Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  “You know, I’m not sure I’ve got this straight.” In a tone he hadn’t heard from her before, diamond-tipped, glittery with sarcasm. “Are we just being collegial here, is that what this is? Because if meanwhile you’re off fucking every bit of tail you can get your hands on, I’d like to know. Just in case someone asks.”

  He felt sure if he told her the truth she would throw him over then and there. For once he was frightened. For once he didn’t feel he already had an eye on the exit. When he’d slept with the girl, it was Julia he’d pictured.

  “It’s not as if I haven’t thought of you every night since we met. Let’s just say I know myself by now. That there’s patterns I fall into.”

  “Well.” He could feel her relenting. “It’s not like all the choices I’ve made have exactly been stellar ones either.”

  She was the one who had ended up making a confession then. It turned out that the rumours about her and Dirksen were true: there had been a brief dalliance between them in the summer after she’d graduated. David could hardly believe it. From her terse description of it he gathered it hadn’t come to much more than a couple of half-abortive mercy fucks, but still he was floored. He couldn’t get the thought from his head of Dirksen’s fumbling exertions, of her allowing them.

  “You have to promise you’ll never breathe a word of this, not to anyone. For his sake. Something like this could wreck his career.”

  That was the night she came home with him, with these things that shouldn’t have mattered, that he should have been able to laugh at, banging around in his head. He couldn’t give a shape to the emotion pumping through him, jealousy and guilt but also a kind of outrage whose object he couldn’t make out.

  “I feel so foolish about it now,” she’d admitted. “But at the time he seemed different. Promising, in a way. A bit like you, really.”

  He let that sit.

  “I guess you ruined him.”

  But she hadn’t caught his tone.

  “I sometimes wondered that. He was so mortified afterwards. We both were, really.”

  Then she was there with him in his apartment. All the days and weeks of anticipation, of getting to know her, seemed now only like obstacles he had to overcome. He made a show of being rough with her because he thought that was what she wanted, feeling the whole time that he was playing at being himself. Afterwards she lay with her face turned away from him into the pillow, finally naked next to him, as beautiful as he had hoped, yet still somehow obscure to him.

  It took him an instant to realize she was crying.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Fucking hell,” she said, letting out a laugh. “I swore I wouldn’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “All of this. Sleep with someone I work with. With someone like you.”

  Someone like you. A bounder, a striver, a climber, a cad. Someone in whom the impulse to cut and run was as instinctive as breathing. Whose only ethic was the practical one of what worked. He heard all of this and felt cut to the quick and somehow set free. Felt seen, in a way he seldom had.

  “The worst of it,” she said, “is that I practically had to beg you for it.”

  He would have liked to have told her everything then, every doubt and fear, every hatred, every callous act.

  “It won’t be the last time you’ll beg.” He pressed up against her and they fucked again, harder, and this time it seemed that the obstacles were kicked clear.

  All the things he had planned to tell her back then. His father, his brother, his women, his crimes. How precarious everything felt to him sometimes, the whole edifice of his life, nothing that a good solid blow wouldn’t shatter to its foundations. How all his success seemed built on sand, on a book that was just a rehash of the same tired sources and a theory that had started out as a joke, a poke in the eye of the sacred cows of the day that he and Greg Borovic had come up with on one of their late-night benders.

  Back then he thought he had all the time in the world to speak of these things. Ten years on, he is still waiting for the right opening.

  They are both shouting now, David has managed that, has hit the right buttons, inching their volume up bit by bit until they have drowned out the TV and filled the room. This is what he has turned Julia into, this shouter, this shrew. What she has made herself for his benefit, her way of giving him, again and again, a second chance, because the alternative would be to see through him.

  “Don’t you see how you do it? How every word to him you’re turning him against me? I’m sure it was closed if your dad says it was! You’re basically telling him I’m a liar.”

  “Are you serious? Are you even listening to how ludicrous you sound?”

  “Don’t turn this back on me. I’m not an idiot. The place was fucking closed, full stop! Not because Daddy said it was.”

  What keeps him going in this is that the anger is real, that there is always this pressure chamber of resentments and hurts he can tap into instantly, until the rage is all he sees. Until he feels he will burst with it. That he has a right to, as if any emotion this violent must be justified.

  They both become aware at the same moment that Marcus is standing at the foot of the stairs. Julia takes him in her arms so quickly that there is no role for David except as the perpetrator, exactly the one he deserves.

  “I’m sorry, my little munchkin.” She is close to tears. “It’s nothing. We didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You were fighting.”

  David sees it as soon as she takes hold of him, how much fear is still in him.

  “My God, you’re trembling. What is it, Marcus? What is it? What are you scared of?”

  David catches a look from him that is like a trapped animal’s. Those split seconds of terror on the highway are in it, but also the understanding that he must say nothing, that that is his father’s unspoken imperative. How is it that the incident has remained so vivid in his five-year-old brain when it was so fleeting, so near to incoherence, that even David, afterwards, had to struggle to make sense of it?

  “Jesus Christ, David, he’s terrified, what did you do to him? What is it, Marcus? Tell Mommy.”

  He is just a child. None of this, David can see, is about manipulation or piling up grievances, only about fear. About not knowing which way to jump. Which side is safer.

  Any second now, he will have to choose.

  “Cut the hysterics, for God’s sake. He’s probably afraid because we’re fighting like animals. If you want to know the truth, he was upset because I didn’t buy him a plastic penguin or some bloody thing he wanted at the zoo. That’s what all this is about. That’s what the big trauma is, that he didn’t get his fix. Another addiction you’ve managed to pass on to him. Every outing I take him on, that’s all he cares about, what we’re going to buy at the gift shop.”

  He is trying to veer off again toward the familiar, the well-worn. Except that Marcus knows nothing of these patterns, of this collusion. He only knows what he knows.

  “It wasn’t that,” he says. “It wasn’t the gift shop.”

  David feels the same sense of foreboding he’d felt on the highway, sees the next moments unfolding before his mind’s eye as if they have already happened.

  “What was it, Marcus? Tell Mommy. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Look,” David says, “what’s the point of this exactly? Haven’t we traumatized the kid enough for one day?”

  “Tell me, Marcus. What was it?”

  An awful pause. There is a flash of fear in Marcus’s eyes, and David can’t bring himself to try to stop him anymore.

  “Dad fell asleep.”

  For an instant, Julia is confused. Clearly this is nothing like what she was expecting.

  “Fell asleep where? What do you mean?”

  Before Marcus has had a chance to answer, David can see understanding beginning to dawn on her.

  “Fell asleep where?” With more urgency now. “In the car?”

  Marcus’s eyes ha
ve clouded. He seems suddenly to have realized that no side, after all, is safe.

  “In the car, Marcus? While he was driving?”

  Marcus won’t look at her.

  “I thought so, but Daddy said no.”

  “But what happened? Did he close his eyes? Did he go off the road?”

  “There was a noise. But Daddy said no.”

  “I hope you’re enjoying this, Julia. Talk about traumatizing.”

  “He says you fell asleep! Where was this? On the expressway?”

  “I didn’t fall asleep, for Christ’s sake. I got distracted and hit the rumble strip. The noise must have scared him.”

  “So why didn’t you bring it up?”

  “What, that I hit the rumble strip?”

  “You knew something was bothering him!”

  “Look, I thought it was the gift shop. I didn’t realize the thing had affected him so much. I hadn’t even thought of it again till he brought it up now.”

  “But he says you fell asleep. Why would he lie?”

  “He didn’t say I fell asleep, you did!” He puts this so forcefully he almost convinces himself it is the truth. “This is how you operate. You let him know what you want him to say, then you get him to say it.”

  “Don’t twist this, David! Did you fall asleep? Why would he think that?”

  “Maybe he was sleeping himself and the noise woke him up! He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake. Kids get confused.”

  “He hasn’t fallen asleep in the car since he was two. Not once.”

  “That’s such bullshit! He was sleeping when we got home. It shows how much you know your own son.”

  He can still get to her this way when he needs to, can still touch the spot in her that is afraid, above all, of being a bad mother.

  “Is that true, Marcus? Did you fall asleep?”

  Marcus shrugs, stares at the ground, seeming to sense the trap David has set for him.

  “Why are you making such a big deal of this?” David says. He has introduced enough doubt, perhaps, to bring them back from the edge. “Why are you putting him on the spot?”

  Julia takes the boy in her arms again, holding him with a fierceness that brings the moment on the highway crashing to the front of David’s thoughts again in all its enormity.

  “Let’s get you back upstairs,” she says. “We’ll put you in Mommy’s bed. Just for tonight.”

  David feels no sense of reprieve when she is gone, only of pointless deferral. Sooner or later, even despite herself, even wanting, like David, just to forget, to move on, she will tease from Marcus the telling detail from which the rest will follow. The pills. The stopped car. It is how her mind works, what she does. Right from when he first knew her he has feared this skill in her, how she unlocks whole histories from what appear the smallest irrelevances.

  The TV is still on. All this time it has kept flashing through its own separate stream of images like some oblivious house guest, carrying on its self-absorption while the house comes down around it. A deer stares out from a car ad and David feels tears well up in him, he hardly knows why. Another misfiring. They happen more and more, these emotions that surge in him though he can’t trace their source, the memories that shimmer yet stay out of reach. It is as if they are there but the bridge to them has been scuttled. Or he reaches a spot where there are too many turnings and no way to choose among them, to distinguish what is real from what he has read or seen in a movie, what has actually happened to him from what he has dreamed. The breakdown of borders.

  Becker had given him a copy of his sleep-study report, half a dozen pages of jargon and statistics and charts that for weeks David resisted putting his mind to. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to make his affliction more real by paying attention to it. Now, bit by bit, he has begun to inform himself. He has been surprised at how little he has known about sleep given how much time he has spent at it, though even the experts, it turns out, don’t have much of a clue. One thing is sure: it is infinitely more complex than David has imagined. He has always thought of sleep as a kind of zero to waking’s one, with the occasional dream thrown in like static, when it is a place as varied and shifting and strange as the ocean floor, moving through permutations that have as little to do with each other as with waking itself. REM and NREM; theta sleep and delta sleep; the alpha flatlines and jagged spindles and K-complex spikes that are like the creak and moan of the brain shutting the door to the outer world. Out of these a shape emerges that is called the architecture of sleep. As if sleep were an apartment building or boarding house, a warren of different rooms each with its own grizzled denizen keeping his own hours and his own rules, the wired dreamer in the attic, the plodding slow-wave oaf in the mouldering basement.

  That is what David sees now when he thinks of sleep, these secret lives going on in him that his waking self has known almost nothing of. Except suddenly these other selves are on the move, leaving their curtains open, their doors, shuffling ceaselessly through the halls until it seems they must burst out into the light of day. Sometimes as he is falling asleep he hears them trudging into his room, sees the shadow of them at his bedside, feels the weight of them as they settle onto his chest to take him over like succubi, like alien abductors. He tries to flail, to scream, defend himself, but cannot move.

  The terror he feels then is real.

  From upstairs, silence. Perhaps Julia isn’t returning, has had enough of him or has simply fallen asleep next to Marcus. Another throb of emotion: how he had fought her, in the first years, over having Marcus in bed with them. They would spoil him, he said; they would never be free of him; they would stunt him in some irreparable way. When the truth was that those were the purest times for him, Marcus’s little body between them smelling of milk and sleep. Hardly daring to give in to the love in him then, afraid for it, that it was too fragile a thing to risk exposing.

  It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  He takes up the remote again and surfs. Shopping channel. Cooking channel. Family channel. History. What passes for history these days: reality shows, conspiracy theories, proofs of alien abductions or of biblical truth. Animations of battle scenes where squirts of blood spatter the screen. Doomsday documentaries: this one, a countdown of likely scenarios—pestilence, war—for the end of days.

  David feels an unpleasant grinding in him like a gear not quite slipping into place. It is the thought of his book, the new one. A doomsday book, in its way, one he has been planning practically since childhood, since Ostia Antica, in fact, when that same young guide who had admonished him over the piece of mosaic—really just some smooth talker the concierge at their hotel had hooked them up with, probably a cousin of his in need of quick cash—had painted a picture for David of the town’s rapid decline after the fall of Rome. More than a little fanciful, it later turned out, though the image had stayed with David, of this bustling port town of hundreds of thousands reduced to ruins almost overnight. That sense of the transience of things, mysterious and bracing. How in an instant humans could revert from the civilized to the savage.

  That is the book he has always wanted to write, about that reversion, not just at the fall of Rome but across all of history, like something embedded in history’s DNA. He should have started in on it years ago, right after he’d finished the Augustus book, when the whole end-of-civilization rage hadn’t kicked in yet and he would have been seen as a trailblazer. Instead he has wasted his time churning out stopgaps. He wouldn’t have admitted it back then but the fiasco in Montreal had spooked him, exactly when he should have been bold, when he should have been striking out into new territory. Even the Augustus book, by the end, was just him playing it safe, trying to shore up his bona fides, with the result that he’d been crucified both inside the academy and out.

  On the screen, they are at death by machine. Armed robots march in the background while Stephen Hawking warns in his computer voice of the day when computers will exceed humans.

  Back when these so-called learnin
g channels were still running programs of substance, one of them had actually optioned Masculine History. David had signed the deal only a couple of months after starting up with Julia, when it had seemed a final assurance that every problem was behind him. For once he had even managed to sustain a relationship for longer than a dirty weekend, had proved he was not just some sociopath, that he was capable of real connection. He kept waiting to grow tired of Julia, for the flight instinct to kick in, but instead he awoke every morning with the same thankfulness that he hadn’t yet wrecked things. It might have been nothing more than hormones—he has read about that, how at a certain point the nesting instinct kicks in, in men as much as in women. But at the time it felt like arrival. Like coming to the end of a hard road and being able to rest.

  When his father had been diagnosed at the start of his doctorate David had felt rudderless, in the grip of feelings that pulled in so many different directions he thought they would tear him apart. He had been in the midst of his comprehensives, up against deadlines for his dissertation proposal, for research funding, for the whole course of his future, yet once it was clear his father was dying, once David no longer had his defiance of him to spur him on, it felt like all volition had left him. There had been one awful night when he had wept like a child at how little his life seemed set to amount to for all his ambitions. And yet he had got through. Had managed barely into his thirties to reach a pinnacle most academics wouldn’t get to in a lifetime.

  With the TV deal even Julia’s father finally deigned to take notice of David, inviting him and Julia to dinner. Not at his house, which David wouldn’t see the inside of until after the wedding, but at his club, a fusty place downtown all oak and velour and padded leather where they were served overcooked salmon and underdone vegetables and where some months later, having failed to scare David off, her father would insist on holding the wedding reception, complete with cash bar. David had expected someone more turned out, not this barrel-chested scrapper, a big man a good three inches taller than David with a shock of white hair that looked like it had been trimmed with a weed-whacker and a plaid sports jacket a good half-century out of fashion. But he was sharp, the sort of man who dared you to underestimate him.