My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,71
tired to break through the glass. “Whoopi, can you help?” No answer. I attuned my ears to the sounds in the room, to cars driving slowly down my block, a door slamming, a set of high heels clomping up the sidewalk. Maybe that’s Reva, I thought. Reva. “Reva?” The thought jolted me awake.
Suddenly I felt very strange, as though my head had come off and was floating three inches above the stump of my neck. I got out of bed and went to the windows and ticked open a slat in the blinds and looked out. I fixed my eyes east toward the bleak horizon over the river, perfectly visible through the trees in Carl Schurz Park, which were black and skeletal. The branches undulated tauntingly against the pale afternoon, then stopped, froze, and trembled. Why were they shaking like that? What was wrong with them? They looked like a videotape in fast-forward. My VCR. My head floated a few inches to the left.
I took three Nembutals and the last of the Ativan, then flopped down on the sofa. The weird feeling in my head seemed to descend into my torso. Instead of guts, I just had air inside of me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved my bowels. What if the only way to sleep is death? I thought. Should I consult a priest? Oh, the absurdity. I started to wallow. I wished I’d never taken that damned Infermiterol. I wanted the old half life back, when my VCR still worked and Reva would come over with her petty gripes and I could lose myself in her shallow universe for a few hours and then disappear into slumber. I wondered if those days were over now that Reva had been promoted and Ken was out of the picture. Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend? Could she really dispose of me so easily? No. No. She was a drone. She was too far gone. If the VCR had been working, I would have watched Working Girl on high volume, munching melatonin and animal crackers, if I’d had any left. Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing?
I turned on the TV.
I watched Law & Order. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched Friends, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will & Grace.
Hours clicked by in half-hour segments. For days, I watched, it seemed, and I didn’t sleep. Occasionally I mistook vertigo and nausea for sleepiness, but when I closed my eyes, my heart raced. I watched The King of Queens. I watched Oprah. Donahue. The Ricki Lake Show. Sally Jessy Raphael. I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness.
At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I’m here, I thought. I’m awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa.
I watched Jenny Jones and Maury Povich and Nightline.