Sleep (22 page)

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?”

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 fatal 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
.

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.