My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  How many of my parents’ hairs and eyelashes and skin cells and fingernail clippings had survived between the floorboards since the professor moved in? If I sold the house, the new owners might cover the hardwood with linoleum, or tear it out. They might paint the walls bright colors, build a deck in the back and seed the lawn with wildflowers. The place could look like “the hippie house” next door by spring, I thought. My parents would have hated that.

  I put the letter from the lawyer aside and lay down on the sofa. I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn’t hit. These weren’t my memories. I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. So I called the estate lawyer.

  “What would make more money?” I asked him. “Selling the house, or burning it down?” There was a breathless pause on the phone. “Hello?”

  “Selling it, definitely,” the lawyer said.

  “There are some things in the attic and the basement,” I began to say. “Do I have to—”

  “You can pick that up when we pass the papers. In due time. The professor moves out mid-February, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know what transpires.”

  I hung up and put my coat on and went down to Rite Aid.

  It was cold and windy out, snow brushing up off parked cars like rainbow glitter in the noon light. I could smell the coffee burning as I passed the bodega and was tempted to get some for the walk to the pharmacy, but I knew better. Caffeine wouldn’t help me now. I was already shaky and nervous. I had high hopes for the Ambien. Four Ambien with a Dimetapp chaser could put me out for at least four hours, I thought. “Think positive,” Reva liked to tell me.

  At Rite Aid, I browsed the videos: The Bodyguard, The Mighty Ducks, The Karate Kid Part III, Bullets over Broadway, and Emma, then remembered, heartbreakingly, again—the truth was cruel—that my VCR was still broken.

  The woman working the pharmacy counter was old and birdlike. I’d never seen her before. Her name tag said her name was Tammy. The worst name on Earth. She spoke to me with a clinical professionalism that made me hate her.

  “Date of birth? Have you been here before?”

  “Do you guys sell VCRs?”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am.”

  I could have made the trek to Best Buy on Eighty-sixth Street. I could have taken a cab there and back. I was just too lazy, I told myself. But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me. I could already hear the jet planes thunder overhead, a rumble in the atmosphere of my mind that would rend things open, then obscure the damage with smoke and tears. I didn’t know what it would look like. That was fine. I paid for some Dimetapp, the Ambien, a tiny tin of Altoids, and strutted home through the cold—vibrating but relieved, the pills and mints now rattling like snakes, I thought, with each step I took. Soon I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep.

  A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazed me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter, but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.

  “Some flowers just came for you,” the doorman said as I walked back into my building. He pointed at a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the mantel over the nonworking fireplace in the lobby.

  “For me?”

  Were the roses from Trevor? Had he changed his mind about his fat old girlfriend? Was this good? Was this the beginning of the new life? Renewed romance? Did I want that? My heart reared up like a frightened horse, an idiot. I went over to look at the flowers. The mirror hanging on the wall above the mantel showed a frozen corpse, still pretty.

  And then I noticed that the glass vase was skull-shaped. Trevor wouldn’t have sent me that. No.

  “Did you see who dropped these off?” I asked the doorman.

  “A delivery guy.”

  “Was he Asian?” I asked.

  “Old black guy. A foot messenger.”

  Tucked between the flowers was a small note written in girly ballpoint: “To my muse. Call me and we’ll get started.”

  I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.—Pablo Picasso”

  I took the vase off the mantel and got into the elevator, the smell of the roses like the stink off a dead cat in the gutter. Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me—I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me—he had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson. “Oh, Trevor!”

  At home, I stuck Ping Xi’s business card into the frame of the mirror in the living room, next to the Polaroid of Reva. I popped four Ambien and sucked down some Dimetapp. “You are getting very sleepy,” I said in my head. I dug in the linen closet for fresh sheets, made my bed, and got in. I shut my eyes and imagined darkness, I imagined fields of grain, I imagined the shifting patterns of sand between dunes in the desert, I imagined the slow sway of a willow by the pond in Central Park, I imagined looking out a hotel window in Paris, at the flat gray sky, warped green copper and slate roofs, and tendrils of black steel on balconies and wet sidewalks down below. I was in Frantic with the smell of diesel and people with trench coats flying like capes from their shoulders, hands on hats, bells ringing in the distance, a two-tone French siren, the fierce, unforgiving vroom of a motorcycle, tiny brown birds whipping by. Maybe Harrison Ford would show up. Maybe I’d be Emmanuelle Seigner and rub cocaine on my gums in a speeding car and dance at a nightclub like a boneless serpent, hypnotizing everyone with my body. “Sleep. Now!” I imagined a long hospital hallway, a nurse in blue scrubs and thick thighs rushing soberly toward me. “I’m so, so sorry,” she was going to say. I turned away. I imagined Whoopi Goldberg in Star Trek wearing a purple robe standing at the huge panel through which outer space stretched into infinite mystery. She looked at me and said, “Isn’t it pretty?” That smile. “Oh, Whoopi, it’s beautiful.” I took a step toward the glass. The sheets ruffled against my foot. I wasn’t entirely awake, but I couldn’t cross the line into sleep. “Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.” But I was too tired to break through the glass. “Whoopi, can you help?” No answer. I attuned my ears to the sounds in the room, to cars driving slowly down my block, a door slamming, a set of high heels clomping up the sidewalk. Maybe that’s Reva, I thought. Reva. “Reva?” The thought jolted me awake.

  Suddenly I felt very strange, as though
my head had come off and was floating three inches above the stump of my neck. I got out of bed and went to the windows and ticked open a slat in the blinds and looked out. I fixed my eyes east toward the bleak horizon over the river, perfectly visible through the trees in Carl Schurz Park, which were black and skeletal. The branches undulated tauntingly against the pale afternoon, then stopped, froze, and trembled. Why were they shaking like that? What was wrong with them? They looked like a videotape in fast-forward. My VCR. My head floated a few inches to the left.

  I took three Nembutals and the last of the Ativan, then flopped down on the sofa. The weird feeling in my head seemed to descend into my torso. Instead of guts, I just had air inside of me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved my bowels. What if the only way to sleep is death? I thought. Should I consult a priest? Oh, the absurdity. I started to wallow. I wished I’d never taken that damned Infermiterol. I wanted the old half life back, when my VCR still worked and Reva would come over with her petty gripes and I could lose myself in her shallow universe for a few hours and then disappear into slumber. I wondered if those days were over now that Reva had been promoted and Ken was out of the picture. Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend? Could she really dispose of me so easily? No. No. She was a drone. She was too far gone. If the VCR had been working, I would have watched Working Girl on high volume, munching melatonin and animal crackers, if I’d had any left. Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing?

  I turned on the TV.

  I watched Law & Order. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched Friends, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will & Grace.

  Hours clicked by in half-hour segments. For days, I watched, it seemed, and I didn’t sleep. Occasionally I mistook vertigo and nausea for sleepiness, but when I closed my eyes, my heart raced. I watched The King of Queens. I watched Oprah. Donahue. The Ricki Lake Show. Sally Jessy Raphael. I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness.

  At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I’m here, I thought. I’m awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa.

  I watched Jenny Jones and Maury Povich and Nightline.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN THE TWENTIETH CAME, I went downtown to see Dr. Tuttle. I felt drunk and crazy getting dressed and lacing up a pair of rubber-soled boots from the closet, which I hadn’t remembered buying. I felt drunk in the elevator, I felt drunk walking across York, I felt drunk in the cab. I toddled up the steps to Dr. Tuttle’s brownstone and leaned on the buzzer for a good minute until she came to the door. The snow-covered street blinded me. I shut my eyes. I was dying. I would tell Dr. Tuttle that. I was the walking dead.

  “You look troubled,” she said matter-of-factly through the glass. I looked at her standing in the foyer. She wore red long underwear under a fleece cape. Her hair came down over her forehead and covered the top halves of the lenses in her glasses. She had her neck brace on again.

  “I’ve done some reorganizing,” she said, opening the door. “You’ll see.”

  I hadn’t been to her office in over a month. A full menorah of candles had melted in a baking dish on top of the radiator in the waiting room. A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings.

  Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table.

  “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please,” Dr. Tuttle said. “You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?” I leaned carefully against the bookshelf.

  “What do you use the massage table for?” I heard myself ask.

  “Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It’s an ancient form of healing—locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies.”

  “I see.”

  “And by surgery I mean metaphysical operations. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you’re interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it’s very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms—adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don’t worry. I’m not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you, anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it,” she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid’s at the doctor’s. “You really do look troubled. How are you sleeping these days?”

  “Like I said, I’ve been having some serious issues,” I began.

  “Don’t tell me, I know what you’re going to say,” Dr. Tuttle said. She picked a length of copper wire off her desk and put the tip to her cheek, poking in the soft flesh. Her skin looked suppler than I’d remembered it, and it struck me that Dr. Tuttle was probably younger than I had thought she was. She might only have been in her early forties. “It’s the Infermiterol. It didn’t work. Am I right?”

  “Not really . . .”

  “I know exactly what went wrong,” she said, and put the wire down. “The sample I gave you was the children’s dosage. That would only muddy up the waters, so to speak. The brain must cross a certain threshold before it can function abnormally. It’s like filling a bathtub. It means nothing to your downstairs neighbors until it’s overflowing.”

  “I was going to say that the Infermiterol—”

  “Because of leaks,” Dr. Tuttle clarified.

  “I get it. But I think the Infermiterol—”

  “Now just a moment while I pull your file.” She shuffled papers on her desk. “I haven’t seen you since December. Had a happy holiday?”

  “It was all right.”

  “Did Santa bring you something nice this year?”

  “This fur coat,” I told her.

  “Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity. Why? She licked a finger and leafed slowly through the pages in my folder, too slowly. Maddening. “The blind leading the blind,” she said wistfully. “The expression has been misused for centuries. It isn’t about ignorance at all. It’s about intuition—the sixth sense, which is the psychic sense. How else could the blind lead? The answer to this question has more to do with science than you might think. Ever seen doctors try to revive someone whose heart has stopped? People d
on’t understand electroshock. It’s not like sitting in the electric chair. The shocker. Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.”

  “I don’t know. I always forget them. And I’m not sleeping at all, I don’t think.”

  “We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?”

  “I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.”

  “A family friend?”

  “She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg?

  “And how did your mother die? Was it sudden? Was it violent?”

  I had answered this question half a dozen times by now.

  “I killed her,” I said then.

  Dr. Tuttle smirked and adjusted her glasses. “How did you achieve that, metaphorically speaking?”

  I racked my mind. “I crushed oxycodone into her vodka.”

  “That would do it,” Dr. Tuttle said, scribbling maniacally with a ballpoint pen to get the ink flowing. I couldn’t watch. Dr. Tuttle had never been so irritating. I closed my eyes.

  It was true that my father had kept a white marble mortar and pestle in his study—an antique. I tried to imagine taking a leftover bottle of his oxycodone and crushing the pills in there. I could see my hands grinding, then spooning the white powder into one of my mother’s frosty bottles of Belvedere. I swirled it around.

  “Now sit still for a minute,” Dr. Tuttle said, dismissing my confession. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to assess your personality shift. I notice today that your face is slightly off center. Has anyone pointed that out to you? Your whole face,” she held out her pen and squinted, measuring me, “is at approximately negative ten degrees. That’s counterclockwise to me, but clockwise to you when you go home and look in the mirror. A very minor slant. Really only a trained eye could pick it up. But it’s a significant deviation from when we started your treatment. So it makes sense that you’re having extra trouble sleeping now. You’re having to work that much harder just to hold your mind centered. It’s effort wasted, I’m afraid. If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful. Oh, is it powerful. Proper medication should soften the impulse. You had no idea about your facial deviation?”