My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  • • •

  SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT. The sunlight tilted through the blinds once in a while, and I’d peek out to see if the leaves on the trees were dying yet. Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum. I shuffled down to the Egyptians. I filled my prescriptions. Reva continued to appear from time to time, usually drunk and always on the brink of hysteria or outrage or complete meltdown one way or another.

  In October, she barged in while I was watching Working Girl.

  “This again?” she huffed and threw herself down in the armchair. “I’m fasting for Yom Kippur,” she sighed boastfully. This was not unusual. She’d been on some truly insane diets in the past. A gallon of salt water a day. Only prune juice and baking soda. “I can have as much sugar-free Jell-O as I want before eleven A.M.” Or “I’m fasting,” she’d say. “I’m fasting on weekends.” “I’m fasting every other weekday.”

  “Melanie Griffith looks bulimic in this movie,” Reva said now, pointing lazily at the screen. “See her swollen jowls? Her face looks fat, but her legs are super skinny. Or maybe she’s just fat with skinny legs. Her arms look soft, don’t they? I could be wrong. I don’t know. I’m kind of out of it. I’m fasting,” she said again.

  “That’s not puking, it’s boozing, Reva,” I told her, slurping drool from the corner of my mouth. “Not every skinny person has an eating disorder.” It was the most I’d said in weeks to anyone.

  “Sorry,” Reva said. “You’re right. I’m just in a mood. I’m fasting, you know?” She dug around in her purse and pulled out her dwindling fifth of tequila. “Want some?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She cracked open a Diet Mountain Dew. We watched the movie in silence. In the middle, I fell back asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  OCTOBER WAS PLACID. The radiator hissed and sputtered, releasing a sharp vinegary smell that reminded me of my dead parents’ basement, so I rarely turned on the heat. I didn’t mind the cold. My visit to Dr. Tuttle that month was relatively unremarkable.

  “How is everything at home?” she asked. “Good? Bad? Other?”

  “Other,” I said.

  “Do you have a family history of nonbinary paradigms?”

  When I explained for the third time that both my parents had died, that my mother had killed herself, Dr. Tuttle unscrewed the cap of her value-size bottle of Afrin, twirled around in her chair, tilted her head back so that she was looking at me upside down, and started sniffing. “I’m listening,” she said. “It’s allergies, and now I’m hooked on this nasal spray. Please continue. Your parents are dead, and . . . ?”

  “And nothing. It’s fine. But I’m still not sleeping well.”

  “What a conundrum.” She twirled back around and put her Afrin in her desk drawer. “Here, let me give you my latest samples.” She got up to open her little cabinet and filled a brown paper lunch bag with packets of pills. “Trick or treat,” she said, dropping in a mint from the bowl on her desk. “Dressing up for Halloween?”

  “Maybe I’ll be a ghost.”

  “Economical,” she remarked.

  I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains.

  And during this lull in the drama of sleep, I entered a stranger, less certain reality. Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.

  Three

  IN NOVEMBER, however, an unfortunate shift occurred.

  The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious. I’d fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I’d go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I’d acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I’d been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted? The Egyptians were generally indifferent and returned the standard chitchat or flat out ignored me, so it was hard to tell. It concerned me that I was venturing out of the apartment while unconscious. It seemed antithetical to my hibernation project. If I committed a crime or got hit by a bus, the chance for a new and better life would be lost. If my unconscious excursions went only as far as the bodega around the corner, that was okay, I thought. I could live. The worst that could happen was I’d make a fool of myself in front of the Egyptians and would have to start going to the deli a few blocks farther down First Avenue. I prayed that my subconscious understood the value of convenience. Amen.

  This was when my online purchasing of lingerie and designer jeans began in earnest. It seemed that while I was sleeping, some superficial part of me was taking aim at a life of beauty and sex appeal. I made appointments to get waxed. I booked time at a spa that offered infrared treatments and colonics and facials. One day, I cancelled my credit card in the hope that doing so might deter me from filling my nonexistent datebook with the frills of someone I used to think I was supposed to be. A week later, a new credit card showed up in the mail. I cut it in half.

  My stress levels rose. I couldn’t trust myself. I felt as though I had to sleep with one eye open. I even considered installing a video camera to record myself while I was unconscious, but I knew that would only prove to be a document of my resistance to my project. It wouldn’t stop me from doing anything since I’d be unable to watch it until I woke up for real. So I was in a state of panic. I doubled my Xanax dosage in an attempt to counteract my anxiety. I lost track of the days, and as a result, missed my visit to Dr. Tuttle in November. She called and left me a message.

  “I’ll have to charge you for the missed appointment. Let me remind you, you did sign the agreement to my office policy. There’s a twenty-four-hour cutoff for cancellations. Most doctors in the area require you to cancel thirty-six or forty-eight hours before the scheduled appointment, so I think I’m being pretty generous. And it concerns me that you’d be so flip about your mental health. Call me to reschedule. The ball is in your basket.” She sounded stern. I felt terrible. But when I called to apologize and make another appointment, she was back to normal.

  “See you Thursday,” she said. “Toodle-oo.”

  Halfway through the month, my Internet use began to rise even more. I woke up with my laptop screen filled with AOL chat-room conversations with strangers in places like Tampa and Spokane and Park City, Utah. In my waking hours, I rarely thought of sex, but in my medicated blackouts, I guess my lusts arose. I scrolled through the transcripts. They were surprisingly polite. “How are you?” “I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Horny much?” It went on from there. I was relieved I never gave anyone my real name. My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I once wrote. The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject.

  “What’s your favorite movie?”

  Then one day I woke up to discover that I ha
d dug out my digital camera and sent a bunch of strangers snapshots of my asshole, my nipple, the inside of my mouth. I’d written messages saying that I’d like it if they came and “tied me up” and “held me hostage” and “slurped my pussy like a plate of spaghetti.” And there were numbers in my cell phone log I didn’t recognize. So I made up a rule that whenever I took my pills, which was roughly every eight hours, I’d put my computer in the closet and power down my phone, seal it with packing tape in a Tupperware container, and stick the container in the back of a high kitchen cabinet.

  But then I woke up with the unopened Tupperware next to me on the pillow.

  The next night, the phone was on the window ledge, next to a dozen half-smoked cigarettes stubbed out on an Alanis Morissette CD case.

  “Why are you killing yourself?” Reva asked, seeing the butts in the trash can when she came over uninvited a few days later. Reva’s mother’s cancer had started in her lungs.

  “My smoking has nothing to do with you or your mother. My mother’s dead, too, you know,” I added.

  By this point, Reva’s mother was in hospice care, in and out of consciousness. I was tired of hearing about it. It brought back too many memories. Plus, I knew she’d expect me to go to her mother’s funeral. I really didn’t want to do that.

  “My mom’s not dead yet,” Reva said.

  I didn’t tell Reva about my Internet proclivities. But I did ask her to change my AOL password to something I could never guess. “Just some random letters and numbers. I waste too much time online,” I told her.

  “Doing what?”

  “I send e-mails late at night and regret it,” was the lie I knew she would believe.

  “To Trevor, right?” she asked, nodding her head knowingly.

  Reva changed my password, and once my AOL account was inaccessible, my sleep stayed low stakes for a while. The worst I did while I was unconscious was write letters to Trevor on a yellow legal pad—long petitions about our romantic history and how I wanted things to change so that we could be together again. The letters were so ridiculous, I wondered if they were written in my sleep to keep me entertained while I was awake. By the end of the month, my blackout excursions down to the bodega had become less frequent, maybe due to the onset of winter.

  Reva’s visits became less frequent, too. And her attitude shifted from melodrama to polite posturing. Instead of venting, she gave well-articulated summaries of her week, including the latest current events. I appreciated her self-control, I told her. She said she was trying to be more sensitive to my needs. When she would once have given me advice or commented on the state of the apartment, she now bit her tongue. She complained less. She also started giving me hugs and air kisses whenever she said good-bye. She did this by bending over me on the sofa. I imagine she got in the habit because of her bedbound mother. It made me feel like I was on my deathbed, too. In fact, I appreciated the affection. By Thanksgiving I’d been hibernating for almost six months. Nobody but Reva had touched me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I DIDN’T TELL Dr. Tuttle about my blackouts. I was afraid she’d cut me off out of fear of potential lawsuits. So when I went to see her in December, I just complained that the insomnia had crept up with a vengeance. I lied that I could stay down for no more than a few hours at a time. Bouts of sweat and nausea made me dizzy and restless, I told her. Imaginary noises shook me awake so violently “I thought my building had been bombed or struck by lightning.”

  “You must have a callus on your cortex,” Dr. Tuttle said, clucking her tongue. “Not figuratively. Not literally, I mean. I’m saying, parenthetically,” she held up her hands and cupped them side by side to demonstrate the punctuation. “You’ve built up a tolerance, but it doesn’t mean the drugs are failing.”

  “You’re probably right,” I replied.

  “Not probably.”

  “Parenthetically speaking, I mean, I probably need something stronger.”

  “Aha.”

  “Pillwise, I mean.”

  “You’re not being sarcastic, I hope,” Dr. Tuttle said.

  “Of course not. I take my health completely seriously.”

  “Well, in that case.”

  “I’ve heard of an anesthetic they give to people for endoscopies. Something that keeps you awake during the procedure, but you can’t remember anything afterward. Something like that would be good. I have a lot of anxiety. And I have an important business meeting coming up later this month.” Really, I just wanted something especially powerful to blindfold me through the holidays.

  “Give these a try,” Dr. Tuttle said, sliding a sample bottle of pills across her desk. “Infermiterol. If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer in Germany. Take one and let me know how it goes.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Any plans for Christmas?” she asked, scribbling my refills. “Seeing the folks? Where are you from again? Albuquerque?”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not surprised,” Dr. Tuttle said, writing in her file. “Orphans usually suffer from low immunity, psychiatrically speaking. You may consider getting a pet to build up your relational skills. Parrots, I hear, are nonjudgmental.”

  “I’ll think about that,” I said, taking the sheaf of prescriptions she’d written, and the Infermiterol sample.

  It was freezing cold outside that afternoon. As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating. I was glad not to see many people on the street. Those I did see looked like lumbering monsters, human shapes deformed by puffy coats and hoods, mittens and hats, snow boots. I assessed my reflection in the windows of a darkened storefront as I walked up West Fifteenth Street. It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still had good posture. One might have even confused me for a celebrity in slovenly incognito. Not that people cared. I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them.

  The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman—perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said.

  Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing. A pleather pillow inflated around my bicep. I watched numbers on the digital screen go up and down. Pulse 48. Pressure 80/50. That seemed appropriate.

  I went to the rack of DVDs to browse the latest selection of pre-owned movies. The Nutty Professor, Jumanji, Casper, Space Jam, The Cable Guy. It was all kids’ stuff. Then an orange discount sticker on the bottom shelf caught my eye—9½ Weeks. I picked it up. Trevor had claimed that it was one of his favorite movies. I still hadn’t seen it.

  “Mickey Rourke’s performance in this is unparalleled. Who knows? You might relate to it.” I resembled Kim Basinger, he explained, and just like me, her character worked in an art gallery. “This movie inspires me to try new things,” he said.

  “Like what?” I asked, amused by the thought that he might have the courage to do more in bed than reposition himself to get “better leverage.”

  He took me into his kitchen, turned his back, and said, “Get on your knees.” I did as I was told and knelt down on the cold marble tile. “Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “And open your mouth.” I almost laughed, but I played along. Trevor took his blow jobs very seriously.

  �
��Have you seen Sex, Lies, and Videotape?” I asked him. “James Spader in that—”

  “Be quiet,” he said. “Open up.”

  He put an unpeeled banana in my mouth, warning me that if I took it out he’d know, and he’d punish me emotionally.

  “Okay, master,” I mumbled sarcastically.

  “Keep it in there,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. I didn’t think it was very funny, but I played along. Back then, I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism. His little games were so silly. So I just knelt there with the banana in my mouth, breathing through my nose. I could hear him on the phone making a reservation for two for dinner that night at Kurumazushi. After twenty minutes he came back in, took the banana out of my mouth. “My sister’s in town so you have to leave,” he said, and put his flaccid penis in my mouth. When he wasn’t hard after a few minutes, he got angry. “What are you even doing here? I don’t have time for this.” He ushered me out. “The doorman will hail you a cab,” he said to me, like I was some one-night stand, some cheap prostitute, like somebody he didn’t know at all.

  Anal sex came up with Trevor only once. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to prove that I wasn’t uptight—a complaint he gave because at some point I’d hesitated to give him a blow job while he sat on the toilet. We tried once on a night we’d both had a lot to drink, but he lost his erection as he tried to wedge it in. Then all of a sudden he got up and went into the shower, saying nothing to me. Maybe I should have felt vindicated by his failure, but instead I just felt rejected. I followed him to the bathroom.

  “Is it because I smell?” I asked him through the shower curtain. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You just left without saying anything.”

  “There was shit all over my dick, okay?” he said angrily. But that was impossible. He hadn’t even penetrated me. I knew he was lying. But I still apologized.