Sleep (6 page)

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

He takes up the remote again and surfs. Shopping channel. Cooking channel. Family channel. History. What passes for history these days: reality shows, conspiracy theories, proofs of alien abductions or of biblical truth. Animations of battle scenes where squirts of blood spatter the screen. Doomsday documentaries: this one, a countdown of likely scenarios—pestilence, war—for the end of days.

David feels an unpleasant grinding in him like a gear not quite slipping into place. It is the thought of his book, the new one. A doomsday book, in its way, one he has been planning practically since childhood, since Ostia Antica, in fact, when that same young guide who had admonished him over the piece of mosaic—really just some smooth talker the concierge at their hotel had hooked them up with, probably a cousin of his in need of quick cash—had painted a picture for David of the town’s rapid decline after the fall of Rome. More than a little fanciful, it later turned out, though the image had stayed with David, of this bustling port town of hundreds of thousands reduced to ruins almost overnight. That sense of the transience of things, mysterious and bracing. How in an instant humans could revert from the civilized to the savage.

That is the book he has always wanted to write, about that reversion, not just at the fall of Rome but across all of history,
like something embedded in history’s DNA. He should have started in on it years ago, right after he’d finished the Augustus book, when the whole end-of-civilization rage hadn’t kicked in yet and he would have been seen as a trailblazer. Instead he has wasted his time churning out stopgaps. He wouldn’t have admitted it back then but the fiasco in Montreal had spooked him, exactly when he should have been bold, when he should have been striking out into new territory. Even the Augustus book, by the end, was just him playing it safe, trying to shore up his bona fides, with the result that he’d been crucified both inside the academy and out.

On the screen, they are at death by machine. Armed robots march in the background while Stephen Hawking warns in his computer voice of the day when computers will exceed humans.

Back when these so-called learning channels were still running programs of substance, one of them had actually optioned
Masculine History
. David had signed the deal only a couple of months after starting up with Julia, when it had seemed a final assurance that every problem was behind him. For once he had even managed to sustain a relationship for longer than a dirty weekend, had proved he was not just some sociopath, that he was capable of real connection. He kept waiting to grow tired of Julia, for the flight instinct to kick in, but instead he awoke every morning with the same thankfulness that he hadn’t yet wrecked things. It might have been nothing more than hormones—he has read about that, how at a certain point the nesting instinct kicks in, in men as much as in women. But at the time it felt like arrival. Like coming to the end of a hard road and being able to rest.

When his father had been diagnosed at the start of his doctorate David had felt rudderless, in the grip of feelings that pulled in so many different directions he thought they would
tear him apart. He had been in the midst of his comprehensives, up against deadlines for his dissertation proposal, for research funding, for the whole course of his future, yet once it was clear his father was dying, once David no longer had his defiance of him to spur him on, it felt like all volition had left him. There had been one awful night when he had wept like a child at how little his life seemed set to amount to for all his ambitions. And yet he had got through. Had managed barely into his thirties to reach a pinnacle most academics wouldn’t get to in a lifetime.

With the TV deal even Julia’s father finally deigned to take notice of David, inviting him and Julia to dinner. Not at his house, which David wouldn’t see the inside of until after the wedding, but at his club, a fusty place downtown all oak and velour and padded leather where they were served overcooked salmon and underdone vegetables and where some months later, having failed to scare David off, her father would insist on holding the wedding reception, complete with cash bar. David had expected someone more turned out, not this barrel-chested scrapper, a big man a good three inches taller than David with a shock of white hair that looked like it had been trimmed with a weed-whacker and a plaid sports jacket a good half-century out of fashion. But he was sharp, the sort of man who dared you to underestimate him.

“Here he is, our
novus homo
,” he had greeted David, what the Romans had called those striving plebes who had managed to scrounge a place among the patricians.

That was how the evening unfolded, in these smiling assaults, Julia looking on the whole time like an amused spectator. Away from her father she was scathing about him, but up close David could feel the dark lines of force that bound them.

“You’ll get used to him,” she said afterwards. “He just needs to claim his territory.”

Julia, too, had been quick to claim her territory, right from the start giving up any pretense of hiding their relationship at work, lingering in his office, taking his arm in the halls, planting her stakes. The truth was it pleased him to be taken possession of like this. He could see they were the envy of the department, in the untouchable way of celebrities or royalty, as if there was the sort of rightness to their coming together that put aside the usual pettinesses and rancour. Then the more open they were, the sooner Julia would be free of any lingering residue of Dirksen. For his own part, Dirksen had taken the hint early on—there was no more mooning at her office door, no orbiting at a distance, just his nods and smiles and quick retreats as if he were trying to make himself invisible. David figured he had come around like everyone else had, was probably even happy for them. They were both his protégés, in a way, even David, whom Dirksen had pushed for when he’d been hired and had always shown a paternal protectiveness toward.

The television deal brought another wave of buzz around David’s book and another flurry of speaking invitations, some of them from big-name universities in the States. More than once he was asked, with the sort of discretion that suggested serious intent, whether he had any plans for a move. The idea grew more compelling the more he thought about it. Even the B university back home had approached him, with an offer of a tailor-made cross-appointment. Nothing like the money he might get south of the border, but with course relief and a decent research budget.

He made a point of following up on every query and of shaking the right hands whenever he was on the road, telling himself he was merely finding out what was out there even while a part of him was already living an imagined future of
doubled earnings and halved teaching loads. He didn’t breathe a word of any of this in the department, not even to Julia: he had too much at stake to risk involving her at this stage, still more than two years short of tenure and with plenty of detractors who would be ready to force his hand if any rumour got out that he was thinking of jumping ship. What made sense was to wait until he had decided definitively before bringing the matter up. Maybe even to wait until he had an actual offer; it would be easy enough then to negotiate something for Julia as part of the deal. That was his secret vision, to come to her with an engagement ring in one hand and a fat offer from a prestigious American school in the other. This despite all the evidence he’d had by then of her attachment to the city, the friends she’d had since kindergarten, the old haunts she’d taken him to, her secret devotion to her insufferable father. Somehow he shut all that out, drunk with his own possibilities.

He was just on the verge of expressing interest to a couple of places when Dirksen waylaid him in the hall one day as he was coming back from class. By then Dirksen had drifted so much to the edge of David’s field of vision that he had to keep reminding himself to actually take notice of him.

“I’ve got a student of yours in my office who wanted to see you.” Smiling, a bit quizzically. “Just a small matter, I think.”

David didn’t think anything of it—it was just like Dirksen to take in wandering strays like that and make sure they were tended to. The student was a hulking plodder from David’s Late Republic seminar who never said boo in class, sitting hunched in Dirksen’s office next to a hippopotamus of a woman decked out in bangles and shawls as if she had just come from a Bedouin wedding.

“I think Maddy and his mother have a question for you about his final paper,” Dirksen said, and there it sat on his desk, a big
B minus on its cover page that David had awarded it, as he recalled, only because he couldn’t be bothered with the work of justifying the lower grade it actually deserved.

The woman was rummaging in her purse as if searching for some round of cheese or bottle of wine she had brought to propitiate him.

“Professor, please.” She had pulled out a newspaper clipping, which she laid with great ceremony next to the essay. “I can show you.”

It took David an instant to recognize the clipping as one of his own articles, a review he’d done recently for a local paper of a book on the Roman dictator Sulla. A couple of lines near the end of it had been carefully underlined in pencil.

David felt a shiver at the back of his neck.

“My son, he says you are famous. That you are writing a famous book. I tell him, he is lucky to have good professor. For good professor, he can work harder. He can learn more.”

Already David was finding it difficult to follow her. What threw him off was this deference, which did not waver the whole time she was making her case.

“You see, you write, ‘Good work,’ only that, no mistakes. But only B minus! He is trying for lawyer, my son, on the test, is good, but here only B minus. Then I see in the newspaper, where you write, is like Maddy! If famous professor can write for the newspaper, why only B minus?”

David’s temperature was rising. He wished Dirksen had had the wherewithal to spare him this. He was sick of students assuming that anything in their papers that didn’t have a big red circle around it was essentially flawless. Of parents coming to beg higher grades for their unremarkable offspring in the hope of getting them into law or medicine or a Harvard MBA.

The woman was urging the newspaper clipping on him, but he wouldn’t take it. Dirksen was still sitting there like a lump, his vicar’s smile plastered on his face.

“I beg you, Professor. Maybe can be B plus or A. To help him for lawyer.”

“You can’t expect him to get a fucking A just because he copied something he probably heard me say in class!”

The woman started back as if David had made a swipe at her. In the corner of his eye, he saw Dirksen go white.

“No, Professor Pace.” It was Maddy. He was the only one who looked unfazed. “I remember, I came up with the idea myself. Not that I would have if I hadn’t been in your class. I mean, you’re the one who taught us to think like that.”

The room had started to warp and shift. He shouldn’t have said
probably
, shouldn’t have left room for doubt. He shouldn’t have said
fucking
. He shouldn’t have given shape to an accusation that hadn’t even been made yet.

Dirksen was finally stirring to action.

“I think we understand your point, Mrs. Hakimi.” In a soothing tone David was actually grateful for. “Why don’t you let us discuss this on our own and see if we can’t find a solution.”

“Yes, Professor, thank you, I thank you!”

All David could see by then was a great black maw opening up before him. The matter came down to a short passage at the end of his Sulla review comparing a recent corruption scandal in the city to one in Roman times. A throwaway, really, just David acting clever, but of strikingly similar gist to an idea Maddy had developed at some length in his paper. Even the wording had echoes, David saw them at once. There was no chance Maddy had lifted the point from the review, which had come out only days earlier, after the essay had been marked and returned. One of the few margin comments David had bothered to make on
the paper had singled out exactly the passage in question. “Great analogy,” he’d written. “Good work.”

David sat staring at the evidence after the duo had gone, unable to take it in.

“There’s no way that kid came up with this on his own! I distinctly remember discussing it in class. Either that or in a private meeting with him.”

But already he was scrambling, contradicting himself, until he wasn’t even sure anymore what the truth was.

Dirksen, to his credit, hadn’t expressed the least hint of judgment in any of this, not even over David’s outburst.

“Let’s not lose our heads.” David could feel himself clutching at Dirksen’s calm. “It sounds like all they’re looking for is a grade review. Why don’t you let me give the paper a read and we’ll see if we can’t find some way for everyone to come out happy.”

When Dirksen called him back into his office the next day, however, all his assurance was gone. One of the boy’s other professors, it turned out, a Renaissance witch David had never got along with, had got wind of the dispute and had pressed Dirksen for details.

Dirksen wouldn’t meet David’s eye.

“I held her off, of course, but you have to understand this complicates things a bit, there’ll have to be some sort of follow-up. The boy must have talked to her after he left here. I suppose if you’d given him a bit more hope.” All the judgment Dirksen had withheld the previous day seemed there now. “The important thing is just to put your case together so we can keep this out of your tenure file. To spare you any awkwardness down the road.”

David wanted to scream. He already knew by then that he had nothing to prove he was in the right, no class notes that might clear him, no record of a private meeting. Not even his own
confidence: the truth was, he’d reread the paper and been surprised, stunned really, at how cogent it had suddenly sounded.

Over the smallest thing—a couple of lines, it could happen to anyone—he was looking at ruin. Word would get out, it always did, and all his options would vanish, and meanwhile the matter would sit in his file ready to bite him again when he came up for tenure. Maybe some zealot would have managed to dig up dirt on
Masculine History
by then and David would be confirmed as a serial plagiarist, lucky to land a sessional job in the back of beyond.