Sleep (20 page)

“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.

“Not to mention the cameras.”

“Sorry?”

“The security cameras. Greg says they’re everywhere.”

“Right.” Her eyes shift uncomfortably. “I always forget about them.”

Her fear of a moment earlier, which had seemed pure, turbid with possibility, feels tainted now. It has been enough simply to bring up Greg’s name.

“I guess you better get going. Greg’s probably got breakfast waiting.”

He begins to vary the times of his runs, wondering at the demon in him that always wants to drive him to the most destructive thing. The days go by without his seeing her again and yet still she is there in his thoughts, is there in his dreams at night. His
mind keeps returning to the moment when he might have pushed things with her, to the black wave that rose up before him then that was less conscience or reason or fear than simply the fatigue of a lifetime, the impulse to turn toward what was easy, what required nothing of him. For all his new discipline the fatigue is there almost always now, a wall he has to fight his way through each time he sits down to write or make his way through some tome, each time he starts a conversation or heads out to class. It is born, perhaps, of his disorder and yet is somehow larger than it, seems to take in every wrong turn he has ever made, everything he has ever risked or lost, every delusion he has laboured under or bauble he has let himself covet. Every pat on the back that he pretends to himself now is the sign of a resurgence when perhaps he is just reverting to all the old compromises, all the old lies, to the sleep his life had become before his disorder, in its twisted way, had dragged him kicking and screaming from it.

Mornings, now, instead of running, he drives out to a gun club he has joined, where he fires rounds from his SIG and from a vintage Colt revolver he has picked up to break the monotony of the SIG’s relentless precision. With the Colt there is no mistaking what he is at, the fire bursting from the chamber with each shot with an addictive violence. Often he is at the range before sunrise so he can have the bays to himself, letting himself in with his key card and clustering round after round in the kill zone to kick-start the day.

The Colt he picked up at a local gun show. Row after row of banquet tables lined with guns heaped up like underwear in a discount bin, cookie-cutter handguns in black polymer, derringers and revolvers, assault rifles and sniper rifles, semi-automatic shotguns with massive 30-round drums. At the NRA booth he ended up signing on for a free on-the-spot safety class that qualified takers for concealed carry.

“Believe me, it’s a whole different experience,” the bleached-blond at the sign-up desk told him. “The first time you go out you’ll feel like you just swallowed a box of Viagra.”

The instructor turned out to be little more than a kid, greasy-haired and scrawny, dressed in an ill-fitting blazer that at the outset of the class he opened with a studied casualness to reveal a Glock 17 at his hip.

“First bit of advice: you want a high-volume mag. The law says, you’ve got time to reload, you’ve got time to think. Which means you’ve just seen self-defence ratchet up to first-degree.”

He trotted out the colour code of alertness that was popular in gun circles, Condition White, Condition Yellow, Condition Red. For a few minutes then he almost rose to the poetic.

“Condition White is every jogger or boarder going down the street with earbuds jammed in their ears. It’s everyone texting or talking on the phone hardly noticing what’s two feet in front of them. Condition White, basically, is asleep. It’s what almost everyone is almost all of the time, which is why people like you can’t be. Why every minute of every day, as soon as you step out your door, you have to be alert. Because when the time comes to do something, it’s on you.”

The pitch sounded like an ode to the hope guns imparted. They made of everyone, even this scrawny kid with his Glock 17, a potential warrior, a potential hero.

Afterwards everyone had their photos taken and filled out the paperwork that would get sent on to whatever office it was that issued the permits. David was sure there would be some glitch, that the class had been little more than a hook to get him on an NRA mailing list. But one day he opens his mail and the permit is there, a flimsy plasticized card with the bad graphics and grainy print of something run off in someone’s basement.
License to Carry a Concealed Handgun
. A strange charge goes
through him. He has been given the right to arm himself like a vigilante, could walk out his door with a handgun in every pocket and enough ammo to take out an entire schoolyard or platoon, and no one could stop him.

For the rest of the day he floats in a kind of suspended animation. Then toward sunset he gets out his SIG and loads the magazine, pulls the slide back to draw a round into the chamber. He’ll need to get a holster of some sort; for now he simply sets the gun in a side pocket of his coat. His heart is already pounding. It is the first time outside of a shooting bay that he has carried the gun loaded. Apart from an auto-lock that keeps it from firing if it is jostled or dropped, the gun’s only safety is the 5.5 pounds of pressure it takes to pull the trigger.

He steps outside. Despite himself, the instructor’s spiel comes back to him, every detail around him suddenly sharp, important, the baring branches, the dying leaves. He starts down the dirt path behind his house that leads into the woods. He can hear every twig that snaps and make out every smell, of earth and bark and decay and something else, vaguely out of place, like the smell that warns a prey or the one that betrays it.

He passes a brown security car. In the twilight all he makes out through the tinted windows is the barest silhouette of a face, featureless and dark like a comic book rendering of a villain or spy. He thinks of the two of them with their guns and a shadow crosses him of what feels like a primordial fear, the sense of what it might mean to live in a lawlessness where every stranger had to be reckoned a threat, like those isolate tribes you heard of for whom every meeting on the road carried the prospect of death. He is only playing at this, he knows it, and yet for the first time he thinks he gets what the real thrall of a gun is beyond the blood lust and compensations, this feeling of being alone on the road without judges or gods,
beholden to no authority but your own. The terrible freedom of that, of making the hard choice. Anything less, it seems, is only for sleepwalkers.

Around him the woods stand carved in the sodium light of the lampposts as if a fog that has surrounded him all his life has suddenly lifted.

He is out in the woods the next morning before he can second-guess himself, circling them again and again until she appears coming toward him on the path as though he has conjured her by sheer force of will. At the sight of him, a flash on her face as at a gunshot.

“I haven’t seen you,” she says, but distant and muted.

“Just work. Trying to finish something up.”

For a long time they run in silence, with only the sound of their footfalls and their breaths. They reach the stairwell that goes up to her street but she doesn’t slow, and they end up circling back toward his house.

“I think I’m going to head in.” Trying to empty his voice of every false note, every hint of casualness. “I don’t suppose I could offer you a coffee.”

Her face colours like a beacon going off.

“Kateri will be getting up.”

He sees it clearly then, her other life, the closed curtains and rumpled sheets, the smell of sleep, the sound of puttering in the kitchen.

“Another time, then.”

In the end she is the one who starts toward his house, without so much as a glance at him, only a furtive look over her shoulder as if they were fugitives in a police state, making their escape. Any minute the alarm will sound, the shots will ring out.

“We have to hurry.”

It is all she offers in the way of consent.

He is on her the second they are inside. They don’t talk now, not a word, only pull at each other’s clothes until enough parts are exposed to fuck, which they do on the living room floor, still trailing bits of clothing like patches of skin they have shed. There doesn’t seem time to think or plan or take stock, to show consideration or restraint. Afterwards there is no small talk, no fishing for endearments, only her panicked look, her brain on her face, the sense of her fear again like a tidal wave rising.

“I have to go,” she says, gathering up clothes like someone trying to piece back together a life after a hurricane or war.

When she is gone it is almost as if he has dreamed the whole episode. He feels rattled, not sure what has begun or if anything has, if he has pleased her or merely terrified her. He has no email address for her or private cell, doesn’t dare try to call her at home, so that the whole day he is on tenterhooks. When he doesn’t spot her the next morning on his run, he goes into full panic.

“We’re doing Canadian Thanksgiving Sunday night,” Greg says at their squash game. “If you’re around.”

David wonders how they imagined they could hide such a thing from someone like Greg in this fishbowl, this place where there are cameras in every tree. But then that is the kind of lie people always tell themselves at the outset, when such lies are needed.

“I’ll let you know,” he says.

At class that day he is a ticking bomb. He has grown too chummy with the students, too invested in being the hip one, the one not afraid to confront their creeping nihilism rather than dosing it with bromides. Now, all of a sudden, he can’t bear his own falseness.

One of them tries to shrug off a missed reading.

“Next time,” David says, “read the fucking text or stay home.”

The boy packs up his things and leaves the room without a word. With one lapse David has managed to undo all the weeks of hard work he has put in to win the students over.

Fuck them
.

The next morning, again, there is no sign of Sophie on the trails. It is all David can do to keep from showing up at her door. She has slit her wrists for all he knows, has confessed everything, has slipped town in the dead of night.

At the height of his panic, he gets a call from Julia.