Methylphenidate

A WASH OF CHEMICALS floods David’s brain and at once the urge is there, irresistible. What is the trigger, what switch opens the floodgate? If he could find it, he could control it. But even to think of the urge is to bring it on.

“Dad. Dad!”

These are the times it overtakes him: When he is reading. When he is watching. When he is listening. At the crossroads of action and thought, the mind’s gathering place, the very place where he lives.

When he is driving.

“Daddy, wake up!”

He hears a thundering like a stampede, he sees chariots, horses. Then the image splinters and there is only the noise itself, jagged and black, until finally the expressway pixelates into clarity and he realizes he has veered onto the rumble strip.

A car is stopped on the shoulder not a hundred metres in front of them. They are headed straight for it.

“Dad, there’s a car!”

Afterwards David will never quite be able to sort out his memory of what happens next in any way that makes sense. It will seem as if he has split in two, on one side of him the nuclear blast of sensation, the thump of his wheels, the stopped car, his son’s grating terror, on the other an eerie calmness, as if every fibre in him has long been preparing for just such a moment, when everything hangs in the balance. He will be amazed how much data has been left in him by an event that has happened in the blink of an eye. The slant of autumn light through the windshield. The colour of the car, silver-grey, he is heading toward. The look of its driver, a small, dark-skinned man, Middle Eastern or Asian, who has stopped to make a call or stretch his legs or take a leak, as he innocently turns to check for traffic before opening his door only to discover that death is bearing down on him. And already before it comes, David sees the crash, the mess of twisted metal and broken glass and ruined flesh.

He jerks the wheel hard and the car bucks like a wild animal, no longer under his will. His body has braced itself for impact but, impossibly, the impact doesn’t come. Instead there is only a suck of air from the far side of the car like the pull of something’s gravity, the scream of a horn as David overshoots his lane and nearly sideswipes a passing van. Then, as quickly as that, the danger has passed. As if it had never been. Already the car on the shoulder has receded to a harmless glint in the rear-view mirror.

David’s heart is pounding. He digs his little pill container out of his pant pocket and dumps the pills onto the passenger seat, then grabs two by feel and crunches down on them. Do not chew. They are bitter like cyanide, like hemlock. But pointless now: he is fully awake.

He can feel Marcus eyeing him from his car seat in the back.

“You fell asleep,” he says.

“I wasn’t asleep.” But already David has taken the wrong tack, has responded to the boy’s accusation rather than to his fear. “I just closed my eyes for a second, that’s all. Because of the sun.”

David nudges the mirror to get a better view of him, sees how his shoulders have hunched, how he has balled himself up in his gloom and distrust. He is barely five but already he carries his moods like an adolescent. At the zoo, where they were visiting, he fell into a sulk over a trinket David refused him at the gift shop, and now he will roll this new, larger hurt into the old one, each lending weight to the other. When did he become like this, so vigilant, so hungry for grievance?

David knows he ought to say more about what has happened but is afraid that saying more will only raise the event’s importance in the boy’s mind. Will only make him more likely to report it to his mother.

“Sit up straight, please. We’ve talked about that.”

A thin line of fire burns a path through David’s veins as the drug enters his bloodstream and he feels a panic go through him, nothing like the adrenal rush of the near accident itself but a sense of being vulnerable after the fact, as if by some loop the moment might replay itself, differently. He realizes, suddenly, that his whole body is trembling. It happens sometimes when he is agitated, this loss of control, another of his symptoms.

The sheerest luck has saved him from killing his son.

Daddy, wake up.

He casts another look back at Marcus.

“Almost home now,” he says. “Almost there.”

A hesitation, then the inevitable question.

“Will Momma be there?”

He is never enough. He is never the last recourse.

David lets the question hang.

They merge onto the valley parkway to find it backed up for miles, lurching forward in tiny spurts as the sun sets and the trees along the parkway flame up like an apocalypse in their autumn colours. Julia will be livid that they are so late, that David hasn’t called. It has crossed his mind to call any number of times, but each time he has resisted, knowing that she herself will never be the one to call. This is how she tests him, piling up her grievances the way Marcus has learned to. The behaviour of children.

He feels the dull throb of a headache beginning from the spike in his medication. For the next few hours, his heart will pound like a battering ram. He takes advantage of the stalled traffic to gather up the pills still scattered on the seat next to him: stupid to have let Marcus see them, to risk his mentioning them. Right from the start David has kept Julia in the dark, has passed the blame for his symptoms onto insomnia, late nights, overwork, has hidden from her the doctors’ visits, the clinics, the pills. That is his default with her now: to hide any sign of weakness, anything that might give her ammunition.

His mind keeps circling back to the instant when the crash felt inevitable, trying to sort out what saved them, though already it is hard to say how much is real in what he remembers and how much is the illogic of whatever dream he had slipped into. A deep brain disorder. That was how Becker put it, his sleep doctor, a fleshy Slav with the needling rasp of an East Bloc apparatchik and the parboiled look of a village butcher. A breakdown in the border that separated waking from sleep. As if sleep were some rebel force that David had let overrun him, leaving him condemned now to live in this place of constant incursion, where nothing was safe, nothing was certain.

A police cruiser squeezes by on the shoulder, then an ambulance. It occurs to David that the loop he has imagined has really happened: somewhere ahead, a version of the horror he has averted is playing itself out. He will drive by and see his own child lying dead, his own double howling in bloodied agony. At the image, something like relief stirs in him, as if only now has he dared it, the sense of a cosmic reprieve, a second chance. This is exactly the sort of thinking he is constantly having to root out of his students, whose notions of historical process don’t go much beyond mindless mantras like Everything happens for a reason.

He takes out his cell phone and sets it to speaker.

“Just calling your mom,” he says to Marcus, and he can feel the boy’s mood lift.

She picks up on the first ring.

“Christ, David, where are you? It’s past six. Why didn’t you call?”

Why didn’t you?

“We’re stuck on the parkway,” he says evenly.

“For fuck’s sake! I thought we talked about using the cell when you’re driving!”

He allows himself the smallest pause.

“We’re on speaker, actually.”

The behaviour of children.

Into the silence David adds, evenly again, “We had a nice day at the zoo.”

“That’s just great, David, I’m happy for you. I just wish it would cross your mind sometimes to think of someone other than yourself.”

The call leaves David circling along a well-worn path of anger and self-justification. It’s her, he tells himself, this implacable she-wolf she has been ever since Marcus was born, framing everything he does as a betrayal of his most basic duties as husband and father. The defence has become so knee-jerk in him by now that he seldom thinks beyond it. That she doesn’t call because he accuses her of checking up on him, of being controlling. Or because he might be in class, or in a conference, or driving home. Because in a thousand ways, over the years, he has made it known not to call. Probably all afternoon she has been fighting the urge to call him, meanwhile imagining every horror. He has learned that about her, though she doesn’t show it, how deep her fears go the second Marcus is out of her sight, how primordial they are, beyond reason.

It is fully dark by the time they reach the source of the holdup. An accident, yes, but less tragedy than farce. A moving van has spilled it contents and sent half a dozen cars into a minor pileup, emergency crews sorting through the wreckage and traffic choked down to a single lane. Debris from the van lies heaped at the roadside etched in the halogen glare of the highway’s mast lights, a half-sprung sofa-bed, splintered end tables, ruptured moving boxes spilling clothes, shattered dishes, DVDs. The van itself is farther up, back doors still open, sitting alone at the side of the road as if the accident had nothing to do with it. David makes out two forms, a man and a woman, hurrying toward it in the dark clutching armfuls of salvage.

Idiots, he thinks.

Past the bottleneck he picks up speed at once. The red tail-lights of the cars ahead of him weave through the highway’s dips and curves as if riding the air, held disembodied by the dark swath the valley forms against the backdrop of the city. He remembers driving here as a teen in his first car, a reconditioned MG he’d paid for out of his own pocket, the top down and the pedal to the floor while his blood pumped through his veins and the wind roared around him. Back then the valley seemed some hopeful landscape of the future, with the river winding its way toward the lake beneath the flyovers and cloverleaves, and the skyscrapers of downtown beckoning in the distance. Now, he realizes, he is looking instead at the past, that all this is part of an order already in full decline.

There is a clearing near their exit where more than once David has seen deer grazing, as many as a dozen of them. Somehow they have managed to find a corridor here from open country, have been able to thrive in these back-yard-sized patches of bush between murderous highway on one side and the endless concrete and cracked asphalt and brick of the east end on the other. David thinks of them not as some harbinger of a return to the wilderness of old but a sign that nature is on the march, trying to force a new accommodation. All over the city the animals have grown urban, the raccoons long ago but now coyotes, hawks, herds of deer. Meanwhile, the humans grow savage. Jogging past the camps of the homeless that dot the valley, David has seen the scattered bits of offal and bone and matted fur from their kills.

At their exit David steals another look at Marcus.

“Still awake back there?”

Marcus shifts in his seat.

“Are you?”

David ought to laugh, feel proud even; it is a sophisticated response. Instead, he hears the voice of Julia. He has the urge to shake the boy, to strike him. He fears that one day, he will.

He remembers the promise he made to himself at Marcus’s birth. That he would never do what his own father had done. That he would never make an enemy of his son.

In the darkness, the tree-lined streets of their neighbourhood give off the dead calm of a village. When David was a kid, coming out here to visit an uncle who ran an east-end vegetable shop, the streets teemed with children and grizzled men and old women in black and the yards were staked with laundry lines or with tomatoes and beans. Now, the area is already into its third or fourth wave of gentrification, the houses, mostly two-storey semis on postage-stamp lots, all burnished and bevelled and bleached for maximum value added and their gardens as manicured as Versailles, still with fall flowers in bloom or roses in their second or third flourishing.

David and Julia’s place is a standout, a detached Victorian in yellow brick that was built when the tracts east of the valley were still open fields. Of the dozens of places they saw at the time of their move here from Montreal, this was the only one Julia would even consider, though it was too large by half and had never been properly updated. Exactly the sort of place David hated then, fusty and creaky and small-roomed, hemmed in on every side by the inconvenience of the old. David got enough of the old in his work; at home he preferred something more neutral. Clean lines, lots of light, a place he could see his own life in.

Before Marcus, there was this house: it was the project Julia poured all her energies into, all her unspoken resentment at being uprooted for the sake of David’s career, this despite his having negotiated a place for her here better than anything she would have got back home. For a while her reputation even seemed set to eclipse his own, her dissertation coming out with one of the more respectable academic presses to critical raves while his follow-up to his first book was almost universally panned, presumably to punish him for the first one’s success. By her third year Julia was leveraging enough research money to bring her teaching load down to nearly the same level as David’s, though instead of trying to bank a few more publications for her tenure review she instead put the time she’d freed up into the house.

She had become obsessed with restoring the place as closely as possible to its original form, which meant tearing down a mudroom at the back and adding a front veranda, having custom plasterwork done and ordering custom baseboards and period wallpaper, all of this on top of the furnace that needed replacing and the attic that needed insulating and the electrical panel that needed upgrading. David was staggered by the bills coming in. They had bought the place on a pre-emptive bid that was well above the asking price to head off the chance of losing it in an auction, then had sunk the last of his book money into the down payment. When David’s second book failed even to earn back its advance, all the reno work had to come right off their salaries. Before his marriage David had always made a point of living large, of picking up tabs, of dressing well, of always ordering the premium wine, but with the money flowing out like water he began to harp on every expense.

At bottom even the money was probably a tangent, every one of their arguments over the house so compromised from the start by other agendas that resolution was never a realistic prospect, maybe not even a hoped-for one. All that mattered, really, was to make a point. For Julia, that this was David’s own doing, the price to pay for taking her away from everything familiar, from a place where her life might have been her own; for David, that even casting the move in these terms, as what he had wanted, was just a cover for what he’d been denied. What he had wanted then, what would have made sense, was not a puffed-up chair at a second-rate university in a city he had no wish to return to but an appointment at one of the better schools south of the border. Someplace where ambition wasn’t seen as a disease. Where they would have paid him real money. He could have had that then.

His breaking point with the house came over some vintage door hardware Julia had ordered from England, half of it, David thought, stuff his brother could have picked up for nothing from salvage.

“This isn’t Daddy’s mausoleum on the hill!” David had screamed at her. “Daddy’s not paying the fucking bills!”

That was a constant refrain with him at the time, the implication that Julia’s extravagances were somehow born of the same old-money contempt that her father—who insisted on pronouncing David’s surname, Pace, as Pah-cheh, though it probably hadn’t been said that way since before David’s own father had stepped off the boat—had shown for David from the day he’d first laid eyes on him. And yet at the outset David had taken pleasure in indulging her, still flush with his successes and believing the money would never end. And it wasn’t that he had ever really pushed her to seek his brother’s services, or that the hardware she’d ordered was much of an extravagance next to what they’d already spent by then. When it had arrived, Julia had come to him in all innocence to show him a lock set from the 1800s whose wooden knobs, carved in a beehive pattern, were delicately canted from the uneven wear of whatever hands had touched them over the centuries. Not in a decade of scouring would Danny have turned up anything that exquisite in salvage. David thinks of those knobs now every time he opens one of the house’s doors: after the argument, Julia had returned all the vintage stuff to wherever she’d got it from and had simply left in place the generic hardware the house had come with.

David parks on the street but turns to find that Marcus, uncharacteristically, has nodded off after all, slumped like a shooting victim against the restraints of his car seat. The sight of him asleep like that sparks a complicated burst of emotion in David, a mix of fear and remorse and maybe what for want of a better word he might call love, though that is the part that feels most malevolent, most likely to lead to failure or bad judgment or ill will. Again the image flashes through his head of the stopped car and with it the panic comes as well, even more gut-wrenching now, as though it is only in these incremental waves that he is able to take in the fullness of it. Yet beneath the panic is the memory of that second self who sat steely and clear-eyed and calm, exhilarated, almost, at the crucial instant. Who saved their lives, perhaps, but as if all that had really mattered was the sense, for maybe the first time in months or years, of being fully awake, of being fully alive.

He can’t bring himself to rouse Marcus and sits staring out at his house, seeming to see it as a stranger might. The front veranda is bathed in a sallow light that gives way by slow degrees to shadow like the light from a fire, one of Julia’s period touches. The veranda had been one of her biggest projects, though only after their blowout—when work on the house essentially ceased, so that to this day it is dotted with little jobs that were never completed—was David finally able to see it as something more than the price tag it had come with. What had struck him as mere frippery at first, its filigreed sconces, its endless balusters and spindles, took on a kind of resonance, of depth. He would look at the veranda and see the homestead the house had once been, this stubborn bit of empire at the edge of the bush. Somehow Julia had succeeded in conjuring that ghost. What was the point of all those arguments they’d had except to rob her, to rob them both, of the pleasure of what she’d accomplished? Why had he come to see the house as something she was taking from him rather than something she was giving him?

A second chance. He stares out and can see it shimmering in front of him, a chance at the life he has always wanted. The beautiful house, the beautiful wife, the beautiful child; the successful career. The life that, despite himself, he actually has. And yet even as it sits waiting for him he wonders at the stranger shifting inside him who sees only the lie of it.

At the sound of them at the door Julia comes out of the kitchen and at once bends to take Marcus in her arms, not so much as looking at David. She is dressed in sweats but he gets a whiff of body powder or perfume as if she has changed back from something nicer.

“Did you see the echidna?”

“We couldn’t. Dad said that part wasn’t open.”

“I’m sure it was closed if your dad said it was. You’ll see it next time.”

David knows he has to speak, make contact, but also that there is nothing he can say that will be the right thing.

“What smells so good?”

“It might have been good, if you’d been here an hour ago.”

The dining table is set with candlesticks and wine, the good china. No doubt she has spent much of the afternoon cooking and planning, nursing, against the odds, the hope that it might still be possible to enjoy an evening at home with her husband and son. Time after time David forgets this side of her, her vestigial need to make house, her hope for the restoration of a domestic order that has never really existed. Or he doesn’t forget: he suppresses. This is not the Julia he fell in love with; it is not the Julia he married. The Julia he fell in love with was the rising star, the one who loved her work, who could spend hours in the archives poring through letters and journals and laundry lists until the right detail finally leapt out at her. Now it is as if she has cut out that part of herself like a tumour she needed to be free of.

For Marcus, as usual, there is an entirely separate meal, hot dogs with canned beans in molasses. It boggles David how Julia dotes on him but then feeds him this poison. How she trains him to want only that. Pancakes. French fries. Macaroni and cheese from a box. These are the raw materials building the boy’s sinew and bone, his brain. It makes David think of the cut-throat contractors his father used to rail against who knocked together whole housing blocks out of cardboard and spit. His father had been a bastard, but at least he’d had standards. None of his buildings looked old the week after they went up. Nor would he ever have allowed to enter his house any of the processed chemical confections that Julia insists on feeding Marcus.

“You have to eat the bun too,” Julia says, though it is the punkiest sort of white bread. “And some of the beans.”

“I don’t like the beans.”

David holds his tongue.

“You have to eat some of them. For Mommy.”

“Please, Mom. I don’t like them.”

“Just three spoons, then. For Mommy.”

The same ordeal, night after night; the same anger in David that they have veered so badly off course. The anger spirals in him until he has lost all perspective, no longer sure if it is Julia or just the drug coursing through him or if the anger is what he wants, all that keeps him going.

They have hardly exchanged a word the whole meal. David gets up silently when they have finished and starts clearing the table.

“Thanks, Julia,” Julia says. “Great supper.”

He goes up to his office on the third floor while Julia gets Marcus ready for bed, though he knows how much she hates it when he does this. No point offering help when she is in this mood. The truth, though, is that he is afraid, afraid Marcus will say something, that he himself will. That something will come out of him that he can’t take back.

His office is the one room in the house that bears no mark of Julia’s restorations. The same desk in aluminum and brushed glass that he had in his apartment in Montreal; a wall of built-ins for his library done in painted MDF. On a top shelf, a row of the various editions of his own work, his only indulgence. None of the little flourishes his fellow classicists go in for, the Romanists especially, the period maps on every wall, the framed coinage, the seventeenth-century editions of Tacitus or Virgil or Livy that belonged to some Cambridge schoolboy. Most of them have a toilet seat from Hadrian’s Villa or a collarbone from the catacombs that they’ve purloined at some point and that they’ll bring out like pornography to titillate their colleagues. David had been cured of that impulse early on, when his mother had taken him on his first trip to Rome at age twelve. He had picked up a loose bit of mosaic to pocket as a souvenir while they were visiting Ostia Antica, and the young cicerone who was showing them around had grown suddenly grave, impressing on David what would happen if every tourist took home a piece of the place. It was a lesson that stuck with him.

He checks his email. There is a reminder from Sonny Krishnan about their Monday one-on-one; knowing Sonny, he probably set it up on auto-send the minute they booked the appointment, timed to blot David’s weekend. No doubt he is going to try to fob off on David another numbing survey course or hit him up with more thesis supervision or committee work, seeming to have made it his mission ever since taking over as department head to claw back the research concessions David was granted when he was hired. It hasn’t helped that David’s evaluations have been dipping, or that there have been a couple of incidents that Sonny somehow managed to get wind of. The worst was when he called a student a fucking punk in the middle of a lecture and threw him out of class. This was before his diagnosis, when his symptoms had reached the point where he’d started blanking out in mid-sentence, losing his train of thought or cutting out entirely for a few seconds. After one of these lapses, a football thug logging time for his humanities requirement had made some quip that caused an eruption of laughter around him, and David had lost it.

He had had to put up with one of Sonny’s lectures afterwards, delivered in that urgent new-order tone of his that suggested the department, the whole university, was under threat of imminent dissolution, with no room for slippage. It infuriates David how Sonny is constantly looking for ways to position him as some sort of liability when he is still arguably one of the best-published instructors in the department, even now that History has been subsumed within the huge Liberal Studies hydra that Sonny presides over. When he is probably the main reason classical studies haven’t disappeared entirely, the only one who has made the effort to keep them current. David has lost count of the number of times students have told him that what got them interested in ancient Rome was some article or post of his that made the connection for them between past and present. That is the Rome David brings to his students, not some dead relic but a place still alive everywhere they look, in their language, their calendars, their government, their laws, in the shapes of their buildings and the concrete they’re made of. A place not of yesterday but of tomorrow. That went to the brink of what it meant to be human, then one step beyond.

All of this counts for shit in Sonny’s new order.

David hears the water start for Marcus’s bath. He logs into his web site to check for comments on his blog even though he knows that he should be making himself present, that with each minute he spends up here he pushes Julia closer to the breaking point. At some point in their marriage the internet has become in Julia’s mind a sort of underworld David has given himself over to, a bad side of town where he goes to indulge the degraded parts of himself, the ones for which emotion, human contact, are anathema. That is never how the internet has felt for David: from the start what has thrilled him about it is exactly the sense of connection it gives him, of these millions of threads leading away from him like neural pathways, making him bigger. His web site, PaceRomana, which he has had since before most academics knew what one was, has become a virtual brand. Pace as in David, as in pah-cheh, as in peace. As in Pax Romana, the great sleight of hand Rome had managed, making peace its legacy by dint of perpetual war. To tie into the web site David had used the phrase as the title of his second book, the one on Augustus. By then he’d already been happy to start moving away from the brand of his first book, Masculine History. It had used Julius Caesar to put forward a theory of historical change whose viral rise to almost cultish currency had quickly been matched by virulent backlash.

No responses yet to his new post. Lately his comments have been plagued by trolling, ad hominem attacks too scurrilous to be taken seriously but too pointed to be dismissed as spam. Et tu, brute? Get a fucking life! Ex nihilo nihil fit. From the start there had been no shortage of diatribes against him from all the purists he had offended, but this recent stuff feels different, more personal, more malignant. He finds himself compiling lists in his head of the people who might loathe him enough to expend this sort of energy on him. It could be anyone, of course, some student he failed or colleague he slighted or some anonymous madman out there in cyberspace who has made David his personal anti-Christ, itching to get him in his crosshairs. But certain names recur. Greg Borovic, his grad school sidekick, who cut off all connection with him after Masculine History came out. Susan Morales: the last David heard, she was still stuck doing sessional work in some no-name place out West, no doubt convinced David was the one who got her exiled there. Then there is the kid who started all the trouble for him back in Montreal, though chances are he is just some paunchy personal injury lawyer or middle manager by now and has forgotten all about him.

David had run into his old department head from Montreal, Ed Dirksen, at a conference the previous year, ending up face to face with him at a refreshment table before he had even noticed him. It was the first time he had seen him since leaving Montreal.

“My God, David, it’s been years! Not that I haven’t kept up with your work!”

He looked utterly unchanged, still in the same rumpled suit, still with the babyish cast to his features of someone whose manhood had been stunted. And yet for all the nonentity he had always been, still he had persisted, hadn’t simply vanished into the void.

David had to endure several torturous minutes of Dirksen updating him on his former colleagues as if they had all been part of some happy fellowship. Then this.

“Too bad about that unpleasant business.” In an almost rueful tone, eyes dipping slightly as if to spare David embarrassment. “But I suppose it all worked out.”

He hears footsteps at the base of the stairs.

“I could use some help down here.”

He has lost his chance.

He finds Julia staring out the bathroom window seeming withdrawn to a second order of reclusion, one that leaves out even Marcus, who sits playing quietly in the tub with one of his bath toys as if he is merely playing at playing. She might be a stranger to David when she is like this, someone he has never exchanged a word with, never desired, never fucked. After Marcus was born she went weeks in this zombie state—some sort of postpartum syndrome, David figured out afterwards, though at the time it felt like revulsion, utter retreat, as if it had suddenly dawned on her that her marriage, her house, her child, had been a massive error. He often forgets it now, that darkness she slipped into, with him left to take up the slack, not knowing what to do with this child, this being, who cried for hours and hours without reason. Waiting for instinct to kick in, for love.

Julia doesn’t turn when he comes in.

“There’s two loads of laundry downstairs that need to be folded.”

The urge comes to him to apologize, to make amends.

“You okay?”

She gives him a look that seems to draw all emotion back into itself like a black hole.

“Let’s not start this right now.”

It had been only a matter of weeks after Marcus’s birth before Julia had come around, with the suddenness of a genetic switch being thrown. The panicked protectiveness she has had around Marcus ever since makes David suspect that she is still reliving with horror the numbness of those first weeks, when anything might have happened. In this reliving, David has become the enemy, the threat, the bad parent she needs him to be in order to assure herself she is the good one. She caught him nodding off the other day while he was supervising Marcus’s bath and it was as if he had dropped the boy into boiling pitch, had shown, in that brief lapse, how little all of this means to him.

He brings the laundry into the living room. His head is throbbing by now from the extra pills he took in the car, from the glass of wine he stupidly drank with supper. It has been one of the hardest things to mask, how badly wine affects him these days, how sharply his intake has dropped. He pops another pill, dry, to stay alert, chewing this one as well, though he has lost all track of how many he is up to. At the end of the month he’ll come up short: the pills are strictly controlled, down to the day, no new script until the old one has run its course.

He tunes the TV to one of the news channels, keeping the volume low to head off Julia’s reprimand. A car bomb in Baghdad; a drone attack near the Afghan border. Instinctively his mind lays a map of the past over the present, the Arabians, the Parthians, the Persians, trying to match up the fault lines, a reflex from a feature he runs on his web site, “Back to the Future,” that connects current events to Roman parallels. These days the connections never feel as clear cut as they once did, the insights never quite as inspired. It isn’t just burnout or age: it’s the crossed wires from his disorder, the lacunae and gaps that build up each time a synapse misfires or goes astray. Then the energy he spends on these baubles feels more and more like fiddling, when his new book is still just a mess of jottings and his last one, over two years ago, was just another culling of his web posts, light as air. Time and again he has stayed late at the university trying to get up momentum on the new book only to have his brain go to blue screen, waking with a start to find he’s been out for an hour or more or has filled the screen with gibberish or has somehow erased a whole day’s work, following some dream logic he can’t reconstruct. And of course each time he works late he adds a little more poison to his marriage, a little more silence.

A deep brain disorder.

It was the lapses in class that finally sent David in for testing. Two days and nights at the clinic Becker operated near the east-end hospital he worked out of, a warren of narrow rooms and labyrinthine corridors just above a 24-hour Coffee Time.

He was prepped in a control room that was a bedlam of cables and ancient equipment and cluttered cubicles. His technician, Sanja, kept up a steady litany of complaint about the working conditions as she fixed electrodes to his scalp, letting him know that the country she had come from had not been a backward one, though she didn’t name it. His whole time in the place David remained rigged up to these electrodes like a head case, his only contact with the outside world the quick forays he made to pick up bad sandwiches at the Coffee Time and bad coffee he wasn’t supposed to be drinking. The clinic stank of other people’s sleep, the fecal-and-breath-and-sweat smell of David’s half-dozen or so fellow inmates, people he never exchanged a word with but whom he caught glimpses of in the halls in their own Frankenstein gear and heard being tended to in the night as if they were all part of some collective nightmare. More and more the place felt like the inside of his own head, with its hazy half-reality. His dreams were vivid, phantasmagoric, epic battles and travels in time, dreams within dreams where he was above himself like a god, watching himself dream that he was dreaming. He’d buzz Sanja in the night to unplug him to pee and then he’d be fucking her or she would be killing him. The whole place seemed steeped somehow in moral ambiguity: the surly technicians from their war-torn countries where they might as easily have been perpetrators as victims; the presiding animus of Becker, who however never once set foot in the place, as if it were a dirty secret he had to keep separate from his public life at the hospital, and who for all David knew had been some sort of Mengele in his former life, had tortured political prisoners or had attached electrodes to the insides of people’s brains. It didn’t help that David had had to lie to Julia, claiming an engagement out of town, so that he was dogged the entire time by the kind of panic he’d get in fever dreams, the sense of some problem he couldn’t solve or critical thing he had failed to attend to. It would have been easy enough for Julia to check up on him; easy enough, if she discovered the lie, for her to imagine the worst yet say nothing.

After the ordeal of the tests, the follow-up with Becker was almost comically anticlimactic.

“We’ll start you at thirty milligrams of the Ritalin.” In his inquisitor’s tone, scowling at David’s results as if they had failed to yield anything of clinical interest. “We can increase that, of course, but you must be careful of tolerance.”

David asked all the obvious questions about prognosis and cause, which Becker deflected like a guardian of the mysteries. The research had isolated a certain brain chemical that sufferers lacked, though what the chemical did and what caused its lack, to hear Becker tell it, were still matters of purest speculation.

“The brain is a territory more mysterious than Mars, Mr. Pace. The precise mechanisms are not always understood.”

David wasn’t sure what exactly he had expected. Something larger, certainly, more life-changing, more exculpatory, than a simple prescription, and for a drug that was a mockery, the dirty drug of ADD. A zeitgeist drug, David had always thought of it as, the kind of popular cure of the day, like blood-letting or witch burning, that required appropriate ailments to be invented for it. According to Becker, though, it had been designed exactly for this, for stimulation, its focussing effects just a matter of fluke.

Six months later David is already at twice the dose he started at, his brain awash in stimulants from the minute he awakes in the morning until he burns out at night, when the drug seems to drain from him with the finality of a gas tank going empty. What it gives him in the interim is not some unencumbered alertness but the edgy sense of being constantly goaded, prodded, to stay awake, of hovering over a pit of sleep that only the drug keeps him from being swallowed by. By now he has learned that its stimulant properties are well known, that it is a favoured pick-me-up of soccer moms fighting suburban drift and undergrads pulling all-nighters. Yet still he cannot shed the sense of stigma he associates with it, of damage, even in his own thoughts always referring to it by its generic name, methylphenidate.

For his other symptom, the loss of control, David takes nothing yet, downplaying it with Becker for fear of having his driver’s licence revoked. At the outset it was no more than a flutter he’d feel in his brain stem like the brush of a wing at the back of his neck or the intimation of a blade about to fall. Now, though, it is as if a pulse moves through him that shuts his circuits down as it goes, until his body trembles with the effort of keeping erect and he has to sit, lean into a wall, anything to catch himself. His falling sickness, he thinks of it as, like Caesar’s, though in his case not an epileptic fit but a momentary paralysis, another misfiring, a malfunction of the switch that shuts the muscles off during REM to keep the body from acting out its dreams. It lasts only seconds, his mind awake, aware, the whole time, but his body refusing to respond to it, as in the dreams of car wrecks he has where his limbs go as droopy as rubber or the dreams of being attacked, some assailant plunging the knife again and again and David unable to lift a finger. What sets it off in him, mostly, is anger, as if anger and dream sit too close to one another in his brain.

The weather lady has come on, a pixie of a woman in a bizarre 1970s-era pantsuit whom the anchor flirts with in a forced way as if he has been instructed to in order to boost ratings. First the tally of the dead through pestilence and war; then the latest word on the coming warm front. David thinks of Petronius’s spoof in the Satyricon of the Acta Diurna, the daily news sheet out of Rome that Caesar popularized, the beginning of headline news. Seventy children born at Trimalchio’s estate. Slave put to death. Fire in Pompey’s gardens.

Julia’s voice reaches him from their bedroom as she starts in on Marcus’s bedtime reading. Idiot: instead of taking the clothes upstairs to be with them, he has set himself apart again. Then, because he isn’t there, Marcus will ask if he can sleep in his mother’s bed and she will say yes, despite all her vows to break him of the habit, so that for the thousandth time David will be consigned to Marcus’s room and the poison between him and Julia will have a chance to seep into their fibre, into their dreams. He can make out the dips and swells of Julia’s voice as she reads, its reassuring storytime calm, the emotion that speaks in it having nothing to do with the words themselves yet just as clear as they are. She has come back to herself, has come back to Marcus. He feels a rush of gratitude that Marcus has her, at least, is not utterly adrift.

What he felt in those first awful weeks after Marcus’s birth, though he hardly understood it then, was fear. It was not that he hadn’t wanted a child, that it hadn’t been part of the plan from the start, another step on his cursus honorum. But then suddenly this blackness in Julia, coming on top of a rough pregnancy in which she had bloated like a whale, hardly able to walk, to sleep, do anything. He had thought of the birth as when some sort of normalcy would return, when Julia would come back to herself, to him, when they’d have sex again, talk, when the marriage would become—in a way it hadn’t been yet, not really—a joint enterprise. Instead it was as if she had dropped off a cliff. She couldn’t get the baby to latch to her breast, despite all the instruction they’d been given, so that within days her ducts were infected and they’d had to switch to formula. Then it was nearly two weeks before she’d allowed David’s family to come, something unheard of. Nelda, Danny’s wife, took Marcus in her arms and it seemed the first time he’d been held with a mother’s sureness.

David wasn’t so infantile at the time as to have used any of this as an excuse for Susan Morales. That wasn’t anything he’d sought out or planned, wasn’t even really something he’d wanted except perhaps in some left-over lizard corner of his brain. He had got his philandering out of his system before he had married—it was one of the things that had appealed to him about marriage, the thought of all the work it would spare him, the juggling and half-lies, the appeasements, the roller coaster of living through the same precipitous arc of emotions again and again. His only lapse had been a conference hook-up a few months after he and Julia had married that he’d fallen into almost out of habit, as if he had suddenly found himself driving a car he’d forgotten he’d sold. It had been a foolish risk, but if anything he had only felt closer to Julia afterwards, relieved he could put his old life behind him.

Morales was different. The worst of it was that she had come to his office looking for Julia, a new hire who had wanted to work with her but was shy of getting in touch while she was on maternity leave. David ought to have sent her packing; the last thing Julia needed then was to have to hold the hand of some fawning acolyte. But something about her held him—her looks or her youth, the energy of her, like things he was looking at now in a rear-view mirror; her name, perhaps, something as simple as that. He made a joke about it and she laughed, with a Latin openness.

“She’s a little sleep deprived right now,” David told her. “But I’m sure she’d love to hear from you as soon as her brain’s back in working order.”

If she had turned and gone that might have been the end of it. Instead she lingered, maybe simply glad of the chance for conversation, for connection. Something caught her eye on his bookshelf and her jaw dropped, as literally as that.

“You wrote that book! The one all the feminists hated.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“It’s so funny the two of you are married. Your wife’s work is so different.”

There seemed only the logistics to work out after that. A drink in the graduate lounge; the offer of a lift to her apartment; the lies they had to tell themselves at each step in order to get to the next one. She lived in one of the towers of the high-rise ghetto that surrounded the campus. David had offered to pass on to Julia some offprints of her work and he followed her in to fetch them, past the security cameras in the denuded lobby, up through the fetor of ethnic cooking as the elevator took them to her floor. Still lying to themselves even then, still pretending, though maybe the matter had been ordained the minute she had set foot in his office, by her laugh or her smile or her smell, the split-second transmission that scientists said was all it took.

He feels a tingle at his neck and turns to see that Julia is standing behind him.

“Did something happen today?”

He picks up the TV remote and starts surfing.

“Happen where?”

“At the zoo, for Christ’s sake. When you were out. He seems scared.”

He is looking for turns, the places where he’ll be safe.

“Scared of what?”

“I don’t know, you tell me! Can you turn that fucking thing off?”

He knows all their battlefields by now, the thickets and swamps, the paths that lead forward and those that only circle back again and again. In a minute they will be shouting, though a thousand times they have vowed not to do this, not in Marcus’s hearing. The same accusations, the same gutter language, the same stopping short of anything that matters.

“Don’t you see how he plays you?” Continuing to flit through the channels. “Instead of it occurring to you that he just wants to sleep in our bed, right away I’m the bad guy.”

What he was afraid of, when Marcus was born, was himself. Not Julia’s deadness but his own, the sense of having been stumbling forward like a sleepwalker, wandering deeper and deeper into country he hadn’t the vaguest notion how to find his way through. Not knowing, suddenly, what the point of a marriage was, of a family. All the compromises and failures and fights, the constant sense of not measuring up, and then this nightmarish child thrown into the mix, this judgment, this monster of need.

At least Susan Morales was something he understood. Being with her was like every relationship he had had before Julia only more so, dirty and fierce, precipitous, insufficient. The furtive calls and the missed ones, the constant endings and beginning again, the times he showed up unexpectedly at her apartment in the middle of the day and fucked her the instant he was inside the door and the times he didn’t show at all. Her always pretending how little she needed from him and his always giving her less than that, until it was hard to tell desire from desperation. A mistake, in other words, from beginning to end, mesmerizing in its destructiveness even while it seemed to hold out the promise of the real life that real life made impossible.

He cut it off definitively within a matter of months. By then this woman who had struck him as so fearless when he’d met her, so self-sufficient, appeared to be dissolving before his eyes. She had never got in touch with Julia, of course. To David she’d shrugged the matter off as more her department head’s idea than her own. Yet almost at once she began to feel stalled in her work, missed submission deadlines for conference presentations, became anxious over her teaching, began questioning everything, her accent, her weight, her cooking, her clothes. It was as if he had inadvertently pricked the heart of her, caused some small rupture that was deflating her, bit by bit, to nothing. He didn’t tell her it was for her own good that he was ending things, but for once he actually felt that. Later, though, when he learned she had failed her first-year probation and been let go, all he felt was relief. By then the true horror of what he’d done had dawned on him. He had shit in the nest, the unforgivable thing. Each time he went home to his wife, to his son, he carried with him this fecal stink.

Julia is still hovering behind him.

“Do you know how fucking exhausting this is, David?”

He needs the shouting to start, for them to veer off to their familiar set pieces, but instead her voice is hollowed out, as if she has reached the bottom of something.

“I just want to know if anything happened. For Marcus’s sake. Just the truth for once, that’s all I’m asking. Don’t make me beg for it.”

This is always the risk, that one of them will step out of the loop.

“And for the record,” she adds, “he’s in his own bed.”

Just the truth. If only he could give her that. If he could get down on his knees and make a clean breast of everything, every failure, every lie, every part of himself he has hidden away. If he could be naked before her, the way he had felt for a time at the outset, what had bound him to her, that she had seen to his core and hadn’t refused him.

David’s head is pounding, his blood is.

“I’ll tell you what’s fucking exhausting,” he says. “That it’s always a witch hunt with you, it’s always about scoring points. The truth is the last thing you want!”

The shouting has started.

The irony of history is that it is already over. The crucial moment when disaster might have been averted has already passed. Pompey at Pharsalus. Caesar setting out for the Senate House on the Ides of March.

When the lies started: before he and Julia had so much as set eyes on one another, both of them primed for exactly the mistake the other one was for them. At the heart of the mistake, like some stray bit of viral DNA, some slow-acting carcinogen, was Edward Dirksen. It was under his reign as department head that David had been hired, back before his book had come out and he was still enough of an unknown quantity to have been grateful for the job; it was under him that Julia was brought in for a postdoc a couple of years later, coming back from graduate work in England trailing every sort of accolade after having been a star pupil of Dirksen’s as an undergrad. The rumour was that he’d actually had designs on her back then, but David couldn’t credit it, couldn’t picture Dirk, still a bachelor at forty, with all the sex appeal of a church deacon, ever girding himself for that sort of sexual adventurism.

She was the one who had started things, coming up to him at a beginning-of-term meet-and-greet with the awkward forthrightness of someone determined not to be cowed, long legs stretching like delinquents from her sensible skirt to her sensible shoes. By then he had already spotted her in the department, each time she came in a flutter passing through the place like a shift in the air that signalled a turn in the weather.

“I take it you’re Mr. Masculine History.”

“I hope this means you’re a feminist.” Her hair, which she wore long and loose in those days, flashed from dark to red whenever it caught the light. “It would be about time in this department. Even the girls here are old boy.”

“What about you? You don’t exactly strike me as old boy.”

“I guess that makes me your only hope.”

In the corner of his eye he had picked out Dirksen making the rounds of the room, playing the host, and yet with the plane of his body half-trained the whole time on Julia.

“I heard Dirksen fought pretty hard to get you back here. I mean, you could have gone anywhere.”

She flushed as if he had slapped her.

“I came back because I wanted to come home, actually.” She had shut right down. “Dirksen didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Who knew why he even made the effort after that. Her own stock was as old boy as it came, her father some sort of backroom kingmaker, with a house on the mountain and a pedigree that went back to the Conquest, and her own credentials all of the right sort, with none of the taint that went with David’s brand of success. For every good review David had got in the mainstream press for Masculine History there had been a snide one in the academic journals, deriding his scholarship or his conclusions or his prose or dismissing his theory as ersatz postmodernism on the one hand or mere reactionism on the other.

He sent her flowers after the dig about Dirksen. It was the sort of gesture she might have felt obliged to scoff at, yet he saw how she brightened despite herself when their paths crossed again.

“Next time instead of sending flowers, just don’t act like an asshole.”

He made a point of taking matters slowly with her. Coffee in the middle of the day at dingy places in the student ghetto. A couple of foreign films at the Cinémathèque. Trying to avoid the usual crash-and-burn, not daring to so much as touch her, hazard a kiss, until some signal was clear. What surprised him was how much he liked her, how unfamiliar this felt, as if being with women until then had been simply a matter of compulsion. They had more in common than he’d expected—food, films, a zero tolerance for pretension; dead parents. Her mother had died the year before she’d gone overseas, around the time his own father had.

“She essentially drank herself to death. All my father’s fault, of course. You’ll understand when you meet him.”

He hung on the word “when.”

“With my father it was cigarettes.”

“Looks like substance abuse runs in our families. Remind me never to have children with you.”

Then on an overnight trip for a book event he ended up bedding a graduate student who’d been assigned to look after him. Nothing to do with Julia, he told himself, but when he met up with her for supper on his return it was as if the smell of the woman was still on him.

“You know, I’m not sure I’ve got this straight.” In a tone he hadn’t heard from her before, diamond-tipped, glittery with sarcasm. “Are we just being collegial here, is that what this is? Because if meanwhile you’re off fucking every bit of tail you can get your hands on, I’d like to know. Just in case someone asks.”

He felt sure if he told her the truth she would throw him over then and there. For once he was frightened. For once he didn’t feel he already had an eye on the exit. When he’d slept with the girl, it was Julia he’d pictured.

“It’s not as if I haven’t thought of you every night since we met. Let’s just say I know myself by now. That there’s patterns I fall into.”

“Well.” He could feel her relenting. “It’s not like all the choices I’ve made have exactly been stellar ones either.”

She was the one who had ended up making a confession then. It turned out that the rumours about her and Dirksen were true: there had been a brief dalliance between them in the summer after she’d graduated. David could hardly believe it. From her terse description of it he gathered it hadn’t come to much more than a couple of half-abortive mercy fucks, but still he was floored. He couldn’t get the thought from his head of Dirksen’s fumbling exertions, of her allowing them.

“You have to promise you’ll never breathe a word of this, not to anyone. For his sake. Something like this could wreck his career.”

That was the night she came home with him, with these things that shouldn’t have mattered, that he should have been able to laugh at, banging around in his head. He couldn’t give a shape to the emotion pumping through him, jealousy and guilt but also a kind of outrage whose object he couldn’t make out.

“I feel so foolish about it now,” she’d admitted. “But at the time he seemed different. Promising, in a way. A bit like you, really.”

He let that sit.

“I guess you ruined him.”

But she hadn’t caught his tone.

“I sometimes wondered that. He was so mortified afterwards. We both were, really.”

Then she was there with him in his apartment. All the days and weeks of anticipation, of getting to know her, seemed now only like obstacles he had to overcome. He made a show of being rough with her because he thought that was what she wanted, feeling the whole time that he was playing at being himself. Afterwards she lay with her face turned away from him into the pillow, finally naked next to him, as beautiful as he had hoped, yet still somehow obscure to him.

It took him an instant to realize she was crying.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Fucking hell,” she said, letting out a laugh. “I swore I wouldn’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“All of this. Sleep with someone I work with. With someone like you.”

Someone like you. A bounder, a striver, a climber, a cad. Someone in whom the impulse to cut and run was as instinctive as breathing. Whose only ethic was the practical one of what worked. He heard all of this and felt cut to the quick and somehow set free. Felt seen, in a way he seldom had.

“The worst of it,” she said, “is that I practically had to beg you for it.”

He would have liked to have told her everything then, every doubt and fear, every hatred, every callous act.

“It won’t be the last time you’ll beg.” He pressed up against her and they fucked again, harder, and this time it seemed that the obstacles were kicked clear.

All the things he had planned to tell her back then. His father, his brother, his women, his crimes. How precarious everything felt to him sometimes, the whole edifice of his life, nothing that a good solid blow wouldn’t shatter to its foundations. How all his success seemed built on sand, on a book that was just a rehash of the same tired sources and a theory that had started out as a joke, a poke in the eye of the sacred cows of the day that he and Greg Borovic had come up with on one of their late-night benders.

Back then he thought he had all the time in the world to speak of these things. Ten years on, he is still waiting for the right opening.

They are both shouting now, David has managed that, has hit the right buttons, inching their volume up bit by bit until they have drowned out the TV and filled the room. This is what he has turned Julia into, this shouter, this shrew. What she has made herself for his benefit, her way of giving him, again and again, a second chance, because the alternative would be to see through him.

“Don’t you see how you do it? How every word to him you’re turning him against me? I’m sure it was closed if your dad says it was! You’re basically telling him I’m a liar.”

“Are you serious? Are you even listening to how ludicrous you sound?”

“Don’t turn this back on me. I’m not an idiot. The place was fucking closed, full stop! Not because Daddy said it was.”

What keeps him going in this is that the anger is real, that there is always this pressure chamber of resentments and hurts he can tap into instantly, until the rage is all he sees. Until he feels he will burst with it. That he has a right to, as if any emotion this violent must be justified.

They both become aware at the same moment that Marcus is standing at the foot of the stairs. Julia takes him in her arms so quickly that there is no role for David except as the perpetrator, exactly the one he deserves.

“I’m sorry, my little munchkin.” She is close to tears. “It’s nothing. We didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You were fighting.”

David sees it as soon as she takes hold of him, how much fear is still in him.

“My God, you’re trembling. What is it, Marcus? What is it? What are you scared of?”

David catches a look from him that is like a trapped animal’s. Those split seconds of terror on the highway are in it, but also the understanding that he must say nothing, that that is his father’s unspoken imperative. How is it that the incident has remained so vivid in his five-year-old brain when it was so fleeting, so near to incoherence, that even David, afterwards, had to struggle to make sense of it?

“Jesus Christ, David, he’s terrified, what did you do to him? What is it, Marcus? Tell Mommy.”

He is just a child. None of this, David can see, is about manipulation or piling up grievances, only about fear. About not knowing which way to jump. Which side is safer.

Any second now, he will have to choose.

“Cut the hysterics, for God’s sake. He’s probably afraid because we’re fighting like animals. If you want to know the truth, he was upset because I didn’t buy him a plastic penguin or some bloody thing he wanted at the zoo. That’s what all this is about. That’s what the big trauma is, that he didn’t get his fix. Another addiction you’ve managed to pass on to him. Every outing I take him on, that’s all he cares about, what we’re going to buy at the gift shop.”

He is trying to veer off again toward the familiar, the well-worn. Except that Marcus knows nothing of these patterns, of this collusion. He only knows what he knows.

“It wasn’t that,” he says. “It wasn’t the gift shop.”

David feels the same sense of foreboding he’d felt on the highway, sees the next moments unfolding before his mind’s eye as if they have already happened.

“What was it, Marcus? Tell Mommy. Don’t be afraid.”

“Look,” David says, “what’s the point of this exactly? Haven’t we traumatized the kid enough for one day?”

“Tell me, Marcus. What was it?”

An awful pause. There is a flash of fear in Marcus’s eyes, and David can’t bring himself to try to stop him anymore.

“Dad fell asleep.”

For an instant, Julia is confused. Clearly this is nothing like what she was expecting.

“Fell asleep where? What do you mean?”

Before Marcus has had a chance to answer, David can see understanding beginning to dawn on her.

“Fell asleep where?” With more urgency now. “In the car?”

Marcus’s eyes have clouded. He seems suddenly to have realized that no side, after all, is safe.

“In the car, Marcus? While he was driving?”

Marcus won’t look at her.

“I thought so, but Daddy said no.”

“But what happened? Did he close his eyes? Did he go off the road?”

“There was a noise. But Daddy said no.”

“I hope you’re enjoying this, Julia. Talk about traumatizing.”

“He says you fell asleep! Where was this? On the expressway?”

“I didn’t fall asleep, for Christ’s sake. I got distracted and hit the rumble strip. The noise must have scared him.”

“So why didn’t you bring it up?”

“What, that I hit the rumble strip?”

“You knew something was bothering him!”

“Look, I thought it was the gift shop. I didn’t realize the thing had affected him so much. I hadn’t even thought of it again till he brought it up now.”

“But he says you fell asleep. Why would he lie?”

“He didn’t say I fell asleep, you 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 weeks David 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 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 might have been nothing more than hormones—he has read about that, how at a certain point the nesting instinct kicks in, in men as much as in women. But at the time it felt like arrival. Like coming to the end of a hard road and being able to rest.

When his father had been diagnosed at the start of his doctorate David had felt rudderless, in the grip of feelings that pulled in so many different directions he thought they would tear him apart. He had been in the midst of his comprehensives, up against deadlines for his dissertation proposal, for research funding, for the whole course of his future, yet once it was clear his father was dying, once David no longer had his defiance of him to spur him on, it felt like all volition had left him. There had been one awful night when he had wept like a child at how little his life seemed set to amount to for all his ambitions. And yet he had got through. Had managed barely into his thirties to reach a pinnacle most academics wouldn’t get to in a lifetime.

With the TV deal even Julia’s father finally deigned to take notice of David, inviting him and Julia to dinner. Not at his house, which David wouldn’t see the inside of until after the wedding, but at his club, a fusty place downtown all oak and velour and padded leather where they were served overcooked salmon and underdone vegetables and where some months later, having failed to scare David off, her father would insist on holding the wedding reception, complete with cash bar. David had expected someone more turned out, not this barrel-chested scrapper, a big man a good three inches taller than David with a shock of white hair that looked like it had been trimmed with a weed-whacker and a plaid sports jacket a good half-century out of fashion. But he was sharp, the sort of man who dared you to underestimate him.

“Here he is, our novus homo,” he had greeted David, what the Romans had called those striving plebes who had managed to scrounge a place among the patricians.

That was how the evening unfolded, in these smiling assaults, Julia looking on the whole time like an amused spectator. Away from her father she was scathing about him, but up close David could feel the dark lines of force that bound them.

“You’ll get used to him,” she said afterwards. “He just needs to claim his territory.”

Julia, too, had been quick to claim her territory, right from the start giving up any pretense of hiding their relationship at work, lingering in his office, taking his arm in the halls, planting her stakes. The truth was it pleased him to be taken possession of like this. He could see they were the envy of the department, in the untouchable way of celebrities or royalty, as if there was the sort of rightness to their coming together that put aside the usual pettinesses and rancour. Then the more open they were, the sooner Julia would be free of any lingering residue of Dirksen. For his own part, Dirksen had taken the hint early on—there was no more mooning at her office door, no orbiting at a distance, just his nods and smiles and quick retreats as if he were trying to make himself invisible. David figured he had come around like everyone else had, was probably even happy for them. They were both his protégés, in a way, even David, whom Dirksen had pushed for when he’d been hired and had always shown a paternal protectiveness toward.

The television deal brought another wave of buzz around David’s book and another flurry of speaking invitations, some of them from big-name universities in the States. More than once he was asked, with the sort of discretion that suggested serious intent, whether he had any plans for a move. The idea grew more compelling the more he thought about it. Even the B university back home had approached him, with an offer of a tailor-made cross-appointment. Nothing like the money he might get south of the border, but with course relief and a decent research budget.

He made a point of following up on every query and of shaking the right hands whenever he was on the road, telling himself he was merely finding out what was out there even while a part of him was already living an imagined future of doubled earnings and halved teaching loads. He didn’t breathe a word of any of this in the department, not even to Julia: he had too much at stake to risk involving her at this stage, still more than two years short of tenure and with plenty of detractors who would be ready to force his hand if any rumour got out that he was thinking of jumping ship. What made sense was to wait until he had decided definitively before bringing the matter up. Maybe even to wait until he had an actual offer; it would be easy enough then to negotiate something for Julia as part of the deal. That was his secret vision, to come to her with an engagement ring in one hand and a fat offer from a prestigious American school in the other. This despite all the evidence he’d had by then of her attachment to the city, the friends she’d had since kindergarten, the old haunts she’d taken him to, her secret devotion to her insufferable father. Somehow he shut all that out, drunk with his own possibilities.

He was just on the verge of expressing interest to a couple of places when Dirksen waylaid him in the hall one day as he was coming back from class. By then Dirksen had drifted so much to the edge of David’s field of vision that he had to keep reminding himself to actually take notice of him.

“I’ve got a student of yours in my office who wanted to see you.” Smiling, a bit quizzically. “Just a small matter, I think.”

David didn’t think anything of it—it was just like Dirksen to take in wandering strays like that and make sure they were tended to. The student was a hulking plodder from David’s Late Republic seminar who never said boo in class, sitting hunched in Dirksen’s office next to a hippopotamus of a woman decked out in bangles and shawls as if she had just come from a Bedouin wedding.

“I think Maddy and his mother have a question for you about his final paper,” Dirksen said, and there it sat on his desk, a big B minus on its cover page that David had awarded it, as he recalled, only because he couldn’t be bothered with the work of justifying the lower grade it actually deserved.

The woman was rummaging in her purse as if searching for some round of cheese or bottle of wine she had brought to propitiate him.

“Professor, please.” She had pulled out a newspaper clipping, which she laid with great ceremony next to the essay. “I can show you.”

It took David an instant to recognize the clipping as one of his own articles, a review he’d done recently for a local paper of a book on the Roman dictator Sulla. A couple of lines near the end of it had been carefully underlined in pencil.

David felt a shiver at the back of his neck.

“My son, he says you are famous. That you are writing a famous book. I tell him, he is lucky to have good professor. For good professor, he can work harder. He can learn more.”

Already David was finding it difficult to follow her. What threw him off was this deference, which did not waver the whole time she was making her case.

“You see, you write, ‘Good work,’ only that, no mistakes. But only B minus! He is trying for lawyer, my son, on the test, is good, but here only B minus. Then I see in the newspaper, where you write, is like Maddy! If famous professor can write for the newspaper, why only B minus?”

David’s temperature was rising. He wished Dirksen had had the wherewithal to spare him this. He was sick of students assuming that anything in their papers that didn’t have a big red circle around it was essentially flawless. Of parents coming to beg higher grades for their unremarkable offspring in the hope of getting them into law or medicine or a Harvard MBA.

The woman was urging the newspaper clipping on him, but he wouldn’t take it. Dirksen was still sitting there like a lump, his vicar’s smile plastered on his face.

“I beg you, Professor. Maybe can be B plus or A. To help him for lawyer.”

“You can’t expect him to get a fucking A just because he copied something he probably heard me say in class!”

The woman started back as if David had made a swipe at her. In the corner of his eye, he saw Dirksen go white.

“No, Professor Pace.” It was Maddy. He was the only one who looked unfazed. “I remember, I came up with the idea myself. Not that I would have if I hadn’t been in your class. I mean, you’re the one who taught us to think like that.”

The room had started to warp and shift. He shouldn’t have said probably, shouldn’t have left room for doubt. He shouldn’t have said fucking. He shouldn’t have given shape to an accusation that hadn’t even been made yet.

Dirksen was finally stirring to action.

“I think we understand your point, Mrs. Hakimi.” In a soothing tone David was actually grateful for. “Why don’t you let us discuss this on our own and see if we can’t find a solution.”

“Yes, Professor, thank you, I thank you!”

All David could see by then was a great black maw opening up before him. The matter came down to a short passage at the end of his Sulla review comparing a recent corruption scandal in the city to one in Roman times. A throwaway, really, just David acting clever, but of strikingly similar gist to an idea Maddy had developed at some length in his paper. Even the wording had echoes, David saw them at once. There was no chance Maddy had lifted the point from the review, which had come out only days earlier, after the essay had been marked and returned. One of the few margin comments David had bothered to make on the paper had singled out exactly the passage in question. “Great analogy,” he’d written. “Good work.”

David sat staring at the evidence after the duo had gone, unable to take it in.

“There’s no way that kid came up with this on his own! I distinctly remember discussing it in class. Either that or in a private meeting with him.”

But already he was scrambling, contradicting himself, until he wasn’t even sure anymore what the truth was.

Dirksen, to his credit, hadn’t expressed the least hint of judgment in any of this, not even over David’s outburst.

“Let’s not lose our heads.” David could feel himself clutching at Dirksen’s calm. “It sounds like all they’re looking for is a grade review. Why don’t you let me give the paper a read and we’ll see if we can’t find some way for everyone to come out happy.”

When Dirksen called him back into his office the next day, however, all his assurance was gone. One of the boy’s other professors, it turned out, a Renaissance witch David had never got along with, had got wind of the dispute and had pressed Dirksen for details.

Dirksen wouldn’t meet David’s eye.

“I held her off, of course, but you have to understand this complicates things a bit, there’ll have to be some sort of follow-up. The boy must have talked to her after he left here. I suppose if you’d given him a bit more hope.” All the judgment Dirksen had withheld the previous day seemed there now. “The important thing is just to put your case together so we can keep this out of your tenure file. To spare you any awkwardness down the road.”

David wanted to scream. He already knew by then that he had nothing to prove he was in the right, no class notes that might clear him, no record of a private meeting. Not even his own confidence: the truth was, he’d reread the paper and been surprised, stunned really, at how cogent it had suddenly sounded.

Over the smallest thing—a couple of lines, it could happen to anyone—he was looking at ruin. Word would get out, it always did, and all his options would vanish, and meanwhile the matter would sit in his file ready to bite him again when he came up for tenure. Maybe some zealot would have managed to dig up dirt on Masculine History by then and David would be confirmed as a serial plagiarist, lucky to land a sessional job in the back of beyond.

The worst of it would be the humiliation. The look on his colleagues’ faces. On Julia’s. The smirk on her father’s.

He was ready to beg, even to Dirksen.

“Ed, you know how it’ll look if something like this gets out. The kind of stain it can leave.”

Some shadow flitted across Dirksen’s face, of compassion maybe. For some reason David thought he was thinking of Julia, of his own transgression.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Forcing a smile. “I’m sure in a couple of weeks the whole matter will be behind you.”

David is falling, scrambling for handholds, hurtling toward solid ground or just the realization that there is no solid ground, only space without end. Then he opens his eyes with a jerk: he has nodded off. Five minutes? Twenty? He can’t say. When he drops out like this his head fills with such a rush of images he has the sense that months might be passing, whole lives. Another of his symptoms, that his dreams light up like the Milky Way the instant he closes his eyes as if all along they have been reeling there at the back of his thoughts, waiting for dark.

On the Doomsday Channel the countdown has reached number one: death by warm front. Animals changing their habitats; flowers blooming out of season. Hurricanes, forest fires, floods. Great sheets of ice fall into the sea while satellite maps show Florida, London, Bangladesh disappearing beneath the rising tides. The stuff of nightmare. Of history.

The irony of history: that in the long run, it hardly matters. Ice caps spread and recede, continents drift, tumours the size of the moon split away and it is all just the blink of an eye on the way to final extinction. There is something comforting in that, liberating. In their deepest selves, David suspects, apocalypse is what people long for, to be freed of all caring, all restraint.

What he’d felt when he’d left Dirksen’s office was something like that freedom, a rush like heroin going through him or poison, the sense of his ties to the world being cut. The worst would happen and all the disguises he had made for himself, the careful lies, would fall away. Even Julia: this wasn’t something she could forgive him for, not really, he had already convinced himself of that. She needed him to be the golden boy, the star, not this blemished thing.

Then the instant he’d accepted the worst, the way forward was suddenly clear. All he had to do was act, to stop his dithering and forge ahead with the plans he had already been setting in motion for months. Now, at a distance of years, he suspects he might have invented the entire crisis just to galvanize himself into action, imagining himself at a precipice when chances were that the whole matter would have blown over even if he had done nothing. In any event he had proved Dirksen right, in the space of a couple of weeks managing to put the whole fiasco behind him, on his own terms. By then he had proposed to Julia and had brought her around to the idea of a move; he had quit his job and landed a new one. With his resignation there was no real point to any sort of inquisition beyond the practical one of the boy’s grade, which, without the least qualm, he bumped up to the A his mother had asked for.

David had been proud then of how well he had arranged things, had thought himself bold, the master of his fate. He had managed to talk Julia into the move through a blend of seduction and coercion, taking her out to a resort in the Townships for a weekend getaway with a big diamond ring in tow and making her promises and telling her lies, framing the move as a matter of getting better terms for the both of them, of catching the tide. By then he already had a firm offer in hand from the university back home, the only place he had called, in fact, using the interest from the States as leverage but never really following up on any of it. This was his concession to Julia, was what he told himself, just as he told himself that his strongarming—that he hadn’t hesitated, for instance, to put her tryst with Dirksen into the mix, probably what had broken her in the end—was all to the greater good of their relationship. Now, though, he sees that he was just using Julia as a cover for his own fears. That what would truly have been bold back then would have been to be honest, to have shown her the whole of himself as he had wanted to from the start.

He still remembers the stupid pleasure he took announcing to Dirksen that he was leaving.

“You have a good job here, David. Don’t throw it away.”

Certain then that he was making the right choice, that he was averting exactly the sort of plodding mediocrity Dirksen himself embodied. Yet ever since the run-in with him the year before David has been haunted by the feeling there was something he’d missed. More than once he has dreamed of being with Dirksen in his office again, everything the same, the tidy desk, the ordered shelves, yet more fraught, as if layered over with all the things David never knew that he knew, the deception and self-deception, the animal reflex, unavailable to the conscious mind, that is ninety per cent of every act. Dirksen, too, is amorphous in this way, himself and not, some question hanging between them that is never spoken but is like the very air they breathe, ubiquitous, forgettable, life-and-death.

David doesn’t know what to make of these revisitings. Since the onset of his disorder his dreams have grown increasingly pressing and vivid, yet if there is some insight they are trying to impart, David has yet to piece it out. From the sleep literature he has gathered that the thinking on dreams is as all over the map as on sleep itself, that Freud was utterly mistaken in them or only slightly so, that they are merely the brain’s desperate attempts to make sense of its own chemical twitches during sleep or a kind of spawning ground for consciousness itself. That they have something to do with firming up memories though in a way that subtly changes them, adding neural links that shift their associative streams according to a logic beyond the conscious mind’s reach. All night long, perhaps, this secret reconstruction work is going on in David’s head, his nighttime selves rejigging the experiences that his daytime one regards as the very stuff of his life. To what end? To make better sense of them? Or simply to fit them to the lie of what he thinks of as himself?

David had never really suspected Dirksen’s motives back then, never wondered why he had called him into his own office rather than sending the boy to David’s, whether he was as much in the dark as David was about what was coming or already knew the noose the boy’s mother would dangle and sat calmly waiting until David had put his neck in it. Even the story of the other professor who had come to him could have been pure invention. David had stolen his woman, after all, and knew things that could have destroyed him. Not that Dirksen was the type who could ever have schemed so brazenly, but then who knew what under-selves of his own he employed to hold intact the smiling innocent he no doubt believed himself.

David wonders now if he would ever have proposed to Julia at all if Dirksen hadn’t been a factor. When he did, actually getting down on one knee to give her the ring, Julia’s face cycled through a dozen different emotions in an instant.

“You’ve got to be kidding! Pace the player is proposing? Let me get my camera! Who would believe it?”

In the first years of their marriage Julia used to tell this story with that same mordant good humour, as if this enterprise they had embarked on had had exactly the sort of grand beginning that boded well. Eventually her version of things overwrote David’s own until his memories of the weekend faded to mere impression. All that sticks out for him now with any vividness is a single image, of some animal crashing through the winter deadwood behind them as they were walking through the woods and Julia half-turned with a look of dread that for a split second seemed directed at him.

The sound of footsteps.

“What kills me is that you thought I’d never notice. That you could just keep putting me off with the same stupid excuses.”

The doomsday show is winding down. Images of abandoned cities, of empty highways, of desert and waste. The earth without people.

“What kills me is that you’d lie about it as if it were some kind of threat to your precious manhood. That that’s more important to you than your own son.”

“If you’d noticed,” he says, “why didn’t you ever bring it up?”

“For fuck’s sake, David. Is that really how this is supposed to work?”

On the TV, a view of the earth from space that gradually pulls back to take in the moon, the other planets, the Milky Way, as the screen fades to black. Against the blackness, a man-on-the-street voiceover. We might be the lucky ones, in a way. We’ll get to be there at the end.

Julia picks up the remote and kills the power.

“You don’t know how close I am right now to just walking out the door with him.”

“Please don’t dramatize for once. Don’t make me out to be some kind of monster.”

“What are you, then? Tell me. Because sometimes I look at you and I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.”

“It’s just a sleep disorder, Julia, not a heroin addiction. It’s not like I can’t control it.”

“So it’s true, then. You fell asleep. Christ, David. Jesus fucking Christ.”

He sees himself through the prism of her own horror and suddenly can hardly make sense of himself. The truth is that driving home from his late nights at the university he has drifted off any number of times, even now with his meds. And yet has persisted in the notion that he is in control. That he is safe.

“I didn’t say I fell asleep. Don’t twist things.”

“So what is it, then? Did you or didn’t you? Ten fucking years I’ve been waiting for one honest word from you. Here’s your chance.”

“Don’t do this, Julia.”

“Did you fall asleep? Yes or no?”

He should never have given her the least opening.

“It’s always the same with you, isn’t it? It’s always about making me feel like shit.”

“You risked his life. Do you understand that? Who does that to his son?”

“Don’t start high-grounding me because of your own garbage. I’m the one who’s been waiting ten years, if it comes to that. It’s like every fuck-up of yours is a payback, the house, your job, even our son. Do you remember what you were like? I swear, every time I went to work I was afraid you were going to drop him in front of a subway. Talk about monsters.”

“Thank God I had you to cover for me. Thank God you had my back.”

“Don’t rewrite history, Julia. I was the one who had to feed him, who had to change him, who had to walk around with him for hours when he wouldn’t stop crying because you were off in one of your zombie states. Let’s try to stick to the truth.”

“The truth? Are you serious? Is this really where you want to take a stand? Are you that much of an asshole? There are a lot of things I’ve been willing to forget, believe me, but not this one. Whatever little scandal it was that you were hiding when we moved here, for instance. Or whatever little trysts you’ve had on the road. All the passes you’ve expected me to give you for the sake of your bloody career when you know as much as I do you’ve just been spinning your wheels ever since we moved here. But not this one. This one takes the cake, David, that the best you have to offer for what a good parent you’ve been is that when I needed you most you were off fucking some junior lecturer. Am I understanding you, David? Is that what you mean by the truth? And then all these years you’ve had the gall to go on about how I’ve abandoned my career. You fucked my career, David, that’s what happened to it. You fucked it.”

The room recedes. He has the impression again of seeing himself from the outside, not as the person who has managed to rise up every morning all these years as if his life had a semblance of normalcy and meaning but as some despicable stranger, a scoundrel, a beast.

“There’s your truth for you, David. If you ask me it looks like shit. That’s what I’m covered in every day. And yet I still keep thinking you’ll change, if not for me then at least for your son. But you’d rather kill him than change. That’s who you are.”

David sees Marcus then, watching them again from the top of the stairs. He has heard everything. Years from now, this day, this night, will still be emblazoned in him.

He wants Julia to stop.

“It’s like we’re just burdens to you! We’re just things that get in the fucking way. In the way of what, David? What is it you want?”

What he wants is to scream, to throttle her, anything to make her stop. To be free of this part of him he has never asked for, has never understood, for whom all of this, his marriage, his home, his child, is a living death.

“Why are you still even here, David? Why?”

He is on his feet, needing to smash something, flee, though he feels the flutter at the back of his neck and then the knife drops and he is falling. Inertia keeps him pitching forward, a dead slab of flesh, to upend the laundry, the coffee table, the DVD rack, the TV, a great flurry of destruction.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he howls, though all that comes out is a wordless yammer.

“What is wrong with you?” No trace of sympathy in her voice, of any connection. “What is wrong with you?”

When he hits the floor it is only his body that stops, the rest of him continuing to hurtle out into empty space.