My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  Not even a yawn. I wasn’t remotely sleepy. I could tell my sense of balance was off—I nearly fell over when I tried to stand up, but I pushed through it and tidied up for a while, sliding the videocassettes into their cases and putting them back on the shelf. I thought some activity might tire me out. I took a Zyprexa and some more Ativan. I ate a handful of melatonin, chewing like a cow on cud. Nothing was working.

  So I called Trevor.

  “It’s five in the morning,” he said. He sounded irritated and foggy, but he’d answered. My number must have shown up on his caller ID, and he’d answered.

  “I’ve been sexually assaulted,” I lied. I hadn’t said anything aloud in days by then. My voice had a sexy rasp. I felt like I might vomit again. “Can you come over? I need you to come look to see if there are any tears in my vagina. You’re the only one I trust,” I said. “Please?”

  “Who is it?” I heard a woman’s voice murmuring in the distance.

  “Nobody,” Trevor said to her. Then, “Wrong number,” he said to me and hung up.

  I took three Solfoton and six Benadryl, put Frantic in to rewind, cracked the window in the living room to circulate the air, found the blizzard was howling outside, and then I remembered that I’d bought cigarettes, so I smoked one out the window, pressed “play” on the VCR, and lay back down on the sofa. I felt my head get heavy. Harrison Ford was my dream man. My heart slowed, but still, I couldn’t sleep. I drank from the jug of gin. It seemed to settle my stomach.

  At eight A.M., I called Trevor again. This time he didn’t answer.

  “Just checking in,” I said in my message. “It’s been a while. Curious how you’ve been and what you’ve been up to. Let’s catch up soon.”

  I called again fifteen minutes later.

  “Look, I don’t know how to say this. I’m HIV positive. I probably got it from one of the black guys at the gym.”

  At eight thirty, I called and said, “I’ve been thinking I might get a boob job, just take them clean off. What do you think? Could I pull off the flat-chested look?”

  At eight forty-five, I called and said, “I need some financial advice. Actually, I’m serious. I’m in a bind.”

  At nine o’clock, I called again. He answered.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I was hoping to hear you say you miss me.”

  “I miss you,” he said. “Is that it?”

  I hung up.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’D INHERITED the complete VHS set of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my father. Ordering those cassettes was probably the one time in my father’s life that he’d dialed a 1-800 number. Watching Star Trek as an adolescent was when I first came to regard Whoopi Goldberg with the reverence she deserves. Whoopi seemed like an absurd interloper on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production. Her presence made the show completely absurd. That was true of all her movies, too. Whoopi in her nun’s habit. Whoopi dressed like a churchgoing Georgian in the 1930s with her Sunday hat and Bible. Whoopi in Moonlight and Valentino alongside the pasty Elizabeth Perkins. Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof.

  After a few episodes, I got up and took a few Nembutals and a Placidyl and guzzled another half a bottle of children’s Robitussin and sat down to watch Whoopi—in a cornflower blue velour tunic and an upside-down cone-shaped hat like a futuristic bishop—have a heart-to-heart talk with Marina Sirtis. It was all nonsense. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept watching. I went through three seasons. I took Solfoton. I took Ambien. I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup like a hot diaper. This was supposed to be relaxing? I took a bath and put on a brand new set of slippery satin pajamas I found in the closet. Still I wasn’t sleepy. Nothing was working. I thought I’d watch Braveheart again so I put it into the VCR and pressed “rewind.”

  And then the VCR broke.

  I heard the wheels spin, then whine, then screech, then stop. I hit “eject” and nothing happened. I poked at all the buttons. I unplugged and replugged the machine. I picked it up and shook it. I banged on it with the butt of my hand, then a shoe. Nothing was working. Outside, it was dark. My phone said it was January 6, 11:52 P.M.

  So now I was stuck with TV. I surfed the channels. A commercial for cat food. A commercial for home saunas. A commercial for low-fat butter. Fabric softener. Potato chips in individually portioned packages. Chocolate yogurt. Go to Greece, the birthplace of civilization. Drinks that give you energy. Face cream that makes you younger. Fish for your kitties. Coca-Cola means “I love you.” Sleep in the most comfortable bed in the world. Ice cream is not just for children, ladies: your husbands like it, too! If your house smells like shit, light this candle that smells like freshly baked brownies.

  My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes. Count U.S. presidents. Count the years you have left to live. I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. I counted state capitals. I counted different kinds of flowers. I counted shades of blue. Cerulean. Cadet. Electric. Teal. Tiffany. Egyptian. Persian. Oxford. I didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I counted as many kinds of birds as I could think of. I counted TV shows from the eighties. I counted movies set in New York City. I counted famous people who committed suicide: Diane Arbus, the Hemingways, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf. Poor Kurt Cobain. I counted the times I’d cried since my parents died. I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

  I pulled the blanket off me. On TV, a young couple spelunking in a cave in New Zealand lowered themselves down into a huge black crevasse, shimmied through a narrow crack in the stone, passed under a field of what looked like huge boogers dripping from the ceiling, and then entered a room illuminated by glowing blue worms. I tried to imagine something stupid Reva would have said to try to soothe me, but nothing came to mind. I was so tired. I truly believed I might never sleep again. So my throat clenched. I cried. I did it. My breath sputtered like from a scraped knee on the playground. It was so stupid. I counted down from a thousand and flicked the tears off my cheeks with my fingers. My muscles ticked like a car that’s been driven a long distance and is left parked in the shade.

  I changed the channel. It was a British nature show. A small white fox burrowed down into the snow on a blinding sunny day. “While many mammals hibernate during the winter, the arctic fox does not. With special fur and fat covering her stocky body, low temperatures are not going to slow down this little fox! Its tremendous tolerance for cold climes is thanks to an extraordinary metabolism. It only starts to increase at negative fifty degrees Centigrade. That means she doesn’t even shiver before temps drop to negative seventy degrees and below. Wow.”

  I counted furs: mink, chinchilla, sable, rabbit, muskrat, raccoon, ermine, skunk, possum. Reva had taken her mother’s beaver fur coat. It had a boxy cut and made me think of a gunslinging outlaw hiding out in a snow-filled forest, then taking off west along the train tracks by moonlight, his beaver fur keeping him warm against the biting wind. The image impressed me. It was unusual. I was being creative. Maybe I was dreaming, I thought. I pictured the man in the beaver fur rolling up the ankles of his worn-out trousers to cross an ice-cold brook, his feet so white, like fish in the water. There, I thought. A dream is starting. My eyes were closed. I felt myself begin to drift.

  And then, as though she’d timed it, as though she’d heard my thoughts, Reva was banging on my door. I opened my eyes. Slivers of white, snowy light str
iped the bare floor. It felt like the crack of dawn.

  “Hello? It’s me, Reva.”

  Had I slept at all?

  “Let me in.”

  I got up slowly and made my way down the hall.

  “I’m sleeping,” I hissed through the door. I squinted into the peephole: Reva looked bedraggled and deranged.

  “Can I come in?” she asked. “I really need to talk.”

  “Can I just call you later? What time is it?”

  “One fifteen. I tried calling,” she said. “Here, the doorman sent up your mail. I need to talk. It’s serious.”

  Maybe Reva had been involved somehow in my Infermiterol escapade downtown. Maybe she had some privileged information about what I’d done. Did I care? I did, a little. I unlocked the door and let her in. She wore, as I’d imagined, her mother’s huge beaver coat.

  “Nice sweater,” she said, slicking past me into the apartment, a whiff of cold and mothballs. “Gray is in for spring.”

  “It’s still January, right?” I asked, still paralyzed in the hallway. I waited for Reva to confirm but she just dumped the armful of mail on the dining table, then took off her coat and draped it over the back of the sofa next to my fox fur. Two pelts. I thought of Ping Xi’s dead dogs again. A memory arose from one of my last days at Ducat: a rich gay Brazilian petting the stuffed poodle and telling Natasha he wanted “a coat just like this, with a hood.” My head hurt.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said, but it came out like I was just clearing my throat.

  “Huh?”

  The floor shifted slightly beneath my feet. I felt my way into the living room, my hand skimming the cool wall. Reva had made herself comfortable in the armchair already. I steadied myself, hands free, before staggering toward the sofa.

  “Well, it’s over,” Reva said, “It’s officially over.”

  “What is?”

  “With Ken!” Her bottom lip trembled. She crooked her finger under her nose, held her breath, then got up and came toward me, cornering me against the end of the sofa. I couldn’t move. I felt slightly ill watching her face turn red from lack of oxygen, holding in her sobs, then realized that I was holding my breath, too. I gasped, and Reva, mistaking this for an exclamation of compassionate woe, put her arms around me. She smelled like shampoo and perfume. She smelled like tequila. She smelled vaguely of French fries. She held me and shook and cried and snotted for a good minute.

  “You’re so skinny,” she said, between her sniffles. “No fair.”

  “I need to sit down,” I told her. “Get off.” She let me go.

  “Sorry,” she said and went into the bathroom to blow her nose. I lay down and turned to face the back of the sofa, snuggled against the fox and beaver furs. Maybe I could sleep now, I thought. I closed my eyes. I pictured the fox and the beaver, cozied up together in a little cave near a waterfall, the beaver’s buckteeth, its raspy snore, the perfect animal avatar for Reva. And me, the little white fox splayed out on its back, a bubble-gum pink tongue lolling out of its pristine, furry snout, impervious to the cold. I heard the toilet flush.

  “You’re out of toilet paper,” Reva said, rupturing the vision. I’d been wiping myself with napkins from the bodega for weeks—she must have realized that before. “I could really use a drink,” she huffed. Her heels clacked on the tile in the kitchen. “I’m sorry to come over like this. I’m such a mess right now.”

  “What is it, Reva?” I groaned. “Spit it out. I’m not feeling well.”

  I heard her open and close a few cabinets. Then she came back with a mug and sat down in the armchair and poured herself a cupful of gin. She wasn’t crying anymore. She sighed once morosely, and then once again violently, and drank.

  “Ken got me transferred. And he says he doesn’t want to see me anymore. So that’s it. After all this time. I’ve had such a day, I can’t even tell you.” But there she was, telling me. Five whole minutes spent on what it was like to come back from lunch and find a note on her desk. “Like you can break up with someone over memo. Like he doesn’t care about me at all. Like I’m some kind of secretary. Like this is a matter of business. Which it is not!”

  “Then what was it, Reva?”

  “A matter of the heart!”

  “Oh.”

  “So I go in and he’s like, ‘Leave the door open,’ and my heart is pounding because, you know? A memo? So I just close the door and I’m like, ‘What is this? How can you do this?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s over. I can’t see you anymore.’ Like in a movie!”

  “What did the memo say?”

  “That I’m getting a promotion, and they’re transferring me to the Towers. On my first day back to work after my mom died. Ken was at the funeral. He saw the state I was in. And now suddenly it’s over? Just like that?”

  “You’re getting a promotion?”

  “Marsh is starting a new crisis consulting firm. Terrorist risks, blah blah. But did you hear what I said? He doesn’t want to see me anymore, not even at the office.”

  “What a dick,” I said robotically.

  “I know. He’s a coward. I mean, we were in love. Totally in love!”

  “You were?”

  “How do you just decide to turn that off?”

  I kept my eyes closed. Reva went on without any breaks, repeating the story six or seven times, each version highlighting a new aspect of the experience and analyzing it accordingly. I tried to disengage from her words and just listen to the drone of her voice. I had to admit that it was a comfort to have Reva there. She was just as good as a VCR, I thought. The cadence of her speech was as familiar and predictable as the audio from any movie I’d watched a hundred times. That’s why I’d held on to her this long, I thought as I lay there, not listening. Since I’d known her, the drone of what-ifs, the seemingly endless descriptions of her delusional romantic projections had become a kind of lullaby. Reva was a magnet for my angst. She sucked it right out of me. I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank slate. Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die—awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. I could take the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean. Then I’d just float on my back looking up at the stars, go numb, get sleepy, drift, drift. Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands.

  I opened my eyes. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling, fluttering like a scrap of moth-eaten silk in the draft. I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.

  “So then I was like, ‘I’m tired of you jerking me around.’ And he starts talking about how he’s my boss. All macho, right? And actually evading the real issue which is the thing I told you about, which I can’t even think about right now.” I had no memory of her telling me anything. The sound of more gin. “I mean, I’m not keeping it. Obviously. Especially not now! But no. Ken can’t be bothered about that. Being evasive is totally his thing.”

  I turned around and peeked at her.

  “If he thinks he can get rid of me so easily . . . ,” she said, wagging her finger
. “If he thinks he’s gonna get away with this . . .”

  “What, Reva? What are you going to do to him? Are you going to kill him? You’re going to burn his house down?”

  “If he thinks I’m just going to eat his shit and slink away . . .”

  She couldn’t finish her sentence. She had no threats to make. She was too afraid of her own rage to ever imagine it through to any violent end. She would never exact revenge. So I suggested, “Tell his wife he’s been fucking you. Or sue him for sexual harassment.”

  Reva wrinkled her nose and sucked her teeth, her rage suddenly transformed into calculated pragmatism. “I don’t want people to know, though. That puts me in such an awkward position. And I am getting a raise, so that’s good. Plus, I’ve always wanted to work in the World Trade Center. So it’s not like I can complain exactly. I just want Ken to feel bad.”

  “Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want. That’s why you got fired. You’re depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want.”

  “Transferred, not fired.” Reva set her mug down on the coffee table and lifted her hands up in front of her face. “Look, I’m shaking.”

  “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “There’s a tremor. I can feel it.”

  “Do you want a Xanax?” I asked sarcastically.

  To my surprise, Reva said yes. I told her to bring me the bottle from the medicine cabinet. She clacked back and forth to the bathroom and handed me the bottle.

  “There must be twenty prescriptions in there,” she said. “Are you on all of them?”

  I gave Reva one Xanax. I took two.