“See, you do want to be happy. Then why did you tell me that being happy is dumb?” she asked. “You’ve said that to me more than once.”
“Let me be dumb,” I said, glugging the NyQuil. “You go be smart and tell me how great it is. I’ll be here, hibernating.”
Reva rolled her eyes.
“It’s natural,” I told her. “People used to hibernate all the time.”
“People never hibernated. Where are you getting this?”
She could look really pathetic when she was outraged. She got up and stood there holding her stupid knockoff Kate Spade bag or whatever it was, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and crowned with a useless, plastic, tortoiseshell headband. She was always getting her hair blown out, her eyebrows waxed into thin arched parentheses, her fingernails painted various shades of pink and purple, as though all of this made her a wonderful person.
“It’s not up for discussion, Reva. This is what I’m doing. If you can’t accept it, then you don’t have to.”
“I accept it,” she said, her voice dropping. “I just think it’s a shame to miss out on a fun evening.” She wrestled her white feet into her fake Louboutin stilettos. “You know, in Japan, companies have special rooms for businessmen to take naps in. I read about it in GQ. I’ll check on you tomorrow. I love you,” she said, grabbing the bottle of rosé on her way out.
* * *
? ? ?
I DREAMT A LOT at the beginning, especially when the summer started in full force and the air in my apartment got thick with the sickly chill of AC. Dr. Tuttle said my dreams might indicate how well certain medications were working. She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the “waning intensity of suffering.”
“I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ‘night vision log.’”
So I made notes on Post-its. Each time I awoke, I scribbled down whatever I could remember. Later I copied the dreams over in crazier-looking handwriting on a yellow legal pad, adding terrifying details, to hand in to Dr. Tuttle in July. My hope was that she’d think I needed more sedation. In one dream, I went to a party on a cruise ship and watched a lone dolphin circling in the distance. But in the dream journal, I reported that I was actually on the Titanic and the dolphin was a shark that was also Moby Dick and also Dick Tracy and also a hard, inflamed penis, and the penis was giving a speech to a crowd of women and children and waving his gun around. “Then I saluted everyone like a Nazi and jumped overboard and everybody else got executed.”
In another dream, I lost my balance standing in a speeding subway car, “and accidentally grabbed and ripped the hair off an old woman’s head. Her scalp was teeming with larvae, and the larvae were all threatening to kill me.”
I dreamt I drove a rusted Mercedes up onto the Esplanade by the East River, “skinny joggers and Hispanic housekeepers and toy poodles thudding under the tires, and my heart exploded with happiness when I saw all the blood.”
I dreamt I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and found an underwater village abandoned because its inhabitants had heard life was better somewhere else. “A fire-breathing serpent disemboweled me and slurped up my entrails.” I dreamt I stole somebody’s diaphragm and put it in my mouth “before giving my doorman a blow job.” I cut off my ear and e-mailed it to Natasha with a bill for a million dollars. I swallowed a live bee. “I ate a grenade.” I bought a pair of red suede ankle boots and walked down Park Avenue. “The gutters were flooded with aborted fetuses.”
“Tsk-tsk,” Dr. Tuttle replied, when I showed her the “log.” “Looks like you’re still in the depths of despair. Let’s up your Solfoton. But if you have nightmares about inanimate objects coming to life, or if you experience such things while you’re awake, discontinue.”
And then there were the dreams about my parents, which I never mentioned to Dr. Tuttle. I dreamt my dad had an illegitimate son he kept in the closet of his study. I discovered the boy, pale and undernourished, and together we conspired to burn down the house. I dreamt that I lathered up my mother’s pubic hair with a bar of Ivory soap in the shower, then pulled a tangle of hair out of her vagina. It was like the kind of fur ball a cat coughs up, or a clog in a bathtub drain. In the dream, I understood that the tangle of hair was my father’s cancer.
I dreamt that I dragged both my parents’ dead bodies down into a ravine, then waited calmly in the moonlight, watching for vultures. In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom.