Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  ALSO BY NINO RICCI

  FICTION

  Lives of the Saints

  In a Glass House

  Where She Has Gone

  Testament

  The Origin of Species

  NON-FICTION

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau

  Copyright © 2015 Nino Ricci

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ricci, Nino, 1959-, author

  Sleep / Nino Ricci.

  ISBN 978-0-385-68160-5 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-385-68161-2 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8585. I126S54 2015 C813′.54 C2015-901958-3

  C2015-901959-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover art: Alex Colville, Pacific 1967. Acrylic on hardboard.

  Copyright A.C.Fine Art Inc.

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  In memory of Paul Quarrington

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Methylphenidate

  Fluoxetine

  Sodium Oxybate

  Part Two

  SIG Sauer P250

  Beretta M9

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Methylphenidate

  A WASH OF CHEMICALS floods David’s brain and at once the urge is there, irresistible. What is the trigger, what switch opens the floodgate? If he could find it, he could control it. But even to think of the urge is to bring it on.

  “Dad. Dad!”

  These are the times it overtakes him: When he is reading. When he is watching. When he is listening. At the crossroads of action and thought, the mind’s gathering place, the very place where he lives.

  When he is driving.

  “Daddy, wake up!”

  He hears a thundering like a stampede, he sees chariots, horses. Then the image splinters and there is only the noise itself, jagged and black, until finally the expressway pixelates into clarity and he realizes he has veered onto the rumble strip.

  A car is stopped on the shoulder not a hundred metres in front of them. They are headed straight for it.

  “Dad, there’s a car!”

  Afterwards David will never quite be able to sort out his memory of what happens next in any way that makes sense. It will seem as if he has split in two, on one side of him the nuclear blast of sensation, the thump of his wheels, the stopped car, his son’s grating terror, on the other an eerie calmness, as if every fibre in him has long been preparing for just such a moment, when everything hangs in the balance. He will be amazed how much data has been left in him by an event that has happened in the blink of an eye. The slant of autumn light through the windshield. The colour of the car, silver-grey, he is heading toward. The look of its driver, a small, dark-skinned man, Middle Eastern or Asian, who has stopped to make a call or stretch his legs or take a leak, as he innocently turns to check for traffic before opening his door only to discover that death is bearing down on him. And already before it comes, David sees the crash, the mess of twisted metal and broken glass and ruined flesh.

  He jerks the wheel hard and the car bucks like a wild animal, no longer under his will. His body has braced itself for impact but, impossibly, the impact doesn’t come. Instead there is only a suck of air from the far side of the car like the pull of something’s gravity, the scream of a horn as David overshoots his lane and nearly sideswipes a passing van. Then, as quickly as that, the danger has passed. As if it had never been. Already the car on the shoulder has receded to a harmless glint in the rear-view mirror.

  David’s heart is pounding. He digs his little pill container out of his pant pocket and dumps the pills onto the passenger seat, then grabs two by feel and crunches down on them. Do not chew. They are bitter like cyanide, like hemlock. But pointless now: he is fully awake.

  He can feel Marcus eyeing him from his car seat in the back.

  “You fell asleep,” he says.

  “I wasn’t asleep.” But already David has taken the wrong tack, has responded to the boy’s accusation rather than to his fear. “I just closed my eyes for a second, that’s all. Because of the sun.”

  David nudges the mirror to get a better view of him, sees how his shoulders have hunched, how he has balled himself up in his gloom and distrust. He is barely five but already he carries his moods like an adolescent. At the zoo, where they were visiting, he fell into a sulk over a trinket David refused him at the gift shop, and now he will roll this new, larger hurt into the old one, each lending weight to the other. When did he become like this, so vigilant, so hungry for grievance?

  David knows he ought to say more about what has happened but is afraid that saying more will only raise the event’s importance in the boy’s mind. Will only make him more likely to report it to his mother.

  “Sit up straight, please. We’ve talked about that.”

  A thin line of fire burns a path through David’s veins as the drug enters his bloodstream and he feels a panic go through him, nothing like the adrenal rush of the near accident itself but a sense of being vulnerable after the fact, as if by some loop the moment might replay itself, differently. He realizes, suddenly, that his whole body is trembling. It happens sometimes when he is agitated, this loss of control, another of his symptoms.

  The sheerest luck has saved him from killing his son.

  Daddy, wake up.

  He casts another look back at Marcus.

  “Almost home now,” he says. “Almost there.”

  A hesitation, then the inevitable question.

  “Will Momma be there?”

  He is never enough. He is never the last recourse.

  David lets the question hang.

  They merge onto the valley parkway to find it backed up for miles, lurching forward in tiny spurts as the sun sets and the trees along the parkway flame up like an apocalypse in their autumn colours. Julia will be livid that they are so late, that David hasn’t called. It has crossed his mind to call any number of times, but each time he has resisted, knowing that she herself will never be the one to call. This is how she tests him, piling up her grievances the way Marcus has learned to. The behaviour of children.

  He feels the dull throb of a headache beginning from the spike in his medication. For the next few hours, his heart will pound like a battering ram. He takes advantage of the stalled traffic to gather up the pills still scattered on the seat next to him: stupid to have let Marcus see them, to risk his mentioning them. Right from the start David has kept Julia in the dark, has passed the blame for his symptoms onto insomnia, late nights, overwork, has hidden from her the doctors’ visits, the clinics, the pills. That is his default with her now: to hide any sign of weakness, anything that might give her ammunition.

  His mind keeps circling back to the instant when the crash felt inev
itable, trying to sort out what saved them, though already it is hard to say how much is real in what he remembers and how much is the illogic of whatever dream he had slipped into. A deep brain disorder. That was how Becker put it, his sleep doctor, a fleshy Afrikaner with the hectoring twang of an apartheid politician and the parboiled look of a village butcher. A breakdown in the border that separated waking from sleep. As if sleep were some rebel force that David had let overrun him, leaving him condemned now to live in this place of constant incursion, where nothing was safe, nothing was certain.

  A police cruiser squeezes by on the shoulder, then an ambulance. It occurs to David that the loop he has imagined has really happened: somewhere ahead, a version of the horror he has averted is playing itself out. He will drive by and see his own child lying dead, his own double howling in bloodied agony. At the image, something like relief stirs in him, as if only now has he dared it, the sense of a cosmic reprieve, a second chance. This is exactly the sort of thinking he is constantly having to root out of his students, whose notions of historical process don’t go much beyond mindless mantras like Everything happens for a reason.

  He takes out his cell phone and sets it to speaker.

  “Just calling your mom,” he says to Marcus, and he can feel the boy’s mood lift.

  She picks up on the first ring.

  “Christ, David, where are you? It’s past six. Why didn’t you call?”

  Why didn’t you?

  “We’re stuck on the parkway,” he says evenly.

  “For fuck’s sake! I thought we talked about using the cell when you’re driving!”

  He allows himself the smallest pause.

  “We’re on speaker, actually.”

  The behaviour of children.

  Into the silence David adds, evenly again, “We had a nice day at the zoo.”

  “That’s just great, David, I’m happy for you. I just wish it would cross your mind sometimes to think of someone other than yourself.”

  The call leaves David circling along a well-worn path of anger and self-justification. It’s her, he tells himself, this implacable she-wolf she has been ever since Marcus was born, framing everything he does as a betrayal of his most basic duties as husband and father. The defence has become so knee-jerk in him by now that he seldom thinks beyond it. That she doesn’t call because he accuses her of checking up on him, of being controlling. Or because he might be in class, or in a conference, or driving home. Because in a thousand ways, over the years, he has made it known not to call. Probably all afternoon she has been fighting the urge to call him, meanwhile imagining every horror. He has learned that about her, though she doesn’t show it, how deep her fears go the second Marcus is out of her sight, how primordial they are, beyond reason.

  It is fully dark by the time they reach the source of the holdup. An accident, yes, but less tragedy than farce. A moving van has spilled it contents and sent half a dozen cars into a minor pileup, emergency crews sorting through the wreckage and traffic choked down to a single lane. Debris from the van lies heaped at the roadside etched in the halogen glare of the highway’s mast lights, a half-sprung sofa-bed, splintered end tables, ruptured moving boxes spilling clothes, shattered dishes, DVDs. The van itself is farther up, back doors still open, sitting alone at the side of the road as if the accident had nothing to do with it. David makes out two forms, a man and a woman, hurrying toward it in the dark clutching armfuls of salvage.

  Idiots, he thinks.

  Past the bottleneck he picks up speed at once. The red tail-lights of the cars ahead of him weave through the highway’s dips and curves as if riding the air, held disembodied by the dark swath the valley forms against the backdrop of the city. He remembers driving here as a teen in his first car, a reconditioned MG he’d paid for out of his own pocket, the top down and the pedal to the floor while his blood pumped through his veins and the wind roared around him. Back then the valley seemed some hopeful landscape of the future, with the river winding its way toward the lake beneath the flyovers and cloverleaves, and the skyscrapers of downtown beckoning in the distance. Now, he realizes, he is looking instead at the past, that all this is part of an order already in full decline.

  There is a clearing near their exit where more than once David has seen deer grazing, as many as a dozen of them. Somehow they have managed to find a corridor here from open country, have been able to thrive in these back-yard-sized patches of bush between murderous highway on one side and the endless concrete and cracked asphalt and brick of the east end on the other. David thinks of them not as some harbinger of a return to the wilderness of old but a sign that nature is on the march, trying to force a new accommodation. All over the city the animals have grown urban, the raccoons long ago but now coyotes, hawks, herds of deer. Meanwhile, the humans grow savage. Jogging past the camps of the homeless that dot the valley, David has seen the scattered bits of offal and bone and matted fur from their kills.

  At their exit David steals another look at Marcus.

  “Still awake back there?”

  Marcus shifts in his seat.

  “Are you?”

  David ought to laugh, feel proud even; it is a sophisticated response. Instead, he hears the voice of Julia. He has the urge to shake the boy, to strike him. He fears that one day, he will.

  He remembers the promise he made to himself at Marcus’s birth. That he would never do what his own father had done. That he would never make an enemy of his son.

  In the darkness, the tree-lined streets of their neighbourhood give off the dead calm of a village. When David was a kid, coming out here to visit an uncle who ran an east-end vegetable shop, the streets teemed with children and grizzled men and old women in black and the yards were staked with laundry lines or with tomatoes and beans. Now, the area is already into its third or fourth wave of gentrification, the houses, mostly two-storey semis on postage-stamp lots, all burnished and bevelled and bleached for maximum value added and their gardens as manicured as Versailles, still with fall flowers in bloom or roses in their second or third flourishing.

  David and Julia’s place is a standout, a detached Victorian in yellow brick that was built when the tracts east of the valley were still open fields. Of the dozens of places they saw at the time of their move here from Montreal, this was the only one Julia would even consider, though it was too large by half and had never been properly updated. Exactly the sort of place David hated then, fusty and creaky and small-roomed, hemmed in on every side by the inconvenience of the old. David got enough of the old in his work; at home he preferred something more neutral. Clean lines, lots of light, a place he could see his own life in.

  Before Marcus, there was this house: it was the project Julia poured all her energies into, all her unspoken resentment at being uprooted for the sake of David’s career, this despite his having negotiated a place for her here better than anything she would have got back home. For a while her reputation even seemed set to eclipse his own, her dissertation coming out with one of the more respectable academic presses to critical raves while his follow-up to his first book was almost universally panned, presumably to punish him for the first one’s success. By her third year Julia was leveraging enough research money to bring her teaching load down to nearly the same level as David’s, though instead of trying to bank a few more publications for her tenure review she instead put the time she’d freed up into the house.

  She had become obsessed with restoring the place as closely as possible to its original form, which meant tearing down a mudroom at the back and adding a front veranda, having custom plasterwork done and ordering custom baseboards and period wallpaper, all of this on top of the furnace that needed replacing and the attic that needed insulating and the electrical panel that needed upgrading. David was staggered by the bills coming in. They had bought the place on a pre-emptive bid that was well above the asking price to head off the chance of losing it in an auction, then had sunk the last of his book money into the down payment. When Da
vid’s second book failed even to earn back its advance, all the reno work had to come right off their salaries. Before his marriage David had always made a point of living large, of picking up tabs, of dressing well, of always ordering the premium wine, but with the money flowing out like water he began to harp on every expense.

  At bottom even the money was probably a tangent, every one of their arguments over the house so compromised from the start by other agendas that resolution was never a realistic prospect, maybe not even a hoped-for one. All that mattered, really, was to make a point. For Julia, that this was David’s own doing, the price to pay for taking her away from everything familiar, from a place where her life might have been her own; for David, that even casting the move in these terms, as what he had wanted, was just a cover for what he’d been denied. What he had wanted then, what would have made sense, was not a puffed-up chair at a second-rate university in a city he had no wish to return to but an appointment at one of the better schools south of the border. Someplace where ambition wasn’t seen as a disease. Where they would have paid him real money. He could have had that then.

  His breaking point with the house came over some vintage door hardware Julia had ordered from England, half of it, David thought, stuff his brother could have picked up for nothing from salvage.

  “This isn’t Daddy’s mausoleum on the hill!” David had screamed at her. “Daddy’s not paying the fucking bills!”

  That was a constant refrain with him at the time, the implication that Julia’s extravagances were somehow born of the same old-money contempt that her father—who insisted on pronouncing David’s surname, Pace, as Pah-cheh, though it probably hadn’t been said that way since before David’s own father had stepped off the boat—had shown for David from the day he’d first laid eyes on him. And yet at the outset David had taken pleasure in indulging her, still flush with his successes and believing the money would never end. And it wasn’t that he had ever really pushed her to seek his brother’s services, or that the hardware she’d ordered was much of an extravagance next to what they’d already spent by then. When it had arrived, Julia had come to him in all innocence to show him a lock set from the 1800s whose wooden knobs, carved in a beehive pattern, were delicately canted from the uneven wear of whatever hands had touched them over the centuries. Not in a decade of scouring would Danny have turned up anything that exquisite in salvage. David thinks of those knobs now every time he opens one of the house’s doors: after the argument, Julia had returned all the vintage stuff to wherever she’d got it from and had simply left in place the generic hardware the house had come with.