Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  “Look, it’s David!”

  Whatever this is, he thinks, he is sure he doesn’t need it.

  By the time he gets down to them he has managed to dredge up the wife’s name.

  “It’s Sophie, right?” Cheery and glib, as though to underline how peripheral she is to him.

  “We didn’t mean to bother you. It was Kateri’s idea to come. She used to play here when Sidney lived here.”

  The girl, like a discreet chaperone, has kept at her exertions on the jungle gym.

  “Sidney?”

  “Sidney who lived here before you. Sidney who died here, in fact. In the bedroom, I think.”

  “Mom!” This seems some sort of running joke between the two of them. “You weren’t supposed to tell!”

  “Funny that Greg never mentioned any of this,” David says.

  “I’ll bet you wish I hadn’t either. You’ll see ghosts now.”

  “Don’t worry, I brought enough of my own.”

  They end up inside. Kateri wanders the house calling out the changes she notices since the reign of Sidney while Sophie makes coffee, moving about the kitchen as though it were her own.

  It has come out that Sidney was a visiting choreographer the university got saddled with when he fell ill.

  “The dreaded you-know-what,” Sophie says. “So it took a while.”

  “I didn’t think people died from that anymore.”

  Another of her laughs.

  “People die of the flu! Come to think of it, that’s how it started. He didn’t have anyone, really, by the end. Just me and Kateri.”

  There seems no moroseness in this, no sentimentality, just the plain refreshing fact of aloneness and death.

  Kateri has drifted up behind him. Belatedly he thinks of the SIG Sauer in a drawer of his desk. Unlike back home, no law here requires him to keep his weaponry under lock and key.

  “We used to bring him food sometimes,” Kateri says. “This was his place, right where you’re sitting.”

  “What about me? Are you going to bring me food?”

  She blushes.

  “If you want.”

  When they leave, Sophie lingers at the door after Kateri has gone out.

  “I imagined you differently,” she says. “From how Greg described you.”

  “Well. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  He feels strangely deflated afterwards. She was expecting David the sex fiend, David the asshole, David the rival. Instead she has found this avuncular middle-aged academic. This Sidney.

  Later in the day he gets a call from Greg.

  “So. I hear the Welcome Wagon stopped in on you.” In a neutral tone David can’t read. “Sorry about Sidney, by the way. I hope you washed the sheets.”

  He invites David for dinner at the house. It is as if he has passed some test.

  “Let’s aim for next weekend. Sophie’s schedule’s a little crazy during the week, what with extracurriculars.”

  Good, David thinks. So there was no intrigue after all, nothing to hide. But he also thinks, I’m no fucking Sidney.

  He puts the visit from his mind. The last thing he needs is distraction. Since his arrival here he feels he has finally turned the corner on his doomsday book, his head cleared of all the static that filled it back home and the ideas starting to flow again. By now he has broadened his scope to take in the Hittite and Mycenaean collapses, which has meant a whole new round of reading and notes, of virtual tours of the important sites, of mastering the prevailing views until he knows them well enough to refute them.

  Right from the start he has been logging ten- and twelve-hour days up in his coach-house office, up at dawn every morning to run in the wooded reserve behind his house and keeping a close watch on his meds after the months of abuse. By now he knows that every deviation from routine will cost him, every lost half-hour of sleep, every glass of wine, every extra pill that pushes up his tolerance. Every cigarette: he has cut himself back to three or four a day, and none past supper or he can feel the nicotine coursing through him the whole night. It feels positively monkish, living this way, all his usual habits getting stripped from him one by one until he is no longer sure whether he is distilling himself to some essence or simply erasing himself.

  His teaching duties run only to a single upper-level seminar that meets once a week. Because he hardly prepared for it, the first class did not go well—he could see students’ eyes starting to glaze, could hear the bombast creeping into his voice in lieu of anything like real conviction. By the second week his numbers have dropped from a full complement of twenty to a mere dozen, as if here too he has failed to deliver the bad boy people have been expecting.

  It was the black girl he joked about with the provost who tripped him up the first class. The whole time she sat with the skeptical look of the unconvinced, finally deigning to weigh in when he was rehashing an argument from his book about the imperial trappings of the Obama inaugurations on the Mall.

  “But isn’t that a little simple-minded? I mean, by that logic the March on Washington would look imperial.”

  Instead of rising to the challenge he grew defensive.

  “You’re missing the point. You’re talking about an entirely different relationship to power.”

  He is glad the second class to see that the girl, Abby, is among the returned. He starts by offering an apology, admitting the dangers of mapping the present onto the past.

  “Take something like slavery.” The reference is so on-the-nose that the air in the room goes heavy at once. “In Rome slavery was what you did, not what you were, something you could leave behind in your own lifetime. But here, even a hundred and fifty years later, right down to the sixth and seventh generations like the good book says, we still can’t look at someone like Abby without thinking she came from slaves.”

  The girl’s eyes go to stone. No one dares to look at her.

  “What’s more, we can hardly even talk about it. In a free country. In a country built on freedom. Now that’s power the Romans never dreamed of.”

  All this is standard PoMo 101, maybe as tendentious as his original argument, but it has had the desired effect. The room is charged now; they have stepped beyond the expected.

  “So what’s your point, exactly?” one of the guys says. Defiant; angry, really.

  “I dunno. What’s my point?”

  The girl shifts. He can almost see it, the bubble that has formed around her. When she speaks it is in the same defiant tone, with the same anger.

  “The point is it’s true.”

  This is enough to break the ice. A discussion starts, careful at first, though bit by bit people start to risk something like an honest opinion. For the first time in years David feels a bit of the thrill he had in the classroom when he started out, all these young minds before him ready to be cracked open like eggs. Where did it go, that thrill? How much of it has been lost to his own shutting-down, to the walls he has built to hide his afflictions?

  They end up going the whole three hours without a break. Afterwards David keeps expecting the phone call telling him to pack his bags, though the only one he gets is from Greg, confirming dinner.

  “B.Y.O.W.,” he says, from the old days. Bring your own weapons.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you how you’ve mastered the digital idiom. I don’t think there’s a single paragraph in that last book that’s longer than three lines.”

  David has arrived for dinner to find Greg alone, chopping vegetables and seasoning tenderloin in the kitchen like a reality-show master chef. He has the dim sense he has been lured here for some sort of ambush.

  “Sophie’s just dropping Kateri off at a sleepover, by the way. In case you were afraid I was going to try to force myself on you.”

  Greg has poured them both double Scotches. The drinks, David knows, are a test: on the several restaurant dinners Greg has treated him to he has had to defend himself against the expensive wines Greg has insisted on plying him with. He makes a show of taking up
his glass, of nodding his approval, and Greg makes a show of not noticing it is a show.

  “What I don’t get,” David says, “is how you missed the boat on all that stuff. You were always so ahead of the curve. Now I do a search for you and all that turns up is a plumber in Belgrade.”

  “My cousin, I think. Don’t let the plumbing fool you. And whatever you do, don’t ask him about the war.”

  “If I know you, you’ve got your reasons. Some kind of theory, probably. As in conspiracy.”

  “Here’s my theory. The only stuff worth looking at on the net is for people who don’t need a search engine to find it. Homeland Security, pedophiles, arms dealers. All the rest is just TV on steroids, one more mind-control network to get us to buy more stuff so we can burn through what’s left of the world’s resources even faster. And don’t tell me you don’t pay attention to the ads. It’s all ads, every word of it. What’s your web site but an ad for David Pace?”

  “All I can say is, one day you’ll wake up and you won’t exist. The balance will have shifted. Having a body won’t mean shit unless there’s some piece of you out there in the cloud.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. It’ll be the other way around. Don’t think we’re not mobilized, we resisters. When the time’s right we’ll take out the whole system, and everything in the cloud’ll just vanish. Think of it, banks, corporations, whole governments ceasing to exist from one minute to the next. Now there’s a terrorist act I could subscribe to.”

  They used to spend hours on riffs like this. It was how they limbered their minds, how they communicated. How the theory of masculine history had got its start.

  “Sounds like a great idea for a blog post,” David says.

  “Go for it. All yours. No charge.”

  David hears a car in the drive and a minute later Sophie steps in through the mud room.

  “Oh!” Her face twisting in surprise at the sight of them as if she had accidentally stumbled into a men’s room.

  Greg barely turns.

  “Traffic?”

  “No. A bit.”

  She slips past him at the stove like a ghost flitting by. Her eyes catch David’s an instant.

  “How’s the Gingerbread House?” she says.

  It is what Kateri calls his place. A smile seems to start but she is out of the room before it has a chance to finish.

  David waits for the sound of her footsteps on the stairs.

  “So I heard she’s ABD.”

  “She told you that?”

  “No. Someone at the mixer, I think.”

  “Right. My trusted colleagues.” With more sourness than David might have expected. “Just don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “You mean, former grad student marries mentor?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. For your information, she went to the state school across town. In cybernetics, for that matter, so so much for your mentor theory.”

  “Cybernetics? I would have thought that was right up your alley. AI and all that.”

  “That’s a bit of a misconception, actually.” With a hint of pride, almost. “More the study of systems. Games. Brains. Civilizations. Finite universes.”

  “Right. It makes sense now.”

  “Really? How’s that?”

  “How she’s managed to survive being married to you. She’s smarter than you are.”

  “At least you got that right.”

  Greg lets his guard down a bit after that. At supper he sits by like the doting husband while David grills Sophie on their relationship. It turns out she had been a student of Greg’s after all, taking a graduate Enlightenment course with him through an interuniversity exchange.

  “I figured that was when it started,” she says.

  “What? Greg’s Lolita complex?”

  She laughs.

  “I mean thinking in systems. Cybernetics. In the Enlightenment.”

  “You see what I have to put up with,” Greg says. David thinks he can feel the impulse in him then to put an arm around her, to claim possession of her. “Total Asperger’s. She wanted to spend the whole term talking about automata.”

  David manages to get through three of Greg’s double Scotches without falling asleep or falling down. The biggest surprise is how much he enjoys himself, how he almost feels, even while a part of him keeps waiting for the knife, as if he is among friends. He and Greg will clap arms around one another at the end of the night and all will be forgiven, all the one-upmanship and stupid jealousies, all the dark things that seem to dog them still out of the past.

  David’s hand rests at Sophie’s waist an instant as he leans in to kiss her at the door.

  “Tell Kateri I’m still waiting for my Meals on Wheels.”

  Greg follows him outside to his car.

  “Look, David. There’s been a bit of a problem.” David can’t make out his face in the dark. “It seems that black girl you mentioned to the provost has been in to see him.”

  The fucker. David has to fight to keep the rage from his voice.

  “So when’s the hanging?”

  “You can imagine how the provost took it. He said it was a first for him.”

  David had been so sure he had won the girl over. He can already see how matters will go, how Greg will make a show of fighting for him, will finally shrug his shoulders and say nothing could be done.

  “What did she say exactly?”

  “That’s the kicker. She said you were the first teacher she’d had here who’d actually been honest with her. You can guess how disappointed the provost was, after the stunning first impression you made.”

  David feels his knees go weak. This is how vulnerable he has become, how needy.

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “Of course I’m fucking with you. When I stop fucking with you is when you should be worried.”

  He just wants to leave now, to be in his bed, but Greg wants to prolong the moment.

  “The best part was the provost’s face when he told me. Pouring it on thick. I mean, think what she was really saying to him. That it took an outsider. After all the years of being the fucking outsider, I can tell you, it was sweet.”

  “I hope this isn’t going to cost you your annual increment.”

  “It’s more the Klan I’m worried about. Just don’t let it happen again.”

  Somehow the evening has ended in exactly the absolution David has dreamed of. Yet now that he has it, it only feels like a burden, something to get free of. Now that he has it, all he can think of on the drive home is Sophie’s heat against his palm as he bent to kiss her.

  When he sees her again it is as a shadow that crosses his path on one of his morning runs, so fleetingly he isn’t sure at first he hasn’t simply imagined her. It is barely sunrise, the morning light through the trees just a stain of orange and red against the orange and red of the changing leaves. He quickens his pace to go after her, then thinks of the terror that might go through her at the sound of someone pounding up the trail behind her at this hour and feels a strange doubling, as if he were running to save someone from himself.

  By then she has already vanished into the labyrinth of trails that vein the reserve.

  He mentions the sighting to Greg. They have taken to getting together for squash, a carry-over from their student days, on the court their barbed banter falling away until they are just battling animals, grunting and heaving in the court’s intimate space with the same controlled brutality animals have, the same aversion to risk. Then as soon as they are back in the locker room all their jangling weaponry comes out again.

  “What kind of man sends his wife out into those woods alone? I hope she’s packing.”

  “Believe me, they’ve got security guys coming out of your yin-yang in there and cameras in every tree. One wrong move and they send in the drones.”

  On his morning runs now, David keeps circling back to where their paths crossed. Every day that goes by without his spotting her again he feels the same lag in his
energy. He notices now the webcams peering down from the lampposts, the brown security cars parked discreetly at trailheads. The cars give off a mixed air of protection and menace. Inside, high school dropouts and failed cops probably sit with loaded Tauruses or Smith and Wessons in their laps, spinning visions of the one who will give them a reason.

  It is several days before he finally sees her again, this time when he practically runs into her as he is coming around a bend. For a second she looks ready to veer right past him.

  “Oh! It’s you!” With the same startled look she’d had in her kitchen.

  “Nice to see you too.”

  She flushes.

  “Sorry!” Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and the colour spreads in a wave right down to the nape of her neck. “Greg says I do that. He says I wear my brain on my face.”

  “That makes me feel better. So I really do scare the shit out of you.”

  “It’s not that!” But she’s laughing now. “It’s more like, when something’s out of context. Like you jogging here. I dunno.”

  “I get it. A sort of systems error. Me doing something healthy when I’m supposed to be this chain-smoking badass.”

  She laughs again.

  “You must think I’m awful.”

  He stays with her for the rest of her run. He can feel his blood thrill at being this close to her again. For many days now the images of her have crowded his head, the thoughts of what he might do to her. It is madness, of course, would put everything at risk again, yet the more he tells himself this, the more the thoughts fill him.

  At the end of her run they linger at the stairwell at the far end of the reserve that leads up to her street. A mist of sweat has formed on the down of her cheek.

  “Maybe we should coordinate our runs,” he says, as casually as he can manage. “So you don’t have to be out here alone.”

  “Oh. Maybe.” Her eyes have taken on the look of a panicked animal’s. “Do you really think it’s dangerous? There’s always other runners around.”

  Her brain on her face. For the first time he is sure that the thought of him has crossed her mind.

  All it would take now to move them forward, perhaps, is the right lie, the right excuse.