Free Sleep by Nino Ricci

contempt has come into his mother as if this were the greatest failure for a man, to lose his woman. She was always the one who had
got
him when he was young, who had shared his own sense of ambition for himself. Now, every word from her has some dagger in it.
    “What you never understood is she’s just like her father. There’s only one way to deal with people like that. To show strength.”
    David holds his tongue.
    Danny comes out of the house flourishing a tray of bruschetta. Even now, into their forties, something flinches inDavid whenever he lays eyes on his brother. To look at them you would never know they are twins, Danny a good six inches shorter than him and with a slightly stunted look as if his body had turned in on itself. Nearly two pounds separated them at birth. The story was that David had tried to starve Danny in the womb, like those animals that killed off their siblings to boost their own survival odds.
    “Davie, you get the tour yet? Ma, did you show him around?”
    “Show him what? We just got here.”
    It has taken David nearly a year to get around to seeing the place. He was expecting the usual ersatz monumentalism, some big-box eyesore built to within an inch of its lot lines, festooned with arches and electrocoated in ceramic. Instead he has found something of an entirely different order. He did a double take when his mother pulled up to the place, the facade a complicated fretwork of cantilevered stone and wooden beams and two-storey windows like something out of Frank Lloyd Wright.
    “This is Danny’s?”
    “You’d know if you ever came out here.”
    What David can’t get over is that his brother has had the vision for such a place. Before this he was living in a three-bedroom bungalow near their mother’s condo in the north of the city that was the essence of the second-generation dead end, crammed with children and memorabilia and too-heavy furnishings.
    “Let me get you a beer, Davie. I’ve got a nice local label, you’re gonna like it.”
    “Think I’ll pass for now.”
    “What’s the big deal? It’s not like you’re driving.”
    He can’t tell if Danny is mocking him or just being literal. No doubt their mother has already passed on to him some convoluted version of David’s disorder from the bare-bones one David has had to give her to explain his need for a ride.
    “It’s because you sit at a desk all day instead of getting your hands dirty,” was her analysis. “Your father used to get by on five, six hours of sleep every night. Then in the day, he did what he had to.”
    David’s eye keeps going back to Marcus. Always when he looks at him now he sees only deficiency, all the things about him that need fixing. Always when he is with him he feels the same impatience, that he is waiting for their time together to truly begin in some way or maybe simply for it to be over, he hardly knows which.
    Jamie, the older boy, grabs hold of his little brother and makes as if to toss him on top of Marcus. Marcus flinches and Jamie pulls short at the last instant, laughing.
    Asshole
.
    Danny is nodding at the patio tiles.
    “What do you think of that stone, Davie? Ever see anything like it?”
    It is all David can do not to march out and wring the boy’s neck.
    “What is it, kryptonite or something?”
    “It’s local marble, if you can believe it. From just north of here. Used to be big once but you have to look for it now. We bought a little quarry of it a couple of years ago. Like Carrara was for Augustus, right? I was thinking of that when I bought the place, about what you said in your book. How he changed Rome from a city of wood into one of marble. That stuck with me.”
    David is taken off guard. So Danny has read one of his books. Has read the second one, several hundred copies of which David had had to toss into the recycling when he moved out of the house because he couldn’t even give them away.
    He makes a show of looking at the stone, salmon coloured with