My Year of Rest and Relaxation

I’D INHERITED the complete VHS set of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my father.

In the elevator back up to my apartment, I thought up combinations of pills that I hoped would <…> arrest my imagination and put me into a deep, boring, inert sleep.

Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.”

I WOKE UP ALONE on the sofa a few days later.
<…>
I listened to the world weather report:

I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just <…> a portrait hanging in another world.
“I love you, Reva,” I heard myself say from so far away. “I’m really sorry about your mom.”
Then I was gone.

I was in the fog by then, eyes open just a crack.

I was glad to hear she was drunk now. It took some of the tension out of the room.

The credits rolled.

Then she found a corkscrew in the kitchen, opened a bottle of the funeral wine, came back to the sofa and sat down. We passed the bottle back and forth and watched porn.

I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees.