I opened the fridge, stood in the yellow light, and chewed my piece of pizza. My salivary glands were hesitant at first, but then they acquiesced, and the pizza tasted better than I’d remembered it. I pulled clean pajamas from the dryer and put them on in the hallway. I sniffed the air again and recognized the distinct tang of turpentine. It was coming from the bedroom. The bedroom door was locked.
I knocked.
“Hello?”
I listened with my ear pressed against the door, but all I heard was my own shallow breathing, the blink of my eyes, my mouth filling with spit, the echo in my throat swallowing it down.
I took my vitamins, but did not bathe.
When I took the Infermiterol that day, I pictured Ping Xi’s paintings. They flashed into my mind like memories. They were all “sleeping nudes,” mussed beds and tangles of pale limbs and blond hair, blue shadows in the folds of the white sheets, sunsets reflected on the white wall backgrounds. In every painting, my face was hidden. I saw them in my mind’s eye—small oils on cheap prestretched canvases or smaller primed panels. They were innocent and not very good. It didn’t matter. He could sell them for hundreds of thousands and say they were self-conscious critiques of the institutionalization of painting, maybe even about the objectification of women’s bodies through art history. “School is not for artists,” I could hear him say. “Art history is fascism. These paintings are about what we sleep through while we’re reading books our teachers give us. We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit about who we really are. These paintings are deliberately boring.” Did he think that was an original idea? I would never remember posing for the paintings, but I knew that if I was high on Infermiterol, I must have just been feigning sleep.
I took an Infermiterol, lay down on the living room floor, a fresh towel folded under my head as a pillow, and went back to sleep.
Over the next month, when I’d wake up, my mind was filled with colors. The apartment began to feel less cavernous to me. One time I awoke to find my hair had been cut off, like a boy’s, and there were long blond hairs stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl. I imagined sitting on the toilet with a towel over my shoulders, Ping Xi standing above me, snipping away. In the mirror, I looked bold and sprightly. I thought I looked good. I wrote Post-it notes requesting fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from “a good Japanese restaurant.” I asked for a candle to burn while I bathed. During this period, my waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance. I put on a little weight, and so when I lay down on the living room floor, my bones didn’t hurt. My face lost its mean edge. I asked for flowers. “Lilies.” “Birds of paradise.” “Daisies.” “A branch of catkins.” I jogged in place, did leg lifts, push-ups. It was easier and easier to pass the time between getting up and going down.
But by the end of May, I sensed that I was going to grow restless soon. A prediction. The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in. The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what—some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything? In time, I would understand, I told myself.
* * *
? ? ?
ON MAY 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol. There was only one pill left. I swallowed it and prayed for mercy.
Light from passing cars slid through the blinds and flashed across the living room walls in yellow stripes, once, twice. I turned to face the ceiling. The floorboards gave a short screech, like the squelch of a boat turning suddenly in a storm. A hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish. The sound got louder until it was almost deafening, and then it stopped. In that silence, I began to drift down into the darkness, descending at first so slowly and steadily, I felt I was being lowered on pulleys—by angels with gold-spun ropes around my body, I imagined, and then by the electric casket lowering device they used at both my parents’ burials, and so my heart quickened at that thought, remembering that I’d had parents once, and that I’d taken the last of the pills, that this was the end of something, and then the ropes seemed to detach and I was falling faster. My stomach turned and I was cold with sweat, and I started writhing, first grasping at the towel under me to slow my fall, and then more wildly because that hadn’t worked, tumbling like Alice down the rabbit hole or like Elsa Schneider disappearing down into the infinite abyss in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The gray mist obscured my vision. Had I crossed the seal? Was the world crumbling? Calm, calm, I told myself. I could feel gravity sucking me deeper, time accelerating, the darkness around me, widening until I was somewhere else, somewhere with no horizon, an area of space that awed me in its foreverness, and I felt calm for just a moment. 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. “It was so pretty there. It was interesting!” But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone—maybe it was Ping Xi, maybe it was a wakefulness outside myself—and that other hand steadied me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over, my brain throbbing from the pressure, my eyes leaking as though each teardrop shed a vision of my past. I felt the wetness trickle down my neck. I was crying. I knew that. I could hear myself gasp and whimper. I focused on the sound and then the universe narrowed into a fine line, and that felt better because there was a clearer trajectory, so I traveled more peacefully through outer space, listening to the rhythm of my respiration, each breath an echo of the breath before, softer and softer, until I was far enough away that there was no sound, there was no movement. There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone.