My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,72

I went downtown to see Dr. Tuttle. I felt drunk and crazy getting dressed and lacing up a pair of rubber-soled boots from the closet, which I hadn’t remembered buying. I felt drunk in the elevator, I felt drunk walking across York, I felt drunk in the cab. I toddled up the steps to Dr. Tuttle’s brownstone and leaned on the buzzer for a good minute until she came to the door. The snow-covered street blinded me. I shut my eyes. I was dying. I would tell Dr. Tuttle that. I was the walking dead.

“You look troubled,” she said matter-of-factly through the glass. I looked at her standing in the foyer. She wore red long underwear under a fleece cape. Her hair came down over her forehead and covered the top halves of the lenses in her glasses. She had her neck brace on again.

“I’ve done some reorganizing,” she said, opening the door. “You’ll see.”

I hadn’t been to her office in over a month. A full menorah of candles had melted in a baking dish on top of the radiator in the waiting room. A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings.

Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table.

“I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please,” Dr. Tuttle said. “You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?” I leaned carefully against the bookshelf.

“What do you use the massage table for?” I heard myself ask.

“Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It’s an ancient form of healing—locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies.”

“I see.”

“And by surgery I mean metaphysical operations. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you’re interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it’s very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms—adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don’t worry. I’m not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you, anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it,” she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid’s at the doctor’s. “You really do look troubled. How are you sleeping these days?”

“Like I said, I’ve been having some serious issues,” I began.

“Don’t tell me, I know what you’re going to say,” Dr. Tuttle said. She picked a length of copper wire off her desk and put the tip to her cheek, poking in the soft flesh. Her skin looked suppler than I’d remembered it, and it struck me that Dr. Tuttle was probably younger than I had thought she was. She might only have been in her early forties. “It’s the Infermiterol. It didn’t work. Am I right?”

“Not really . . .”

“I know exactly what went wrong,” she said, and put the wire down. “The sample I gave you was the children’s dosage. That would only muddy up the waters, so to speak. The brain must cross a certain threshold before it can function abnormally. It’s like filling a bathtub. It means nothing to your downstairs neighbors until it’s overflowing.”

“I was going to say that the Infermiterol—”

“Because of leaks,” Dr. Tuttle clarified.

“I get it. But I think the Infermiterol—”

“Now just a moment while I pull your file.” She shuffled papers on her desk. “I haven’t seen you since December. Had a happy holiday?”

“It was all right.”

“Did Santa bring you something nice this year?”

“This fur coat,” I told her.

“Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity. Why? She licked a finger and leafed slowly through the pages in my folder, too slowly. Maddening. “The blind leading the blind,” she said wistfully. “The expression has been misused for centuries. It isn’t about ignorance at all. It’s about intuition—the sixth sense, which is the psychic sense. How else