by Nino Ricci
David nods at a sign behind the counter that reads “We don’t call 911,” beneath an image of the business end of a revolver.
“Ever get bothered here?”
The shopkeeper gives him a furtive once-over.
“Nah. Not here.”
“I guess you’re taking your chances robbing a gun store.”
“Well, I’m ready for them, I’ll tell you that.”
Likely he has loaded weapons stashed in every cranny, awaiting a day of reckoning. It occurs to David that even in this place where the danger is real, it is still also a fantasy, that there is probably a part of this man that dreams only of this, of blowing some hoodlum to kingdom come.
Outside, the heat, the gun at his side, give the surrounding blight the post-apocalypse feel of the first-person shooter games Marcus has lately taken to. The violence of these games, that Julia would allow it, is always a shock to David, the blood spatters, the constant barrages, the enemies mown down in swaths or the innocents dragged from their cars or shot dead or simply run down and abandoned. Sometimes he stands watching behind Marcus as he plays and grows frightened at the silence between them, the weird energy that seems to join them like a third person they have formed.
He has left his car a few minutes’ walk from the shop, on a tree-lined side street where in a matter of paces the mood changes from urban menace to small-town idyll, complete with rose bushes and juniper hedges and picket fences. It is like the sudden scene shift of a dream, with a dream’s same inscrutable logic. In his drives through the city he has gone, in the space of a block, from the not quite faded glories of robber-baron carriageways to no-man zones that look like they’ve been pillaged by marauding armies, whole strip malls sitting abandoned, schools defaced, houses with their clapboard worn to the weathered grey of dust-bowl farmhouses.
He finds his car intact, no tires missing, no smashed windows. He puts the Walmart bag on the front passenger seat, where it sets off the seat belt alarm when he shifts into drive like another presence beside him.
If he had a gun. In the moment when matters had come to a head it had actually felt possible, easy, just a matter of filling the magazine and emptying it out, of giving in to the him-not-him in his animal brain that acted only on the cold irrefutable logic of stimulus and response.
Instead of buffering him from Sonny’s threats, David’s disability application had ended up playing right into his hands. It was David’s bad luck that the same week he submitted it he got flagged for double-dipping on his Ritalin, which had become a regular habit by then. Becker, who had sounded ready to write up whatever claim David asked him to, grew suddenly circumspect.
“It’s not a joke, David. It’s a risk for the doctor as well, this sort of abuse, you should think of that.”
This from the man who had been handing out meds as if they were jujubes the whole time David had been seeing him.
Everything began to unravel after that. The university used the charge as an excuse to drag its feet on his application, making David sit through a series of infantile psychological tests, presumably to determine if he was some sort of drug fiend. He had gone on unpaid leave by then to help buttress his claim, and as the matter stretched on he quickly burned through what little he had in the way of savings. He missed a child support payment and had a screaming argument with Julia when he went by for Marcus. The next day his brother phoned.
“We’re worried about you, Davie. Julia too. You’re the father of her child.”
“Are you doing her dirty work for her now, is that it? Can’t you see how she’s playing you? Are you that stupid?”
Burning his bridges.
Then toward the end of the summer the university announced it had appointed a new dean of arts: Dr. Sunil Krishnan. It was as if all these years Sonny had held off making the leap to admin until just the right time when he could do David maximum damage. Now with each day that went by with no word on his application David grew more obsessed with the thought of Sonny plotting against him. Again and again he had to stop himself from picking up the phone, from sending the emails he composed in his head, from tracking Sonny down in the flesh and doing he didn’t know what, something eviscerating, irrevocable. Had to keep reminding himself to save his energies for his book: it was all that mattered now, what all his hopes rested on. It was why he had holed himself up in his condo the whole summer seeing no one and going nowhere; was why he kept begging off his weekends with Marcus, inventing bogus excuses that Julia no longer bothered to call him on. Was what would give the lie to every calumny against him and put him back on top. This time, he would work out a canvas large enough to match the book’s ambitions. This time, even if it cost him his life’s blood, he would see it through to the end.
The fall term had already started by the time the university gave him an answer on his application. What they offered was a joke, not the full leave he had asked for but a mere thirty per cent cut in duties coupled with a fifteen per cent cut in pay. He could already see what would happen: all his best courses would be taken from him and he’d be left with the shit intro courses and the mountains of marking like an indentured sessional, doing more work than before at less pay. To top if off there was no mention of backdating the claim to cover his unpaid leave or of what accommodation would be made for the fall. He felt a real panic then, a dizzying sense of how vulnerable he was. He couldn’t survive another term without pay; in a matter of weeks his benefits would lapse if he didn’t return to work and after that his drug costs alone would beggar him.
The kicker, though, was the letter that arrived a couple of days later from the office of the new dean notifying David that disciplinary procedures had been started against him. Apart from the expected charges, which covered nearly every infraction Sonny had ever hauled him in for, there were some that came straight out of his disability files. An infuriating reference to his “medication abuse” was made to seem to apply not just to his Ritalin but to the whole range of drugs Becker had cycled him through over the previous years, all of which were named and described. In amongst the list, sticking out like a dagger, was a bald reference to the “date-rape drug” sodium oxybate.
The thin thread that was all that was still holding David to the world seemed to snap. He packed his Beretta into his car with the notion of blowing off steam at the club, though when he came off the parkway he found himself heading instead in the direction of the university. Thinking and not thinking. Seeing the image play out, the look on the fucker’s face. Just to put a scare in him, he thought, but not really thinking it, not wanting to know in that moment what he might be capable of.
He ended up in the parking lot outside Sonny’s office not quite certain how he had got there, his mind at once empty and filled with a white fury that was new to him, dizzying, enthralling, spinning its not-dreams of the not-him that would be able to do such a thing. Picturing himself opening the trunk, taking out the padlocked case he used for carrying the gun to the club, undoing the lock. Dropping the gun’s magazine and pushing in the rounds. The whole time feeling as if he was floating above himself, was already dead or near-dead or in whatever uncanny space you slipped into when you were ready to take a life.
He could hardly have said afterwards who he was in those moments. It was as if the different selves who inhabited him no longer reported to any final authority, like the self who could stab a wife forty-seven times for a tiny betrayal while his alter ego slept, like the one who could drive across town to kill his in-laws to avoid losing their good opinion. Like the borderline case at his old university in Montreal who had shown up at work one day with a couple of handguns and killed three of his colleagues because he felt he hadn’t been given proper credit for some minor joint publication. The line that separated such acts from each other, with their same skewed sense of proportion, was starting to feel increasingly thin to David. There were studies that suggested one of the functions of sleep was exactly to mitigate the day’s injuries and slights, through an intric
ate mechanics of deep sleep and dream that gradually wore down every grievance and sublimated every hurt. Who knew what mayhem threatened when the machinery faltered, at what point walking awake became as dangerous as asleep.
Over the next months David would end up making all the same mistakes he had made in his divorce, hiring lawyers he couldn’t afford, losing all objectivity, fighting tooth and nail on what anyone could have told him from the start were lost causes. He had taken out his credit line by then, but his legal fees kept mounting ever more precipitously as victory grew ever less likely. What he settled for, finally, was little more than nothing, the university agreeing to call off its inquisition in exchange for his backing off on his disability suit. The catch was a sort of unofficial probation that would keep him on unpaid leave until a reassessment a couple of years down the road, his only wins a concession on benefits and a partial payout on an upcoming sabbatical.
By the end of this gutting Sonny Krishnan had come to seem almost an irrelevance. It wasn’t Sonny David blamed anymore but the higher-ups, who cared nothing for Sonny’s little agendas or principles, whose only principle was expedience. Yet Sonny was the one who haunted him. David had made up his excuses by then, his explanations, the anger, the isolation, the fatigue, until from a distance what he had contemplated looked almost innocuous, almost comic, almost sane. And yet the shadow of it remained, as if he had touched something in himself that should have stayed hidden.
It was only after matters with the university had been settled that he ran into Sonny again, not on campus, where he barely set foot anymore, but in the parking lot of a big-box mall near his gun club where he’d gone in search of a birthday gift for Marcus. Sonny had three kids in tow, all boys, who stood ranged beside him in descending order in their cheap Michelin-man parkas like Russian dolls. At the sight of David, Sonny looked caught out, one minute joking with his boys, seeming unburdened in a way David had never seen him, the next his familiar armoured self.
“David! Ah! Well!”
Not even able to look him in the eye. David felt a stab go through him at the sight of his sprawling brood, of his ancient car even more rundown and junk-filled than his own, that it took him a second to recognize as envy.
“Nice family,” was all he said.
“Yes, well. Thank you. Thank you.”
David hadn’t so much as got out of the car that day outside Sonny’s office. And yet what he had pictured in his head had remained etched there as vividly as though he had lived it. The blue autumn sky as he made his preparations; the pellucid air. The weight of the gun in his hand, the feel of each round. The burn in his gut as he knocked on Sonny’s door. It was only when a colleague he knew distantly walked by his car and gave him a curt nod of greeting that David came out of the trance state he seemed to have fallen into. His blood was racing. Not with fear, or with horror; something else. He had put it from his mind.
At the end of the first week of classes Greg puts on a mixer for David at his house, a rambling Queen Anne Victorian at the edge of the university zone that back home would have run him well into the seven figures.
“Just the elect,” Greg says of the guest list. “The ones whose butts you’ll have to kiss now and then.”
The old poison is still there. David was hoping to find him aged, pot-bellied, gone soft, but he looks unchanged, right down to the horn-rimmed geek chic he wore like a badge twenty years ago and that now makes him come across like a veteran of the siege of Sarajevo, bristling with ironies. “Still waiting for my share of the royalties on Masculine History,” he wrote in his first email, making a show of burying the hatchet as a way of planting it squarely in David’s chest. At the mixer he goes out of his way to mention the book at every introduction, never failing to work in its time on the American bestseller lists.
“Oh, yes,” people say. “I think I remember that.”
The real irony is that just as David’s stock has been tanking back home it has been enjoying a small rally south of the border. He had put out a collection of essays a couple of years earlier comparing the decline of American democracy to the failure of the Republic, another stopgap he had cobbled together from old articles and blog posts to fill space while he worked on his opus. The book had looked destined to sink like a stone until a belated rave on its paperback release had been picked up by every two-bit affiliate across the country and had pushed it to the bottom rungs of a few bestseller lists. That Greg has never breathed a word about the book even though the course David has proposed to teach is essentially based on it seems the clearest evidence it is what has put David back on his radar.
“Just be careful looking at this stuff as an outsider,” was all Greg had said about the course. “You don’t want to come across as a dilettante.”
Greg’s “elect” turn out to be mostly horses’ asses from what David can tell, smarmy liberals to a one, all steeped in the prevailing orthodoxies. After only a week on campus David already feels smothered by the Orwellian atmosphere of the place. At the mixer he downs three vodka tonics in quick succession to get by and chases each of them with a tab of methylphenidate, so that by the time the provost arrives, a crew-cut all-American type who exudes the menacing charm of a cult leader, David is ready for blood.
“Greg tells me you’re quite the powerhouse. I hope our students are up to your standards.”
David leans in confidentially, shooting Greg a look to make clear he has the matter well in hand.
“To be honest, there’s an African-American girl in my class I’m already having a hard time keeping my hands off.”
The provost’s grin hasn’t altered. He claps a beefy linebacker’s arm around David’s shoulders.
“Dave, I don’t know how you do things back home, but down here we don’t joke about these matters.”
Greg corners him in the kitchen afterwards looking ready to strike him.
“Christ, David! You can’t pull that shit with guys like him!”
“Come on, how can you stand it? It’s like Pyongyang around here, the PC’s so thick.”
He knows the nerve this will touch in Greg. Back in their bad-boy days no cow had been too sacred for them.
“You don’t have any idea how differently sex plays down here.” But already he sounds defensive, petulant. “Try to remember that.”
Round one to me, David thinks. He has put Greg on notice: he won’t be licking his boots for this bone Greg has thrown him.
He doubts Greg would have had him here at all if he’d had any real clue of the depths he had plucked him from. After the lawyers and fights, the paranoia, the constant sense of siege; after the months of being closed off in his condo like a subject in a sensory deprivation experiment. The growing tolerance to his meds, so that bit by bit he had upped his dosages, chipping away at the stockpile he’d amassed from his double-dipping, and which no one had thought to take away from him, until he had lost all track of how much drug was pumping through him. Sleeping in erratic fits, without schedule, pressing himself at his work until he simply passed out at his desk. Weeks had gone by that might never have happened for all he could remember of them; or he could not say for certain if what he remembered had in fact occurred. He had started seeing things by then, at first just flashes at the edges of his vision but then full-blown hallucinations. Visits from Marcus or Julia or his father, some judgment always hanging over him; from Jennifer Lowe, who had packed her bags and left town without David’s ever having lifted a finger to stop her. In the end he had agreed to the university’s settlement offer mainly just to rid himself of the thought of her, of the prospect of her showing up one day in some hearing room or continuing to haunt him until the men in white suits came.
From the kitchen he hears Greg making the rounds in the living room again.
“You should have seen him in grad school. Like Fredo in The Godfather. Banging cocktail waitresses two at a time.”
So there will be no respite between them. Fine. That is the last thing David wants, some
kind of mid-life reconciliation. Anything that might require him to let down his guard.
He slips out to the back yard for a cigarette and finds Greg’s wife and daughter there, the daughter practising pliés and pirouettes in the shade of a big oak and the wife sitting in a weathered deck chair as though the party inside had nothing to do with her.
He tries to call up her name.
“Not fond of faculty parties?”
Her eyes flit from his like a nervous teen’s. She is not unattractive, fine-boned and pale-skinned and blond like some elf queen or changeling, though from the couple of times he has met her he has taken away only an eerie blankness.
“Dance class,” she says. “I’m the taxi.”
The phrases sound so cryptic and disconnected it takes him a second to follow her meaning.
“Mind if I come?”
She actually laughs, a short “Ha!” as if she has caught him out.
“Not fond of faculty parties?”
This time she leaves an impression. He has heard she is ABD, All But Dissertation—no doubt Greg plucked her right out of his own doctoral stream, moulding her to his tastes and then quickly getting her with child to keep her out of circulation. It is a common syndrome at these small private schools, the grad programs often serving as spouse farms for the aging male faculty. Then at some point the progesterone haze begins to fade and the old ambitions rear their heads again.
The next morning the wife and daughter show up at the coach house Greg has set him up in behind the university’s foreign student centre. He hears their voices from the upstairs office and looks out the window to see the girl playing on a jungle gym that sits next to the house. As soon as he looks out, the girl turns.
