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 standinghunching-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.
Which you just about are, ma'am, if you but knew it.
To her he must have looked like the biggest pervo of all time. He had to get rid of this. Real or hallucination, it didn't matter-he had to make it quit. If he didn't, somebody was going to call either the cops or the men with the butterfly nets. For all he knew, the pretty mother could be making the bank of pay-phones just inside the market's main doors her first stop.
He was just asking himself how one thought away something which was all in one's mind to begin with when he realized it had already happened. Psychic phenomenon or sensory hallucination, it had simply disappeared while he'd been thinking about how awful he must have looked to the pretty young mother. The day had gone back to its previous Indian summery brilliance, which was wonderful but still a long way from that pellucid, all-pervading glow. The people crisscrossing the parking lot of the strip-mall were just people again: no auras, no balloon-strings, no fireworks. just people on their way to buy groceries in the Shop in Save, or to pick up their last batch of summer pictures at Photo-Mat, or to grab a take-out coffee from Day Break, Sun Down. Some of them might even be ducking into the Rite Aid for a box of Trojans or, God bless us and keep us, a SLEEPING AID. just your ordinary, everyday citizens of Derry going about their ordinary, everyday business.
Ralph released pent-up breath in a gusty sigh and braced himself for a wave of relief. Relief did come, but not in the tidal wave he had expected. There was no sense of having drawn back from the brink of madness in the nick of time; no sense of having been close to any sort of brink. Yet he understood perfectly well that he couldn't live for long in a world that bright and wonderful without endangering his sanity; it would be like having an orgasm which lasted for hours. That might be how geniuses and great artists experienced things, but it was not for him; so much juice would blow his fuses in short order, and when the men with the butterfly nets rolled up to give him a shot and take him away, he would probably be happy to go.
The most readily identifiable emotion he was feeling just now wasn't relief but a species of pleasant melancholy which he remembered sometimes experiencing after sex when he was a very young man. This melancholy was not deep but it was wide, seeming to fill the empty places of his body and mind the way a receding flood leaves a scrim of loose, rich topsoil. He wondered if he would ever have such an alarming, exhilarating moment of epiphany again. He thought the chances were fairly good... at least until next month, when James Roy Hong got his needles into him, or perhaps until Anthony Forbes started swinging his gold pocket watch in front of his eyes and telling him he was getting... very... sleepy. It was possible that neither Hong nor Forbes would have any success in curing his insomnia, but if one of them did, Ralph guessed he would stop seeing auras and balloon-strings after his first good night's sleep.
And, after a month or so of restful nights, he would probably forget this had ever happened. As far as he was concerned, that was a perfectly good reason to feel a touch of melancholy.
You better get moving, buddy-if your new friend happens to look out the drugstore window and sees you still standing here like a dope, he'll probably send for the men with the nets himself "Call Dr. Litchfield, more like it," Ralph muttered, and cut across the parking lot toward Harris Avenue.
He poked his head through Lois's front door and called, "Yo!
Anybody home?"
"Come on in, Ralph!" Lois called back. "We're in the living room! "Ralph had always imagined a hobbit-hole would be a lot like Lois Chasse's little house half a block or so down the hill from the Red Apple-neat and crowded, a