She visited me just once in New York, my sophomore year. She took the train down and was an hour late to meet me at the Guggenheim. I could smell alcohol on her breath as we wandered around. She was skittish and quiet. “Oh, isn’t that pretty?” she said about a Kandinsky, a Chagall. She left me abruptly when we got to the top of the ramp, saying she’d lost track of time. I followed her down and out of the museum, watched her try to hail a cab, seething and flabbergasted when each passing taxi was occupied. I don’t know what her problem was. Maybe she’d seen a piece of art that unnerved her. She never explained it. But she called me later from her hotel and had me meet her for dinner that evening. It was as if nothing strange had happened at the museum. She was accountable for nothing when she was drunk. I was used to it.
I paid for my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in cash from my inheritance. From the windows in the living room, I could see some of Carl Schurz Park and a sliver of the East River. I could see the nannies with their strollers. Wealthy housewives milled up and down the Esplanade in visors and sunglasses. They reminded me of my mother—pointless and self-obsessed—only she had been less physically active. If I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island with its weird geometry of low brick buildings. I liked to think those buildings housed the criminally insane, though I knew that wasn’t the case, at least anymore. Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would.
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THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again.
The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta. I owned VHS copies of all her movies, but many of them were too powerful to watch often. The Color Purple was too sad. Ghost filled me with too much longing, and Whoopi only had a small part in it. Sister Act was tricky because the songs got stuck in my head and made me want to laugh, run wild, dance, be impassioned, or whatnot. That would not be good for my sleep. I could only handle it once a week or so. I usually watched Soapdish and The Player back-to-back as though they were two volumes of a single film.
On my visits to Rite Aid to pick up my pills, I’d buy a pre-owned VHS tape, maybe a box of microwave popcorn, sometimes a two-liter bottle of Diet Sprite if I felt I had the strength to carry it home. Those cheap movies were usually terrible—Showgirls, Enemy of the State, I’ll Be Home for Christmas starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose face unnerved me—but I didn’t mind watching them once or twice. The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work. But I preferred the familiar—Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg, doing what they always do.
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WHEN I WENT TO SEE Dr. Tuttle in early August for my monthly in-person visit, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown with tattered lace across her bosom and huge honey-tinted sunglasses with blinders. She still had the neck brace on. “I had a procedure done on my eyes,” she explained, “and the central air has sprung a leak. Excuse the humidity.” Sweat bubbled across her chest and arms like blisters. Her hair frizzed up and out. The fat cats lay on the fainting sofa. “They’re overheated,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Better not disturb them.” There was no place else to sit, so I stood against the bookshelf, bracing myself and taking shallow breaths. The smell of ammonia in the room was intense. It seemed to be coming from the cats.