Sleep (12 page)

A war movie is raging on the projection screen but the boys aren’t attending to it. Instead they are huddled on the floor with a furtive air around some object Jamie has apparently laid out for them.

“Marcus! We have to go.”

They start at the sound of his voice and David sees what it is they are gawking at. It is so far from anything he has expected that he can’t quite process it at first. Some sort of replica or toy, he thinks, though it is so convincing-looking, right down to its dull metallic sheen, that he feels a shiver.

The boys have gone silent.

“Nice piece. Mind if I take a look?”

He takes it up from the wooden case it sits in. The instant he feels the solidity of it, he knows in his bones it is real.

He tries to keep his voice even.

“Where’d you get this thing?”

“Grandma gave it to me. She said it belonged to Grandpa.”

The shiver has become a throb. It is as if the clue he searched for his whole childhood has suddenly been handed to him.

“She gave it to you?”

“She said it wasn’t loaded or anything.”

It is not much larger than the palm of his hand. The grips on the handle are embossed with a logo done in an elaborate Gothic script, though what strikes David is the rough machining of the rest, the metal ridged and notched as if some last finishing pass has been skipped. The only markings are a tiny one above one of the grips like a silver mark and a serial number above the trigger guard.

The boys’ eyes are riveted on him, Marcus’s as much as the others’. On impulse he drops the gun’s magazine. The dulled copper heads of several bullets show in it.

The boys stare open-mouthed.

“Ma!
Ma!
Would you get down here please? Danny, you might want to see this!”

By the time everyone has gathered, his mother is already in full denial mode.

“You and Danny had guns when you were younger than he is! What’s the big deal?”

“Did you think to ask his parents before you gave it to him? Did you think what might have happened if he’d taken it to school to show his friends? A loaded handgun?”

Nelda flushes.

“My God, Danny. A loaded gun.”

“Who knew it was loaded, for God’s sake? I took it out on the balcony and pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so I figured it was safe. If it isn’t working, what difference does it make if it’s loaded?”

Danny has taken over. He pulls the slide back on the gun and jiggles his pinky around in the chamber, then peers into the barrel.

“What were you thinking, Ma? This isn’t something you give to a kid.”

“I just wanted him to have a keepsake, that’s all. Something of his grandfather’s.”

Danny eases the bullets out of the magazine and sets the gun back in its case.

“Sorry, son, I think we’ll have to turn this sucker in. It’s not like the old days when I used to keep my Winchester out in the garden shed.”

Somehow, in this gutless scolding, it seems their mother has prevailed again.

“Why do you have to turn it in?” she says. “It’s ours, isn’t it? Just keep it for him until he’s older.”

“It doesn’t really work that way, Ma. I mean, where did it even come from? It doesn’t even have a brand name on it. Don’t tell me he brought the thing with him from the old country.”

“You know how he was. The past was the past. He used to
keep it at the top of the closet, that’s all I knew. I didn’t ask questions.”

David wonders how he could have missed it in all those years of prying. What dark theories it might have confirmed for him if he had found it.

“Why don’t you let me take it in?”

“Nah, Davie, it’s no trouble. I know people here.”

“That’s why it should be me. The word goes around someone from the tribe brought in a gun, right away all the old bullshit gets trotted out.”

“Let him take it, Danny,” Nelda says. “Just the thought of it here even one more night—”

“Fine, then. Just don’t shoot yourself with it. And Marcus, not a word to your mother about any of this or we won’t see you again till you’re twenty-one.”

David takes the bullets as well, dropping them into a jacket pocket. He can feel Marcus eyeing the gun case as they walk out to his mother’s car.

“When are you going to take it in?”

It is out of character for Marcus to break a silence like this.

“I dunno.” All David can think of is what the gun felt like in his hand. “Maybe tomorrow. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering, that’s all.”

Clearly Julia’s prohibitions against guns haven’t stopped Marcus from being fascinated with them. David, too, though he had hidden it, had been drawn to them: more than once he had snuck Danny’s Winchester or .22 out of the house to hunt groundhogs and squirrels or to shoot out the windows of an abandoned factory near their place. A couple of times, though it boggles his mind to think of it now, he had hidden himself on a hill overlooking the uptown expressway extension and taken potshots at the licence plates of passing vehicles.

In the car, he sets the gun case at his feet.

“You know, I’m thinking they’d probably let me keep the thing as long as it’s registered. It’s a family heirloom, after all.”

“Keep it for what?” his mother says. “What do you need it for? You said you’d turn it in, so turn it in.”

He shoots a complicit look at Marcus in back.

“Listen to yourself, Ma. You were the one who wanted to keep it in the family.”

He is anxious to get home so he can try to trace the gun’s origins. So he can hold it in his hands again.

He presses his feet to the case, keeping it close.

David opens his eyes to darkness, fighting to get his bearings like someone awaking to the sound of a threat. He is in his mother’s car still, alone; he has fallen asleep.

The car is parked in front of Julia’s house. Clearly his mother has taken it upon herself to come here directly instead of letting him collect his car at her place and bring Marcus down on his own. Because of the time, she’ll say; because he fell asleep.

She and Julia stand talking in the sallow light of the front veranda with what seems a grotesque complicity, as if he were some problem child they were consulting over. Marcus, meanwhile, is nowhere in sight, spirited away from him without so much as a goodbye between them. David has half a mind to waltz into the house to claim his due.
His
house, a part of him still thinks of it as, maybe more now than when he actually lived in it. The house he bled for.

He feels the gun case at his feet and thinks,
Fuck it
.

Julia actually takes his mother’s hand in both of hers when they part as if she has saved Marcus from certain death.

“Please don’t do that again,” he says when his mother returns. “Please don’t humiliate me like that in front of her.”

She doesn’t fight him. It feels like the first concession she has made to him the entire day.

They drive up to her condo in silence. His mother takes the parkway for a stretch but then cuts up through a complicated series of backstreets that she manoeuvres with practised ease. Maybe she isn’t losing it after all. The truth is that David hardly sees her enough anymore to be able to judge. That there hasn’t been any real connection between them for years, probably, since before his marriage at least. Since his father’s death, in short, though he has never admitted as much. He remembers standing in the rec room of their house after he died watching her pack things for her move and thinking that all this was dead to him now, that he wanted only to be gone, free and clear. That he didn’t want to know.

She had given him a box of photographs then from their Italy trip. For years he had carted them around with him with each move, going through them for probably the first time only when he moved into the condo after the divorce. Half of them were from a visit they’d made to her hometown in the south, of people and places he had barely any recollection of now, the rest from the couple of weeks they’d spent as tourists in Rome. Of these the bulk were from their visit to Ostia Antica, mostly close-ups of him and his mother that had surely been taken by their young guide, who appeared in none of them. His mother looked younger than he remembered her, girlish, almost, but elegant, dressed in a form-fitting sleeveless dress she had probably picked up in one of the high-end shops that flanked their hotel in Rome. It was something she had fostered in him, an appreciation for style, taking him shopping downtown at the end of every summer to pick out his clothes for the fall. “Danny doesn’t care,” she would say. “But you know what it means to look good.”

From Ostia Antica there was a shot of him and his mother at the Thermopolium, with its fresco of food and wine and still-intact bar; another of his mother laughing at the picnic lunch their guide had laid out for them in the courtyard garden beyond it. His mother had been different those weeks in Rome. The whole time of her marriage David had never once heard his father raise his voice against her, had never seen him be anything other than the gentleman, attentive, indulgent, everything that David knows he himself has never been to a woman. Yet in Rome it was as if his mother, too, was suddenly free of some shadow, some darkness.

She turns into the visitors’ lot at her building and pulls up next to the no-options hatchback David picked up used after the divorce.

“David, don’t think I don’t see it. Don’t think I don’t know how hard all this stuff has been for you.”

There is sympathy in her voice but also something deeper, more wrenching. Disappointment, perhaps. For a moment he sees the woman she was on their Italy trip, remembers the thrill of waking with her in their hotel room to the buzz of Vespas in the street, the rattle of storefront shutters. Remembers sitting in that courtyard in Ostia Antica in the tawny afternoon light, wishing they’d never go home.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Ma. I’ll manage.”

“Because you’ve done such a good job so far. I’m saying this with the best intention, David. Don’t let whatever it is you’re going through wreck your life. You’re not young enough anymore for a second chance.”

In his car he sets the gun case at the foot of the front passenger seat so he can keep an eye on it. He heads downtown, but when he reaches his cross street he doesn’t turn, unable to face the prospect of making a meal, of eating it alone. His
place still has such a provisional air, like a temporary stop en route to some other, fuller life. One he has so far been unable to imagine.

He considers crossing the river to eat at one of his former haunts in the old neighbourhood but the thought only fills him with bitterness. Instead he keeps driving until he hits the lakeshore, then follows it out past the condo towers and hotels, the badlands of the old port, until he comes to the turnoff for the spit. It has been years since he was down here, though in the old days it was like a gathering place for the tribe. Maybe a hundred trucks a day came through then, from every contractor in the city, edging the spit out bit by bit into the lake with the city’s detritus. The rumours always swirling about this one who had snuck in a load of car batteries or asbestos or that one the lead-laced dirt from some old factory site; and then the other rumours, about mob hits and bodies in concrete. A couple of union men disappeared when David was a kid, guys David himself had seen speak at the local union hall when his father had taken him and Danny there, and the story had always been that they were pushing up dandelions down at the spit.

Already from the entrance gate, at the bottom of a desolate zone of industrial warehouses and empty lots, the place looks unrecognizable. What was once a moonscape of shattered concrete and jutting rebar now, in the dark, gives off the lush silhouette of a nature preserve. A chain has been drawn across the roadway to bar entry but no one has bothered to lock it. David unravels one end from its hitching post to pass his car through and reattaches it behind him. A beaten track leads him past stands of poplar and willow; walking trails lead off into darkened bush. Through his open window, a lake smell and a racket of crickets and of frogs, who bellow and moan in the dark like fiends in heat.

Somehow, out of this garbage heap, nature has reclaimed
her own, only the occasional lump of concrete or brick pushing up through the roadway giving any sign of the tons of detritus and waste that lie underneath. The road winds past ponds and lagoons that glimmer in the moonlight like ancient tar pits. Something scuttles across his path but he doesn’t make out what, a shadowy mass whose eyes flash in his headlights before it melts back into the bush.

Gradually the vegetation thins and gives way to the familiar blight of old. Bulldozed earth rutted with truck tracks; staggered heaps of rubble that stretch off toward the black of the lake. He has reached the spit’s festering edge. He parks by the water, a highway of moonlight stretching out in front of him. Nearby a backhoe sits parked against a half-levelled pile of debris with a logo on the door he remembers from childhood, from one of the old-boy operations that even back then the city tended to favour.

He takes out the cigar his brother gave him and lights it, sucking the smoke right into his lungs, wanting to feel the burn of it. The smell teases at him again and then it comes back to him, the image of his father in the back yard with his cigar, though he isn’t sure if he is remembering or if his mind has merely conjured the image from scratch, is trying to give him the past he might have had if he’d been different, had cared about different things, had bothered to see them. The past he might have wanted. He has learned from his sleep books that even the waking mind is a place of merest invention, winnowing the billions of points of data the universe emits every second down to the handful of isolate bits it needs to create the dream it calls the world. All the rest, all the excess that the brain has no use for, the colours it doesn’t register, the smells and sounds, the inconceivable worldviews and extra dimensions, are like the universe’s dark matter, invisible, unknown, though the very pith and meaning of things might reside in it and every
accepted truth be overthrown. David wonders sometimes if the fraying he feels at the edges of himself is this dark matter worming its way in, demanding accommodation.