Insomnia (95 page)

‘Let me do that,’ she said, and had his belt unbuckled before he could say much, one way or the other. There was nothing erotic about it; she moved with the efficiency of a woman who had often helped her husband dress and undress during the last year of his life.

‘We’re down again,’ he said. ‘This time I didn’t even feel it happening.’

‘I did, while I was in the shower. I was glad, actually. Trying to wash your hair through an aura is very distracting.’

The wind gusted outside, shaking the house and blowing a long, shivering note across the mouth of a downspout. They looked toward the window, and although he was back down on the Short-Time level, Ralph was suddenly sure that Lois was sharing his own thought: Atropos was out there somewhere right now, no doubt disappointed by the way things had gone but by no means crushed, bloody but unbowed, down but not out.
From now on they can call him Old One-Ear,
Ralph thought, and shivered. He imagined Atropos swinging erratically through the scared, excited populace of the city like a rogue asteroid, peering and hiding, stealing souvenirs and slashing balloon-strings . . . taking solace in his work, in other words. Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitting on top of that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not very long ago.
How did I ever find the courage?
he wondered, but he supposed he knew. The diamond earrings the little monster had been wearing had provided most of it. Did Atropos know those earrings had been his biggest mistake? Probably not. In his way, Doc #3 had proved even more ignorant of Short-Time motivations than Clotho and Lachesis.

He turned to Lois and grasped her hands. ‘I lost your earrings again. This time they’re gone for good, I think. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize. They were already lost, remember? And I’m not worried about Harold and Jan anymore, because now I’ve got a friend to help me when people don’t treat me right, or when I just get scared. Don’t I?’

‘Yes. You most certainly do.’

She put her arms around him, hugged him tightly, and kissed him again. Lois had apparently not forgotten a single thing she’d ever learned about kissing, and it seemed to Ralph that she’d learned quite a lot. ‘Go on and hop in the shower.’ He started to say that he thought he’d fall asleep the moment he got his head under a stream of warm water, but then she added something which changed his mind in a hurry: ‘Don’t take offense, but there’s a funny smell on you, especially on your hands. It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.’

Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows.

When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts. Only her face showed, and that was visible only from the nose up. Ralph crossed the room quickly, wearing only his undershorts and painfully conscious of his spindly legs and potbelly. He tossed back the covers and slid in quickly, gasping a little as the cool sheets slid along his warm skin.

Lois slipped over to his side of the bed at once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.

‘Thank God there’s a man in my bed,’ Lois said sleepily.

‘Thank God it’s me,’ Ralph replied, and she laughed.

‘Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin?’

‘Nope. I’m sure they’ll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up.’ The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind – one that had probably been waiting there all along. ‘Lois?’

‘Mmmmm?’

In his mind’s eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world’s cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

‘Do you think we’ll sleep through?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘I think we’ll sleep just fine.’

A moment later, Lois was doing just that.

Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.

The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again – like the world’s biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world’s biggest pop-bottle – and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.

Except there
was
something better, one thing, at least, and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best,
Ralph thought.

The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names – peace, serenity, fulfillment – but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are known but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.

When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn’t hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o’clock in the morning. They slept – sometimes apart but mostly together – until just past seven o’clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.

Lois made them breakfast at sunset – splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind – to create that sensation of
blink
. He couldn’t do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.

‘Just as well,’ she said, bringing their plates to the table.

‘I suppose,’ Ralph agreed, but he still felt as he would have if he had lost the ring Carolyn had given him instead of the one he had taken from Atropos – as if some small but essential object had gone rolling out of his life with a wink and a gleam.

Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the auras had begun to fade, as well. By the following week they were gone, and Ralph began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing hadn’t been some strange dream. He knew that wasn’t so, but it became harder and harder to believe what he
did
know. There was the scar between the elbow and wrist of his right arm, of course, but he even began to wonder if that wasn’t something he had acquired long ago, during those years of his life when there had been no white in his hair and he had still believed, deep in his heart, that old age was a myth, or a dream, or a thing reserved for people not as special as he was.

Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape

and so move forward, as someone in the woods

at night might hear the sound of approaching feet

and stop to listen; then, instead of silence

he hears some creature trying to be silent.

What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly

down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks;

the other ever closer, yet not really

hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.

Stephen Dobyns

If I had some wings, I’d fly you all around;

If I had some money, I’d buy you the goddam town;

If I had the strength, then maybe I coulda pulled you through;

If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you,

If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you.

Michael McDermott

On January 2nd, 1994, Lois Chasse became Lois Roberts. Her son, Harold, gave her away. Harold’s wife did not attend the ceremony; she was up in Bangor with what Ralph considered a highly suspect case of bronchitis. He kept his suspicions to himself, however, being far from disappointed at Jan Chasse’s failure to appear. The groom’s best man was Detective John Leydecker, who still wore a cast on his right arm but otherwise showed no signs of the assignment which had nearly killed him. He had spent four days in a coma, but Leydecker knew how lucky he was; in addition to the State Trooper who had been standing beside him at the time of the explosion, six cops had died, two of them members of Leydecker’s handpicked team.

The bride’s maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguay, and at the reception, the first toast was made by a fellow who liked to say he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. Trigger Vachon delivered a fractured but heartfelt follow-up, concluding with the wish that ‘Dese two people gonna live to a hunnert and fifty and never know a day of the rheumatiz or constipations!’

When Ralph and Lois left the reception hall, their hair still full of rice thrown for the most part by Faye Chapin and the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, an old man with a book in his hand and a fine cloud of white hair floating around his head came walking up to them. He had a wide smile on his face.

‘Congratulations, Ralph,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, Lois.’

‘Thanks, Dor,’ Ralph said.

‘We missed you,’ Lois told him. ‘Didn’t you get your invitation? Faye said he’d give it to you.’

‘Oh, he gave it to me. Yes, oh yes, he did, but I don’t go to those things if they’re inside. Too stuffy. Funerals are even worse. Here, this is for you. I didn’t wrap it, because the arthritis is in my fingers too bad for stuff like that now.’

Ralph took it. It was a book of poems called
Concurring Beasts
. The poet’s name, Stephen Dobyns, gave him a funny little chill, but he wasn’t quite sure why.

‘Thanks,’ he told Dorrance.

‘Not as good as some of his later work, but good. Dobyns is very good.’

‘We’ll read them to each other on our honeymoon,’ Lois said.

‘That’s a good time to read poetry,’ Dorrance said. ‘Maybe the best time. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.’

He started off, then looked back.

‘You did a great thing. The Long-Timers are very pleased.’

He walked away.

Lois looked at Ralph. ‘What was he talking about? Do you know?’

Ralph shook his head. He didn’t, not for sure, although he felt as if he
should
know. The scar on his arm had begun to tingle as it sometimes did, a feeling which was almost like a deep-seated itch.

‘Long-Timers,’she mused. ‘Maybe he meant us, Ralph – after all, we’re hardly spring chickens these days, are we?’

‘That’s probably just what he
did
mean,’ Ralph agreed, but he knew better . . . and her eyes said that, somewhere deep down, so did she.

On that same day, and just as Ralph and Lois were saying their ‘I do’s, a certain wino with a bright green aura – one who actually
did
have an uncle in Dexter, although the uncle hadn’t seen this ne’er-do-well nephew for five years or more – was tramping across Strawford Park, slitting his eyes against the formidable glare of sun on snow. He was looking for returnable cans and bottles. Enough to buy a pint of whiskey would be great, but a pint of Night Train wine would do.

Not far from the Portosan marked
MEN
, he saw a bright gleam of metal. It was probably just the sun reflecting off a bottle-cap, but such things needed to be checked out. It might be a dime . . . although to the wino, it actually seemed to have a goldy sort of gleam. It—

‘Holy Judas!’ he cried, snatching up the wedding ring which lay mysteriously on top of the snow. It was a broad band, almost certainly gold. He tilted it to read the engraving on the inside:
HD
–
ED
5–8–87.

A pint? Hell, no. This little baby was going to secure him a quart.
Several
quarts. Possibly a
week’s
worth of quarts.

Hurrying across the intersection of Witcham and Jackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw the approaching Green Line bus. The driver saw him, and put on his brakes, but the bus struck a patch of ice.

The wino never knew what hit him. At one moment he was debating between Old Crow and Old Grand Dad; at the next he had passed into the darkness which awaits us all. The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.