Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  What has replaced David’s Prozac to manage his falling fits is sodium oxybate, a sleep drug that enjoys the singular distinction of having been approved for prescription use even while remaining classed as a banned substance. Danger of hallucinations, of seizures, of suicidal ideation. Danger of respiratory depression. Of coma. Of death. Its real infamy, though, rests on its having, like Ritalin, an active street life, where as gamma-hydroxybutyric acid—a.k.a. GHB, Georgia Home Boy, Liquid Ecstasy, Fantasy, Everclear, Salty Water, Easy Lay—it is a favoured drug of raves and of heightened sex for its pleasant buzz at lower doses and of date rape at slightly higher ones, when it induces a few hours of coma-like unconsciousness before being excreted from the system as water and CO2, leaving no trace of itself except a small black hole of oblivion in the brain.

  For David, that oblivion is what now passes for sleep. Two doses a night of a viscous solution as salty as the Dead Sea, one at bedtime and the other three or four hours later when the first wears off, which it does with the abruptness of a light clicking on in his head. In the interim he is like a dead man, often waking stiff from lack of movement still in the same pose as when he closed his eyes. Becker had mentioned the drug a couple of years earlier when it was just coming off its approvals, but it had struck David as too sketchy then. Another drug that had been repurposed, this one originally used as an anaesthetic, before the dosage range between efficacy and death had been deemed too narrow; another one whose precise mechanism was unknown. Then on top of the absurdity of having to wake in the middle of the night to take something to sleep, there was the long list of contraindications, nearly two hundred of them, everything from muscle relaxants and cold pills to hand sanitizers and rubbing alcohol. Next to it, Prozac had seemed as safe as Pez.

  That, though, was before David had reached the lower circles of Prozac hell. Beyond the cluster bomb Prozac had lobbed into his sex life there was also the ongoing demise of his sleep, which had become such a carnival of bizarre acrobatics that it had ceased to give him anything like respite. The sleepwalking and confusional arousals, the bouts of paralysis and repetitive movement, the pissing into corners; and then the constant tossing and turning, the sense of hovering the whole night in a hallucinatory purgatory in which his dreams had so much of the nagging insistence of the waking world that he arose exhausted from them. It was like a slow descent into madness. David made the connection to the Prozac only after he came across a couple of studies that linked it to insomnia and REM cycle aberrations, possibilities that Becker had failed to mention.

  “Yes, perhaps there is some effect,” Becker said dismissively. “But you must also accept that this is normal for your condition. This deterioration.”

  Who knew what normal meant in this context, given the general level of ignorance in brain medicine, whose remedies by then had begun to strike David as little above the level of reading entrails. There were a hundred billion neurons in the brain, each in constant communication with as many as ten thousand of its neighbours, in an intricate language of chemical exchange that had been built up over hundreds of millions of years. Pumping indiscriminate drugs into this scheme by trial and error to target some barely understood short circuit amidst some barely mapped network of dense neural wiring was like using Agent Orange to cure a case of leaf blight. David had given up thinking about the knock-on effects of his ongoing regimen of drugs, the incalculable tiny shifts is his brain’s chemistry that like the flap of a butterfly’s wings had surely already altered the very essence of him in ways he would never know.

  At least with the sodium oxybate his sex drive has revived and he has even been able to cut back on his stimulants. Able to get through a day without collapsing each time he loses his temper or tells a joke; to get through a night without smashing his bedside lamp or pissing into his kitchen sink or opening his eyes to find himself standing half-naked in the cold on his twenty-sixth-storey balcony. The drug apparently works by boosting slow-wave sleep, though there is some question whether what it induces is actual sleep or only an eerie synthetic version of it, something that reads as sleep in the monitors but that at a deeper cellular level might be an entirely new state of consciousness, unknown in nature. Studies in humans and in mice have shown that the drug can bring on in subjects who are still awake the same slow-wave patterns once thought distinctive to deep sleep. It has already happened a number of times to David that he has got up to pee in mid-dose and has suddenly found himself thrashing against the walls or crawling on the floor stuck in a mindset altogether unfamiliar to him, feeling purposeful and awake yet utterly unable to get his bearings. It is as if he is conscious, lucid, yet somehow blind, half his brain still in darkness or each half inaccessible to the other as in those epileptics whose brains had been split in experimental surgeries.

  The drug is ringed round with security protocols that make those of Ritalin look like high school. David has managed to double-dip on his Ritalin more than once without being called on it, cadging scripts from his family doctor when his supply from Becker has run short and getting them filled at independents rather than through his regular chain so they wouldn’t show on his file. That isn’t something he could ever pull with his sodium oxybate. Only a single pharmacy in the country is authorized to dispense it, sending a shipment by courier every thirty days, the deliveries scheduled by a rep from the drug company who calls him on day sixteen or so of every cycle and who repeats her name in full each time she calls, Emmanuelle Gattuso. She speaks in a slightly accented but thoroughly uninflected English, avoiding the least foray into the personal, as if she is being closely monitored. Always she begins by asking how many days’ worth of medication he still has on hand, a question that used to throw him into a small panic because it felt like a test, especially as, more than once, she had pressed him on his answer as though to suggest he was lying or had made a mistake. Now, instead of trying to guess if a partly filled bottle has three days’ worth of drug in it or five, he has put a thirty-day repeat on his desktop calendar and simply counts back from the end date for each cycle to arrive at the number that Emmanuelle Gattuso herself has surely already worked out by exactly the same method. In this way he often shows a bit of a surplus each month, as the pharmacists tend to err a few grams in his favour with nearly every bottle, though David wouldn’t be surprised if this, too, were part of some scheme to test his trustworthiness.

  In any event he has been putting the surplus to good use. A few times a week, when the mood hits him, he takes a small starter dose a half-hour or so before sleep and stretches out on his bed to masturbate. At first he couldn’t understand why the drug was considered such an aphrodisiac when all he felt was a kind of pleasant drowsiness. Bit by bit, though, something has been unleashed in him, until these sessions have become almost an addiction. In the usual way of sex it is less what happens in his body that matters than in his head, the different place the drug takes him to, leading him on like some force outside of him in the way that dreams do or the first rush of images that goes through his head just before sleep. Up unfamiliar stairwells, down unfamiliar halls, into rooms where every speakable and unspeakable act is permitted, anything that can be imagined or abhorred.

  He has set out another round of lines but has lost all track by now of how many they are up to. At some point his father’s Beretta has made an appearance, after Jennifer started going through the drawers in his living room cabinet and found the one that was locked.

  “This is the one I have to see! The stuff you hide from your son!”

  She’d expected porn, maybe, though had looked thrilled to discover the Beretta instead.

  “You’re shitting me. Just don’t tell me you’re a serial killer or something because that would really wreck the whole evening.”

  It had been easier than he had expected to get the thing registered and have himself licensed. A police check; a weekend course on gun safety; a couple of exams any seven-year-old could have passed. He kept waiting for the gun to get tied to some mob
hit or war crime but the paperwork went through without a hitch. Afterwards he joined the gun club north of the city where he’d taken his safety course and started driving out a couple of times a week to fire rounds.

  Jennifer pulls back the slide on the Beretta the way David has shown her and whips around like a gunslinger to her reflection in the living room window. She pulls the trigger. Click. In his mind’s eye David sees the window shatter and the two of them sucked off into the night as into the vacuum of interstellar space.

  “Shit. I really thought it was going to go off.”

  “You should come out with me to my club sometime. We could go after the faculty meeting tomorrow. It’s always my favourite time to go.”

  David has spent much of the morning at the club, shooting until his arms were numb, until his whole body ached. The buzz of it lingers for days sometimes. By now he has gotten good enough not to embarrass himself, able to manage consistent two-and-a-half-inch clusters at twenty-five yards. When he is peering into his sights, the world falls away. There is only his finger on the trigger, only the bullet barrelling forward like his own will. It is better than any brain drug, the only time when every fibre in him feels fully awake.

  Jennifer is picking off imaginary foes, faking kickback with each shot. P-tew. P-tew.

  David checks his cigarette pack: empty.

  “I’m wondering if you’re as wired as I am,” he says.

  She picks off the glass door that guards his collectibles. She picks off his flat-screen. The picture of Marcus. P-tew.

  “Look at us,” she says. “Look at us. It’s so fucking weird. It’s like I’m in ancient Rome with David Pace. So decadent. I always loved that word. What was it you said about Roman art? I mean, it was fucking brilliant.”

  “If I said something about Roman art, then you have my permission to shoot me.”

  “Not tonight, silly! In your book!”

  “Whatever I said, I take it back.”

  “About realism. How they got to a level that wouldn’t come back till the fucking Renaissance and then they just got bored with it! It’s like, in fifteen years they covered fifteen hundred. That’s where we are now, isn’t that what you’re always saying? We’re the fucking Romans! Everything has to happen so fast or we’re bored out of our tree. Ritalin, don’t you see? It all fits. Attention deficit.”

  Cigarettes. But then the thought of the thousand obstacles he will have to negotiate to get some while he is bouncing off the walls like this, the door fobs and keys, the buttons in elevators. The thought of leaving Jennifer alone here with a cocked Beretta and a half-box of ammo in an unlocked drawer.

  P-tew.

  “You know what?” he says. “I don’t know the first thing about you. Why is that exactly? I mean, apart from the fact that I’m an insufferable narcissist prick.”

  “But you know everything about me. You read my dissertation, right?”

  “By that logic, I’m Julius Caesar.”

  “I always thought of you more as Augustus.”

  She plops down in the club chair gangster-style, legs spread, the Beretta loose in one hand like an apple she is about to bite into.

  “Listen,” he says. “Why don’t I give us something to slow us down a bit.”

  “Something good, I hope.”

  The phrase goes through his mind: informed consent.

  “Something you’ll like, I think.”

  She trains the Beretta on him, utterly deadpan.

  “Just don’t try to pull anything, fucker.”

  A kick goes through him like a cattle bolt. Her jaw drops in pleased, scandalized horror.

  “Jesus, shit, I’m sorry! I can’t believe I said that!”

  He can feel the sweat coming off him, smell the stink of it.

  He puts up his hands.

  “No false moves,” he says, as evenly as he can manage.

  He waits until they have taken the stuff before he goes down for the cigarettes. When he returns he finds her standing in the cold on his balcony still in her stocking feet, staring into the dark. He comes up behind her, just close enough for the heat of their bodies to touch, like weather fronts meeting, like rivers.

  She doesn’t turn.

  “You’ll catch your death out here.”

  And yet the cold feels far from them, as if a bubble protects them, a private atmosphere.

  It has started to snow, small scattered flakes that flash out of the dark.

  He knows if he touches her, there will be no going back.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like—I don’t know.”

  “Like what? Tell me.”

  “Like—God. I shouldn’t say.” A shiver goes through her. “What was that stuff? Like jello.”

  Twenty-six storeys below them a cube van pulls into the courtyard and stops at the lobby door. It sits for a moment, idling, then pulls away, though no one has emerged from it.

  “Jello sounds right,” David says.

  He tries to muster a proper sense of the cold. This is how errors are made, how people miss warning signs. He pictures the two of them freezing to death out here, caught in this frozen instant for all time. Millennia from now they’ll be sifted from the ash of the apocalypse like the fugitives of Pompeii. The right and the wrong won’t make any difference then, they’ll be merely history, a story, beyond judgment.

  “It’s just,” she says. “I don’t know.”

  She leans into him then with the near-weightless press of a snowfall or wind, or maybe he is the one who presses against her. The different versions of the evening that have been shadowing each other like light and dark seem to collapse suddenly into one.

  “You’re freezing,” he says, though her body is as hot as a bird’s. “Come inside.”

  What happens next he’ll be able to reconstruct afterwards only in the way that dreams can be reconstructed, with always that sense of a logic that can’t be recaptured or put into words, of a larger complexity that is forever lost. The air itself has grown gelatinous by then, an ether they move through or water, past tilting doors, down tilting halls, as in the hold of a sinking ship. Time makes its way through here only in flickers, brief gloamings of murky light. There is her dress, the feel of it under his hand like satin, like skin; there is his gun, floating free like a dismembered appendage. Then outside the window, the building snow, slowly whiting out the darkness like an opiate, like sleep.

  This much is clear, that at some point they end up in his bedroom and fuck. There is nothing tentative about this, for all the torpor of the drug: he has crossed over by then, to the dark rooms, the unspeakable sanctum, and he fucks her the way he has imagined, splitting her open, crawling inside her. All that matters is that none of it matters, that they are beyond scrutiny here, beyond telling. That that is the point.

  Afterwards all he will remember is her body beneath him the merest scribble of flesh and bone, so flimsy he could break it in two.

  Smell, emanating from the bedsheets. Julia’s but not Julia’s: he feels for her beside him but with the sick sense he has done it again, has betrayed her. Then suddenly he is awake.

  The place beside him is empty. He taps the dimmer bar on his clock radio to light up the face: three in the morning. His head is pounding from the wine and the Ritalin. For a long moment he sits on the edge of the bed, listening, hears only the whirr of the fridge, the distant clack of the twenty-four-hour streetcar that passes in front of his building.

  He checks the bathroom, the couch, the fold-out bed in the den. She is gone.

  The snow has stopped, though the blanketing it has left gives the city light through the living room windows a ghoulish glow. The apartment stinks of cigarettes and spilled wine, of the left-over food they never bothered to clear. Open cabinets and open drawers; half a dozen books lying askew on the coffee table and floor. The mortar and pestle. The fresh pack of cigarettes.

  David lights one and sits down in the club chair to smoke it.

&nb
sp; Fragments come back to him that he can’t quite tease out into intelligibility. He must have overestimated their doses, he thinks, then thinks, Don’t think.

  A bottle of sodium oxybate sits on the bathroom counter with its red warning stickers and threats. Keep away from children! Avoid alcohol! It isn’t like him to have left it out. The thought hangs an instant, then he pushes it away, because of the other thoughts he feels pressing up behind it.

  He measures out a dose to get him through the rest of the night. In his bedroom, in the dark, he makes out a lump of greater dark on his dresser: the Beretta. Then he feels something hard underfoot and bends to collect a bullet. There are more, scattered at the foot of the bed and under the dresser. David can’t dredge up any memory of how they got there and yet even before he takes up the gun and feels the weight of it he knows that someone—who? at what point? to what end?—has taken the trouble to load it.

  He sits down on the edge of the bed. In his brain, just white space.

  The panic doesn’t really start to set in until Jennifer Lowe fails to show for the afternoon faculty meeting. Until then he has more or less been able to put the matter from his mind. To armour himself with what he tells himself is the truth, that he has broken no laws or university protocols, crossed no uncrossable lines. Consenting adults.

  The meeting is in one of the Humanities lecture halls. The minute David sets foot in it the familiar repugnance rises up in him: the factions and cliques, the jockeying, the whispered stratagems; the sense of how low the stakes are, how everything that happens here is only in the service of crushing whatever doesn’t fit in. The real reason, he knows, that it was so easy to push through Jennifer Lowe was that there had seemed nothing dangerous in her, no sign of brilliance or heresy, anything that might challenge the dreamless sleep of the status quo.

  He ought to have phoned her. The truth is it didn’t occur to him to phone, didn’t occur to him to do anything at all except show up here at the meeting acting as if nothing untoward had happened between them, and so put them on the light footing that was surely the only workable one going forward.