it worked for me, and I had some real problems sleeping around the time I turned forty. Looking back on it, I guess that was my midlife crisis – six months of insomnia and a year-long depression over my bald spot.’
Although the books he’d been consulting all said that booze was a vastly overrated cure for sleeplessness – that it often made the problem worse instead of better, in fact – Ralph had tried it just the same. He had never been much of a drinker, so he began by adjusting McGovern’s recommended half-shot dosage down to a quarter of a shot, but after a week of no relief he had upped the ante to a full shot . . . then to two. He woke up one morning at four-twenty-two with a nasty little headache to accompany the dull brown taste of Early Times on the roof of his mouth, and realized he was suffering his first hangover in fifteen years.
‘Life’s too short for this shit,’ he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.
2
Okay, Ralph thought now as he watched the desultory mid-morning flow of customers in and out of the Red Apple across the street. Here’s the situation: McGovern says you look like shit, you almost fainted at Lois Chasse’s feet this morning, and you just cancelled the appointment you made with Ye Olde Family Physician. So what next? Just let it go? Accept the situation and let it go?
The idea had a certain Oriental charm – fate, karma, and all that – but he was going to need more than charm to get him through the long hours of early morning. The books said there were people in the world, quite a lot of them, who managed very well on no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. There were even some who got along on only two. They were an extremely small minority, but they did exist. Ralph Roberts, however, was not among their number.
How he looked wasn’t very important to him – he had a feeling that his matinee-idol days were well behind him – but how he felt was, and it was no longer just a matter of not feeling good; he felt horrible. The insomnia had begun to pervade every aspect of his life, the way the smell of frying garlic on the fifth floor will eventually pervade an entire apartment building. The color had started to drain out of things; the world had begun to take on the dull, grainy quality of a newspaper photograph.
Simple decisions – whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example – had become difficult, almost agonizing. In the last couple of weeks he had found himself coming back to the apartment from Dave’s Video Stop empty-handed more and more often, not because there was nothing at Dave’s he wanted to watch but because there was too much – he couldn’t decide if he wanted one of the Dirty Harry movies or a Billy Crystal comedy or maybe a few old Star Trek episodes. After a couple of these unsuccessful trips, he had plopped himself down in this very wing-chair, almost crying with frustration . . . and, he supposed, fear.
That creeping sensory numbness and the erosion of his decision-making capabilities were not the only problems he had come to associate with the insomnia; his short-term memory had also begun to slip. It had been his practice to go to the movies at least once and sometimes twice a week ever since his retirement from the printshop where he had finished his working life as the bookkeeper and general supervisor. He had taken Carolyn until last year, when she had gotten too sick to enjoy going out anywhere. After her death he had mostly gone alone, although Helen Deepneau had accompanied him once or twice when Ed was home to mind the baby (Ed himself almost never went, claiming he got headaches at the movies). Ralph had gotten so used to calling the cinema center’s answering machine to check showtimes that he had the number by heart. As the summer went on, however, he
Although the books he’d been consulting all said that booze was a vastly overrated cure for sleeplessness – that it often made the problem worse instead of better, in fact – Ralph had tried it just the same. He had never been much of a drinker, so he began by adjusting McGovern’s recommended half-shot dosage down to a quarter of a shot, but after a week of no relief he had upped the ante to a full shot . . . then to two. He woke up one morning at four-twenty-two with a nasty little headache to accompany the dull brown taste of Early Times on the roof of his mouth, and realized he was suffering his first hangover in fifteen years.
‘Life’s too short for this shit,’ he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.
2
Okay, Ralph thought now as he watched the desultory mid-morning flow of customers in and out of the Red Apple across the street. Here’s the situation: McGovern says you look like shit, you almost fainted at Lois Chasse’s feet this morning, and you just cancelled the appointment you made with Ye Olde Family Physician. So what next? Just let it go? Accept the situation and let it go?
The idea had a certain Oriental charm – fate, karma, and all that – but he was going to need more than charm to get him through the long hours of early morning. The books said there were people in the world, quite a lot of them, who managed very well on no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. There were even some who got along on only two. They were an extremely small minority, but they did exist. Ralph Roberts, however, was not among their number.
How he looked wasn’t very important to him – he had a feeling that his matinee-idol days were well behind him – but how he felt was, and it was no longer just a matter of not feeling good; he felt horrible. The insomnia had begun to pervade every aspect of his life, the way the smell of frying garlic on the fifth floor will eventually pervade an entire apartment building. The color had started to drain out of things; the world had begun to take on the dull, grainy quality of a newspaper photograph.
Simple decisions – whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example – had become difficult, almost agonizing. In the last couple of weeks he had found himself coming back to the apartment from Dave’s Video Stop empty-handed more and more often, not because there was nothing at Dave’s he wanted to watch but because there was too much – he couldn’t decide if he wanted one of the Dirty Harry movies or a Billy Crystal comedy or maybe a few old Star Trek episodes. After a couple of these unsuccessful trips, he had plopped himself down in this very wing-chair, almost crying with frustration . . . and, he supposed, fear.
That creeping sensory numbness and the erosion of his decision-making capabilities were not the only problems he had come to associate with the insomnia; his short-term memory had also begun to slip. It had been his practice to go to the movies at least once and sometimes twice a week ever since his retirement from the printshop where he had finished his working life as the bookkeeper and general supervisor. He had taken Carolyn until last year, when she had gotten too sick to enjoy going out anywhere. After her death he had mostly gone alone, although Helen Deepneau had accompanied him once or twice when Ed was home to mind the baby (Ed himself almost never went, claiming he got headaches at the movies). Ralph had gotten so used to calling the cinema center’s answering machine to check showtimes that he had the number by heart. As the summer went on, however, he
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