Insomnia

by Stephen King

  'Not at all. My fault entirely.' And before Ralph could do more than pick up two boxes of Sleepinex and one box of Drow-Zee gel capsules, the man in the white smock who had spoken to him had swept up the rest and was redistributing them with the speed of a riverboat gambler dealing a hand of poker. According to the gold ID bar pinned to his breast, this was JOE WYZER, RITE AID PHARMACIST.

  'Now,' Wyzer said, dusting off his hands and turning to Ralph with a friendly grin, 'let's start over. Can I help you? You look a little lost.'

  Ralph's initial response - annoyance at being disturbed while having a deep and meaningful conversation with himself - was being replaced with guarded interest. 'Well, I don't know,' he said, and gestured to the array of sleeping potions. 'Do any of these actually work?'

  Wyzer's grin widened. He was a tall, middle-aged man with fair skin and thinning brown hair which he parted in the middle. He stuck out his hand, and Ralph had barely begun the polite reciprocatory gesture when his own hand was swallowed. 'I'm Joe,' the pharmacist said, and tapped the gold tunic-pin with his free hand. 'I used to be Joe Wyze, but now I'm older and Wyzer.'

  This was almost certainly an ancient joke, but it had lost none of its savor for Joe Wyzer, who laughed uproariously. Ralph smiled a polite little smile with just the smallest touch of anxiety around its edges. The hand which had enfolded his was clearly a strong one, and he was afraid if the pharmacist squeezed hard, his hand might finish the day in a cast. He found himself wishing, at least momentarily, that he'd taken his problem to Paul Durgin downtown after all. Then Wyzer gave his hand two energetic pumps and let go.

  'I'm Ralph Roberts. Nice to meet you, Mr Wyzer.'

  'Mutual. Now, concerning the efficacy of these fine products. Let me answer your question with one of my own, to wit, does a bear shit in a telephone booth?'

  Ralph burst out laughing. 'Rarely, I'd think,' he said when he could say anything again.

  'Correct. And I rest my case.' Wyzer glanced at the sleeping aids, a wall done in shades of blue. 'Thank God I'm a pharmacist and not a salesman, Mr Roberts; I'd starve trying to peddle stuff door to door. Are you an insomniac? I'm asking partly because you're investigating the sleeping aids, but mostly because you have that lean and hollow-eyed look.'

  Ralph said, 'Mr Wyzer, I'd be the happiest man on earth if I could get five hours' sleep some night, and I'd settle for four.'

  'How long's it been going on, Mr Roberts? Or do you prefer Ralph?'

  'Ralph's fine.'

  'Good. And I'm Joe.'

  'It started in April, I think. A month or six weeks after my wife died, anyway.'

  'Gee, I'm sorry to hear you lost your wife. My sympathies.'

  'Thank you,' Ralph said, then repeated the old formula. 'I miss her a lot, but I was glad when her suffering was over.'

  'Except now you're suffering. For . . . let's see.' Wyzer counted quickly on his big fingers. 'Going on half a year now.'

  Ralph suddenly found himself fascinated by those fingers. No jet contrails this time, but the tip of each one appeared to be wrapped in a bright silvery haze, like tinfoil you could somehow look right through. He suddenly found himself thinking of Carolyn again, and remembering the phantom smells she had sometimes complained of last fall - cloves, sewage, burning ham. Maybe this was the male equivalent, and the onset of his own brain tumor had been signaled not by headaches but by insomnia.

  Self-diagnosis is a fool's game, Ralph, so why don't you just quit it?

  He moved his eyes resolutely back to Wyzer's big, pleasant face. No silvery haze there; not so much as a hint of a haze. He was almost sure of it.

  'That's right,' he said. 'Going on half a year. It seems longer. A lot longer, actually.'

  'Any noticeable pattern? There usually is. I mean, do you toss and turn before you go to sleep, or--'

  'I'm a premature waker.'

  Wyzer's eyebrows went up. 'And read a book or three about the problem too, I deduce.' If Litchfield had made a remark of this sort, Ralph would have read condescension into it. From Joe Wyzer he sensed not condescension but genuine admiration.

  'I read what the library had, but there wasn't much, and none of it has helped much.' Ralph paused, then added: 'The truth is none of it has helped at all.'

  'Well, let me tell you what I know on the subject, and you just kind of flop your hand when I start heading into territory you've already explored. Who's your doctor, by the way?'

  'Litchfield.'

  'Uh-huh. And you usually trade at . . . where? The People's Drug out at the mall? The Rexall downtown?'

  'The Rexall.'

  'You're incognito today, I take it.'

  Ralph blushed . . . then grinned. 'Yeah, something like that.'

  'Uh-huh. And I don't need to ask if you've been to see Litchfield about your problem, do I? If you had, you wouldn't be exploring the wonderful world of patent medicines.'

  'Is that what these are? Patent medicines?'

  'Put it this way - I'd feel a helluva lot more comfortable selling most of this crap off the back of a big red wagon with fancy yellow wheels.'

  Ralph laughed, and the bright silvery cloud which had been gathering in front of Joe Wyzer's tunic blew away when he did.

  'That kind of salesmanship I might be able to get into,' Wyzer said with a misty little grin. 'I'd get a sweet little honeybun to do a dance in a sequined bra and a pair of harem pants . . . call her Little Egypt, like in that old Coasters song . . . she'd be my warm-up act. Plus I'd have a banjo-picker. In my experience, there's nothing like a good dose of banjo music to put people in a buying mood.'

  Wyzer looked off past the laxatives and analgesics, enjoying this gaudy daydream. Then he looked back at Ralph again.

  'For a premature waker like you, Ralph, this stuff is entirely useless. You'd be better off with a shot of booze or one of those wave machines they sell through the catalogues, and looking at you, I'd guess you probably tried em both.'

  'Yes.'

  'Along with about two dozen other oldtimer-tested home remedies.'

  Ralph laughed again. He was coming to like this guy a lot. 'Try four dozen and you'll be in the ballpark.'

  'Well, you're an industrious bugger, I'll give you that,' Wyzer said, and waved a hand at the blue boxes. 'These things are nothing but antihistamines. Essentially they're trading on a side-effect - antihistamines make people sleepy. Check out a box of Comtrex or Benadryl down there in Decongestants and it'll say you shouldn't take it if you're going to be driving or operating heavy machinery. For people who suffer from occasional sleeplessness, a Sominex every now and then may work. It gives them a nudge. But they wouldn't work for you in any case, because your problem isn't getting to sleep, it's staying asleep . . . correct?'

  'Correct.'

  'Can I ask you a delicate question?'

  'Sure. I guess so.'

  'Do you have a problem with Dr Litchfield regarding this? Maybe have some doubts about his ability to understand how really pissy your insomnia is making you feel?'

  'Yes,' Ralph said gratefully. 'Do you think I should go see him? Try to explain that to him so he'll understand?' To this question Wyzer would of course respond in the affirmative, and Ralph would finally make the call. And it would be, should be Litchfield - he saw that now. It was madness to think of hooking up with a new doctor at his age.

  Can you tell Dr Litchfield you're seeing things? Can you tell him about the blue marks you saw shooting up from the tips of Lois Chasse's fingers? The footprints on the sidewalk, like the footprints in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram? The silvery stuff around the tips of Joe Wyzer's fingers? Are you really going to tell Litchfield that stuff? And if you're not, if you can't, why are you going to see him in the first place, no matter what this guy recommends?

  Wyzer, however, surprised him by going in an entirely different direction. 'Are you still dreaming?'

  'Yes. Quite a lot, in fact, considering that I'm down to about three hours' sleep a night.'

  'Are they coherent
dreams - dreams that consist of perceivable events and have some kind of narrative flow, no matter how kooky - or are they just jumbled images?'

  Ralph remembered a dream he'd had the night before. He and Helen Deepneau and Bill McGovern had been having a three-sided game of Frisbee in the middle of Harris Avenue. Helen had a pair of huge, clunky saddle shoes on her feet; McGovern was wearing a sweatshirt with a vodka bottle on it. ABSOLUT-LY THE BEST, the sweatshirt proclaimed. The Frisbee had been bright red with fluorescent green stripes. Then Rosalie the dog had shown up. The faded blue bandanna someone had hung around her neck was flapping as she limped toward them. All at once she had leaped into the air, snatched the Frisbee, and gone running off with it in her mouth. Ralph wanted to give chase, but McGovern said, Relax, Ralph, we're getting a whole case of them for Christmas. Ralph turned to him, intending to point out that Christmas was over three months away and to ask what the hell they were going to do if they wanted to play Frisbee between then and now, but before he could, the dream had either ended or gone on to some other, less vivid, mind-movie.

  'If I understand what you're saying,' Ralph replied, 'my dreams are coherent.'

  'Good. I also want to know if they're lucid dreams. Lucid dreams fulfill two requirements. First, you know you're dreaming. Second, you can often influence the course the dream takes - you're more than just a passive observer.'

  Ralph nodded. 'Sure, I have those, too. In fact, I seem to have a lot of them lately. I was just thinking of one I had last night. In it this stray dog I see on the street from time to time ran off with a Frisbee some friends of mine and I were playing with. I was mad that she broke up the game, and I tried to make her drop the Frisbee just by sending her the thought. Sort of a telepathic command, you know?'

  He uttered a small, embarrassed chuckle, but Wyzer only nodded matter-of-factly. 'Did it work?'

  'Not this time,' Ralph said, 'but I think I have made that sort of thing work in other dreams. Only I can't be sure, because most of the dreams I have seem to fade away almost as soon as I wake up.'

  'That's the case with everyone,' Wyzer said. 'The brain treats most dreams as disposable matter, storing them in extreme short-term memory.'

  'You know a lot about this, don't you?'

  'Insomnia interests me very much. I did two research papers on the link between dreams and sleep disorders when I was in college.' Wyzer glanced at his watch. 'It's my break-time. Would you like to have a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie with me? There's a place just two doors down, and the pie is fantastic.'

  'Sounds good, but maybe I'll settle for an orange soda. I've been trying to cut down on my coffee intake.'

  'Understandable but completely useless,' Wyzer said cheerfully. 'Caffeine is not your problem, Ralph.'

  'No, I suppose not . . . but what is?' To this point Ralph had been quite successful at keeping the misery out of his voice, but now it crept back in.

  Wyzer clapped him on the shoulder and looked at him kindly. 'That,' he said, 'is what we're going to talk about. Come on.'

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  1

  'Think of it this way,' Wyzer recommenced five minutes later. They were in a New Age-y sort of diner called Day Break, Sun Down. The place was a little too ferny for Ralph, who believed in old-fashioned diners that gleamed with chrome and smelled of grease, but the pie was good, and while the coffee was not up to Lois Chasse's standards - Lois made the best cup he had ever tasted - it was hot and strong.

  'Which way is that?' Ralph asked.

  'There are certain things mankind - womankind, too - keeps striving for. Not the stuff that gets written up in the history and civics books, either, at least for the most part; I'm talking fundamentals here. A roof to keep the rain out. Three hots and a cot. A decent sex-life. Healthy bowels. But maybe the most fundamental thing of all is what you've been missing, my friend. Because there's really nothing in the world that can measure up to a good night's sleep, is there?'

  'Boy, you got that right,' Ralph said.

  Wyzer nodded. 'Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man's physician. Shakespeare said it's the thread that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Napoleon called it the blessed end of night, and Winston Churchill - one of the great insomniacs of the twentieth century - said it was the only relief he ever got from his deep depressions. I put all that stuff in my papers, but what all the quotes come down to is what I just said: nothing in the whole wide world can measure up to a good night's sleep.'

  'You've had the problem yourself, haven't you?' Ralph asked suddenly. 'Is that why you . . . well . . . why you're taking me under your wing?'

  Joe Wyzer grinned. 'Is that what I'm doing?'

  'I think so, yes.'

  'Hey, I can live with that. The answer is yes. I've suffered from slow-sleep insomnia ever since I was thirteen. It's why I ended up doing not just one research paper on the subject but two.'

  'How are you doing with it these days?'

  Wyzer shrugged. 'So far it's been a pretty good year. Not the best, but I'll take it. For a couple of years in my early twenties, the problem was acute - I'd go to bed at ten, fall asleep around four, get up at seven, and drag myself through the day feeling like a bit player in someone else's nightmare.'

  This was so familiar to Ralph that his back and upper arms broke out in goosebumps.

  'Here comes the most important thing I can tell you, Ralph, so listen up.'

  'I am.'

  'The thing you have to hang onto is that you're still basically okay, even though you feel like shit a lot of the time. All sleep is not created equal, you see - there's good sleep and bad sleep. If you're still having coherent dreams, and, maybe even more importantly, lucid dreams, you're still having good sleep. And because of that, a scrip for sleeping pills could be about the worst thing in the world for you right now. And I know Litchfield. He's a nice enough guy, but he loves that prescription pad.'

  'Say it twice,' Ralph told him, thinking of Carolyn.

  'If you tell Litchfield what you told me while we were walking down here, he's going to prescribe a benzodiazepine - probably Dalmane or Restoril, maybe Halcion or even Valium. You'll sleep, but you'll pay a price. Benzodiazepines are habit-forming, they're respiratory depressants, and worst of all, for guys like you and me, they significantly reduce REM sleep. Dreaming sleep, in other words.

  'How's your pie? I only ask because you've hardly touched it.'

  Ralph took a big bite and swallowed it without tasting. 'Good,' he said. 'Now tell me why you have to have dreams to make your sleep good sleep.'

  'If I could answer that, I'd retire from the pill-pushing business and go into business as a sleep guru.' Wyzer had finished his pie and was now using the pad of his index finger to pick up the larger crumbs left on his plate. 'REM stands for rapid eye movements, of course, and the terms REM sleep and dreaming sleep have become synonymous in the public mind, but nobody really knows just how the eye movements of sleepers relate to the dreams they are having. It seems unlikely that the eye movements indicate "watching" or "tracking", because sleep researchers see a lot of it even in dreams test subjects later describe as fairly static - dreams of conversations, for instance, like the one we're having now. Similarly, no one really knows why there seems to be a clear relationship between lucid, coherent dreams and overall mental health: the more dreams of that sort a person has, the better off he seems to be, the less he has, the worse. There's a real scale there.'

  'Mental health's a pretty general phrase,' Ralph said skeptically.

  'Yeah.' Wyzer grinned. 'Makes me think of a bumper sticker I saw a few years back - SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I'LL KILL YOU. Anyway, we're talking about some basic, measurable components: cognitive ability, problem-solving ability, by both inductive and deductive methods, ability to grasp relationships, memory--'

  'My memory is lousy these days,' Ralph said. He was thinking of his inability to remember the number of the cinema complex and his long hunt through the kitc
hen cabinet for the last Cup-A-Soup envelope.

  'Yeah, you're probably suffering some short-term memory loss, but your fly is zipped, your shirt is on right-side out, and I bet if I asked you what your middle name is, you could tell me. I'm not belittling your problem - I'd be the last person in the world to do that - but I am asking you to change your point of view for a minute or two. To think of all the areas in your life where you're still perfectly functional.'

  'All right. These lucid and coherent dreams - do they just indicate how well you're functioning, like a gas gauge in a car, or do they actually help you function?'

  'No one knows for sure, but the most likely answer is a little of both. In the late fifties, around the time the doctors were phasing out the barbiturates - the last really popular one was a fun drug called Thalidomide - a few scientists even tried to suggest that the good sleep we've been beating our gums about and dreams aren't related.'

  'And?'

  'The tests don't support the hypothesis. People who stop dreaming or suffer from constant dream interruptions have all sorts of problems, including loss of cognitive ability and emotional stability. They also start to suffer perceptual problems like hyper-reality.'

  Beyond Wyzer, at the far end of the counter, sat a fellow reading a copy of the Derry News. Only his hands and the top of his head were visible. He was wearing a rather ostentatious pinky-ring on his left hand. The headline at the top of the front page read ABORTION RIGHTS ADVOCATE AGREES TO SPEAK IN DERRY NEXT MONTH. Below it, in slightly smaller type, was a subhead: Pro-Life Groups Promise Organized Protests. In the center of the page was a color picture of Susan Day, one that did her much more justice than the flat photographs on the poster he had seen in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. In those she had looked ordinary, perhaps even a bit sinister; in this one she was radiant. Her long, honey-blonde hair had been pulled back from her face. Her eyes were dark, intelligent, arresting. Hamilton Davenport's pessimism had been misplaced, it seemed. Susan Day was coming after all.

  Then Ralph saw something which made him forget all about Ham Davenport and Susan Day.

  A gray-blue aura had begun to gather around the hands of the man reading the newspaper, and around the just-visible crown of his head. It seemed particularly bright around the onyx pinky-ring he wore. It did not obscure but seemed to clarify, turning the ringstone into something that looked like an asteroid in a really realistic science-fiction movie--