Sleep by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page A

almost nothing of. Except suddenly these other selves are on the move, leaving their curtains open, their doors, shuffling ceaselessly through the halls until it seems they must burst out into the light of day. Sometimes as he is falling asleep he hears them trudging into his room, sees the shadow of them at his bedside, feels the weight of them as they settle onto his chest to take him over like succubi, like alien abductors. He tries to flail, to scream, defend himself, but cannot move.
    The terror he feels then is real.
    From upstairs, silence. Perhaps Julia isn’t returning, has had enough of him or has simply fallen asleep next to Marcus.Another throb of emotion: how he had fought her, in the first years, over having Marcus in bed with them. They would spoil him, he said; they would never be free of him; they would stunt him in some irreparable way. When the truth was that those were the purest times for him, Marcus’s little body between them smelling of milk and sleep. Hardly daring to give in to the love in him then, afraid for it, that it was too fragile a thing to risk exposing.
    It doesn’t bear thinking about.
    He takes up the remote again and surfs. Shopping channel. Cooking channel. Family channel. History. What passes for history these days: reality shows, conspiracy theories, proofs of alien abductions or of biblical truth. Animations of battle scenes where squirts of blood spatter the screen. Doomsday documentaries: this one, a countdown of likely scenarios—pestilence, war—for the end of days.
    David feels an unpleasant grinding in him like a gear not quite slipping into place. It is the thought of his book, the new one. A doomsday book, in its way, one he has been planning practically since childhood, since Ostia Antica, in fact, when that same young guide who had admonished him over the piece of mosaic—really just some smooth talker the concierge at their hotel had hooked them up with, probably a cousin of his in need of quick cash—had painted a picture for David of the town’s rapid decline after the fall of Rome. More than a little fanciful, it later turned out, though the image had stayed with David, of this bustling port town of hundreds of thousands reduced to ruins almost overnight. That sense of the transience of things, mysterious and bracing. How in an instant humans could revert from the civilized to the savage.
    That is the book he has always wanted to write, about that reversion, not just at the fall of Rome but across all of history,like something embedded in history’s DNA. He should have started in on it years ago, right after he’d finished the Augustus book, when the whole end-of-civilization rage hadn’t kicked in yet and he would have been seen as a trailblazer. Instead he has wasted his time churning out stopgaps. He wouldn’t have admitted it back then but the fiasco in Montreal had spooked him, exactly when he should have been bold, when he should have been striking out into new territory. Even the Augustus book, by the end, was just him playing it safe, trying to shore up his bona fides, with the result that he’d been crucified both inside the academy and out.
    On the screen, they are at death by machine. Armed robots march in the background while Stephen Hawking warns in his computer voice of the day when computers will exceed humans.
    Back when these so-called learning channels were still running programs of substance, one of them had actually optioned
Masculine History
. David had signed the deal only a couple of months after starting up with Julia, when it had seemed a final assurance that every problem was behind him. For once he had even managed to sustain a relationship for longer than a dirty weekend, had proved he was not just some sociopath, that he was capable of real connection. He kept waiting to grow tired of Julia, for the flight instinct to kick in, but instead he awoke every morning with the same thankfulness that he hadn’t yet wrecked things. It