'What did you say, Ralph?'
'Hmm?' Ralph drew his gaze away from the newspaper reader's pinky-ring with an effort. 'I don't know . . . was I talking? I guess I asked you what hyper-reality is.'
'Heightened sensory awareness,' Wyzer said. 'Like taking an LSD trip without having to ingest any chemicals.'
'Oh,' Ralph said, watching as the bright gray-blue aura began to form complicated, runic patterns on the nail of the finger Wyzer was using to mash up crumbs. At first they looked like letters written in frost . . . then sentences written in fog . . . then odd, gasping faces.
He blinked and they were gone.
'Ralph? You still there?'
'Sure, you bet. But listen, Joe - if the folk remedies don't work and the stuff in Aisle 3 doesn't work and the prescription drugs could actually make things worse instead of better, what does that leave? Nothing, right?'
'You going to eat the rest of that?' Wyzer said, pointing at Ralph's plate. Chilly gray-blue light drifted off the tip of his finger like Arabic letters written in dry ice vapor.
'Nope. I'm full. Be my guest.'
Wyzer pulled Ralph's plate to him. 'Don't give up so fast,' he said. 'I want you to come back to the pharm with me so I can give you a couple of business cards. My advice, as your friendly neighborhood drug-pusher, is that you give these guys a try.'
'What guys?' Ralph watched, fascinated, as Wyzer opened his mouth to receive the last bite of pie. Each of his teeth was lit with a fierce gray glow. The fillings in his molars glowed like tiny suns. The fragments of crust and apple filling on his tongue crawled with (lucid Ralph lucid) light. Then Wyzer closed his mouth to chew, and the glow was gone.
'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. His hand rose to touch the Magic Eye, which he was still wearing under his shirt. 'Believe me, I'm not.'
'Okay, good. My advice is that you try Hong first. The needles look scary, but they only hurt a little, and he's got something going there. I don't know what the hell it is or how it works, but I do know that when I went through a bad patch two winters ago, he helped me a lot. Forbes is also good - so I've heard - but Hong's my pick. He's busy as hell, but I might be able to help you there. What do you say?'
Ralph saw a bright gray glow, no thicker than a thread, slip from the corner of Wyzer's eye and slide down his cheek like a supernatural tear. It decided him. 'I say let's go.'
Wyzer clapped him on the shoulder. 'Good man! Let's pay up and get out of here.' He produced a quarter. 'Flip you for the check?'
2
Halfway back to the pharmacy, Wyzer stopped to look at a poster which had been put up in the window of an empty storefront between the Rite Aid and the diner. Ralph only glanced at it. He had seen it before, in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.
'Wanted for murder,' Wyzer marvelled. 'People have lost all goddam sense of perspective, do you know it?'
'Yes,' Ralph said. 'If we had tails, I think most of us would spend all day chasing them and trying to bite them off.'
'The poster's bad enough,' Wyzer said indignantly,'but look at this!'
He was pointing at something beside the poster, something which had been written in the dirt which coated the outside of the empty display window. Ralph leaned close to read the short message. KILL THIS CUNT, it said. Below the words was an arrow pointing at the left-hand photo of Susan Day.
'Jesus,' Ralph said quietly.
'Yeah,' Wyzer agreed. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped away the message, leaving in place of the words a bright silvery fan-shape which Ralph knew only he could see.
3
He followed Wyzer to the rear of the pharmacy and stood in the doorway of an office not much bigger than a public-toilet cubicle while Wyzer sat on the only piece of furniture - a high stool that would have looked at home 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 Hong could not possibly see a new patient until after Thanksgiving. Ralph's shoulders slumped. Wyzer raised an open palm in his direction - Wait a minute, Ralph - and then proceeded to talk Audra into finding (or perhaps creating) an opening for Ralph in early October. That was almost a month away, but a lot better than Thanksgiving.
'Thanks, Audra,' Wyzer said. 'We still on for dinner Friday night?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Now turn off the damned speaker, Joe - I have something that's for your ears only.'
Wyzer did it, listened, laughed until tears - to Ralph they looked like gorgeous liquid pearls - stood in his eyes. Then he smooched twice into the phone and hung up.
'You're all set,' he said, handing Ralph a small white card with the time and date of the appointment written on the back. 'October fourth, not great, but really the best she could do. Audra's good people.'
'It's fine.'
'Here's Anthony Forbes's card, in case you want to call him in the interim.'
'Thanks,' Ralph said, taking the second card. 'I owe you.'
'The only thing you owe me is a return visit so I can find out how it went. I'm concerned. There are doctors who won't prescribe anything for insomnia, you know. They like to say that no one ever died from lack of sleep, but I'm here to tell you that's crap.'
Ralph supposed this news should have frightened him, but he felt pretty steady, at least for the time being. The auras had gone away - the bright gray gleams in Wyzer's eyes as he'd laughed at whatever Hong's receptionist had said had been the last. He was starting to think they had just been a mental fugue brought on by a combination of extreme tiredness and Wyzer's mention of hyper-reality. There was another reason for feeling good - he now had an appointment with a man who had helped this man through a similar bad patch. Ralph thought he'd let Hong stick needles into him until he looked like a porcupine, if the treatment allowed him to sleep until the sun came up.
And there was a third thing: the gray auras hadn't actually been scary. They had been sort of . . . interesting.
'People die from lack of sleep all the time,' Wyzer was saying, 'although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line, rather than insomnia. Insomnia and alcoholism have a lot in common, but the major thing is this: they're both diseases of the heart and mind, and when they're allowed to run their course they usually gut the spirit long before they're able to destroy the body. So yeah - people do die from lack of sleep. This is a dangerous time for you, and you have to take care of yourself. If you start to feel really wonky, call Litchfield. Do you hear me? Don't stand on ceremony.'
Ralph grimaced. 'I think I'd be more apt to call you.'
Wyzer nodded as if he had absolutely expected this. 'The number under Hong's is mine,' he said.
Surprised, Ralph looked down at the card again. There was a second number there, marked J.W.
'Day or night,' Wyzer said. 'Really. You won't disturb my wife; we've been divorced since 1983.'
Ralph tried to speak and found he couldn't. All that came out was a choked, meaningless little sound. He swallowed hard, trying to clear the obstruction in his throat.
Wyzer saw he was struggling and clapped him on the back. 'No bawling in the store, Ralph - it scares away the big spenders. You want a Kleenex?'
'No, I'm okay.' His voice was slightly watery, but audible and mostly under control.
Wyzer cast a critical eye on him. 'Not yet, but you will be.' Wyzer's big hand swallowed Ralph's once more, and this time Ralph didn't worry about it. 'For the time being, try to relax. And remember to be grateful for the sleep you do get.'
'Okay. Thanks again.'
Wyzer nodded
and walked back to the prescription counter.
4
Ralph walked back down Aisle 3, turned left at the formidable condom display, and went out through a door with THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT RITE AID declared above the push-bar. At first he thought there was nothing unusual about the fierce brightness that made him squint his eyes almost shut - it was midday, after all, and perhaps the drugstore had been a little darker than he had realized. Then he opened his eyes wide again, and his breath came to a dead stop in his throat.
A look of thunderstruck amazement spread over his face. It was the expression an explorer might wear when, after pushing his way through just one more nondescript tangle of bushes, he finds himself looking at some fabulous lost city or brain-busting geological feature - a cliff of diamonds, perhaps, or a spiral waterfall.
Ralph shrank back against the blue mailbox standing to one side of the drugstore's entrance, still not breathing, his eyes shuttling jerkily from left to right as the brain behind them tried to understand the wonderful and terrible news it was receiving.
The auras were back, but that was a little like saying Hawaii was a place where you didn't have to wear your overcoat. This time the light was everywhere, fierce and flowing, strange and beautiful.
Ralph had had only one experience in his entire life which was remotely similar to this. During the summer of 1941, the year he'd turned eighteen, he'd been riding his thumb from Derry to his uncle's place in Poughkeepsie, New York, a distance of about four hundred miles. An early evening thunderstorm at the end of his second day on the road had sent him scurrying for the nearest available shelter - a decrepit barn swaying drunkenly at the end of a long hayfield. He had spent more of that day walking than riding, and had fallen soundly asleep in one of the barn's long-abandoned horse stalls even before the thunder had stopped blasting the sky overhead.
He'd awakened at mid-morning the next day after a solid fourteen hours of sleep and had looked around in utter wonder, not even sure, in those first few moments, where he was. He only knew it was some dark, sweet-smelling place, and that the world above and on all sides of him had been split open with brilliant seams of light. Then he had remembered taking shelter in the barn, and it came to him that this strange vision had been caused by the cracks in the barn's walls and roof combined with the bright summer sunlight . . . only that, and nothing more. Yet he'd sat there in mute wonder for at least five minutes just the same, a wide-eyed teenage boy with hay in his hair and his arms dusted with chaff; he sat there looking up at the tidal gold of dust-motes spinning lazily in the slanting, crosshatching rays of the sun. He remembered thinking it had been like being in church.
This was that experience to the tenth power. And the hell of it was simply this: he could not describe exactly what had happened, and how the world had changed, to make it so wonderful. Things and people, particularly the people, had auras, yes, but that was only where this amazing phenomenon began. Things had never been so brilliant, so utterly and completely there. The cars, the telephone poles, the shopping carts in the Kart Korral in front of the supermarket, the frame apartment buildings across the street - all these things seemed to pop out at him like 3-D images in an old film. All at once this dingy little strip-mall on Witcham Street had become wonderland, and although Ralph was looking right at it, he was not sure what he was looking at, only that it was rich and gorgeous and fabulously strange.
The only things he could isolate were the auras surrounding the people going in and out of stores, stowing packages in their trunks, or getting in their cars and driving away. Some of these auras were brighter than others, but even the dimmest were a hundred times brighter than his first glimpses of the phenomenon.
But it's what Wyzer was talking about, no doubt of that. It's hyper-reality, and what you're looking at is no more there than the hallucinations of people who are under the influence of LSD. What you're seeing is just another symptom of your insomnia, no more and no less. Look at it, Ralph, and marvel over it as much as you want - it is marvellous - just don't believe it.
He didn't need to tell himself to marvel, however - there were marvels everywhere. A bakery truck was backing out of a slot in front of Day Break, Sun Down, and a bright maroon substance - it was almost the color of dried blood - came from its tailpipe. It was neither smoke nor vapor but had some of the characteristics of each. This brightness rose in gradually attenuating spikes, like the lines of an EEG read-out. Ralph looked down at the pavement and saw the tread of the van's tires printed on the concrete in that same maroon shade. The van speeded up as it left the parking lot, and the ghostly graph-trail emerging with its exhaust turned the bright red of arterial blood as it did.
There were similar oddities everywhere, phenomena which intersected in slanting paths and made Ralph think again of how the light had come slanting through the cracks in the roof and walls of that long-ago barn. But the real wonder was the people, and it was around them that the auras seemed most clearly defined and real.
A bagboy came out of the supermarket, pushing a cartload of groceries and walking in a nimbus of such brilliant white that it was like a travelling spotlight. The aura of the woman beside him was dingy by comparison, the gray-green of cheese which has begun to mould.
A young girl called to the bagboy from the open window of a Subaru and waved; her left hand left bright contrails, as pink as cotton candy, in the air as it moved. They began to fade almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fin of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.
Ralph's fear at this confused, shining vision was considerable, but for the time being, at least, fear had taken a back seat to wonder, awe, and simple amazement. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his life. But it's not real, he cautioned himself. Remember that, Ralph. He promised himself he would try, but for the time being that cautioning voice seemed very far away.
Now he noticed something else: there was a line of that lucid brightness emerging from the head of every person he could see. It trailed upward like a ribbon of bunting or brightly colored crepe paper until it attenuated and disappeared. For some people the point of disappearance was five feet above the head; for others it was ten or fifteen. In most cases the color of the bright, ascending line matched the rest of the aura - bright white for the bagboy, gray-green in the case of the female customer beside him, for instance - but there were some striking exceptions. Ralph saw a rust-red line rising from a middle-aged man who was striding along in the middle of a dark-blue aura, and a woman with a light-gray aura whose ascending line was an amazing (and slightly alarming) shade of magenta. In some cases - two or three, not a lot - the rising lines were almost black. Ralph didn't like those, and he noticed that the people to whom these 'balloon-strings' (they were named just that simply and quickly in his mind) belonged invariably looked unwell.
Of course they do. The balloon-strings are an indicator of health . . . and ill-health, in some cases. Like the Kirlian auras people were so fascinated with back in the late sixties and early seventies.
Ralph, another voice warned, you are not really seeing these things, okay? I mean, I hate to be a bore, but--
But wasn't it at least possible that the phenomenon was real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception?
Quit it, Ralph, and right now. You have to do better than that, or you'll end up in the same boat as poor old Ed Deepneau.
Thinking of Ed kicked off some association - something he'd said on the day he'd been arrested for beating his wife - but before Ralph could isolate it, a voice spoke almost at his left elbow.
'Mom? Mommy? Can we get the Honey Nut Cheerios again?'
'We'll see once we get inside, hon.'
A young woman and a little boy passed in front of him, walking hand-i
n-hand. It was the boy, who looked to be four or five, who had spoken. His mother was walking in an envelope of almost blinding white. The 'balloon-string' rising out of her blonde hair was also white and very wide - more like the ribbon on a fancy gift box than a string. It rose to a height of at least twenty feet and floated out slightly behind her as she walked. It made Ralph think of things bridal - trains, veils, gauzy billows of skirt.
Her son's aura was a healthy dark blue verging on violet, and as the two of them walked past, Ralph saw a fascinating thing. Tendrils of aura were also rising from their clasped hands: white from the woman, dark blue from the boy. They twined in a pigtail as they rose, faded, and disappeared.
Mother-and-son, mother-and-son, Ralph thought. There was something perfectly, simply symbolic about those bands, which were wrapped around each other like woodbine climbing a garden stake. Looking at them made his heart rejoice - corny, but it was exactly how he felt. Mother-and-son, white-and-blue, mother-and--
'Mom, what's that man looking at?'
The blonde woman's glance at Ralph was brief, but he saw the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned away. More importantly, he saw the brilliant aura which surrounded her suddenly darken, close in, and pick up spiraling tints of dark red.
That's the color of fright, Ralph thought. Or maybe anger.
'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! Quit pull-ing!' The little boy had to trot in order to keep up.
That's my fault, Ralph thought, and an image of how he must have looked to the young mother flashed into his mind: old guy, tired face, big purplish pouches under his eyes. He's standing - hunching - by the mailbox outside the Rite Aid Pharmacy, staring at her and her little boy as if they were the most remarkable things in the world.