Characters in Insomnia

Lisette Benson was back on the screen. “We now go to Anne Rivers, who talked less than an hour ago to two of the so-called Friends of Life who were arrested in this morning’s demonstration.”

“James Roy Hong and Anthony Forbes. Hong is an acupuncturist with offices on Kansas Street. Forbes is a hypnotist with a place over on the east side—Hesser Street, I think. And before you yell quack—” “I’m not going to yell quack,” Ralph said quietly.

… 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 …

Hong’s receptionist (someone named Audra, who seemed to know Wyzer on a basis a good deal warmer than a merely professional one) at first said Dr. Hong could not possibly see a new patient until after Thanksgiving. Ralph’s shoulders slumped.

“I was terrified,” Barbara Richards told Kirkland. “At first I thought they were really throwing dead babies, or maybe fetuses they’d gotten hold of somehow. Even after Dr. Harper ran through, yelling they were only dolls, I still wasn’t sure.” “You said they were chanting?” Kirkland asked. “Yes.

4 Bertha Roberts sat in her bentwood rocker about five feet beyond where the sidewall of the Cherokee’s cockpit had been, knitting and rocking back and forth on thin air a mile or more above the ground.

Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice cream. Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s. [“Ralph, what is it?

We’ll also have Chris Altoberg’s weather and Bob McClanahan on sports. Stay tuned.” Ralph forked a bite of macaroni and cheese into his mouth, looked up, and saw Lois watching him. “All right?” she asked.

It was certainly the way Bob Polhurst liked it. “He saw into people in a way that seemed scary to me . . . at first, anyway.

They’re poison. Bobby Therriault told me if one of em sticks inya, you could get paralyzed. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. So be careful, Ralphie.

I called Candy Shoemaker, my friend from over on Kansas Street, and she came and got Nat. She’s keeping her for the night. She wanted to know what had happened, but I wouldn’t tell her.

Quite possibly true, quite possibly Carl Litchfield was a peach of a guy and a helluva doctor, but Ralph still found himself calling Litchfield’s office again half an hour later.

… Avenue, where the still beautiful and much beloved Carolyn Roberts was now spending her last year in a haze of headaches and morphine, to the Harris Avenue Extension and Derry County Airport. He would walk out the Extension—which was treeless and completely exposed to the pitiless sun—until he felt his …

… time in years, of a childhood acquaintance named Charles Engstrom. “Don’t you play with Chuckie,” Ralph’s mother used to tell him. “He’s a dirty boy.” Ralph didn’t know if Chuckie was a dirty boy or not, but he was fruitcrackers, no question about that. Chuckie Engstrom liked to hide behind …

She said one of them was Charles Pickering, the guy the cops caught apparently getting ready to firebomb the joint late last year. Simone’s niece said the police only arrested four people. It looks like she was a little low.” “Was Ed really with them?” Ralph asked.

She doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to him anymore, but you linger on his mind, Ralph. I asked Chief Johnson if I could assign a man—Chris Nell would be my pick—to keep an eye on you, at least until after WomanCare’s Rent-A-Bitch has come and gone.

We’ll also have Chris Altoberg’s weather and Bob McClanahan on sports. Stay tuned.” Ralph forked a bite of macaroni and cheese into his mouth, looked up, and saw Lois watching him. “All right?” she asked.

“I’m Detective Sergeant John Leydecker,” the burly man said. “This is Officer Chris Nell. Understand you had a little trouble here, sir.” “Well, yes. I guess that’s right. A little trouble. Or, if you want to call a spade a spade, I behaved like a horse’s ass.”

I will be Clotho, although I spin no thread, and my colleague and old friend will be Lachesis, although he shakes no rods and has never thrown the coins. Come in, both of you—please!] They came in and stood warily between the visitor’s chair and the bed.

Isn’t that Connie Chung?” Ralph looked. Yes; the woman in the beige coat standing between two techs with the CBS logo on their jackets was almost certainly Connie Chung. He had admired her pretty, intelligent face and pleasant smile over too many evening meals to have much doubt about it.

Well, let’s see, shall we? Let’s just see!] The Crimson King leaned forward again on its throne, its mouth yawning, its remaining eye blazing with red light. Ralph fought the urge to yank his now-empty right hand away.

They wouldn’t be very good even if the County Prosecutor wasn’t as conservative as Dale Cox.” “Why not?” “First of all, I doubt if we’ll be able to show any deep connection between the two men.

“Lisette,” the good-looking blonde was saying, “with me I have Edward Deepneau and Daniel Dalton, both of Derry, two of those arrested in this morning’s demonstration. That’s correct, gentlemen? You were arrested?” They nodded, Ed with the barest twinkle of humor, Dalton with dour, jut-jawed determination.

One of them sprinted through Ralph like a gust of warm wind before he could dodge aside: a young man named David Wilbert who thought his wife might be having an affair with her boss at the real-estate office where she worked as a secretary.

They had seen the woman and ignored the bumper-stickers. We are family; I’ve got all my sisters with me. “When Deanie said the people getting out of the car were dressed in army clothes and carrying guns, we thought it was a joke. All of us but Gretchen, that is.

3 The hospital receptionist connected him with Room 313. The clearly tired woman who answered the phone was Denise Polhurst, the dying man’s niece. Bill wasn’t there, she told him. Four other teachers from what she termed “Unc’s glory days” had shown up around one, and Bill had proposed lunch.

… a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games. Games were what the picnic area was about—what most of the places in the Derry of the Old Crocks were about—but Ralph …

If he was lucky, he could find Faye Chapin or Don Veazie and play a little chess. 2 His relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph’s insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m.

Anyway, Donna Hagen said the guy sounded very young and sure of himself.” The words were barely out of his mouth before Leydecker winced and put a hand on top of his head. “That didn’t come out just the way I meant it, Ralph. Sorry.”

The doctors are all off—I mean, Dr. Hamilton is technically covering, but I’m not even sure I could get to her. There’s a lot going on—this is a big day for us.” “I know,” Lois said, and gave Ralph’s hand another squeeze before letting it go.

It wasn’t Dr. Litchfield who came to see Ralph in the third-floor waiting room early that evening but Dr. Jamal, the neurologist.

He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr. Pickard (Dr. Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head.

The burly plainclothes cop shook it, still smiling his small, benign smile. “Edward Deepneau?” he asked. “Right.” Ed shook hands with the uniformed cop, who looked a trifle bemused, and then returned his attention to the burly man.

Great, huh? Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton, petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence.

… mode of locomotion, coupled with the overcoat, gave Esther Perrine a somewhat surreal aspect as she approached. She looked like the black queen on a chessboard, a piece that was either being guided by an invisible hand or moving all by itself. As she neared the place where Ralph sat—still …

Father Coughlin came by this noon and told me the poor old guy is sinking fast. He CAN have visitors, tho. He is in Derry Home I.C.U., Room 315. P.S.

Ed and Charlie and two other people—a man named Frank Felton and a woman named Sandra McKay—seem to be operating very much on their own hook now.

“I’ll be glad when the Day woman comes n goes n things can get back to normal,” Fred Zell said. Doc Mulhare was down on his hands and knees, collecting chess-pieces. “Do you want to finish, Faye?” he asked. “I think I remember where they all were.” “No,” Faye said.

A ghostly shape like a big milkweed puff became his mom’s old Angora cat, Futzy, curled up on the window-sill and looking out at the gulls circling above the old dump in the Barrens. Futzy had died around the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had stopped making movies together.

He was passing the unpretentious double storefront which housed George Lyford, C.P.A., on one side and Maritime Jewelry (WE BUY YOUR OLD GOLD AT TOP PRICES) on the other, when he was pulled out of his thoughts by a short, strangled bark.

Great, huh? Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton, petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence.

6 Stan and Georgina Eberly walked to the low line of hedge which separated their front yard from Mrs. Locher’s. They had put their arms around each other’s waist, and to Ralph they looked like the Bobbsey Twins grown old and fat and frightened.

“Be sure to tune in at six for further updates. In Augusta, Governor Greta Powers responded to charges that she may have—” Lois got up and pushed the Off button on the TV. She simply stared at the darkening screen for a moment, then sighed heavily and sat down.

There was a deep scar running down it, almost all the way from her hip to her knee. “She said her name was Gretchen Tillbury, that she was a family-abuse counsellor at WomanCare, and that her husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife in 1978.

Then all the floors start to tilt and all the corners on things start to round off. It was Hamilton Davenport, the proprietor of Back Pages, who had spoken to him. He was stocking the library cart he kept in front of his shop with brightly jacketed paperbacks.

You saw it in her and all around her.” As he himself now saw Harold Chasse’s wife in Lois, as if the woman sitting beside him on the bench had become a lens. Janet Chasse was tall, fair-skinned, and long-waisted.

Easier to watch old Harriet Bennigan, who made Mrs. Perrine look like a spring chicken, bent over her walker in her bright red fall coat, out for her morning lurch.

… Chapter 3 1 Ed and Helen Deepneau lived in a small Cape Cod—chocolate-brown, whipped-cream trim, the kind of house which older women often call “darling”—four houses up from the one Ralph and Bill McGovern shared. Carolyn had liked to say the Deepneaus belonged to “the Church of the Latter-Day Yuppies,” …

They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker’s named Howard Hayman. When he wasn’t playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a lawyer who enjoyed lunching on insurance companies.

… in Ebenezer Scrooge’s counting-house—and phoned the office of James Roy Hong, acupuncturist. Wyzer pushed the phone’s speaker button so Ralph could follow the conversation. Hong’s receptionist (someone named Audra, who seemed to know Wyzer on a basis a good deal warmer than a merely professional one) at first said Dr. …

“Well, that was the end of it for me; I’d had enough. ‘I keep my appointments, Janet Chasse,’ I said, ‘but only the ones I make for myself. I don’t give a fart in a high wind for the ones other people make for me.’

Ralph felt a sudden and surprisingly sharp pang of sorrow at this news. He and Jimmy Vandermeer had known each other well during their own “real lives.”

… of the Kenduskeag while fishing with his brother, John—this had been when it was still possible to eat what you caught down in the Barrens. Ralph had asked his older brother to take the convulsively flopping thing off his hook for him and put it in the bucket of fresh …

“—John Kirkland at WomanCare, with the first of two reports,” Lisette Benson was finishing, and the picture switched to a reporter doing a stand-up outside a long, low brick building. A super at the bottom of the screen informed viewers that this was a LIVE-EYE REPORT.

“I’m Detective Sergeant John Leydecker,” the burly man said. “This is Officer Chris Nell. Understand you had a little trouble here, sir.” “Well, yes. I guess that’s right. A little trouble. Or, if you want to call a spade a spade, I behaved like a horse’s ass.”

He started to turn away. The heavyset man stopped him with an outstretched hand. “John Tandy,” he said. He shook it. “Ralph Roberts. Pleased to meet you.” Tandy smiled. “Under the circumstances, I kinda doubt that . . . but I’m real glad you showed up when you did.

… I didn’t know Pickering was going to draw Judge Steadman, who has been known to say that he doesn’t even believe in insanity. Steadman set bail at eighty grand. Pickering’s court-appointed bellowed like a calf in the moonlight, but it didn’t make any difference.” Ralph looked down and saw he …

Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is on the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall.

“Better call the cops, Justin. It looks like we’ve got us a situation here.” 5 “Am I in trouble for using that?” Ralph asked an hour later, and pointed to one of the two sealed plastic bags sitting on the cluttered surface of the desk in Mike Hanlon’s office.

The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking rankly across the street at them.

That these names originally belonged to women means little to us, since we are creatures with no sexual dimension. I will be Clotho, although I spin no thread, and my colleague and old friend will be Lachesis, although he shakes no rods and has never thrown the coins.

It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin had introduced Ralph to one of life’s most important considerations . . . once you’d become a bona fide Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one’s “real life.”

“What are you going to do?” “Call Larry Perrault,” McGovern said. “May’s younger brother. He still lives out in Cardville. She’ll be buried in Cardville, I imagine.” McGovern gave Ralph a strange, speculative look. “What did you think I was going to do?” “I don’t know,” Ralph said uneasily.

… going with the Sparkmeyer boy—” “Oh my God, Lennie Sparkmeyer, I haven’t thought of him in years,” Barbara Richards said, and gave an embarrassed little laugh. “But I remember you. Lois Delancey. Aunt Simone’s poker-buddy. Do you guys still play?” “It’s Chasse, not Delancey, and we still do.” Lois sounded …

Faye grunted and captured the Doc’s remaining bishop. “What I don’t understand is these cootie-bugs,” Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare.

Over the canned music and studio applause that marked the end of the game-show, a woman’s voice said, “This is Lisette Benson. Topping our News at Noon, a well-known women’s rights advocate agrees to speak in Derry, sparking a protest—and six arrests—at a local clinic.

“Now that Tillbury’s dead, the ones that matter are Maggie Petrowsky, Barbara Richards, and Dr. Roberta Harper. Harper’s going to introduce the Big Kahuna tonight, I think . . . or maybe in this case it’s the Big Kahunette.”

My big brother, Marcel, fought da las year of the war in the Pacific. One of the t’ings he brought back was a scarf with dat same two marks on it, in dat same red. I ast him, jus to be sure, and he wrote it on dat card.”

Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, and that was why the demonstrators had been arrested.

The issue, he saw, was not his own sanity, not the auras, not the little bald doctors, but May Locher.

“The only other male Centurion on their list—that we know about, anyway—is Mayor Cohen.” “Did you give him one of these?” Ralph asked, picking up the aerosol can. It looked no more dangerous than the free samples of shaving cream he got in the mail from time to time.

… trip they had taken to Boston with “Aunt Melanie,” a bank teller with whom Helen had become close friends. Helen and Aunt Melanie had gone to some sort of feminist convention while Natalie networked with about a billion new kids in the day-care center, and then Aunt Melanie had left …

She looked alarmed. “Gretchen!” she exclaimed. “And Merrilee! We have to get Merrilee, Ralph, she’s seven months pregnant!” “She’s up there,” Ralph said, grabbing Helen’s arm when she showed signs of wanting to leave the foot of the stairs and go back into the burning cellar. “She and Gretchen both.

Connie Chung walked out from beneath the canopy with a bearded, handsome cameraman—MICHAEL ROSENBERG the tag on his CBS jacket said—and then raised her small hands in a framing gesture, showing him how she wanted him to shoot the bedsheet banner hanging down from the canopy. Rosenberg nodded.

“ . . . and I breathed in a big cloud of her stuff.” “What happened?” Ralph asked, fascinated and afraid. Lois laughed ruefully. “To me or her?” “Both of you.” “Mina jumped and slapped the back of her neck. ‘There’s a bug on me!’ she said. ‘It bit me!

Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in my flowerbeds or up on the porch roof. Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner’s permit, I understand.

Here came Mr. Dugan, head of the Derry Trust’s Loan Department, decked out in his customary three-piece suit and rimless eyeglasses. As always, he looked to Ralph like the only man in the history of the world to be born without an asshole.

Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr. Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.

And the devil of it was, he probably would, as he had already tried Mrs. Rapaport’s lemon-and-hot-water recipe, and Shawna McClure’s advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word cool (except when Shawna said it, the word came out cuhhhh-ooooooooooool ).

… Ralph could see two frightened faces behind the windshield as the car veered, and he thought Mrs. Sullivan was screaming. Atropos was leaping up and down, doing an obscenely joyful hornpipe. [Yahh, Short-Time! Silly white-hair! Toldja I’d fix you …

No, she had no idea who was taking care of Mrs. Deepneau’s baby; all she knew was that she did not have a Natalie Deepneau on her admissions list.

Patrick, that’s his name. She calls him Pat. He’s named after his grandfather, and— He closed his eyes tightly for a moment. His stomach was fluttering lightly just below his Adam’s apple and he was suddenly sure he was going to vomit. “Ralph?” McGovern asked. “Are you all right?”

“It’s Ralph Roberts! And Paul Chasse’s wife widdim! Say, Ralphie, do you remember the day we tried to get into that tent revival so we could hear em sing ‘Amazing Grace’?” [“I remember, Jimmy.”] Jimmy appeared to smile, and then his eyes slipped closed again.

They knew him down there, knew him well, and he didn’t want Paul Durgin, the Rexall druggist, to see him buying sleeping-pills. It was probably stupid—like going across town to buy rubbers—but that didn’t change the way he felt.

… Faye’s shoulders a bare second before Stan gripped Pedersen’s upper left arm. “You ain’t doing none of that,” Stan said, speaking directly into one of Pedersen’s tufted ears. “We’ll end up taking the both of you over to Derry Home with heart-attacks, and you don’t need another one of those, …

Sleepiness began to steal over him at its usual time—eleven-twenty, just as Pete Cherney was giving the following day’s weather forecast.

“Sure she did,” Ralph said. “Pete Sullivan, the same kid who delivers the newspaper. Now that I think of it, I saw him doing it.” “Mystery-novel bullshit,” Leydecker said, but Ralph thought Leydecker would have swapped Susan Day for May Locher in about three seconds.

“They’re talking, and Peter says everything’s okay, so I guess I better just be quiet.” “What a good idea,” Ralph said, still holding her upper arm lightly. Lois took a quick look around to confirm Ralph had the situation under control, then turned back to Barbara Richards once again.

The cleaning woman’s name was Rachel Anderson. She’d been married once, to a man who’d beaten her hard and often until he disappeared eight years ago. Now she had a dog and her friends at WomanCare, and that was enough. “Oh sure,” Rachel Anderson said in a dreamy, thoughtful voice.

“See? Satisfied?” Heavyset asked, speaking directly to Ed again. “I ain’t Ray Joubert or that guy Dahmer after all. How ’bout that!”

Ralph had a nightmare image of his old dog, Rex, who’d liked to ride with his head out the passenger window and his raggedy ears blowing back in the slipstream. He closed his eyes. What if I fall?

“No, I don’t think so.” “When I was seventeen,” she said, “my mother hired this boy from down the road—Richard Henderson, his name was—to do chores around our place.

“Many people—especially radical feminists like Dr. Roberta Harper, WomanCare’s chief administrator—like to gild the lily with phrases like ‘early termination,’ but what she’s talking about is abortion, the ultimate act of abuse against women by a sexist society.”

… and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations. 6 Across town, in Strawford Park, the door of the …

It’s something you do when you’re nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I’m crazy ’bout dis lady.” Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once. “What will you name her?” Lois asked. “Any idea?” “Sure,” Ralph said. “Rosalie.”

“Hi there, Rosalie,” Ralph muttered, and rubbed a hand across his eyes. It was a Thursday morning, garbage-pickup day on Harris Avenue, so he wasn’t surprised to see Rosalie, who’d been a wandering, here-and-there fixture in the neighborhood for the last year or so.

Somewhere a woman was yelling for Sam to get his sister and come inside. It was just the usual streetlife serenade, no more and no less, but to Ralph it all seemed strangely false. He supposed it was because he had gotten so used to seeing Harris Avenue empty lately.

Ed and Charlie and two other people—a man named Frank Felton and a woman named Sandra McKay—seem to be operating very much on their own hook now.

… had already tried Mrs. Rapaport’s lemon-and-hot-water recipe, and Shawna McClure’s advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word cool (except when Shawna said it, the word came out cuhhhh-ooooooooooool ). When you were trying to deal with a slow but relentless erosion …

“Let’s go up to my house,” Lois proposed suddenly. “I’ll call Simone Castonguay. Her niece is the day receptionist at WomanCare. If anyone knows exactly what happened up there this morning, it’ll be Simone—she’ll have called Barbara.” “I was just on my way down to the supermarket,” Ralph said.

Very lucky, indeed. 4 Halfway up the north balcony, a woman named Sonia Danville—a woman with the bruises of the last beating any man would ever give her still fading from her face—sat with her arms around the shoulders of her son, Patrick.

Ralph had known many of them for years (had, in fact, gone to grammar school with Stan Eberly), and was comfortable with them . . . as long as they didn’t get too nosy. Most didn’t.

“Steve Anderson—the a.d.a. who questioned you—and Pickering’s court-appointed attorney are probably horse-trading even as we speak. Pickering’s guy will be saying he might be able to get his client—the thought of Charlie Pickering being anyone’s client, for anything, sort of blows my mind, …

Do you remember him from the day we arrested Ed?” “I remember the name.” “Uh-huh. Steve Utterback was the responding detective and the OIC—officer in charge. He’s a good man.” The guy in the watchcap, Ralph thought. “The lady was dead in bed, but there was no sign of violence.

… and started to bawl my silly head off—and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.” “Nah, not that big,” Ralph said, smiling uneasily. “Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?” “Chess,” Ralph …

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.

“I don’t know, Tim. Come on, stop dawdling.” She began to move him along faster, her ponytailed hair flipping back and forth and leaving small fans of gray-tinged-with-red in the air. To Ralph they looked like the arcs that wipers sometimes left on dirty windshields. “Hey, Mom, get a life!

Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

3 The interior of Trigger Vachon’s truck smelled of clean, freshly pressed clothes, an aroma which for some reason always reminded Ralph of fresh bread.

It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.” Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows. 10 When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts.

… shower running and the mercifully distant sound of William D. McGovern singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Ralph went out to the porch, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and read the day like a catalogue. There was nothing, he reflected, really nothing in the world like …

Winston Smith, his old gray tomcat, sat in the open doorway of the shop with his tail curled around his paws. He looked at Ralph with yellow-eyed indifference, as if to say, You think you know old, my friend? I’m here to testify you don’t know dick about getting old.

“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.”