Sleep (8 page)

David glances at his watch.

“Marcus, don’t just stand there. Jump on!”

David’s mother sits straight-backed and silvern on a padded lounge chair looking as out of place as Marcus does. Not for her the villas of the north, with their deserted sidewalk-less streets, their lunar silence, far from the bustle and grind. David’s father had built a place out here in the first wave of immigrant exodus, but she had sold it within weeks of his death and moved back to the city.

She is staring out hawk-eyed at Marcus. Any minute now, David can feel it, she will start in on one of her rants.

He checks his watch again.

“For Christ’s sake, David, we’ve still got the whole afternoon.” He has had to endure the humiliation of catching a ride with her here. A court order prevents him from driving on a highway with Marcus. “Anyway, what can she do if you’re late, call the police?”

“It’s not worth the energy, Ma. Believe me.”

“Each time you give in you show you’re weak. And she takes more.”

She’s losing it, is what it is, thinks she’s the matriarch in one of those TV series about the mob or Imperial Rome.

“It’s called family law, Ma.”

Ever since the divorce a contempt has come into his mother as if this were the greatest failure for a man, to lose his woman. She was always the one who had
got
him when he was young, who had shared his own sense of ambition for himself. Now, every word from her has some dagger in it.

“What you never understood is she’s just like her father. There’s only one way to deal with people like that. To show strength.”

David holds his tongue.

Danny comes out of the house flourishing a tray of bruschetta. Even now, into their forties, something flinches in
David whenever he lays eyes on his brother. To look at them you would never know they are twins, Danny a good six inches shorter than him and with a slightly stunted look as if his body had turned in on itself. Nearly two pounds separated them at birth. The story was that David had tried to starve Danny in the womb, like those animals that killed off their siblings to boost their own survival odds.

“Davie, you get the tour yet? Ma, did you show him around?”

“Show him what? We just got here.”

It has taken David nearly a year to get around to seeing the place. He was expecting the usual ersatz monumentalism, some big-box eyesore built to within an inch of its lot lines, festooned with arches and electrocoated in ceramic. Instead he has found something of an entirely different order. He did a double take when his mother pulled up to the place, the facade a complicated fretwork of cantilevered stone and wooden beams and two-storey windows like something out of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“This is Danny’s?”

“You’d know if you ever came out here.”

What David can’t get over is that his brother has had the vision for such a place. Before this he was living in a three-bedroom bungalow near their mother’s condo in the north of the city that was the essence of the second-generation dead end, crammed with children and memorabilia and too-heavy furnishings.

“Let me get you a beer, Davie. I’ve got a nice local label, you’re gonna like it.”

“Think I’ll pass for now.”

“What’s the big deal? It’s not like you’re driving.”

He can’t tell if Danny is mocking him or just being literal. No doubt their mother has already passed on to him some convoluted version of David’s disorder from the bare-bones one David has had to give her to explain his need for a ride.

“It’s because you sit at a desk all day instead of getting your hands dirty,” was her analysis. “Your father used to get by on five, six hours of sleep every night. Then in the day, he did what he had to.”

David’s eye keeps going back to Marcus. Always when he looks at him now he sees only deficiency, all the things about him that need fixing. Always when he is with him he feels the same impatience, that he is waiting for their time together to truly begin in some way or maybe simply for it to be over, he hardly knows which.

Jamie, the older boy, grabs hold of his little brother and makes as if to toss him on top of Marcus. Marcus flinches and Jamie pulls short at the last instant, laughing.

Asshole
.

Danny is nodding at the patio tiles.

“What do you think of that stone, Davie? Ever see anything like it?”

It is all David can do not to march out and wring the boy’s neck.

“What is it, kryptonite or something?”

“It’s local marble, if you can believe it. From just north of here. Used to be big once but you have to look for it now. We bought a little quarry of it a couple of years ago. Like Carrara was for Augustus, right? I was thinking of that when I bought the place, about what you said in your book. How he changed Rome from a city of wood into one of marble. That stuck with me.”

David is taken off guard. So Danny has read one of his books. Has read the second one, several hundred copies of which David had had to toss into the recycling when he moved out of the house because he couldn’t even give them away.

He makes a show of looking at the stone, salmon coloured with streaks of grey, but can’t manage to form an opinion of it.

“Looks great,” he says.

“You should come up there one day, I think you’d enjoy it. I picked these pieces out myself, on the spot. Don’t you love the colour?”

David’s brain feels like a sheet of glass, ready to shatter at the next word that reaches it, the next shaft of light.

“Is there a bathroom I can use?”

“There’s half a dozen of them. Take your pick.”

In the bathroom David pulls out his pill pod and downs a twenty-mig tab of Ritalin SR and a cap of fluoxetine, chasing them with a handful of water from the sink. Whenever Marcus stays over he hardly gets a minute’s sleep, so that the next day he is a basket case. The extra fluoxetine—a.k.a. Prozac, another in his growing list of repurposed zeitgeist drugs—is in the hope of quelling the shudder he keeps feeling in his brain stem that presages one of his collapses. It isn’t likely to help: the drug needs days or weeks to rewire his circuits before it kicks in, though in the usual way of these crossover brain drugs no one seems sure why it works at all.

Three years after his diagnosis his pharma regime is still stunningly hit and miss. Becker, for all the banker’s parsimoniousness he showed at the outset, has been happy to ply him with every sort of psychotropic, pushing his dosages to the upper limits with each new cocktail as if he were an expendable specimen in a rat trial. Phenethylamines and tricyclics; drugs to boost his serotonin or his dopamine or his norepinephrine; a so-called smart drug promising seventy-two hours of wakefulness at a stretch; time-released drugs with delivery systems as sophisticated as an ICBM’s. The smart drug, modafinil, had sounded promising: another fluke, stumbled on by chance, mechanism unknown, but already in wide use among pilots and soldiers,
emergency doctors, academics looking for an edge. David, though, got pounding headaches on it, and nothing like the kick he got from the Ritalin. Worse, he couldn’t focus, couldn’t see the big picture. He’d spend hours redrafting a single paragraph over and over, then be unable to choose among the dozen different versions he’d come up with. Maybe it was just that he was too hooked on the Ritalin by then, though who knew anymore what was him and what was the drugs taking him over.

The Ritalin is what he has stuck with, juggling various formulations—immediate release and sustained release and extended release—with the vigilance of military deployments and cycling in substitutes on the weekends to keep down his tolerance. He might almost feel he was managing if not for the constant thrum at the back of his neck these days ready to fell him like a taser charge at the least spike of emotion. All day long he is fighting himself, pumped up on his meds but having to stifle every reaction to keep from collapsing. It isn’t just anger anymore but almost any heightened state—elation, amusement, excitement, fear. Bit by bit he is having to strip away everything that drives him, that makes him alive. Becker’s response has been merely to keep upping his Prozac, from five migs to ten to twenty to forty, though the drug seems only to have sped up the process of extinguishing the person he thinks of as himself.

He takes a seat on the toilet to give the drugs a chance to kick in. A powder room, Danny called this one, though it is probably twice the size of the den that serves as Marcus’s bedroom in the condo David now calls home. Everything is top of the line, the fixtures, the lighting, the cabinets, the faucets. The counters and floor are in a glossy space-age material of brilliant white that gives the room an otherworldly look, like a film depiction of a place in heaven or in a dream.

The realization is coming over David that his brother is rich, at a level he would never have imagined. Danny had gone into the business right out of high school, had doggedly stuck with it through the real estate crash, through all the legal troubles, through their father’s illness and death. When their father died David had figured the company was about five minutes short of receivership. Yet somehow Danny has managed to survive. Not just survive: to thrive. To grow rich. David, meanwhile, has been reduced since the divorce to a one-bedroom condo downtown that, ironically, was part of a deal he’d made to relinquish any claim in the family business when his father had made Danny a partner.

This was something David hadn’t reckoned on going into the divorce, how much it would cost him. Even though he was told by everyone who cared to offer an opinion that divorce was a fight in which there were no winners except the lawyers, still he forged ahead and committed every error, animated by what in retrospect seems to have been a kind of derangement. He wasted a lot of money up front on idiocies, taking his lawyer’s advice that he not move out of the house because it would prejudice his claim to Marcus but then paying for an office downtown to have a place away from his students to work and maxing out his credit cards on restaurant meals and dry cleaning and hotel stays. Then right from the start Julia’s father had got into the act, calling in chits from every quarter to make sure Julia was properly lawyered. Almost weekly, David was served with some new motion or disclosure order. The worst was the forensic accountant her father set on him, who made his every smallest excess seem the sign of a criminal profligacy.

If David had been smart he would have accepted from the start how outgunned he was. Instead, with each setback he dug in his heels, firing lawyers and hiring new ones, firing those
and representing himself, somehow convinced at each stage that if he fought hard enough it would prove he was in the right. One by one, the judgments went against him. He was forced to move out of the house, was left on the hook for both child and spousal support, was assessed a big whack of Julia’s legal fees because of motions of his own that the court deemed frivolous. Through a couple of loopholes Julia’s lawyers even managed to get almost the entire value of his condo thrown in as common property, though he’d had it for years before the marriage, so that when the final balance sheet came in, what Julia ended up owing him for his share of the house—the house she had insisted on, on which she had indulged her every whim, that had cost him every penny he had earned from his books—had barely been enough to cover his legal bills.

The sucker punch was custody. Julia got sole, which meant final say on everything, and managed to limit his access to three weekends a month. He had gone to great lengths to fight her on that one, had brought in experts, dredged up the postpartum episode, forced Julia to go in for psychiatric testing, yet the asshole judge—the same one who had issued the injunction against his taking Marcus on the highway—completely turned the tables on him, going so far as to cite concern for the boy’s safety on account of David’s disorder. The whole system seemed rife with this sort of hypocrisy, demonizing fathers under the guise of being progressive when it was just the worst sort of mother worship, of old-style family-values conservatism. The same hypocrisy he had had to put up with his entire marriage: for all his dereliction, all his mistakes, it was Julia, from the start, who had set the boundaries, who had closed him out from what she’d claimed as her realm until it held no place for him.

Now, though, he finds it hard to connect to the self-righteousness he felt then, hard to piece together his actions
in any way that makes sense. He can barely fathom how they ever got through those long nightmare months when they were both still in the house, all the work of negotiating bathrooms and breakfasts and bedtimes, school drop-offs, of murdering every emotion, every memory or image of the different people they had been to each other before this hate. Then all the while having to pretend to believe that they could make Marcus believe that all this was normal, that it was possible to pass through such devastation and come out whole.

His ass has gone numb from the toilet seat. He should have chewed the Ritalin the way he used to, though with the time-release tabs it is like mainlining, like jabbing a needle directly into his brain. Instead he has to hide from his family like a child nursing a grudge. Not that telling the truth is an option.
I popped out to take my Prozac and Ritalin
. He could mention as well the boxes of Viagra he has at home, Becker’s answer to Prozac’s libido death. This is what his life has come down to, this unholy zeitgeist triumvirate, three drugs whose brand names are like banners for the times. Meanwhile, just to feel alive, he has to search out ever more extreme forms of stimulation, has to drive faster, watch more violent movies, surf porn for the hope of an erection that isn’t medically induced.

“Hey Davie!” Danny calls. “You fall asleep in there or what?”

He can hear his mother’s snort of laughter.

“It’s like the time he fell asleep in that greenhouse, remember that, Danny? Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that in years! Even back then he was falling asleep. Your father gave him such a smack!”

David’s blood rises and he feels his face go slack, feels his head dip. He is like a dog on a choke chain, leaping forward, teeth bared, then slammed back, forever trying to find the still point between too little and too much. Then each time he thinks he has found it, the right pills at the right times to get through
the morning slump and the afternoon one, to not keep him up at night, the right mix of stimulation and restraint that will keep him sharp, in control, on his feet, it seems to shift.