My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,33

open the M&M’s, ate them and a couple of Zyprexa, and watched Regarding Henry, dozing, the forgotten Klondike bar melting in my pocket.

Reva showed up halfway through the movie with a huge tin of caramel popcorn. I answered the door on my hands and knees.

“Can I leave this here?” she asked. “If I keep it at my house, I’m afraid I’ll eat it all.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted. Reva helped me up off the floor. I was relieved that she had no elaborately wrapped gift for me. Although Reva was Jewish, she celebrated every Christian holiday. I went to the bathroom, took my coat off, turned the pocket inside out and threw it in the tub. I let the water rinse away the melted Klondike bar. As the chocolate flowed down toward the drain, it looked like blood.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Reva when I came back into the living room.

She ignored the question. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I took a cab.” She sat on the sofa. I reheated my half-drunk second cup of coffee in the microwave. I went to the VCR, moved the little elephant statue that I’d positioned to cover the glare from the digital clock. I rubbed my eyes. It was ten thirty. Christmas was almost over, thank God. When I looked at Reva, I saw that under her long black wool cape she was wearing a sparkly red dress and black stockings with boughs of holly embroidered on them. Her mascara was smudged, her face was droopy and swollen and caked with foundation and bronzer. Her hair was slicked back into a bun, shiny with gel. She had kicked off her heels and was now cracking her toe knuckles against the floor. Her shoes lay under the coffee table, tipped over on their sides like two dead crows. She wasn’t giving me any jealous, scornful looks, wasn’t asking if I’d eaten anything that day, wasn’t tidying up or putting the videotapes on the coffee table back in their cases. She was quiet. I leaned against the wall and watched her take her phone out of her purse and turn it off, then open the tin of popcorn, eat some, and put the cover back on. Something had happened, that was clear. Maybe Reva had gone to Ken’s Christmas party and watched him carouse with his wife, who she’d told me was petite and Japanese and cruel. Maybe he’d finally ended the affair. I didn’t ask. I finished my coffee and picked up the tin of popcorn, took it to the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage, which Reva had taken out, apparently, while I was washing my coat.

“Thanks,” she said, when I sat down beside her on the sofa. I grunted and turned on the TV. We split the rest of the M&M’s and watched a show about the Bermuda Triangle and I ate some melatonin and Benadryl and drooled a little. At some point I heard my phone ring from wherever I’d last hidden it.

“Is it a vortex to a new dimension? Or a myth? Or is there a conspiracy to cover up the truth? And where do people go when they disappear? Perhaps we’ll never know.”

Reva went to the thermostat and turned it up and came back to the sofa. The Bermuda Triangle episode ended and a new one started up, this time about the Loch Ness Monster. I closed my eyes.

“My mom died,” Reva said during a commercial break.

“Shit,” I said.

What else could I have said?

I pulled the blanket across our laps.

“Thanks,” Reva said again, crying softly this time.

The ghoulish voice of the TV show’s male narrator and Reva’s sniffles and sighs should have lulled me to sleep. But I could not sleep. I closed my eyes. When the next episode, about crop circles, started, Reva poked me. “Are you awake?” I pretended I wasn’t. I heard her get up and put her shoes back on, ticktock to the bathroom, blow her nose. She left without saying good-bye. I was relieved to be alone again.

I got up and went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. The Infermiterol pills Dr. Tuttle had given me were small and pellet-shaped, with the letter I etched into each one, very white, very hard, and strangely heavy. They almost seemed to be made of polished stone. I figured if there were ever a time to hit the sleep hard, it was now. I didn’t want to have to make it through Christmas with