My Year of Rest and Relaxation (17)

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THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again.

The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta. I owned VHS copies of all her movies, but many of them were too powerful to watch often. The Color Purple was too sad. Ghost filled me with too much longing, and Whoopi only had a small part in it. Sister Act was tricky because the songs got stuck in my head and made me want to laugh, run wild, dance, be impassioned, or whatnot. That would not be good for my sleep. I could only handle it once a week or so. I usually watched Soapdish and The Player back-to-back as though they were two volumes of a single film.

On my visits to Rite Aid to pick up my pills, I’d buy a pre-owned VHS tape, maybe a box of microwave popcorn, sometimes a two-liter bottle of Diet Sprite if I felt I had the strength to carry it home. Those cheap movies were usually terrible—Showgirls, Enemy of the State, I’ll Be Home for Christmas starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose face unnerved me—but I didn’t mind watching them once or twice. The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work. But I preferred the familiar—Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg, doing what they always do.



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    WHEN I WENT TO SEE Dr. Tuttle in early August for my monthly in-person visit, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown with tattered lace across her bosom and huge honey-tinted sunglasses with blinders. She still had the neck brace on. “I had a procedure done on my eyes,” she explained, “and the central air has sprung a leak. Excuse the humidity.” Sweat bubbled across her chest and arms like blisters. Her hair frizzed up and out. The fat cats lay on the fainting sofa. “They’re overheated,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Better not disturb them.” There was no place else to sit, so I stood against the bookshelf, bracing myself and taking shallow breaths. The smell of ammonia in the room was intense. It seemed to be coming from the cats.

“Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk.

“I forgot my journal today,” I said. “The nightmares have been getting worse and worse, though,” I lied. My dreams had actually mellowed.

“Tell me about one of them, just so I can update my file,” Dr. Tuttle said, pulling out a folder. She seemed harried and hot, but she was not disorganized.

“Well . . .” I mined my mind for something disturbing. All I could recall were the plots of the terrible movies I’d recently seen. “I had this one nightmare where I moved to Las Vegas and met a seamstress and gave lap dances. Then I ran into an old friend who gave me a floppy disk full of government secrets and I became a suspect in a murder case and the NSA chased me, and instead of getting a Porsche for Christmas, a football team left me stranded in the desert.”

Dr. Tuttle scribbled dutifully, then lifted her head, waiting for more.

“So I started eating sand to try to kill myself instead of dying of dehydration. It was awful.”

“Very troubling,” Dr. Tuttle murmured.

I wobbled against the bookshelf. It was difficult to stay upright—two months of sleep had made my muscles wither. And I could still feel the trazodone I’d taken that morning.

“Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.”

“Dr. Tuttle,” I began, “I was wondering if you could prescribe something a little stronger for bedtime. When I’m tossing and turning at night, I get so frustrated. It’s like I’m in hell.”

“Hell? I can give you something for that,” she said, reaching for her prescription pad. “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”