Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  There is sympathy in her voice but also something deeper, more wrenching. Disappointment, perhaps. For a moment he sees the woman she was on their Italy trip, remembers the thrill of waking with her in their hotel room to the buzz of Vespas in the street, the rattle of storefront shutters. Remembers sitting in that courtyard in Ostia Antica in the tawny afternoon light, wishing they’d never go home.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Ma. I’ll manage.”

  “Because you’ve done such a good job so far. I’m saying this with the best intention, David. Don’t let whatever it is you’re going through wreck your life. You’re not young enough anymore for a second chance.”

  In his car he sets the gun case at the foot of the front passenger seat so he can keep an eye on it. He heads downtown, but when he reaches his cross street he doesn’t turn, unable to face the prospect of making a meal, of eating it alone. His place still has such a provisional air, like a temporary stop en route to some other, fuller life. One he has so far been unable to imagine.

  He considers crossing the river to eat at one of his former haunts in the old neighbourhood but the thought only fills him with bitterness. Instead he keeps driving until he hits the lakeshore, then follows it out past the condo towers and hotels, the badlands of the old port, until he comes to the turnoff for the spit. It has been years since he was down here, though in the old days it was like a gathering place for the tribe. Maybe a hundred trucks a day came through then, from every contractor in the city, edging the spit out bit by bit into the lake with the city’s detritus. The rumours always swirling about this one who had snuck in a load of car batteries or asbestos or that one the lead-laced dirt from some old factory site; and then the other rumours, about mob hits and bodies in concrete. A couple of union men disappeared when David was a kid, guys David himself had seen speak at the local union hall when his father had taken him and Danny there, and the story had always been that they were pushing up dandelions down at the spit.

  Already from the entrance gate, at the bottom of a desolate zone of industrial warehouses and empty lots, the place looks unrecognizable. What was once a moonscape of shattered concrete and jutting rebar now, in the dark, gives off the lush silhouette of a nature preserve. A chain has been drawn across the roadway to bar entry but no one has bothered to lock it. David unravels one end from its hitching post to pass his car through and reattaches it behind him. A beaten track leads him past stands of poplar and willow; walking trails lead off into darkened bush. Through his open window, a lake smell and a racket of crickets and of frogs, who bellow and moan in the dark like fiends in heat.

  Somehow, out of this garbage heap, nature has reclaimed her own, only the occasional lump of concrete or brick pushing up through the roadway giving any sign of the tons of detritus and waste that lie underneath. The road winds past ponds and lagoons that glimmer in the moonlight like ancient tar pits. Something scuttles across his path but he doesn’t make out what, a shadowy mass whose eyes flash in his headlights before it melts back into the bush.

  Gradually the vegetation thins and gives way to the familiar blight of old. Bulldozed earth rutted with truck tracks; staggered heaps of rubble that stretch off toward the black of the lake. He has reached the spit’s festering edge. He parks by the water, a highway of moonlight stretching out in front of him. Nearby a backhoe sits parked against a half-levelled pile of debris with a logo on the door he remembers from childhood, from one of the old-boy operations that even back then the city tended to favour.

  He takes out the cigar his brother gave him and lights it, sucking the smoke right into his lungs, wanting to feel the burn of it. The smell teases at him again and then it comes back to him, the image of his father in the back yard with his cigar, though he isn’t sure if he is remembering or if his mind has merely conjured the image from scratch, is trying to give him the past he might have had if he’d been different, had cared about different things, had bothered to see them. The past he might have wanted. He has learned from his sleep books that even the waking mind is a place of merest invention, winnowing the billions of points of data the universe emits every second down to the handful of isolate bits it needs to create the dream it calls the world. All the rest, all the excess that the brain has no use for, the colours it doesn’t register, the smells and sounds, the inconceivable worldviews and extra dimensions, are like the universe’s dark matter, invisible, unknown, though the very pith and meaning of things might reside in it and every accepted truth be overthrown. David wonders sometimes if the fraying he feels at the edges of himself is this dark matter worming its way in, demanding accommodation.

  He takes up the gun case and opens it on the passenger seat next to him. On his phone he does a search of the two letters, PB, that make up the logo on the grips: Pietro Beretta. Another quick search and he has located the factory, in Gardone Val Trompia. Not thirty miles from his father’s hometown, in the heart of what was once Mussolini’s puppet republic.

  David’s blood is racing. It is as if the fantasies of his childhood have turned real. He keeps up his searches, trying to pin down some explanation for the gun’s crude finish. He is amazed at the gun lore available at a touch, encyclopedia sites, chat rooms, auction sites, videos, feeling the same disjunction as when he’d started surfing for porn, the sense of these alternate worlds out there in the ether in which the dangerous, the forbidden, the deviant have assumed the bland normality of stamp collecting or trading recipes. He comes across a video of a spectacled man with the look a children’s show host demonstrating a Beretta M1935. “Ever wonder what kind of handguns the Italians were making in the 1930s?” In smiling detail he explains how to load, cock and fire it, getting off eight rounds in as many seconds.

  His father’s gun is a match for the M1935 except for the lack of markings and finish. Then on an auction site David finds its double: the same rough machining, the same industrial-grade serial number over the trigger guard. A great addition to any Nazi pistol collection. A write-up explains how the Germans, who commandeered the Beretta factory under the republic, ordered it to dispense with aesthetics to speed up production, the guns marked only by the seal of the special inspection unit the Germans instituted to ensure the guns still met their standards, the Quarto Ufficio Tecnico.

  David, almost trembling, lifts his father’s gun from its case and holds it up to the cabin light. He squints at the tiny mark on the frame: a 4 over the letters UT.

  The feeling that goes through him seems to have little to do with his old suspicions and theories, is more like a sudden sense of his father’s presence, as if, across the decades, the gun has connected David to him like a dark thread. All those years that he spent dreaming up infamies for him. Yet even if he’d had the evidence in his hands, it hardly would have mattered. It wasn’t accusation he was after but connection. Something that said to his father, We’re the same.

  You want me dead. Who could have seen that in him if not someone like him?

  He drops the gun’s magazine and squeezes the bullets in his pocket back into place. Loaded, the gun feels more real, more itself. Such a strange object, designed for one purpose, to kill, yet oddly compelling, maybe even more so in this state of raw incompletion.

  David isn’t sure how he has reached a point where his own life has become a place he dreads returning to. His family, his shoebox apartment, his work. He is well into his fourth year of effort on his doomsday book but it has yet to coalesce, so that he has started finding every reason to avoid it, to waste his time on frivolities. Then every time he comes back to it he feels it eluding him like his memories do, his thoughts, his very life.

  He pulls back the slide on the Beretta the way the video has shown him to draw a round up into the chamber. Now the hammer is cocked and the gun is ready to fire, as simply as that. His heart is pounding. He keeps expecting the throb in his brain stem, the familiar slackening, but it doesn’t come. Instead he feels a strange calm, a focus. As if he has found it, the still point be
tween too little and too much.

  He points the gun out the window and sights targets in the moonlight. A fluted column. A shard of ceramic. A metal pole.

  The windshield of the backhoe.

  Bang.

  A blast of flame and a noise like his head exploding, the gun bucking in his hands as if to rip them apart. It takes his brain a second to realize that he is the one who has pulled the trigger.

  The backhoe’s windshield looks like the Milky Way, an intricate web of tiny cracks.

  Bang.

  The windshield shatters.

  His ears are ringing, the bones of his hands feel unhinged.

  He targets the gas tank.

  Bang. Then again.

  There is no explosion like in the movies, only the smell of gas. He ought to go, might have been heard, but instead he takes up his cigar and sits smoking, feeling clearer than he has in months, feeling awake. The cigar slows down time like some menial but essential task, tending a garden or watching a child.

  When he has smoked it down to a stub he tosses it into the dark. At the gate he replaces the chain behind him when he has passed through, no looking back.

  Sodium Oxybate

  “NOT IF YOU’RE TENURE-TRACK,” David says, and she laughs.

  They have moved to the living area by now, she to the couch and he kitty-corner to her in the club chair. The dregs of the meal that they picked up from the high-end caterer down the street litter the table behind them and the city stretches out in front, lit up in all its frigid majesty right down to the lake through the ceiling-high windows. The view is the one feature of the place that still makes it bearable for David, more than just a cage for his reduced life.

  She is wearing the same nunnish dress suit in ash grey, collar tight, hem past her knees, that she’d worn to the hiring committee’s pre-interview dinner. Maybe it is the only good thing she owns. Or maybe, like then, she is trying to avoid any charge of sexual provocation, though, like then, all David can think of is the dark wisp of her body beneath it.

  He reaches for the last of the pinot noir.

  “More wine?”

  “I dunno,” she says, going suddenly girlish, “I’m pretty tipsy already.”

  He fills her glass nonetheless and makes a show of topping up his own, though he has hardly touched it.

  In the courtroom of his mind David is already making his excuses. Surely no one could accuse him of premeditation; no one could say he has done anything more than follow her cues. As much as anyone, it is Sonny Krishnan who has landed her here. He was the one who pointed out, at the sad little wine-and-cheese he put on for her after her hire, that the place she’d rented downtown was just a few blocks from David’s.

  “Oh!” she’d said, with panicked brightness. This was the kind of creepy personal data that Sonny regularly trafficked in, to let people know he literally knew where they lived. “We should get together for coffee or something! Since we’re so close!”

  David had gone out of his way to avoid the least hint of predatory intent, arranging to meet in the dead middle of a dead Sunday afternoon at a coffee bar that was more or less at the midpoint between them, steering clear of the Saturday even though it was Marcus’s weekend with his mother. What he expected was an hour or so of insipid conversation while she tried to gauge when she could politely make her excuses and he tried to hide his dirty thoughts. Only in his fantasies had it ever occurred to him he might actually have a chance with her—she seemed too clueless, too unspoiled. It was part of her appeal, that someone like him would be so far outside the realm of what she knew as nearly to defy comprehension.

  Somehow, though, their coffee ended up stretching on until the light outside had started to fade and the windows of the coffee shop had grown steamy. David trotted out his usual Sonny anecdotes and she didn’t balk, laughing at them with a lightness that seemed to take the malice out of them.

  “I’m getting the feeling there’s something between you two.”

  “If you mean, do I hate his bloody bureaucratic guts, then, no, I think that would be putting the matter too strongly.”

  “But he’s always saying such nice things about you!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, really! Like you’re the star of the department and all that. He really said that.”

  “The thing you have to realize about Sonny is that every move he makes is part of some master plan. Mind you, nobody has figured out what it is yet. In fact, no one knows the first thing about Sonny. I can’t even tell you if he’s married. I can’t even tell you if he’s straight.”

  “Oh, definitely straight,” she said.

  “Wow. So I guess someone’s been putting the moves on you.”

  She laughed.

  “Just good gaydar, that’s all. Though he did ask me to come in to see him before the faculty meeting tomorrow. To go over my paperwork, was how he put it.”

  “That’s definitely code, coming from Sonny. Nothing gets him going like paperwork.”

  David kept waiting for the glance at her watch, the mock-surprised exclamation, the little moue of disappointment at having to go. Instead it was as if she was at his disposal. She asked about buying food in the neighbourhood and he offered to introduce her to his local catering shop, whose menu he practically lived on.

  “I was going to pick something up for supper there, actually. If you wanted to join me.”

  As easy as that, one step leading to the next. If there was any deceit in this it was surely just the mutual self-deceit of any seduction, that level of knowing and unknowing that gave the mind permission for its own complicity.

  She slips off her shoes now and crosses her legs beneath her on the couch with a slightly boozy primness, a stretch of black-nyloned thigh flaring out.

  “People are a lot more open here,” she is saying. “Back there it was like, the profs were using White so everyone had to. All that stuff about metaphor, I don’t know, it just seems such a cop-out.”

  “Maybe you’re just afraid he’s right. It’s not as if history comes with its own storylines. If it did we wouldn’t need historians.”

  “But isn’t that like saying there was no Holocaust? Isn’t it like saying we’re just making it all up?”

  “Of course we’re making it up. I bet the two of us, right now, couldn’t even come up with a version of the afternoon we could agree on, never mind the Holocaust.”

  Something flashes in her eyes, as if he might actually make her try this in earnest.

  “Our thoughts would be different,” she says, “but not the facts.”

  “Let’s do the facts, then. How long did we spend at that coffee shop drinking overpriced lattes?”

  “That isn’t fair. I was too caught up in the conversation.”

  “Right answer, but it doesn’t let you off the hook. What about the name of the catering place we went to? Or the address? Or mine, for that matter?”

  Now she laughs.

  “Those are trick questions. Anyway, all I’d have to do is look them up.”

  “Exactly. Enter the historian. You’ve proved my point.”

  She laughs again. When she laughs she seems most herself, most innocent.

  “Very clever,” she says.

  He grabs a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. In less than two years he has gone from the occasional nighttime smoke to nearly a pack a day, a development that has both astonished him and given him a perverse satisfaction.

  “So,” she says. “I was wondering. If the things I heard about you in the department are true.”

  “Do you mean about what a bastard I am? Or about how washed up my career is?”

  “I mean about the hire! About you pushing for me.”

  “If people are saying I pushed for you,” he says, “I doubt they mean it as a compliment.”

  A pinprick of panic shows in her eyes. It is clear she hasn’t understood yet the nest of vipers she has landed in.

  “I never know if you�
�re joking or telling the truth.”

  “Are those the only options?”

  “So are you saying people hate me? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Hate’s a strong word. Though I’m guessing one or two of the women aren’t especially pleased.”

  “Why would that be?” But she perks up a bit. “I mean, it’s not like I’m a threat.”

  “That’s not how they see it.”

  She seems smart enough to realize that pressing him for more would just look like narcissism.

  She reaches for his cigarettes.

  “You mind?”

  “Hardly. Nothing makes addicts happier than dragging other people into their addictions.”

  “The scary thing is you’re serious.”

  “The scary thing is you think I’m not.”

  That she knows he pushed for her, that she has made it a point to let him know that she knows, means the spectre of quid pro quo hangs over them now. He isn’t sure whether this helps him or hurts him.

  She turns to take a light from him and her hair, of blackest black, falls forward from one of her shoulders straight as falling water. His hand brushes against it and a charge shoots through him that begins right at the base of his cock.

  In his fantasies he has already lived this moment, has crossed over a dozen, a hundred times from this sort of accidental touch to what comes next. Has run a hand along her midriff, along her ass; has slid her panties down and licked her clit. Has fucked her again and again, in his half dreams and dreams and awake until the line between what he has imagined and what is real has grown thin.

  She has nearly emptied her wine glass again.

  “Let me top that up for you,” he says, and gets up to grab another bottle before the line frays.

  On paper she barely even made his long list. Graduate work at a couple of B-level universities out West; a postdoc at a place in New Mexico that had the unmistakable whiff of last resort. Her dissertation, some sort of revisionist look at aboriginal first contact that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do more than power-skim, was exactly the sort of topic-of-the-moment irrelevance that drove David to distraction. Out in the real world Indians might still be living poor and forgotten and dispossessed, but in the academy they were king.