Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  He keeps his eye on the doors. Despite the extra fistful of meds he has downed he has to fight to keep from nodding off. It happened once in committee during the hire, on a day that Sonny had sat in to go over procedures.

  “Late night, David?” Then the titters around the room, as if there was nothing more laughable, more demeaning, than falling asleep. If he’d had a gun then. Instead, even to open his mouth was to risk the further humiliation of having his words come out garbled like a mental deficient’s.

  He spots Julia up front but makes a point of blotting her from his field of vision. She had managed to get a new book out the previous fall: all those years that she had languished at home making his ambition seem something criminal, then the instant he was out the door she was back in the game. Meanwhile he has had to return again and again to the start on his own stalled opus as one after another his lines of approach have faltered.

  He is already halfway to the door after the meeting has broken up when Sonny’s voice rings out from the rostrum above the din of exodus.

  “David, wait!” In such a peremptory tone that for a moment the whole room seems to focus on him. “My office! Five minutes!”

  He detours outside for a cigarette, huddling in the cold near the garbage dumpsters at the back of the building. When he comes in, Sonny is already waiting for him, his skin the bluer blue-black it takes on whenever he is in high dudgeon.

  “I don’t even know where to start, David. I don’t even know.”

  It has been clear from the moment Sonny called him out that she has been in to see him. What David can’t figure is what she might have said, or out of what madness or malice.

  “You could start,” he says to Sonny, “by telling me what made you think you could ream me out like a teenager in front of my peers.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, David! Don’t play dumb with me! I sent that girl to you in good faith! Because she looked up to you, if you can believe it!”

  The bitterness of this, the sense of personal affront, takes David by surprise.

  “Look, Sonny, you’re going to have to spell out what exactly you’re accusing me of here, because honestly, I’m not following.”

  “She came in here today trying to get out of her contract! Are you going to tell me you had nothing to do with that? I don’t know what it was you did to her, I don’t want to know, I don’t even want to think about it, but whatever it was you better find a way to make it right, because if it comes down to a choice I’ll trade you for her in a second! And don’t think I won’t find the way to do it! Don’t think it isn’t already there in your file!”

  She is overreacting, clearly, is behaving like a child. All they did was fuck, for Christ’s sake. And yet her reaction is all he has to go by, really, the only thing that might give a shape to his own blankness.

  This much is obvious, at least: she hasn’t told Sonny shit.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” He resists the mistake of going on the defensive. “Look, I’m sorry she’s changed her mind, but how is that even a problem? Everyone knows she wasn’t your first choice.”

  Sonny’s face twists with some emotion David can’t read.

  “I don’t believe it. Here I was thinking all this was some revenge scheme you’d cooked up when you still don’t have a clue, do you? She was the choice practically right out of the gate! The only question was how to get the great David Pace to think the idea was his so he wouldn’t pull one of his diva acts.”

  “That’s bullshit.” This seems too byzantine even for Sonny’s tortured power politics. And yet already David suspects he is actually telling the truth, that even now the story is making the rounds of the department. “It’s not as if she’s some big catch, for fuck’s sake! She can’t even place her dissertation.”

  “Do you know how many other offers she’s had? Don’t tell me she isn’t a catch! She’ll bring in more funding in a year than you will the rest of your life!”

  “You’re joking, right? Because she’s been to the University of fucking New Mexico or wherever?”

  “Because she’s Indian, David! Do I have to spell it out?”

  “What are you talking about? Not from your part of India. Not from where I’m sitting.”

  “Jesus, David. Native Indian! First Nations or whatever the bloody term is these days. Please don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  It is as if someone has put a bullet in his head. As if all along the gun has been raised, he has been staring right at it, yet somehow has missed it.

  “It’s right there in her dissertation, for the love of God, it’s not as if she made some big secret of it! Did you even bother to read her dissertation before you wrote your report or were you just planning to fuck her from the start?”

  David feels like he is back in Dirksen’s office in Montreal with that woman and her son, facing the maw.

  “What exactly is it you want from me here, Sonny? Why do you think you can just put this on my plate? For all you know she’s just playing all of us. Maybe she’s just using us to leverage a better offer.”

  “David, I’m not an idiot. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference between leveraging pay scale and running scared. If you’d been here when she came in. Like I say, I don’t want to know what went on with you two, but if she walks out after all the work and expense of finding her, after fighting tooth and nail to get money that’ll probably just get shuttled over now to Engineering or Business Admin—it’s pretty fucking irritating, David. It’s pretty dispiriting. So if there’s something you did that you can undo, I’m asking you. I’m begging you.”

  A window opens up into Sonny suddenly, into his own split brain, all the trade-offs he has had to make, all the lies he has had to tell himself to get by. It isn’t true that David knows nothing about him. He knows about the wife he never shows in public, probably the product of some arranged village marriage he made when he was barely out of his teens; about the four or five children he never talks about, and of whom not a single photo has ever shown up in his office. About the early promise he has frittered away on pointless monographs and on being an errand boy for upper-level administrators who earn three times his salary for a quarter the effort, though he could easily have defected to admin himself years before instead of staying down with the rank and file. David knows these things but doesn’t like to think about them, for fear of letting down his defences.

  “I’ll call her,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Sonny nods, purses his lips.

  “Look, David, I know you’ve been going through a lot these years, with the divorce and everything. But I can’t help feeling there’s something else going on here. Something that’s behind this destructiveness you’re bent on. If there’s a health problem or anything or some kind of mental issue, maybe we need to look at that. Even Lowe asked about it. If you had some kind of condition.”

  To think David had actually been ready to take pity on him.

  “My health is fine,” he says, as acidly as he can manage. “It’s also none of your fucking business.”

  He retreats to his office feeling enraged, indiscriminately, at Sonny, at himself, at Jennifer Lowe, unable to think, form a plan, see anything clearly. All these years of waiting for a turnaround, an even break, and now his whole fate seems to rest on a one-night stand. All the years of scrambling for some sort of handhold, anything to stop his free fall. Fudging his students’ grades because he can’t get through their papers; blowing up at them on the least pretext to bully them out of their complaints. Exhausting the milder fare of the surface web and gradually sinking down into the hard-core filth of the deep one. Avoiding his own son because of what he has become. And spurring it all, the panic, the horror, at this oblivion that trails him, that continues to steal up ever closer at his back like his own death.

  All he can see now of Jennifer Lowe is the black hole of her Indianness. As if he had debauched a Holocaust survivor, a child. As if in his split brain that was exactly
what he had wanted, to go past some limit, some uncrossable line.

  In the accounts he has read of crimes people have committed in their sleep the crimes always get depicted as going against the grain. The gentle giant who drove miles across town to murder in-laws who adored him. The devout Mormon who stabbed a beloved wife of twenty years against whom he had never so much as raised his voice. And yet there is always some detail that points to intent, the gambling addiction the in-laws would soon learn of, the problem at work over which the wife had not shown full support. If intent is there, doesn’t blame follow? Maybe all sleep has done is provide the permission the waking mind has withheld.

  From those human guinea-pig epileptics whose brains had literally been cut in two a bizarre discovery had been made: that the brain houses within its separate hemispheres actual warring consciousnesses, each so distinct from the other, down to the level of political affiliations, of food preferences, of religious beliefs, as to seem those of entirely different people. In the normal course of things one side dominates and the other gets suppressed, though what this means is that everyone carries within them a shadow self that dogs the dominant one like a stalker, always at odds, always seeking an outlet, awaiting its chance under cover of dark.

  David sits in his office at his computer going through Jennifer Lowe’s dissertation. Only toward the end of it does he come across the half-dozen pages in which she sketches out her life. It turns out to be so close to the one he has imagined for her that he almost laughs: small prairie town, grain silos, big sky. Her father, a doctor, she describes as pure Scots. The native blood comes from her mother, descended from the Blackfoot Confederacy, though Jennifer’s only contact with actual status Indians before she started studying them seems to have been through a high school literacy project at a reserve near her hometown.

  None of this ever came up in committee, of course. Despite the expected tokenism, any reference to something as specific as bloodline or race would probably have rung out like the N-word, surely part of the logic behind Sonny’s video interviews. Now, though, David can see that the evasions had the added bonus of allowing everyone to skirt the embarrassing truth at the heart of Jennifer’s Indianness that was exactly what made her the ideal candidate. Better by far to bring in someone like her, a doctor’s daughter, with barely half a black foot in the alien camp, than to risk the genuine article, whose grievances were too staggering by now, whose chances at redress too remote. It was the typical doublethink of academia, scared shitless of what it claimed most to want.

  There is a final peroration in Jennifer’s bio sketch where she writes of a kind of turning-point moment, a visit to an old buffalo jump near her town where she had a vision of the order that had prevailed in the thousands of years before the coming of the white man. In a few quick strokes she conjures that vanished world with an impressive complexity and breadth, the enmities and alliances, the different ways of life, the farmers with their settlements and divisions of labour and routes of trade and the nomads following the herds, slowly changing the landscape for their sake from woodland to grassland. The description has an authenticity to it that seems to moot the question of her own background. What does it matter if she is Micmac or Mongol if she has been able to make this sort of leap?

  Something in the passage rings strangely familiar. When he reaches the end of it, where she compares the invading whites to the barbarian hordes who unravelled Rome, the connection hits him: his own Masculine History. He had included in it an account of his own turning-point moment, his visit to Ostia Antica as a child. Now he begins to see echoes everywhere, right down to phrases and words.

  So she wasn’t just snowing him, then. Somehow this cuts him more deeply than anything else has.

  She is merely ashamed, perhaps, something as simple as that. Remembers as little as he does. Or did a search of the drug she found on his bathroom counter, the doctor’s daughter, and needs reassurance, something to quash the nightmare version of the evening that might have formed in her afterwards. And yet already he knows that he won’t call her. That he can’t bring himself to apologize or make light, to face her different version of things or sort out what truths or lies he might have to tell to sway her to his own. Knows he can’t pretend he has done with her anything other than what he has intended, or that his first reaction at finding the spot next to him in bed empty was anything other than the old familiar one of plain relief.

  She is better off leaving this place while she can. He would do it himself if he thought he had anything in the way of real alternatives.

  Maybe we need to look at that.

  As soon as the thought hits him he wonders how he could have taken so long to come to it. It is Sonny himself who has shown him the way out: all this time he has been busting his balls trying to hide his affliction when he ought to have been flaunting it. That is what his mewling colleagues do, using every wart removal and stubbed toe to milk concessions and excuse their sins. He is sure he can get Becker to paint a picture of his disorder so dire that the university will be happy to put him on paid leave just for the peace of mind of keeping him out of the classroom. So much for Sonny’s threats after that. So much for any of this, the enforced mediocrity, the institutional grind.

  He calls up his collective agreement online and reads through the disability clauses, making notes. A burst of energy takes him and on impulse he starts packing up his office, grabbing some empty banker’s boxes from the utility room and beginning to fill them with his books. It is madness, of course, he can’t just walk out; it might take months to plod through all the paperwork. Yet now that the idea has formed he can hardly bear the thought of another day in this place. Shake the dust of it from him, no looking back. All his time free to work on his book, to do it properly now, no more dithering, no more false starts. He is not so old that his best work can’t still be ahead of him. He is not so afflicted that he can’t rally to the task once he is free of distractions.

  Night has fallen. He catches his reflection in his darkened window like his own second self staring in at him and feels a chill. The thought of Montreal floats up again for an instant, the false bravado when he quit, the possibilities that never panned out.

  He grabs another box and starts to fill it.

  PART TWO

  SIG Sauer P250

  THE SHOP IS AT the edge of a beleaguered island of gentrification bounded by crosstown expressways and the old industrial lands to the south, in a turn-of-the-century clapboard barely distinguishable from the residences flanking it. Across the street, the interstate runs where a row of the same clapboards must have once stood, raised up on its concrete pillars above the surrounding rooflines as if part of a separate dimension. From the online crime maps, which give a snapshot of crime across the city practically in real time, David knows that the interstate is a dividing line. It is like being at some borderland, the fraying edge of the civilized world.

  He has landed here, in this dying Rust Belt city, on a year-long visitor’s chair arranged by his former grad-school sidekick Greg Borovic. Borovic is the one who has ended up at the prestigious American school David never got to, a Top 20 where he has won a closetful of teaching awards and oversees a raft of endowments he seems to manage like a personal slush fund. David would have liked to tell him to go fuck himself except that he needs the money, reduced to living off a credit line on his condo as one by one he has burned whatever other bridges remained to him.

  Inside the shop the August heat hangs like a fog. A rifle rack behind the counter holds a couple of Bushmasters and Remingtons, a glass-fronted display case an array of handguns. The walls, in faux wood panelling, are covered with joke signs and bumper stickers. “If you can read this, you’re in range.” “Make my day.” “Protected by gun.” It is like the setting for a B movie that takes place in a dystopian near future. Any second the aliens will burst through the walls or the zombies through the windows and the massacre will begin.

  The man who emerges from the back room
seems to have stepped out of the same B movie, dwarf-sized and slightly humpbacked and trailing an odour of cigarettes and boiled cabbage.

  “So what can I do you for?”

  David gets him to bring up some of his handguns. A Colt; a Ruger; a couple of Glocks. From a back cupboard the man takes out a SIG Sauer in black polymer that he sets in front of David like some vintage wine he has been holding back.

  “Can’t beat the Germans for engineering. Believe me, you’re not going to find anything sweeter than this biscuit.”

  The gun is entirely black, right down to its rivets, like a thing forged in the devil’s furnace.

  “And the best part,” the shopkeeper says, “it’s completely modular. Don’t like the frame, get the bigger one. Want more concealment, take the shorter barrel.”

  With practised ease he breaks the gun down and reassembles it with different components, switching the parts in and out like shells in a shell game. His fingers, despite the stubbiness of the rest of him, are elegant and long. David wonders how many hours he has given over, sitting alone in his back rooms, to perfecting manoeuvres such as these.

  David takes up the gun. For all its space-age efficiencies it is not so far removed from his Beretta, has the same profile, the same frugality, the same weight. Nuclear bombs have fallen since his Beretta rolled off the line, men have walked on the moon, yet this simple design has persisted unchanged.

  Already in the short time he holds it he knows his hand will remember the feel of it the way an addict’s arm remembers the needle.

  “How much?”

  The background check, on the phone, takes under a minute. David has brought along the state hunting licence the web sites said he would need in order to get the restrictions on foreigners waived, but the shopkeeper hardly glances at it. He fits the gun into a blue plastic carrying case that looks like it might hold a power drill or wrench set and bundles the case into an old Walmart bag along with two hundred rounds of 40-calibre Smith and Wessons.