That’s weird, he thought, turning back toward the little strip-mall halfway down Up-Mile Hill. That’s very weird, Ralph. Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse are about as far from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as you can get. “Ralph?” Lois called, and he turned back.
There was one intersection and about a block’s worth of distance between them now.
Cars zipped back and forth on Elizabeth Street, turning Ralph’s view of them into a moderate stutter.
“What?” he called back.
“You look better! More rested! Are you finally getting some sleep?”
“Yes!” he returned, thinking Just another small lie, in another good cause.
“Didn’t I say you’d feel better once the seasons changed? See you in a little while!”
Lois wiggled her fingers at him, and Ralph was amazed to see bright blue diagonal lines stream back from the short but carefully shaped nails. They looked like contrails.
What the fuck-?
He shut ’ his eyes tight, then popped them open again. Nothing.
Only Bill and Lois once again walking up the street toward Lois’s house, their backs to him. No bright blue diagonals in the air, nothing like thatRalph’s eyes dropped to the sidewalk and he saw that Lois and Bill were leaving tracks behind them on the concrete, tracks that looked exactly like the footprints in the old Arthur Murray learn-todance instructions you used to be able to get by mail-order.
Lois’s were gray. McGovern’s-larger but still oddly delicate-were a dark shade of olive green, They glowed on the sidewalk, and Ralph, who was standing on the far side of Elizabeth Street with his jaw hanging almost down to his breastbone, suddenly realized he could see little ribbands of colored smoke rising from them. Or perhaps it was steam.
A city bus bound for Old Cape snored by, momentarily blocking his view, and when it passed the tracks were gone. There was nothing on the sidewalk but a message chalked inside a fading pink heart: SAM + DEANIE 4-EVER.
Those tracks are not gone, Ralph. they were never there in the first Place. You know that, don’t you?
Yes, he knew. The idea that Bill and Lois looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had gotten into his head; progressing from that idea to a hallucination of phantom footprints leading up the sidewalk like tracks in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram had a certain bizarre log,c. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he own, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois’s waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails. don’t, I’ve got to get more sleep, Ralph thought. I’ve got to. If I I’m apt to start seeing anything.
“That’s right,” he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the drugstore again. “Anything at all.”
Ten minutes later, Ralph was standing at the front of the Rite Aid Pharmacy and looking at a sign which hung on chains from the ceiling.
FEEL BETTER AT RITE AID! it said, seeming to suggest that feeling better was a goal attainable by any reasonable, hard-working consumer.
Ralph had his doubts about that.
This, Ralph decided, was retail drug-dealing on a grand scale-it made the Rexall where he usually traded look like a tenement apartment by comparison. The fluorescent-lit aisles seemed as long as bowling alleys and displayed everything from toaster ovens to jigsaw puzzles.
After a little study, Ralph decided Aisle 3 contained most of the patent medicines and was probably his best bet. He made his way slowly through the area marked STOMACH REMEDIES, sojourned briefly in the kingdom of ANALGESICS, and quickly crossed the land of LAXATIVES. And there, between LAXATIVES and DECONGESTANTS, he stopped.
This is it, folks-my last shot. After this there’s only Dr. Litchfield, and if he suggests chewing honeycomb or drinking chamomile tea, I’ll probably snap and it’ll take both the nurses and the receptionist to pull me off him. closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down.
SLEEPING AIDS, the sign over this section of Aisle 3 read.
Ralph, never much of a patent-medicine user (he would otherwise have arrived here much sooner, no doubt), didn’t know exactly what he’d expected, but it surely had not been this wild, almost indecent profusion of products. His eye slipped across the boxes (the majority were a soothing blue), reading the names. Most seemed strange and slightly ominous: Compoz, Nytol, Sleepinal, Z-Power, Sominex, Sleepinex, Drow-Zee. There was even a generic brand.
You have to be kidding, he thought. None of these things are going to work for you. It’s time to quit fucking around, don’t you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it is time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor, But on the other hand he heard Dr. Litchfield, heard him so clearly it was as if a tape recorder had turned on in the middle of his head: Your wife is suffering from tension headaches, Ralph-unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening. I think we can take care of the problem, Unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening-yes, right, that was what the man had said. And then he had reached for his prescription pad and written out the order for the first bunch of useless pills while the tiny clump of alien cells in Carolyn’s head continued to send out its microbursts of destruction, and maybe Dr. Jamal had been right, maybe it was too late even then, but maybe jamal was full of shit, maybe jamal was just a stranger in a strange land, trying to get along, trying not to make waves. Maybe this and maybe that; Ralph didn’t know for sure and never would. All he really knew was that Litchfield hadn’t been around when the final two tasks of their marriage had been set before them: her job to die, his job to watch her do it.
Is that what I want to do? Go to Litchfield and watch him reach for his prescription pad again?
Maybe this time it would work, he argued to-with-himself. At ’me his hand stole out, seemingly Of its own volition, and the same time took a box of Sleepinex from the shelf. He turned it over, held it the slightly away from his eyes so he could read the small print on its side panel, and ran his eye slowly down the list of active ingredients.
He had no idea of how to pronounce most of the jawbreaking words, and even less of what they were or how they were supposed to help you sleep.
Yes, he answered the voice. Maybe this time it would work. But maybe the real answer would be just to find another doc “Help you?” a voice asked from directly behind Ralph’s shoulder.
He was in the act of returning the box of Sleepinex to its place, meaning to take something that sounded a little less like a sinister drug in a Robin Cook novel, when the voice spoke. Ralph jumped and knocked a dozen assorted boxes of synthetic sleep onto the floor.
“oh, sorry-clumsy!” Ralph said, and looked over his shoulder.
“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. with a friendly grin, “let’s start over. Can I help you? You look a “Now,” Wyzer said, dusting off his hands and turning to Ralph 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.