Sleep by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online

did!” He puts this so forcefully he almost convinces himself it is the truth. “This is how you operate. You let him know what you want him to say, then you get him to say it.”
    “Don’t twist this, David! Did you fall asleep? Why would he think that?”
    “Maybe he was sleeping himself and the noise woke him up! He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake. Kids get confused.”
    “He hasn’t fallen asleep in the car since he was two. Not once.”
    “That’s such bullshit! He was sleeping when we got home. It shows how much you know your own son.”
    He can still get to her this way when he needs to, can still touch the spot in her that is afraid, above all, of being a bad mother.
    “Is that true, Marcus? Did you fall asleep?”
    Marcus shrugs, stares at the ground, seeming to sense the trap David has set for him.
    “Why are you making such a big deal of this?” David says. He has introduced enough doubt, perhaps, to bring them back from the edge. “Why are you putting him on the spot?”
    Julia takes the boy in her arms again, holding him with a fierceness that brings the moment on the highway crashing to the front of David’s thoughts again in all its enormity.
    “Let’s get you back upstairs,” she says. “We’ll put you in Mommy’s bed. Just for tonight.”
    David feels no sense of reprieve when she is gone, only of pointless deferral. Sooner or later, even despite herself, even wanting, like David, just to forget, to move on, she will tease from Marcus the telling detail from which the rest will follow. The pills. The stopped car. It is how her mind works, what she does. Right from when he first knew her he has feared this skill in her, how she unlocks whole histories from what appear the smallest irrelevances.
    The TV is still on. All this time it has kept flashing through its own separate stream of images like some oblivious house guest, carrying on its self-absorption while the house comes down around it. A deer stares out from a car ad and David feels tears well up in him, he hardly knows why. Another misfiring. They happen more and more, these emotions that surge in him though he can’t trace their source, the memories that shimmer yet stay out of reach. It is as if they are there but the bridge to them has been scuttled. Or he reaches a spot where there are too many turnings and no way to choose among them, to distinguish what is real from what he has read or seen in a movie, what has actually happened to him from what he has dreamed. The breakdown of borders.
    Becker had given him a copy of his sleep-study report, half a dozen pages of jargon and statistics and charts that for weeksDavid resisted putting his mind to. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to make his affliction more real by paying attention to it. Now, bit by bit, he has begun to inform himself. He has been surprised at how little he has known about sleep given how much time he has spent at it, though even the experts, it turns out, don’t have much of a clue. One thing is sure: it is infinitely more complex than David has imagined. He has always thought of sleep as a kind of zero to waking’s one, with the occasional dream thrown in like static, when it is a place as varied and shifting and strange as the ocean floor, moving through permutations that have as little to do with each other as with waking itself. REM and NREM; theta sleep and delta sleep; the alpha flatlines and jagged spindles and K-complex spikes that are like the creak and moan of the brain shutting the door to the outer world. Out of these a shape emerges that is called the architecture of sleep. As if sleep were an apartment building or boarding house, a warren of different rooms each with its own grizzled denizen keeping his own hours and his own rules, the wired dreamer in the attic, the plodding slow-wave oaf in the mouldering basement.
    That is what David sees now when he thinks of sleep, these secret lives going on in him that his waking self has known