Sleep (16 page)

“Listen,” he says. “Why don’t I give us something to slow us down a bit.”

“Something good, I hope.”

The phrase goes through his mind:
informed consent
.

“Something you’ll like, I think.”

She trains the Beretta on him, utterly deadpan.

“Just don’t try to pull anything, fucker.”

A kick goes through him like a cattle bolt. Her jaw drops in pleased, scandalized horror.

“Jesus, shit, I’m sorry! I can’t believe I said that!”

He can feel the sweat coming off him, smell the stink of it.

He puts up his hands.

“No false moves,” he says, as evenly as he can manage.

He waits until they have taken the stuff before he goes down for the cigarettes. When he returns he finds her standing in the cold on his balcony still in her stocking feet, staring into the dark. He comes up behind her, just close enough for the heat of their bodies to touch, like weather fronts meeting, like rivers.

She doesn’t turn.

“You’ll catch your death out here.”

And yet the cold feels far from them, as if a bubble protects them, a private atmosphere.

It has started to snow, small scattered flakes that flash out of the dark.

He knows if he touches her, there will be no going back.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know. I feel like—I don’t know.”

“Like what? Tell me.”

“Like—God. I shouldn’t say.” A shiver goes through her. “What was that stuff? Like jello.”

Twenty-six storeys below them a cube van pulls into the courtyard and stops at the lobby door. It sits for a moment, idling, then pulls away, though no one has emerged from it.

“Jello sounds right,” David says.

He tries to muster a proper sense of the cold. This is how errors are made, how people miss warning signs. He pictures
the two of them freezing to death out here, caught in this frozen instant for all time. Millennia from now they’ll be sifted from the ash of the apocalypse like the fugitives of Pompeii. The right and the wrong won’t make any difference then, they’ll be merely history, a story, beyond judgment.

“It’s just,” she says. “I don’t know.”

She leans into him then with the near-weightless press of a snowfall or wind, or maybe he is the one who presses against her. The different versions of the evening that have been shadowing each other like light and dark seem to collapse suddenly into one.

“You’re freezing,” he says, though her body is as hot as a bird’s. “Come inside.”

What happens next he’ll be able to reconstruct afterwards only in the way that dreams can be reconstructed, with always that sense of a logic that can’t be recaptured or put into words, of a larger complexity that is forever lost. The air itself has grown gelatinous by then, an ether they move through or water, past tilting doors, down tilting halls, as in the hold of a sinking ship. Time makes its way through here only in flickers, brief gloamings of murky light. There is her dress, the feel of it under his hand like satin, like skin; there is his gun, floating free like a dismembered appendage. Then outside the window, the building snow, slowly whiting out the darkness like an opiate, like sleep.

This much is clear, that at some point they end up in his bedroom and fuck. There is nothing tentative about this, for all the torpor of the drug: he has crossed over by then, to the dark rooms, the unspeakable sanctum, and he fucks her the way he has imagined, splitting her open, crawling inside her. All that matters is that none of it matters, that they are beyond scrutiny here, beyond telling. That that is the point.

Afterwards all he will remember is her body beneath him the merest scribble of flesh and bone, so flimsy he could break it in two.

Smell, emanating from the bedsheets. Julia’s but not Julia’s: he feels for her beside him but with the sick sense he has done it again, has betrayed her. Then suddenly he is awake.

The place beside him is empty. He taps the dimmer bar on his clock radio to light up the face: three in the morning. His head is pounding from the wine and the Ritalin. For a long moment he sits on the edge of the bed, listening, hears only the whirr of the fridge, the distant clack of the twenty-four-hour streetcar that passes in front of his building.

He checks the bathroom, the couch, the fold-out bed in the den. She is gone.

The snow has stopped, though the blanketing it has left gives the city light through the living room windows a ghoulish glow. The apartment stinks of cigarettes and spilled wine, of the left-over food they never bothered to clear. Open cabinets and open drawers; half a dozen books lying askew on the coffee table and floor. The mortar and pestle. The fresh pack of cigarettes.

David lights one and sits down in the club chair to smoke it.

Fragments come back to him that he can’t quite tease out into intelligibility. He must have overestimated their doses, he thinks, then thinks,
Don’t think
.

A bottle of sodium oxybate sits on the bathroom counter with its red warning stickers and threats.
Keep away from children! Avoid alcohol!
It isn’t like him to have left it out. The thought hangs an instant, then he pushes it away, because of the other thoughts he feels pressing up behind it.

He measures out a dose to get him through the rest of the night. In his bedroom, in the dark, he makes out a lump of
greater dark on his dresser: the Beretta. Then he feels something hard underfoot and bends to collect a bullet. There are more, scattered at the foot of the bed and under the dresser. David can’t dredge up any memory of how they got there and yet even before he takes up the gun and feels the weight of it he knows that someone—who? at what point? to what end?—has taken the trouble to load it.

He sits down on the edge of the bed. In his brain, just white space.

The panic doesn’t really start to set in until Jennifer Lowe fails to show for the afternoon faculty meeting. Until then he has more or less been able to put the matter from his mind. To armour himself with what he tells himself is the truth, that he has broken no laws or university protocols, crossed no uncrossable lines. Consenting adults.

The meeting is in one of the Humanities lecture halls. The minute David sets foot in it the familiar repugnance rises up in him: the factions and cliques, the jockeying, the whispered stratagems; the sense of how low the stakes are, how everything that happens here is only in the service of crushing whatever doesn’t fit in. The real reason, he knows, that it was so easy to push through Jennifer Lowe was that there had seemed nothing dangerous in her, no sign of brilliance or heresy, anything that might challenge the dreamless sleep of the status quo.

He ought to have phoned her. The truth is it didn’t occur to him to phone, didn’t occur to him to do anything at all except show up here at the meeting acting as if nothing untoward had happened between them, and so put them on the light footing that was surely the only workable one going forward.

He keeps his eye on the doors. Despite the extra fistful of meds he has downed he has to fight to keep from nodding off.
It happened once in committee during the hire, on a day that Sonny had sat in to go over procedures.

“Late night, David?” Then the titters around the room, as if there was nothing more laughable, more demeaning, than falling asleep. If he’d had a gun then. Instead, even to open his mouth was to risk the further humiliation of having his words come out garbled like a mental deficient’s.

He spots Julia up front but makes a point of blotting her from his field of vision. She had managed to get a new book out the previous fall: all those years that she had languished at home making his ambition seem something criminal, then the instant he was out the door she was back in the game. Meanwhile he has had to return again and again to the start on his own stalled opus as one after another his lines of approach have faltered.

He is already halfway to the door after the meeting has broken up when Sonny’s voice rings out from the rostrum above the din of exodus.

“David, wait!” In such a peremptory tone that for a moment the whole room seems to focus on him. “My office! Five minutes!”

He detours outside for a cigarette, huddling in the cold near the garbage dumpsters at the back of the building. When he comes in, Sonny is already waiting for him, his skin the bluer blue-black it takes on whenever he is in high dudgeon.

“I don’t even know where to start, David. I don’t even know.”

It has been clear from the moment Sonny called him out that she has been in to see him. What David can’t figure is what she might have said, or out of what madness or malice.

“You could start,” he says to Sonny, “by telling me what made you think you could ream me out like a teenager in front of my peers.”

“Don’t fuck with me, David! Don’t play dumb with me! I sent
that girl to you in good faith! Because she looked up to you, if you can believe it!”

The bitterness of this, the sense of personal affront, takes David by surprise.

“Look, Sonny, you’re going to have to spell out what exactly you’re accusing me of here, because honestly, I’m not following.”

“She came in here today trying to get out of her contract! Are you going to tell me you had nothing to do with that? I don’t know what it was you did to her, I don’t want to know, I don’t even want to think about it, but whatever it was you better find a way to make it right, because if it comes down to a choice I’ll trade you for her in a second! And don’t think I won’t find the way to do it! Don’t think it isn’t already there in your file!”

She is overreacting, clearly, is behaving like a child. All they did was
fuck
, for Christ’s sake. And yet her reaction is all he has to go by, really, the only thing that might give a shape to his own blankness.

This much is obvious, at least: she hasn’t told Sonny shit.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” He resists the mistake of going on the defensive. “Look, I’m sorry she’s changed her mind, but how is that even a problem? Everyone knows she wasn’t your first choice.”

Sonny’s face twists with some emotion David can’t read.

“I don’t believe it. Here I was thinking all this was some revenge scheme you’d cooked up when you still don’t have a clue, do you? She was the choice practically right out of the gate! The only question was how to get the great David Pace to think the idea was his so he wouldn’t pull one of his diva acts.”

“That’s bullshit.” This seems too byzantine even for Sonny’s tortured power politics. And yet already David suspects he is actually telling the truth, that even now the story is making the
rounds of the department. “It’s not as if she’s some big catch, for fuck’s sake! She can’t even place her dissertation.”

“Do you know how many other offers she’s had? Don’t tell me she isn’t a catch! She’ll bring in more funding in a year than you will the rest of your life!”

“You’re joking, right? Because she’s been to the University of fucking New Mexico or wherever?”

“Because she’s Indian, David! Do I have to spell it out?”

“What are you talking about? Not from your part of India. Not from where I’m sitting.”

“Jesus, David.
Native
Indian! First Nations or whatever the bloody term is these days. Please don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

It is as if someone has put a bullet in his head. As if all along the gun has been raised, he has been staring right at it, yet somehow has missed it.

“It’s right there in her dissertation, for the love of God, it’s not as if she made some big secret of it! Did you even bother to
read
her dissertation before you wrote your report or were you just planning to fuck her from the start?”

David feels like he is back in Dirksen’s office in Montreal with that woman and her son, facing the maw.

“What exactly is it you want from me here, Sonny? Why do you think you can just put this on my plate? For all you know she’s just playing all of us. Maybe she’s just using us to leverage a better offer.”

“David, I’m not an idiot. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference between leveraging pay scale and running scared. If you’d been here when she came in. Like I say, I don’t want to know what went on with you two, but if she walks out after all the work and expense of finding her, after fighting tooth and nail to get money that’ll probably just get shuttled over now to Engineering
or Business Admin—it’s pretty fucking irritating, David. It’s pretty dispiriting. So if there’s something you did that you can undo, I’m asking you. I’m begging you.”

A window opens up into Sonny suddenly, into his own split brain, all the trade-offs he has had to make, all the lies he has had to tell himself to get by. It isn’t true that David knows nothing about him. He knows about the wife he never shows in public, probably the product of some arranged village marriage he made when he was barely out of his teens; about the four or five children he never talks about, and of whom not a single photo has ever shown up in his office. About the early promise he has frittered away on pointless monographs and on being an errand boy for upper-level administrators who earn three times his salary for a quarter the effort, though he could easily have defected to admin himself years before instead of staying down with the rank and file. David knows these things but doesn’t like to think about them, for fear of letting down his defences.

“I’ll call her,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Sonny nods, purses his lips.

“Look, David, I know you’ve been going through a lot these years, with the divorce and everything. But I can’t help feeling there’s something else going on here. Something that’s behind this destructiveness you’re bent on. If there’s a health problem or anything or some kind of mental issue, maybe we need to look at that. Even Lowe asked about it. If you had some kind of condition.”

To think David had actually been ready to take pity on him.

“My health is fine,” he says, as acidly as he can manage. “It’s also none of your fucking business.”

He retreats to his office feeling enraged, indiscriminately, at Sonny, at himself, at Jennifer Lowe, unable to think, form a plan, see anything clearly. All these years of waiting for a turnaround, an even break, and now his whole fate seems to rest on a
one-night stand. All the years of scrambling for some sort of handhold, anything to stop his free fall. Fudging his students’ grades because he can’t get through their papers; blowing up at them on the least pretext to bully them out of their complaints. Exhausting the milder fare of the surface web and gradually sinking down into the hard-core filth of the deep one. Avoiding his own son because of what he has become. And spurring it all, the panic, the horror, at this oblivion that trails him, that continues to steal up ever closer at his back like his own death.