of the old books called theta sleep, Ralph had discovered) forty-five minutes or so after drifting off, slow-sleepers usually took an additional hour or two to get down there... and on many nights they did not get all the way down at all. They awoke unrefreshed, sometimes with unfocused memories of unpleasant, tangled dreams, more often with the mistaken impression that they had been awake all night.
Following Carolyn's death, Ralph began to suffer from premature waking. He continued to go to bed most nights following the conclusion of the eleven o'clock news, and he continued to pop off to sleep almost at once, but instead of waking promptly at six-fifty-five, five minutes before the clock-radio alarm buzzed, he began to wake at six. At first he dismissed this as no more than the price of living with a slightly enlarged prostate and a seventy-year-old set of kidneys, but he never seemed to have to go that badly when he woke up, and he found it impossible to get back to sleep even after he'd emptied what had accumulated. He simply lay in the bed he'd shared with Carolyn for so many years, waiting for it to be five of seven (quarter till, anyway) so he could get up. Eventually he gave up even trying to drop off again; he simply lay there with his long-fingered, slightly swollen hands laced together on his chest and stared up at the shadowy ceiling with eyes that felt as big as doorknobs. Sometimes he thought of Dr. Jamal down there in Westport, talking in his soft and comforting Indian accent, building up his little piece of the American dream.
Sometimes he thought of places he and Carolyn had gone in the old days, and the one he kept coming back to was a hot afternoon at Sand Beach in Bar Harbor, the two of them sitting at a picnic table in their bathing suits, sitting under a big bright umbrella, eating sweet fried clams and drinking Bud from longneck bottles as they watched the sailboats scudding across the dark-blue ocean. When had that been?
1964? 1967?
Did it matter?
Probably not.
The alterations in his sleep schedule wouldn't have mattered, either, if they had ended there; Ralph would have adapted to the changes not just with ease but with gratitude. All the books he hunted through that summer seemed to confirm one bit of folk wisdom he'd heard all his life-people slept less as they got older. If losing an hour or so a night was the only fee he had to pay for the dubious pleasure of being "seventy years young," he would pay it gladly, and consider himself well off.
But it didn't end there. By the first week of May, Ralph was waking up to birdsong at 5:15 a.m. He tried earplugs for a few nights, although he doubted from the outset that they would work. It wasn't the newly returned birds that were waking him up, nor the occasional delivery-truck backfire out on Harris Avenue. He had always been the sort of guy who could sleep in the middle of a brass marching band, and he didn't think that had changed. What had changed was inside his head. There was a switch in there, something was turning it on a little earlier every day, and Ralph hadn't the slightest idea of how to keep it from happening.
By June he was popping out of sleep like jack out of his box at 4:30 a.m. 4:45 at the latest. And by the middle of July-not quite as hot as July of '92, but bad enough, thanks very much-he was snapping to at around four o'clock. It was during those long hot nights, taking up too little of the bed where he and Carolyn had made love on so many hot nights (and cold ones), that he began to consider what a hell his life would become if sleep departed entirely.
In daylight he was still able to scoff at the notion, but he was discovering certain dismal truths about F. Scott Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, and the grand-prize winner was this: at 4:15 a.m anything seems possible. Anything.
During the days he was able to go on telling himself that he was simply experiencing a readjustment of his sleep-cycle, that his body was responding in perfectly normal fashion to a number of big changes in his life, retirement and the loss of his wife being the two biggest.
He sometimes used the word loneliness when he thought about his