My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,27

the transcripts. They were surprisingly polite. “How are you?” “I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Horny much?” It went on from there. I was relieved I never gave anyone my real name. My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I once wrote. The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject.

“What’s your favorite movie?”

Then one day I woke up to discover that I had dug out my digital camera and sent a bunch of strangers snapshots of my asshole, my nipple, the inside of my mouth. I’d written messages saying that I’d like it if they came and “tied me up” and “held me hostage” and “slurped my pussy like a plate of spaghetti.” And there were numbers in my cell phone log I didn’t recognize. So I made up a rule that whenever I took my pills, which was roughly every eight hours, I’d put my computer in the closet and power down my phone, seal it with packing tape in a Tupperware container, and stick the container in the back of a high kitchen cabinet.

But then I woke up with the unopened Tupperware next to me on the pillow.

The next night, the phone was on the window ledge, next to a dozen half-smoked cigarettes stubbed out on an Alanis Morissette CD case.

“Why are you killing yourself?” Reva asked, seeing the butts in the trash can when she came over uninvited a few days later. Reva’s mother’s cancer had started in her lungs.

“My smoking has nothing to do with you or your mother. My mother’s dead, too, you know,” I added.

By this point, Reva’s mother was in hospice care, in and out of consciousness. I was tired of hearing about it. It brought back too many memories. Plus, I knew she’d expect me to go to her mother’s funeral. I really didn’t want to do that.

“My mom’s not dead yet,” Reva said.

I didn’t tell Reva about my Internet proclivities. But I did ask her to change my AOL password to something I could never guess. “Just some random letters and numbers. I waste too much time online,” I told her.

“Doing what?”

“I send e-mails late at night and regret it,” was the lie I knew she would believe.

“To Trevor, right?” she asked, nodding her head knowingly.

Reva changed my password, and once my AOL account was inaccessible, my sleep stayed low stakes for a while. The worst I did while I was unconscious was write letters to Trevor on a yellow legal pad—long petitions about our romantic history and how I wanted things to change so that we could be together again. The letters were so ridiculous, I wondered if they were written in my sleep to keep me entertained while I was awake. By the end of the month, my blackout excursions down to the bodega had become less frequent, maybe due to the onset of winter.

Reva’s visits became less frequent, too. And her attitude shifted from melodrama to polite posturing. Instead of venting, she gave well-articulated summaries of her week, including the latest current events. I appreciated her self-control, I told her. She said she was trying to be more sensitive to my needs. When she would once have given me advice or commented on the state of the apartment, she now bit her tongue. She complained less. She also started giving me hugs and air kisses whenever she said good-bye. She did this by bending over me on the sofa. I imagine she got in the habit because of her bedbound mother. It made me feel like I was on my deathbed, too. In fact, I appreciated the affection. By Thanksgiving I’d been hibernating for almost six months. Nobody but Reva had touched me.

* * *

• • •

I DIDN’T TELL Dr. Tuttle about my blackouts. I was afraid she’d cut me off out of fear of potential lawsuits. So when I went to see her in December, I just complained that the insomnia had crept up with a vengeance. I lied that I could stay down for no more than a few hours at a time. Bouts of sweat and nausea made me dizzy and restless, I told her. Imaginary noises shook me awake so violently “I thought my building had been bombed or struck by lightning.”

“You must have a callus on your cortex,” Dr. Tuttle said, clucking her tongue. “Not figuratively. Not literally, I mean. I’m saying, parenthetically,” she held