06: the back

Pharmacy didn't have it.

I want to lead with that because everything else is going to come out slippery and sideways and that's a fact. Nine o'clock, I'm at the counter, the pharmacy tech pulls it up and does the face. The oh no, here we go face. The prior auth came back denied, the doctor's office has to resubmit, two business days, sorry. Two business days. I said it back to her like it was spoken in a foreign language. Two business days. Kate was actually more upset than I was. She was standing right behind me and she said "denied for what?" in a voice I hadn't heard her use before, a lawyer voice I guess, flat and pointed, and the tech kind of flinched. It kinda startled me as well. Then in the car she was fine again. Normal. She said she'd make some calls. She pulled the sticky note off the coffee maker when we got home and threw it away and put up a new one that said Wednesday. We had made it to the neon orange sticky notes on the pad.

So. Day six. Then day seven. I'm writing this on day seven at whatever o'clock and I'm going to tell you about Monday because Monday's the one.

You need to know the layout here at work. Behind the fitting rooms there's a door, staff only, and through it there's this hall that runs the entire length of the fitting room bank and turns left into receiving. Everybody calls it the back. It's not really a mysterious place. It's where the Z-racks live and the freight elevator is and the compactor and the cage with the fixture parts. It's maybe sixty feet of hallway and then a turn. I have carried a thousand garments down it. I know where the drain in the floor is that you have to roll the racks around. I know which ceiling tiles are stained. I KNOW this hallway.

Monday, maybe two in the afternoon, I went through the door with a rack of go-backs and the hall didn't turn.

It just... kept going. Same hall. Same grey paint, same rubber bumper rail along the wall at rack height, same fluorescents in the same spacing, and where the turn to receiving should be, there was more hall. I stopped. I did the thing. I looked at my hands on the rack, I looked at the floor, I looked back. Still hall. And here's the biggest part I need you to grasp, it did not get fixed this time. I looked back and it was still wrong and it stayed wrong, and I stood there with a rack of go-backs in a hallway that ran past the end of the building I was standing in, and nothing swapped, nothing corrected, nothing changed. I shouldn't exist here. Here shouldn't exist here.

I don't know how long I stood there. I know I could hear the floor. The music, a register, somebody laughing. All of it right through the wall, the normal distance away. That's what made me keep going. If it had been quiet I don’t think I would have, but it sounded like a Monday, so I pushed the rack and walked.

I want to illustrate this carefully because I'll never get to describe it for the first time again.

It was the back. It was our back. The back of the store. Every part of it was a part I'd seen before, the bumper rail, the drain, the stained tile, they kept repeating, drain, tile, drain, tile, at the same spacing, like somebody had one photograph of our hallway and was laying it end to end. And the doors along the wall, there were doors, the kind with the little wire-glass security window, and looking through the windows they were stockrooms. Our stockroom. Except there were many of them and there was nothing on the racks. Rolling racks, rows and rows of them, and on the racks... more rolling racks. Little tiny ones. Hanging by their own top bars like garments. Racks on racks. And roll cages, the wire ones we get freight in, stacked and latched and holding nothing, not empty exactly, holding the shape of nothing, like the cage had been built around a box that was never put in. Holding empty space. Garment bags on the rails with no garments in them, zipped, hanging perfectly flat.

Nothing was scary. I need to say that. None of it. I keep waiting for something about it to have been scary when I tell it back and it just, wasn't. It was... unfinished. That's the only thing I can think to describe it. It was a back room somebody had started building from a description of our back room that someone else was looking at and hadn't gotten to the part where the stuff goes on the racks. Everything that was a container was there. Nothing that a container would contain.

I went a really long way. Longer than the building, longer than the strip mall, longer than the parking lot, if I'd been walking in the real world I'd have crossed the road. Drain, tile, drain, tile. And I started to feel it, the thing I felt in the corridor, the listening, it wasn't entropy, it was contemplation. Except bigger. Like the whole hall was a jury now and I wasn't being contemplated anymore, I'd been decided about, and this was the decision, this is what you get if you don't stop looking, you get to look at all of it, it's all yours, keep going. And that's when I got scared, that was the moment, not of anything in the hall, there was nothing in the hall, I got scared of how much of it there was. The hall didn't need me to be there, it didn't care. It would have gone on being that long whether I came through or not.

So I turned around. And I want to say the hall was short again when I turned, that it snapped back to size, but it didn't. I walked back as far as I'd walked in, pushing a rack of go-backs, and the doors went by with the wrong stockrooms in them, and then I came to the turn. The real turn. Receiving. Dave from receiving was on a pallet jack, gave me a weird look, and said "you good?" and I said yeah, and he said "where'd you come from?" and I said the floor, and he looked at me for a second and went back to his pallet.

He looked at me for a second. I'll circle back to that, just, not tonight.

I put the go-backs away. I went back out onto the floor and it was two forty. I'd been gone forty minutes. My manager had been looking for me and there's a brand new note in my file now, which is the second one this month, and she said it kindly, she said "just let someone know when you step off," and I said I'd been in the back, and she said "I checked the back."

Here's what I've got and I'm going to try to keep it simple.

Behind our store there is a version of our store with nothing in it. It's made of the parts of our store, over and over. I don't think it's a place. I don't think you drive to it. I think it's what's there when you look too long at something that was only meant to be looked at for a second... the way if you stare at a word long enough it stops being a word and starts being alien shapes. I stared at the back until it stopped being the back. And there was a lot of it. That's the thing I can't get over. There was just so freaking much of it. Whoever's making our store made a lot more than they needed, and it's all just... hanging there. Waiting. On the racks. Holding the shape of things to come that never arrived.

I've been calling it the back. It's not a good name. It's the only one I've got, and I'm not going to let myself pick a better one, because I know how I get sometimes, I'll name it something and then the name will be the thing and I'll stop looking at what's actually there. So: the back. Lowercase. It's just the back.

Kate's awake. I can hear her. Wednesday's on the coffee maker in her neat handwriting and I keep thinking about the pink sticky note going in the trash, the Monday one, how fast she did it. Like the day hadn't happened, like you just take it down and put up the next one.

I'm going to sleep, if I can. I don't think I've eaten since the pharmacy.