Free Sleep by Nino Ricci Page A

streaks of grey, but can’t manage to form an opinion of it.
    “Looks great,” he says.
    “You should come up there one day, I think you’d enjoy it. I picked these pieces out myself, on the spot. Don’t you love the colour?”
    David’s brain feels like a sheet of glass, ready to shatter at the next word that reaches it, the next shaft of light.
    “Is there a bathroom I can use?”
    “There’s half a dozen of them. Take your pick.”
    In the bathroom David pulls out his pill pod and downs a twenty-mig tab of Ritalin SR and a cap of fluoxetine, chasing them with a handful of water from the sink. Whenever Marcus stays over he hardly gets a minute’s sleep, so that the next day he is a basket case. The extra fluoxetine—a.k.a. Prozac, another in his growing list of repurposed zeitgeist drugs—is in the hope of quelling the shudder he keeps feeling in his brain stem that presages one of his collapses. It isn’t likely to help: the drug needs days or weeks to rewire his circuits before it kicks in, though in the usual way of these crossover brain drugs no one seems sure why it works at all.
    Three years after his diagnosis his pharma regime is still stunningly hit and miss. Becker, for all the banker’s parsimoniousness he showed at the outset, has been happy to ply him with every sort of psychotropic, pushing his dosages to the upper limits with each new cocktail as if he were an expendable specimen in a rat trial. Phenethylamines and tricyclics; drugs to boost his serotonin or his dopamine or his norepinephrine; a so-called smart drug promising seventy-two hours of wakefulness at a stretch; time-released drugs with delivery systems as sophisticated as an ICBM’s. The smart drug, modafinil, had sounded promising: another fluke, stumbled on by chance, mechanism unknown, but already in wide use among pilots and soldiers,emergency doctors, academics looking for an edge. David, though, got pounding headaches on it, and nothing like the kick he got from the Ritalin. Worse, he couldn’t focus, couldn’t see the big picture. He’d spend hours redrafting a single paragraph over and over, then be unable to choose among the dozen different versions he’d come up with. Maybe it was just that he was too hooked on the Ritalin by then, though who knew anymore what was him and what was the drugs taking him over.
    The Ritalin is what he has stuck with, juggling various formulations—immediate release and sustained release and extended release—with the vigilance of military deployments and cycling in substitutes on the weekends to keep down his tolerance. He might almost feel he was managing if not for the constant thrum at the back of his neck these days ready to fell him like a taser charge at the least spike of emotion. All day long he is fighting himself, pumped up on his meds but having to stifle every reaction to keep from collapsing. It isn’t just anger anymore but almost any heightened state—elation, amusement, excitement, fear. Bit by bit he is having to strip away everything that drives him, that makes him alive. Becker’s response has been merely to keep upping his Prozac, from five migs to ten to twenty to forty, though the drug seems only to have sped up the process of extinguishing the person he thinks of as himself.
    He takes a seat on the toilet to give the drugs a chance to kick in. A powder room, Danny called this one, though it is probably twice the size of the den that serves as Marcus’s bedroom in the condo David now calls home. Everything is top of the line, the fixtures, the lighting, the cabinets, the faucets. The counters and floor are in a glossy space-age material of brilliant white that gives the room an otherworldly look, like a film depiction of a place in heaven or in a dream.
    The realization is coming over David that his brother is rich, at a level he would never have imagined. Danny had gone into the business right out of high school, had doggedly stuck with it through the real