And then I noticed that the glass vase was skull-shaped. Trevor wouldn’t have sent me that. No.
“Did you see who dropped these off?” I asked the doorman.
“A delivery guy.”
“Was he Asian?” I asked.
“Old black guy. A foot messenger.”
Tucked between the flowers was a small note written in girly ballpoint: “To my muse. Call me and we’ll get started.”
I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.—Pablo Picasso”
I took the vase off the mantel and got into the elevator, the smell of the roses like the stink off a dead cat in the gutter. Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me—I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me—he had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson. “Oh, Trevor!”
At home, I stuck Ping Xi’s business card into the frame of the mirror in the living room, next to the Polaroid of Reva. I popped four Ambien and sucked down some Dimetapp. “You are getting very sleepy,” I said in my head. I dug in the linen closet for fresh sheets, made my bed, and got in. I shut my eyes and imagined darkness, I imagined fields of grain, I imagined the shifting patterns of sand between dunes in the desert, I imagined the slow sway of a willow by the pond in Central Park, I imagined looking out a hotel window in Paris, at the flat gray sky, warped green copper and slate roofs, and tendrils of black steel on balconies and wet sidewalks down below. I was in Frantic with the smell of diesel and people with trench coats flying like capes from their shoulders, hands on hats, bells ringing in the distance, a two-tone French siren, the fierce, unforgiving vroom of a motorcycle, tiny brown birds whipping by. Maybe Harrison Ford would show up. Maybe I’d be Emmanuelle Seigner and rub cocaine on my gums in a speeding car and dance at a nightclub like a boneless serpent, hypnotizing everyone with my body. “Sleep. Now!” I imagined a long hospital hallway, a nurse in blue scrubs and thick thighs rushing soberly toward me. “I’m so, so sorry,” she was going to say. I turned away. I imagined Whoopi Goldberg in Star Trek wearing a purple robe standing at the huge panel through which outer space stretched into infinite mystery. She looked at me and said, “Isn’t it pretty?” That smile. “Oh, Whoopi, it’s beautiful.” I took a step toward the glass. The sheets ruffled against my foot. I wasn’t entirely awake, but I couldn’t cross the line into sleep. “Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.” But I was too tired to break through the glass. “Whoopi, can you help?” No answer. I attuned my ears to the sounds in the room, to cars driving slowly down my block, a door slamming, a set of high heels clomping up the sidewalk. Maybe that’s Reva, I thought. Reva. “Reva?” The thought jolted me awake.
Suddenly I felt very strange, as though my head had come off and was floating three inches above the stump of my neck. I got out of bed and went to the windows and ticked open a slat in the blinds and looked out. I fixed my eyes east toward the bleak horizon over the river, perfectly visible through the trees in Carl Schurz Park, which were black and skeletal. The branches undulated tauntingly against the pale afternoon, then stopped, froze, and trembled. Why were they shaking like that? What was wrong with them? They looked like a videotape in fast-forward. My VCR. My head floated a few inches to the left.
I took three Nembutals and the last of the Ativan, then flopped down on the sofa. The weird feeling in my head seemed to descend into my torso. Instead of guts, I just had air inside of me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved my bowels. What if the only way to sleep is death? I thought. Should I consult a priest? Oh, the absurdity. 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?