My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  * * *

  • • •

  “I BROUGHT A CONTRACT for you to sign,” Ping Xi said, standing in the doorway, a handheld digital video camera in his hand. He switched it on and held it at chest level. “In case something goes wrong, or in case you change your mind. Mind if I tape this?”

  “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  He then encouraged me to burn my birth certificate so he could record the ritual on videotape. His interest in me was like his interest in those dogs. He was an opportunist and a stylist, a producer of entertainment more than an artist. Though, like an artist, he clearly believed that the situation we were in together—he the warden of my hibernation with full permission to use me in my blackout state as his “model”—was a projection of his own genius, as though the universe were orchestrated in such a way as to lead him toward projects that he’d unconsciously predicted for himself years earlier. The illusion of fateful realization. He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts. He was an art-world hack. But he was successful. He knew how to operate. I noticed that his chin was greasy with something. I looked closer: under the smear of Vaseline was a tattoo of a cluster of big red zits.

  “I think I’m going to be taking lots of footage,” he said. “Handheld digital with this thing mostly. Comes out grainy. I like it.”

  “I don’t care. As long as I’m on the drug, I won’t remember.”

  He promised me that he would lock me up and keep my sleeping prison a secret, that he wouldn’t allow anyone to accompany him into my apartment, not an assistant, not even a cleaning person. If he was going to bring in props or furniture or materials, he’d have to bring them in himself, and above all, each time he went away, no trace of his activities could be left. Not a scrap. When I came to on the third day of each Infermiterol blackout, there was to be no evidence of what had happened since my last awakening. There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.

  “I wouldn’t want you to know what I’m up to anyway. It would screw up my work. The creative incentive for me is that you’ll be constantly . . . naive.”

  I think it disappointed him that I wasn’t begging him to tell me what the work was going to be about. It didn’t worry me that he could make sex tapes. He was obviously homosexual. I wasn’t threatened.

  “As long as the place is clean and empty and you’re gone before I wake up every third day, and I don’t starve to death or break any bones, I don’t care about your artwork. You have carte blanche. Just don’t let me out of here. I’m doing important work of my own. Tit for tat.”

  “Tit for tit makes more sense,” he said. “What about just burning your passport or cutting up your driver’s license,” he suggested. I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how the critics would describe the video. He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to. And anyway, I needed my birth certificate and my passport and my driver’s license. At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d wake up with a different face and body and name. I’d appear to be the old me.

  “But that’s cheating,” he said. “If you’re planning to walk out of here and go back to being the same person you are now, what’s the point?”

  “It’s personal,” I said. “It’s not about ID cards. It’s an inside job. What do you want me to do? Walk out into the woods, build a fort, hunt squirrels?”

  “Well, that would be a more authentic rebirth. Have you seen any Tarkovsky? Haven’t you read Rousseau?”

  “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.”

  “I might have to, like, downgrade to Super 8 then. Can I take down the blinds in the bedroom?” He pulled a handwritten document from his messenger bag.

  “Put the contract away,” I said. “I won’t sue you. Just don’t fuck this up for me.”

  Ping Xi shrugged.

  I gave him the key to the new lock.

  “If I need anything, I’ll stick a Post-it note here,” I said, pointing to the dining table. “You see this red pen?”

  Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom. Every three days, I’d wake up, look at the calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total, I would spend only forty hours in a conscious state.

  “Sweet dreams,” said Ping Xi.

  His face was wan, fleshy, something blurry about it—maybe it was the Vaseline on his chin—but his eyes were sharp, hooded, dark, clear, and although I understood that he was foolish, I trusted his resolve. He wouldn’t let me out of there. He was too conceited to fail to keep his word, and too ambitious to give up the opportunity to take advantage of my offer. A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. I shut the door in his face. I heard him slide in the key and lock it.

  I took the first of forty Infermiterol, went into the bedroom, fluffed the pillow, and lay down.

  * * *

  • • •

  THREE NIGHTS LATER, I came to in pitch darkness, crawled off the mattress, turned on the lights, and went into the living room, expecting to find scratches at the door, evidence of a wild animal being held against her will. But I found nothing. Ping Xi hadn’t even crossed out the days on the calendar. My apartment was almost unrecognizable in its blankness, clean and empty. I could imagine some well-dressed real estate agent bursting in—a floral scarf fluttering like a sail from her upheld arm as she extolled the virtues of the unit to a newly married couple: “High ceilings, hardwood, all the original molding, and quiet, quiet. From those windows, you can even see the East River.” The agent’s suit was canary yellow. The couple, I imagined, were the ones whose photo I’d taken a few days earlier on the Esplanade. My memory had blundered into my imagination, but I knew what was what. I understood that three days had passed without me, and there was a long way ahead.

  I saw no trace of Ping Xi until I went to the kitchen: Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans; tin foil smeared with the contents of what I could assume was a burrito; the New York Times from February 2. I wrote a list of things I desired on a Post-it and stuck it to the table: “Ginger ale, animal crackers, Pepto-Bismol.” And then, “Remove all garbage after each visit! Cross out the days!” I guessed Ping Xi had been over to take measurements or talk or sketch plans for some video project, but had made no real work yet. I just had that feeling.

  I pulled a slice of pizza from the fridge and ate it cold, with my eyes closed, swaying under the fluorescent light streaming down from overhead and reflecting back up off the kitchen floor. I should have bought a sunlamp. The thought occurred to me, then rang a bell that I’d left in a boring corner of my mind to remind myself to take my vitamins. I gulped grayish water from the tap. When I righted myself, I felt a little swoon of panic at the thought of that lock on the door. If something happened to Ping Xi, I could die in here, I thought. But the panic vanished as soon as I flicked off the kitchen lights.

  I bathed quickly, put my laundry in, did a few exercises, brushed my teeth, took an Infermiterol, and went back to the bedroom. Nothing felt very deep yet. Everything was mundane and pra
ctical. In the moments waiting to lose consciousness, I imagined Trevor on one knee, proposing to his current lady friend. The self-satisfaction. The stupidity of wanting something “forever.” I almost felt sorry for him, for her. I heard myself chuckle, then sigh, as I drifted away, back into the cold.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SECOND AWAKENING WAS at midday. I came to with my thumb in my mouth. When I pulled it out, it was white and wrinkled, and I had a kink in my jaw that reminded me of the cramp I used to get giving blow jobs. This didn’t alarm me. I rose, alert and hungry, and went to the kitchen. Ping Xi had crossed six days off the calendar and stuck a Post-it note on the fridge that said, “Sorry!” I opened the fridge, chewed a slice of pizza, took my vitamins, and chugged a can of Schweppes. The trash can was empty this time, no liner. I left the empty soda can on the kitchen counter and thought only passingly of Reva and her Diet 7UPs full of tequila before I bathed, combed my hair, did some jumping jacks, et cetera. I made a mental note to change the sheets upon awakening, took an Infermiterol, lay down, massaged my jaw with my fingers, and lost consciousness.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE THIRD AWAKENING MARKED nine days locked inside my apartment. I could feel it in my eyes when I got up, the atrophy of the muscles I’d use to focus on things at a distance, I guessed. I kept the lights low. In the shower, I read the shampoo label and got stuck on the words “sodium lauryl sulfate.” Each word carried with it a seemingly endless string of associations. “Sodium”: salt, white, clouds, gauze, silt, sand, sky, lark, string, kitten, claws, wound, iron, omega.

  The fourth awakening, the words fixated me again. “Lauryl”: Shakespeare, Ophelia, Millais, pain, stained glass, rectory, butt plug, feelings, pigpen, snake eyes, hot poker. I shut the water off, did my due diligence with the laundry, et cetera, took an Infermiterol, and lay back down on the mattress. “Sulfate”: Satan, acid, Lyme, dunes, dwellings, hunchbacks, hybrids, samurais, suffragettes, mazes.

  * * *

  • • •

  SO MY HOURS WENT by in three-day chunks. Ping Xi was dutiful about the calendar and the garbage. One time I wrote a Post-it note and asked for Canada Dry instead of Schweppes. Another time, I wrote a Post-it note and asked for dryer sheets. I paid minor attention to the dust on the windowsills, swirls of lint and hairs caught between the floorboards. I wrote a Post-it note: “Sweep or tell me to sweep when I’m blacked out.” I forgot Ping Xi’s name, then remembered it. I passed the hallway to the locked door of the apartment and vaguely nodded at the idea of the lock, as though it might be just an idea, the door itself, just the notion of a door. “Plato”: chalk, chain, Hollywood, Hegel, carte postale, banana daiquiri, breezes, music, roads, horizons. I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music.

  “Ginger”: ale, smoke, China, satin, rose, blemish, treble, babka, fist.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON FEBRUARY 19, I stared into the mirror. My lips were chapped but I was smiling. Two syllables chimed in my mind and I wrote them down on a Post-it for Ping Xi: “Lip balm.”

  “ChapStick”: strawberry, linoleum, pay scale, sundae, poodle.

  And then, another Post-it note: “Thank you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ON FEBRUARY 25, I could tell immediately that something was different. I awoke not sprawled on the mattress in the bedroom, but curled up under a towel on the floor in the northeast corner of the living room, where my desk used to be.

  I thought I smelled gas, and the association with fire alarmed me, so I got up and went to the stove before remembering that it was electric. Maybe, I thought, what I’d smelled was my own sweat. I relaxed.

  I opened the fridge, stood in the yellow light, and chewed my piece of pizza. My salivary glands were hesitant at first, but then they acquiesced, and the pizza tasted better than I’d remembered it. I pulled clean pajamas from the dryer and put them on in the hallway. I sniffed the air again and recognized the distinct tang of turpentine. It was coming from the bedroom. The bedroom door was locked.

  I knocked.

  “Hello?”

  I listened with my ear pressed against the door, but all I heard was my own shallow breathing, the blink of my eyes, my mouth filling with spit, the echo in my throat swallowing it down.

  I took my vitamins, but did not bathe.

  When I took the Infermiterol that day, I pictured Ping Xi’s paintings. They flashed into my mind like memories. They were all “sleeping nudes,” mussed beds and tangles of pale limbs and blond hair, blue shadows in the folds of the white sheets, sunsets reflected on the white wall backgrounds. In every painting, my face was hidden. I saw them in my mind’s eye—small oils on cheap prestretched canvases or smaller primed panels. They were innocent and not very good. It didn’t matter. He could sell them for hundreds of thousands and say they were self-conscious critiques of the institutionalization of painting, maybe even about the objectification of women’s bodies through art history. “School is not for artists,” I could hear him say. “Art history is fascism. These paintings are about what we sleep through while we’re reading books our teachers give us. We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit about who we really are. These paintings are deliberately boring.” Did he think that was an original idea? I would never remember posing for the paintings, but I knew that if I was high on Infermiterol, I must have just been feigning sleep.

  I took an Infermiterol, lay down on the living room floor, a fresh towel folded under my head as a pillow, and went back to sleep.

  Over the next month, when I’d wake up, my mind was filled with colors. The apartment began to feel less cavernous to me. One time I awoke to find my hair had been cut off, like a boy’s, and there were long blond hairs stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl. I imagined sitting on the toilet with a towel over my shoulders, Ping Xi standing above me, snipping away. In the mirror, I looked bold and sprightly. I thought I looked good. I wrote Post-it notes requesting fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from “a good Japanese restaurant.” I asked for a candle to burn while I bathed. During this period, my waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance. I put on a little weight, and so when I lay down on the living room floor, my bones didn’t hurt. My face lost its mean edge. I asked for flowers. “Lilies.” “Birds of paradise.” “Daisies.” “A branch of catkins.” I jogged in place, did leg lifts, push-ups. It was easier and easier to pass the time between getting up and going down.

  But by the end of May, I sensed that I was going to grow restless soon. A prediction. The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in. The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what—some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything? In time, I would understand, I told myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON MAY 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol. There was only one pill left. I swallowed it and prayed for mercy.

  Light from passing cars slid through the blinds and flashed across the living room walls in yellow stripes, once, twice. I turned to face the ceiling. The floorboards gave a short screech, like the squelch of a boat turning suddenly in a storm. A hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious sel
f roamed like a goldfish. The sound got louder until it was almost deafening, and then it stopped. In that silence, I began to drift down into the darkness, descending at first so slowly and steadily, I felt I was being lowered on pulleys—by angels with gold-spun ropes around my body, I imagined, and then by the electric casket lowering device they used at both my parents’ burials, and so my heart quickened at that thought, remembering that I’d had parents once, and that I’d taken the last of the pills, that this was the end of something, and then the ropes seemed to detach and I was falling faster. My stomach turned and I was cold with sweat, and I started writhing, first grasping at the towel under me to slow my fall, and then more wildly because that hadn’t worked, tumbling like Alice down the rabbit hole or like Elsa Schneider disappearing down into the infinite abyss in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The gray mist obscured my vision. Had I crossed the seal? Was the world crumbling? Calm, calm, I told myself. I could feel gravity sucking me deeper, time accelerating, the darkness around me, widening until I was somewhere else, somewhere with no horizon, an area of space that awed me in its foreverness, and I felt calm for just a moment. Then I recognized that I was floating without a tether. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. I was afraid. The fear felt like desire: suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again. I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind. “It was so pretty there. It was interesting!” But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone—maybe it was Ping Xi, maybe it was a wakefulness outside myself—and that other hand steadied me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over, my brain throbbing from the pressure, my eyes leaking as though each teardrop shed a vision of my past. I felt the wetness trickle down my neck. I was crying. I knew that. I could hear myself gasp and whimper. I focused on the sound and then the universe narrowed into a fine line, and that felt better because there was a clearer trajectory, so I traveled more peacefully through outer space, listening to the rhythm of my respiration, each breath an echo of the breath before, softer and softer, until I was far enough away that there was no sound, there was no movement. There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone.