05: everything is louder

I'm going to try to do the log first and then I'm going to let go of the wheel because I can feel it wanting to go and I would rather it go down here than in my head where nobody can read it back to me later.

Sun 3/29, 7:36am, corridor. Four doors. Clock 7 slow. Crack

That's as far as I got in the notebook this morning. The pen just stopped. I'm going to finish it here. I had to run and find a new pen.

The crack was wrong. It ran low-left to high-right, seven o'clock up to one, and I know the face of that clock like the face of an old friend, I have peered upon its visage every morning for three years as my medication distilled my thoughts and clarified my vision, I have stood in front of it in that grey cathedral light with the freight door tolling somewhere behind the wall and somebody's radio bleeding top-forty through the drywall, and it has never once, not one single morning in three years, been anything other than exactly and precisely what it was... and I stood there, body vibrating, and my entire being felt like it was listening to the cosmos. Like this hallway was a throat and I was being swallowed whole by entropy, staring forward down the hall at nothing as my whole world shook. The crack... slowly I turned my head back to the clock...

4:30 to 10:15.

Where it's always been. Where it's always, always been, and I said good morning to Deb from loss prevention and my voice came out at the normal volume, which I want entered into the record as the strangest thing that happened all day. Be proud of me.

It wasn't though. It wasn't the strangest thing at all. That's the part I need to get down on paper, or well, text.

Day five. No pill. Kate called the pharmacy and the pharmacy said Monday, which is today, which is in six hours, and I'm going to be at the counter when they unlock the door like an alcoholic waiting for the bar to open. She wrote the time on a sticky note and put it on the coffee maker, it’s hot pink standing out against the black and steel like a hazard light in a storm. Nine. In her very neat handwriting, much like everything about her. Everything about her is very, unquestionably neat.

Okay so here's the thing about day five that nobody tells you and that I never had words for until tonight. It isn't that the world gets weirder. The world is exactly as weird as it always is. It's that on day five you can't not see it. The subtraction is gone, remember, I wrote that, the pill subtracts and I'm not subtracting, so everything comes in at full scale, and at full scale a lot of things are wrong. A LOT of things. It’s bad math. And normally, under normal circumstances your eyes just... slide. They sliiide away. You don't decide to, they do it for you, the way your hand pulls back from a stove before you get burned, your eyes pull back from a thing that's wrong before you know it's wrong, and you go on with your day and you never find out. That's what everybody's doing, all day, every day. Sliding. Sliding away.

Mine don't. Not this week. Mine stick. Sticky eyes.

So. In the order I noticed, because that's the only order I've got:

The price tag on a cardigan at fixture 22, which I would not have looked at twice, which nobody looks at twice, has a barcode that is one bar. The same bar. Over and over, the exact same width, the exact same gap, like somebody drew a fence. It scanned. I took it to a register and it scanned and the right price came up and the cashier, Marisol, looked at me strange like "why are you scanning a cardigan?", and I said "just checking", and I looked at the tag again and it was a barcode. A normal one. Thick thin thick. The correction took mayyybe four seconds that time. I counted. I'm counting now. It used to be instant.

A hanger on the returns rack with two hooks. The normal one on top, and a second one coming off the bottom of the crossbar and twisted outward. It was hanging on the rack by the top hook and the bottom hook was just dangling there under it, jutting into the air at nothing, like a hitchhiker thumbing for a ride. It looks like one of ours but it's not one of ours. You couldn't put a shirt on it, the shirt would have a hook bursting out of its chest like in an alien movie. Like whoever made it knew a hanger has a hook and didn't know what the hook was for. I took it off the rack. I held it in my hand and turned it over inspecting the two hooks. I ran my finger over the crossways addition, it was molded this way. I looked up at Marisol, she was working the returns counter, Marisol with the curls and the cheeks, twenty-one, twenty-two, the only person in this building who's happy to be here, and I went to say "Hey, what's this hanger from?", and looked back down to see it was now just a plain old hanger. One hook. The bottom of the crossbar was smooth plastic, no seam, no stub, nothing. I'd felt the second hook against my touch ten seconds earlier.

The door to the access room. Second on the right, the one I said nobody uses. The hinges are on the left. I've walked past that door two thousand times, I said that, I've never once looked at the hinges because who looks at hinges, and today I looked and they were on the left and the handle was also on the left. Handle side and hinge side. Same side. A door that can't open. And I stood there, bewildered, and I thought, that's not a door, that's a picture of a door, that's what somebody would build if you described a door to them over the phone... and I reached for the handle but I didn't touch it. I don't know why. I just didn't, I couldn't. And when I got to the end of the hall and looked back the handle was on the right.

And then the one I can't put in the log because I don't know what column it goes in.

Walking to the bus. Four forty-something, the sun starting its evening trek down behind the building across from the store, and where the roof of that building meets the sky, for maybe half a second, less, there was a shape. A wheel and a line. A pulley. The way you'd draw one. A little wheel with a rope going up off the top of the building and up, and up, and I'm not saying it was there, I'm saying I saw it, and then I saw sky, and the sky was once again just the regular old sky, and I stood on the sidewalk with my mouth wide open and a random stranger grunted in annoyance and had to walk around me.

I want to say something about the pulley and then I'll stop because it's almost four and I have to be at the pharmacy at nine like a functioning adult.

A barcode that's one bar is a mistake somebody could make. A hanger with two hooks, a door with the hinges wrong, a mannequin with nails painted where the nails aren't, okay, fine, a factory, a prank, a bad night. Each one on its own could have its story. I'm the one who's supposed to be good at finding out the story. That's the job, the sheet says twelve, the rack says eleven, there's a story and you go find it.

But they're all the same story. That's what I saw today. Every single one of them is a copy of a thing, made by something that knew what the thing looks like but didn't know what it's for. Knew that some nails are painted. Knew that a hanger has a hook, but not where the hook goes. Knew a door has hinges and a handle. Knew a roof meets a sky. And put the parts together the way you'd put together a word you'd only ever heard and never seen written.

And every time I look, it fixes it. Slower now. Four seconds. Long enough for me to count.

Kate's light was on when I got in, past midnight, and I don't know what she does at a law firm that keeps her up that late but her door was shut and I could hear her typing and it sounded exactly like my typing. That sentence sounds weird now that it’s written down, but that's what it sounded like. I stood in the hall and listened to it for a while, which I know is also weird. I know. I'm writing it down so I know that I know.

Nine o'clock. Sticky note. Then I take the pill and the room gets small again and I'll read this back and I won't even recognize the person I was when I wrote it, I already know that, I can feel that coming in like stormy weather. Barometric pressure changes...

So this is for you, then, future me. Whoever's reading this back. When your eyes slide off something tomorrow, and they will, they do it all day... make them go back. Just once. Just to see how long it takes.