My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me.

She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan,

“I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

He always smelled like a department store.

Trevor was right about my Achilles’ heel. Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.

The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair.

petted the black Lab while the workers swept up the dog hair that had fallen out. Its face was silky and cold.

I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile.

Maybe this memory triggered the hemorrhage of adrenaline that pushed me to go back inside the gallery. I pulled a few Kleenex from the box on my old desk, flipped the power switch to turn on the lasers, and stood between the stuffed black Lab and the sleeping dachshund. Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor. I wiped myself and shuffled across the gallery with my pants around my ankles and stuffed the shitty Kleenex into the mouth of that bitchy poodle. That felt like vindication.

I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.

her eyebrows waxed into thin arched parentheses,

I bought a pair of red suede ankle boots and walked down Park Avenue. “The gutters were flooded with aborted fetuses.”

In the dream, I understood that the tangle of hair was my father’s cancer.

It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world.

My dad’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table.

And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived.

Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again.

took a cab home, filled the new prescriptions and refilled the old ones at Rite Aid, bought a pack of Skittles, and went home and ate the Skittles and a few leftover primidone and went back to sleep.

AS SUMMER DWINDLED, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air-conditioning.

I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly.

Anal sex came up with Trevor only once. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to prove that I wasn’t uptight—a complaint he gave because at some point I’d hesitated to give him a blow job while he sat on the toilet. We tried once on a night we’d both had a lot to drink, but he lost his erection as he tried to wedge it in. Then all of a sudden he got up and went into the shower, saying nothing to me. Maybe I should have felt vindicated by his failure, but instead I just felt rejected. I followed him to the bathroom.

might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heart-break and

Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

I thought, but I didn’t really care, as long I was intact, I wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t bruised or broken. I knew where I was.

Every emotional gesture was always right on cue.

And in one of the pamphlets, they describe how they cremate dead babies in these little individual ‘metal pans.’ That’s what they call them—‘metal pans.’ I can’t stop thinking about that. ‘Pans.’ It’s so gross. Like they’re making personal pan pizzas.

Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown.

If puking could have brought me any solace, I would have tried it years ago.

I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering.

We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads.

“My daughter is barely nineteen years old,” my mother scoffed. She wasn’t defending me against his lechery. She was bragging. By then, I was actually twenty.

What I was bartering for in letting that guy kiss me was still not immediately clear. Maybe my mother’s dignity. Or maybe I just wanted a little affection.

I remember noticing in the hospital room that her roots were showing. She’d been vigilant about keeping her hair icy blond as long as I’d known her, but her natural color had grown in, a warmer shade—honey blonde, my color. I’d never seen her real hair before.

She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.

Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness.

I paid strangers to make me feel good.

whore to feed me lullabies.

Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her lap.

They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away.

“And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell-O mold.’”

We passed the bottle back and forth and watched ejaculate dribble over the girl’s face. Gobs of it got stuck in her fake eyelashes.

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.