Insomnia

In late April Dr. jamal had left to establish a practice in southern Co

By late summer Ralph had read enough about insomnia to know that the type with which he was afflicted, while not rare, was a lot less common than the usual slow-sleep insomnia. People unaffected by insomnia are usually in first-stage sleep seven to twenty minutes after turning in. Slow-sleepers, on the other hand, sometimes take as long as three hours to slip below the surface, and while normal sleepers begin to ramp down into third-stage sleep (what some of the old books called theta sleep, Ralph had discovered) forty-five minutes or so after drifting off, slow-sleepers usually took an additional hour or two to get down there… and on many nights they did not get all the way down at all. They awoke unrefreshed, sometimes with unfocused memories of unpleasant, tangled dreams, more often with the mistaken impression that they had been awake all night.

Following Carolyn’s death, Ralph began to suffer from premature waking. He continued to go to bed most nights following the conclusion of the eleven o’clock news, and he continued to pop off to sleep almost at once, but instead of waking promptly at six-fifty-five, five minutes before the clock-radio alarm buzzed, he began to wake at six. At first he dismissed this as no more than the price of living with a slightly enlarged prostate and a seventy-year-old set of kidneys, but he never seemed to have to go that badly when he woke up, and he found it impossible to get back to sleep even after he’d emptied what had accumulated. He simply lay in the bed he’d shared with Carolyn for so many years, waiting for it to be five of seven (quarter till, anyway) so he could get up. Eventually he gave up even trying to drop off again; he simply lay there with his long-fingered, slightly swollen hands laced together on his chest and stared up at the shadowy ceiling with eyes that felt as big as doorknobs. Sometimes he thought of Dr. Jamal down there in Westport, talking in his soft and comforting Indian accent, building up his little piece of the American dream.

Sometimes he thought of places he and Carolyn had gone in the old days, and the one he kept coming back to was a hot afternoon at Sand Beach in Bar Harbor, the two of them sitting at a picnic table in their bathing suits, sitting under a big bright umbrella, eating sweet fried clams and drinking Bud from longneck bottles as they watched the sailboats scudding across the dark-blue ocean. When had that been?

1964? 1967?

Did it matter?

Probably not.

The alterations in his sleep schedule wouldn’t have mattered, either, if they had ended there; Ralph would have adapted to the changes not just with ease but with gratitude. All the books he hunted through that summer seemed to confirm one bit of folk wisdom he’d heard all his life-people slept less as they got older. If losing an hour or so a night was the only fee he had to pay for the dubious pleasure of being “seventy years young,” he would pay it gladly, and consider himself well off.

But it didn’t end there. By the first week of May, Ralph was waking up to birdsong at 5:15 a.m. He tried earplugs for a few nights, although he doubted from the outset that they would work. It wasn’t the newly returned birds that were waking him up, nor the occasional delivery-truck backfire out on Harris Avenue. He had always been the sort of guy who could sleep in the middle of a brass marching band, and he didn’t think that had changed. What had changed was inside his head. There was a switch in there, something was turning it on a little earlier every day, and Ralph hadn’t the slightest idea of how to keep it from happening.

By June he was popping out of sleep like jack out of his box at 4:30 a.m. 4:45 at the latest. And by the middle of July-not quite as hot as July of ’92, but bad enough, thanks very much-he was snapping to at around four o’clock. It was during those long hot nights, taking up too little of the bed where he and Carolyn had made love on so many hot nights (and cold ones), that he began to consider what a hell his life would become if sleep departed entirely.

In daylight he was still able to scoff at the notion, but he was discovering certain dismal truths about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, and the grand-prize wi

During the days he was able to go on telling himself that he was simply experiencing a readjustment of his sleep-cycle, that his body was responding in perfectly normal fashion to a number of big changes in his life, retirement and the loss of his wife being the two biggest.

He sometimes used the word loneliness when he thought about his new life, but he shied away from The Dreaded D-Word, stuffing it back into the deep closet of his subconscious whenever it happened to glimmer for a moment in his thoughts. Loneliness was okay. Depression most certainly was not.

Maybe you need to get more exercise, he thought. Do some walking’ like you used to last summer. After all, you’ve been leading a pretty sedentary life-get up, eat a toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the hah f hey happen to be sitting out, eat upper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for awhile. Then what?

Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed.

Sedentary.

Boring. No wonder you wake up early.

Except that was crap. His life sounded sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn’t. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from “pottering around.” Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. “Punishment” probably would have been closer to the mark than “pottering,” but punishment for what?

Waking up before dawn?

Ralph didn’t know and didn’t care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn’t really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional lights of black spots in front of his eyes.

He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.

“You ought to quit that,” Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning.

It’s got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic.”

“Maybe I am a lunatic,” Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.

He did begin walking again-nothing like the Marathons of ’92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn’t raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used-book store and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.

Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the a