doctor, but he found that surprisingly hard to do. He supposed he still bore Dr. Litchfield a grudge. It was Litchfield, after all, who had originally diagnosed Carolyn’s brain tumor as tension headaches (except Ralph had an idea that Litchfield, a lifelong bachelor, might actually have believed that Carolyn was suffering from nothing but a moderate case of the vapors), and Litchfield who had made himself as scarce as medically possible once Carolyn was diagnosed. Ralph was positive that if he had asked the man about that point-blank, Litchfield would have said he had handed the case off to Jamal, the specialist . . . all quite proper and aboveboard. Yes. Except Ralph had made it his business to get a good look into Litchfield’s eyes on the few occasions he had seen him between Carolyn’s first convulsions last July and her death this March, and Ralph thought that what he’d seen in those eyes was a mixture of unease and guilt. It was the look of a man trying very hard to forget he has fucked up. Ralph believed the only reason he could still look at Litchfield without wanting to knock his block off was that Dr. Jamal had told him that an earlier diagnosis probably would have made no difference; by the time Carolyn’s headaches started, the tumor was already well entrenched, and no doubt sending out little bursts of bad cells to other areas of the brain like malignant CARE packages.
In late April Dr. Jamal had left to establish a practice in southern Connecticut, and Ralph missed him. He thought that he could have talked about his sleeplessness to Dr. Jamal, and he had an idea that Jamal would have listened in a way Litchfield wouldn’t . . . or couldn’t.
By late summer Ralph had read enough about insomnia to know that the type with which he was afflicted, while not rare, was a lot less common than the usual slow-sleep insomnia. People unaffected by insomnia are usually in first-stage sleep seven to twenty minutes after turning in. Slow-sleepers, on the other hand, sometimes take as long as three hours to slip below the surface, and while normal sleepers begin to ramp down into third-stage sleep (what some of the old books called theta sleep, Ralph had discovered) forty-five minutes or so after drifting off, slow-sleepers usually took an additional hour or two to get down there . . . and on many nights they did not get all the way down at all. They awoke unrefreshed, sometimes with unfocused memories of unpleasant, tangled dreams, more often with the mistaken impression that they had been awake all night.
Following Carolyn’s death, Ralph began to suffer from premature waking. He continued to go to bed most nights following the conclusion of the eleven o’clock news, and he continued to pop off to sleep almost at once, but instead of waking promptly at six-fifty-five, five minutes before the clock-radio alarm buzzed, he began to wake at six. At first he dismissed this as no more than the price of living with a slightly enlarged prostate and a seventy-year-old set of kidneys, but he never seemed to have to go that badly when he woke up, and he found it impossible to get back to sleep even after he’d emptied what had accumulated. He simply lay in the bed he’d shared with Carolyn for so many years, waiting for it to be five of seven (quarter till, anyway) so he could get up. Eventually he gave up even trying to drop off again; he simply lay there with his long-fingered, slightly swollen hands laced together on his chest and stared up at the shadowy ceiling with eyes that felt as big as doorknobs. Sometimes he thought of Dr. Jamal down there in Westport, talking in his soft and comforting Indian accent, building up his little piece of the American dream. Sometimes he thought of places he and Carolyn had gone in the old days, and the one he kept coming back to was a hot afternoon at Sand Beach in Bar Harbor, the two of them sitting at a picnic table in their bathing suits, sitting under a big bright umbrella, eating sweet fried clams and drinking Bud from longneck bottles as they watched the sailboats scudding across the dark-blue ocean. When had that been? 1964? 1967? Did it matter? Probably not.
The alterations in his sleep schedule wouldn’t have mattered, either, if they had ended there; Ralph would have adapted to the changes not just with ease but with gratitude. All the books he hunted through that summer seemed to confirm one bit of folk wisdom he’d heard all his life—people slept less as they got older. If losing an hour or so a night was the only fee he had to pay for the dubious pleasure of being “seventy years young,” he would pay it gladly, and consider himself well off.
But it didn’t end there. By the first week of May, Ralph was waking up to birdsong at 5:15 a.m. He tried earplugs for a few nights, although he doubted from the outset that they would work. It wasn’t the newly returned birds that were waking him up, nor the occasional delivery-truck backfire out on Harris Avenue. He had always been the sort of guy who could sleep in the middle of a brass marching band, and he didn’t think that had changed. What had changed was inside his head. There was a switch in there, something was turning it on a little earlier every day, and Ralph hadn’t the slightest idea of how to keep it from happening.
By June he was popping out of sleep like Jack out of his box at 4:30 a.m., 4:45 at the latest. And by the middle of July—not quite as hot as July of ’92, but bad enough, thanks very much—he was snapping to at around four o’clock. It was during those long hot nights, taking up too little of the bed where he and Carolyn had made love on so many hot nights (and cold ones), that he began to consider what a hell his life would become if sleep departed entirely. In daylight he was still able to scoff at the notion, but he was discovering certain dismal truths about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, and the grand-prize winner was this: at 4:15 a.m., anything seems possible. Anything.
During the days he was able to go on telling himself that he was simply experiencing a readjustment of his sleep-cycle, that his body was responding in perfectly normal fashion to a number of big changes in his life, retirement and the loss of his wife being the two biggest. He sometimes used the word loneliness when he thought about his new life, but he shied away from The Dreaded D-Word, stuffing it back into the deep closet of his subconscious whenever it happened to glimmer for a moment in his thoughts. Loneliness was okay. Depression most certainly was not.
Maybe you need to get more exercise, he thought. Do some walking, like you used to last summer. After all, you’ve been leading a pretty sedentary life—get up, eat toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the baby if they happen to be out, eat supper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for awhile. Then what? Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed. Sedentary. Boring. No wonder you wake up early.
Except that was crap. His life sounded sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn’t. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from “pottering around.” Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. “Punishment” probably would have been closer to the mark than “pottering,” but punishment for what? Waking up before dawn?
Ralph didn’t know and didn’t care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn’t really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional flights of black spots in front of his eyes. He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.
“You ought to quit that,” Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning. “It’s got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic.”
“Maybe I am a lunatic,” Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.
2
He did begin walking again—nothing like the Marathons of ’92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn’t raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used-book store and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.
Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the announcements of outdated bean suppers and ancient church socials, placed so it covered roughly half of a yellowing PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT placard.
The woman in the two photographs at the top of the poster was a pretty blonde in her late thirties or early forties, but the style of the photos—unsmiling full face on the left, unsmiling profile on the right, plain white background in both—was unsettling enough to stop Ralph in his tracks. The photos made the woman look as if she belonged on a post office wall or in a TV docudrama . . . and that, the poster’s printed matter made clear, was no accident.
The photos were what stopped him, but it was the woman’s name that held him.
WANTED FOR MURDER
SUSAN EDWINA DAY
was printed across the top in big black letters. And below the simulated mug-shots, in red:
STAY OUT OF OUR CITY!
There was a small line of print at the very bottom of the poster. Ralph’s close vision had deteriorated quite a bit since Carolyn’s death—gone to hell in a handbasket might actually have been a more accurate way of putting it—and he had to lean forward until his brow was pressed against the dirty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes before he could decipher it:
Paid for by the Maine LifeWatch Committee
Far down in his mind a voice whispered: Hey, hey, Susan Day! How many kids did you kill today?
Susan Day, Ralph recalled, was a political activist from either New York or Washington, the sort of fast-speaking woman who regularly drove taxi-drivers, barbers, and hardhat construction workers into foaming frenzies. Why that particular little jangle of doggerel had come into his mind, however, he couldn’t say; it was tagged to some memory that wouldn’t quite come. Maybe his tired old brains were just cross-referencing that sixties Vietnam protest chant, the one which had gone Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?
No, that’s not it, he thought. Close, but no cigar. It was—
Just before his mind could cough up Ed Deepneau’s name and face, a voice spoke from almost beside him. “Earth to Ralph, earth to Ralph, come in, Ralphie-baby!”
Roused out of his thoughts, Ralph turned toward the voice. He was both shocked and amused to find he had almost been asleep on his feet. Christ, he thought, you never know how important sleep is until you miss a little. Then all the floors start to tilt and all the corners on things start to round off.
It was Hamilton Davenport, the proprietor of Back Pages, who had spoken to him. He was stocking the library cart he kept in front of his shop with brightly jacketed paperbacks. His old corncob pipe—to Ralph it always looked like the stack of a model steamship—jutted from the corner of his mouth, sending little puffs of blue smoke into the hot, bright air. Winston Smith, his old gray tomcat, sat in the open doorway of the shop with his tail curled around his paws. He looked at Ralph with yellow-eyed indifference, as if to say, You think you know old, my friend? I’m here to testify you don’t know dick about getting old.
“Sheesh, Ralph,” Davenport said. “I must have called your name at least three times.”
“I guess I was woolgathering,” Ralph said. He stepped past the library cart, leaned in the doorway (Winston Smith held his place with regal disinterest), and grabbed the two papers he bought every day: a Boston Globe and a USA Today. The Derry News came right to the house, courtesy of Pete the paperboy. Ralph sometimes told people that he was sure one of the three papers was comic relief, but he had never been able to make up his mind which one it was. “I haven’t—”
He broke off as Ed Deepneau’s face came into his mind. It was Ed he’d heard that nasty little chant from, last summer, out by the airport, and it really wasn’t any wonder it had taken him a little while to retrieve the memory. Ed Deepneau was the last person in the world from whom you’d expect to hear something like that.
“Ralphie?” Davenport said. “You just shut down on me.”
Ralph blinked. “Oh, sorry. I haven’t been sleeping very well, that’s what I started to say.”
“Bummer . . . but there are worse problems. Just drink a glass of warm milk and listen to some quiet music half an hour before bed.”
Ralph had begun to discover this summer that everyone in America apparently had a pet remedy for insomnia, some bit of bedtime magic that had been handed down through the generations like the family Bible.
“Bach’s good, also Beethoven, and William Ackerman ain’t bad. But the real trick”—Davenport raised one finger impressively to emphasize this—“is not to get up from your chair during that half hour. Not for anything. Don’t answer the phone, don’t wind up the dog and put out the alarm-clock, don’t decide to brush your teeth . . . nothing! Then, when you do go to...
