My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,82
man would be visiting me regularly. “He’s not my boyfriend, but give him that kind of consideration. He has my keys. Full access,” I said, then went upstairs and took a bath, put on the first set of pajamas, lay down on the mattress in the bedroom, and waited for a knock on the door.
* * *
• • •
“I BROUGHT A CONTRACT for you to sign,” Ping Xi said, standing in the doorway, a handheld digital video camera in his hand. He switched it on and held it at chest level. “In case something goes wrong, or in case you change your mind. Mind if I tape this?”
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
He then encouraged me to burn my birth certificate so he could record the ritual on videotape. His interest in me was like his interest in those dogs. He was an opportunist and a stylist, a producer of entertainment more than an artist. Though, like an artist, he clearly believed that the situation we were in together—he the warden of my hibernation with full permission to use me in my blackout state as his “model”—was a projection of his own genius, as though the universe were orchestrated in such a way as to lead him toward projects that he’d unconsciously predicted for himself years earlier. The illusion of fateful realization. He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts. He was an art-world hack. But he was successful. He knew how to operate. I noticed that his chin was greasy with something. I looked closer: under the smear of Vaseline was a tattoo of a cluster of big red zits.
“I think I’m going to be taking lots of footage,” he said. “Handheld digital with this thing mostly. Comes out grainy. I like it.”
“I don’t care. As long as I’m on the drug, I won’t remember.”
He promised me that he would lock me up and keep my sleeping prison a secret, that he wouldn’t allow anyone to accompany him into my apartment, not an assistant, not even a cleaning person. If he was going to bring in props or furniture or materials, he’d have to bring them in himself, and above all, each time he went away, no trace of his activities could be left. Not a scrap. When I came to on the third day of each Infermiterol blackout, there was to be no evidence of what had happened since my last awakening. There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.
“I wouldn’t want you to know what I’m up to anyway. It would screw up my work. The creative incentive for me is that you’ll be constantly . . . naive.”
I think it disappointed him that I wasn’t begging him to tell me what the work was going to be about. It didn’t worry me that he could make sex tapes. He was obviously homosexual. I wasn’t threatened.
“As long as the place is clean and empty and you’re gone before I wake up every third day, and I don’t starve to death or break any bones, I don’t care about your artwork. You have carte blanche. Just don’t let me out of here. I’m doing important work of my own. Tit for tat.”
“Tit for tit makes more sense,” he said. “What about just burning your passport or cutting up your driver’s license,” he suggested. I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how the critics would describe the video. He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to. And anyway, I needed my birth certificate and my passport and my driver’s license. At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d