by Nino Ricci
Now, though, he finds it hard to connect to the self-righteousness he felt then, hard to piece together his actions in any way that makes sense. He can barely fathom how they ever got through those long nightmare months when they were both still in the house, all the work of negotiating bathrooms and breakfasts and bedtimes, school drop-offs, of murdering every emotion, every memory or image of the different people they had been to each other before this hate. Then all the while having to pretend to believe that they could make Marcus believe that all this was normal, that it was possible to pass through such devastation and come out whole.
His ass has gone numb from the toilet seat. He should have chewed the Ritalin the way he used to, though with the time-release tabs it is like mainlining, like jabbing a needle directly into his brain. Instead he has to hide from his family like a child nursing a grudge. Not that telling the truth is an option. I popped out to take my Prozac and Ritalin. He could mention as well the boxes of Viagra he has at home, Becker’s answer to Prozac’s libido death. This is what his life has come down to, this unholy zeitgeist triumvirate, three drugs whose brand names are like banners for the times. Meanwhile, just to feel alive, he has to search out ever more extreme forms of stimulation, has to drive faster, watch more violent movies, surf porn for the hope of an erection that isn’t medically induced.
“Hey Davie!” Danny calls. “You fall asleep in there or what?”
He can hear his mother’s snort of laughter.
“It’s like the time he fell asleep in that greenhouse, remember that, Danny? Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that in years! Even back then he was falling asleep. Your father gave him such a smack!”
David’s blood rises and he feels his face go slack, feels his head dip. He is like a dog on a choke chain, leaping forward, teeth bared, then slammed back, forever trying to find the still point between too little and too much. Then each time he thinks he has found it, the right pills at the right times to get through the morning slump and the afternoon one, to not keep him up at night, the right mix of stimulation and restraint that will keep him sharp, in control, on his feet, it seems to shift.
By now David knows that the problem is his sleep. Little by little, Becker has warned him, it is coming undone. Losing integrity, was his term. The evidence is there in David’s sleep graphs, the early-onset REM, the light sleep that refuses to deepen, blips that at a glance might appear mere variations but are like the fault lines in a structure that won’t hold. Every night, it seems, a labour unfolds in his head as vast as the night work of Caesar’s armies building their fortress camps as they marched. What gets built by it, what risks dilapidation with each oversight, each cut corner, is his mind. David has read by now of the role sleep plays not only in memory but in almost every mental function, from solving problems to improving his squash game; in repairing the neural wear and tear of the day; in helping to hold intact the sort of unified self that makes it possible to face the world. The more he learns, the more Becker’s vagueness about prognosis feels like a matter of discretion rather than hedging: David can do the math, the damage all this lost work will amount to as it accumulates night by night.
Whole nights go by now when David feels he hasn’t slept at all, has merely been wandering in some middle state that is less sleep than waking dream. Marcus appears beside him or Julia does, he imagines holding them or hurting them, he can’t tell which, then awakes to his sheets twisted into knots, his pillows knocked across the room. Or he finally sinks into deeper sleep, with the suddenness of a stone dropping to the bottom of a well, then finds himself at his kitchen counter on some mission he can’t reconstruct or pissing into a corner of his couch with an animal precision, just here and not here, as if it made all the difference. It has happened more than once. Confusional arousals, Becker calls them, like surfacing too quickly from a dive, though he doesn’t rule out a dozen other possibilities, each with its own taxonomy and dangers. The disorders of sleep, it turns out, are legion; one by one, as David’s sleep betrays him, they appear at his door like lost relations he has to accommodate.
Once, before the breakup, he awoke to Julia slapping at him in a daze of confusion and fear because he had struck her. The bruise on her midriff where he had hit her persisted for days.
There are those who in their sleep have sexually assaulted their own children. A man who stabbed his wife forty-four times with a kitchen knife, then rolled her into their swimming pool and went back to bed. One who drove across town to murder his in-laws. One who smashed what he thought was a dangerous animal to the floor and woke to find he had killed his own son. The strength people have in sleep is mythic, superhuman. They let nothing stand in their way, no obstacle or restraint.
Whenever Marcus stays over, David goes through the apartment after he is asleep making his special arrangements, barring the balcony door with a cut broomstick, shifting tables and chairs to block the usual passageways, setting out stacks of books, strips of masking tape, in the hope of startling himself if he wanders. So far, it has been enough to be vigilant, to be afraid. Sleeping in half-hour bursts, an hour at most; doing tests at each waking to make sure he is truly awake and not merely dreaming he is, checking a clock, for instance, since clocks tend to malfunction in dreams, or picking up a book, since books tend to read as gibberish. Staring into a mirror to make sure the person who stares back is himself. It is madness, of course, he can’t go on like this; he knows that the more he cheats sleep, the more voracious it grows. The whole time Marcus is with him he feels it massing in his head, waiting to swarm; the whole time he feels angry, indiscriminately, because he is tired and because he wants the boy and wants him gone and because it will never be enough now between them, will never be right. Angry because he is angry. Because even in affliction, even with his mind no longer his own, he cannot help simply being himself.
The sunlight hits him like an assault when he returns to the patio. His mother is still going on about the greenhouse.
“Where was it, David? It was that little park, what was it called? Some kind of botanical gardens. Your father used to love that place.”
Danny looks over at him.
“Everything okay, Davie?”
“I guess the bruschetta didn’t agree with me. I remember in Rome they used to call it toast, as if it was some kind of American fast food.”
Only now does David notice that Marcus has actually joined his cousins on the trampoline, the three boys locked arm in arm bouncing in unison, higher and higher. Jamie is whooping it up, urging the other boys on. As they reach the top of a bounce, he goes eerily silent and David feels his heart lurch, afraid of some mishap or trick. But then Jamie lets out another whoop and they land without incident, easing back on their rebounds until the three of them have collapsed on the mat in a jostling heap.
“Way to go, Marco!” Jamie says.
Marcus is grinning from ear to ear, maybe the happiest David has seen him in years.
“Looks like he’s a natural on that thing,” Danny says. “Too bad you can’t get one for the condo.”
“Yeah, I’ll put it on the balcony.”
He must have got on the minute David left the scene. This is what his son looks like without him, David thinks, just a normal kid having fun.
“It was in the east end,” his mother says, a dog with a bone, “I remember that. With a creek that went through it, you boys used to race little sticks in it. It was always the joke that you had to let David win.”
It isn’t just the lies she comes out with these days but that no matter how farfetched they are, David still ends up having to make some sort of space for them in his head. He remembers the greenhouse incident vividly but isn’t about to start scrapping with her over the details.
“Maybe it started back then,” she says, “did you ever think of that? Maybe you should have Marcus tested.”
The place is surely still out there somewhere, though it has never occurred to David to try to track it down. What his father liked about it
was the market garden, a big outdoor patch where they grew herbs and vegetables and greens. He had befriended a custodian there who used to give him seedlings from the greenhouses for his garden at home, and they would talk about plants with what to David sounded like a secret language, coded and strangely intimate.
Once, on one of their visits, David got separated from the others. Or he wandered off on purpose: he couldn’t have been more than five at the time, yet already the wilfulness had grown large in him. His father was leading them along some path like the paterfamilias he was when David noticed that the door to one of the greenhouses had been left ajar. Somehow he managed to drop behind the others and slip through it. He still remembers the pleasant cushion of heat that hit him, remembers the smell, unlike any smell he could have named. There were trays of seedlings laid out on benches and at the end of them a heap of straw of the sort his father used to protect his vines in winter and to bed his fig tree, which he would tip into a trench and pad with the straw, then bury beneath a mound of earth.
All this comes back to David with utter clarity. Maybe his mind is not so far gone yet after all. But then as soon as he thinks this, his memory starts to clot. He must have lain down in the straw and fallen asleep, though all he remembers is a sense of unfurling, of respite, that seems as much a wish from the present as a memory of the past. Then opening his eyes to Danny grinning down at him, and the custodian and his mother. Waiting for some reward to take shape, for his mother to bend to take him in her arms, and instead his father wrenching him to his feet right there in front of the custodian and giving him a backhand to his head that was like a brick smashing into it. Just as his mother has claimed.
Don’t try something stupid like that again. You ruined things for everyone.
Even in his silence, his mother has won. All he can see now is that he got what he deserved.
Nelda has come out to call them for lunch. David grabs at Marcus to roughhouse him as he comes up from the yard and sees how his eyes go at once to Jamie as if seeking permission from him.
“Fun stuff out there,” David says.
“It was all right.” Already he is retreating back to his shell. But then he adds, “Can we come here again next weekend?”
“Of course we can.” Letting himself forget that he has already traded the next weekend to Julia. That the last thing he could face is another ride up here with his mother.
He puts an arm around Marcus to lead him into the house and can feel him relax a bit against him. Maybe this is all he really wants, his father’s approval. For David to be the one, for once, to bend and take him up.
They eat at a dining table that is a huge kidney-shaped slab of unpolished stone that looks as if it has arrived straight from whatever mountainside it has been carved from. Around them the ground floor stretches like the flight deck of the USS Enterprise, half walls and jutting appurtenances dividing it by a kind of gestalt into virtual rooms and the ceiling rising up in a series of intersecting planes to the two-storey atrium, whose massive windows suffuse the entire floor with light.
Nelda brings out the food. She has barely stepped out of the kitchen the whole time David has been here, a real throwback, the sort of wife men used to have to make a trip back to the old country to find. Cooks and cleans, raises the kids, does the company books. Exactly the sort David would never have gone for.
“You better tell Danny what he has to do when they get home,” his mother had said to David at the wedding. “Don’t expect Nelda to know.”
She doesn’t take a seat until everyone has been served. She gives Danny a look.
“Did you show David the house yet?”
“He got waylaid.” It is growing obvious that all of this matters to Danny a lot more than David would have guessed. “We’ll do a tour after lunch.”
Even the meal is a showpiece, with a nouvelle salad topped with gorgonzola and figs and a risotto laced with white truffle. David is sure his mother will never go for this stuff.
“I feel like I’m on the Cooking Channel,” he says, to give her an opening.
But Nelda is beaming.
“Nelda spent a few weeks last summer at one of those cooking schools in New York,” Danny says. “You can imagine the grocery bills since then.”
“New York. I’m impressed.” The last time David was in New York was well before the divorce. “I guess Danny must be eating like a king.”
“Idiot.” The word hits him like a bullet. “She didn’t do it for Danny. It’s for the restaurant.”
He has to stop himself from lashing out. It comes to him, suddenly, what he has been hearing in his mother all morning: the voice of his father.
“What are you talking about, Ma? What restaurant?”
“Danny didn’t tell you?”
“Danny’s opening a restaurant?”
“Not Danny. You think he has time for that? Me and Nelda.”
“We’ve been meaning to bring it up,” Danny says quickly. “Just a sort of hot table, really. Like in the old days. Now that the kids are getting older. It’s always been a kind of dream for Nelda.”
David’s head is spinning.
“I can’t believe this.” That, indeed, is his feeling, that none of this makes sense. “Do I even belong to this family anymore? Was anyone ever going to mention any of this?”
The whole table seems to brace itself for some inevitable escalation, for David to be David and try to bully everyone into a proper state of contrition. Except that he can’t trust his lips to form another word.
“Don’t make a big deal of this, David,” his mother says. But some of the hardness has gone from her. “You’ve had your own problems lately. It’s not like you’ve been around.”
“We bought a building in town that we’re fixing up,” Danny says. “We can drive over later if you want. I think you’re going to like it.”
Somehow they get through the meal. At least he hasn’t ruined things for Marcus by making a scene. Nelda has gone to the trouble of preparing a separate dish for the children, spaghetti and meatballs, and Marcus, for once, following his cousins’ lead, is actually eating what has been set in front of him.
“I’ll bet all his mother feeds him is hot dogs,” David’s mother says. “Look at him, skin and bones.”
Danny gives Marcus a wink.
“What’s wrong with hot dogs? You used to make them for us all the time.”
It was to spare everyone the spectacle of this sort of inanity, David always told himself, that he avoided these people the whole time he was married. Marcus, though, is lapping it all up like some orphan suddenly discovering what a family is.
The boys have cleaned their plates.
“Is it all right if we show Marcus our rooms, Uncle David?” Jamie says.
The deference sends a twitch of shame through him.
“Just don’t get him hooked on some computer game or his mother will have my hide.”
The last time he and Julia had felt anything like a family had been on an all-inclusive they had done with Marcus on the Gulf the winter before the breakup. Their hotel turned out to be a disaster, an awful shopping mall of a place on the strip that looked out to a narrow sliver of beach eroded nearly to nothing by a string of recent hurricanes. Somehow, though, they had managed to make things work. Julia scouted out a five-star place where the beach hadn’t been affected and every day they’d take a taxi there, eating their meals à la carte at the hotel restaurant and spreading the tips around so the staff turned a blind eye when they used the facilities. Marcus befriended a couple of boys his own age and David would watch him building sandcastles with them at the water’s edge and think: It isn’t too late.
Their last day they took the ferry out to a nearby island, renting a golf cart in the little town there and following the coastal road until the low-end resorts and beach houses gave way to deserted scrubland and rocky shoals. David turned onto a dirt side road looking for a turtle-breeding station that was marked on their map but they ended up
instead at a narrow strip of beachfront hemmed in by a wall of matted brush.
The beach was littered with shells.
“Can we stop?” Marcus said. “Can we collect some?”
He went along collecting shells in his sand bucket while David and Julia followed behind. David reached a hand out for Julia’s and felt grateful when she didn’t resist him.
“What do you think?” he said. “Could you see living here? No more department meetings, no more theme birthday parties.”
“You’d get bored in a week. You need to be on the circuit.”
“I could do the circuit right here. Take the golf cart out for a spin every morning.”
“Right.” But she was laughing. “And leave me doing the laundry by the river with the other chicas.”
Julia spotted a speck of some sort out at sea, then another, and they tried to make out whether they were dolphins or whales. They couldn’t have spent more than a minute or two looking out, but when they turned back to the beach Marcus was nowhere in sight.
David’s stomach dropped.
“Jesus, David, where is he? Marcus!”
His mind went at once to the dangers, the water on one side, the bush on the other. Who knew what the currents were here, maybe dangerous rip tides. And then all the abduction stories you heard, what better location than this if they’d been followed?
Julia was already out in the water, thrashing through the shoals looking for who knew what. The beach fell away steeply here and in a matter of steps she was nearly up to her waist.
“For God’s sake, where could he be? Wouldn’t we have heard him if he’d gone in the water?”
David remembered the public service ads they used to run of the sound of a child drowning: perfect silence. If a current had taken him, they were lost.
“My God, David, what should we do?”
“Keep searching the water! I’ll search the shore!”
The shingle of beach stretched no more than half a dozen metres before coming up against brush. He tried to make out footprints, but the beach here was mostly shale.
