Sleep Read Online Free

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, somestudent 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    He finds Julia staring out the bathroom window seeming withdrawn to a second order of reclusion, one that leaves out even Marcus, who sits playing quietly in the tub with one of his bath toys as if he is merely playing at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