by Nino Ricci
David parks on the street but turns to find that Marcus, uncharacteristically, has nodded off after all, slumped like a shooting victim against the restraints of his car seat. The sight of him asleep like that sparks a complicated burst of emotion in David, a mix of fear and remorse and maybe what for want of a better word he might call love, though that is the part that feels most malevolent, most likely to lead to failure or bad judgment or ill will. Again the image flashes through his head of the stopped car and with it the panic comes as well, even more gut-wrenching now, as though it is only in these incremental waves that he is able to take in the fullness of it. Yet beneath the panic is the memory of that second self who sat steely and clear-eyed and calm, exhilarated, almost, at the crucial instant. Who saved their lives, perhaps, but as if all that had really mattered was the sense, for maybe the first time in months or years, of being fully awake, of being fully alive.
He can’t bring himself to rouse Marcus and sits staring out at his house, seeming to see it as a stranger might. The front veranda is bathed in a sallow light that gives way by slow degrees to shadow like the light from a fire, one of Julia’s period touches. The veranda had been one of her biggest projects, though only after their blowout—when work on the house essentially ceased, so that to this day it is dotted with little jobs that were never completed—was David finally able to see it as something more than the price tag it had come with. What had struck him as mere frippery at first, its filigreed sconces, its endless balusters and spindles, took on a kind of resonance, of depth. He would look at the veranda and see the homestead the house had once been, this stubborn bit of empire at the edge of the bush. Somehow Julia had succeeded in conjuring that ghost. What was the point of all those arguments they’d had except to rob her, to rob them both, of the pleasure of what she’d accomplished? Why had he come to see the house as something she was taking from him rather than something she was giving him?
A second chance. He stares out and can see it shimmering in front of him, a chance at the life he has always wanted. The beautiful house, the beautiful wife, the beautiful child; the successful career. The life that, despite himself, he actually has. And yet even as it sits waiting for him he wonders at the stranger shifting inside him who sees only the lie of it.
At the sound of them at the door Julia comes out of the kitchen and at once bends to take Marcus in her arms, not so much as looking at David. She is dressed in sweats but he gets a whiff of body powder or perfume as if she has changed back from something nicer.
“Did you see the echidna?”
“We couldn’t. Dad said that part wasn’t open.”
“I’m sure it was closed if your dad said it was. You’ll see it next time.”
David knows he has to speak, make contact, but also that there is nothing he can say that will be the right thing.
“What smells so good?”
“It might have been good, if you’d been here an hour ago.”
The dining table is set with candlesticks and wine, the good china. No doubt she has spent much of the afternoon cooking and planning, nursing, against the odds, the hope that it might still be possible to enjoy an evening at home with her husband and son. Time after time David forgets this side of her, her vestigial need to make house, her hope for the restoration of a domestic order that has never really existed. Or he doesn’t forget: he suppresses. This is not the Julia he fell in love with; it is not the Julia he married. The Julia he fell in love with was the rising star, the one who loved her work, who could spend hours in the archives poring through letters and journals and laundry lists until the right detail finally leapt out at her. Now it is as if she has cut out that part of herself like a tumour she needed to be free of.
For Marcus, as usual, there is an entirely separate meal, hot dogs with canned beans in molasses. It boggles David how Julia dotes on him but then feeds him this poison. How she trains him to want only that. Pancakes. French fries. Macaroni and cheese from a box. These are the raw materials building the boy’s sinew and bone, his brain. It makes David think of the cut-throat contractors his father used to rail against who knocked together whole housing blocks out of cardboard and spit. His father had been a bastard, but at least he’d had standards. None of his buildings looked old the week after they went up. Nor would he ever have allowed to enter his house any of the processed chemical confections that Julia insists on feeding Marcus.
“You have to eat the bun too,” Julia says, though it is the punkiest sort of white bread. “And some of the beans.”
“I don’t like the beans.”
David holds his tongue.
“You have to eat some of them. For Mommy.”
“Please, Mom. I don’t like them.”
“Just three spoons, then. For Mommy.”
The same ordeal, night after night; the same anger in David that they have veered so badly off course. The anger spirals in him until he has lost all perspective, no longer sure if it is Julia or just the drug coursing through him or if the anger is what he wants, all that keeps him going.
They have hardly exchanged a word the whole meal. David gets up silently when they have finished and starts clearing the table.
“Thanks, Julia,” Julia says. “Great supper.”
He goes up to his office on the third floor while Julia gets Marcus ready for bed, though he knows how much she hates it when he does this. No point offering help when she is in this mood. The truth, though, is that he is afraid, afraid Marcus will say something, that he himself will. That something will come out of him that he can’t take back.
His office is the one room in the house that bears no mark of Julia’s restorations. The same desk in aluminum and brushed glass that he had in his apartment in Montreal; a wall of built-ins for his library done in painted MDF. On a top shelf, a row of the various editions of his own work, his only indulgence. None of the little flourishes his fellow classicists go in for, the Romanists especially, the period maps on every wall, the framed coinage, the seventeenth-century editions of Tacitus or Virgil or Livy that belonged to some Cambridge schoolboy. Most of them have a toilet seat from Hadrian’s Villa or a collarbone from the catacombs that they’ve purloined at some point and that they’ll bring out like pornography to titillate their colleagues. David had been cured of that impulse early on, when his mother had taken him on his first trip to Rome at age twelve. He had picked up a loose bit of mosaic to pocket as a souvenir while they were visiting Ostia Antica, and the young cicerone who was showing them around had grown suddenly grave, impressing on David what would happen if every tourist took home a piece of the place. It was a lesson that stuck with him.
He checks his email. There is a reminder from Sonny Krishnan about their Monday one-on-one; knowing Sonny, he probably set it up on auto-send the minute they booked the appointment, timed to blot David’s weekend. No doubt he is going to try to fob off on David another numbing survey course or hit him up with more thesis supervision or committee work, seeming to have made it his mission ever since taking over as department head to claw back the research concessions David was granted when he was hired. It hasn’t helped that David’s evaluations have been dipping, or that there have been a couple of incidents that Sonny somehow managed to get wind of. The worst was when he called a student a fucking punk in the middle of a lecture and threw him out of class. This was before his diagnosis, when his symptoms had reached the point where he’d started blanking out in mid-sentence, losing his train of thought or cutting out entirely for a few seconds. After one of these lapses, a football thug logging time for his humanities requirement had made some quip that caused an eruption of laughter around him, and David had lost it.
He had had to put up with one of Sonny’s lectures afterwards, delivered in that urgent new-order tone of his that suggested the department, the whole university, was under threat of imminent dissolution, with no room for slippage. It infuriates David how Sonny is constantly looking for ways to position him as some sort of liability w
hen he is still arguably one of the best-published instructors in the department, even now that History has been subsumed within the huge Liberal Studies hydra that Sonny presides over. When he is probably the main reason classical studies haven’t disappeared entirely, the only one who has made the effort to keep them current. David has lost count of the number of times students have told him that what got them interested in ancient Rome was some article or post of his that made the connection for them between past and present. That is the Rome David brings to his students, not some dead relic but a place still alive everywhere they look, in their language, their calendars, their government, their laws, in the shapes of their buildings and the concrete they’re made of. A place not of yesterday but of tomorrow. That went to the brink of what it meant to be human, then one step beyond.
All of this counts for shit in Sonny’s new order.
David hears the water start for Marcus’s bath. He logs into his web site to check for comments on his blog even though he knows that he should be making himself present, that with each minute he spends up here he pushes Julia closer to the breaking point. At some point in their marriage the internet has become in Julia’s mind a sort of underworld David has given himself over to, a bad side of town where he goes to indulge the degraded parts of himself, the ones for which emotion, human contact, are anathema. That is never how the internet has felt for David: from the start what has thrilled him about it is exactly the sense of connection it gives him, of these millions of threads leading away from him like neural pathways, making him bigger. His web site, PaceRomana, which he has had since before most academics knew what one was, has become a virtual brand. Pace as in David, as in pah-cheh, as in peace. As in Pax Romana, the great sleight of hand Rome had managed, making peace its legacy by dint of perpetual war. To tie into the web site David had used the phrase as the title of his second book, the one on Augustus. By then he’d already been happy to start moving away from the brand of his first book, Masculine History. It had used Julius Caesar to put forward a theory of historical change whose viral rise to almost cultish currency had quickly been matched by virulent backlash.
No responses yet to his new post. Lately his comments have been plagued by trolling, ad hominem attacks too scurrilous to be taken seriously but too pointed to be dismissed as spam. Et tu, brute? Get a fucking life! Ex nihilo nihil fit. From the start there had been no shortage of diatribes against him from all the purists he had offended, but this recent stuff feels different, more personal, more malignant. He finds himself compiling lists in his head of the people who might loathe him enough to expend this sort of energy on him. It could be anyone, of course, some student he failed or colleague he slighted or some anonymous madman out there in cyberspace who has made David his personal anti-Christ, itching to get him in his crosshairs. But certain names recur. Greg Borovic, his grad school sidekick, who cut off all connection with him after Masculine History came out. Susan Morales: the last David heard, she was still stuck doing sessional work in some no-name place out West, no doubt convinced David was the one who got her exiled there. Then there is the kid who started all the trouble for him back in Montreal, though chances are he is just some paunchy personal injury lawyer or middle manager by now and has forgotten all about him.
David had run into his old department head from Montreal, Ed Dirksen, at a conference the previous year, ending up face to face with him at a refreshment table before he had even noticed him. It was the first time he had seen him since leaving Montreal.
“My God, David, it’s been years! Not that I haven’t kept up with your work!”
He looked utterly unchanged, still in the same rumpled suit, still with the babyish cast to his features of someone whose manhood had been stunted. And yet for all the nonentity he had always been, still he had persisted, hadn’t simply vanished into the void.
David had to endure several torturous minutes of Dirksen updating him on his former colleagues as if they had all been part of some happy fellowship. Then this.
“Too bad about that unpleasant business.” In an almost rueful tone, eyes dipping slightly as if to spare David embarrassment. “But I suppose it all worked out.”
He hears footsteps at the base of the stairs.
“I could use some help down here.”
He has lost his chance.
He finds Julia staring out the bathroom window seeming withdrawn to a second order of reclusion, one that leaves out even Marcus, who sits playing quietly in the tub with one of his bath toys as if he is merely playing at playing. She might be a stranger to David when she is like this, someone he has never exchanged a word with, never desired, never fucked. After Marcus was born she went weeks in this zombie state—some sort of postpartum syndrome, David figured out afterwards, though at the time it felt like revulsion, utter retreat, as if it had suddenly dawned on her that her marriage, her house, her child, had been a massive error. He often forgets it now, that darkness she slipped into, with him left to take up the slack, not knowing what to do with this child, this being, who cried for hours and hours without reason. Waiting for instinct to kick in, for love.
Julia doesn’t turn when he comes in.
“There’s two loads of laundry downstairs that need to be folded.”
The urge comes to him to apologize, to make amends.
“You okay?”
She gives him a look that seems to draw all emotion back into itself like a black hole.
“Let’s not start this right now.”
It had been only a matter of weeks after Marcus’s birth before Julia had come around, with the suddenness of a genetic switch being thrown. The panicked protectiveness she has had around Marcus ever since makes David suspect that she is still reliving with horror the numbness of those first weeks, when anything might have happened. In this reliving, David has become the enemy, the threat, the bad parent she needs him to be in order to assure herself she is the good one. She caught him nodding off the other day while he was supervising Marcus’s bath and it was as if he had dropped the boy into boiling pitch, had shown, in that brief lapse, how little all of this means to him.
He brings the laundry into the living room. His head is throbbing by now from the extra pills he took in the car, from the glass of wine he stupidly drank with supper. It has been one of the hardest things to mask, how badly wine affects him these days, how sharply his intake has dropped. He pops another pill, dry, to stay alert, chewing this one as well, though he has lost all track of how many he is up to. At the end of the month he’ll come up short: the pills are strictly controlled, down to the day, no new script until the old one has run its course.
He tunes the TV to one of the news channels, keeping the volume low to head off Julia’s reprimand. A car bomb in Baghdad; a drone attack near the Afghan border. Instinctively his mind lays a map of the past over the present, the Arabians, the Parthians, the Persians, trying to match up the fault lines, a reflex from a feature he runs on his web site, “Back to the Future,” that connects current events to Roman parallels. These days the connections never feel as clear cut as they once did, the insights never quite as inspired. It isn’t just burnout or age: it’s the crossed wires from his disorder, the lacunae and gaps that build up each time a synapse misfires or goes astray. Then the energy he spends on these baubles feels more and more like fiddling, when his new book is still just a mess of jottings and his last one, over two years ago, was just another culling of his web posts, light as air. Time and again he has stayed late at the university trying to get up momentum on the new book only to have his brain go to blue screen, waking with a start to find he’s been out for an hour or more or has filled the screen with gibberish or has somehow erased a whole day’s work, following some dream logic he can’t reconstruct. And of course each time he works late he adds a little more poison to his marriage, a little more silence.
A deep brain disorder.
It was the lapses in class that finally sent David in for testing. Two days and nights
at the clinic Becker operated near the west-end hospital he worked out of, a warren of narrow rooms and labyrinthine corridors just above a 24-hour Coffee Time. Becker seemed to run the place like his personal fiefdom, the halls lined with his conference posters and a big photo of him hanging in the foyer posed with an ancient-looking Nathaniel Kleitman, the granddaddy of sleep medicine. The sleep rooms were all named after painters, each with its corresponding sleep-themed print on the door, Dali’s melting clocks, Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters. David got Henri Rousseau and The Dream, of a woman reclining naked on a couch like a Titian Venus while around her the jungle rose up and wild animals lurked.
He was prepped in a control room that was a bedlam of cables and ancient equipment and cluttered cubicles. His technician, Nada, kept up a steady litany of complaint about the working conditions as she fixed electrodes to his scalp, letting him know that the country she had come from had not been a backward one, though she didn’t name it. His whole time in the place David remained rigged up to these electrodes like a head case, his only contact with the outside world the quick forays he made to pick up bad sandwiches at the Coffee Time and bad coffee he wasn’t supposed to be drinking. The clinic stank of other people’s sleep, the fecal-and-breath-and-sweat smell of David’s half-dozen or so fellow inmates, people he never exchanged a word with but whom he caught glimpses of in the halls in their own Frankenstein gear and heard being tended to in the night as if they were all part of some collective nightmare. More and more the place felt like the inside of his own head, with its hazy half-reality. His dreams were vivid, phantasmagoric, epic battles and travels in time, dreams within dreams where he was above himself like a god, watching himself dream that he was dreaming. He’d buzz Nada in the night to unplug him to pee and then he’d be fucking her or she would be killing him. The whole place seemed steeped somehow in moral ambiguity: the surly technicians from their war-torn countries where they might as easily have been perpetrators as victims; the presiding animus of Becker, who however never once set foot in the place, as if it were a dirty secret he had to keep separate from his public life at the hospital, and who for all David knew had been some sort of Mengele in his former life, had tortured political prisoners or had attached electrodes to the insides of people’s brains. It didn’t help that David had had to lie to Julia, claiming an engagement out of town, so that he was dogged the entire time by the kind of panic he’d get in fever dreams, the sense of some problem he couldn’t solve or critical thing he had failed to attend to. It would have been easy enough for Julia to check up on him; easy enough, if she discovered the lie, for her to imagine the worst yet say nothing.
