Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  “So what was it?” Julia says. “Computer games the whole weekend?”

  Marcus shoots him a look.

  “We did some other stuff. Movies and things.”

  It is only when Marcus is gone that David wonders at the foolish risk he has taken, not just with his son’s safety but with his own access to him. He was merely pandering to him, perhaps, risking everything just for the sake of winning him over. Was trying to cast what they did as some sort of rite of passage when maybe all he was passing on was his own darkness.

  What matters now is that the weekend not turn into just one more false start. That he keep his resolutions to spend more time with the boy, to be the father Marcus needs, the one he has always wanted to be.

  Then the next morning there is a knock at his door in the dark of pre-dawn and every resolution gives way.

  This is how it goes between them: she shows up at his door in the lengthening dark of early morning and they fuck. They don’t talk about what they are doing or what it means, don’t make declarations or plans. There is only the stink of their bodies, of their heat, their sweat, the need that rises in him the instant he hears her knock.

  Always, at the door, that last look over her shoulder.

  “He can’t ever know. Not ever. It would kill him.”

  What he hears, though, what he sees in her eyes, is, “kill me.”

  She likes him to hurt her. He doesn’t see this at first, not even after all the internet smut he has consumed across the whole gamut of depravity and perversion. But then slowly he gathers that the fear, for her, is the point, not that it isn’t real but that it is her addiction somehow, what she can’t resist. There are no rules or safe words in this, no sense of a game they can step out of, and yet it is still a game, a way of reopening a wound again and again.

  Bit by bit, her addiction addicts him, like a drug she pumps into him each time they fuck that he then needs to withdraw from each she time she flees.

  “It’s always so rushed like this,” he says. “We need to work something out. So we can take our time.”

  She turns away as if he had slapped her.

  “This isn’t like that.”

  “What’s it like, then? Because I don’t have a clue.”

  “Don’t you see? It’s like nothing. Like something the instant you talk about it, it has to stop.”

  But the next morning she is at his door again.

  Every day to him now feels like a day won against a lethal threat. Attending faculty dinners, doing public lectures, teaching his class with the same sense of heightened, hidden alertness as when he is walking around with his loaded SIG. Going out of his way to pass by Greg’s office to forestall the least hint of avoidance or change.

  “Isn’t that David Pace of Masculine History fame? Right here in our own humble hallways?”

  David keeps up the old patter, keeps up their squash games and restaurant meals. This is the hardest part, the cruellest, the one that most makes his heart race, until it is all he can do to keep from shouting, Fool, open your eyes!

  He has stopped asking himself what he is at, how he finds the way to live with himself. Instead he plunges forward headlong, afraid to slow or look to his side to see what damage he is doing, what devil spurs him on; afraid of the moment of tolerance, when the adrenalin rush starts its crushing decline. Every time he and Sophie fuck they seem to push one step closer to ruin. He fists her and shits on her, ties her up like a pig for slaughter. He fucks her from behind holding his loaded SIG to her head.

  “Come or I’ll kill you,” he says, “I fucking swear it,” and she does, as if her life depended on it.

  They never discuss these acts or plan them, only move forward like blind things, eating whatever they stumble on, crawling into whatever hole. Afterwards it is always a shock to return to the mundane world, to breakfasts and school drop-offs, to Cato and classes at three. This, too, they never speak of, everything that is left out of the shadowy country they defect to together, what carnage threatens if its borders fail. All the things about her that he doesn’t quite let himself take in, how her eyes flatline sometimes, the faded pencil-thin scars on her limbs, on her wrists. How the more he sees her, the more he travels with her to the darkest places, the more she seems somehow lost to him, until bit by bit he begins to crave what he has tried to close out, the small, telling details, the thoughts that run through her head.

  He asks her once about Greg, what she does with him, if they still fuck. That is how he puts, purposefully crude, as if it is just another part of their brutality, though she pulls away from him at once.

  “Why would you ask that? Why would you want to know?”

  “So I don’t have to think about it. So I don’t have to imagine it.”

  Instead of answering him she takes up his laptop and goes to a login page whose password runs to a good fifteen or twenty characters.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s what we do. It’s what he does.”

  She has entered a cybersex site of the kind David himself has gotten his jollies from, dozens of avatars milling around in a lurid dance-club setting done up in every sort of fetishist gear and getting off on every sort of perversion. Torture scenarios, asphyxiation and cutting, whips and chains, like scenes from The Last Judgment. Sophie manoeuvres her POV out an exit door to a blighted suburban landscape where people run screaming, where corpses lie rotting in the street covered in rats.

  “So he visits these sites? That’s how he gets off?”

  She stops at a house with a crumbling turret, a ruined veranda. On the lawn, some kind of dead animal. It takes David a moment to recognize the house as her own.

  She kills the screen.

  “He doesn’t visit them. He builds them.”

  She was right to resist him. Already he knows too much. Now Greg will be there in his head whenever he is with her, the sense of Greg’s strangeness, not so different from his own. The creeping fear that all of this comes down to the two of them, that Sophie is merely collateral damage.

  He can’t ever know. And yet the knowing has always felt certain to David. He has seen it in his dreams, in the telling word he lets slip, the clue he plants that can’t be overlooked; has seen it in the visions he has of showing up at Greg’s door in the dead of night and fucking Sophie right there on his living room couch, on his kitchen counter, on his front lawn, right in front of the neighbours, in front of his child. Each time he makes love to Sophie that is the real gun that he holds to her head, whatever monster it is in him, whatever god, that keeps needing to push him to ruin.

  David is winding up one of his classes one evening when Greg comes to stand at his open door.

  “Don’t mind me,” he says. “Just seeing how it’s done.”

  “We were just talking about the Romans’ perfection of ethnic cleansing. Something I think your own people have had some experience in.”

  Greg’s smile freezes. He waits at the door until the last of the students have cleared out.

  “What kind of asshole comment was that?”

  David knows that with the right barb he might still defuse things.

  “I just don’t like being checked up on, that’s all.”

  “Checked up on? I came by to see if you wanted to grab a bite, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Ah. My mistake.”

  It is too late. Something, some bit of truth, has flashed through.

  “You can be a real fucking jerk, you know that?”

  “So I guess that nixes the dinner invitation.”

  “You know what? I’ve lost my appetite.”

  The next time Sophie shows up at his house she makes him come to the door to let her in instead of using the key he leaves for her now.

  “Come inside, for Christ’s sake, it’s freezing out there.”

  “Did Greg say something to you?”

  “Not about you. We had one of our spats, that’s all. I touched one of his sore spots. Why, what did he say?”

&nbs
p; The look in her eyes then, like black water, sends a chill through him.

  “I can’t stay,” she says, and then, with strange candour, not looking at him, “He was looking forward to this so much. To your coming here.”

  When she has gone the words hang like frozen breath.

  Days pass and she doesn’t return. He has a cell number for her now and an email address but is on strict instructions to use them only as a last resort. From having consumed him for weeks, the affair seems set to die away like a straw fire. He waits for the relief that always comes at the end of things but every morning he is up earlier, listening for the sound of her key in the door.

  He drops by Greg’s office.

  “Look. About the other night.”

  “If you’re going to apologize, David, then fuck you. The last thing I want is anything to undermine my bad opinion of you.”

  This is about as close as they are likely to get to a reconciliation. It is only now that he has squandered it that David is beginning to admit the windfall Greg’s goodwill has been.

  “It wasn’t that. I just wanted to mention an ethnic cleansing support group you might be interested in.”

  He ought to be grateful, ought to count his blessings that the thing has ended without their having aroused any suspicions. Instead he starts running again, along her old route, at her usual time. When the days go by and he doesn’t spot her he goes out earlier and stays out longer, sometimes alone on the trails except for the cameras and the guards. Each time he passes the stairs at the end of the woods he thinks of the moment when the thing was just pure possibility. The best moment, somehow. All the rest, he begins to tell himself, was just the diminishing return of addiction. One day, as he pressed his SIG to her head, he would have had to pull the trigger. One day, like the beast-gods of the ancient mystery cults, he would have had to tear her limb from limb.

  From the cache on his laptop he manages to retrieve the login data from the site Sophie took him to. Day after day he prowls it using Sophie’s avatar. The world of it stretches on and on without apparent end, all in the same ghoulish half-familiarity and half-ruin, every doorway leading to some new torture chamber or snuff scene or orgy. It is like walking around in the darkest underside of Greg’s brain. What disturbs him is how at home he feels, how there is nothing here he doesn’t understand, that hasn’t become standard fare in his own late-night drugged ecstasies.

  He starts to get sloppy, forgetting to enter any proxy settings to mask his address or simply not bothering to. Then one day, the site suddenly goes black.

  Only a few seconds pass before his phone rings. It is the first time she has called him.

  “You can’t do that!” With a fierceness he has never heard in her. “You can’t use my account! He can track you!”

  “I need to see you. I’m going nuts here. We need to talk, at least.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t.”

  The line goes dead.

  For American Thanksgiving he buys a bolt-action Weatherby and books a spot at a hunting lodge a few hours from the city. By then nearly two weeks have passed since he last laid eyes on Sophie. Already she is fading from him, already he can hardly picture her face or call up the things that they did with any sort of clarity or sureness. As the drug of her drains from him he feels like he is the one who is fading. He has begun to up his meds again, is back to a pack a day of cigarettes. Sometimes at night he drives into ruined neighbourhoods where gunshots ring out and cars sit stripped and abandoned just to feel the fear go through him, as if it is all that still holds him to the earth.

  The hunting lodge turns out to be in the back of beyond, lost in a blasted landscape of rundown farms and endless scrub. He has opted for spot-and-stalk, the guide they have set him up with still in his teens, dressed in a ratty parka that looks straight from the Goodwill. They set out at dawn, for a long time trekking through the same featureless scrub David has seen from the roads.

  “I thought there’d be more clearings. More elevation.”

  “Don’t worry, man, there’s clearings all right. You’ll get your buck, that’s a promise.”

  A sprinkling of snow has fallen overnight that slowly turns the terrain to muck as the sun climbs. A dozen times David thinks of cutting his losses and heading back to camp. He ought to have stayed in the city. He ought to have gone home to visit Marcus, like he’d resolved.

  “Bit more of a challenge the end of the season like this,” the guide says. “They’re not so fucked up with hormones anymore.”

  It is late morning before the landscape finally starts to open up. They come to a valley a good-sized creek runs through and follow it for several miles. Only now does David start to feel the world fall away. On hunts, out in the open like this, he’ll go the whole day without meds. For an hour or two he’ll feel the ache of withdrawal and then some animal brain kicks in, from the sunlight and air, the thrum in his blood of the coming kill.

  They have been following the valley an hour or so when the guide spots a buck near the ridgeline of the far slope. A big one, three or four years old, his antlers rising up like great naked oaks. The guide’s whole manner changes now. He smears his clothes with mud to keep down his smell and helps David do the same.

  “Last chance for a smoke or a piss before we go in. Bow hunters been up and down this place this last month so you can bet he’ll be pretty spooked.”

  They steal forward like shadows now, avoiding abrupt movements and being careful to keep downwind. The buck moves at a brisk pace, cutting an angle against the wind so he can catch any scent of available does that drifts down to him from their bedding zones. It takes a couple of hours to get within striking distance of him but then they have to scramble to stay out of the wind, losing sight of him again and again amidst the thick brush that lines the ridgeline.

  The buck stops and they get in close enough for a shot, maybe three hundred yards. David looks to the guide.

  “Too far, man.” David is relieved. “Anyway, I bet he moves before you could get your scope on him.”

  Sure enough the buck turns and heads back into the brush.

  The afternoon is waning by the time the buck sniffs out a prospect, a doe grazing alone in a small clearing just beyond the ridge. David and the guide move in to about a hundred and fifty yards and shelter behind a stand of sumac. The doe starts as the buck approaches and edges away; the buck circles, approaches again, and the doe starts again.

  The guide grins.

  “You can get a shot in if you want it. Some guys like to wait.”

  The doe has calmed. The buck circles behind her and dips the impressive monument of his head to lick at her calves, her thighs, the wet pink of her privates.

  “Let’s wait, then.”

  The delicate push-and-pull goes on for several more minutes. The doe balks again and the buck peers around with what looks like feigned indifference, then starts from scratch again. Finally, with astounding gentleness, he makes an attempt to mount. It is always baffling to David, this mating of beasts, how familiar the protocols look, how human. How, in contrast, the mating of humans seems so much more bestial, more depraved.

  Once he has managed a proper coupling the buck is finished in a matter of seconds. The doe holds his weight only an instant before bolting.

  “Moment of truth,” the guide whispers. “Make it count.”

  All year the buck has lived only for this, the sole source of whatever sense of purpose he might feel on the earth. The jockeying, the desperate search, the does who resist him, the children he will never know. David would have liked to follow him back to whatever bed of mud or reeds he has made for his home.

  “The doe’s still too close.”

  “Take your time,” the guide says. “No worries.”

  The buck turns his head in their direction as if he has sensed them and David takes the shot. He almost thinks he can see in the buck’s eyes the sudden realization that something has gone badly awry, that he has made some fa
tal miscalculation. When his head drops, it drops like dead weight. A single bullet is all it takes.

  They dress the thing in darkness, loading as much as they can in their packs and hanging the rest from the trees to come back for. They leave the head with its massive rack swinging from a bough in the dark like a warning.

  “Yours if you want it,” he says to the guide. “You earned it.”

  It is late when they get back to the lodge. David feels a blackness by then that he can’t seem to shake. Nothing like guilt over the kill yet somehow the kill is the source. The thought of returning to his job, to his friend, to his book, his familiar heap of lies.

  He decides to settle his bill and check out. In the car, before he starts back, he sends a text. Need to c u.

  It is the middle of the night when he gets home. He takes a double dose of his sodium oxybate and falls into a dead sleep, waking at first light to the sound of a key in his front door. But already as he starts down the stairs he knows that he has miscalculated. That the presence he feels in the house is not her.

  He finds Greg sitting in the kitchen still in his coat and gloves, the Weatherby propped in the corner behind him.

  “I don’t want to hear a fucking word from you, do you understand? Not a fucking word.”

  Sophie’s cell phone sits on the table. So this is where it ends, David thinks. Any minute Greg will pick up the Weatherby, chamber a round. Crime of passion.

  David feels a lifting at the thought.

  “Here is how things are going to go.”

  What happens instead is much more predictable and banal. The sanctimoniousness, the bravado, the insults. Above all, the need to save face: Greg actually brings up deadlines and grades, resignation letters, trying to tie up every loose end. David can barely bring himself to listen. The thought keeps forming in his head: Open your eyes.