The teller of the story is unnamed, but a portrait of the author as an image is easily enough constructed: twenty-something, thin, white, Protestant, wealthy and privileged enough to not just enter with the intention but graduate an Ivy League university having actually earned a degree in art history. Orphaned during that last year of college, she has since enjoyed a life that ninety-percent of the American population would consider one which lead to what events do actually occur. She live alone in an apartment on the not-exactly-ghetto section of New York City known as the Upper East Side of Manhattan and was employed in a less than stressful position in the less than stressful business commonly referred to as “working in an art gallery.”
It is being fired from that job that is the stimulus for her year of rest and relaxation. Why would being fired not cause stress which stimulates something quite different than actively deciding to loaf literally full time for 365 days? Because adding to the reduction of stress of working in an art gallery is the fact that while the death of both parents—independent of each other—within a year left her an orphan, it left her a financially secure orphan. She can decide to quit working for a year precisely because she can afford to quite working for a year.
Her plan, however, is not merely to go a year without working or even just to go a year loafing full time. Already far away from any inkling of the mainstream in America, she actively commits to becoming a revolutionary figure of iconoclastic history; a queen of the loafers. She is going to sleep the whole year. This plan does sound mad, of course, for a host of reasons, but one of those reasons which turns out to be less insane than it sounds is actually the sleeping part. For the unnamed princess of privilege among privilege has the kind of accomplice that only the privileged or the armed can ever hope to find.
Dr. Tuttle—perhaps the second most incompetent doctor in the world behind Dr. Nick Riviera—buys the narrator’s story about treatment resistant insomnia to the tune of prescribing every drug possible to treat it and get her firmly into the world of slumber. Things would appear to be coming up roses for the narrator—not for the first time in her life, one can fairly assume—except for three recurring obstructions to her plan to sleep soundly through the year, all of which in collusion together become the engine which drives what “plot” is to be found.
First up is chemical dependence. One cannot hope to keep taking the same sleeping pills—even prescription strength—for a whole year and expect them to maintain their efficacy. As such, the narrator naturally moves from one to the next, eventually getting to the point where those infamous Ambien-like symptoms begin altering her plans in ways she doesn’t even realize. The narrator details the evidence she finds after the fact related to a series of adventures she takes outside her apartment while technically still asleep. These extreme sleepwalking cases even include trips to the loud, bright, crowded worlds of New York City nightclubs. Of more lasting importance, however, is the occasion in which she wakes up from one of these sleepwalking adventures to find herself in a fur coat she’s never seen before on a train to headed to Long Island she doesn’t remember boarding.
More significant to the story and its narrative trek toward is the constant interruption by her roommate from college, Reva. Thanks to Reva’s incessant acting out upon her conflicting emotions toward the narrator—jealous and envious at the same time—the narrator’s year of rest and relaxation is upset by such intrusions as Reva’s affair with her married boss, Reva’s terminally-ill cancer-stricken mother. That trip to Long Island in the fur coat she doesn’t recognize on the train she doesn’t remember boarding is not just some willy-nilly joyride. In fact, the trip has a specific purpose; one that almost certainly would have disallowed her ever stepping onto that train without being under the influence of highly potent drugs. The train is on its way to Long Island because that is where the funeral is being held. Reva’s mother finally succumbs to cancer just as the year 2000 is drawing to a close. As if that is not bad enough, the narrator must endure the continuing saga of Reva’s life as it spirals out of control: once the boss/lover finds out she’s pregnant, he pulls the strings to get her promoted which actually means getting her transferred to the company’s World Trade Center office and out of his hair. Reva announces she is going to have an abortion while the narrator has made a strange pact with an artist involving an exchange of food and necessities for the privilege of using her unconscious state as the genesis for an art project. In an act that is less generous than it would seem, she also gifts her entire collection of expensive designer clothes to her sad, unhappy, lonely yet predictably avaricious friend, Reva. After this, their brittle, difficult-to-define relationship deteriorates to the point of non-communication. The narrator attempts to communicate one last time to wish her happy birthday in August, but positions have since switched and it is the narrator who gets the message to go away, kid, you’re bothering me.
And then finally there is Trevor. He is the narrator’s sometimes-but-never-always boyfriend whom she was likely drawn to because he exists along roughly the same plane as she on the spectrum of self-involved, emotionally cold, spiritually empty humanity. When Trevor shows up, it is because he is looking for sex. When he’s absent, it is because he’s found sex elsewhere. Their relationship is of little consequence to the story other than the fact that Trevor is profoundly unreliable as a mechanism of stability in her life and as such it come as little surprise to discover the narrator’s relationship with him has also deteriorated. Actually, deteriorated is something of an understatement. As she will learn after the fact, sometime over the second weekend of that September, Trevor had up and gotten himself married to another woman.
The following Tuesday of that weekend—September 11, 2001—Trevor was somewhere with new bride in Bardados enjoying his honeymoon. Reva, however, had accepted promotion and the transfer and is at work inside her office inside the World Trade Center. That morning, the narrator purposely leaves her apartment while wide awake and not under the influence of behavior-controlling medication. She heads to a nearby store to purchase a VCR then comes home and connects so she can tape the non-stop news coverage of the terrorist attacks. She will return to the tape many times, especially on those occasions when she started getting particularly bored or begins to feel overcome by doubts about the worthiness of existence. She returns not just to the tape, but to a very particular moment part of the tape which recorded a very particular moment of that day-long nightmare of unforgettable moments.
It is the moment when a camera is focused on a woman located on high story situated above the fire in the North Tower. A woman who looks exactly like someone she knew who loses just one of her high heel shoes as she makes the leap and plummets through the air to the asphalt waiting below.
