Insomnia (17 page)

‘Stop that, Bill!’ Lois said. She was blushing, and maybe not just because Bill was up to his usual tricks. She’d also heard the laughter from the park. McGovern undoubtedly had, too, but McGovern would believe they were laughing with him, not at him.
Sometimes,
Ralph thought wearily,
a slightly inflated ego could be a protection
.

McGovern let her go, then removed his fedora and swept it across his waist as he made an exaggerated bow. Lois was too busy making sure that her silk blouse was still tucked into the waistband of her skirt all the way around to pay him much notice. Her blush was already fading, and Ralph saw she looked rather pale and not particularly well. He hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

‘Come by, if you can,’ she told Ralph quietly.

‘I will, Lois.’

McGovern slipped an arm around her waist, the gesture of affection both friendly and sincere this time, and they started up the street together. Watching them, Ralph was suddenly gripped by a strong sense of
déjà vu,
as if he had seen them like that in some other place. Or some other life. Then, just as McGovern dropped his arm, breaking the illusion, it came to him: Fred Astaire leading a dark-haired and rather plump Ginger Rogers out onto a small-town movie set, where they would dance together to some tune by Jerome Kern or maybe Irving Berlin.

That’s weird,
he thought, turning back toward the little strip-mall halfway down Up-Mile Hill.
That’s very weird, Ralph. Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse are about as far from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as you can g—

‘Ralph?’ Lois called, and he turned back. There was one intersection and about a block’s worth of distance between them now. Cars zipped back and forth on Elizabeth Street, turning Ralph’s view of them into a moderate stutter.

‘What?’ he called back.

‘You look better! More rested! Are you finally getting some sleep?’

‘Yes!’ he returned, thinking,
Just another small lie, in another good cause
.

‘Didn’t I say you’d feel better once the seasons changed? See you in a little while!’

Lois wiggled her fingers at him, and Ralph was amazed to see bright blue diagonal lines stream back from the short but carefully shaped nails. They looked like contrails.

What the
fuck—?

He shut his eyes tight, then popped them open again. Nothing. Only Bill and Lois once again walking up the street toward Lois’s house, their backs to him. No bright blue diagonals in the air, nothing like that—

Ralph’s eyes dropped to the sidewalk and he saw that Lois and Bill were leaving tracks behind them on the concrete, tracks that looked exactly like the footprints in the old Arthur Murray learn-to-dance instructions you used to be able to get by mail-order. Lois’s were gray. McGovern’s – larger but still oddly delicate – were a dark shade of olive green. They glowed on the sidewalk, and Ralph, who was standing on the far side of Elizabeth Street with his jaw hanging almost down to his breastbone, suddenly realized he could see little ribbands of colored smoke rising from them. Or perhaps it was steam.

A city bus bound for Old Cape snored by, momentarily blocking his view, and when it passed the tracks were gone. There was nothing on the sidewalk but a message chalked inside a fading pink heart:
SAM
+
DEANIE
4-
EVER
.

Yes, he knew. The idea that Bill and Lois looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had gotten into his head; progressing from that idea to a hallucination of phantom footprints leading up the sidewalk like tracks in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram had a certain bizarre logic. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois’s waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails.

I’ve got to get more sleep,
Ralph thought.
I’ve
got
to. If I don’t, I’m apt to start seeing anything
.

‘That’s right,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the drugstore again. ‘Anything at all.’

Ten minutes later, Ralph was standing at the front of the Rite Aid Pharmacy and looking at a sign which hung on chains from the ceiling.
FEEL BETTER AT RITE AID
! it said, seeming to suggest that feeling better was a goal attainable by any reasonable, hard-working consumer. Ralph had his doubts about that.

This, Ralph decided, was retail drug-dealing on a grand scale – it made the Rexall where he usually traded look like a tenement apartment by comparison. The fluorescent-lit aisles seemed as long as bowling alleys and displayed everything from toaster ovens to jigsaw puzzles. After a little study, Ralph decided Aisle 3 contained most of the patent medicines and was probably his best bet. He made his way slowly through the area marked
STOMACH REMEDIES
, sojourned briefly in the kingdom of
ANALGESICS
, and quickly crossed the land of
LAXATIVES
. And there, between
LAXATIVES
and
DECONGESTANTS
, he stopped.

SLEEPING AIDS
, the sign over this section of Aisle 3 read.

Ralph, never much of a patent medicine user (he would otherwise have arrived here much sooner, no doubt), didn’t know exactly what he’d expected, but it surely had not been this wild, almost indecent profusion of products. His eye slipped across the boxes (the majority were a soothing blue), reading the names. Most seemed strange and slightly ominous: Compoz, Nytol, Sleepinal, Z-Power, Sominex, Sleepinex, Drow-Zee. There was even a generic brand.

But on the heels of this he heard Dr Litchfield, heard him so clearly it was as if a tape recorder had turned on in the middle of his head:
Your wife is suffering from tension headaches, Ralph – unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening. I think we can take care of the problem
.

Unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening – yes, right, that was what the man had said. And then he had reached for his prescription pad and written out the order for the first bunch of useless pills while the tiny clump of alien cells in Carolyn’s head continued to send out its microbursts of destruction, and maybe Dr Jamal had been right, maybe it was too late even then, but maybe Jamal was full of shit, maybe Jamal was just a stranger in a strange land, trying to get along, trying not to make waves. Maybe this and maybe that; Ralph didn’t know for sure and never would. All he really knew was that Litchfield hadn’t been around when the final two tasks of their marriage had been set before them: her job to die, his job to watch her do it.

Maybe this time it would work,
he argued to –
with
– himself. At the same time his hand stole out, seemingly of its own volition, and took a box of Sleepinex from the shelf. He turned it over, held it slightly away from his eyes so he could read the small print on the side panel, and ran his eye slowly down the list of active ingredients. He had no idea of how to pronounce most of the jawbreaking words, and even less of what they were or how they were supposed to help you sleep.

Yes, he answered the voice.
Maybe this time it
would
work. But maybe the real answer would be just to find another doc—

‘Help you?’ a voice asked from directly behind Ralph’s shoulder.

He was in the act of returning the box of Sleepinex to its place, meaning to take something that sounded a little less like a sinister drug in a Robin Cook novel, when the voice spoke. Ralph jumped and knocked a dozen assorted boxes of synthetic sleep onto the floor.

‘Oh, sorry – clumsy!’ Ralph said, and looked over his shoulder.

‘Not at all. My fault entirely.’ And before Ralph could do more than pick up two boxes of Sleepinex and one box of Drow-Zee gel capsules, the man in the white smock who had spoken to him had swept up the rest and was redistributing them with the speed of a riverboat gambler dealing a hand of poker. According to the gold ID bar pinned to his breast, this was
JOE WYZER, RITE AID PHAR
MACIST
.

‘Now,’ Wyzer said, dusting off his hands and turning to Ralph with a friendly grin, ‘let’s start over. Can I help you? You look a little lost.’

Ralph’s initial response – annoyance at being disturbed while having a deep and meaningful conversation with himself – was being replaced with guarded interest. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, and gestured to the array of sleeping potions. ‘Do any of these actually work?’

Wyzer’s grin widened. He was a tall, middle-aged man with fair skin and thinning brown hair which he parted in the middle. He stuck out his hand, and Ralph had barely begun the polite reciprocatory gesture when his own hand was swallowed. ‘I’m Joe,’ the pharmacist said, and tapped the gold tunic-pin with his free hand. ‘I used to be Joe Wyze, but now I’m older and Wyzer.’

This was almost certainly an ancient joke, but it had lost none of its savor for Joe Wyzer, who laughed uproariously. Ralph smiled a polite little smile with just the smallest touch of anxiety around its edges. The hand which had enfolded his was clearly a strong one, and he was afraid if the pharmacist squeezed hard, his hand might finish the day in a cast. He found himself wishing, at least momentarily, that he’d taken his problem to Paul Durgin downtown after all. Then Wyzer gave his hand two energetic pumps and let go.

‘I’m Ralph Roberts. Nice to meet you, Mr Wyzer.’

‘Mutual. Now, concerning the efficacy of these fine products. Let me answer your question with one of my own, to wit, does a bear shit in a telephone booth?’

Ralph burst out laughing. ‘Rarely, I’d think,’ he said when he could say anything again.

‘Correct. And I rest my case.’ Wyzer glanced at the sleeping aids, a wall done in shades of blue. ‘Thank God I’m a pharmacist and not a salesman, Mr Roberts; I’d starve trying to peddle stuff door to door. Are you an insomniac? I’m asking partly because you’re investigating the sleeping aids, but mostly because you have that lean and hollow-eyed look.’

Ralph said, ‘Mr Wyzer, I’d be the happiest man on earth if I could get five hours’ sleep some night, and I’d settle for four.’

‘How long’s it been going on, Mr Roberts? Or do you prefer Ralph?’

‘Ralph’s fine.’

‘Good. And I’m Joe.’

‘It started in April, I think. A month or six weeks after my wife died, anyway.’

‘Gee, I’m sorry to hear you lost your wife. My sympathies.’

‘Thank you,’ Ralph said, then repeated the old formula. ‘I miss her a lot, but I was glad when her suffering was over.’

‘Except now
you’re
suffering. For . . . let’s see.’ Wyzer counted quickly on his big fingers. ‘Going on half a year now.’

Ralph suddenly found himself fascinated by those fingers. No jet contrails this time, but the tip of each one appeared to be wrapped in a bright silvery haze, like tinfoil you could somehow look right through. He suddenly found himself thinking of Carolyn again, and remembering the phantom smells she had sometimes complained of last fall – cloves, sewage, burning ham. Maybe this was the male equivalent, and the onset of his own brain tumor had been signaled not by headaches but by insomnia.

He moved his eyes resolutely back to Wyzer’s big, pleasant face. No silvery haze there; not so much as a hint of a haze. He was almost sure of it.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Going on half a year. It seems longer. A lot longer, actually.’

‘Any noticeable pattern? There usually is. I mean, do you toss and turn before you go to sleep, or—’

‘I’m a premature waker.’

Wyzer’s eyebrows went up. ‘And read a book or three about the problem too, I deduce.’ If Litchfield had made a remark of this sort, Ralph would have read condescension into it. From Joe Wyzer he sensed not condescension but genuine admiration.

‘I read what the library had, but there wasn’t much, and none of it has helped much.’ Ralph paused, then added: ‘The truth is none of it has helped at all.’

‘Well, let me tell you what I know on the subject, and you just kind of flop your hand when I start heading into territory you’ve already explored. Who’s your doctor, by the way?’

‘Litchfield.’

‘Uh-huh. And you usually trade at . . . where? The People’s Drug out at the mall? The Rexall downtown?’

‘The Rexall.’

‘You’re incognito today, I take it.’

Ralph blushed . . . then grinned. ‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘Uh-huh. And I don’t need to ask if you’ve been to see Litchfield about your problem, do I? If you had, you wouldn’t be exploring the wonderful world of patent medicines.’

‘Is that what these are? Patent medicines?’

‘Put it this way – I’d feel a helluva lot more comfortable selling most of this crap off the back of a big red wagon with fancy yellow wheels.’