Devotion by Howard Norman Read Free Book Online

creepy soul without portfolio. His voice had a fingernails-on-blackboard effect. “A man betrays, he pays for it,” Lorre said.
“But sometimes he gets assistance paying for it, you see. That’s why I’m here. To help you pay for it.” The knife flicked forward and back, and the shadow crumpled down the side of a brick building.
    William had fallen asleep and was lightly snoring. David watched the movie until its closing credits and then turned off the television. He had enjoyed
Background to Danger very
much. Yet with the onset of a headache and newly jangled nerves—David suspected the cause may have been seeing Peter Lorre and recalling the surgeon’s analogy in the London hospital—he realized that in all likelihood it was to be a night of wretched insomnia. While his inclination was not to try figuring out all the whys and wherefores of his frequent sleepless nights, he long ago learned to recognize their advance notices. The subtle pressure behind the eyes, the prescient slight nausea, his plummeting spirits. With Maggie on their honeymoon, he’d had three sleepless nights at intervals; Maggie had slept soundly. He told her about the problem. On a walk along the cliffs near their hotel, she said, “You also talk in your sleep, darling.” When he asked what he’d said, Maggie was circumspect, mentioned just a few names. “It varies, but three or four nights, it’s as if you’re speaking with a Dr. Steenhagen. Does that name ring a bell?”
    â€œJesus, that’s my pediatrician. From Vancouver.”
    â€œAnd what about—Dynaflow?”
    David started to laugh with incredulousness. “That was my dad’s car. An American car, a Buick, Dynaflow transmission. I was always begging my mom to let me sleep in the Buick on summer nights.”
    â€œDid she let you?”
    â€œOnce or twice.”
    â€œWell, you must be dreaming of this Dr. Steenhagen and that car, David. That’s all I know.”
    â€œDo I keep you awake?”
    â€œI eavesdrop a few minutes, then nod right off. Maybe that’s selfish, huh? Should I wake you?”
    â€œWhy both not sleep?”
    â€œThey say if you talk talk talk a troubling thing out, you might make all sorts of connections. I suppose that’s Freud in a nutshell. But you know what I mean.”
    David knew the connection between Dr. Steenhagen and the Buick. He regretted not informing Maggie about it then and there. (He thought:
What kind of choice was that, either not sleep or talk in your sleep, on one’s honeymoon? Did Maggie now think she was in for a lifetime of this?)
After his parents’ divorce, he started having what Dr. Steenhagen called “nervous stomach.” It kept him awake at night. His mother made an appointment. When asked what she thought might be the source of the problem, she said, “Well, I think one culprit’s David’s cursive example.”
    Students worked on their “cursive example” every Thursday morning. Blue, wide-lined notebooks were handed front to back down the aisles of standard Canadian school desks, pencils were distributed, and then David’s fifth-form teacher, Mrs. Dhomhnaill, would say, “Here is today’s paragraph. It’s from
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens,” or some other famous book. She’d read the paragraph with glacial deliberation, allowing the students to take dictation, the entire class transformed into stenographers. “You have two minutes by the clock to hand in your examples.”
    In Mrs. Dhomhnaill’s view—she sent home weekly reports—David’s
l
’s looped too widely, his
b’
s were erratic, his
z
’s shopworn. David admitted that she had an inventive vocabulary when describing flaws in a student’s handwriting. She didn’t regularly single David out in her critiques, though once she flapped his open notebook in midair, saying,