Insomnia (67 page)

‘But we
do
know,’ she protested. ‘If we don’t step in, Ed Deepneau is going to commit suicide tonight during that woman’s speech and take two thousand people with him.’

‘Yeah,’ Ralph said, ‘and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop him, Lois, don’t worry about that.’ He finished his coffee and set the cup down again. His stomach was fully awake now, and raving for food. ‘I could no more stand aside and let Ed kill all those people than I could stand in one place and not duck if someone threw a baseball at my head. It’s just that we never got a chance to read the fine print at the bottom of the contract, and that scares me.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘It also pisses me off.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘About being played for a couple of patsies. We know why we’re going to try and stop Susan Day’s speech; we can’t stand the thought of a lunatic killing a couple of thousand innocent people.
But we don’t know why they want us to do it
. That’s the part that scares me.’

‘We have a chance to save two thousand lives,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me that’s enough for us but not for them?’

‘That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they’re used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots.’

‘Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove,’ Lois said. ‘Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago.’

‘Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of ’85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That’s a lot of Panama hats and jump-ropes and pairs of . . . of eyeglasses, Lois.’ He was horrified at how close he had come to saying
pairs of earrings
.

‘Don’t,’ she said, and shuddered.

‘I don’t like thinking about it any more than you do,’ he said, ‘but we
have
to, if only because those two guys were so goddam anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I’m getting at yet? You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lois said,‘but it was important enough for them to draft us, and I have an idea that was a pretty big step.’

Ralph nodded. He could feel the caffeine hitting him now, jiving up his head, jittering his fingers the tiniest bit. ‘I’m sure it was. Now think back to the hospital roof. Did you ever in your entire life hear two guys explain so much without explaining anything?’

‘I don’t get what you mean,’ Lois said, but her face suggested something else: that she didn’t
want
to get what he meant.

‘What I mean goes back to one central idea:
maybe they can’t lie
. Suppose they can’t. If you have certain information you don’t want to give out but you can’t tell a lie, what do you do?’

‘Keep dancing away from the danger zone,’ Lois said. ‘Or zones.’

‘Bingo. And isn’t that what they did?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess it was a dance, all right, but I thought you did a fair amount of leading, Ralph. In fact, I was impressed by all the questions you asked. I think I spent most of the time we were on that roof just trying to convince myself it was all really happening.’

‘Sure, I asked questions, lots of them, but . . .’ He stopped, not sure how to express the concept in his head, a concept which seemed simultaneously complex and baby-simple to him. He made another effort to go up a little, searching inside his head for that sensation of
blink,
knowing that if he could reach her mind, he could show her a picture that would be crystal clear. Nothing happened, and he drummed his fingers on the tablecloth in frustration.

‘I was just as amazed as you were,’ he said finally. ‘If my amazement came out as questions, it’s because men – those from my generation, anyway – are taught that it’s very bad form to ooh and aah. That’s for women who are picking out the drapes.’

‘Sexist.’ She smiled as she said it, but it was a smile Ralph couldn’t return. He was remembering Barbie Richards. If Ralph had moved toward her, she would almost certainly have pushed the alarm button beneath her desk, but she had allowed Lois to approach because she had swallowed a little too much of the old sister-sister-sister crap.

‘Yes,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m sexist, I’m old-fashioned, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.’

‘Ralph, I didn’t mean—’

‘I know what you meant, and it’s okay. What I’m trying to get across to you is that I was as amazed . . . as knocked out . . . as you were. So I asked questions, so what? Were they good questions?
Useful
questions?’

‘I guess not, huh?’

‘Well, maybe I didn’t start out so badly. As I remember, the first thing I asked when we finally made it to the roof was who they were and what they wanted. They slipped those questions with a lot of philosophical blather, but I imagine they got a little sweaty on the backs of their necks for awhile, just the same. Next we got all that background on the Purpose and the Random – fascinating, but nothing we exactly needed in order to drive out to High Ridge and persuade Gretchen Tillbury to cancel Susan Day’s speech. Hell, we would have done better – saved time – getting the road directions from them that we ended up getting from Simone’s niece.’

Lois looked startled. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. And all the time we were talking, time was flying by the way it does when you go up a couple of levels. They were
watching
it fly, too, you can believe that. They were timing the whole scene so that when they finished telling us the things we
did
need to know, there would be no time left to ask the questions they didn’t want to answer. I think they wanted to leave us with the idea that this whole thing was a public service, that saving all those lives is what it’s all about, but they couldn’t come right out and say so, because—’

‘Because that would be a lie, and maybe they can’t lie.’

‘Right. Maybe they can’t lie.’

‘So what
do
they want, Ralph?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t have a clue, Lois. Not even a hint.’

She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty – almost levelled by it.

‘They were good,’ she said. ‘They
are
good. I felt that very strongly. Didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, almost reluctantly. Of course he had felt it. They were everything Atropos was not.

‘And you’re going to try to stop Ed regardless – you said you could no more
not
try than you could not try to duck a baseball someone chucked at your head. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes,’ he said, more reluctantly still.

‘Then you should let the rest of it go,’ she said calmly, meeting his blue eyes with her dark ones. ‘It’s just taking up space inside your head, Ralph. Making clutter.’

He saw the truth of what she said, but still doubted if he could simply open his hand and let that part of it fly free. Maybe you had to live to be seventy before you could fully appreciate how hard it was to escape your upbringing. He was a man whose education on how to
be
a man had begun before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and he was still a prisoner of a generation that had listened to H.V. Kaltenborn and the Andrews Sisters on the radio – a generation of men that believed in moonlight cocktails and walking a mile for a Camel. Such an upbringing almost negated such nice moral questions as who was working for the good and who was working for the bad; the important thing was not to let the bullies kick sand in your face. Not to be led by the nose.

Is that so?
Carolyn asked, coolly amused.
How fascinating. But let me be the first to let you in on a little secret, Ralph: that’s crap. It was crap back before Glenn Miller disappeared over the horizon and it’s crap now. The idea that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, now . . . there might be a little truth to that, even in this day and age. It’s a long walk back to Eden in any case, isn’t it, sweetheart?

Yes. A very long walk back to Eden.

‘What are you smiling about, Ralph?’

He was saved the need to reply by the arrival of the waitress and a huge tray of food. He noticed for the first time that there was a button pinned to the frill of her apron.
LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE
, it read.

‘Are you going to the rally at the Civic Center tonight?’ Ralph asked her.

‘I’ll be there,’ she said, setting her tray down on the unoccupied table next to theirs in order to free her hands. ‘Outside. Carrying a sign. Walking roundy-round.’

‘Are you a Friend of Life?’ Lois asked as the waitress began to deal out omelets and side-dishes.

‘Am I livin?’ the waitress asked.

‘Yes, you certainly appear to be,’ Lois said politely.

‘Well, I guess that makes me a Friend of Life, doesn’t it? Killing something that could someday write a great poem or invent a drug that cures AIDS or cancer, in my book that’s just flat wrong. So I’ll wave my sign around and make sure the Norma Kamali feminists and Volvo liberals can see that the word on it is
MURDER
. They hate that word. They don’t use it at their cocktail parties and fundraisers. You folks need ketchup?’

‘No,’ Ralph said. He could not take his eyes off her. A faint green glow had begun to spread around her – it almost seemed to come wisping up from her pores. The auras were coming back, cycling up to full brilliance.

‘’D I grow a second head or somethin while I wasn’t lookin?’ the waitress asked. She popped her gum and switched it to the other side of her mouth.

‘I was staring, wasn’t I?’ Ralph asked. He felt blood heating his cheeks. ‘Sorry.’

The waitress shrugged her beefy shoulders, setting the upper part of her aura into lazy, fascinating motion. ‘I try not to get carried away with this stuff, you know? Most days I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. But I ain’t no quitter, either. Do you know how long I’ve been marchin around in front of that brick slaughterin pen, on days hot enough to fry my butt and nights cold enough to freeze it off?’

Ralph and Lois shook their heads.

‘Since 1984. Nine long years. You know what gets me the most about the choicers?’

‘What?’ Lois asked quietly.

‘They’re the same people who want to see guns outlawed so people won’t shoot each other with them, the same ones who say the electric chair and the gas chamber are unconstitutional because they’re cruel and unusual punishment. They say those things, then go out and support laws that allow doctors –
doctors!
– to stick vacuum tubes into women’s wombs and pull their unborn sons and daughters to pieces.
That’s
what gets me the most.’

The waitress said all this – it had the feel of a speech she had made many times before – without raising her voice or displaying the slightest outward sign of anger. Ralph only listened with half an ear; most of his attention was fixed on the pale green aura which surrounded her. Except it wasn’t
all
pale green. A yellowish-black blotch revolved slowly over her lower right side like a dirty wagon wheel.

Her liver,
Ralph thought.
Something wrong with her liver
.

‘You wouldn’t
really
want anything to happen to Susan Day, would you?’ Lois asked, looking at the waitress with troubled eyes. ‘You seem like a very nice person, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.’

The waitress sighed through her nose, producing two jets of fine green mist. ‘I ain’t as nice as I look, hon. If
God
did something to her, I’d be the first wavin my hands around in the air and sayin “Thy will be done,” believe me. But if you’re talking about some nut, I guess that’s different. Things like that drag us all down, put us on the same level as the people we’re trying to stop. The nuts don’t see it that way, though. They’re the jokers in the deck.’

‘Yes,’ Ralph said. ‘Jokers in the deck is just what they are.’

‘I guess I really don’t want anything bad to happen to that woman,’ the waitress said, ‘but something could. It really could. And the way I look at it, if something
does,
she’s got no one to blame but herself. She’s running with the wolves . . . and women who run with wolves shouldn’t go acting too surprised if they get bitten.’

Ralph wasn’t sure how much he would want to eat after that, but his appetite turned out to have survived the wait-ress’s views on abortion and Susan Day quite nicely. The auras helped; food had never tasted this good to him, not even as a teenager, when he’d eaten five and even six meals a day, if he could get them.

Lois matched him bite for bite, at least for awhile. At last she pushed the remains of her home fries and her last two strips of bacon aside. Ralph plugged gamely on down the home stretch alone. He wrapped the last bite of toast around the last bit of sausage, pushed it into his mouth, swallowed, and sat back in his chair with a vast sigh.

‘Your aura has gone two shades darker, Ralph. I don’t know if that means you finally got enough to eat or that you’re going to die of indigestion.’

‘Could be both,’ he said. ‘You see them again too, huh?’

She nodded.

‘You know something?’ he asked. ‘Of all the things in the world, the one I’d like most right now is a nap.’ Yes indeed. Now that he was warm and fed, the last four months of largely sleepless nights seemed to have fallen on him like a bag filled with sashweights. His eyelids felt as if they had been dipped in cement.