- 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.
- I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly.
- My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system—a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?
- Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me—he was always clinical, always rational, always dry—or that his death was no longer just an idea—it was happening, it was real—or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him. So I lost it. I started crying. “I’ll be all right,” my father told me. I got down on my knees beside him and buried my face in his stale blue blanket. I wanted him to pet my head. I wanted him to soothe me. He stared up at the ceiling as I begged him not to leave me alone with my mother. I was passionate in my supplication.
- Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me.
- Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.” I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam.
- And then, simply to humiliate me, the professor, a woman with long waxy hair and crude silver jewelry, asked me how much I’d paid for my shoes. They were black suede stiletto boots, and they’d cost almost five hundred dollars, one of many purchases I’d made to mitigate the pain of having lost my parents, or whatever it was I was feeling. I could remember all of this, each sniveling, pouty face in that classroom. One idiot said I was “broken by the male gaze.” I remembered the tick of the clock as they stared. “I guess that’s enough,” said the professor, finally.
- She had no threats to make. She was too afraid of her own rage to ever imagine it through to any violent end.
- That was fair. He could keep his flabby old vagina lady and her retarded kid. I knew how this new affair would play out for him. He’d win her over with a few months of honorable declarations—“I want to be there for you.
- I started to wallow. I wished I’d never taken that damned Infermiterol. I wanted the old half life back, when my VCR still worked and Reva would come over with her petty gripes and I could lose myself in her shallow universe for a few hours and then disappear into slumber. I wondered if those days were over now that Reva had been promoted and Ken was out of the picture. Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend? Could she really dispose of me so easily? No. No. She was a drone. She was too far gone. If the VCR had been working, I would have watched Working Girl on high volume, munching melatonin and animal crackers, if I’d had any left. Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing?
- Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.
- I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.
- 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.
- The illusion of fateful realization. He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts.
- Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Snapshot. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene. “Forget me, Reva,” I’d say, flapping the photos in her face. “You’ll never see me again.” But did I care? I
- “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.”
mar 15 2024 ∞
apr 11 2024 +