CLETE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Forty years ago he had accepted insomnia as a way of life. For a long time the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape. Sometimes he made a pot of tea for her, then put it and a demitasse and saucer and napkin and tiny spoon on the windowsill, regardless of the terror in his wife’s face. One day the mamasan moved on, and his wife joined a Buddhist cult in Boulder, one in which the members were made to remove their clothes and humiliate themselves, and Clete was left with a sense of desertion and emptiness no amount of booze or redwings or weed could kill.
