by Nino Ricci
After the ordeal of the tests, the follow-up with Becker was almost comically anticlimactic.
“We’ll start you at thirty milligrams of the Ritalin.” In his inquisitor’s tone, scowling at David’s results as if they had failed to yield anything of clinical interest. “We can increase that, of course, but you must be careful of tolerance.”
David asked all the obvious questions about prognosis and cause, which Becker deflected like a guardian of the mysteries. The research had isolated a certain brain chemical that sufferers lacked, though what the chemical did and what caused its lack, to hear Becker tell it, were still matters of purest speculation.
“The brain is a territory more mysterious than Mars, Mr. Pace. The precise mechanisms are not always understood.”
David wasn’t sure what exactly he had expected. Something larger, certainly, more life-changing, more exculpatory, than a simple prescription, and for a drug that was a mockery, the dirty drug of ADD. A zeitgeist drug, David had always thought of it as, the kind of popular cure of the day, like blood-letting or witch burning, that required appropriate ailments to be invented for it. According to Becker, though, it had been designed exactly for this, for stimulation, its focussing effects just a matter of fluke.
Six months later David is already at twice the dose he started at, his brain awash in stimulants from the minute he awakes in the morning until he burns out at night, when the drug seems to drain from him with the finality of a gas tank going empty. What it gives him in the interim is not some unencumbered alertness but the edgy sense of being constantly goaded, prodded, to stay awake, of hovering over a pit of sleep that only the drug keeps him from being swallowed by. By now he has learned that its stimulant properties are well known, that it is a favoured pick-me-up of soccer moms fighting suburban drift and undergrads pulling all-nighters. Yet still he cannot shed the sense of stigma he associates with it, of damage, even in his own thoughts always referring to it by its generic name, methylphenidate.
For his other symptom, the loss of control, David takes nothing yet, downplaying it with Becker for fear of having his driver’s licence revoked. At the outset it was no more than a flutter he’d feel in his brain stem like the brush of a wing at the back of his neck or the intimation of a blade about to fall. Now, though, it is as if a pulse moves through him that shuts his circuits down as it goes, until his body trembles with the effort of keeping erect and he has to sit, lean into a wall, anything to catch himself. His falling sickness, he thinks of it as, like Caesar’s, though in his case not an epileptic fit but a momentary paralysis, another misfiring, a malfunction of the switch that shuts the muscles off during REM to keep the body from acting out its dreams. It lasts only seconds, his mind awake, aware, the whole time, but his body refusing to respond to it, as in the dreams of car wrecks he has where his limbs go as droopy as rubber or the dreams of being attacked, some assailant plunging the knife again and again and David unable to lift a finger. What sets it off in him, mostly, is anger, as if anger and dream sit too close to one another in his brain.
The weather lady has come on, a pixie of a woman in a bizarre 1970s-era pantsuit whom the anchor flirts with in a forced way as if he has been instructed to in order to boost ratings. First the tally of the dead through pestilence and war; then the latest word on the coming warm front. David thinks of Petronius’s spoof in the Satyricon of the Acta Diurna, the daily news sheet out of Rome that Caesar popularized, the beginning of headline news. Seventy children born at Trimalchio’s estate. Slave put to death. Fire in Pompey’s gardens.
Julia’s voice reaches him from their bedroom as she starts in on Marcus’s bedtime reading. Idiot: instead of taking the clothes upstairs to be with them, he has set himself apart again. Then, because he isn’t there, Marcus will ask if he can sleep in his mother’s bed and she will say yes, despite all her vows to break him of the habit, so that for the thousandth time David will be consigned to Marcus’s room and the poison between him and Julia will have a chance to seep into their fibre, into their dreams. He can make out the dips and swells of Julia’s voice as she reads, its reassuring storytime calm, the emotion that speaks in it having nothing to do with the words themselves yet just as clear as they are. She has come back to herself, has come back to Marcus. He feels a rush of gratitude that Marcus has her, at least, is not utterly adrift.
What he felt in those first awful weeks after Marcus’s birth, though he hardly understood it then, was fear. It was not that he hadn’t wanted a child, that it hadn’t been part of the plan from the start, another step on his cursus honorum. But then suddenly this blackness in Julia, coming on top of a rough pregnancy in which she had bloated like a whale, hardly able to walk, to sleep, do anything. He had thought of the birth as when some sort of normalcy would return, when Julia would come back to herself, to him, when they’d have sex again, talk, when the marriage would become—in a way it hadn’t been yet, not really—a joint enterprise. Instead it was as if she had dropped off a cliff. She couldn’t get the baby to latch to her breast, despite all the instruction they’d been given, so that within days her ducts were infected and they’d had to switch to formula. Then it was nearly two weeks before she’d allowed David’s family to come, something unheard of. Nelda, Danny’s wife, took Marcus in her arms and it seemed the first time he’d been held with a mother’s sureness.
David wasn’t so infantile at the time as to have used any of this as an excuse for Susan Morales. That wasn’t anything he’d sought out or planned, wasn’t even really something he’d wanted except perhaps in some left-over lizard corner of his brain. He had got his philandering out of his system before he had married—it was one of the things that had appealed to him about marriage, the thought of all the work it would spare him, the juggling and half-lies, the appeasements, the roller coaster of living through the same precipitous arc of emotions again and again. His only lapse had been a conference hook-up a few months after he and Julia had married that he’d fallen into almost out of habit, as if he had suddenly found himself driving a car he’d forgotten he’d sold. It had been a foolish risk, but if anything he had only felt closer to Julia afterwards, relieved he could put his old life behind him.
Morales was different. The worst of it was that she had come to his office looking for Julia, a new hire who had wanted to work with her but was shy of getting in touch while she was on maternity leave. David ought to have sent her packing; the last thing Julia needed then was to have to hold the hand of some fawning acolyte. But something about her held him—her looks or her youth, the energy of her, like things he was looking at now in a rear-view mirror; her name, perhaps, something as simple as that. He made a joke about it and she laughed, with a Latin openness.
“She’s a little sleep deprived right now,” David told her. “But I’m sure she’d love to hear from you as soon as her brain’s back in working order.”
If she had turned and gone that might have been the end of it. Instead she lingered, maybe simply glad of the chance for conversation, for connection. Something caught her eye on his bookshelf and her jaw dropped, as literally as that.
“You wrote that book! The one all the feminists hated.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“It’s so funny the two of you are married. Your wife’s work is so different.”
There seemed only the logistics to work out after that. A drink in the graduate lounge; the offer of a lift to her apartment; the lies they had to tell themselves at each step in order to get to the next one. She lived in one of the towers of the high-rise ghetto that surrounded the campus. David had offered to pass on to Julia some offprints of her work and he followed her in to fetch them, past the security cameras in the denuded lobby, up through the fetor of ethnic cooking as the elevator took them to her floor. Still lying to themselves even then, still pretending, though maybe the matter had been ordained the minute she had set foot in his office, by her laugh or her smile or her smell, the split-second transmission that scient
ists said was all it took.
He feels a tingle at his neck and turns to see that Julia is standing behind him.
“Did something happen today?”
He picks up the TV remote and starts surfing.
“Happen where?”
“At the zoo, for Christ’s sake. When you were out. He seems scared.”
He is looking for turns, the places where he’ll be safe.
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know, you tell me! Can you turn that fucking thing off?”
He knows all their battlefields by now, the thickets and swamps, the paths that lead forward and those that only circle back again and again. In a minute they will be shouting, though a thousand times they have vowed not to do this, not in Marcus’s hearing. The same accusations, the same gutter language, the same stopping short of anything that matters.
“Don’t you see how he plays you?” Continuing to flit through the channels. “Instead of it occurring to you that he just wants to sleep in our bed, right away I’m the bad guy.”
What he was afraid of, when Marcus was born, was himself. Not Julia’s deadness but his own, the sense of having been stumbling forward like a sleepwalker, wandering deeper and deeper into country he hadn’t the vaguest notion how to find his way through. Not knowing, suddenly, what the point of a marriage was, of a family. All the compromises and failures and fights, the constant sense of not measuring up, and then this nightmarish child thrown into the mix, this judgment, this monster of need.
At least Susan Morales was something he understood. Being with her was like every relationship he had had before Julia only more so, dirty and fierce, precipitous, insufficient. The furtive calls and the missed ones, the constant endings and beginning again, the times he showed up unexpectedly at her apartment in the middle of the day and fucked her the instant he was inside the door and the times he didn’t show at all. Her always pretending how little she needed from him and his always giving her less than that, until it was hard to tell desire from desperation. A mistake, in other words, from beginning to end, mesmerizing in its destructiveness even while it seemed to hold out the promise of the real life that real life made impossible.
He cut it off definitively within a matter of months. By then this woman who had struck him as so fearless when he’d met her, so self-sufficient, appeared to be dissolving before his eyes. She had never got in touch with Julia, of course. To David she’d shrugged the matter off as more her department head’s idea than her own. Yet almost at once she began to feel stalled in her work, missed submission deadlines for conference presentations, became anxious over her teaching, began questioning everything, her accent, her weight, her cooking, her clothes. It was as if he had inadvertently pricked the heart of her, caused some small rupture that was deflating her, bit by bit, to nothing. He didn’t tell her it was for her own good that he was ending things, but for once he actually felt that. Later, though, when he learned she had failed her first-year probation and been let go, all he felt was relief. By then the true horror of what he’d done had dawned on him. He had shit in the nest, the unforgivable thing. Each time he went home to his wife, to his son, he carried with him this fecal stink.
Julia is still hovering behind him.
“Do you know how fucking exhausting this is, David?”
He needs the shouting to start, for them to veer off to their familiar set pieces, but instead her voice is hollowed out, as if she has reached the bottom of something.
“I just want to know if anything happened. For Marcus’s sake. Just the truth for once, that’s all I’m asking. Don’t make me beg for it.”
This is always the risk, that one of them will step out of the loop.
“And for the record,” she adds, “he’s in his own bed.”
Just the truth. If only he could give her that. If he could get down on his knees and make a clean breast of everything, every failure, every lie, every part of himself he has hidden away. If he could be naked before her, the way he had felt for a time at the outset, what had bound him to her, that she had seen to his core and hadn’t refused him.
David’s head is pounding, his blood is.
“I’ll tell you what’s fucking exhausting,” he says. “That it’s always a witch hunt with you, it’s always about scoring points. The truth is the last thing you want!”
The shouting has started.
The irony of history is that it is already over. The crucial moment when disaster might have been averted has already passed. Pompey at Pharsalus. Caesar setting out for the Senate House on the Ides of March.
When the lies started: before he and Julia had so much as set eyes on one another, both of them primed for exactly the mistake the other one was for them. At the heart of the mistake, like some stray bit of viral DNA, some slow-acting carcinogen, was Edward Dirksen. It was under his reign as department head that David had been hired, back before his book had come out and he was still enough of an unknown quantity to have been grateful for the job; it was under him that Julia was brought in for a postdoc a couple of years later, coming back from graduate work in England trailing every sort of accolade after having been a star pupil of Dirksen’s as an undergrad. The rumour was that he’d actually had designs on her back then, but David couldn’t credit it, couldn’t picture Dirk, still a bachelor at forty, with all the sex appeal of a church deacon, ever girding himself for that sort of sexual adventurism.
She was the one who had started things, coming up to him at a beginning-of-term meet-and-greet with the awkward forthrightness of someone determined not to be cowed, long legs stretching like delinquents from her sensible skirt to her sensible shoes. By then he had already spotted her in the department, each time she came in a flutter passing through the place like a shift in the air that signalled a turn in the weather.
“I take it you’re Mr. Masculine History.”
“I hope this means you’re a feminist.” Her hair, which she wore long and loose in those days, flashed from dark to red whenever it caught the light. “It would be about time in this department. Even the girls here are old boy.”
“What about you? You don’t exactly strike me as old boy.”
“I guess that makes me your only hope.”
In the corner of his eye he had picked out Dirksen making the rounds of the room, playing the host, and yet with the plane of his body half-trained the whole time on Julia.
“I heard Dirksen fought pretty hard to get you back here. I mean, you could have gone anywhere.”
She flushed as if he had slapped her.
“I came back because I wanted to come home, actually.” She had shut right down. “Dirksen didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Who knew why he even made the effort after that. Her own stock was as old boy as it came, her father some sort of backroom kingmaker, with a house on the mountain and a pedigree that went back to the Conquest, and her own credentials all of the right sort, with none of the taint that went with David’s brand of success. For every good review David had got in the mainstream press for Masculine History there had been a snide one in the academic journals, deriding his scholarship or his conclusions or his prose or dismissing his theory as ersatz postmodernism on the one hand or mere reactionism on the other.
He sent her flowers after the dig about Dirksen. It was the sort of gesture she might have felt obliged to scoff at, yet he saw how she brightened despite herself when their paths crossed again.
“Next time instead of sending flowers, just don’t act like an asshole.”
He made a point of taking matters slowly with her. Coffee in the middle of the day at dingy places in the student ghetto. A couple of foreign films at the Cinémathèque. Trying to avoid the usual crash-and-burn, not daring to so much as touch her, hazard a kiss, until some signal was clear. What surprised him was how much he liked her, how unfamiliar this felt, as if being with women until then had been simply a matter of compulsion. They had more in common than he’d expected—food, fil
ms, a zero tolerance for pretension; dead parents. Her mother had died the year before she’d gone overseas, around the time his own father had.
“She essentially drank herself to death. All my father’s fault, of course. You’ll understand when you meet him.”
He hung on the word “when.”
“With my father it was cigarettes.”
“Looks like substance abuse runs in our families. Remind me never to have children with you.”
Then on an overnight trip for a book event he ended up bedding a graduate student who’d been assigned to look after him. Nothing to do with Julia, he told himself, but when he met up with her for supper on his return it was as if the smell of the woman was still on him.
