My Year of Rest and Relaxation (20)

“How is everything at home?” she asked. “Good? Bad? Other?”

“Other,” I said.

“Do you have a family history of nonbinary paradigms?”

When I explained for the third time that both my parents had died, that my mother had killed herself, Dr. Tuttle unscrewed the cap of her value-size bottle of Afrin, twirled around in her chair, tilted her head back so that she was looking at me upside down, and started sniffing. “I’m listening,” she said. “It’s allergies, and now I’m hooked on this nasal spray. Please continue. Your parents are dead, and . . . ?”

“And nothing. It’s fine. But I’m still not sleeping well.”

“What a conundrum.” She twirled back around and put her Afrin in her desk drawer. “Here, let me give you my latest samples.” She got up to open her little cabinet and filled a brown paper lunch bag with packets of pills. “Trick or treat,” she said, dropping in a mint from the bowl on her desk. “Dressing up for Halloween?”

“Maybe I’ll be a ghost.”

“Economical,” she remarked.

I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains.

And during this lull in the drama of sleep, I entered a stranger, less certain reality. Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.





Three


IN NOVEMBER, however, an unfortunate shift occurred.

The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious. I’d fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I’d go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I’d acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I’d been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted? The Egyptians were generally indifferent and returned the standard chitchat or flat out ignored me, so it was hard to tell. It concerned me that I was venturing out of the apartment while unconscious. It seemed antithetical to my hibernation project. If I committed a crime or got hit by a bus, the chance for a new and better life would be lost. If my unconscious excursions went only as far as the bodega around the corner, that was okay, I thought. I could live. The worst that could happen was I’d make a fool of myself in front of the Egyptians and would have to start going to the deli a few blocks farther down First Avenue. I prayed that my subconscious understood the value of convenience. Amen.

This was when my online purchasing of lingerie and designer jeans began in earnest. It seemed that while I was sleeping, some superficial part of me was taking aim at a life of beauty and sex appeal. I made appointments to get waxed. I booked time at a spa that offered infrared treatments and colonics and facials. One day, I cancelled my credit card in the hope that doing so might deter me from filling my nonexistent datebook with the frills of someone I used to think I was supposed to be. A week later, a new credit card showed up in the mail. I cut it in half.

My stress levels rose. I couldn’t trust myself. I felt as though I had to sleep with one eye open. I even considered installing a video camera to record myself while I was unconscious, but I knew that would only prove to be a document of my resistance to my project. It wouldn’t stop me from doing anything since I’d be unable to watch it until I woke up for real. So I was in a state of panic. I doubled my Xanax dosage in an attempt to counteract my anxiety. I lost track of the days, and as a result, missed my visit to Dr. Tuttle in November. She called and left me a message.

“I’ll have to charge you for the missed appointment. Let me remind you, you did sign the agreement to my office policy. There’s a twenty-four-hour cutoff for cancellations. Most doctors in the area require you to cancel thirty-six or forty-eight hours before the scheduled appointment, so I think I’m being pretty generous. And it concerns me that you’d be so flip about your mental health. Call me to reschedule. The ball is in your basket.” She sounded stern. I felt terrible. But when I called to apologize and make another appointment, she was back to normal.

“See you Thursday,” she said. “Toodle-oo.”

Halfway through the month, my Internet use began to rise even more. I woke up with my laptop screen filled with AOL chat-room conversations with strangers in places like Tampa and Spokane and Park City, Utah. In my waking hours, I rarely thought of sex, but in my medicated blackouts, I guess my lusts arose. I scrolled through the transcripts. They were surprisingly polite. “How are you?” “I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Horny much?” It went on from there. I was relieved I never gave anyone my real name. My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I once wrote. The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject.