Insomnia (68 page)

‘I think that would be a bad idea right now,’ Lois said, sounding alarmed. ‘A
very
bad idea.’

‘I suppose so,’ Ralph agreed.

Lois started to raise her hand for the check, then lowered it again. ‘What about calling your policeman friend? Leydecker, isn’t that his name? Could he help us? Would he?’

Ralph considered this as carefully as his muzzy head would allow, then reluctantly shook his head. ‘I don’t quite dare try it. What could we tell him that wouldn’t get us committed? And that’s only part of the problem. If he
did
get involved . . . but in the wrong way . . . he might make things worse instead of better.’

‘Okay.’ Lois waved to the waitress. ‘We’re going to ride out there with all the windows open, and we’re going to stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts out in the Old Cape for giant economy-sized coffees. My treat.’

Ralph smiled. It felt large and dopey and disconnected on his face – almost a drunken smile. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

When the waitress came over and slid their check face-down in front of him, Ralph noticed that the button reading
LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE
was no longer pinned to the frill of her apron.

‘Listen,’ she said with an earnestness Ralph found almost painfully touching,‘I’m sorry if I offended you folks. You came in for breakfast, not a lecture.’

‘You didn’t offend us,’ Ralph said. He glanced across the table at Lois, who nodded agreement.

The waitress smiled briefly. ‘Thanks for saying so, but I still kinda zoomed on you. Any other day I wouldn’ta, but we’re having our own rally this afternoon at four, and I’m introducing Mr Dalton. They told me I could have three minutes, and I guess that’s about what I gave you.’

‘That’s all right,’ Lois said, and patted her hand. ‘Really.’

The waitress’s smile was warmer and more genuine this time, but as she started to turn away, Ralph saw Lois’s pleasant expression falter. She was looking at the yellow-black blob floating just above the waitress’s right hip.

Ralph pulled out the pen he kept clipped to his breast pocket, turned over his paper placemat, and printed quickly on the back. When he was done, he took out his wallet and placed a five-dollar bill carefully below what he had written. When the waitress reached for the tip, she would hardly be able to avoid seeing the message.

He picked up the check and flapped it at Lois. ‘Our first real date and I guess it’ll have to be dutch,’ he said. ‘I’m three bucks short if I leave her the five. Please tell me you’re not broke.’

‘Who, the poker queen of Ludlow Grange? Don’t be seely, dollink.’ She handed him a helter-skelter fistful of bills from her purse. While he sorted through them for what he needed, she read what he had written on the placemat:

‘Pretty stupid, I know,’ Ralph said.

She kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Trying to help other people is never stupid.’

‘Thanks. She won’t believe it, though. She’ll think we were pissed off about her button and her little speech in spite of what we said. That what I wrote is just our weird way of trying to get our own back on her.’

‘Maybe there’s a way to convince her otherwise.’

Lois fixed the waitress – who was standing hipshot by the kitchen pass-through and talking to the short-order cook while she drank a cup of coffee – with a look of dark concentration. As she did, Ralph saw Lois’s normal blue-gray aura deepen in color and draw inward, becoming a kind of body-hugging capsule.

He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on . . . but he could feel it. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; his forearms broke out in gooseflesh.
She’s powering up,
he thought,
flipping all the switches, turning on all the turbines, and doing it on behalf of a woman she never saw before and will probably never see again
.

After a moment the waitress felt it, too. She turned to look at them as if she had heard her name called. Lois smiled casually and twiddled her fingers in a small wave, but when she spoke to Ralph, her voice was trembling with effort. ‘I’ve almost . . . almost got it.’

‘Almost got
what
?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever it is I need. It’ll come in a second. Her name is Zoë, with two dots over the e. Go pay the check. Distract her. Try to keep her from looking at me. It makes it harder.’

He did as she asked and was fairly successful in spite of the way Zoë kept trying to look over his shoulder at Lois. The first time she attempted to ring the check into the register, Zoë came up with a total of $234.20. She cleared the numbers with an impatient poke of her finger, and when she looked up at Ralph, her face was pale and her eyes were upset.

‘What’s with your wife?’ she asked Ralph. ‘I apologized, didn’t I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?’

Ralph knew Zoë couldn’t see Lois, because he was all but tap-dancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right – Lois
was
staring.

He attempted to smile. ‘I don’t know what—’

The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. ‘
Quit banging those pots around!
’ she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoë looked back at Ralph. ‘Christ, it sounds like Vietnam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it’s not polite to—’

‘To stare? She’s not. She’s really not.’ Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. ‘See?’

Zoë didn’t reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back to Ralph. ‘Sure. I see. Now why don’t you and her just make yourselves scarce?’

‘All right – still friends?’

‘Whatever you want,’ Zoë said, but she wouldn’t look at him.

When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.

‘Still tired, Lois?’ he asked her softly.

‘No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let’s go.’

He started to open the door for her, then stopped. ‘Got my pen?’

‘Gee, no – I guess it’s still on the table.’

Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a PS in rolling Palmer-method script:

‘Oh boy,’ Ralph said as he rejoined her. ‘That’s going to scare the bejesus out of her.’

‘If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don’t care.’

He nodded and they went out.

‘Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her aura?’ Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot.

Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.

‘I don’t think I took very much of her . . . her stuff,’ Lois said, ‘but it was as if I swallowed
all
of her.’

Ralph remembered something he’d read in a science magazine not long ago. ‘If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we’re made,’ he said, ‘why shouldn’t every bit of a person’s aura contain a complete blueprint of what we
are
?’

‘That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.’

‘I suppose not.’

She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. ‘It
does
sound about right, though.’

He grinned back at her.

‘You need to take some more, too,’ she told him. ‘It still feels wrong to me – like stealing – but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.’

‘As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.’ Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.

‘Ralph? What is it?’

‘Nothing . . . everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into some-body’s living room.’

He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.

Are
you seeing it?
a part of his mind asked doubtfully.
Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?

He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen. The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiving that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he’d begun seeing on the day he’d gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer – and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.

‘What’s that?’ Lois asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said, but he thought he did – either a tie-rod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go. At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. ‘Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.’

‘You can count on it,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go.’

The Dunkin’ Donuts on Newport Avenue was a jolly pink sugarchurch in a drab neighborhood of tract houses. Most had been built in a single year, 1946, and were now crumbling. This was Derry’s Old Cape, where elderly cars with wired-up mufflers and cracked windshields wore bumper stickers saying things like
DON
’
T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR PEROT
and
ALL THE WAY WITH THE NRA
, where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.

Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s paths with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as air-traffic controllers . . . if they managed to stay away from coke and car accidents, that was. Both wore their hats backward. Ralph wondered briefly why they weren’t in school on a Friday morning, or at least on the way, and decided he didn’t care. Probably they didn’t, either.

Suddenly the two bikes, which had been avoiding each other easily up until then, crashed together. Both boys fell to the pavement, then got to their feet almost immediately. Ralph was relieved to see neither was hurt; their auras did not even flicker.

‘Goddam wet end!’ the one in the Nirvana tee-shirt yelled indignantly at his friend. He was perhaps eleven. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you? You ride a bike like old people fuck!’

‘I heard something,’ the other said, resetting his hat carefully on his dirty-blond hair. ‘Great big bang. You tellin me you didn’t hear it? Boo-ya!’

‘I didn’t hear jack shit,’ Nirvana Boy said. He held out his palms, which were now dirty (or perhaps just dirtier) and oozing blood from two or three minor scratches. ‘Look at this – fuckin road-rash!’

‘You’ll live,’ his friend said.

‘Yeah, but –’ Nirvana Boy noticed Ralph, leaning against his rusty whale of an Oldsmobile with his hands in his pockets, watching them. ‘The fuck you lookin at?’

‘You and your friend,’ Ralph said. ‘That’s all.’

‘That’s all, huh?’

‘Yep – the whole story.’

Nirvana Boy glanced at his friend, then back at Ralph. His eyes glowered with a purity of suspicion which, in Ralph’s experience, could be found only here in the Old Cape. ‘You got a problem?’

‘Not me,’ Ralph said. He had inhaled a great deal of Nirvana Boy’s russet-colored aura and now felt quite a bit like Superman on a speed trip. He also felt like a child-molester. ‘I was just thinking that we didn’t talk much like you and your friend when I was a kid.’

Nirvana Boy regarded him insolently. ‘Yeah? What’d you talk like?’

‘I can’t quite remember,’ Ralph said,‘but I don’t think we sounded quite so much like shitheads.’ He turned away from them as the screen door slammed. Lois came out of the Dunkin’ Donuts with a large container of coffee in each hand. The boys, meanwhile, jumped on their fluorescent bikes and streaked off, Nirvana Boy giving Ralph one final distrustful look over his shoulder.

‘Can you drink this and drive the car at the same time?’ Lois asked, handing him a coffee.

‘I think so,’ Ralph said, ‘but I don’t really need it anymore. I’m fine, Lois.’

She glanced after the two boys, then nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

The world blazed all around them as they drove out Route 33 toward what had once been Barrett’s Orchards, and they didn’t have to slide even a single inch up the ladder of perception to see it. The city fell away and they drove through second-growth woods on fire with autumn. The sky was a blue lane above the road, and the Oldsmobile’s shadow raced beside them, wavering across leaves and branches.