Insomnia (5 page)

‘Ralph!’ Bill called down. ‘Thank God! Carolyn’s having . . . well, I guess it’s some sort of seizure. I just dialed 911, asked them to send an ambulance.’

Ralph discovered he could run up the rest of the stairs, after all.

She was lying half in and half out of the kitchen with her hair in her face. Ralph thought there was something particularly horrible about that; it looked sloppy, and if there was one thing Carolyn refused to be, it was sloppy. He knelt beside her and brushed the hair away from her eyes and forehead. The skin beneath his fingers felt as chilly as his feet inside his soaked sneakers.

‘I wanted to put her on the couch, but she’s too heavy for me,’ Bill said nervously. He had taken off his Panama and was fiddling nervously with the band. ‘My back, you know—’

‘I know, Bill, it’s okay,’ Ralph said. He slid his arms under Carolyn and picked her up. She did not feel heavy to him at all, but light – almost as light as a milkweed pod which is ready to burst open and disgorge its filaments into the wind. ‘Thank God you were here.’

‘I almost wasn’t,’ Bill replied, following Ralph into the living room and still fiddling with his hat. He made Ralph think of old Dorrance Marstellar with his book of poems.
I wouldn’t touch him anymore, if I were you,
old Dorrance had said.
I can’t see your hands
. ‘I was on my way out when I heard a hell of a thud . . . it must have been her falling . . .’ Bill looked around the storm-darkened living room, his face somehow distraught and avid at the same time, his eyes seeming to search for something that wasn’t there. Then they brightened. ‘The door!’ he said. ‘I’ll bet it’s still open! It’ll be raining in! I’ll be right back, Ralph.’

He hurried out. Ralph barely noticed; the day had taken on the surreal aspects of a nightmare. The ticking was the worst. He could hear it in the walls, so loud now that even the thunder could not blot it out.

He put Carolyn on the couch and knelt beside her. Her respiration was fast and shallow, and her breath was terrible. Ralph did not turn away from it, however. ‘Hang in there, sweetheart,’ he said. He picked up one of her hands – it was almost as clammy as her brow had been – and kissed it gently. ‘You just hang in there. It’s fine, everything’s fine.’

But it wasn’t fine, the ticking sound meant that
nothing
was fine. It wasn’t in the walls, either – it had never been in the walls, but only in his wife. In Carolyn. It was in his dear one, she was slipping away from him, and what would he ever do without her?

‘You just hang on,’ he said. ‘Hang on, you hear me?’ He kissed her hand again, and held it against his cheek, and when he heard the warble of the approaching ambulance, he began to cry.

She came around in the ambulance as it sped across Derry (the sun was already out again, the wet streets steaming), and at first she talked such gibberish that Ralph was sure she had suffered a stroke. Then, just as she began to clear up and speak coherently, a second convulsion struck, and it took both Ralph and one of the paramedics who had answered the call to hold her down.

It wasn’t Dr Litchfield who came to see Ralph in the third-floor waiting room early that evening but Dr Jamal, the neurologist. Jamal talked to him in a low, soothing voice, telling him that Carolyn was now stabilized, that they were going to keep her overnight, just to be safe, but that she would be able to go home in the morning. There were going to be some new medications – drugs that were expensive, yes, but also quite wonderful.

‘We must not be losing the hope, Mr Roberts,’ Dr Jamal said.

‘No,’ Ralph said, ‘I suppose not. Will there be more of these, Dr Jamal?’

Dr Jamal smiled. He spoke in a quiet voice that was rendered somehow even more comforting by his soft Indian accent. And although Dr Jamal did not come right out and tell him that Carolyn was going to die, he came as close as anyone ever did during that long year in which she battled to stay alive. The new medications, Jamal said, would probably prevent any further seizures, but things had reached a stage where all predictions had to be taken ‘with the grains of salt’. The tumor was spreading in spite of everything they had tried, unfortunately.

‘The motor-control problems may show up next,’ Dr Jamal said in his comforting voice. ‘And I am seeing some deterioration in the eyesight, I am afraid.’

‘Can I spend the night with her?’ Ralph asked quietly. ‘She’ll sleep better if I do.’ He paused, then added: ‘So will I.’

‘Of gorse!’ Dr Jamal said, brightening. ‘That is a fine idea!’

‘Yes,’ Ralph said heavily. ‘I think so, too.’

So he sat beside his sleeping wife, and he listened to the ticking that was not in the walls, and he thought:
Some day soon – maybe this fall, maybe this winter – I will be back in this room with her
. It had the feel not of speculation but of prophecy, and he leaned over and put his head on the white sheet that covered his wife’s breast. He didn’t want to cry again, but did a little anyway.

That ticking. So loud and so steady.

I’d like to get hold of what’s making that sound,
he thought.
I’d stamp it until it was so many pieces scattered across the floor. With God as my witness I would
.

He fell asleep in his chair a little after midnight, and when he woke the next morning the air was cooler than it had been in weeks, and Carolyn was wide awake, coherent, and bright-eyed. She seemed, in fact, hardly to be sick at all. Ralph took her home and began the not-inconsiderable job of making her last months as comfortable as possible. It was a long while before he thought of Ed Deepneau again; even after he began to see the bruises on Helen Deepneau’s face, it was a long time before he thought of Ed again.

As that summer became fall, and as that fall darkened down toward Carolyn’s final winter, Ralph’s thoughts were occupied more and more by the deathwatch, which seemed to tick louder and louder even as it slowed down.

But he had no trouble sleeping.

That came later.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can

sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the

great divisions of the human race.

Iris Murdoch

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.