My Year of Rest and Relaxation (6)

“Barely,” I said.

“Any dreams?”

“Only nightmares.”

“I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?”

“Yeah. Like The House of Mirth,” I said.

“A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle.

“I haven’t read it.”

“Better you don’t.”

“I read The Age of Innocence.”

“So you’re educated.”

“I went to Columbia.”

“That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia. How’s your food intake? Is it steady? Any dietary restrictions? When you walked in here, I thought of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway. Any relation? I’d say you’re what, twenty pounds below an ideal Quetelet index?”

“I think my appetite would come back if I could sleep,” I said. It was a lie. I was already sleeping upwards of twelve hours, from eight to eight. I was hoping to get pills to help me sleep straight through the weekends.

“Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats. I’m not a religious person, but you could try visiting a church or synagogue to ask for advice on inner peace. The Quakers seem like reasonable people. But be wary of cults. They’re often just traps to enslave young women. Are you sexually active?”

“Not really,” I told her.

“Do you live near any nuclear plants? Any high-voltage equipment?”

“I live on the Upper East Side.”

“Take the subway?”

At this point, I took the subway each day to work.

“A lot of psychic diseases get passed around in confined public spaces. I sense your mind is too porous. Do you have any hobbies?”

“I watch movies.”

“That’s a fun one.”

“How’d they get the rats to meditate?” I asked her.

“You’ve seen rodents breed in captivity? The parents eat their babies. Now, we can’t demonize them. They do it out of compassion. For the good of the species. Any allergies?”

“Strawberries.”

With that, Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and stared off into space, deep in thought, it seemed.

“Some rats,” she said after a while, “probably deserve to be demonized. Certain individual rats.” She picked her pen back up with a flourish of the purple feather. “The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern. I hope you follow me. Rats are very loyal to the planet. Try these,” she said, handing me a sheath of prescriptions. “Don’t fill them all at once. We need to stagger them so as not to raise any red flags.” She got up stiffly and opened a wooden cabinet full of samples, flicked sample packets of pills out onto the desk. “I’ll give you a paper bag for discretion,” she said. “Fill the lithium and Haldol prescriptions first. It’s good to get your case going with a bang. That way later on, if we need to try out some wackier stuff, your insurance company won’t be surprised.”

I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all. She gave me everything I asked for, and I appreciated her for that. I’m sure there were others like her out there, but the ease with which I’d found her, and the immediate relief that her prescriptions provided, made me feel that I’d discovered a pharmaceutical shaman, a magus, a sorcerer, a sage. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Tuttle were even real. If she were a figment of my imagination, I’d find it funny that I’d chosen her over someone who looked more like one of my heroes—Whoopi Goldberg, for example.

“Dial 9-1-1 if anything bad happens,” Dr. Tuttle told me. “Use reason when you feel you can. There’s no way to know how these medications will affect you.”

At the beginning of this, I’d look up any new pills she gave me on the Internet to try to learn how much I was likely to sleep on any given day. But reading up on a drug sapped its magic. It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body, like sneezing or shitting or bending at the joint. The “side effects and warnings” on the Internet were discouraging, and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do. So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely.

Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school. Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having premonition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh-story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.