My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The narrator wakes up alone on the sofa a few days later and finds evidence that she has been out partying—a number of unfamiliar Polaroid photos. In one of them, she recognizes a small Asian man: It is Ping Xi, the pretentious young artist from Ducat (the fateful taxidermic poodle was Ping’s work). She decides not to take any more Infermiterol, seeing as it was “working against my goal of doing nothing” (186).

With the discontinuation of Infermiterol, however, the narrator experiences bouts of sleeplessness. She watches movies for hours on end, hoping to fall asleep to one of them. She continues to pop other pills, but to no effect. In a moment of desperation at about 5am, she calls Trevor. When he picks up the phone, she lies about being sexually assaulted, claiming she needs him to come over immediately; she hears a woman’s voice, muffled in the background, asking Trevor who it is. Trevor hangs up. The narrator takes more pills, still not sleepy, and continues calling him throughout the day, each time leaving a message with a different, fabricated reason for why she’s calling (she wants to catch up, she’s in a financial quandary and needs help, she has HIV, and so on).