Sleep (3 page)

He checks his email. There is a reminder from Sonny Krishnan about their Monday one-on-one; knowing Sonny, he probably set it up on auto-send the minute they booked the appointment, timed to blot David’s weekend. No doubt he is going to try to fob off on David another numbing survey course or hit him up with more thesis supervision or committee work, seeming to have made it his mission ever since taking over as department head to claw back the research concessions David was granted when he was hired. It hasn’t helped that David’s evaluations
have been dipping, or that there have been a couple of incidents that Sonny somehow managed to get wind of. The worst was when he called a student a fucking punk in the middle of a lecture and threw him out of class. This was before his diagnosis, when his symptoms had reached the point where he’d started blanking out in mid-sentence, losing his train of thought or cutting out entirely for a few seconds. After one of these lapses, a football thug logging time for his humanities requirement had made some quip that caused an eruption of laughter around him, and David had lost it.

He had had to put up with one of Sonny’s lectures afterwards, delivered in that urgent new-order tone of his that suggested the department, the whole university, was under threat of imminent dissolution, with no room for slippage. It infuriates David how Sonny is constantly looking for ways to position him as some sort of liability when he is still arguably one of the best-published instructors in the department, even now that History has been subsumed within the huge Liberal Studies hydra that Sonny presides over. When he is probably the main reason classical studies haven’t disappeared entirely, the only one who has made the effort to keep them current. David has lost count of the number of times students have told him that what got them interested in ancient Rome was some article or post of his that made the connection for them between past and present. That is the Rome David brings to his students, not some dead relic but a place still alive everywhere they look, in their language, their calendars, their government, their laws, in the shapes of their buildings and the concrete they’re made of. A place not of yesterday but of tomorrow. That went to the brink of what it meant to be human, then one step beyond.

All of this counts for shit in Sonny’s new order.

David hears the water start for Marcus’s bath. He logs into his web site to check for comments on his blog even though he knows that he should be making himself present, that with each minute he spends up here he pushes Julia closer to the breaking point. At some point in their marriage the internet has become in Julia’s mind a sort of underworld David has given himself over to, a bad side of town where he goes to indulge the degraded parts of himself, the ones for which emotion, human contact, are anathema. That is never how the internet has felt for David: from the start what has thrilled him about it is exactly the sense of connection it gives him, of these millions of threads leading away from him like neural pathways, making him bigger. His web site, PaceRomana, which he has had since before most academics knew what one was, has become a virtual brand. Pace as in David, as in
pah-cheh
, as in peace. As in Pax Romana, the great sleight of hand Rome had managed, making peace its legacy by dint of perpetual war. To tie into the web site David had used the phrase as the title of his second book, the one on Augustus. By then he’d already been happy to start moving away from the brand of his first book,
Masculine History
. It had used Julius Caesar to put forward a theory of historical change whose viral rise to almost cultish currency had quickly been matched by virulent backlash.

No responses yet to his new post. Lately his comments have been plagued by trolling, ad hominem attacks too scurrilous to be taken seriously but too pointed to be dismissed as spam.
Et tu, brute? Get a fucking life! Ex nihilo nihil fit
. From the start there had been no shortage of diatribes against him from all the purists he had offended, but this recent stuff feels different, more personal, more malignant. He finds himself compiling lists in his head of the people who might loathe him enough to expend this sort of energy on him. It could be anyone, of course, some
student he failed or colleague he slighted or some anonymous madman out there in cyberspace who has made David his personal anti-Christ, itching to get him in his crosshairs. But certain names recur. Greg Borovic, his grad school sidekick, who cut off all connection with him after
Masculine History
came out. Susan Morales: the last David heard, she was still stuck doing sessional work in some no-name place out West, no doubt convinced David was the one who got her exiled there. Then there is the kid who started all the trouble for him back in Montreal, though chances are he is just some paunchy personal injury lawyer or middle manager by now and has forgotten all about him.

David had run into his old department head from Montreal, Ed Dirksen, at a conference the previous year, ending up face to face with him at a refreshment table before he had even noticed him. It was the first time he had seen him since leaving Montreal.

“My God, David, it’s been years! Not that I haven’t kept up with your work!”

He looked utterly unchanged, still in the same rumpled suit, still with the babyish cast to his features of someone whose manhood had been stunted. And yet for all the nonentity he had always been, still he had persisted, hadn’t simply vanished into the void.

David had to endure several torturous minutes of Dirksen updating him on his former colleagues as if they had all been part of some happy fellowship. Then this.

“Too bad about that unpleasant business.” In an almost rueful tone, eyes dipping slightly as if to spare David embarrassment. “But I suppose it all worked out.”

He hears footsteps at the base of the stairs.

“I could use some help down here.”

He has lost his chance.

He finds Julia staring out the bathroom window seeming withdrawn to a second order of reclusion, one that leaves out even Marcus, who sits playing quietly in the tub with one of his bath toys as if he is merely playing at playing. She might be a stranger to David when she is like this, someone he has never exchanged a word with, never desired, never fucked. After Marcus was born she went weeks in this zombie state—some sort of postpartum syndrome, David figured out afterwards, though at the time it felt like revulsion, utter retreat, as if it had suddenly dawned on her that her marriage, her house, her child, had been a massive error. He often forgets it now, that darkness she slipped into, with him left to take up the slack, not knowing what to do with this child, this being, who cried for hours and hours without reason. Waiting for instinct to kick in, for love.

Julia doesn’t turn when he comes in.

“There’s two loads of laundry downstairs that need to be folded.”

The urge comes to him to apologize, to make amends.

“You okay?”

She gives him a look that seems to draw all emotion back into itself like a black hole.

“Let’s not start this right now.”

It had been only a matter of weeks after Marcus’s birth before Julia had come around, with the suddenness of a genetic switch being thrown. The panicked protectiveness she has had around Marcus ever since makes David suspect that she is still reliving with horror the numbness of those first weeks, when anything might have happened. In this reliving, David has become the enemy, the threat, the bad parent she needs him to be in order to assure herself she is the good one. She caught him nodding off the other day while he was supervising Marcus’s bath and it
was as if he had dropped the boy into boiling pitch, had shown, in that brief lapse, how little all of this means to him.

He brings the laundry into the living room. His head is throbbing by now from the extra pills he took in the car, from the glass of wine he stupidly drank with supper. It has been one of the hardest things to mask, how badly wine affects him these days, how sharply his intake has dropped. He pops another pill, dry, to stay alert, chewing this one as well, though he has lost all track of how many he is up to. At the end of the month he’ll come up short: the pills are strictly controlled, down to the day, no new script until the old one has run its course.

He tunes the TV to one of the news channels, keeping the volume low to head off Julia’s reprimand. A car bomb in Baghdad; a drone attack near the Afghan border. Instinctively his mind lays a map of the past over the present, the Arabians, the Parthians, the Persians, trying to match up the fault lines, a reflex from a feature he runs on his web site, “Back to the Future,” that connects current events to Roman parallels. These days the connections never feel as clear cut as they once did, the insights never quite as inspired. It isn’t just burnout or age: it’s the crossed wires from his disorder, the lacunae and gaps that build up each time a synapse misfires or goes astray. Then the energy he spends on these baubles feels more and more like fiddling, when his new book is still just a mess of jottings and his last one, over two years ago, was just another culling of his web posts, light as air. Time and again he has stayed late at the university trying to get up momentum on the new book only to have his brain go to blue screen, waking with a start to find he’s been out for an hour or more or has filled the screen with gibberish or has somehow erased a whole day’s work, following some dream logic he can’t reconstruct. And of course each time he works late he adds a little more poison to his marriage, a little more silence.

A deep brain disorder.

It was the lapses in class that finally sent David in for testing. Two days and nights at the clinic Becker operated near the west-end hospital he worked out of, a warren of narrow rooms and labyrinthine corridors just above a 24-hour Coffee Time. Becker seemed to run the place like his personal fiefdom, the halls lined with his conference posters and a big photo of him hanging in the foyer posed with an ancient-looking Nathaniel Kleitman, the granddaddy of sleep medicine. The sleep rooms were all named after painters, each with its corresponding sleep-themed print on the door, Dali’s melting clocks, Goya’s
The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters
. David got Henri Rousseau and
The Dream
, of a woman reclining naked on a couch like a Titian Venus while around her the jungle rose up and wild animals lurked.

He was prepped in a control room that was a bedlam of cables and ancient equipment and cluttered cubicles. His technician, Nada, kept up a steady litany of complaint about the working conditions as she fixed electrodes to his scalp, letting him know that the country she had come from had not been a backward one, though she didn’t name it. His whole time in the place David remained rigged up to these electrodes like a head case, his only contact with the outside world the quick forays he made to pick up bad sandwiches at the Coffee Time and bad coffee he wasn’t supposed to be drinking. The clinic stank of other people’s sleep, the fecal-and-breath-and-sweat smell of David’s half-dozen or so fellow inmates, people he never exchanged a word with but whom he caught glimpses of in the halls in their own Frankenstein gear and heard being tended to in the night as if they were all part of some collective nightmare. More and more the place felt like the inside of his own head, with its hazy half-reality. His dreams were vivid,
phantasmagoric, epic battles and travels in time, dreams within dreams where he was above himself like a god, watching himself dream that he was dreaming. He’d buzz Nada in the night to unplug him to pee and then he’d be fucking her or she would be killing him. The whole place seemed steeped somehow in moral ambiguity: the surly technicians from their war-torn countries where they might as easily have been perpetrators as victims; the presiding animus of Becker, who however never once set foot in the place, as if it were a dirty secret he had to keep separate from his public life at the hospital, and who for all David knew had been some sort of Mengele in his former life, had tortured political prisoners or had attached electrodes to the insides of people’s brains. It didn’t help that David had had to lie to Julia, claiming an engagement out of town, so that he was dogged the entire time by the kind of panic he’d get in fever dreams, the sense of some problem he couldn’t solve or critical thing he had failed to attend to. It would have been easy enough for Julia to check up on him; easy enough, if she discovered the lie, for her to imagine the worst yet say nothing.

After the ordeal of the tests, the follow-up with Becker was almost comically anticlimactic.

“We’ll start you at thirty milligrams of the Ritalin.” In his inquisitor’s tone, scowling at David’s results as if they had failed to yield anything of clinical interest. “We can increase that, of course, but you must be careful of tolerance.”

David asked all the obvious questions about prognosis and cause, which Becker deflected like a guardian of the mysteries. The research had isolated a certain brain chemical that sufferers lacked, though what the chemical did and what caused its lack, to hear Becker tell it, were still matters of purest speculation.

“The brain is a territory more mysterious than Mars, Mr. Pace. The precise mechanisms are not always understood.”

David wasn’t sure what exactly he had expected. Something larger, certainly, more life-changing, more exculpatory, than a simple prescription, and for a drug that was a mockery, the dirty drug of ADD. A zeitgeist drug, David had always thought of it as, the kind of popular cure of the day, like blood-letting or witch burning, that required appropriate ailments to be invented for it. According to Becker, though, it had been designed exactly for this, for stimulation, its focussing effects just a matter of fluke.

Six months later David is already at twice the dose he started at, his brain awash in stimulants from the minute he awakes in the morning until he burns out at night, when the drug seems to drain from him with the finality of a gas tank going empty. What it gives him in the interim is not some unencumbered alertness but the edgy sense of being constantly goaded, prodded, to stay awake, of hovering over a pit of sleep that only the drug keeps him from being swallowed by. By now he has learned that its stimulant properties are well known, that it is a favoured pick-me-up of soccer moms fighting suburban drift and undergrads pulling all-nighters. Yet still he cannot shed the sense of stigma he associates with it, of damage, even in his own thoughts always referring to it by its generic name, methylphenidate.