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she is the good one. She caught him nodding off the other day while he was supervising Marcus’s bath and itwas 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 west-end hospital he worked out of, a warren of narrow rooms and labyrinthine corridors just above a 24-hour Coffee Time. Becker seemed to run the place like his personal fiefdom, the halls lined with his conference posters and a big photo of him hanging in the foyer posed with an ancient-looking Nathaniel Kleitman, the granddaddy of sleep medicine. The sleep rooms were all named after painters, each with its corresponding sleep-themed print on the door, Dali’s melting clocks, Goya’s
The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters
. David got Henri Rousseau and
The Dream
, of a woman reclining naked on a couch like a Titian Venus while around her the jungle rose up and wild animals lurked.
    He was prepped in a control room that was a bedlam of cables and ancient equipment and cluttered cubicles. His technician, Nada, 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