A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize for her stories in The Paris Review and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book, the novella, McGlue, was recently published by Vintage. Her novel Eileen was awarded the 2016 Pen/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her collection of stories, Homesick for Another World, was published in 2017.
ALSO BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
McGlue
Eileen
Homesick for Another World
For Luke.
My one. My only.
If you’re smart or rich or lucky
Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man
But the inner laws of spirit
And the outer laws of nature
No man can
No, no man can …
“THE WOLF THAT LIVES IN LINDSEY,” JONI MITCHELL
WHENEVER I WOKE up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. I’d get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by. When I thought of it, I ordered delivery from the Thai restaurant across the street, or a tuna salad platter from the diner on First Avenue. I’d wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments I’d booked in my sleep. I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.
Early on in this phase, I had my dirty laundry picked up and clean laundry delivered once a week. It was a comfort to me to hear the torn plastic bags rustle in the draft from the living room windows. I liked catching whiffs of the fresh laundry smell while I dozed off on the sofa. But after a while, it was too much trouble to gather up all the dirty clothes and stuff them in the laundry bag. And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victoria’s Secret kept showing up in the mail—frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with men’s pajamas and other things I couldn’t remember ordering—cashmere socks, graphic T-shirts, designer jeans.
I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I’d already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents’ old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed “1” for “yes” when the robot asked if I’d made a sincere effort to find a job. That was enough to cover the copayments on all my prescriptions, and whatever I picked up at the bodega. Plus, I had investments. My dead father’s financial advisor kept track of all that and sent me quarterly statements that I never read. I had plenty of money in my savings account, too—enough to live on for a few years as long as I didn’t do anything spectacular. On top of all this, I had a high credit limit on my Visa card. I wasn’t worried about money.
I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.
I didn’t do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldn’t stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I’d get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn’t handle it. The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega. I’d quickly glance at them as I paid for my coffees. Bush versus Gore for president. Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City—they always are—but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried.
When I needed more pills, I ventured out to the Rite Aid three blocks away. That was always a painful passage. Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born—the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile. I relied on alcohol only on the days of these excursions—a shot of vodka before I went out and walked past all the little bistros and cafes and shops I’d frequented when I was out there, pretending to live a life. Otherwise I tried to limit myself to a one-block radius around my apartment.
The men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians. Besides my psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, my friend Reva, and the doormen at my building, the Egyptians were the only people I saw on a regular basis. They were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on. There must have been half a dozen of them—brothers or cousins, I assumed. Their style deterred me. They wore soccer jerseys and leather racing jackets and gold chains with crosses and played Z100 on the radio. They had absolutely no sense of humor. When I’d first moved to the neighborhood, they’d been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I’d begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection.
“You have something,” the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later.
After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me “boss” and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn’t have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee—coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didn’t want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.
Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her.
“You forgot I was coming over?” Reva would ask, pushing her way past me into the living room and flipping on the lights. “We talked last night, remember?”
I liked to call Reva just as the Ambien was kicking in, or the Solfoton, or whatever. According to her, I only ever wanted to talk about Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg, which she said was fine. “Last night you recounted the entire plot of Frantic. And you did the scene where they’re driving in the car, with the cocaine. You went on and on.”
“Emmanuelle Seigner is amazing in that movie.”
“That’s exactly what you said last night.”
I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.
“Now get in the shower,” Reva would say, heading into the kitchen. “I’ll take out the trash.”
I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore. We’d been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I’d let Reva borrow, which she’d promised to dry clean and return but never did. She worked as an executive assistant for an insurance brokerage firm in Midtown. She was an only child, a gym rat, had a blotchy red birthmark on her neck in the shape of Florida, a gum-chewing habit that gave her TMJ and breath that reeked of cinnamon and green apple candy. She liked to come over to my place, clear a space for herself on the armchair, comment on the state of the apartment, say I looked like I’d lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip.
“People don’t understand what it’s like for me,” she said. “They take it for granted that I’m always going to be cheerful. Meanwhile, these assholes think they can go around treating everyone below them like shit. And I’m supposed to giggle and look cute and send their faxes? Fuck them. Let them all go bald and burn in hell.”
Reva was having an affair with her boss, Ken, a middle-aged man with a wife and child. She was open about her obsession with him, but she tried to hide that they were sexually involved. She once showed me a picture of him in a company brochure—tall, big shoulders, white button-down shirt, blue tie, face so nondescript, so boring, he may as well have been molded out of plastic. Reva had a thing for older men, as did
I. Men our age, Reva said, were too corny, too affectionate, too needy. I could understand her disgust, but I’d never met a man like that. All the men I’d ever been with, young as well as old, had been detached and unfriendly.
“You’re a cold fish, that’s why,” Reva explained. “Like attracts like.”
As a friend, Reva was indeed corny and affectionate and needy, but she was also very secretive and occasionally very patronizing. She couldn’t or simply wouldn’t understand why I wanted to sleep all the time, and she was always rubbing my nose in her moral high ground and telling me to “face the music” about whatever bad habit I’d been stuck on at the time. The summer I started sleeping, Reva admonished me for “squandering my bikini body.” “Smoking kills.” “You should get out more.” “Are you getting enough protein in your diet?” Et cetera.
“I’m not a baby, Reva.”
“I’m just worried about you. Because I care. Because I love you,” she’d say.
Since we’d met junior year, Reva could never soberly admit to any desire that was remotely uncouth. But she wasn’t perfect. “She’s no white lily,” as my mother would have said. I’d known for years that Reva was bulimic. I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy a proper vibrator from a sex shop. I knew she was deep in debt from college and years of maxed-out credit cards, and that she shoplifted testers from the beauty section of the health food store near her apartment on the Upper West Side. I’d seen the tester stickers on various items in the huge bag of makeup she carried around wherever she went. She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence. She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in.” She made regular trips down to Chinatown for the latest knockoff designer handbags. She’d given me a Dooney & Bourke wallet for Christmas once. She got us matching fake Coach key rings.
Ironically, her desire to be classy had always been the dé-classé thorn in her side. “Studied grace is not grace,” I once tried to explain. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.” Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty, like mine. When we’d watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she’d said, “Did you know Julie Delpy’s a feminist? I wonder if that’s why she’s not skinnier. No way they’d cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.”
“Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?” I’d asked her.
“No,” she’d said after some consideration. “Happiness is not what I’d call it. More like satisfaction.”
Jealousy was one thing Reva didn’t seem to feel the need to hide from me. Ever since we’d formed a friendship, if I told her that something good happened, she’d whine “No fair” often enough that it became a kind of catchphrase that she would toss off casually, her voice flat. It was an automatic response to my good grade, a new shade of lipstick, the last popsicle, my expensive haircut. “No fair.” I’d make my fingers like a cross and hold them out between us, as though to protect me from her envy and wrath. I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.
“It’s not because I’m Jewish,” I remember her saying. This was right around graduation, when I’d made the dean’s list despite having skipped more than half my classes senior year, and Reva had bombed the GRE. “It’s because I’m fat.” She really wasn’t. She was very pretty, in fact.
“And I wish you’d take better care of yourself,” she said one day visiting me in my half-awake state at my apartment. “I can’t do it for you, you know. What do you like so much about Whoopi Goldberg? She’s not even funny. You need to be watching movies that are going to cheer you up. Like Austin Powers. Or that one with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. You’re like Winona Ryder from Girl, Interrupted all of a sudden. But you look more like Angelina Jolie. She’s blond in that.”
This was how she expressed her concern for my well-being. She also didn’t like the fact that I was “on drugs.”
“You really shouldn’t mix alcohol with all your medications,” she said, finishing the wine. I let Reva have all the wine. In college, she’d called hitting the bars “going to therapy.” She could suck a whiskey sour down in one sip. She popped Advil between drinks. She said it kept her tolerance up. She would probably qualify as an alcoholic. But she was right about me. I was “on drugs.” I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan.
“I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”
“Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.” Once she was drunk, she’d put her feet up on the coffee table, scooching my dirty clothes and unopened mail to the floor, and she’d go on and on about Ken and catch me up on the latest episode of their soap opera drama, Office Romance. She’d brag about all the fun things she was going to do over the weekend, complain that she’d gone off her most recent diet and had to do overtime at the gym to make up for it. And eventually, she’d cry about her mother. “I just can’t talk to her like I used to. I feel so sad. I feel so abandoned. I feel very, very alone.”
“We’re all alone, Reva,” I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.
“I know I have to prepare for the worst with my mom. The prognosis isn’t good. And I don’t even think I’m getting the full story about her cancer. It just makes me feel so desperate. I wish there was someone to hold me, you know? Is that pathetic?”
“You’re needy,” I said. “Sounds frustrating.”
“And then there’s Ken. I just can’t stand it. I’d rather kill myself than be all alone,” she said.
“At least you have options.”
If I was up for it, we’d order salads from the Thai place and watch movies on pay-per-view. I preferred my VHS tapes, but Reva always wanted to see whatever movie was “new” and “hot” and “supposed to be good.” She took it as a source of pride that she had a superior knowledge of pop culture during this period. She knew all the latest celebrity gossip, followed the newest fashion trends. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff. Reva, however, studied Cosmo and watched Sex and the City. She was competitive about beauty and “life wisdom.” Her envy was very self-righteous. Compared to me, she was “underprivileged.” And according to her terms, she was right: I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was “cultured.” Reva, on the other hand, came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself “a New York three,” and had majored in economics. “The Asian nerd major,” she named it.
Reva’s apartment across town was a third-floor walk-up that smelled like sweaty gym clothes and French fries and Lysol and Tommy Girl perfume. Although she’d given me a spare set of keys to the place when she moved in, I’d been over only twice in five years. She preferred coming to my apartment. I think she enjoyed being recognized by my doorman, taking the fancy elevator with the gold buttons, watching me squander my luxuries. I don’t know what it was about Reva. I couldn’t get rid of her. She worshipped me, but she also hated me. She saw my struggle with misery as a cruel parody of her own misfortunes. I had chosen my solitude and purposelessness, and Reva had, despite her hard work, simply failed to get what she wanted—no husband, no children, no fabulous career. So when I started sleeping all the time, I think Reva took some satisfaction in watching me crumble into the ineffectual slob she hoped I was becoming. I wasn’t interested in competing with her, but I resented her on principle, and so we did argue. I imagine this is what having a sister is like, someone who loves you enough to point out all your flaws. Even on weekends, if she’d stayed over late, she’d refuse to sleep over. I wouldn’t have wanted her to anyway, but she always made a fuss about it, as though she had responsibilities I would never understand.
I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.
“I’ll lend you my confidence-boosting CD set,” she would say if I alluded to any concern or worry.
Reva was partial to self-help books and workshops that usually combined some new dieting technique with professional development and romantic relationship skills, under the guise of teaching young women “how to live up to their full potential.” Every few weeks, she had a whole new paradigm for living, and I had to hear about it. “Get good at knowing when you’re tired,” she’d advised me once. “Too many women wear themselves thin these days.” A lifestyle tip from Get the Most Out of Your Day, Ladies included the suggestion to preplan your outfits for the workweek on Sunday evenings.
“That way you won’t be second-guessing yourself in the morning.”
I really hated when she talked like that.
“And come out to Saints with me. It’s ladies’ night. Girls drink for free until eleven. You’ll feel so much better about yourself.” She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.
“I’m not up for going out, Reva,” I said.
She looked down at her hands, fiddled with her rings, scratched her neck, then stared down at the floor.
“I miss you,” she said, her voice cracking a little. Maybe she thought those words would break through to my heart. I’d been taking Nembutals all day.
“We probably shouldn’t be friends,” I told her, stretching out on the sofa. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue.”
Reva just sat there, kneading her hands against her thighs. After a minute or two of silence, she looked up at me and put a finger under her nose—something she did when she was about to start crying. It was like an Adolf Hitler impression. I pulled my sweater over my head and grit my teeth and tried not to laugh while she sputtered and whined and tried to compose herself.
“I’m your best friend,” she said plaintively. “You can’t shut me out. That would be very self-destructive.”
I pulled the sweater down to take a drag of my cigarette. She batted the smoke out of her face and fake coughed. Then she turned to me. She was trying to embolden herself by making eye contact with the enemy. I could see the fear in her eyes, as though she were staring into a black hole she might fall into.
“At least I’m making an effort to change and go after what I want,” she said. “Besides sleeping, what do you want out of life?”
I chose to ignore her sarcasm.
“I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent,” I told her.
“Do you really need talent?”
That might have been the smartest thing Reva ever said to me.
“Yes,” I replied.
She got up and ticktocked across the floor in her heels and shut the door softly behind her. I took a few Xanax and ate a few animal crackers and stared at the wrinkled seat of the empty armchair. I got up and put in Tin Cup, and watched it halfheartedly as I dozed on the sofa.
Reva called half an hour later and left a voice mail saying she’d already forgiven me for hurting her feelings, that she was worried about my health, that she loved me and wouldn’t abandon me, “no matter what.” My jaw unclenched listening to the message, as though I’d been gritting my teeth for days. Maybe I had been. Then I pictured her sniffling through Gristedes, picking out the food she’d eat and vomit up. Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going.
“You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo.
“Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain.
I CAN’T POINT to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me. I started seeing Dr. Tuttle in January 2000. It started off very innocently: I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body. Dr. Tuttle confirmed that this was nothing unusual. She wasn’t a good doctor. I had found her name in the phone book.
“You’ve caught me at a good moment,” she said the first time I called. “I just finished rinsing the dishes. Where did you find my number?”
“In the Yellow Pages.”
I liked to think that I’d picked Dr. Tuttle at random, that there was something fated about our relationship, divine in some way, but in truth, she’d been the only psychiatrist to answer the phone at eleven at night on a Tuesday. I’d left a dozen messages on answering machines by the time Dr. Tuttle picked up.
“The biggest threats to brains nowadays are all the microwave ovens,” Dr. Tuttle explained on the phone that night. “Microwaves, radio waves. Now there are cell phone towers blasting us with who knows what kind of frequencies. But that’s not my science. I deal in treating mental illness. Do you work for the police?” she asked me.
“No, I work for an art dealer, at a gallery in Chelsea.”
“Are you FBI?”
“No.”
“CIA?”
“No, why?”
“I just have to ask these questions. Are you DEA? FDA? NICB? NHCAA? Are you a private investigator hired by any private or governmental entity? Do you work for a medical insurance company? Are you a drug dealer? Drug addict? Are you a clinician? A med student? Getting pills for an abusive boyfriend or employer? NASA?”
“I think I have insomnia. That’s my main issue.”
“You’re probably addicted to caffeine, too, am I right?”
“I don’t know.”
“You better keep drinking it. If you quit now, you’ll just go crazy. Real insomniacs suffer hallucinations and lost time and usually have poor memory. It can make life very confusing. Does that sound like you?”
“Sometimes I feel dead,” I told her, “and I hate everybody. Does that count?”
“Oh, that counts. That certainly counts. I’m sure I can help you. But I do ask new patients to come in for a fifteen-minute consultation to make sure we’ll make a good fit. Gratis. And I recommend you get into the habit of writing notes to remind yourself of our appointments. I have a twenty-four-hour cancellation policy. You know Post-its? Get yourself some Post-its. I’ll have some agreements for you to sign, some contracts. Now write this down.”
Dr. Tuttle told me to come in the next day at nine A.M.
Her home office was in an apartment building on Thirteenth Street near Union Square. The waiting room was a dark, wood-paneled parlor full of fake Victorian furniture, cat toys, pots of potpourri, purple candles, wreaths of dead purple flowers, and stacks of old National Geographic magazines. The bathroom was crowded with fake plants and peacock feathers. On the sink, next to a huge bar of cracked lilac soap, was a wooden bowl of peanuts in an abalone shell. That baffled me. She hid all her personal toiletries in a large wicker basket in the cabinet under the sink. She used several antifungal powders, a prescription steroid cream, shampoo and soap and lotions that smelled like lavender and violet. Fennel toothpaste. Her mouthwash was prescription. When I tried it, it tasted like the ocean.
The first time I met Dr. Tuttle, she wore a foam neck brace because of a “taxi accident” and was holding an obese tabby, whom she introduced as “my eldest.” She pointed out the tiny yellow envelopes in the waiting room. “When you come in, write your name on an envelope and fold your check inside. Payments go in here,” she said, knocking on the wooden box on the desk in her office. It was the kind of box they have in churches for accepting donations for candles. The fainting couch in her office was covered in cat fur and piled on one end with little antique dolls with chipped porcelain faces. On her desk were half-eaten granola bars and stacked Tupperware containers of grapes and cut-up melon, a mammoth old computer, more National Geographic magazines.
“What brings you here?” she asked. “Depression?” She’d already pulled out her prescription pad.
My plan was to lie. I’d given it careful consideration. I told her I’d been having trouble sleeping for the past six months, and then complained of despair and nervousness in social situations. But as I was reciting my practiced speech, I realized it was somewhat true. I wasn’t an insomniac, but I was miserable. Complaining to Dr. Tuttle was strangely liberating.
“I want downers, that much I know,” I said frankly. “And I want something that’ll put a damper on my need for company. I’m at the end of my rope,” I said. “I’m an orphan, on top of it all. I probably have PTSD. My mother killed herself.”
“How?” Dr. Tuttle asked.
“Slit her wrists,” I lied.
“Good to know.”
Her hair was red and frizzy. The foam brace she wore around her neck had what looked like coffee and food stains on it, and it squished the skin on her neck up toward her chin. Her face was like a bloodhound’s, folded and drooping, her sunken eyes hidden under very small wire-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it.
“Both my parents died when I was in college,” I went on. “Just a few years ago.”
She seemed to study me for a moment, her expression blank and breathless. Then she turned back to her little prescription pad.
“I’m very good with insurance companies,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know how to play into their little games. Are you sleeping at all?”
“Barely,” I said.
“Any dreams?”
“Only nightmares.”
“I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?”
“Yeah. Like The House of Mirth,” I said.
“A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle.
“I haven’t read it.”
“Better you don’t.”
“I read The Age of Innocence.”
“So you’re educated.”
“I went to Columbia.”
“That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia. How’s your food intake? Is it steady? Any dietary restrictions? When you walked in here, I thought of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway. Any relation? I’d say you’re what, twenty pounds below an ideal Quetelet index?”
“I think my appetite would come back if I could sleep,” I said. It was a lie. I was already sleeping upwards of twelve hours, from eight to eight. I was hoping to get pills to help me sleep straight through the weekends.
“Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats. I’m not a religious person, but you could try visiting a church or synagogue to ask for advice on inner peace. The Quakers seem like reasonable people. But be wary of cults. They’re often just traps to enslave young women. Are you sexually active?”
“Not really,” I told her.
“Do you live near any nuclear plants? Any high-voltage equipment?”
“I live on the Upper East Side.”
“Take the subway?”
At this point, I took the subway each day to work.
“A lot of psychic diseases get passed around in confined public spaces. I sense your mind is too porous. Do you have any hobbies?”
“I watch movies.”
“That’s a fun one.”
“How’d they get the rats to meditate?” I asked her.
“You’ve seen rodents breed in captivity? The parents eat their babies. Now, we can’t demonize them. They do it out of compassion. For the good of the species. Any allergies?”
“Strawberries.”
With that, Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and stared off into space, deep in thought, it seemed.
“Some rats,” she said after a while, “probably deserve to be demonized. Certain individual rats.” She picked her pen back up with a flourish of the purple feather. “The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern. I hope you follow me. Rats are very loyal to the planet. Try these,” she said, handing me a sheath of prescriptions. “Don’t fill them all at once. We need to stagger them so as not to raise any red flags.” She got up stiffly and opened a wooden cabinet full of samples, flicked sample packets of pills out onto the desk. “I’ll give you a paper bag for discretion,” she said. “Fill the lithium and Haldol prescriptions first. It’s good to get your case going with a bang. That way later on, if we need to try out some wackier stuff, your insurance company won’t be surprised.”
I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all. She gave me everything I asked for, and I appreciated her for that. I’m sure there were others like her out there, but the ease with which I’d found her, and the immediate relief that her prescriptions provided, made me feel that I’d discovered a pharmaceutical shaman, a magus, a sorcerer, a sage. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Tuttle were even real. If she were a figment of my imagination, I’d find it funny that I’d chosen her over someone who looked more like one of my heroes—Whoopi Goldberg, for example.
“Dial 9-1-1 if anything bad happens,” Dr. Tuttle told me. “Use reason when you feel you can. There’s no way to know how these medications will affect you.”
At the beginning of this, I’d look up any new pills she gave me on the Internet to try to learn how much I was likely to sleep on any given day. But reading up on a drug sapped its magic. It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body, like sneezing or shitting or bending at the joint. The “side effects and warnings” on the Internet were discouraging, and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do. So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely.
Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school. Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having pre-monition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh-story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.
I’D MOVED INTO