My Year of Rest and Relaxation (64)

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    ON MAY 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol. There was only one pill left. I swallowed it and prayed for mercy.

Light from passing cars slid through the blinds and flashed across the living room walls in yellow stripes, once, twice. I turned to face the ceiling. The floorboards gave a short screech, like the squelch of a boat turning suddenly in a storm. A hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish. The sound got louder until it was almost deafening, and then it stopped. In that silence, I began to drift down into the darkness, descending at first so slowly and steadily, I felt I was being lowered on pulleys—by angels with gold-spun ropes around my body, I imagined, and then by the electric casket lowering device they used at both my parents’ burials, and so my heart quickened at that thought, remembering that I’d had parents once, and that I’d taken the last of the pills, that this was the end of something, and then the ropes seemed to detach and I was falling faster. My stomach turned and I was cold with sweat, and I started writhing, first grasping at the towel under me to slow my fall, and then more wildly because that hadn’t worked, tumbling like Alice down the rabbit hole or like Elsa Schneider disappearing down into the infinite abyss in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The gray mist obscured my vision. Had I crossed the seal? Was the world crumbling? Calm, calm, I told myself. I could feel gravity sucking me deeper, time accelerating, the darkness around me, widening until I was somewhere else, somewhere with no horizon, an area of space that awed me in its foreverness, and I felt calm for just a moment. Then I recognized that I was floating without a tether. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. I was afraid. The fear felt like desire: suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again. I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind. “It was so pretty there. It was interesting!” But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone—maybe it was Ping Xi, maybe it was a wakefulness outside myself—and that other hand steadied me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over, my brain throbbing from the pressure, my eyes leaking as though each teardrop shed a vision of my past. I felt the wetness trickle down my neck. I was crying. I knew that. I could hear myself gasp and whimper. I focused on the sound and then the universe narrowed into a fine line, and that felt better because there was a clearer trajectory, so I traveled more peacefully through outer space, listening to the rhythm of my respiration, each breath an echo of the breath before, softer and softer, until I was far enough away that there was no sound, there was no movement. There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone.



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ON JUNE 1, 2001, I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. Sunlight was needling through the blinds, illuminating crisscrossed planes of yellow dust that blurred and waned as I squinted. I heard a bird chirp.

I was alive.



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AS I’D REQUESTED BACK in January, Ping Xi had laid out a set of clothes for me on the dining table: sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, zip-up hoodie. My credit cards and driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, and a thousand dollars cash were in the envelope I’d sealed and given him to hold. There was a bottle of Evian, an apple in a plastic bag from the grocery store, and a sample-size tube of Neutrogena sunscreen—a thoughtful touch. The table had been cleared of all the Post-it notes, which I appreciated, but then I found the cluster in the trash, like a tossed-out bouquet of daisies. I picked one up and read it: “Don’t forget: clothes, shoes, the envelope, keys. Buy me some sunscreen, please.” And then on another one, “Thanks, good luck.” A smiley face.

My old white fur coat hung on the hook by the front door. A Post-it note stuck to the wall read: “When I bought this for you, it was simply because I wanted you to have it. I’ll really miss working with you. PX.”

The door was unlocked.

I got dressed, put the coat on, went out and down the elevator to the lobby and made my way dizzily toward the light exploding through the glass doors onto the street.

“Miss?” I heard the doorman say. “Can you hear me?” Then the stiff rustle of his uniform pants as he squatted down and cradled my head in his hands. I hadn’t realized that I’d hit the floor.

Someone brought me a glass of water. A woman held my hand and sat me in a leather armchair in the lobby. The doorman gave me the egg salad sandwich from his brown-bag lunch.

“Is there anyone we can call?”

People were so nice.

“No, there’s nobody. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell.”

It took another week until I had the strength to make it outside and walk around the block. The next day I walked to Second Avenue. The next day, all the way to Lexington. I ate prepackaged egg salad sandwiches from a deli on East Eighty-seventh. I sat for hours on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and watched the lapdogs doddling around a tiled, fenced-in area, their owners dodging the sun and clicking at their cell phones. Someone left a collection of books out on the curb one day on East Seventy-seventh Street, and I brought them home and read them all cover to cover. A history of drunk driving in America. An Indian cookbook. War and Peace. Mao II. Italian for Dummies. A book of Mad Libs that I filled in myself using the simplest words I could think of. I passed the days like this for four or five weeks. I did not buy a cell phone. I got rid of the old mattress. Every night at nine I lay down on the smooth hardwood floor with a stretch and a yawn, and I had no trouble sleeping. I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun. I did not walk south of Sixty-eighth Street.