already looked at. The general consensus seemed to be that if going to bed earlier didn't work, going later might.
Ralph went home (mindful of his previous adventures, he took the bus) filled with cautious hope. It might work. If it didn't, he always had Bach, Beethoven, and William Ackerman to fall back on.
His first attempt at this technique, which one of the texts called "delayed sleep," was comic. He awoke at his now-usual time (3:45 by the digital clock on the living-room mantel) with a sore back, an aching neck, no immediate idea of how he had gotten into the wingchair by the window, or why the TV was on, broadcasting nothing but snow and a soft, surflike roar of static.
It was only as he allowed his head to roll cautiously back, supporting the nape of his neck with a cupped palm, that he realized what had happened. He had intended to sit up until at least three o'clock and possibly four. He would then stroll off to bed and sleep the sleep of the just. That had been the plan, anyway. Instead, The Incredible Insomniac of Harris Avenue had dropped off during jay Leno's opening monologue, like a kid who's trying to stay up all night long just to see what it's like. And then, of course, he had finished the adventure by waking up in the damned chair. The problem was the same, Joe Friday might have said; only the location had changed.
Ralph strolled off to bed anyway, hoping against hope, but the urge (if not the need) to sleep had passed. After an hour of lying awake, he had gone back to the wing-chair again, this time with a pillow propped behind his stiff neck and a rueful grin on his face.
There was nothing funny about his second try, which took place the following night. Sleepiness began to steal ever him at its usual time-eleven-twenty, just as Pete Cherney was giving the following day's weather forecast. This time Ralph fought it successfully, making it all the way through Whooping (although he almost nodded off during Whoopis conversation with Roseanne Arnold, that evening's guest) and the late-night movie that comes on after that. It was an old Audie Murphy flick in,which Audie appeared to be winning the war in the Pacific pretty much single-handed. It sometimes seemed to Ralph that there was an unspoken rule among local TV broadcasters which stated that movies telecast in the small hours of the morning could star only Audie Murphy or James Brolin.
After the last Japanese pillbox had been blown up, Channel 2 signed off. Ralph dialed around, looking for another movie, and found nothing but snow. He supposed he could have watched movies all night if he had the cable, like Bill downstairs or Lois down the street; he remembered having put that on his list of things to do in the new year. But then Carolyn had died and cable TV-with or without Home Box Office-had no longer seemed very important.
He found a copy of Sports Illustrated and began to slog through an article on women's tennis he'd missed the first time through, glancing up at the clock every now and then as the hands began to close in on
3:00 a.m. He had become all but convinced that this was going to work.
His eyelids were so heavy they felt as if they had been dipped in concrete, and although he was reading the tennis article carefully, word for word, he had no idea of what the writer was driving at. Whole sentences zipped across his brain without sticking, like cosmic rays.
I'm going to sleep tonight-I really think I am. For the first time in months the sun is going to have to come up without my help, and that isn't just good, friends and neighbors. that's great.
Then, shortly after three o'clock, that pleasant drowsiness began to disappear, It did not go with a champagne-cork pop but rather seemed to ooze away, like sand through a fine sieve or water do-,x,n a partially clogged drain. When Ralph realized what was happening, it wasn't panic he felt, but sick dismay, It was a feeling he had come to recognize as the true opposite of hope, and when he slipperscuffed his way into the bedroom at quarter past three, he couldn't remember a depression as deep as the one which now enveloped him. He felt as if he were suffocating in it.
"Please, God, just forty winks," he muttered as he turned off the