My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,58

the fishnets and went to the bathroom to run the hot water in the shower. My toenails were painted lilac, my previously flaky calloused soles now smooth and soft. I used the toilet and watched a vein throb in my thigh. What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing? It seemed preposterous. Had Reva convinced me to go “enjoy myself” or something just as idiotic? I peed, and when I wiped myself, it was slick. I had recently been aroused, it seemed. Who had aroused me? I remembered nothing. A wave of nausea made me lurch over and regurgitate an acrid globule of phlegm, which I spat into the sink. From the sandy feel of my mouth, I was expecting to see granules of dirt or the grit of a crushed pill speckling my saliva. Instead, it was pink glitter.

I opened the medicine cabinet and took two Valiums and two Ativans, guzzled water from the tap. When I righted myself, someone appeared in the mirror as if through a porthole window, and it startled me. My own startled face startled me. Mascara had streaked down my cheeks like a masquerade mask. Remnants of bright pink lipstick stained the outer edges and corners of my lips. I brushed my teeth and tried my best to scrub the makeup off. I looked in the mirror again. Wrinkles in my forehead and lines around my mouth looked like they’d been drawn in pencil. My cheeks were slack. My skin was pale. Something flashed in the gloss of my eyeballs. I got close up to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.” I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam.

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• • •

IN THE SHOWER, a memory returned from middle school: a cop who visited our seventh grade class to warn us about the dangers of drug use. He hung up a chart depicting every illicit drug in Western civilization and pointed at the little sample pictures one by one—a pile of white powder, cloudy yellow crystals, blue pills, pink pills, yellow pills, black tar. Under each was the drug’s name and nicknames. Heroin: smack, dope, horse, skag, junk, H, hero, white stuff, boy, chiva, black pearl, brown sugar. “This feels like this. That feels like that.” The cop had some kind of disorder that made it hard for him to moderate the volume of his own voice. “Cocaine! Methamphetamine! Psilocybin! PCP!” he shouted, then suddenly lowered his voice to point at Rohypnol. “Forget-me pills, lunch money, Mexican Valium, mind eraser, rib, roach, roofies, trip-and-falls, wolfies . . .” He was almost inaudible. And then he was screaming again. “This is why you don’t accept drinks from strangers! Girls! Never leave a friend alone at a party! The upside is that the victim forgets!” He stopped to catch his breath. He was a sweaty blonde with a V-shaped build like Superman. “But it isn’t addictive,” he said casually, then turned back to the chart.

So my memory seemed to be intact insofar as I could recall with pristine clarity this moment from my adolescence, but I had no recall of what had happened under the influence of Infermiterol. Were there other holes in my memory? I hoped there might be. I tested myself: Who signed the Magna Carta? How tall is the Statue of Liberty? When was the Nazarene Movement? Who shot Andy Warhol? The questions alone proved that my mind was still pretty sound. I knew my social security number. Bill Clinton was president, but not for much longer. In fact, my mind felt sharper, the pathways of my thoughts more direct than before. I could remember things I hadn’t thought of in years: I could remember the time senior year of college when my heel broke on the way to Feminist Theories and Art Practices, 1960s–1990s, and I walked in late, limping and disgruntled, and the professor pointed at me and said, “We were just discussing feminist performance art as a political deconstruction of the art world as a commercial industry,” and told me to stand at the front of the classroom, which I did, my left foot arched like a Barbie’s, and the class analyzed it