Insomnia (20 page)

A young girl called to the bagboy from the open window of a Subaru and waved; her left hand left bright contrails, as pink as cotton candy, in the air as it moved. They began to fade almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fin of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.

Ralph’s fear at this confused, shining vision was considerable, but for the time being, at least, fear had taken a back seat to wonder, awe, and simple amazement. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his life.
But it’s not real,
he cautioned himself.
Remember that, Ralph
. He promised himself he would try, but for the time being that cautioning voice seemed very far away.

Now he noticed something else: there was a line of that lucid brightness emerging from the head of every person he could see. It trailed upward like a ribbon of bunting or brightly colored crepe paper until it attenuated and disappeared. For some people the point of disappearance was five feet above the head; for others it was ten or fifteen. In most cases the color of the bright, ascending line matched the rest of the aura – bright white for the bagboy, gray-green in the case of the female customer beside him, for instance – but there were some striking exceptions. Ralph saw a rust-red line rising from a middle-aged man who was striding along in the middle of a dark-blue aura, and a woman with a light-gray aura whose ascending line was an amazing (and slightly alarming) shade of magenta. In some cases – two or three, not a lot – the rising lines were almost black. Ralph didn’t like those, and he noticed that the people to whom these ‘balloon-strings’ (they were named just that simply and quickly in his mind) belonged invariably looked unwell.

Ralph,
another voice warned,
you are
not
really seeing these things, okay? I mean, I hate to be a bore, but
—

But wasn’t it at least possible that the phenomenon
was
real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception?

Quit it, Ralph, and right now. You have to do better than that, or you’ll end up in the same boat as poor old Ed Deepneau
.

Thinking of Ed kicked off some association – something he’d said on the day he’d been arrested for beating his wife – but before Ralph could isolate it, a voice spoke almost at his left elbow.

‘Mom? Mommy? Can we get the Honey Nut Cheerios again?’

‘We’ll see once we get inside, hon.’

A young woman and a little boy passed in front of him, walking hand-in-hand. It was the boy, who looked to be four or five, who had spoken. His mother was walking in an envelope of almost blinding white. The ‘balloon-string’ rising out of her blonde hair was also white and very wide – more like the ribbon on a fancy gift box than a string. It rose to a height of at least twenty feet and floated out slightly behind her as she walked. It made Ralph think of things bridal – trains, veils, gauzy billows of skirt.

Her son’s aura was a healthy dark blue verging on violet, and as the two of them walked past, Ralph saw a fascinating thing. Tendrils of aura were also rising from their clasped hands: white from the woman, dark blue from the boy. They twined in a pigtail as they rose, faded, and disappeared.

Mother-and-son, mother-and-son,
Ralph thought. There was something perfectly, simply symbolic about those bands, which were wrapped around each other like woodbine climbing a garden stake. Looking at them made his heart rejoice – corny, but it was exactly how he felt.
Mother-and-son, white-and-blue, mother-and
—

‘Mom, what’s that man looking at?’

The blonde woman’s glance at Ralph was brief, but he saw the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned away. More importantly, he saw the brilliant aura which surrounded her suddenly darken, close in, and pick up spiraling tints of dark red.

That’s the color of fright,
Ralph thought.
Or maybe anger
.

‘I don’t know, Tim. Come on, stop dawdling.’ She began to move him along faster, her ponytailed hair flipping back and forth and leaving small fans of gray tinged with red in the air. To Ralph they looked like the arcs that wipers sometimes left on dirty windshields.

‘Hey, Mom, get a life! Quit
pull
-ing!’ The little boy had to trot in order to keep up.

That’s my fault,
Ralph thought, and an image of how he must have looked to the young mother flashed into his mind: old guy, tired face, big purplish pouches under his eyes. He’s standing –
hunching
– by the mailbox outside the Rite Aid Pharmacy, staring at her and her little boy as if they were the most remarkable things in the world.

To her he must have looked like the biggest pervo of all time. He had to get rid of this. Real or hallucination, it didn’t matter – he had to make it quit. If he didn’t somebody was going to call either the cops or the men with the butterfly nets. For all he knew, the pretty mother could be making the bank of pay-phones just inside the market’s main doors her first stop.

He was just asking himself how one thought away something which was all in one’s mind to begin with when he realized it had already happened. Psychic phenomenon or sensory hallucination, it had simply disappeared while he’d been thinking about how awful he must have looked to the pretty young mother. The day had gone back to its previous Indian summery brilliance, which was wonderful but still a long way from that pellucid, all-pervading glow. The people crisscrossing the parking lot of the strip-mall were just people again: no auras, no balloon-strings, no fireworks. Just people on their way to buy groceries in the Shop ’n Save, or to pick up their last batch of summer pictures at Photo-Mat, or to grab a take-out coffee from Day Break, Sun Down. Some of them might even be ducking into the Rite Aid for a box of Trojans or, God bless us and keep us, a
SLEEPING AID
.

Just your ordinary, everyday citizens of Derry going about their ordinary, everyday business.

Ralph released pent-up breath in a gusty sigh and braced himself for a wave of relief. Relief
did
come, but not in the tidal wave he had expected. There was no sense of having drawn back from the brink of madness in the nick of time; no sense of having been close to
any
sort of brink. Yet he understood perfectly well that he couldn’t live for long in a world that bright and wonderful without endangering his sanity; it would be like having an orgasm which lasted for hours. That might be how geniuses and great artists experienced things, but it was not for him; so much juice would blow his fuses in short order, and when the men with the butterfly nets rolled up to give him a shot and take him away, he would probably be happy to go.

The most readily identifiable emotion he was feeling just now wasn’t relief but a species of pleasant melancholy which he remembered sometimes experiencing after sex when he was a very young man. This melancholy was not deep but it was wide, seeming to fill the empty places of his body and mind the way a receding flood leaves a scrim of loose, rich topsoil. He wondered if he would ever have such an alarming, exhilarating moment of epiphany again. He thought the chances were fairly good . . . at least until next month, when James Roy Hong got his needles into him, or perhaps until Anthony Forbes started swinging his gold pocket watch in front of his eyes and telling him he was getting . . . very . . . sleepy. It was possible that neither Hong nor Forbes would have any success in curing his insomnia, but if one of them did, Ralph guessed he would stop seeing auras and balloon-strings after his first good night’s sleep. And, after a month or so of restful nights, he would probably forget this had ever happened. As far as he was concerned, that was a perfectly good reason to feel a touch of melancholy.

‘Call Dr Litchfield, more like it,’ Ralph muttered, and cut across the parking lot toward Harris Avenue.

He poked his head through Lois’s front door and called, ‘Yo! Anybody home?’

‘Come on in, Ralph!’ Lois called back. ‘We’re in the living room!’

Ralph had always imagined a hobbit-hole would be a lot like Lois Chasse’s little house half a block or so down the hill from the Red Apple – neat and crowded, a little too dark, perhaps, but scrupulously clean. And he guessed a hobbit like Bilbo Baggins, whose interest in his ancestors was eclipsed only by his interest in what might be for dinner, would have been enchanted by the tiny living room, where relatives looked down from every wall. The place of honor, on top of the television, was held by a tinted studio photograph of the man Lois always referred to as ‘Mr Chasse’.

McGovern was sitting hunched forward on the couch with a plate of macaroni and cheese balanced on his bony knees. The television was on and a game-show was clattering through the bonus round.

‘What does she mean,
we’re
in the living room?’ Ralph asked, but before McGovern could answer, Lois came in with a steaming plate in her hands.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Sit down, eat. I talked with Simone, and she said it’ll probably be on
News at Noon
.’

‘Gee, Lois, you didn’t have to do this,’ he said, taking the plate, but his stomach demurred strongly when he got his first smell of onions and mellow cheddar. He glanced at the clock on the wall – just visible between photos of a man in a raccoon coat and a woman who looked as if
vo-do-dee-oh-do
might have been in her vocabulary – and was astounded to see it was five minutes of twelve.

‘I didn’t do anything but stick some leftovers into the microwave,’ she said. ‘Someday, Ralph, I’ll
cook
for you. Now sit down.’

‘Not on my hat, though,’ McGovern said, without taking his eyes from the bonus round. He picked the fedora up off the couch, dropped it on the floor beside him, and went back to his own portion of the casserole, which was disappearing rapidly. ‘This is very tasty, Lois.’

‘Thank you.’ She paused long enough to watch one of the contestants bag a trip to Barbados and a new car, then hurried back into the kitchen. The screaming winner faded out and was replaced by a man in wrinkled pajamas, tossing and turning in bed. He sat up and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It said 3:18 a.m., a time of day with which Ralph had become very familiar.

‘Can’t sleep?’ an announcer asked sympathetically. ‘Tired of lying awake night after night?’ A small glowing pill came gliding in through the insomniac’s bedroom window. To Ralph it looked like the world’s smallest flying saucer, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it was blue.

Ralph sat down beside McGovern. Although both men were quite slim (
scrawny
might actually have described Bill better), between them they used up most of the couch.

Lois came in with her own plate and sat down in the rocker by the window. Over the canned music and studio applause that marked the end of the game-show, a woman’s voice said, ‘This is Lisette Benson. Topping our
News at Noon,
a well-known women’s rights advocate agrees to speak in Derry, sparking a protest – and six arrests – at a local clinic. We’ll also have Chris Altoberg’s weather and Bob McClanahan on sports. Stay tuned.’

Ralph forked a bite of macaroni and cheese into his mouth, looked up, and saw Lois watching him. ‘All right?’ she asked.

‘Delicious,’ he said, and it was, but he thought that right now a big helping of Franco-American spaghetti served cold right out of the can would have tasted just as good. He wasn’t just hungry; he was ravenous. Seeing auras apparently burned a lot of calories.

‘What happened, very briefly, was this,’ McGovern said, swallowing the last of his own lunch and putting the plate down next to his hat. ‘About eighteen people showed up outside WomanCare at eight-thirty this morning, while people were arriving for work. Lois’s friend Simone says they’re calling themselves The Friends of Life, but the core group are the assorted fruits and nuts that used to go by the name of Daily Bread. She said one of them was Charles Pickering, the guy the cops caught apparently getting ready to firebomb the joint late last year. Simone’s niece said the police only arrested four people. It looks like she was a little low.’

‘Was Ed really with them?’ Ralph asked.

‘Yes,’ Lois said, ‘and he got arrested, too. At least no one got Maced. That was just a rumor. No one got hurt at all.’

‘
This
time,’ McGovern added darkly.

The
News at Noon
logo appeared on Lois’s hobbit-sized color TV, then dissolved into Lisette Benson. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘Topping our news on this beautiful late-summer day, prominent writer and controversial women’s rights advocate Susan Day agrees to speak at the Civic Center next month, and the announcement of her speech sparks a demonstration at WomanCare, the Derry women’s resource center and abortion clinic which has so polarized—’

‘There they go with that abortion clinic stuff again!’ McGovern exclaimed. ‘Jesus!’

‘Hush!’ Lois said in a peremptory tone not much like her usual tentative murmur. McGovern gave her a surprised look and hushed.

‘– John Kirkland at WomanCare, with the first of two reports,’ Lisette Benson was finishing, and the picture switched to a reporter doing a stand-up outside a long, low brick building. A super at the bottom of the screen informed viewers that this was a
LIVE-EYE REPORT
. A strip of windows ran along one side of WomanCare. Two of them were broken, and several others were smeared with red stuff that looked like blood. Yellow police-line tape had been strung between the reporter and the building; three uniformed Derry cops and one plainclothesman stood in a little group on the far side of it. Ralph was not very surprised to recognize the detective as John Leydecker.