Sleep (7 page)

The worst of it would be the humiliation. The look on his colleagues’ faces. On Julia’s. The smirk on her father’s.

He was ready to beg, even to Dirksen.

“Ed, you know how it’ll look if something like this gets out. The kind of stain it can leave.”

Some shadow flitted across Dirksen’s face, of compassion maybe. For some reason David thought he was thinking of Julia, of his own transgression.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Forcing a smile. “I’m sure in a couple of weeks the whole matter will be behind you.”

David is falling, scrambling for handholds, hurtling toward solid ground or just the realization that there is no solid ground, only space without end. Then he opens his eyes with a jerk: he has nodded off. Five minutes? Twenty? He can’t say. When he drops out like this his head fills with such a rush of images he has the sense that months might be passing, whole lives. Another of his symptoms, that his dreams light up like the Milky Way the instant he closes his eyes as if all along they have been reeling there at the back of his thoughts, waiting for dark.

On the Doomsday Channel the countdown has reached number one: death by warm front. Animals changing their
habitats; flowers blooming out of season. Hurricanes, forest fires, floods. Great sheets of ice fall into the sea while satellite maps show Florida, London, Bangladesh disappearing beneath the rising tides. The stuff of nightmare. Of history.

The irony of history: that in the long run, it hardly matters. Ice caps spread and recede, continents drift, tumours the size of the moon split away and it is all just the blink of an eye on the way to final extinction. There is something comforting in that, liberating. In their deepest selves, David suspects, apocalypse is what people long for, to be freed of all caring, all restraint.

What he’d felt when he’d left Dirksen’s office was something like that freedom, a rush like heroin going through him or poison, the sense of his ties to the world being cut. The worst would happen and all the disguises he had made for himself, the careful lies, would fall away. Even Julia: this wasn’t something she could forgive him for, not really, he had already convinced himself of that. She needed him to be the golden boy, the star, not this blemished thing.

Then the instant he’d accepted the worst, the way forward was suddenly clear. All he had to do was act, to stop his dithering and forge ahead with the plans he had already been setting in motion for months. Now, at a distance of years, he suspects he might have invented the entire crisis just to galvanize himself into action, imagining himself at a precipice when chances were that the whole matter would have blown over even if he had done nothing. In any event he had proved Dirksen right, in the space of a couple of weeks managing to put the whole fiasco behind him, on his own terms. By then he had proposed to Julia and had brought her around to the idea of a move; he had quit his job and landed a new one. With his resignation there was no real point to any sort of inquisition beyond the practical one of the boy’s grade, which,
without the least qualm, he bumped up to the A his mother had asked for.

David had been proud then of how well he had arranged things, had thought himself bold, the master of his fate. He had managed to talk Julia into the move through a blend of seduction and coercion, taking her out to a resort in the Townships for a weekend getaway with a big diamond ring in tow and making her promises and telling her lies, framing the move as a matter of getting better terms for the both of them, of catching the tide. By then he already had a firm offer in hand from the university back home, the only place he had called, in fact, using the interest from the States as leverage but never really following up on any of it. This was his concession to Julia, was what he told himself, just as he told himself that his strongarming—that he hadn’t hesitated, for instance, to put her tryst with Dirksen into the mix, probably what had broken her in the end—was all to the greater good of their relationship. Now, though, he sees that he was just using Julia as a cover for his own fears. That what would truly have been bold back then would have been to be honest, to have shown her the whole of himself as he had wanted to from the start.

He still remembers the stupid pleasure he took announcing to Dirksen that he was leaving.

“You have a good job here, David. Don’t throw it away.”

Certain then that he was making the right choice, that he was averting exactly the sort of plodding mediocrity Dirksen himself embodied. Yet ever since the run-in with him the year before David has been haunted by the feeling there was something he’d missed. More than once he has dreamed of being with Dirksen in his office again, everything the same, the tidy desk, the ordered shelves, yet more fraught, as if layered over with all the things David never knew that he knew, the deception and
self-deception, the animal reflex, unavailable to the conscious mind, that is ninety per cent of every act. Dirksen, too, is amorphous in this way, himself and not, some question hanging between them that is never spoken but is like the very air they breathe, ubiquitous, forgettable, life-and-death.

David doesn’t know what to make of these revisitings. Since the onset of his disorder his dreams have grown increasingly pressing and vivid, yet if there is some insight they are trying to impart, David has yet to piece it out. From the sleep literature he has gathered that the thinking on dreams is as all over the map as on sleep itself, that Freud was utterly mistaken in them or only slightly so, that they are merely the brain’s desperate attempts to make sense of its own chemical twitches during sleep or a kind of spawning ground for consciousness itself. That they have something to do with firming up memories though in a way that subtly changes them, adding neural links that shift their associative streams according to a logic beyond the conscious mind’s reach. All night long, perhaps, this secret reconstruction work is going on in David’s head, his nighttime selves rejigging the experiences that his daytime one regards as the very stuff of his life. To what end? To make better sense of them? Or simply to fit them to the lie of what he thinks of as himself?

David had never really suspected Dirksen’s motives back then, never wondered why he had called him into his own office rather than sending the boy to David’s, whether he was as much in the dark as David was about what was coming or already knew the noose the boy’s mother would dangle and sat calmly waiting until David had put his neck in it. Even the story of the other professor who had come to him could have been pure invention. David had stolen his woman, after all, and knew things that could have destroyed him. Not that Dirksen was the type who could ever have schemed so brazenly, but then who
knew what under-selves of his own he employed to hold intact the smiling innocent he no doubt believed himself.

David wonders now if he would ever have proposed to Julia at all if Dirksen hadn’t been a factor. When he did, actually getting down on one knee to give her the ring, Julia’s face cycled through a dozen different emotions in an instant.

“You’ve got to be kidding! Pace the player is proposing? Let me get my camera! Who would believe it?”

In the first years of their marriage Julia used to tell this story with that same mordant good humour, as if this enterprise they had embarked on had had exactly the sort of grand beginning that boded well. Eventually her version of things overwrote David’s own until his memories of the weekend faded to mere impression. All that sticks out for him now with any vividness is a single image, of some animal crashing through the winter deadwood behind them as they were walking through the woods and Julia half-turned with a look of dread that for a split second seemed directed at him.

The sound of footsteps.

“What kills me is that you thought I’d never notice. That you could just keep putting me off with the same stupid excuses.”

The doomsday show is winding down. Images of abandoned cities, of empty highways, of desert and waste. The earth without people.

“What kills me is that you’d lie about it as if it were some kind of threat to your precious manhood. That that’s more important to you than your own son.”

“If you’d noticed,” he says, “why didn’t you ever bring it up?”

“For fuck’s sake, David. Is that really how this is supposed to work?”

On the TV, a view of the earth from space that gradually pulls back to take in the moon, the other planets, the Milky
Way, as the screen fades to black. Against the blackness, a man-on-the-street voiceover.
We might be the lucky ones
,
in a way. We’ll get to be there at the end
.

Julia picks up the remote and kills the power.

“You don’t know how close I am right now to just walking out the door with him.”

“Please don’t dramatize for once. Don’t make me out to be some kind of monster.”

“What are you, then? Tell me. Because sometimes I look at you and I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.”

“It’s just a sleep disorder, Julia, not a heroin addiction. It’s not like I can’t control it.”

“So it’s true, then. You fell asleep. Christ, David. Jesus fucking Christ.”

He sees himself through the prism of her own horror and suddenly can hardly make sense of himself. The truth is that driving home from his late nights at the university he has drifted off any number of times, even now with his meds. And yet has persisted in the notion that he is in control. That he is safe.

“I didn’t say I fell asleep. Don’t twist things.”

“So what is it, then? Did you or didn’t you? Ten fucking years I’ve been waiting for one honest word from you. Here’s your chance.”

“Don’t do this, Julia.”

“Did you fall asleep? Yes or no?”

He should never have given her the least opening.

“It’s always the same with you, isn’t it? It’s always about making me feel like shit.”

“You risked his
life
. Do you understand that? Who does that to his son?”

“Don’t start high-grounding me because of your own garbage. I’m the one who’s been waiting ten years, if it comes to
that. It’s like every fuck-up of yours is a payback, the house, your job, even our son. Do you remember what you were like? I swear, every time I went to work I was afraid you were going to drop him in front of a subway. Talk about monsters.”

“Thank God I had you to cover for me. Thank God you had my back.”

“Don’t rewrite history, Julia. I was the one who had to feed him, who had to change him, who had to walk around with him for hours when he wouldn’t stop crying because you were off in one of your zombie states. Let’s try to stick to the truth.”

“The truth? Are you serious? Is this really where you want to take a stand? Are you that much of an asshole? There are a lot of things I’ve been willing to forget, believe me, but not this one. Whatever little scandal it was that you were hiding when we moved here, for instance. Or whatever little trysts you’ve had on the road. All the passes you’ve expected me to give you for the sake of your bloody career when you know as much as I do you’ve just been spinning your wheels ever since we moved here. But not this one. This one takes the cake, David, that the best you have to offer for what a good parent you’ve been is that when I needed you most you were off fucking some junior lecturer. Am I understanding you, David? Is that what you mean by the truth? And then all these years you’ve had the gall to go on about how I’ve abandoned my career. You
fucked
my career, David, that’s what happened to it. You fucked it.”

The room recedes. He has the impression again of seeing himself from the outside, not as the person who has managed to rise up every morning all these years as if his life had a semblance of normalcy and meaning but as some despicable stranger, a scoundrel, a beast.

“There’s your truth for you, David. If you ask me it looks like shit. That’s what I’m covered in every day. And yet I still keep
thinking you’ll change, if not for me then at least for your son. But you’d rather kill him than change. That’s who you are.”

David sees Marcus then, watching them again from the top of the stairs. He has heard everything. Years from now, this day, this night, will still be emblazoned in him.

He wants Julia to stop.

“It’s like we’re just burdens to you! We’re just things that get in the fucking way. In the way of what, David? What is it you want?”

What he wants is to scream, to throttle her, anything to make her stop. To be free of this part of him he has never asked for, has never understood, for whom all of this, his marriage, his home, his child, is a living death.

“Why are you still even here, David? Why?”

He is on his feet, needing to smash something, flee, though he feels the flutter at the back of his neck and then the knife drops and he is falling. Inertia keeps him pitching forward, a dead slab of flesh, to upend the laundry, the coffee table, the DVD rack, the TV, a great flurry of destruction.

Fuck, fuck, fuck
, he howls, though all that comes out is a wordless yammer.

“What is
wrong
with you?” No trace of sympathy in her voice, of any connection. “What is
wrong
with you?”

When he hits the floor it is only his body that stops, the rest of him continuing to hurtle out into empty space.

D
AVID STANDS ON THE
back terrace of his brother’s new house looking out to a yard that is the size of a park, and is landscaped like one, with rocky knolls and a pond, a circular greenhouse, a stand of trucked-in twenty-year-old evergreens that must have cost five, ten thousand a pop. Danny has cheated code on the fencing by topping it with a good two and a half feet of tight-weave trellis, so that all that is visible beyond it are the upper boughs of his neighbours’ own trophy trees and the upper gables of their equally monstrous houses.

In the middle of the yard is one of those circus-sized trampolines that have become the suburban rage, Marcus hovering beside it watching Danny’s two boys show off their acrobatics. He is all angle and bone now, thin as a Holocaust survivor, and as far as David can tell without physical skills of any sort.