Insomnia (56 page)

[
‘Ralph . . . Ralph, I think I know what happened to that baby.’
]

She reached toward his face with her right hand and slipped it between his nose and mouth with her palm down. She pressed the pad of her thumb lightly against one of his cheekbones and the pad of her index finger lightly against the other. It was done so quickly and confidently that no one else in the elevator noticed. If one of the three other riders
had
noticed, he or she would have seen something that looked like a neatness-minded wife smoothing away a blot of skin lotion or a dollop of leftover shaving cream.

Ralph felt as if someone had pulled a high-voltage switch inside his brain, one that turned on whole banks of blazing stadium lights. In their raw, momentary glow, he saw a terrible image: hands clad in a violent brownish-purple aura reaching into a crib and snatching up the baby they had just seen. He was shaken back and forth, head snapping and rolling on the thin stalk of neck like the head of a Raggedy Andy doll—

– and
thrown
—

The lights in his head went black then, and Ralph let out a harsh, shuddery sigh of relief. He thought of the pro-life protestors he’d seen on the evening news just last night, men and women waving signs with Susan Day’s picture and
WANTED FOR MURDER
on them, men and women in Grim Reaper robes, men and women carrying a banner which read
LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE
.

He wondered if the thunderstruck baby might have a differing opinion on that last one. He met Lois’s amazed, agonized eyes with his own, and groped out to take her hands.

[
‘Father did it, right? Threw the kid against the wall?’
]

[
‘Yes. The baby wouldn’t stop crying.’
]

[
‘And she knows. She knows, but she hasn’t told anyone.’
]

[
‘No . . . but she might, Ralph. She’s thinking about it.’
]

[
‘She might also wait until he does it again. And next time he might finish the job.’
]

A terrible thought occurred to Ralph then; it shot across his mind like a meteor scratching momentary fire across a midnight summer sky: it might be better if he
did
finish the job. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had only been a stump, but it had been a
healthy
stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone
why
he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist . . .

Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph’s heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.

‘Do you still think it’s all pretty wonderful, Lois?’ he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.

They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.

Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn’t, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of
déjà vu
which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses’ shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.

Even-numbered rooms on your left; odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses’ station. It was 317, all right – I remember. Now that I’m here I remember
everything.
How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor’s chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.

The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor’s chair with an unopened copy of Shirer’s
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off. There would only be one chance to do it right.

It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off. Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, who had never given up in her life, a little longer to get the message. And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.

He had sat in the visitor’s chair, watching and waiting as her respiration grew more and more pronounced – the long, sighing exhale, the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger . . . and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.

Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle:
the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant – a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.

Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle,
and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table. He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn’t come askew again, but there
wasn’t
any next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped.

He remembered waiting as the minutes passed – one, then three, then six – unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion. Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing ‘Scarborough Fair’. They sang it all the way to the end. Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing ‘Danke Shoen’. He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was going to be on Ralph Roberts’s first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the north-east, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other’s naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn’s pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool. She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take
his
pulse. Instead, she had put her arms around him. She—

[
‘Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?’
]

He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.

[
‘Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good ones.’
]

[
‘I understand . . . but look down, Ralph! Look on the floor!’
]

He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibility. Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds in a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which a few tiny reddish flecks still swam.

[
‘Do they belong to the ones we’re looking for, Ralph?’
]

[
‘Yes – the docs are here.’
]

Ralph took Lois’s hand – it felt very cold – and began to lead her slowly up the hall.

They hadn’t gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays. The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller. Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.

The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective returned, but objects looked
thicker,
somehow. The auras were still there, but they appeared both thinner and paler – pastel coronas instead of spray-painted primary colors. At the same time Ralph realized he could see every crack and pore in the Sheetrocked wall to his left . . . and then he realized he could see the pipes, wires, and insulation
behind
the walls, if he wanted to; all he had to do was look.

Oh my God,
he thought.
Is this really happening?
Can
this really be happening?

Sounds were everywhere: hushed bells, a toilet being flushed, muted laughter. Sounds a person normally took for granted, as part of everyday life, but not now. Not here. Like the visible reality of things, the sounds seemed to have an extraordinarily sensuous texture, like thin overlapping scallops of silk and steel.

Nor were all the sounds ordinary; there were a great many exotic ones weaving their way through the mix. He heard a fly buzzing deep in a heating duct. The fine-grain sandpaper sound of a nurse adjusting her pantyhose in the staff bathroom. Beating hearts. Circulating blood. The soft tidal flow of respiration. Each sound was perfect on its own; fitted into the others, they made a beautiful and complicated auditory ballet – a hidden
Swan Lake
of gurgling stomachs, humming power outlets, hurricane hairdryers, whispering wheels on hospital gurneys. Ralph could hear a TV at the end of the hall beyond the nurses’ station. It was coming from Room 340, where Mr Thomas Wren, a kidney patient, was watching Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in
The Bad and the Beautiful
. ‘If you team up with me, baby, we’ll turn this town on its ear,’ Kirk was saying, and Ralph knew from the aura which surrounded the words that Mr Douglas had been suffering a toothache on the day that particular scene was filmed. Nor was that all; he knew he could go

(
higher? deeper? wider?
)

if he wanted. Ralph most definitely did
not
want. This was the forest of Arden, and a man could get lost in its thickets.

Or eaten by tigers.

[‘
Jesus! It’s another level – it must be, Lois! A whole other level!’
]

[
‘I know.’
]

[
‘Are you okay with this?’
]

[
‘I think I am, Ralph . . . are you?’
]

[
‘I guess so, for now . . . but if the bottom drops out again, I don’t know. Come on.’
]

But before they could begin following the green-gold tracks again, Bill McGovern and a man Ralph didn’t know came out of Room 313. They were in deep conversation.

Lois turned a horror-struck face toward Ralph.

[
‘Oh, no! Oh God, no! Do you see, Ralph? Do you see?’
]

Ralph gripped her hand more tightly. He saw, all right. McGovern’s friend was surrounded by a plum-colored aura. It didn’t look especially healthy, but Ralph didn’t think the man was seriously ill, either; it was just a lot of chronic stuff like rheumatism and kidney gravel. A balloon-string of the same mottled purple shade rose from the top of the man’s aura, wavering hesitantly back and forth like a diver’s air-hose in a mild current.