My Year of Rest and Relaxation (10)

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FOR A YEAR OR SO, everything seemed fine with Natasha. The most grief she gave me was about ordering the wrong pens.

“Why do we have all these cheap clicky pens? They’re so loud when you click them. You can’t hear this?” She stood there, clicking at me.

“Sorry, Natasha,” I said. “I’ll order quieter pens.”

“Has FedEx come yet?”

I would rarely know how to answer that.

Once I’d started seeing Dr. Tuttle, I was getting in fourteen, fifteen hours of sleep a night during the workweek, plus that extra hour at lunchtime. Weekends I was only awake for a few hours a day. And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it. I told Dr. Tuttle I was having trouble concentrating. She said it was probably due to “brain mist.”

“Are you sleeping enough?” Dr. Tuttle asked every week I went to see her.

“Just barely,” I always answered. “Those pills hardly put a dent in my anxiety.”

“Eat a can of chickpeas,” she said. “Otherwise known as garbanzos. And try these.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. The array of medicines I was accumulating was awe inspiring. Dr. Tuttle explained that there was a way to maximize insurance coverage by prescribing drugs for their side effects, rather than going directly to those whose main purposes were to relieve my symptoms, which were in my case “debilitating fatigue due to emotional weakness, plus insomnia, resulting in soft psychosis and belligerence.” That’s what she told me she was going to write in her notes. She termed her prescribing method “ecoscripting,” and said she was writing a paper on it that would be published soon. “In a journal in Hamburg.” So she gave me pills that targeted migraine headaches, prevented seizures, cured restless leg syndrome, prevented hearing loss. These medicines were supposed to relax me so that I could get some “much-needed rest.”



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ONE DAY IN MARCH 2000, I returned to my desk at Ducat after a visit to the infinite abyss of the supply closet and found what would light the path toward my eventual dismissal. “Sleep at night,” the note read. It was from Natasha. “This is a place of business.” I can’t blame Natasha for wanting to fire me. I’d been napping at work for almost a year by then. Over the final few months, I had stopped dressing up for work. I just sat at my desk in a hooded sweatshirt, three-day-old mascara caked and smeared around my eyes. I lost things. I confused things. I was bad at my job. I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite. I made messes. The interns wrangled me back on task, reminding me of what I’d asked them to do. “What next?”

What next? I couldn’t imagine.

Natasha started to take notice. My sleepiness was good for rudeness to visitors to the gallery, but not for signing for packages or noticing if someone had come in with a dog and tracked paw prints all over the floor, which happened a few times. There were a few spilled lattes. MFA students touching paintings, once even rearranging an installation of shattered CD jewel cases in a Jarrod Harvey installation to spell out the word “HACK.” When I noticed it, I just shuffled the shards of plastic around, no one the wiser. But when a homeless woman set herself up in the back room one afternoon, Natasha found out. I’d had no idea how long the woman had been there. Maybe people thought she was part of the artwork. I ended up paying her fifty bucks out of petty cash to leave. Natasha couldn’t hide her irritation.

“When people walk in, you make an impression on my behalf. You know Arthur Schilling was in here last week? I just got a call.” She thought I was on drugs, I’m sure.

“Who?”

“Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . .

That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show—“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy.

I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well.

During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician.

“There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.”

“Why doesn’t he just poison them, or break their necks?”

I had a feeling the rumor was true.

When the dogs were set up, the wires connected, all the electric cords plugged in, Natasha killed the lights and turned each dog on. Red lasers shot out of their eyes. I petted the black Lab while the workers swept up the dog hair that had fallen out. Its face was silky and cold.