Sleep (21 page)

“Don’t tell me you forgot, David. We agreed to this weeks ago.”

There it is, clearly marked on his calendar:
Marcus here
. Julia had planned to fly him down for the weekend en route to some conference.

“It’s bad timing for me. Can’t you bring him to your dad’s?”

This is enough to send them into one of their spirals.

“Are you still his father, for fuck’s sake? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

He drives out to the airport on the Friday afternoon for the hand-off. His first thought when he sees the boy, going on twelve but still scrawny and small, still full of quirks and tics and obscure intent, is,
Let this be over
.

He can’t get the image of Sophie out of his head, of fucking her on his living room floor.

“He’s only allowed an hour of internet a day and one of gaming. Don’t let him fight you on that.”

In the car Marcus’s eyes are on him the whole time. Then at the house he is finicky and brooding, avoiding surfaces as if the place seethed with contaminants. He sits hunched over the laptop Julia has sent along with him while David makes supper. Afterwards David manages to find a movie on
pay-per-view he is willing to watch, though when he goes through the options for the next day Marcus offers only unreadable twitches and shrugs.

“We’ll work something out in the morning. If I’m not here when you wake up I’m just out for my run.”

He goes out early, in the cold and dark, scouring the trails for Sophie until dawn has given way to full daylight. Julia would be livid if she knew he’d left Marcus alone for so long. He returns home expecting to find him still in his bed, but from the entrance hall he hears sounds from the upstairs office. A thought shifts at the edge of his brain like a movement in his peripheral vision. Then he starts up the stairs and catches sight of Marcus through the office doorway.

His blood freezes.

“Pee-uw. Pee-uw.”

Marcus is panning the room with David’s SIG Sauer. Somehow, with a child’s instinct, he has known where to look to find the most precious thing, the most forbidden one.

Jesus fucking Christ, Marcus, it’s not a toy!

But he doesn’t say it. Instead he comes up so quietly Marcus doesn’t notice him until he is already close enough to reach for the gun.

“Better let me take that.”

In an instant David has dropped the magazine and checked the chamber. The chamber is clear, though the magazine still carries six or seven rounds from his last trip to the club. All it would have taken to make the gun live was a pull of the slide.

Marcus looks close to tears.

“Sorry, Dad! I was only looking at it!”

Still such a child, really, still so unformed, something David forgets over and over, always imagining him as this looming fault-finder, this adversary, this judge.

“Nobody’s angry at you. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have left it unlocked. I shouldn’t have left it loaded.”

The boy’s relief is so palpable it sends a surge of emotion through David.

“I’ve got another one, too. A revolver. Here, I’ll show you.”

The guns end up filling the rest of the morning. David shows Marcus how to field-strip them and lets him practise on the SIG until he gets good at it. He is taken by the focus Marcus brings to the task. He can’t remember a time when the two of them have shared something so intently.

“I’ve still got that gun of your grandfather’s back home. Maybe it’ll be yours one day. I use it for target shooting, like these two.”

“Do you think I’d be able to do that? Shoot targets?”

“I don’t know, son.” He can imagine what would become of the little he has left in the way of visitation rights if Julia ever got wind of any of this. “You might be a bit young still.”

Instead of dropping the matter, he looks up the state’s minimum age for handling guns. A mere nine.

“Looks like you’re in luck. Maybe we’ll swing by my gun club this afternoon and you can try a few rounds.”

All Marcus’s hunched resistance to him has vanished by now. He asks to help with lunch, something he has never done, and the two of them move around David’s narrow kitchen bumping elbows like bachelor room-mates.

“There’s a couple of safety rules we should probably go over before we head out.”

“I know the first one. Don’t tell Mom.”

David packs only the SIG, which even at .40 calibre is so finely tuned that the recoil hardly registers. He warns Marcus not to be put off by the gun club’s clientele.

“Some of these guys, guns are like a religion for them. They’re all they live for.”

“Why do they like them so much?”

David resists the urge to launch into a lecture.

“I dunno. Why do
we
?”

The club is a no-frills place in a strip mall just outside the university zone. The lounge has all the charm of a halfway house, a battered vending machine, a torn vinyl sofa, a magazine rack where people dump their back issues of
American Hunter
and
American Handgunner
and
Soldier of Fortune
. A couple of regulars, big truck-driver types, sit watching football on a tiny flat-screen. David has a moment of doubt, wondering at what he is dragging Marcus into. Yet it has been enough simply to show some trust in the boy for him to seem to mature before David’s eyes.

The video monitor in the prep room shows two shooters already out in the gallery, the soundproofing cutting the noise of their shots down to distant pops. David fits Marcus with goggles and with earplugs and muffs.

“Whatever you do, don’t take these off. Once you’re out there the noise’ll blow out your eardrums.”

Then they are through the airlock and in their bay, staring out into the gallery’s eerie cave-like space. David can feel the thump-thump of the other shooters in every fibre now.

He has to shout to be heard.

“You all right?”

“I’m okay, Dad!”

He sends a bull’s eye out to ten yards and takes a couple of test shots. He remembers the first time he fired the Beretta, how it twisted in his hands like something alive.

“You’re up, son! I’ll help with the first few shots.”

Marcus’s shoulders barely clear the counter of their bay. David crouches behind him and wraps his hands around Marcus’s to steady his shot. For a second he feels the same panic as when he awakens in some unlikely location from a
bout of sleepwalking and can’t reconstruct what logic has brought him there.

“Just a steady pull! Like we talked about.”

The gun explodes. David, pressed up against Marcus like his shadow, feels the tremor that goes through him.

The bullet has gone wild, missing the target completely.

He squeezes the boy’s hands more firmly.

“Don’t be afraid of it. Just think where you want the bullet to go and pull!”

This time the pull is smoother and the shot lands just a few inches short of the bull’s eye.

“Great shot! Looks like you’re a natural!”

Marcus starts to relax a bit now, his next shots clustering around the second one. David is impressed at how quickly he has learned to absorb the kick of the gun instead of fighting it.

David takes a step back.

“Now try a couple on your own!”

Marcus gives him a nervous look but doesn’t lose form, keeps the gun pointing forward, like David has taught him, keeps his finger off the trigger.

“You think I’m ready?”

“You’ll be fine. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

He pulls up on the first shot and misses the target again.

“Take your time. No hurry. And don’t forget to keep breathing.”

He takes his time. He is just a kid, holding this lethal thing in his hands.

On the second shot he nails the bull’s eye.

“Dad, look! It’s right in the middle! It’s right on the bull’s eye!”

“Like I said, you’re a natural!”

The high carries them through the rest of the visit. David can still feel the thrill of it when he hands Marcus back to Julia at the
airport the next day. He has made his resolutions by then, that he will break off whatever it is he has started with Sophie, that he will make the six- or seven-hour drive home every weekend to spend time with Marcus. Will look into shooting lessons for him and get him signed on at his club, Julia be damned.

“So what was it?” Julia says. “Computer games the whole weekend?”

Marcus shoots him a look.

“We did some other stuff. Movies and things.”

It is only when Marcus is gone that David wonders at the foolish risk he has taken, not just with his son’s safety but with his own access to him. He was merely pandering to him, perhaps, risking everything just for the sake of winning him over. Was trying to cast what they did as some sort of rite of passage when maybe all he was passing on was his own darkness.

What matters now is that the weekend not turn into just one more false start. That he keep his resolutions to spend more time with the boy, to be the father Marcus needs, the one he has always wanted to be.

Then the next morning there is a knock at his door in the dark of pre-dawn and every resolution gives way.

This is how it goes between them: she shows up at his door in the lengthening dark of early morning and they fuck. They don’t talk about what they are doing or what it means, don’t make declarations or plans. There is only the stink of their bodies, of their heat, their sweat, the need that rises in him the instant he hears her knock.

Always, at the door, that last look over her shoulder.

“He can’t ever know. Not ever. It would kill him.”

What he hears, though, what he sees in her eyes, is, “kill
me
.”

She likes him to hurt her. He doesn’t see this at first, not even after all the internet smut he has consumed across the whole gamut of depravity and perversion. But then slowly he gathers that the fear, for her, is the point, not that it isn’t real but that it is her addiction somehow, what she can’t resist. There are no rules or safe words in this, no sense of a game they can step out of, and yet it is still a game, a way of reopening a wound again and again.

Bit by bit, her addiction addicts him, like a drug she pumps into him each time they fuck that he then needs to withdraw from each she time she flees.

“It’s always so rushed like this,” he says. “We need to work something out. So we can take our time.”

She turns away as if he had slapped her.

“This isn’t like that.”

“What’s it like, then? Because I don’t have a clue.”

“Don’t you see? It’s like nothing. Like something the instant you talk about it, it has to stop.”

But the next morning she is at his door again.

Every day to him now feels like a day won against a lethal threat. Attending faculty dinners, doing public lectures, teaching his class with the same sense of heightened, hidden alertness as when he is walking around with his loaded SIG. Going out of his way to pass by Greg’s office to forestall the least hint of avoidance or change.

“Isn’t that David Pace of
Masculine History
fame? Right here in our own humble hallways?”

David keeps up the old patter, keeps up their squash games and restaurant meals. This is the hardest part, the cruellest, the one that most makes his heart race, until it is all he can do to keep from shouting,
Fool, open your eyes!

He has stopped asking himself what he is at, how he finds the way to live with himself. Instead he plunges forward headlong,
afraid to slow or look to his side to see what damage he is doing, what devil spurs him on; afraid of the moment of tolerance, when the adrenalin rush starts its crushing decline. Every time he and Sophie fuck they seem to push one step closer to ruin. He fists her and shits on her, ties her up like a pig for slaughter. He fucks her from behind holding his loaded SIG to her head.

“Come or I’ll kill you,” he says, “I fucking swear it,” and she does, as if her life depended on it.

They never discuss these acts or plan them, only move forward like blind things, eating whatever they stumble on, crawling into whatever hole. Afterwards it is always a shock to return to the mundane world, to breakfasts and school drop-offs, to Cato and classes at three. This, too, they never speak of, everything that is left out of the shadowy country they defect to together, what carnage threatens if its borders fail. All the things about her that he doesn’t quite let himself take in, how her eyes flatline sometimes, the faded pencil-thin scars on her limbs, on her wrists. How the more he sees her, the more he travels with her to the darkest places, the more she seems somehow lost to him, until bit by bit he begins to crave what he has tried to close out, the small, telling details, the thoughts that run through her head.

He asks her once about Greg, what she does with him, if they still fuck. That is how he puts, purposefully crude, as if it is just another part of their brutality, though she pulls away from him at once.

“Why would you ask that? Why would you want to know?”

“So I don’t have to think about it. So I don’t have to imagine it.”

Instead of answering him she takes up his laptop and goes to a login page whose password runs to a good fifteen or twenty characters.

“What is this?”

“It’s what we do. It’s what
he
does.”

She has entered a cybersex site of the kind David himself has gotten his jollies from, dozens of avatars milling around in a lurid dance-club setting done up in every sort of fetishist gear and getting off on every sort of perversion. Torture scenarios, asphyxiation and cutting, whips and chains, like scenes from
The Last Judgment
. Sophie manoeuvres her POV out an exit door to a blighted suburban landscape where people run screaming, where corpses lie rotting in the street covered in rats.

“So he visits these sites? That’s how he gets off?”

She stops at a house with a crumbling turret, a ruined veranda. On the lawn, some kind of dead animal. It takes David a moment to recognize the house as her own.

She kills the screen.

“He doesn’t visit them. He builds them.”

She was right to resist him. Already he knows too much. Now Greg will be there in his head whenever he is with her, the sense of Greg’s strangeness, not so different from his own. The creeping fear that all of this comes down to the two of them, that Sophie is merely collateral damage.