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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 Nada 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 theeffort 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