by Nino Ricci
“For fuck’s sake, David. Is that really how this is supposed to work?”
On the TV, a view of the earth from space that gradually pulls back to take in the moon, the other planets, the Milky Way, as the screen fades to black. Against the blackness, a man-on-the-street voiceover. We might be the lucky ones, in a way. We’ll get to be there at the end.
Julia picks up the remote and kills the power.
“You don’t know how close I am right now to just walking out the door with him.”
“Please don’t dramatize for once. Don’t make me out to be some kind of monster.”
“What are you, then? Tell me. Because sometimes I look at you and I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.”
“It’s just a sleep disorder, Julia, not a heroin addiction. It’s not like I can’t control it.”
“So it’s true, then. You fell asleep. Christ, David. Jesus fucking Christ.”
He sees himself through the prism of her own horror and suddenly can hardly make sense of himself. The truth is that driving home from his late nights at the university he has drifted off any number of times, even now with his meds. And yet has persisted in the notion that he is in control. That he is safe.
“I didn’t say I fell asleep. Don’t twist things.”
“So what is it, then? Did you or didn’t you? Ten fucking years I’ve been waiting for one honest word from you. Here’s your chance.”
“Don’t do this, Julia.”
“Did you fall asleep? Yes or no?”
He should never have given her the least opening.
“It’s always the same with you, isn’t it? It’s always about making me feel like shit.”
“You risked his life. Do you understand that? Who does that to his son?”
“Don’t start high-grounding me because of your own garbage. I’m the one who’s been waiting ten years, if it comes to that. It’s like every fuck-up of yours is a payback, the house, your job, even our son. Do you remember what you were like? I swear, every time I went to work I was afraid you were going to drop him in front of a subway. Talk about monsters.”
“Thank God I had you to cover for me. Thank God you had my back.”
“Don’t rewrite history, Julia. I was the one who had to feed him, who had to change him, who had to walk around with him for hours when he wouldn’t stop crying because you were off in one of your zombie states. Let’s try to stick to the truth.”
“The truth? Are you serious? Is this really where you want to take a stand? Are you that much of an asshole? There are a lot of things I’ve been willing to forget, believe me, but not this one. Whatever little scandal it was that you were hiding when we moved here, for instance. Or whatever little trysts you’ve had on the road. All the passes you’ve expected me to give you for the sake of your bloody career when you know as much as I do you’ve just been spinning your wheels ever since we moved here. But not this one. This one takes the cake, David, that the best you have to offer for what a good parent you’ve been is that when I needed you most you were off fucking some junior lecturer. Am I understanding you, David? Is that what you mean by the truth? And then all these years you’ve had the gall to go on about how I’ve abandoned my career. You fucked my career, David, that’s what happened to it. You fucked it.”
The room recedes. He has the impression again of seeing himself from the outside, not as the person who has managed to rise up every morning all these years as if his life had a semblance of normalcy and meaning but as some despicable stranger, a scoundrel, a beast.
“There’s your truth for you, David. If you ask me it looks like shit. That’s what I’m covered in every day. And yet I still keep thinking you’ll change, if not for me then at least for your son. But you’d rather kill him than change. That’s who you are.”
David sees Marcus then, watching them again from the top of the stairs. He has heard everything. Years from now, this day, this night, will still be emblazoned in him.
He wants Julia to stop.
“It’s like we’re just burdens to you! We’re just things that get in the fucking way. In the way of what, David? What is it you want?”
What he wants is to scream, to throttle her, anything to make her stop. To be free of this part of him he has never asked for, has never understood, for whom all of this, his marriage, his home, his child, is a living death.
“Why are you still even here, David? Why?”
He is on his feet, needing to smash something, flee, though he feels the flutter at the back of his neck and then the knife drops and he is falling. Inertia keeps him pitching forward, a dead slab of flesh, to upend the laundry, the coffee table, the DVD rack, the TV, a great flurry of destruction.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, he howls, though all that comes out is a wordless yammer.
“What is wrong with you?” No trace of sympathy in her voice, of any connection. “What is wrong with you?”
When he hits the floor it is only his body that stops, the rest of him continuing to hurtle out into empty space.
Fluoxetine
DAVID STANDS ON THE back terrace of his brother’s new house looking out to a yard that is the size of a park, and is landscaped like one, with rocky knolls and a pond, a circular greenhouse, a stand of trucked-in twenty-year-old evergreens that must have cost five, ten thousand a pop. Danny has cheated code on the fencing by topping it with a good two and a half feet of tight-weave trellis, so that all that is visible beyond it are the upper boughs of his neighbours’ own trophy trees and the upper gables of their equally monstrous houses.
In the middle of the yard is one of those circus-sized trampolines that have become the suburban rage, Marcus hovering beside it watching Danny’s two boys show off their acrobatics. He is all angle and bone now, thin as a Holocaust survivor, and as far as David can tell without physical skills of any sort.
David glances at his watch.
“Marcus, don’t just stand there. Jump on!”
David’s mother sits straight-backed and silvern on a padded lounge chair looking as out of place as Marcus does. Not for her the villas of the north, with their deserted sidewalk-less streets, their lunar silence, far from the bustle and grind. David’s father had built a place out here in the first wave of immigrant exodus, but she had sold it within weeks of his death and moved back to the city.
She is staring out hawk-eyed at Marcus. Any minute now, David can feel it, she will start in on one of her rants.
He checks his watch again.
“For Christ’s sake, David, we’ve still got the whole afternoon.” He has had to endure the humiliation of catching a ride with her here. A court order prevents him from driving on a highway with Marcus. “Anyway, what can she do if you’re late, call the police?”
“It’s not worth the energy, Ma. Believe me.”
“Each time you give in you show you’re weak. And she takes more.”
She’s losing it, is what it is, thinks she’s the matriarch in one of those TV series about the mob or Imperial Rome.
“It’s called family law, Ma.”
Ever since the divorce a contempt has come into his mother as if this were the greatest failure for a man, to lose his woman. She was always the one who had got him when he was young, who had shared his own sense of ambition for himself. Now, every word from her has some dagger in it.
“What you never understood is she’s just like her father. There’s only one way to deal with people like that. To show strength.”
David holds his tongue.
Danny comes out of the house flourishing a tray of bruschetta. Even now, into their forties, something flinches in David whenever he lays eyes on his brother. To look at them you would never know they are twins, Danny a good six inches shorter than him and with a slightly stunted look as if his body had turned in on itself. Nearly two pounds separated them at birth. The story was that David had tried to starve Danny in the womb, like those animals that killed off their siblings to boost their own survival odds.
“Davie, you get the tour yet? Ma, did you show him around?”
“Show him what? We just got here.”
It has taken David nearly a year to get around to seeing the place. He was expecting the usual ersatz monumentalism, some big-box eyesore built to within an inch of its lot lines, festooned with arches and electrocoated in ceramic. Instead he has found something of an entirely different order. He did a double take when his mother pulled up to the place, the facade a complicated fretwork of cantilevered stone and wooden beams and two-storey windows like something out of Frank Lloyd Wright.
“This is Danny’s?”
“You’d know if you ever came out here.”
What David can’t get over is that his brother has had the vision for such a place. Before this he was living in a three-bedroom bungalow near their mother’s condo in the north of the city that was the essence of the second-generation dead end, crammed with children and memorabilia and too-heavy furnishings.
“Let me get you a beer, Davie. I’ve got a nice local label, you’re gonna like it.”
“Think I’ll pass for now.”
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like you’re driving.”
He can’t tell if Danny is mocking him or just being literal. No doubt their mother has already passed on to him some convoluted version of David’s disorder from the bare-bones one David has had to give her to explain his need for a ride.
“It’s because you sit at a desk all day instead of getting your hands dirty,” was her analysis. “Your father used to get by on five, six hours of sleep every night. Then in the day, he did what he had to.”
David’s eye keeps going back to Marcus. Always when he looks at him now he sees only deficiency, all the things about him that need fixing. Always when he is with him he feels the same impatience, that he is waiting for their time together to truly begin in some way or maybe simply for it to be over, he hardly knows which.
Jamie, the older boy, grabs hold of his little brother and makes as if to toss him on top of Marcus. Marcus flinches and Jamie pulls short at the last instant, laughing.
Asshole.
Danny is nodding at the patio tiles.
“What do you think of that stone, Davie? Ever see anything like it?”
It is all David can do not to march out and wring the boy’s neck.
“What is it, kryptonite or something?”
“It’s local marble, if you can believe it. From just north of here. Used to be big once but you have to look for it now. We bought a little quarry of it a couple of years ago. Like Carrara was for Augustus, right? I was thinking of that when I bought the place, about what you said in your book. How he changed Rome from a city of wood into one of marble. That stuck with me.”
David is taken off guard. So Danny has read one of his books. Has read the second one, several hundred copies of which David had had to toss into the recycling when he moved out of the house because he couldn’t even give them away.
He makes a show of looking at the stone, salmon coloured with streaks of grey, but can’t manage to form an opinion of it.
“Looks great,” he says.
“You should come up there one day, I think you’d enjoy it. I picked these pieces out myself, on the spot. Don’t you love the colour?”
David’s brain feels like a sheet of glass, ready to shatter at the next word that reaches it, the next shaft of light.
“Is there a bathroom I can use?”
“There’s half a dozen of them. Take your pick.”
In the bathroom David pulls out his pill pod and downs a twenty-mig tab of Ritalin SR and a cap of fluoxetine, chasing them with a handful of water from the sink. Whenever Marcus stays over he hardly gets a minute’s sleep, so that the next day he is a basket case. The extra fluoxetine—a.k.a. Prozac, another in his growing list of repurposed zeitgeist drugs—is in the hope of quelling the shudder he keeps feeling in his brain stem that presages one of his collapses. It isn’t likely to help: the drug needs days or weeks to rewire his circuits before it kicks in, though in the usual way of these crossover brain drugs no one seems sure why it works at all.
Three years after his diagnosis his pharma regime is still stunningly hit and miss. Becker, for all the banker’s parsimoniousness he showed at the outset, has been happy to ply him with every sort of psychotropic, pushing his dosages to the upper limits with each new cocktail as if he were an expendable specimen in a rat trial. Phenethylamines and tricyclics; drugs to boost his serotonin or his dopamine or his norepinephrine; a so-called smart drug promising seventy-two hours of wakefulness at a stretch; time-released drugs with delivery systems as sophisticated as an ICBM’s. The smart drug, modafinil, had sounded promising: another fluke, stumbled on by chance, mechanism unknown, but already in wide use among pilots and soldiers, emergency doctors, academics looking for an edge. David, though, got pounding headaches on it, and nothing like the kick he got from the Ritalin. Worse, he couldn’t focus, couldn’t see the big picture. He’d spend hours redrafting a single paragraph over and over, then be unable to choose among the dozen different versions he’d come up with. Maybe it was just that he was too hooked on the Ritalin by then, though who knew anymore what was him and what was the drugs taking him over.
The Ritalin is what he has stuck with, juggling various formulations—immediate release and sustained release and extended release—with the vigilance of military deployments and cycling in substitutes on the weekends to keep down his tolerance. He might almost feel he was managing if not for the constant thrum at the back of his neck these days ready to fell him like a taser charge at the least spike of emotion. All day long he is fighting himself, pumped up on his meds but having to stifle every reaction to keep from collapsing. It isn’t just anger anymore but almost any heightened state—elation, amusement, excitement, fear. Bit by bit he is having to strip away everything that drives him, that makes him alive. Becker’s response has been merely to keep upping his Prozac, from five migs to ten to twenty to forty, though the drug seems only to have sped up the process of extinguishing the person he thinks of as himself.
He takes a seat on the toilet to give the drugs a chance to kick in. A powder room, Danny called this one, though it is probably twice the size of the den that serves as Marcus’s bedroom in the condo David now calls home. Everything is top of the line, the fixtures, the lighting, the cabinets, the faucets. The counters and floor are in a glossy space-age material of brilliant white that gives the room an otherworldly look, like a film depiction of a place in heaven or in a dream.
The realization is coming over David that his brother is rich, at a level he would never have imagined. Danny had gone into the business right out of high school, had doggedly stuck with it through the real estate crash, through all the legal troubles, through their father’s illness and death. When their father died David had figured the company was about five minutes short of receivership. Yet somehow Danny has managed to survive. Not just survive: to thrive. To grow rich. David, meanwhile, has been reduced since the divorce to a one-bedroom condo downtown that, ironically, was part of a deal he’d made to relinquish any claim in the family business when his father had made Danny a partner.
This was something David hadn’t reckoned on going into the divorce, how much it would cost him. Even though he was told by everyone who cared to offer an opinion that divorce was a fight in which there were no winners except the lawyers, still he forged ahead and committed every error, animated by what in retrospect seems to have been a kind of derangement. He wasted a lot of money up front on idiocies, taking his lawyer’s advice that he not move out of the house because it would prejudice his claim to Marcus but then paying for an office downtown to have a place away from his students to work and maxing out his credit cards on restaurant meals and dry cleaning and hotel stays. Then right from the start Julia’s father had got into the act, calling in chits from every quarter to make sure Julia was properly lawyered. Almost weekly, David was served with some new
motion or disclosure order. The worst was the forensic accountant her father set on him, who made his every smallest excess seem the sign of a criminal profligacy.
If David had been smart he would have accepted from the start how outgunned he was. Instead, with each setback he dug in his heels, firing lawyers and hiring new ones, firing those and representing himself, somehow convinced at each stage that if he fought hard enough it would prove he was in the right. One by one, the judgments went against him. He was forced to move out of the house, was left on the hook for both child and spousal support, was assessed a big whack of Julia’s legal fees because of motions of his own that the court deemed frivolous. Through a couple of loopholes Julia’s lawyers even managed to get almost the entire value of his condo thrown in as common property, though he’d had it for years before the marriage, so that when the final balance sheet came in, what Julia ended up owing him for his share of the house—the house she had insisted on, on which she had indulged her every whim, that had cost him every penny he had earned from his books—had barely been enough to cover his legal bills.
The sucker punch was custody. Julia got sole, which meant final say on everything, and managed to limit his access to three weekends a month. He had gone to great lengths to fight her on that one, had brought in experts, dredged up the postpartum episode, forced Julia to go in for psychiatric testing, yet the asshole judge—the same one who had issued the injunction against his taking Marcus on the highway—completely turned the tables on him, going so far as to cite concern for the boy’s safety on account of David’s disorder. The whole system seemed rife with this sort of hypocrisy, demonizing fathers under the guise of being progressive when it was just the worst sort of mother worship, of old-style family-values conservatism. The same hypocrisy he had had to put up with his entire marriage: for all his dereliction, all his mistakes, it was Julia, from the start, who had set the boundaries, who had closed him out from what she’d claimed as her realm until it held no place for him.
