Sleep (25 page)

“You mustn’t go out on your own again, Mr. Pace, I beg you. It’s very dangerous. You must let the hotel look after your security.”

When he has gone David reassembles the gun and goes through his drills. He has brought a holster with him that fits inside his waistband and he practises drawing and holstering, watching for snags and checking the drape of his shirt. He tests the alignment on the sights; he works the trigger. The trigger pull is heavier on the first shot if the gun is uncocked because of the added resistance of having to pull back the hammer. David dry-fires again and again with the hammer both forward
and back so he doesn’t get caught botching a shot because he has miscalculated the weight of the pull.

His room looks out over the razor wire of the hotel’s security wall toward the distant slopes of the northern neighbourhoods. A lone low-rise in concrete and silvered glass a couple of blocks over breaks the view. David can’t tell at this distance if it is occupied or abandoned. Someone could be standing at one of its windows that very minute angling to get a bead on him. In the city’s worst days gangs of boys had made a game of such sport, targeting random strangers for casual killings.

David takes aim at one of the upper windows and in his mind’s eye sees a shadow move behind its mirrored surface. He pulls the trigger and a black throb goes through him.

Click.

At the camp it had come to seem that threat was no longer something he prepared for but what he needed to conjure. Now, in this place of threat, the scenarios keep playing out in his head until it is becoming hard to distinguish what he craves from what he fears.

In the hotel dining room Eric, the Frenchman, calls out to him from a table the journalists have colonized at the back. The Reuters woman is there, scrolling through her phone.

“Petra, have you met David yet?” For some reason Eric has made a point of taking David under his wing. “He’s working on a book about failed states. You must know his work.”

“We met at the bar, I think.” Barely looking up from her phone. “Sorry, I never caught the last name.”

“Pah-cheh.”
Eric rolls the name out like an aria. “As in
‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’
Though maybe you know him as Pace.”

“David Pace? You’ve got to be kidding.”

As if on cue her phone rings.

“Sorry, guys, I have to take this.”

David hates the hard turd of ego in him that still clings to the least sign of recognition. That gives in to Eric’s blandishments, though for all David knows he comes here to diddle young boys. That itches now for Petra’s return.

“It looks like the prospects are good,” Eric says. “I am talking about the truce, of course.”

“Don’t tease me with false promise.”

“Ah, yes. If there is a drug here even more dangerous than khat it is that one. Hope.”

When she returns her whole manner has changed.

“So. Professor David Pace.
Masculine History
, right? Julius Caesar?”

“Excellent,” Eric says. “So you know it, then?”

Petra laughs.

“Oh, I didn’t say I’d read it. But I had this history prof at Harvard who used to go on about it, if you can believe it. Small world.”

David resists the urge to ask the professor’s name.

“So this is the sort of work Harvard gets you these days?”

“Oh, I didn’t say I’d graduated.”

This time David laughs as well, too loudly.

The others have begun to drift off. Eric asks about David’s trip to the gun market.

“I picked up some LAVs and a truckload of M16s. I’m taking the city tonight after supper, if anyone’s up for it.”

“If it means I’d be able to get a drink in this place before midnight,” Petra says, “then I’m in.”

It comes to David that this is his cue.
Any to share?
He is glad of the mickey of gin he scrounged in his first days here on a booze run with some of the journalists.

“I’ve got a bottle back in my room you’re both welcome to.”

Petra lets the offer hang a few beats.

“Can’t say I’d mind. Eric, you in?”

Eric holds up his hands in a show of Gallic helplessness.

“Sadly, some of us have to work for a living.”

Petra draws a cigarette from her pack and David leans in to light it. She takes a long drag.

“I guess that leaves me and Mr. Pah-cheh, then.”

David pours a couple of generous shots of gin into the room’s plastic bar glasses and tops them with a splash of nearly flat tonic from an open can in his fridge. There is an ice machine down the hall but David has yet to see any evidence that it works.

“You need the fucking secret service to keep track of the supply line here these days,” Petra says. “I had some duty-free coming in and the bastards actually confiscated it.”

“I’m sure Eric can set you up. Or Yusuf.”

“Not Yusuf, the snake, he draws the line there. The whole not profiting from sin thing. By which he means what a sin it would be to cut into his profits from his price-gouging bar.”

David doesn’t let himself think how long it has been since he has had sex. More than once he has had to pay for it; more than once he has failed to finish. The last sex he had that actually mattered was with Sophie, also something he doesn’t let himself think about.

He has hardly set the bottle down before Petra is reaching for it to refill her glass. He catches a whiff of something as she leans in that seems too chemical, too deep, to be just the lingering alcohol breath of her previous night’s bender.

“So Harvard,” he says. “How was that?”

For a second she doesn’t seem sure what he is referring to.

“Shit, that was back in the dark ages. But totally Darwinian,
you know, like in that movie, what the fuck was it? About social media. Kill or be killed.”

“Like here,” he says.

“No, this is civilized. At least here they use guns.”

The air conditioning is still out. From the service courtyard comes a burst of laughter and the tinny whine of a ghetto blaster playing Eminem.

“So. Failed states. I guess you’ve come to the right place. I’ve been to armpits but this is the asshole. The fucking colon.”

From the gin they move on to lines of Ritalin and from there to a few grams of sodium oxybate that David cuts with the last of the tonic. By the time their clothes come off, they are lost in a haze of not-quite-presence. It is clear by then that the smell coming off Petra is the acetone stink of the committed alcoholic. David has to fight to stay hard, trying to use his disgust as a way of rising above it.

Petra is already dressed and settled into the lone armchair with a cigarette before he has had time to so much as wipe the jism from him.

“Jesus fucking Christ, it felt like you were drilling for oil down there.”

He resists the impulse to say something cruel. She has fucked him for the sake of a bottle of gin without the least hint of apology or shame. There seems something almost admirable in this.

“You never said who that professor was. At Harvard.”

From the grin on her he knows at once he should have held his tongue.

“You’re shitting me, right? I thought you were on to me. Can you really see me at Harvard? Doing Roman history like some fucking princess?”

“I’m not following.” But he is beginning to.

“I was having you on, for Christ’s sake. That phone call?” She keys a few numbers on her phone and it rings. “It’s programmed, you idiot. For when I want a quick exit. Very handy. It gave me a chance to search you.”

He knows he ought to laugh the matter off.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“To tell you the truth I wanted to get at that pretentious fuckface Eric. The fact that it got me to your gin was a bonus.”

He just wants her gone now.

“I figured it was the liquor you were after from the fumes coming off you. But I’m the one who got the bonus. I’d have settled for a blow job.”

She shoots him a smile that drips malice.

“Fuck you too, Professor Pah-cheh. Or no, maybe not professor after all—looks like you lost your job. Oh, and here’s news, something about date rape. That wouldn’t have to do with that drug you were dosing me with, would it? Amazing what you can learn on the internet. If it’s any consolation, I knew all that and still let you fuck me.”

The only bearable part of this whole encounter for him now is that it will soon be over. Petra, though, takes her time with her cigarette as if this is what passes as connection for her.

“What are you, anyway? Forty-five? Fifty?”

“Are you going to sell me insurance?”

“It’s just, what the fuck are you doing here? I mean, seriously. I just hope you still have a real job somewhere. I hope you have a family or something, in which case, my advice? Get the next plane back to it. People die here.”

By the time she is gone he feels ready to peel off a layer of skin just to be free of her. It had taken her a matter of minutes to piece together all the sordid half-truths that dog him these days across encyclopedia sites and blog comments and academic forums,
bits of innuendo and implication and lie that join up like a puzzle into a portrait of depravity. Greg’s handiwork: that has grown clear from the frequent allusions to plagiarism, which are all the more damning because they are always couched in a vagueness that makes them irrefutable. For a while David was spending hours of every day trying to put out every fire, though usually he only ended up feeding them. Bit by bit he had had to cut himself off, eventually even shutting down his web site.

Exhaustion takes him over and he stretches out on his bed. His stay feels poisoned now. By evening, when Petra joins the others at the bar to regale them with more war stories, he will be a laughingstock.
People die here
. He ought to get on a plane like she suggested and go home. Then he thinks of the cubicle that passes for home now, of his life, of the man he has become.

For days he holes himself up in his room, getting the kitchen boys to bring him his meals and seeing no one. He goes through his video footage and tries to get a start on some of the articles he has pitched; he goes through his book files, the palimpsest of notes and outlines and drafts inscribed into his hard drive going back more than a decade now. The numberless sections he has written up, then excised, then reinserted; the introductory chapter he has reworked a hundred times, polishing and repolishing, then losing faith and restarting from scratch. A million words or more, enough for a dozen books, for a project on the scale of
Decline and Fall
; as ambitious as that, as vast in its reach. His last hope.

He starts writing, in longhand, beginning at the beginning. It has been years since he has worked this way and the process feels incredibly primitive at first, the ink stains, the cramping, the snaking lines. But slowly he finds a rhythm. It is a relief to be forced to commit to a thought and move on. Then there is the pleasure of watching the pages begin to accumulate, these
tangible objects with his tangible mark.

He cuts back on his meds to keep from burning himself out and tries to manage his sleep by napping for twenty minutes in every two-hour stretch. That, he has learned, is the rhythm of his disorder, corresponding roughly to the rhythm of lab rats in whom the neurotransmitters that govern waking and sleep have been knocked out of service. In their absence, mechanisms precisely tuned to calibrate darkness and light, to modulate metabolism, to pump the body with the stimulants that make possible the nine-to-five day humans take for granted cease to function. Instead, from the first moment of wakefulness the craving for sleep begins to build.

The routine breeds its own peculiar brand of altered consciousness, until he starts to lose track of the days. He has the sense he is devolving, regressing to what creatures might have been back when there was only sleep in the world, only the protozoal heave and stir of sensation and reflex. Then one afternoon he goes down to the lobby in search of paper and finds the hotel strangely deserted, as though he has slept through some apocalypse. He wanders into the courtyard and sees that no one is manning the gate, which sits ajar.

The light from the street beckons him. He steps through the gate and follows the street in a direction he hasn’t taken before, away from the downtown. With each step the neighbourhood grows more desolate, the houses more tottering and ruined, though he feels no sense of danger. An old man who sits smoking a pipe on his front step offers it out to him and laughs and David acknowledges the gesture with a wave and walks on.

He comes to a cross street. In the distance an arched gateway like the portal of a walled city looks out to a vista of such unearthly blue it looks like a painted backdrop. It takes David a
second to make sense of it: the sea. He passes through the gate and the sea lies stretched out in front of him to the horizon, edged by a ribbon of white beach. After the days of being holed up in his room he feels dazzled. Some children are playing in the surf, running back and forth as the waves break, holding their sarongs up to keep them dry, and it is all David can do not to join them.

Back at the hotel, Yusuf accosts him in the lobby.

“It is all arranged for tomorrow, Mr. Pace! After afternoon prayers. My driver will take you.”

David has almost forgotten by now: the Malana.

“Fine, fine.” He still sees the children at the beach, their black, black skin, their coloured sarongs. It seems almost impossible now that he hasn’t merely imagined them. “Will any of the others come?”

“No, no, Mr. Pace, there is only you! The talks have finished by now.”

David can’t quite take this in.

“I’ll have to see.”

“No worries, of course, of course. In the morning everything can be settled.”

He is already back in his room before he realizes he has forgotten to get paper. On his desk, his finished pages sit waiting for him. He slips them into a drawer.

At breakfast the dining room is nearly deserted. Yusuf is on David at once, making arrangements.

“You can take two of the guards, I think. It’s better.”

“Just one. Just Wali.”

“Of course, Mr. Pace, of course, you are right.”