My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you mad?”

  “I can’t have this conversation with you right now. I’m tired and I’m not in the mood to deal with your drama.” He was nearly yelling. “I just want to get some sleep. Jesus!”

  I called him the next day and asked if he was free that weekend, but he said he’d already found a woman who wasn’t going to “pull pranks for attention.” A few nights later, I got drunk and called up Rite Aid and ordered a case of sexual lubricant to be delivered to him at his office the next morning. He sent me a note at the gallery by messenger in response. “Don’t ever do that again,” it said.

  We got back together a few weeks later.

  “Ma’am?” the pharmacist called out, snapping me out of my reverie. I put the DVD back on the rack and went to the pharmacy counter to get my pills.

  The pharmacist’s nails made an annoying clicking sound as she tapped her computer screen. I thought she seemed smug; she sighed as she ran each stapled paper bag under the scanner, as though it exhausted her to deal with me and all my mental health issues. “Check that box to say you’re waiving the consultation.”

  “But I haven’t waived it. You’re consulting me now, aren’t you?”

  “Did you have a question about your medications, ma’am?”

  She was judging me. I could feel it. She was modulating her voice a certain way so as not to sound patronizing.

  “Of course I want a consultation,” I said. “I’m ill, and this is my medicine, and I want to know you’ve done your job correctly. Look at all these pills. They could be dangerous. Wouldn’t you want a consultation, if you were as sick as I am?” I pushed my sunglasses back down over my eyes. She unfolded the papers stapled to the bags and pointed out the potential side effects of each drug and the potential interactions with other medications I was taking.

  “Don’t drink with this,” she said. “If you take this one and it doesn’t put you to sleep, you might throw up. You might get a migraine. If you start to feel hot, call an ambulance. You could have seizures or a stroke. If you get blisters all over your hands, stop taking it and go to the emergency room.” She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before. She tapped the paper packages with her long fingernails. “My advice, don’t drink a lot of water before bed. If you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you could hurt yourself.”

  “I’m not going to hurt myself,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, be careful.”

  I thanked her, complimented her on her gold nail polish, pressed the buttons on the payment pad, and left. There was a reason I preferred the pharmacy at Rite Aid over CVS and Duane Reade. The people who worked at Rite Aid didn’t take my moodiness to heart. I’d sometimes heard them cracking up behind the high shelves of pills, talking about their weekends, gossiping about their friends and coworkers, somebody’s bad breath, somebody’s stupid voice on the phone. I’d come in and bitch at them on a regular basis. I blamed them if a prescription was out of stock, cursed them when the line at the pickup window was more than two customers deep, complained that they hadn’t called my insurance company soon enough, were all morons, all uneducated, cruel, unfeeling thugs. Nothing seemed to provoke them to come back at me with anything more than a grin and an eye roll. They never confronted me about my attitude. “Don’t call me ma’am. It’s condescending,” I’d once said. Clearly the woman with the golden fingernails hadn’t gotten that memo. They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.

  I ripped into the paper bags on the walk home, threw away all the printed materials, and sunk the medicine bottles deep into the pockets of my coat. The pills rattled like maracas as I dragged myself back through the snow. I shivered violently in my ski jacket. My face, hit by the wind, felt like it was being slapped. My eyes watered. My hands burned from the cold. From outside the bodega, I saw the Egyptians putting up the Christmas decorations in the window. I went in, ducked under the fluttering red tinsel, got my two coffees, went home and swallowed a few Ambien and went to sleep on the sofa watching Primal Fear.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, thoughts of Trevor called me out of sleep like rats scrabbling inside the walls. It took all the self-control I had not to call him. It took Solfoton and a bottle of Robitussin one day, Nembutal and Zyprexa the next. Reva came and went, blathering about her latest dates and heartaches over her mother. I watched a lot of Indiana Jones. But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything now was somehow linked to getting back what I’d lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY LAST RENDEZVOUS WITH Trevor had been on New Year’s Eve, 2000. I invited him to come to the party with me in DUMBO. I’d sensed he was between girlfriends.

  “I’ll come for a while,” he agreed. “But there are other parties I’m already committed to. I’ll stay at yours for an hour and then I’ll have to leave, so don’t get sensitive about it.”

  “That’s fair,” I said, though my feelings were already hurt.

  He had me meet him in the lobby of his building in Tribeca. He very rarely asked me to come up to his apartment. I think he thought that seeing the place would make me want to marry him. In truth, I thought his apartment made him seem pathetic—status seeking, conformist, shallow. It reminded me of the loft Tom Hanks rents in Big, huge windows along three walls, high ceilings—only instead of pinball machines and trampolines and toys, Trevor had filled the apartment with expensive furniture—a narrow gray velvet sofa from Sweden, a huge mahogany secretary, a crystal chandelier. I assumed some ex-girlfriend had picked it all out for him, or multiple ex-girlfriends. That would have explained the mismatched aesthetic. He worked as a portfolio manager in the Twin Towers, had freckles, loved Bruce Springsteen, and yet the wall above his bed was decorated with horrifying African masks. He collected antique swords. He liked cocaine and cheap beer and top-shelf whiskey, always owned the latest video game system. He had a waterbed. He played acoustic guitar, badly. He owned a gun he kept in a safe in his bedroom closet.

  I buzzed him when I got to his building and he came down wearing a tuxedo under a long black coat with tasteful navy satin accents. I knew then that inviting him to the party had been a mistake. He clearly had somewhere more important to be, and was going to go there to be with someone more important than me after my hour with him was up.

  He pulled on his gloves, hailed a taxi. “Whose party is this again?”

  A video artist represented by Ducat had invited me to her party because I’d handled an important rights situation when Natasha was overseas. All I’d really done, in fact, was send a fax.

  “She’s going to be projecting live births from a video feed some guy set up in a village hospital in Bolivia,” I told Trevor in the cab. I knew it would horrify him.

  “Bolivia time is an hour ahead of New York,” he said. “If they really think they can coordinate births, those babies won’t be born until eleven, and I’m not staying past ten thirty. Anyway, gross.”

  “Do you think it’s exploitative?”

  “No, I just don’t really want to see a bunch of Bolivian women bleeding and moaning for hours.”

  He fiddled with his phone as I recited language from the gallery’s description of the videographer’s
work. Trevor repeated words sarcastically.

  “‘Tectonic,’” he said. “‘Quasi.’ Jesus!”

  Then he called someone and had a very brief, yes-no conversation, said, “See you soon.”

  “Do you even like me?” I asked him once he’d hung up.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I love you,” I was angry enough to say.

  “How is that relevant?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Trevor told the driver to drop me off at the nearest subway station. That was the last time I’d seen him. I didn’t go to the party. I just got on the train and went back home.

  * * *

  • • •

  I LOOKED OUT the windows at the darkening sky. I tried to rub the dirt off the glass, but it was impossible. The dirt was stuck on the other side. The trees were all bare and black against the pale snow. The East River was still and black. The sky was black and heavy over Queens, a blanket of blinking yellow lights spreading out into infinity. There were stars in the sky, I knew, but I couldn’t see them. The moon was more visible now, a white flame glowing high while red lights of planes sailing down to LaGuardia blipped by. In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead. Trevor was probably spending his Christmas vacation with some woman in Hawaii or Bali or Tulum. He was probably fingering her at that very moment, telling her he loved her. He might actually be happy. I shut the window and lowered all the blinds.

  “Merry Christmas,” Reva said in a voice mail. “I’m here at the hospital, but I’m coming back to town for the office party tomorrow. Ken will be there, of course. . . .”

  I deleted her message and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  CHRISTMAS DAY, around nightfall, I woke up on the sofa in a restless fog. Unable to sleep or use my hands to work the remote or open the bottle of temazepam, I went out to get my fix of coffee. Downstairs, the doorman sat reading the paper on his little stool.

  “Merry Christmas,” he yawned, turning the page, barely looking up at me.

  The sidewalks were piled high with snow. A foot-wide pathway had been shoveled from the entrance of my building to the bodega. My slippers were brown suede with shearling on the inside, and the salt on the ground stained them with white crusts. I kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past. No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories. Since it had turned cold, I’d lived in flannel pajamas, the big down-filled ski jacket. Sometimes I even slept in that jacket because I kept the temperature inside the apartment so low.

  The Egyptian on duty gave me my coffees for free that night because the ATM had run out of cash. Stacks of old, unsold newspapers were piled up against a broken window next to the fridge of milk and sodas. I read the headlines slowly, my eyes blurring and crossing as I stared. The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America. A local councilman was caught having gay sex with an illegal immigrant. Someone who used to be fat was now extremely thin. Mariah Carey gave Christmas gifts to orphans in the Dominican Republic. A survivor of the Titanic died in a car crash. I had a vague notion that Reva was coming over that night. She probably wanted to pretend to want to cheer me up.

  “I’ll pay you back for a pack of Parliaments,” I told the Egyptian. “Plus a Klondike bar. And these M&M’s.” I pointed to the peanut kind. He nodded okay. I looked down through the sliding glass cover of the freezer where all the ice cream and popsicles were kept. There was stuff frozen solid at the bottom that had been there for years, embedded in the white fuzz of ice. A glacial world. I stared at the mountains of ice crystals and spaced out for a minute imagining that I was down there, climbing the ice, surrounded by the whiteness of the smoky air, an Arctic landscape. There was a row of old Häagen-Dazs down there, from before they changed the packaging. There were boxes of Klondike bars down there. Maybe that’s where I should go, I thought—Klondike. Yukon. I could move to Canada. I leaned down into the freezer and scraped at the frost and managed to pick out a Klondike for Reva. If she brought me a Christmas gift and I had nothing for her, it would fuel her judgment and “concern” for weeks. I thought I’d also give her some of the fuchsia underwear from Victoria’s Secret I never wore. And a pair of jeans. The looser styles might fit her, I thought. I was feeling generous. The Egyptian slid the cigarettes and M&M’s across the counter with a scrap he’d ripped from a brown paper bag.

  “You still owe me six fifty from last week,” he said, and wrote down the sum I now owed on top of that, along with my name, which I was stunned he knew. I could only assume I’d come down for a snack during a blackout. The Egyptian taped the scrap of paper on the wall next to his rolls of scratch tickets. I put the cigarettes and the Klondike bar and the M&M’s in my coat pocket, took my coffees, and went back upstairs to my apartment.

  I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I’m ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed.

  I threw my first empty coffee cup in the toppling pile of garbage around the trash can in the kitchen, broke back the lid of the second cup, downed a few trazodone, smoked a cigarette out the window, then flopped down on my sofa. I ripped open the M&M’s, ate them and a couple of Zyprexa, and watched Regarding Henry, dozing, the forgotten Klondike bar melting in my pocket.

  Reva showed up halfway through the movie with a huge tin of caramel popcorn. I answered the door on my hands and knees.

  “Can I leave this here?” she asked. “If I keep it at my house, I’m afraid I’ll eat it all.”

  “Uh-huh,” I grunted. Reva helped me up off the floor. I was relieved that she had no elaborately wrapped gift for me. Although Reva was Jewish, she celebrated every Christian holiday. I went to the bathroom, took my coat off, turned the pocket inside out and threw it in the tub. I let the water rinse away the melted Klondike bar. As the chocolate flowed down toward the drain, it looked like blood.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Reva when I came back into the living room.

  She ignored the question. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I took a cab.” She sat on the sofa. I reheated my half-drunk second cup of coffee in the microwave. I went to the VCR, moved the little elephant statue that I’d positioned to cover the glare from the digital clock. I rubbed my eyes. It was ten thirty. Christmas was almost over, thank God. When I looked at Reva, I saw that under her long black wool cape she was wearing a sparkly red dress and black stockings with boughs of holly embroidered on them. Her mascara was smudged, her face was droopy and swollen and caked with foundation and bronzer. Her hair was slicked back into a bun, shiny with gel. She had kicked off h
er heels and was now cracking her toe knuckles against the floor. Her shoes lay under the coffee table, tipped over on their sides like two dead crows. She wasn’t giving me any jealous, scornful looks, wasn’t asking if I’d eaten anything that day, wasn’t tidying up or putting the videotapes on the coffee table back in their cases. She was quiet. I leaned against the wall and watched her take her phone out of her purse and turn it off, then open the tin of popcorn, eat some, and put the cover back on. Something had happened, that was clear. Maybe Reva had gone to Ken’s Christmas party and watched him carouse with his wife, who she’d told me was petite and Japanese and cruel. Maybe he’d finally ended the affair. I didn’t ask. I finished my coffee and picked up the tin of popcorn, took it to the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage, which Reva had taken out, apparently, while I was washing my coat.

  “Thanks,” she said, when I sat down beside her on the sofa. I grunted and turned on the TV. We split the rest of the M&M’s and watched a show about the Bermuda Triangle and I ate some melatonin and Benadryl and drooled a little. At some point I heard my phone ring from wherever I’d last hidden it.

  “Is it a vortex to a new dimension? Or a myth? Or is there a conspiracy to cover up the truth? And where do people go when they disappear? Perhaps we’ll never know.”

  Reva went to the thermostat and turned it up and came back to the sofa. The Bermuda Triangle episode ended and a new one started up, this time about the Loch Ness Monster. I closed my eyes.

  “My mom died,” Reva said during a commercial break.

  “Shit,” I said.

  What else could I have said?

  I pulled the blanket across our laps.

  “Thanks,” Reva said again, crying softly this time.

  The ghoulish voice of the TV show’s male narrator and Reva’s sniffles and sighs should have lulled me to sleep. But I could not sleep. I closed my eyes. When the next episode, about crop circles, started, Reva poked me. “Are you awake?” I pretended I wasn’t. I heard her get up and put her shoes back on, ticktock to the bathroom, blow her nose. She left without saying good-bye. I was relieved to be alone again.