Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  I put a gun to her head and I fucked her, and she liked it. In a different world, some sort of wisdom might have come of that.

  “Don’t think I didn’t know everything when I invited you here, you piece of shit. The health issues, the performance review, that girl you practically raped, for fuck’s sake. The plagiarism in Montreal, even that. You remember the plagiarism, right? But still I invited you. Maybe I figured you could use a leg up. Maybe I thought, fucking idiot that I am, that we might actually be friends again. But you’re poison, David, I should have known that. Everything you touch turns to shit. My only hope is that I never have to lay eyes on you again. And if you ever come within a hundred yards of Sophie again I’ll put a bullet in you, I swear it.”

  Only when Greg has gone does David notice he has left behind a copy of a newsletter from their student days, a compendium of parodies and exposés that the grad students in their department used to put out. He feels something shift in the muck at the bottom of his brain and even before he flips the pages he knows that the article is there, that it isn’t merely the phantom he turned it into long ago as a way of leaving open the possibility it didn’t exist.

  It is the broadest sort of satire, of course, vintage Greg, taking no prisoners, sparing no orthodoxies. A far cry from what David would turn it into, from the possibilities he would see in it, after years of effort and research. And yet the pillaging is clear, right down to examples and subheadings he ended up using in Masculine History almost verbatim, and that surely would have been enough to sink him had anyone bothered to make the connection. Even more damning, perhaps, is that the eventual backlash against David’s revamp seems already prefigured in the satire of the original.

  David doubts it ever crossed Greg’s mind to try to ruin him over something like this. And yet it is as if all these years Greg has put his life on hold awaiting his moment of vindication. At least David has allowed him that. At least he has proved worthy of every calumny.

  David makes coffee and sits staring into the woods through the kitchen window. It has started to snow. The fall has unfolded like some classic fall of another era, the changing leaves, the shortening days, the gradual cold, almost eerie in its unremarkableness. In Marcus’s lifetime or in his own, the days of taking such things for granted may have passed from the earth. He has seen it in the eyes of his students, this sense of an imminent existential threat.

  In a hundred years, or fifty or twenty, all this will end up seeming a sleep from which people refused to be roused, guarding their small proprieties and perks, wondering who would get tenure, who had fucked whose husband or wife. Condition White.

  He has no last resort, no plan, no hope. It is something, at least. Like finally hitting solid ground.

  Beretta M9

  HE STEPS FROM THE tempered air of the hotel lobby and at once is in another country. Heat hits him like a bomb blast; the smell of kerosene and cooking fires and dust. The hotel courtyard is crammed with vehicles, the white minivan the journalists use, an armoured Jeep, the black Peugeot that Yusuf, the hotel’s owner, keeps on standby. The young driver, Said, some sort of nephew or cousin Yusuf has got saddled with, sits smoking listlessly beneath the lone scraggly palm that rises up against the security wall, his eyes sharpening an instant at the sight of David, then going dull again when David heads toward the gate. The couple of times David has been out with the boy he has been thin-skinned and surly, every smallest inconvenience an affront. By mid-afternoon he will be pumped up on khat: David has seen him chewing wad after wad of the stuff with the kitchen help in the service courtyard beneath his room. It is the same in the markets and tea houses throughout the city, a whole generation of men who sit for hours of every day using the drug to feed their violence or to tame it, David isn’t sure which.

  Wali stands guard at the gate with his rifle, part of the troupe of thawb-clad cattlemen Yusuf imports from the provinces to serve as his private militia.

  “Ah, Mr. David!” Flashing a grin. “Where are you going? I can come with you, is better.”

  “I think I’m going to try on my own today.”

  Wali’s grin goes wider.

  “You are a brave man, Mr. David, very brave!” As if sending him off to joyful death.

  It is David’s first outing alone. Mostly he has tagged along in the journalists’ van, with two or three of Yusuf’s cattlemen riding shotgun. Outside the government zone the city is still a jigsaw of clashing factions, each with its own militiamen and checkpoints and tolls. In the neighbourhoods to the north, where the city rises up toward the coastal mountains and every switchback and corner window and cul-de-sac offers some stronghold or point of ambush, new gangs still form almost weekly, only the sections held by the Malana, a Western-style do-gooder David has been researching with whom Yusuf has promised to get him an interview, offering anything like safe passage.

  The street beyond the hotel is deserted, a barren stretch of beaten earth flanked by a jumble of half-built buildings and half-ruined ones. For the first time since he arrived here David feels truly exposed. He has brought sunglasses equipped with a built-in video camera in the hope of putting together some saleable news items or digital extras for his book, though they only make everything he looks at seem more menacing and veiled.

  He turns at the first cross street, following the instructions he got from one of the journalists, Eric, from France. Only now does he begin to see signs of life, men in doorways, cars, open shops. Already the sun is like a hammer blow. He stops at a hole in the wall displaying a motley assortment of hats and picks out a baseball cap that reads Security.

  “How much?”

  The trader sits smoking in the darkness of the shop.

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “I’ll give you seven.”

  The man looks at him so distantly that David thinks he hasn’t understood.

  “Is twenty dollars. Last price.”

  He can’t read the man’s tone. He picks up a fez done in the local pin-hole-style embroidery, in gold and black.

  “And this one?”

  “Five dollars.”

  He peels a five from his wallet.

  By the time he reaches the main boulevard the crowds have thickened. David has seen pictures of the street from the halcyon days of Soviet backing, the flowered planters and royal palms along the centre island, the office buildings in gleaming glass and gleaming white. Now, the planters and palms have given way to rubble and weeds and rows of crude market stalls obscure the buildings. Textbook reversion—David has seen it in other former satellites as well, modern cities that regressed to primitive villages the minute the empire packed its bags.

  David buys a Fanta, piss warm, from a boy hawking them from a water-filled bucket and stands drinking it while the boy waits for the empty. On the roadway, a motorcade bearing the logo of the international delegation in town for peace talks cuts through the traffic flanked by a military escort, a stillness hanging in its wake for a few seconds before the traffic folds back into place.

  The Fanta boy is staring up at him.

  “America? CIA?”

  Anywhere else the question might be a joke. Here, half the guests at David’s hotel seem to be agents of one sort or other, selling arms or buying them, gathering intel, playing factions one against the other or paying off the warlords they have failed to depose to kill off the jihadists they once supported.

  “Not CIA. A journalist.” He drains the bottle and hands it back.

  He is headed for the arms market. It is one of the ideas he has pitched for write-ups to various outlets to help offset the cost of the trip and maybe serve as teasers for his book. After years of work he has had to rethink his original concept: it was getting too bloodless, too invested in his own theorizing. What he needs is something more visceral, exactly what served him so well back in Masculine History. That is what has brought him here, the hope that this place’s reversion, its constant tottering toward anarchy, might give him a paradigm for the failure of
states; the suspicion that what is happening here is not some bizarre aberration but the human default, a microcosm of the brutality and blood lust that have spurred human history ever since Homo sapiens pushed Neanderthal off an evolutionary cliff.

  He looks around to see that the traffic has changed, that the Fanta boy has vanished. This is the other function of his videocam, to act as his brain’s backup for everything he misses or forgets, for the blackouts when whole seconds or minutes fail to register. Such lapses happen daily now, no matter how much he loads himself up with his meds. He’ll be driving down a highway or standing on a street corner or waiting in line at an airport check-in and suddenly he’ll have no idea what he is doing or where he is going or why, as if the thread of time itself, whatever it is that makes a life a continuous whole and not these vanishings his own has become, has been snapped.

  If only he can hold out a while longer. If only he can push through to the end. Every morning he tries to convince himself, tells himself the same lies, which by noon have worn thin.

  At the back of his mind, always with him now, the locusts of sleep, waiting to swarm.

  It had been possible in the end, even easy, to lose even his son. By mere inadvertence, really, as if he had turned his head for a minute and the boy had slipped from him, irrevocably.

  In his mind there had always been a time in the offing when he would make the effort, when he would break through. When there was no book to finish, no issue with money; when Marcus was old enough to understand. Then, not long after his return from the States, Julia announced she had taken a job as dean at their old university in Montreal. There was no question of fighting her: he had neither the resources nor the grounds. He had had to sell his condo by then to cover his living expenses and his debt, still in the same limbo with the university as when he’d gone. His new accommodations, a tiny rented condo with flimsy rice-paper sliders to give the illusion of rooms, had no space for Marcus to sleep and so had ended up limiting their time together to awkward weekend outings that stank of obligation. They never spoke again of their visit to David’s club. David always meant to bring it up with him, to look into shooting courses, to find a way to broach the issue with Julia, yet at the back of his mind he suspected he would just be laying the ground for some new way to fail him.

  It was only when Julia had sold the house that it began to sink in what had happened. The opportunity he had always imagined, the chance to be the good father, to make things up, had passed. Julia moved into the sprawling manse her father still lived in and enrolled Marcus in the same old-boy private school her father had attended two generations earlier, so that visiting him now was like travelling into enemy territory.

  David had stopped in to see him on his way over here, taking him out to a restaurant in the old city that had once been a favourite haunt of his. It was the first time he had seen him since Christmas and he had grown half a foot since then, looking more like David and yet also, in some way, in some new bearing he had, more separate from him.

  “School all right?”

  “You’d have to ask Mom about that.” In a tone of complicity. “She seems to have her own grading system.”

  This was the boy who used to squirm at every question as if it were an awkward piece of clothing he had to squeeze himself into. Almost overnight, he’d turned adult.

  “Do you like that place? All that pretension?”

  “It’s not that bad, really. For a school, I mean.”

  The boy was managing him. Old enough to understand. This was the day David had been waiting for, when they might sit as equals.

  “You never told me where you were going exactly,” Marcus said.

  “Research trip. For my book.”

  “Ah, yes.” Aping a plummy Oxford accent. “The book.”

  It took David an effort to realize the boy had meant no insult. If anything there had been almost a deference in him, an underhanded pride.

  Every moment there had ever been between them seemed suddenly to flash in front of David, every failure.

  “We should go away together this summer. To Europe, maybe. Or a beach.”

  Marcus’s adultness fell away and he was the squirmer again.

  “I dunno. I usually have camps and stuff. You’d have to ask Mom.”

  You’re still his father. Already this seemed less some right he had, some last vestige of hope, than a debt he would never repay.

  There had been only a single time since the divorce that Julia had truly turned to him as a father. A boy Marcus had known since kindergarten had begun to bully him, and though Julia had confronted the boy directly, then had spoken to his teacher, then to the principal, matters had only worsened with each intervention. She had finally called the boy’s parents, who had accused her of being on a witch hunt and threatened legal action if she called again. All of this she had kept from David until it came out in a barrage one afternoon when he went by to pick up Marcus for the weekend.

  “I just want it to end, David, I can’t tell you how this eats at me. I just want it to stop. All I can think of now is ways to hurt this kid. I think of burning his house down. Of running him down in my car.”

  David spent the whole weekend in a fury, imagining how he would ream out Marcus’s teacher, ream out the principal, how he would go to the school board and show them what a mockery all their rhetoric was, how they hadn’t a clue. It was still the same as it had been in his own day, the same cruelty, the same insidiousness, the same idiotic adults who imagined children innocents. There was nothing more brutal than a child. David would show the kid brutal. He would hire some older kid to give him a beating. He would turn up at his house with the Beretta and give him and his asshole parents a taste of what real fear was like.

  He tried to discuss the matter with Marcus.

  “Was there something you did to this boy? Was there a reason he stopped being friends like that?”

  “I don’t know why.” Already close to tears. “I didn’t do anything. Do we have to talk about it? I already talked to Mom.”

  He had taken exactly the wrong tack. That was the worst of it, what made it impossible to see the thing clearly, that beneath his rage was his own sense of shame. He was back in the schoolyard again watching Danny get picked on, feeling stigmatized along with him, feeling marked. Wanting to say to him, For fuck’s sake stand up for yourself.

  David kept running through every possible option, what could be done that would work, that would make the kid pay. Yet the more he thought, the more he felt stymied. The truth was that Julia, too, had taken the wrong tack. She had branded Marcus as weak by fighting his fight for him. Meanwhile the other kid, in being singled out, had gained status. There was no way to defend against that kind of primal algebra.

  “We have to keep at this,” Julia said when he dropped Marcus home. “We have to fix this.”

  David drove by the kid’s house. The front curtains were open and he could make out the father reading in an armchair in the living room, half turning from time to time as though calling out passages to someone in a further room. Something in the look on his face, a certain maleness, vaguely repellent, reminded David of himself. Then, as if on cue, the boy came into the room, not whining or sneering but only holding out a notebook that his father took from him and scanned the pages of before handing it back with a curt nod of approval.

  David had already seen too much by then. He had wanted monsters, something to feed his anger. Instead he might have been looking into his own house back when he had one, at his own family. Whatever violence was being bred here was likely not much different from what had made David imagine taking a Beretta to a child and Julia running him down in her car.

  In the short run it was Julia who solved the problem, insisting the boy be suspended for a few days after he was caught defacing one of Marcus’s notebooks. It was the first real punishment anyone had thought to administer to him and afterwards he left Marcus alone. Who knew what it was that had first set him off, maybe just brut
e animal impulse, something he could no more be blamed for than for the colour of his eyes.

  David, though, knew even then that the only solution that would have made any real difference for Marcus was the one he had never quite had the patience for: that he be a better father. The kind who passed on inner resources. Who taught his son to be strong. The father he had vowed to be, again and again, until every chance had passed.

  The gun market runs for several blocks, a string of tin-roofed stalls and patched-over shops selling M16s, Kalashnikovs, Uzis, RPGs. There is a hair-trigger feel of danger but something muted as well, a sense of lethargy, of boredom almost. On the walk from the hotel David passed hardly a doorway that wasn’t watched over by some young clansman with a rifle, but here half the stalls appear abandoned, rows and rows of lethal weapons spread out on their crude display racks without so much as a child to keep watch over them. Meanwhile men in robes sit smoking Marlboros and drinking tea under the shade netting of the tea houses that flank the street as if all this has nothing to do with them.

  The gun laws here are even more draconian than back home but in practice are a farce, used only for shakedowns and bribes. In the face of recent abductions even some of the journalists have taken to carrying guns, despite the taboo against them, buying them outright if they have ways to get them home or using buyback schemes that amount to a sort of rental system. One of the Americans showed David a full-auto Glock he’d picked up, with a magazine the size of an assault rifle’s.

  “Twelve hundred rounds a minute, if you could manage to feed them in fast enough. The only other people in the world with this thing are the Austrian anti-terror cops.”

  The gun was overkill, the kick on it probably enough to break the man’s wrists. David had done self-defence courses at a camp outside Buffalo before coming out here and has some notion by now of the difference between the fantasy of lethal force and what happens in real time. In real time, the one round you can control is better than the thirty you can’t. In real time, in that first second of blind panic when your life hangs in the balance, the gun you’d thought you’d mastered, landing round after round in the kill zone at twenty-five yards, becomes the bucking animal it had been the first time you’d held it.