"Done-bun-can'the-undone," he repeated, and went into the living room to read one of his Westerns.
Instead he found himself paging through the book of poetry Dorrance had given him-Cemetery Nights, by Stephen Dobyns. Dorance had been right on both counts: the majority of the poems Were like stories, and Ralph discovered that he, liked them just fine. The poem from which Old Dor had quoted was called "Pursuit," and it began: Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days passa blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away: books unread,. okes untold, landscapes unvisited...
Ralph read the poem twice, completely absorbed, thinking he would have to read it to Carolyn. Carolyn would like it, which was good, and she would like him (who usually stuck to Westerns and historical novels) even more for finding it and bringing it to her like a bouquet of flowers. He was actually getting up to find a scrap of paper he could mark the page with when he-remembered that Carolyn had been dead for half a year now and burst into tears. He sat in the wing-chair for almost fifteen minutes, holding Cemetery Nights in his lap and wiping at his eyes with the heel of his left hand. At last he went into the bedroom, lay down, and tried to sleep, After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he got up, made himself a cup of coffee, and found a college football game on TV.
The Public Library was open on Sunday afternoons from one until six, and on the day after Dorrance's visit, Ralph went down there, mostly because he had nothing better to do. The high-ceilinged reading room would ordinarily have contained a scattering of other old men like himself, most of them leafing through the various Sunday papers they now had time to read, but when Ralph emerged from the stacks where he had spent forty minutes browsing, he discovered he had the whole room to himself. Yesterday's gorgeous blue skies had been replaced by driving rain that pasted the new-fallen leaves to the sidewalks or sent them flooding down the gutters and into Derry's peculiar and unpleasantly tangled system of storm-drains.
The wind was still blowing, but it had shifted into the north and now had a nasty cutting edge. Old folks with any sense (or any luck) were at home where it was warm, possibly watching the last game of another dismal Red Sox season, possibly playing (Did Maid or Candyland with the grandkids, possibly napping off a big chicken dinner.
Ralph, on the other hand, did not care for the Red Sox, had no children or grandchildren, and seemed to have completely lost any capacity for napping he might once have had. So had taken the one o'clock Green Route bus down to the library, and here he was, wishing he had worn something heavier than his old scuffed gray jacket-the reading room was chilly. Gloomy, as well. The fireplace was empty, and the clankless radiators strongly suggested that the furnace had yet to be fired up. The Sunday librarian hadn't bothered flipping the switches that turned on the hanging overhead globes, either. The light which did manage to find its way in here seemed to fall dead on the floor, and the corners were full of shadows. The loggers and soldiers and drummers and Indians in the old paintings on the walls looked like malevolent ghosts. Cold rain sighed and gusted against the windows.
I should have stayed home, Ralph thought, but didn't really believe it; these days the apartment was even worse. Besides, he had found an interesting new book in what he had come to think of as the Mr. Sandman Section of the stacks: Patterns of Dreaming, by James A.
Hall, M.D. He turned on the overheads, rendering the room marginally less gruesome, sat down at one of the four long, empty tables, and was soon absorbed in his reading.
Prior to the realization that REM sleep and NREM sleep were distinct states [Hall wrote], studies concerned with total deprivation of a particular stage of sleep led to Dement's suggestion (1960) that deprivatt'on... causes disorganization of the waking personality...
Boy, you got that right, my friend, Ralph thought. Can't eve find a fucking Cup-A-Soup packet tvhen you want one.