My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,73
could the blind lead? The answer to this question has more to do with science than you might think. Ever seen doctors try to revive someone whose heart has stopped? People don’t understand electroshock. It’s not like sitting in the electric chair. The shocker. Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.”
“I don’t know. I always forget them. And I’m not sleeping at all, I don’t think.”
“We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”
“Yes.”
“Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?”
“I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.”
“A family friend?”
“She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg?
“And how did your mother die? Was it sudden? Was it violent?”
I had answered this question half a dozen times by now.
“I killed her,” I said then.
Dr. Tuttle smirked and adjusted her glasses. “How did you achieve that, metaphorically speaking?”
I racked my mind. “I crushed oxycodone into her vodka.”
“That would do it,” Dr. Tuttle said, scribbling maniacally with a ballpoint pen to get the ink flowing. I couldn’t watch. Dr. Tuttle had never been so irritating. I closed my eyes.
It was true that my father had kept a white marble mortar and pestle in his study—an antique. I tried to imagine taking a leftover bottle of his oxycodone and crushing the pills in there. I could see my hands grinding, then spooning the white powder into one of my mother’s frosty bottles of Belvedere. I swirled it around.
“Now sit still for a minute,” Dr. Tuttle said, dismissing my confession. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to assess your personality shift. I notice today that your face is slightly off center. Has anyone pointed that out to you? Your whole face,” she held out her pen and squinted, measuring me, “is at approximately negative ten degrees. That’s counterclockwise to me, but clockwise to you when you go home and look in the mirror. A very minor slant. Really only a trained eye could pick it up. But it’s a significant deviation from when we started your treatment. So it makes sense that you’re having extra trouble sleeping now. You’re having to work that much harder just to hold your mind centered. It’s effort wasted, I’m afraid. If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful. Oh, is it powerful. Proper medication should soften the impulse. You had no idea about your facial deviation?”
“No,” I answered, and raised my hands to touch my eyes.
She reached down into a paper shopping bag and pulled out four sample bottles of Infermiterol. “Double your dosage. These are ten milligram tablets. Take two,” she said, and slid the boxes across her desk. “If vanity is going to keep you up at night, let me just say, it’s a very minor slant.”
* * *
• • •
IN THE CAB HOME, I looked at myself in the reflection of the tinted windows. My face was perfectly aligned: Dr. Tuttle was obviously crazy.
In the gold-tone doors of the elevator up to my apartment, I still looked good. I looked like a young Lauren Bacall the morning after. I’m a disheveled Joan Fontaine, I thought. Unlocking the door to my apartment, I was Kim Novak. “You’re prettier than Sharon Stone,” Reva would have said. She was right. I went to the sofa, clicked the TV on. George Walker Bush was taking his oath of office. I watched him squint and give his monologue. “Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats; it is a call to conscience.” What the hell did that mean? That Americans should take the blame for all the ills of the world? Or just our own world? Who cared?
And then, as though I’d summoned her with my mundane cynicism, Reva was knocking on my door once again. I answered somewhat gratefully.
“Well, I scheduled the abortion,” she said, rushing past me into the living room. “I need you to tell me I’m doing the right thing.”
“I ask you to be citizens: Citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character.”
“This Bush is so much cuter than the last. Isn’t he? Like a rascal puppy.”