You’re done with him, aren’t you?

He supposed he was. Not that Dr. Litchfield was apt to lose any sleep over it; if he thought about Ralph at all, it would be as one less old geezer to fart in his face during the prostate exam.

All right, so what are you going to do about the insomnia, Ralph; “Sit quiet for half an hour before bedtime and listen to classical music,” he said out loud. “Buy some Depends for those troublesome calls of nature.”

He startled himself by laughing at the image. The laughter had a hysterical edge he didn’t much care for-it was damned creepy, as a matter of fact-but it was still a little while before he could make himself stop.

Yet he supposed he would try Hamilton Davenport’s suggestion (although he would skip the diapers, thank You), as he had tried most of the folk remedies well-meaning people had passed on to him. This made him think of his first bona ride folk remedy, and that raised another grin.

It had been McGovern’s idea. He had been sitting on the porch one evening when Ralph came back from the Red Apple with some noodles and spaghetti sauce, had taken one look at his upstairs neighbor and made a tsk-tsk sound, shaking his head dolefully.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ralph asked, taking the seat next to him. A little farther down the street, a little girl in jeans and an oversized white tee-shirt had been skipping rope and chanting in the growing gloom.

“It means you’re looking folded, spindled, and mutilated,” McGovern said. He used one thumb to tilt the Panama back on his head and looked more closely at Ralph. “Still not sleeping?”

“Still not sleeping,” Ralph agreed.

McGovern was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he did so in a tone of absolute-almost apocalyptic, in fact-finality.

“Whiskey is the answer,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“To your insomnia, Ralph. I don’t mean you should take a bath in it-there’s no need of that. Just mix a tablespoon of honey with half a shot of whiskey and hook it down fifteen or twenty minutes before you hit the hay.”

“You think?” Ralph had asked hopefully.

“All I can say is 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.

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 moring, and you just called and canceled 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 found himself having to look it up in the Yellow Pages more and more often-he could no longer be sure if the last four digits were 1317 or 1713.

“It’s 1713,” he said now.

“I know it is.”

But did he know it?

Did he really?

Call Litchfield back. Go on, Ralph-stop sifting through the garbage.

Do something constructive.

And if Litchfield really sticks in your craw, call somebodi, else.

The phone book’s as full of doctors as it ever was.

Probably true, but seventy was maybe a little old to be picking a new sawbones by the eenie-meenie-mime-moe method. And he wasn’t going to call Litchfield back. Period.

Okay, so what’s next, you stubborn old goat? A few more folk remedies? I hope not, because at the rate you’re going you’ll be down to eye Of newt and tongue Of toad in no time.

The answer that came was like a cool breeze on a hot day… and it was an absurdly simple answer. All his book-research this summer had been aimed at understanding the problem rather than finding a solution. When it came to answers, he had relied almost solely on back-fence remedies like whiskey and honey, even when the books had already assured him they probably wouldn’t work or would only work for awhile. Although the books did offer some presumably reliable methods for coping with insomnia, the only one Ralph had actually tried was the simplest and most obvious: going to bed earlier in the evening. That solution hadn’t worked-he had simply lain awake until eleven-thirty or so, then dropped off to awaken at his new, earlier time-but something else might.

It was worth a try, anyway.

Instead of spending the afternoon in his usual frenzy of backyard pottering, Ralph went down to the library and skimmed through some of the books he had already looked at. The general consensus seemed to be that if going to bed earlier didn’t work, going later might.