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). The final time she calls, he answers, and she admits she wants him to tell her that he misses her; when he assents to her request, she hangs up.

The narrator settles back into movie-watching, this time enjoying a VHS set of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She takes a hard-bitten delight in how, when Whoopi Goldberg appears on the set, the actress seems like an “absurd interloper.” Even as she moves through the lofty USS Enterprise, Whoopi is laughing inside, laughing at everyone around her—at least, this is what the narrator believes. Whoopi, who turns everything into a mockery no matter how serious or solemn, is “proof” that anything can be profaned. This is why the narrator loves her.

The narrator continues her movie marathon until the VCR breaks some hours later. When she opens her eyes to Reva banging on the door, she is unsure if she has slept yet. Once inside, Reva reveals that she’s broken up with Ken, her boss with whom she has been having an affair. Exhausted and agitated, the narrator inadvertently exhales a bit too loudly—and Reva, mistaking this noise for empathy, flings her arms around the narrator and sobs. After distractedly bemoaning the narrator’s envious skinniness, Reva tells her more: Ken doesn’t want to see Reva anymore, so he has promoted and transferred her. She will be working from the company’s office at World Trade Center. When Reva says that she doesn’t plan to “keep it,” the narrator eventually realizes that Reva is pregnant and Ken is the father. Distracted by her friend’s restlessness, the narrator takes a Xanax and offers one to Reva, who surprisingly obliges.

When Reva finally leaves—telling the narrator she loves her—the narrator calls Trevor again. She threatens to kill herself if he does not come over within the hour to have sex with her; after the call, she feels better. Sometime later, she wakes up to Trevor hovering above her, ejaculating onto her breasts. When he leaves, he tells her this is the last time he will see her. When she emerges from her bedroom, the narrator notices a DVD player on the coffee table; Trevor has purchased it for her. She’s repulsed by the sight of it.

The morning after Trevor’s visit, the narrator calls Dr. Tuttle to ask for a prescription refill. Taking stock of her pill stash after the call, the narrator realizes that none of them are useful anymore; “the Infermiterol had made all other drugs moot” (218). Noticing a letter from the estate lawyer notifying her that the tenant in her parents’ house was moving out, she calls him to see about selling the house instead of renting it out again. Later that day, she receives flowers from an admirer who turns out to be Ping Xi. In the handwritten note, he refers to the narrator as his muse and says he wants to collaborate on an art project. Though she hates him, the narrator is still flattered.

Later, the narrator takes some pills, but they don’t make her sleepy. Instead, she begins to feel very strange and physically disoriented, as though her head is detached from her body and levitating. She begins questioning everything, wondering, “What if the only way to sleep is death?” (227). She’s suddenly overtaken by a spasm of regret and anxiety: She wishes she’d never taken the Infermiterol, and she longs for what her life was like before the drug; she misses when her VCR still worked; she misses Reva’s visits; she worries that Reva, with her new job, will forget about her, just as the narrator planned on forgetting Reva. She worries that Reva has realized the narrator is a bad friend—that Reva is “waking up” and will leave for good. However, the narrator quickly reassures herself that Reva is too mindless to realize such things. Unable to sleep, she passes the time by watching sitcoms.

The next time the narrator visits Dr. Tuttle, she feels scattered. She tries to explain that she is having trouble sleeping, but Dr. Tuttle interrupts her with ramblings about mystical shamanic practices. Additionally, she says, the narrator’s face seems “off-center” (which ostensibly indicates an unfavorable personality shift). She doubles the narrator’s Infermiterol dosage.

Desperate for sleep, the narrator ends up taking Infermiterol when Reva is visiting later that day. Reva is concerned about the narrator’s prescriptions, but the narrator ignores her and falls asleep. She wakes up three days later to a horrible surprise: all her sleeping pills are gone. Believing an overconcerned Reva has taken the pills in a misguided effort to protect her, the exasperated narrator makes the journey to Reva’s apartment on the Upper West Side to retrieve them. She eventually finds her pills in Reva’s bathroom, in which she accidentally gets locked. While trapped in Reva’s apartment, the narrator is inspired by the experience; she realizes that she needs to be locked up in order to truly hibernate. After Reva comes home and lets her out, the narrator leaves the pills—all but the Infermiterol. She arranges for a locksmith to change her keys, arranges a meeting with Ping Xi for the next day, and calls Dr. Tuttle to tell her she will be away for a few months. That is the last time the narrator speaks to Dr. Tuttle.