Sleep (15 page)

He feels a twitch.

“What does Sonny have to do with it?”

“Oh! Sorry! I mean. I thought he’d mentioned it! Since you brought it up!”

“Brought what up?”

“The dissertation! Sorry! You asked me about it. I just figured that’s what you meant. I mean about you working with me, he thought you could help. I should have said from the start! Shit! I just thought, I don’t know! You’re not angry, are you? He said you gave it such a rave he just thought you’d be willing to help clean it up a bit. Maybe get it to one of the bigger publishers. It sounds so awful now! Like I’ve been scheming or something! Tell me you aren’t angry!”

He bends to do a line. The twenty is still warm from her touch. He ought to just take her this second, right here on the couch. Surely no one could blame him. Quid pro quo.

No doubt Sonny has engineered this whole scenario, right down to playing on his prurience, to knowing the fantasies that run through his head. Sonny who has stripped him by now of every last vestige of privilege; who has gone out of his way to make him a pariah. Not that David gives a flying fuck what people think of him, and yet it wears at his being, the false smiles, the whispered asides, the going day after day without a single warm look, a single connection with someone he trusts.

He has left Jennifer hanging.

“Don’t be silly. How could I be angry at someone who quotes Ranke back at me?”

Only to show how it actually was
. Hard to imagine that he’d actually believed that crap once, that he had been that naive, when even the past afternoon, the past hour, seem already such a chemical and hormonal blot, a hopeless tangle of layered duplicities and veiled intent.

He does another line, then passes the twenty to Jennifer.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m pretty wired already. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

If she had made the least move to leave then, if she had been that obvious, he would have hustled her out the door in a
heartbeat, making promises of every sort of the help he would give her that he would then drag out for months or years until they had come to nothing. Instead she gives him a sidelong look that reminds him of Marcus, how he’ll not quite turn to David in a moment of unsureness as if seeking his permission.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It wears off pretty quickly this way.”

Another look, another pause, then she bends to the table.

The fog of the wine is already lifting. He watches her as she bends, her dress tightening against the small of her back, the round of her haunch, and the images flit through his head of what he has done to her, what he will do.

What has replaced David’s Prozac to manage his falling fits is sodium oxybate, a sleep drug that enjoys the singular distinction of having been approved for prescription use even while remaining classed as a banned substance. Danger of hallucinations, of seizures, of suicidal ideation. Danger of respiratory depression. Of coma. Of death. Its real infamy, though, rests on its having, like Ritalin, an active street life, where as gamma-hydroxybutyric acid—a.k.a. GHB, Georgia Home Boy, Liquid Ecstasy, Fantasy, Everclear, Salty Water, Easy Lay—it is a favoured drug of raves and of heightened sex for its pleasant buzz at lower doses and of date rape at slightly higher ones, when it induces a few hours of coma-like unconsciousness before being excreted from the system as water and CO
₂
, leaving no trace of itself except a small black hole of oblivion in the brain.

For David, that oblivion is what now passes for sleep. Two doses a night of a viscous solution as salty as the Dead Sea, one at bedtime and the other three or four hours later when the first wears off, which it does with the abruptness of a light clicking on in his head. In the interim he is like a dead man, often
waking stiff from lack of movement still in the same pose as when he closed his eyes. Becker had mentioned the drug a couple of years earlier when it was just coming off its approvals, but it had struck David as too sketchy then. Another drug that had been repurposed, this one originally used as an anaesthetic, before the dosage range between efficacy and death had been deemed too narrow; another one whose precise mechanism was unknown. Then on top of the absurdity of having to wake in the middle of the night to take something to sleep, there was the long list of contraindications, nearly two hundred of them, everything from muscle relaxants and cold pills to hand sanitizers and rubbing alcohol. Next to it, Prozac had seemed as safe as Pez.

That, though, was before David had reached the lower circles of Prozac hell. Beyond the cluster bomb Prozac had lobbed into his sex life there was also the ongoing demise of his sleep, which had become such a carnival of bizarre acrobatics that it had ceased to give him anything like respite. The sleepwalking and confusional arousals, the bouts of paralysis and repetitive movement, the pissing into corners; and then the constant tossing and turning, the sense of hovering the whole night in a hallucinatory purgatory in which his dreams had so much of the nagging insistence of the waking world that he arose exhausted from them. It was like a slow descent into madness. David made the connection to the Prozac only after he came across a couple of studies that linked it to insomnia and
REM
cycle aberrations, possibilities that Becker had failed to mention.

“Yes, perhaps there is some effect,” Becker said dismissively. “But you must also accept that this is normal for your condition. This deterioration.”

Who knew what normal meant in this context, given the general level of ignorance in brain medicine, whose remedies
by then had begun to strike David as little above the level of reading entrails. There were a hundred billion neurons in the brain, each in constant communication with as many as ten thousand of its neighbours, in an intricate language of chemical exchange that had been built up over hundreds of millions of years. Pumping indiscriminate drugs into this scheme by trial and error to target some barely understood short circuit amidst some barely mapped network of dense neural wiring was like using Agent Orange to cure a case of leaf blight. David had given up thinking about the knock-on effects of his ongoing regimen of drugs, the incalculable tiny shifts is his brain’s chemistry that like the flap of a butterfly’s wings had surely already altered the very essence of him in ways he would never know.

At least with the sodium oxybate his sex drive has revived and he has even been able to cut back on his stimulants. Able to get through a day without collapsing each time he loses his temper or tells a joke; to get through a night without smashing his bedside lamp or pissing into his kitchen sink or opening his eyes to find himself standing half-naked in the cold on his twenty-sixth-storey balcony. The drug apparently works by boosting slow-wave sleep, though there is some question whether what it induces is actual sleep or only an eerie synthetic version of it, something that reads as sleep in the monitors but that at a deeper cellular level might be an entirely new state of consciousness, unknown in nature. Studies in humans and in mice have shown that the drug can bring on in subjects who are still awake the same slow-wave patterns once thought distinctive to deep sleep. It has already happened a number of times to David that he has got up to pee in mid-dose and has suddenly found himself thrashing against the walls or crawling on the floor stuck in a mindset altogether unfamiliar to
him, feeling purposeful and awake yet utterly unable to get his bearings. It is as if he is conscious, lucid, yet somehow blind, half his brain still in darkness or each half inaccessible to the other as in those epileptics whose brains had been split in experimental surgeries.

The drug is ringed round with security protocols that make those of Ritalin look like high school. David has managed to double-dip on his Ritalin more than once without being called on it, cadging scripts from his family doctor when his supply from Becker has run short and getting them filled at independents rather than through his regular chain so they wouldn’t show on his file. That isn’t something he could ever pull with his sodium oxybate. Only a single pharmacy in the country is authorized to dispense it, sending a shipment by courier every thirty days, the deliveries scheduled by a rep from the drug company who calls him on day sixteen or so of every cycle and who repeats her name in full each time she calls, Emmanuelle Gattuso. She speaks in a slightly accented but thoroughly uninflected English, avoiding the least foray into the personal, as if she is being closely monitored. Always she begins by asking how many days’ worth of medication he still has on hand, a question that used to throw him into a small panic because it felt like a test, especially as, more than once, she had pressed him on his answer as though to suggest he was lying or had made a mistake. Now, instead of trying to guess if a partly filled bottle has three days’ worth of drug in it or five, he has put a thirty-day repeat on his desktop calendar and simply counts back from the end date for each cycle to arrive at the number that Emmanuelle Gattuso herself has surely already worked out by exactly the same method. In this way he often shows a bit of a surplus each month, as the pharmacists tend to err a few grams in his favour with nearly every bottle, though
David wouldn’t be surprised if this, too, were part of some scheme to test his trustworthiness.

In any event he has been putting the surplus to good use. A few times a week, when the mood hits him, he takes a small starter dose a half-hour or so before sleep and stretches out on his bed to masturbate. At first he couldn’t understand why the drug was considered such an aphrodisiac when all he felt was a kind of pleasant drowsiness. Bit by bit, though, something has been unleashed in him, until these sessions have become almost an addiction. In the usual way of sex it is less what happens in his body that matters than in his head, the different place the drug takes him to, leading him on like some force outside of him in the way that dreams do or the first rush of images that goes through his head just before sleep. Up unfamiliar stairwells, down unfamiliar halls, into rooms where every speakable and unspeakable act is permitted, anything that can be imagined or abhorred.

He has set out another round of lines but has lost all track by now of how many they are up to. At some point his father’s Beretta has made an appearance, after Jennifer started going through the drawers in his living room cabinet and found the one that was locked.

“This is the one I have to see! The stuff you hide from your son!”

She’d expected porn, maybe, though had looked thrilled to discover the Beretta instead.

“You’re shitting me. Just don’t tell me you’re a serial killer or something because that would really wreck the whole evening.”

It had been easier than he had expected to get the thing registered and have himself licensed. A police check; a weekend course on gun safety; a couple of exams any seven-year-old could have passed. He kept waiting for the gun to get tied to
some mob hit or war crime but the paperwork went through without a hitch. Afterwards he joined the gun club north of the city where he’d taken his safety course and started driving out a couple of times a week to fire rounds.

Jennifer pulls back the slide on the Beretta the way David has shown her and whips around like a gunslinger to her reflection in the living room window. She pulls the trigger.
Click
. In his mind’s eye David sees the window shatter and the two of them sucked off into the night as into the vacuum of interstellar space.

“Shit. I really thought it was going to go off.”

“You should come out with me to my club sometime. We could go after the faculty meeting tomorrow. It’s always my favourite time to go.”

David has spent much of the morning at the club, shooting until his arms were numb, until his whole body ached. The buzz of it lingers for days sometimes. By now he has gotten good enough not to embarrass himself, able to manage consistent two-and-a-half-inch clusters at twenty-five yards. When he is peering into his sights, the world falls away. There is only his finger on the trigger, only the bullet barrelling forward like his own will. It is better than any brain drug, the only time when every fibre in him feels fully awake.

Jennifer is picking off imaginary foes, faking kickback with each shot.
P-tew. P-tew
.

David checks his cigarette pack: empty.

“I’m wondering if you’re as wired as I am,” he says.

She picks off the glass door that guards his collectibles. She picks off his flat-screen. The picture of Marcus.
P-tew
.

“Look at us,” she says. “Look at us. It’s so fucking weird. It’s like I’m in ancient Rome with David Pace. So
decadent
. I always loved that word. What was it you said about Roman art? I mean, it was fucking brilliant.”

“If I said something about Roman art, then you have my permission to shoot me.”

“Not tonight, silly! In your book!”

“Whatever I said, I take it back.”

“About realism. How they got to a level that wouldn’t come back till the fucking Renaissance and then they just got bored with it! It’s like, in fifteen years they covered fifteen hundred. That’s where we are now, isn’t that what you’re always saying?
We’re
the fucking Romans! Everything has to happen so fast or we’re bored out of our tree. Ritalin, don’t you see? It all fits. Attention deficit.”

Cigarettes. But then the thought of the thousand obstacles he will have to negotiate to get some while he is bouncing off the walls like this, the door fobs and keys, the buttons in elevators. The thought of leaving Jennifer alone here with a cocked Beretta and a half-box of ammo in an unlocked drawer.

P-tew
.

“You know what?” he says. “I don’t know the first thing about you. Why is that exactly? I mean, apart from the fact that I’m an insufferable narcissist prick.”

“But you know everything about me. You read my dissertation, right?”

“By that logic, I’m Julius Caesar.”

“I always thought of you more as Augustus.”

She plops down in the club chair gangster-style, legs spread, the Beretta loose in one hand like an apple she is about to bite into.