My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,12

from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000.

Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit-foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron. I suspected that he and Natasha were fucking. On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers—a pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them positioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site. A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair.

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AT WORK, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. “Napping” is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.

But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was. I’d try to remember something else—a better version, a happy story, maybe, or just an equally lame but different life that would at least be refreshing in its digressions—but it never worked. I was always still me. Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears. The only times I cried, in fact, were when I was pulled out of that nothingness, when the alarm on my cell phone went off. Then I had to trudge up the stairs, get coffee from the little kitchen, and rub the boogers out of my eyes. It always took me a while to readjust to the harsh fluorescent lighting.

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FOR A YEAR OR SO, everything seemed fine with Natasha. The most grief she gave me was about ordering the wrong pens.

“Why do we have all these cheap clicky pens? They’re so loud when you click them. You can’t hear this?” She stood there, clicking at me.

“Sorry, Natasha,” I said. “I’ll order quieter pens.”

“Has FedEx come yet?”

I would rarely know how to answer that.

Once I’d started seeing Dr. Tuttle, I was getting in fourteen, fifteen hours of sleep a night during the workweek, plus that extra hour at lunchtime. Weekends I was only awake for a few hours a day. And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it. I told Dr. Tuttle I was having trouble concentrating. She said it was probably due to “brain mist.”

“Are you sleeping enough?” Dr. Tuttle asked every week I went to see her.

“Just barely,” I always answered. “Those pills hardly put a dent in my anxiety.”

“Eat a can of chickpeas,” she said. “Otherwise known as garbanzos. And