Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

As I drove to work, I considered what advantages that gun might afford me. It was the gun my father had carried around all his years on the police force. While I was growing up it even seemed to have its own place at the dinner table — Dad at the head, Mom across from him, Joanie and I on one side, the gun on the other. Then, in the years since his retirement, he concealed it in his holster against his bare abdomen while he clunked around the house. At a red light, I carefully removed the gun from my purse, thinking I would shove it into my glove compartment. But when I saw that frozen mouse in there, I decided against it. That little critter stayed in there to the bitter end. It doesn’t signify much of anything, but I do remember its little face — long snout, mouth agape, tiny teeth, soft white ears. That was probably the last time I saw it. I kept the gun on my lap as I drove. It did something to me, as I expect it would do to anyone: It calmed me down. It soothed me. Perhaps it was just my hangover which made me lackadaisical, but when I pulled into the Moorehead parking lot that morning, instead of locking my purse in the trunk with the gun inside it, I carried it with me into the prison and let it sit out in the open on my desk. The ugly brown leather stirred my heart with fear and excitement every time I reached out to touch it.

• • •

I suppose it was a typical morning at Moorehead, but every footstep I heard, and every time the door opened to let in a blast of wind, I would first cringe — the headache of my hangover like a blow to the brain — then look up, devil-eyed and excited to see Rebecca walk in, but she didn’t appear. I was eager to be with her again, to reaffirm what I had felt the previous evening. I could smell my excitement leaping up from my body like the pungent shock of burning sulfur when a match is struck. How could I leave X-ville now that Rebecca was in it with me? Maybe she would come with me when I disappeared, I wondered. She’d said she couldn’t spend too long in one place, didn’t she? We would have fun together. I fantasized how I’d change my appearance once I got to New York, the clothes I’d wear, how I’d cut my hair, color it if need be, or wear a long wig, a false pair of glasses. I could change my name if I wanted, I thought. “Rebecca” was as good a name as any. There was time, I told myself, to sort out the future. The future could wait, I thought. At some point that morning I went to the ladies room to apply my lipstick. That’s when Rebecca squealed the door open and shimmied up beside me, aligning her face with mine in the mirror.

“Well hello, old gal,” she said to my reflection. She was playful. She was funny.

“Good morning,” I said. I made my mind up on the spot to sound confident, good-humored, like I was just fine and dandy.

“Aren’t I cute in my holiday colors?” she asked, twirling. She wore a red wool skirt suit and a green scarf around her neck. “Dizzy,” she said, holding her head melodramatically.

“Adorable,” I said and nodded.

“I’m afraid I don’t give a damn about Christ,” she said, or something crass like that. “Kids like Christmas though, I think.” She strutted into the bathroom stall and continued to talk while she urinated. I listened and watched my face turn red in the mirror. I wiped my lipstick off. That new shade wasn’t any good on me — far too bright. My father had been right about it. It made me look like a child playing around with her mother’s makeup. “I was wondering what you’re up to Christmas Eve,” Rebecca went on, “seeing as we have time off.” She flushed the toilet and came out, slip exposed, hiking up her stockings. Her thighs were as thin as a twelve-year-old’s, and just as taut. “Would you be up for a drink tomorrow at my place? I think it’d be nice. That is, unless you have plans.”

“I don’t have plans,” I told her. I hadn’t celebrated Christmas in years.

Rebecca pulled up her sleeve and took a pen from her breast pocket. “We’ll do it like this. Write down your phone number. This way I won’t lose it, unless I take a shower, which I won’t,” she said. “Barring a visit to the doctor, or from a gentleman caller,” she laughed, “I barely shower. It’s too cold up here anyway. Don’t tell.” She lifted her arms and comically craned her neck back and forth between her armpits, then held a finger to her lips as though to hush me.

“Me too,” I said. “I like to stew in my own filth sometimes. Like a little secret under my clothes.” We were the same, she and I, I thought. Rebecca understood that. There was no reason to hide anything from her. She accepted me — liked me, even — just as I was. She handed me the pen and stuck her arm out for me to write on. I gripped the pale, narrow wrist and wrote my digits up her forearm on skin so clean and soft and firm I felt I was defiling something as pristine as a newborn baby. My own hands under the fluorescent lights were red and burnt from the cold and rough and swollen. I tucked them into the cuffs of my sweater.

“I’m leaving early today,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll have fun.”

I pictured a lavish table spread with gourmet dishes, a tuxedoed butler pouring wine into crystal goblets. That was my fantasy.

By noon I was grateful to have to drive out to the nearest grocery store to buy my lunch. It meant I could hold the gun again, let the Dodge coast, feel the wind in my hair. My hunger that day was like no hunger I’d ever felt. I purchased a carton of milk and a box of cheese crackers. I ate them voraciously sitting in my car in the Moorehead parking lot — stink of vomit still strong — then gulped the milk like a football player. Nothing had ever tasted so delicious. The gun, a hard weight in my lap, seemed to have something to do with my appetite. At any moment I could have pointed it at someone and demanded his wallet, his coat, that he do something to please me, sing a song or dance or tell me I was beautiful and perfect. I could have made Randy kiss my feet. The Beach Boys came on the radio. I didn’t understand rock ’n’ roll back then — most rock songs made me want to slit my wrists, made me feel there was a wonderful party happening somewhere, and I was missing it — but I may have jiggled a little in my seat that day. I felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.

Out in the parking lot, I ground my heels into the rocky salt, took in the view of the whole of the children’s prison. It was an old, gray stone building which, from afar, reminded me of a rich person’s summer home. The carved stone details, the rolling sand dunes beyond the fenced gravel, might have looked beautiful under different circumstances. The place felt like it was meant to be restful, peaceful, to inspire contemplation, something like that. As I understood from the odd display case of historical drawings, maps and photographs in the front corridor, the place had been built more than a hundred years earlier, first as a temperance boardinghouse for seamen. Then it was expanded and converted to a military hospital. The sea breeze was refreshing, after all, good for the nerves. At some point it was used as a boarding school, I think, when that part of the state was prosperous, full of smart, wealthy people who preferred quiet lives outside the big city. Once there was a monument to Emerson out front, a circular drive, a fountain with an English garden, as I recall. Later the place turned into an orphanage, then a rehabilitation hospital for ailing veterans, then a school for boys, and finally, twenty-something years before I got there, it became the boys’ prison. If I’d been born a boy, I probably would have ended up there.

Leaning out the open window of my car, ears bright red from the cold, I powdered my nose in the side-view mirror and watched a corrections officer escort a young man out of the back of his cruiser and into the prison. I was especially excited when a new inmate arrived, which was only about once a week. There would be paperwork for me to process. There would be fingerprinting. There would be photographs to take.