Insomnia (60 page)

Ralph turned his attention hastily back to Clotho.

[
Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call ‘senseless’ and ‘unnecessary’ and ‘tragic’ are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog – yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose – is run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at his watch—
]

Lois: [
‘Is that what happened to Rosalie?’
]

Clotho: [Atropos
is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call ‘fulfilling circumstance’.
]

Lachesis: [
And Atropos is also what happened to your friend, the late Mr McGovern.
]

Lois looked the way Ralph felt: dismayed but not really surprised. It was now late afternoon, perhaps as many as eighteen Short-Time hours had passed since they had last seen Bill, and Ralph had known the man’s time was extremely short even last night. Lois, who had inadvertently put her hand inside him, probably knew it even better.

Ralph: [
‘When did it happen? How long after we saw him?’
]

Lachesis: [
Not long. While he was leaving the hospital. I’m sorry for your loss, and for giving you the news in such clumsy fashion. We speak to Short-Timers so infrequently that we forget how. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ralph and Lois.
]

Lois told him it was all right, that she quite understood, but tears were trickling down her cheeks, and Ralph felt them burning in his own eyes. The idea that Bill could be gone – that the little shithead in the dirty smock had gotten him – was hard to grasp. Was he to believe McGovern would never hoist that satiric, bristly eyebrow of his again? Never bitch about how cruddy it was to get old again? Impossible. He turned suddenly to Clotho.

[
‘Show us.’
]

Clotho, surprised, almost dithering: [
I . . . I don’t think—
]

Ralph: [
‘Seeing is believing to us Short-Time
schmoes.
Didn’t you guys ever hear that one?’
]

Lois spoke up unexpectedly.

[
‘Yes – show us. But only enough so we can know it and accept it. Try not to make us feel any worse than we already do.’
]

Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other, then seemed to shrug without actually moving their narrow shoulders. Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating a blue-green peacock’s fan of light. In it Ralph saw a small, eerily perfect representation of the ICU corridor. A nurse pushing a pharmacy cart came into this arc and crossed it. At the far side of the viewing area, she actually seemed to
curve
for a moment before passing out of view.

Lois, delighted in spite of the circumstances: [
‘It’s like watching a movie in a soapbubble!’
]

Now McGovern and Mr Plum stepped out of Bob Polhurst’s room. McGovern had put on an old Derry High letter sweater and his friend was zipping up a jacket; they were clearly giving up the deathwatch for another night. McGovern was walking slowly, lagging behind Mr Plum. Ralph could see that his downstairs neighbor and sometime friend didn’t look good at all.

He felt Lois’s hand slip into his upper arm and grip hard. He put his hand over hers.

Halfway to the elevator, McGovern stopped, braced himself against the wall with one hand, and lowered his head. He looked like a totally blown runner at the end of a marathon. For a moment Mr Plum went on walking. Ralph could see his mouth moving and thought,
He doesn’t know he’s talking to thin air – not yet, at least
.

Suddenly Ralph didn’t want to see any more.

Inside the blue-green arc, McGovern put one hand to his chest. The other went to his throat and began to rub, as if he were checking for wattles. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought his downstairs neighbor’s eyes looked frightened. He remembered the grimace of hate on Doc #3’s face when he realized a Short-Timer had presumed to step into his business with one of the local strays. What had he said?

[
I’ll fuck you over, Shorts. I’ll fuck you over big-time. And I’ll fuck your
friends
over. Do you get me?
]

A terrible idea, almost a certainty, dawned in Ralph’s mind as he watched Bill McGovern crumple slowly to the floor.

Lois: [
‘Make it go away
– please
make it go away!’
]

She buried her face against Ralph’s shoulder. Clotho and Lachesis exchanged uneasy looks, and Ralph realized he had already begun to revise his mental picture of them as omniscient and all-powerful. They might be supernatural creatures, but Dr Joyce Brothers they were not. He had an idea they weren’t much shakes at predicting the future, either; fellows with really efficient crystal balls probably wouldn’t have a look like that in their entire repertoire.

They’re feeling their way along, just like the rest of us,
Ralph thought, and he felt a certain reluctant sympathy for Mr C and Mr L.

The blue-green arc of light floating in front of Lachesis – and the images trapped inside it – suddenly disappeared.

Clotho, sounding defensive: [
Please remember that it was your choice to see, Ralph and Lois. We did not show you that willingly
.]

Ralph barely heard this. His terrible idea was still developing, like a photograph one does not wish to see but cannot turn away from. He was thinking of Bill’s hat . . . Rosalie’s faded blue bandanna . . . and Lois’s missing diamond earrings.

[
I’ll fuck your
friends
over, Shorts – do you get me? I hope so. I most certainly do.
]

He looked from Clotho to Lachesis, his sympathy for them disappearing. What replaced it was a dull pulse of anger. Lachesis had said there was no such thing as accidental death, and that included McGovern’s. Ralph had no doubt that Atropos had taken McGovern when he had for one simple reason: he’d wanted to hurt Ralph, to punish Ralph for messing into . . . what had Dorrance called it? Long-time business.

Old Dor had suggested he not do that – a good policy, no doubt, but he, Ralph, had really had no choice . . . because these two bald half-pints had messed in with
him
. They had, in a very real sense, gotten Bill McGovern killed.

Clotho and Lachesis saw his anger and took a step backward (although they seemed to do it without actually moving their feet), their faces becoming more uneasy than ever.

[
‘You two are the reason Bill McGovern’s dead. That’s the truth of it, isn’t it?’
]

Clotho: [
Please . . . if you’ll just let us finish explaining—
]

Lois was staring at Ralph, worried and scared.

[
‘Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you angry?’
]

[
‘Don’t you get it? This little setup of theirs cost Bill McGovern his life. We’re here because Atropos has either done something these guys don’t like or is getting ready to—’
]

Lachesis: [
You’re jumping to conclusions, Ralph—
]

[
‘– but there’s one very basic problem: he
knows
we see him!
Atropos
KNOWS
we see him!’]

Lois’s eyes widened with terror . . . and with understanding.

A small white hand fell on Ralph’s shoulder and lay there like smoke.

[
Please . . . if you’ll only let us explain—
]

He felt that change – that
blink
– happen in his body even before he was fully aware he had willed it. He could feel the wind again, coming out of the dark like the blade of a cold knife, and shivered. The touch of Clotho’s hand was now no more than a phantom vibration just below the surface of his skin. He could see all three of them, but now they were milky and faint. Now they were ghosts.

Lois’s voice, as distant as a fading echo: [‘
Ralph! What are you doing to your
]

He looked at the ghostly images of Clotho and Lachesis. Now they looked not just uneasy or slightly guilty but downright scared. Their faces were distorted and hard to see, but their fear was none the less unmistakable.

Clotho, his voice distant but audible: [
Come back, Ralph! Please come back!
]

‘If I do, will you quit playing games and be straight with us?’

Lachesis, fading, disappearing: [
Yes! Yes!
]

Ralph made that interior blink happen again. The three of them came back into focus. At the same time, color once more filled up the spaces of the world and time resumed its former sprint – he observed the waning moon sliding down the far side of the sky like a dollop of glowing mercury. Lois threw her arms around his neck, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if she was hugging him or trying to strangle him.

[
‘Thank God! I thought you were going to leave me!’
]

Ralph kissed her and for a moment his head was filled with a pleasant jumble of sensory input: the taste of fresh honey, a texture like combed wool, and the smell of apples. A thought blipped across his mind

(
what would it be like to make love up here?
)

and he banished it at once. He needed to think and speak very carefully in the next few

(
minutes? hours? days?
)

and thinking about stuff like that would only make it that much harder. He turned to the little bald doctors and measured them with his eyes.

[
‘I hope you mean it. Because if you don’t, I think we’d better call this horserace off right now and go our separate ways.’
]

Clotho and Lachesis didn’t bother with the exchanged glance this time; they both nodded eagerly. Lachesis spoke, and he did so in a defensive tone of voice. These fellows, Ralph suspected, were a lot more pleasant to deal with than Atropos, but no more used to being questioned – to being put on their mettle, Ralph’s mother would have said – than he was.

[
Everything we told you was true, Ralph and Lois. We may have left out the possibility that Atropos has a slightly greater understanding of the situation than we would really like, but—
]

Ralph: [
‘What if we refuse to listen to any more of this nonsense? What if we just turn and walk away?’
]

Neither replied, but Ralph thought he saw a dismaying thing in their eyes: they knew that Atropos had Lois’s earrings, and they knew
he
knew. The only one who didn’t know – he hoped – was Lois herself.

She was now tugging his arm.

[
‘Don’t do that, Ralph – please don’t. We need to hear them out.’
]

He turned back to them and made a curt motion for them to go on.

Lachesis: [
Under ordinary circumstances, we don’t interfere with Atropos, nor he with us. We couldn’t interfere with him even if we wanted to; the Random and the Purpose are like the red and black squares on a checkerboard, defining each other by contrast. But Atropos does want to interfere with the way things operate – interfering is, in a very real sense, what he was made to do – and on rare occasions, the opportunity to do so in a really big way presents itself. Efforts to stop his meddling are rare—
]

Clotho: [
The truth is actually a little stronger, Ralph and Lois; never in our experience has an effort been made to check or bar him.
]

Lachesis: [
– and are made only if the situation into which he intends to meddle is a very delicate one, where many serious matters are balanced and counterbalanced. This is one of those situations. Atropos has severed a life-cord he would have done well to leave alone. This will cause terrible problems on all levels, not to mention a serious imbalance between the Random and the Purpose, unless the situation is rectified. We cannot deal with what’s happening; the situation has passed far beyond our skills. We can no longer see clearly, let alone act. Yet in this case our inability to see hardly matters, because in the end, only Short-Timers can oppose the will of Atropos. That is why you two are here.
]

Ralph: [
‘Are you saying that Atropos cut the cord of someone who was supposed to die a natural death . . . or a Purposeful death?’
]

Clotho: [
Not exactly. Some lives – a very few – bear no clear designation. When Atropos touches such lives, trouble is always likely. ‘All bets are off,’ you say. Such undesignated lives are like—
]

Clotho drew his hands apart and an image – playing cards again – flashed between them. A row of seven cards that were swiftly turned over, one after another, by an unseen hand. An ace; a deuce; a joker; a trey; a seven; a queen. The last card the invisible hand flipped over was blank.

Clotho: [
Does this picture help?
]

Ralph’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know if it did or not. Somewhere out there was a person who was neither a regular playing card nor a joker in the deck. A person who was perfectly blank, up for grabs by either side. Atropos had slashed this guy’s metaphysical air-hose, and now somebody – or some
thing
– had called a time-out.