Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life. When I was twenty-four, the most I wanted was a cramped afternoon among strangers, or to dawdle down a sidewalk without my father waiting for me, to be safe someplace far away, to be home somewhere. As I’ve said, my disappearance was not the solution to all my problems, but it did allow me to start over. When I got to New York late on Christmas Day, I was sobered and hungry and my body was cramped and my face was swollen. I walked around Times Square all evening and went to a dirty movie because I was cold and too nervous to check into a hotel, worried that the police were after me. I was scared to speak to anyone, scared to breathe. That’s where I met my first husband — in the back row of that movie theater. So you see, what came after this story ends was not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks.

• • •

I n the quiet darkness of that cold Christmas morning in X-ville, I parked the Dodge in my driveway, left Mrs. Polk slumped in the passenger seat, and barreled through the snow to the front of the house and went inside. I didn’t think to pack a suitcase, though I knew then these were my last moments in that house. My father awoke as I came down the attic steps stuffing the gun and my money, all the cash I had, into my purse. I never did empty my father’s bank account, or cash my last paycheck. I wondered for a long time whether I’d stand to inherit the house after my father died, but after a decade or two, assuming he had passed away, I decided to forget about it. There was nothing in that house, no part of it that I wanted enough to go back to claim it. In any case, I am dead in X-ville, a ghost, a lost soul, a lost cause. When I found my father standing halfway up the stairs that morning, he was already drunk. He had a hat on and a coat wrapped around his shoulders over his usual robe and boxers. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.

“Something’s staking us out from behind the house,” he said. “I heard it breathing all night, dug inside the snow. A hoodlum it was not.” He shook his head. “Some kind of wild animal. A wolf, maybe.”

“Get into bed, Dad,” I told him. There was a bottle on the floor. I picked it up.

“Did you see it?” he asked, straining to lower himself down to sit at the top of the stairs, a decrepit king on his splintery throne. I sat down next to him, handed him the bottle, and turned to face him, watched him drink, his eyes milky, hands quaking.

“There are no wolves,” I told him, “only mice.”

It took him just a minute or two to suck all that gin down. I remember how he grew sleepy — the effect of the gin came over him like a spirit entering his body — and like a child his head lolled, mouth frowned, eyelids fluttered like dying moths. I helped him up, gripping his arms at the elbows, and he fell onto me, neck clammy against my cheek. “Mice?” he mumbled. I led him into my mother’s bedroom, laid him down, kissed his spotted, swollen hand.

“Good night, Dad,” is how I said good-bye, and I stood there and watched him fumble awkwardly with an empty bottle on the nightstand, squint at it, drop it on the dusty carpet, sigh, close his eyes, and drift off. I closed the door.

That was it. There was no grand finale. He was my father, and that is all he was to me. I could have sat and waited for hours for Rebecca to show up. But there was no point. I knew she was not coming. I knew she was long gone. In the end, she was a coward. Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose. Do I hold a grudge against her? I really don’t. She was a strange woman, Rebecca was, and came into my life at an odd moment, just when I needed to run away from it the most. I could say more about her, but this is my story after all, not hers.

Before I left I used the bathroom, ran hot water over my frozen fingers. In the mirror I was a different girl. I can’t explain the certitude I saw in my face. There was a whole new look in my eyes, my mouth. I said good-bye to the house from where I stood over the bathroom sink. I tell you I felt strangely calm. The weight of the gun, the money in my purse told me yes, it’s time. Get out of here. I had my last moment with myself in that place, in front of the mirror with my eyes shut. It hurt to leave. It was my home, after all, and it meant something to me, each of the rooms, each chair and shelf and lamp, the walls, the creaking floorboards, the worn banister. I’d cry my eyes out over it all in the weeks and months to come, but that day I just bid a solemn adieu. I really saw myself for the first time that night, a small creature in the throes of life, changing. I felt a great urge to look at photographs from my childhood, to kiss and caress the young faces in those snapshots. I kissed myself in the mirror — something I used to do as a child — and went down the stairs one final time. I would have liked to have gone out to the car and carried back all the shoes I could hold in my arms, drop them in the foyer, a parting gift to my dying father, hoping he’d storm X-ville like a tornado, create as much havoc as his weak heart would let him. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I pictured him from earlier that morning as he trampled through the snow like a little boy toddling excitedly in his big coat, only gleeless and ragged, his eyes wide with panic instead of joy on our way to the liquor store. He’d lost his mind, and now his daughter.

I don’t know where we went wrong in my family. We weren’t terrible people, no worse than any of you. I suppose it’s the luck of the draw, where we end up, what happens. I shut that front door forever. Then, as though God himself had willed it, as I turned to face the yard, one of those icicles cracked and struck me on the cheek, slicing like a thin blade from my eye to my jaw. It didn’t hurt. It just stung a little. I felt the blood well up and the cold creep into the wound like a ghost. Men would later say the scar gave me character. One said that the line drawn down my face was like an empty grave. Another called it the trail of tears. To me it is simply the mark of having been someone else once, that girl, Eileen — the one who got away.

That was a nice final ride through X-ville in the Dodge before the sun came up. All I had with me was the gun and the money in my purse and the map in my pocket. I had plotted my route from X-ville to Rutland over and over. There was no reason not to follow through with my plan, after all. I thought it would have been nice to have disappeared on New Year’s Eve, lost in the bustle and revelry of out with the old, in with the new. But Christmas was just as easy a day to disappear into, as it turned out. In hindsight, the trains may not have been running at all that day. I’d never know, because I never made it to Rutland.

I sometimes like to imagine the conversation Rebecca would have had with my father if somehow he had stumbled down our cellar stairs and found her bound and frightened, as I’d found Mrs. Polk. Perhaps he’d simply untie her, ask if she had any booze, wander back up, dodging his ghosts. Or maybe he’d listen to her explain her story, her whole philosophy, then leave her to shiver and starve for a few days, or forever. Maybe he’d call the police, put the hounds out for me, his wounded daughter, using the convoluted scent of my sweat on my mother’s soiled clothing to track me through the snow-covered hills. I’ve fantasized all kinds of scenarios. Nobody ever did come looking for me. Either that, or I hid well enough to never be found. I told people to call me Lena. And I did change my last name when I got married that spring. That is one benefit of marriage. The woman becomes someone new.