Insomnia (39 page)

His half-reproachful tone – as if Ralph had wantonly poured glue into the gears of some usually smooth-running machine – made Ralph feel impatient. ‘Of
course
they took it seriously. I saw two guys leaving her house and reported it to the authorities. When they got there, they found the lady dead. How could they
not
take it seriously?’

‘Why didn’t you give your name when you made the call?’

‘I don’t know. What difference does it make? And how in God’s name can they be sure she
wasn’t
scared into a heart attack?’

‘I don’t know if they
can
be a hundred per cent sure,’ McGovern said, now sounding a bit testy himself, ‘but I guess it must be close to that if they’re turning May’s body over to her brother for burial. It’s probably a blood-test of some kind. All I know is that this guy Funderburke—’

‘Utterback—’

‘—told Larry that May probably died in her sleep.’

McGovern crossed his legs, fiddled with the creases in his blue slacks, then gave Ralph a clear and piercing look.

‘I’m going to give you some advice, so listen up. Go to the doctor. Now. Today. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to Litchfield. This is getting heavy.’

The ones I saw coming out of Mrs Locher’s didn’t see me, but this one did,
Ralph thought.
It saw me and it pointed at me. For all I know, it might actually have been looking for me.

Now
there
was a nice paranoid thought.

‘Ralph? Did you hear what I said?’

‘Yes. I take it you don’t believe I actually saw anyone coming out of Mrs Locher’s house.’

‘You take it right. I saw the look on your face just now when I told you I’d been gone forty-five minutes, and I also saw the way you looked at your watch. You didn’t believe so much time had passed, did you? And the
reason
you didn’t believe it is because you dozed off without even being aware of it. Had yourself a little pocket nap. That’s probably what happened to you the other night, Ralph. Only the other night you dreamed up those two guys, and the dream was so real you called 911 when you woke up. Doesn’t that make sense?’

Three-six-nine,
Ralph thought.
The goose drank wine
.

‘What about the binoculars?’ he asked. ‘They’re still sitting on the table beside my chair in the living room. Don’t they prove I was awake?’

‘I don’t see how. Maybe you were sleepwalking, have you thought of that? You say you saw these intruders, but you can’t really describe them.’

‘Those orange hi-intensity lights—’

‘All the doors locked from the inside—’

‘Just the same I—’

‘And these auras you talked about. The insomnia is causing them – I’m almost sure of it. Still, it
could
be more serious than that.’

Ralph got up, walked down the porch steps, and stood at the head of the walk with his back to McGovern. There was a throbbing at his temples and his heart was beating hard. Too hard.

He didn’t just point. I was right the first time, the little sonofabitch
marked
me. And he was no dream. Neither were the ones I saw coming out of Mrs Locher’s. I’m sure of it.

Of course you are, Ralph,
another voice replied.
Crazy people are
always
sure of the crazy things they see and hear. That’s what makes them crazy, not the hallucinations themselves. If you really saw what you saw, what happened to Mrs Bennigan? What happened to the Budweiser truck? How did you lose the forty-five minutes McGovern spent on the phone with Larry Perrault?

‘You’re experiencing very serious symptoms,’ McGovern said from behind him, and Ralph thought he heard something terrible in the man’s voice. Satisfaction? Could it possibly be satisfaction?

‘One of them had a pair of scissors,’ Ralph said without turning around. ‘I saw them.’

‘Oh, come on, Ralph! Think! Use that brain of yours and
think
! On Sunday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before you’re due to have acupuncture treatment, a lunatic nearly sticks a knife into you. Is it any wonder that your mind serves up a nightmare featuring a sharp object that night? Hong’s pins and Pickering’s hunting knife become scissors, that’s all. Don’t you see that this hypothesis covers all the bases while what you claim to have seen covers none of them?’

‘And I was sleepwalking when I got the binoculars? That’s what you think?’

‘It’s possible. Even likely.’

‘Same thing with the spray-can in my jacket pocket, right? Old Dor didn’t have a thing to do with it.’

‘I don’t care about the spray-can or Old Dor!’ McGovern cried. ‘I care about
you
! You’ve been suffering from insomnia since April or May, you’ve been depressed and disturbed ever since Carolyn died—’

‘I have
not
been depressed!’ Ralph shouted. Across the street, the mailman paused and looked in their direction before going on down the block toward the park.

‘Have it your own way,’ McGovern said. ‘You haven’t been depressed. You also haven’t been sleeping, you’re seeing auras, guys creeping out of locked houses in the middle of the night . . .’ And then, in a deceptively light voice, McGovern said the thing Ralph had been dreading all along: ‘You want to watch out, old son. You’re starting to sound too much like Ed Deepneau for comfort.’

Ralph turned around. Dull hot blood pounded behind his face. ‘Why are you being this way? Why are you taking after me this way?’

‘I’m not taking after you, Ralph, I’m trying to
help
you. To be your friend.’

‘That’s not how it feels.’

‘Well, sometimes the truth hurts a little,’ McGovern said calmly. ‘You need to at least consider the idea that your mind and body are trying to tell you something. Let me ask you a question – is this the
only
disturbing dream you’ve had lately?’

Ralph thought fleetingly of Carol, buried up to her neck in the sand and screaming about white-man tracks. Thought of the bugs which had flooded out of her head. ‘I haven’t had
any
bad dreams lately,’ he said stiffly. ‘I suppose you don’t believe that because it doesn’t fit into the little scenario you’ve created.’

‘Ralph—’

‘Let me ask
you
something. Do you really believe that my seeing those two men and May Locher turning up dead was just a coincidence?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe your physical and emotional upset created conditions favorable to a brief but perfectly genuine psychic event.’

Ralph was silenced.

‘I believe such things do happen from time to time,’ McGovern said, standing up. ‘Probably sounds funny, coming from a rational old bird like me, but I do. I’m not out-and-out saying that
is
what happened here, but it
could
have been. What I
am
sure of is that the two men you think you saw did not in fact exist in the real world.’

Ralph stood looking up at McGovern with his hands jammed deep into his pockets and clenched into fists so hard and tight they felt like rocks. He could feel the muscles in his arms thrumming.

McGovern came down the porch steps and took him by the arm, gently, just above the elbow. ‘I only think—’

Ralph pulled his arm away so sharply that McGovern grunted with surprise and stumbled a little on his feet. ‘I
know
what you think.’

‘You’re not hearing what I—’

‘Oh, I’ve heard plenty. More than enough. Believe me. And excuse me – I think I’m going for another walk. I need to clear my head.’ He could feel dull hot blood pounding away in his cheeks and brow. He tried to throw his brain into some forward gear that would allow it to leave this senseless, impotent rage behind and couldn’t do it. He felt a lot as he had when he had awakened from the dream of Carolyn; his thoughts roared with terror and confusion, and as he started his legs moving the sense he got was not one of walking but of falling, as he had fallen out of bed yesterday morning. Still, he kept going. Sometimes that was all you could do.

‘Ralph, you need to see a doctor!’ McGovern called after him, and Ralph could no longer tell himself that he didn’t hear a weird, shrewish pleasure in McGovern’s voice. The concern which overlaid it was probably genuine enough but it was like sweet icing on a sour cake.

‘Not a pharmacist, not a hypnotist, not an acupuncturist! You need to see
your own family doctor
!’

Yeah, the guy who buried my wife below the high-tide line!
he thought in a kind of mental scream.
The guy who stuck her in sand up to her neck and then told her she didn’t have to worry about drowning as long as she kept taking her Valium and Tylenol-3!

Aloud he said, ‘I need to take a
walk
! That’s what I need and that’s
all
I need.’ His heartbeat was now slamming into his temples like the short, hard blows of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to him that this was how strokes must happen; if he didn’t control himself soon, he was apt to fall down with what his father had called ‘a bad-temper apoplexy’.

He could hear McGovern coming down the walk after him.
Don’t touch me, Bill,
Ralph thought.
Don’t even put your hand on my shoulder, because I’m probably going to turn around and slug you if you do
.

‘I’m trying to
help
you, don’t you see that?’ McGovern shouted. The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking frankly across the street at them. Karl, he saw, had a bag of hamburger buns in one hand. It was really sort of amazing, the things you saw at a time like this . . . although not as amazing as some of the things he had already seen that morning.

The things you
thought
you saw, Ralph,
a traitor voice whispered softly from deep inside his head.

‘Walk,’ Ralph muttered desperately. ‘Just a damn
walk
.’ A mind-movie had begun to play in his head. It was an unpleasant one, the sort of film he rarely went to see even if he had seen everything else that was playing at the cinema center. The soundtrack to this mental horror flick seemed to be ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, of all things.

Mrs Bennigan was now standing on her stoop, her walker abandoned at the foot of the front steps. She was still wearing her bright red fall coat, and her mouth appeared to be hanging open as she stared down the street at them.

Ralph walked faster, hunching his shoulders as if against a cold wind.
Suppose he just keeps on yelling, louder and louder? Suppose he follows me right up the street
?

If he does that, people will think
he’s
the one who’s gone crazy,
he told himself, but this idea had no power to soothe him. In his mind he continued to hear a piano playing a children’s tune – no, not really
playing
; picking it out in nursery-school plinks and plonks:

And now Ralph began to see the old people of Harris Avenue, the ones who bought their insurance from companies that advertised on cable TV, the ones with the gallstones and the skin tumors, the ones whose memories were diminishing even as their prostates enlarged, the ones who were living on Social Security and peering at the world through thickening cataracts instead of rose-colored glasses. These were the people who now read all the mail which came addressed to Occupant and scanned the supermarket advertising circulars for specials on canned goods and generic frozen dinners. He saw them dressed in grotesque short pants and fluffy short skirts, saw them wearing beanies and tee-shirts which showcased such characters as Beavis and Butt-Head and Rude Dog. He saw them, in short, as the world’s oldest pre-schoolers. They were marching around a double row of chairs as a small bald man in a white smock played ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on the piano. Another baldy filched the chairs one by one, and when the music stopped and everyone sat down, one person – this time it had been May Locher, next time it would probably be McGovern’s old department head – was left standing. That person would have to leave the room, of course. And Ralph heard McGovern laughing. Laughing because
he’d
found a seat again. Maybe May Locher was dead, Bob Polhurst dying, Ralph Roberts losing his marbles, but
he
was still all right, William D. McGovern, Esq was still fine, still dandy, still vertical and taking nourishment, still able to find a chair when the music stopped.

Ralph walked faster still, shoulders hunched even higher, anticipating another fusillade of advice and admonition. He thought it unlikely that McGovern would actually follow him up the street, but not entirely out of the question. If McGovern was angry enough he might do just that – remonstrating, telling Ralph to stop fooling around and go to the doctor, reminding him that the piano could stop anytime, any old time at all, and if he didn’t find a chair while the finding was good, he might be out of luck forever.

No more shouts came, however. He thought of looking back to see where McGovern was, then thought better of it. If he saw Ralph looking back, it might set him off all over again. Best to just keep going. So Ralph lengthened his stride, heading back in the direction of the airport again without even thinking about it, walking with his head down, trying not to hear the relentless piano, trying not to see the old children marching around the chairs, trying not to see the terrified eyes above their make-believe smiles.