light, but he strongly suspected that this was one prayer which was not going to be answered.
It wasn't. Although he had been awake for twenty-four hours by then, every trace of sleepiness had left his mind and body by quarter of four. He was tired, yes-more deeply and fundamentally tired than he had ever been in his life-but being tired and being sleepy, he had discovered, were sometimes poles apart. Sleep, that undiscriminating friend, humankind's best and most reliable nurse since the dawn of time, had abandoned him again.
By four o'clock Ralph's bed had become hateful to him, as it always did when he realized he could put it to no good use. He swung his feet back onto the floor, scratching the mat of hairalmost entirely gray now-which curled through his mostly unbuttoned pajama top. He slid on his slippers again and scuffed back to the living room, where he dropped into the wing-back chair and looked down at Harris Avenue.
It was laid out like a stage set where the only actor currently on view wasn't even human: it was a stray dog moving slowly down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park and Up-Mile Hill. It held its right rear leg up as much as possible, limping along as best it could on the other three.
"Hi there, Rosalie," Ralph muttered, and rubbed a hand across his eyes.
It was a Thursday morning, garbage-pickup day on Harris Avenue, so he wasn't surprised to see Rosalie, who'd been a wandering, here-and-there fixture in the neighborhood for the last year or so.
She made her way down the street in leisurely fashion, investigating a the rows and c usters of cans with the discrimination of a dead fie market shopper.
Now Rosalie-who was limping worse than ever this morning, and looked as tired as Ralph felt-found what looked like a good-sized beef bone and trotted away with it in her mouth. Ralph watched her out of sight, then simply sat with his hands folded in his lap, gazing out on the silent neighborhood, where the orange hi-intensity lamps added to the illusion that Harris Avenue was nothing but a stage set standing deserted after the evening performance had ended and the actors had gone home; they shone down like spotlights in a perfect diminishing perspective that was surreal and hallucinatory.
Ralph Roberts sat in the wing-chair where he had spent so many early-morning hours lately and waited for light and movement to 9 invest the lifeless world below him. Finally the first human actorPete the paperboy-entered stage right, riding his Raleigh. He biked his way up the street, tossing rolled newspapers from the bag slung over his shoulder and hitting the porches he aimed at with a fair degree of accuracy.
Ralph watched him awhile, then heaved a sigh which felt as if it had come all the way from the basement, and got up to make tea.
"I don't remember ever reading about this shit in my horoscope," he said hollowly, and then turned on the kitchen tap and began to fill the kettle.
That long Thursday morning and even longer Thursday afternoon taught Ralph ROberts a valuable lesson: not to sneer at three or four hours' sleep a night simply because he had spent his entire life under the mistaken impression that he had a right t(o at least six and usually seven. It also served as a hideous preview: if things didn't improve, he could look forward to feeling like this most of the time.
Hell, all of the time. He went into the bedroom at ten o'clock and again at one, hoping for a little nap-even a catnap would do, and half an hour would be a life-saver-but he could not so much as drowse.
He was miserably tired but not the least bit sleepy.
Around three o'clock he decided to make himself a Lipton Cup-A-Soup. He filled the teakettle with fresh water, put it on to boil, and opened the cupboard over the counter where he kept condiments, spices, and various envelopes containing foods which only astronauts and old men actually seem to eat-powders to which the consumer need only add hot water.
He pushed cans and bottles around in aimless fashion and then simply stared into the cupboard for awhile, as if expecting the box of soup packets to magically appear in the space he had made. When they didn't, he repeated the process, only this time moving things back to their original positions before staring in again with the look of distant perplexity which