My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  The coffee table was spread over with empty ice-cube trays and a full gallon jug of distilled water and an empty half-gallon jug of Gordon’s gin and a ripped-out page from a book called The Art of Happiness. Reva had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier, saying I’d “get a lot out of the Dalai Lama. He’s really insightful.” I’d never read the book. On the torn-out page, a single line had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen: “It didn’t happen overnight,” it read. I deduced that I’d been crushing Xanax with the handle of a butcher knife and snorting it with a rolled-up flyer for an open mic night at a club on Hester Street called Portnoy’s Porthole. I’d never heard of it. A few dozen Polaroids splattered between my videotapes and empty cases proved that my blackout activities had not gone undocumented, although I didn’t see my camera anywhere.

  The photos were of pretty party people—young strangers making sultry, self-serious faces. Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils, some caught unawares by the loud white flash of my camera, others posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles. Some photos appeared to have been taken on a downtown street at night, others in a dark, low-ceilinged interior with Day-Glo fake graffiti on the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody in the photos. In one, a group of six clubgoers huddled together, each holding up a middle finger. In another, a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties. A chubby black boy in a fedora and tuxedo T-shirt blew smoke rings. Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in slouchy gold lamé suits high-fived in front of a Basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someone’s pale pink tongue, split to look like a snake’s and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs. There was a series of snapshots taken in what I guessed was the line for the toilet. The whole place looked like some arty rave.

  “Expect road closures, hurricane force gales, coastal flooding,” the weatherman was saying. I dug the remote out from between the sofa cushions and turned the TV off.

  One photo had fallen under the coffee table. I picked it up and flipped it over. A small Asian man stood still and apart from the crowd at the bar. He wore blue coveralls splattered in paint. I looked closely. He had a round face and ruddy acne scars. His eyes were closed. He seemed familiar. Then I recognized him. It was Ping Xi. There was a streak of pink glitter across his cheeks. I put the photo down.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT HAD BEEN MONTHS since I’d even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I’d tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I’d met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.

  I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people. I’d always preferred a septic hotel bar, maybe because that’s where Trevor liked to take me. He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”

  The interns at the gallery had told me about their weekends out at Tunnel and Life and Sound Factory and Spa and Lotus and Centro-Fly and Luke + Leroy. So I had some sense of what went on in the city at night. And as Natasha’s assistant, I’d been responsible for keeping a list of some of the most socially valuable people at an art party—specifically the young impresarios and their attendants. She invited them to openings and told me to study their bios. Maggie Kahpour’s father had owned the largest private collection of Picasso doodles in the world, and when he died, she donated them to an abbey in the south of France. The monks named a cheese after her. Gwen Elbaz-Burke was the grandniece of Ken Burke, the performance artist who was eaten by the shark he kept in his swimming pool, and the daughter of Zara Ali Elbaz, a Syrian princess who was exiled for making a pornographic art film with her German boyfriend, a descendant of Heinrich Himmler. Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun(s)t about “women in the arts,” mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank. Zaza Nakazawa was a nineteen-year-old heiress who had written a book about being in a sexual relationship with her aunt, the painter Elaine Meeks. Eugenie Pratt was the half sister of the documentary filmmaker and architect Emilio Wolford who famously made her eat a raw lamb’s heart on camera when she was twelve. There was Claudia Martini-Richards. Jane Swarovski-Kahn. Pepper Jacobin-Sills. Kylie Jensen. Nell “Nikita” Patrick. Patsy Weinberger. Maybe these were the girls in the photos. I wouldn’t have recognized them outside the gallery. Imogene Behrman. Odette Quincy Adams. Kitty Cavalli. I remembered their names. Dawn’s Early must have been some new after-hours club for the next generation of rich kids and art hags if Ping Xi was hanging out there, presumably among his devotees. I vaguely remembered Natasha saying he’d gone to boarding school with a set of gay royal twins from Prussia. But how had I found him? Or had he found me?

  I collected the photos and stuffed them under the sofa cushion, then got up to peek into my bedroom to make sure nobody was there. All my bedding was in a heap on the floor, the mattress bare. I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed. I opened the closet and found nobody bound and gagged. Just the little plastic Baggies of Victoria’s Secret lingerie spilled out. Nothing was amiss. I was alone.

  Back in the living room, my phone was dead on the windowsill next to a single sneaker I’d used as an ashtray. I snagged down a slat in the blinds to look out the window. The snow was already beginning to fall. That was good, I thought—I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine. And I wouldn’t take any more Infermiterol, at least for a while. It was working against my goal of doing nothing. I plugged my phone in to charge and threw the sneaker away in the kitchen. The trash was filled with the brittle peels of clementines and cloudy plastic packaging from single-serving slices of cheese, which I couldn’t remember buying or eating. The fridge contained only the small, light wood crate the clementines came in, and a second gallon jug of distilled water.

  I took off the white fur and the bustier and 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 ac
rid 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.

  * * *

  • • •

  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 as a performance piece.

  “I can’t get past the context of the art history classroom,” a Barnard girl said.

  “There are so many conflicting layers of meaning here, it’s wonderful,” said the bearded TA.

  And then, simply to humiliate me, the professor, a woman with long waxy hair and crude silver jewelry, asked me how much I’d paid for my shoes. They were black suede stiletto boots, and they’d cost almost five hundred dollars, one of many purchases I’d made to mitigate the pain of having lost my parents, or whatever it was I was feeling. I could remember all of this, each sniveling, pouty face in that classroom. One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.” I remembered the tick of the clock as they stared. “I guess that’s enough,” said the professor, finally. I was permitted to take my seat. Out the window of the classroom, flat, wide yellow leaves fell from a single tree onto gray concrete. I dropped the class, had to explain to my adviser that I wanted to focus more on Neoclassicism, and switched to “Jacques-Louis David: Art, Virtue, and Revolution.” The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.

  I got out of the shower, took an Ambien and two Benadryl, wrapped a mildewed towel around my shoulders, and went back out into the living room to check my phone, which had charged sufficiently for me to turn it on. When I looked through my call history, the numbers I had dialed were Trevor’s and an unidentified 646 number, which I had to assume was Ping Xi’s. I deleted the number and took a Risperdal, pulled a gray cable-knit sweater and pair of leggings out of a pile of dirty laundry in the hallway, put the fur coat back on, stuck my feet into slippers, and looked for my keys. I found them still stuck in the lock on the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON, I gathered, from the clouds drifting overhead like crumpled bedsheets. In the lobby, I ignored the doorman’s cautious salutation about the storm and shuffled out and down the disappearing path snaking between the banks of snow piled high on the sidewalk and over the curb. Everything was hushed, but the air was angry and wet. Any more snow and the whole city would be covered. I passed a twitching, sweater-clad Pomeranian and its nanny on the corner, watched it lift its leg and piss on a flat, glassy plane of ice on the pavement, heard the singe of the hot stuff melting through, steam spreading in a contained bubble for a moment, then dissipating.

  The Egyptians extended no special greeting when I walked into the bodega. They just nodded as usual and went back to their cell phones. That was a good sign, I thought. Whatever I’d done on the Infermiterol, whomever I’d cavorted with or how hard I’d “partied,” I hadn’t behaved so badly at the bodega at least to solicit any special attention. I hadn’t shit where I ate, as the saying goes. I got cash out of the ATM, poured my two coffees and stirred in the cream and sugar, then picked out a slice of prepackaged banana bread, a cup of organic yogurt, and a rock hard pear. Three Brearley girls in tracksuits formed a line at the counter. I glanced at the newspapers while I waited to pay. Nothing earth shattering was going on, it seemed. Strom Thurmond gave Hillary Clinton a hug. A pack of wolves was spotted in Washington Heights. Nigerians smuggled into Libya might one day be washing dishes at your favorite downtown bistro. Giuliani said cursing at a cop should be a crime. It was January 3, 2001.

  In the elevator back up to my apartment, I thought up combinations of pills that I hoped would put me out—Ambien plus Placidyl plus Theraflu. Solfoton plus Ambien plus Dimetapp. I wanted a cocktail that would arrest my imagination and put me into a deep, boring, inert sleep. I needed to dispose of those photographs. Nembutal plus Ativan plus Benadryl. At home, I took a good helping of the latter, washing the pills down with the second coffee. Then I ate a handful of melatonin and the yogurt, and watched The Player and Soapdish, but I couldn’t sleep. I was distracted by the Polaroids under the couch cushions. I put in Presumed Innocent, hit rewind, pulled the Polaroids out, and took them and sent them down the garbage chute. That was better, I thought, and went back in and sat down.

  Night was falling. I felt tired, heavy, but not exactly sleepy. So I took another Nembutal, watched Presumed Innocent, then took a few Lunestas and drank the second bottle of funeral wine, but somehow the alcohol undid the sleeping pills, and I felt even more awake than before. Then I had to vomit, and did so. I had drunk too much. I lay back down on the sofa. Then I was hungry, so I ate the banana bread and watched Frantic three times in a row, taking a few Ativan every thirty minutes or so. But I still couldn’t sleep. I watched Schindler’s List, which I hoped would depress me, but it only irrit
ated me, and then the sun came up, so I took some Lamictal and watched The Last of the Mohicans and Patriot Games, but that had no effect either, so I took a few Placidyl and put The Player back in. When it was over, I checked the digital clock on the VCR. It was noon.

  I ordered Pad See Ew from the Thai place, ate half of it, watched the 1995 remake of Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, took another shower, downed the last of my Ambien, and found the porn channel again. I turned the volume down low, shifted my body away from the screen so that the grunts and moans could lull me. Still, I didn’t sleep. Life could go on forever like this, I thought. Life would, if I didn’t take action. I fingered myself on the sofa under the blanket, came twice, then turned the TV off. I got up and raised the blinds and sat in a daze for a while and watched the sun go down—was it possible?—then I rewound Sabrina and watched it again and ate the rest of the Pad See Ew. I watched Driving Miss Daisy and Sling Blade. I took a Nembutal and drank half a bottle of Robitussin. I watched The World According to Garp and Stargate and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Moonstruck and Flashdance, then Dirty Dancing and Ghost, then Pretty Woman.