18: the dial

I owe somebody an apology and I'm going to do it at the top, properly, before the rest, because the rest is going to make it sound like an excuse.

To the person with the spreadsheet. The one on April 17 who sat at the kitchen table and wrote four rules and said, I'm not going to go looking for the back. That was a promise and it was a good one and I made it in good faith, and I broke it on Tuesday, on purpose, with a rack of go-backs I didn't need to move. I'm sorry. You'd have kept it. You're better at keeping things.

And to Marisol, who asked how far did you go like she'd been in one, and who I told about the hall in a break room like it was a story and not a place that fixes racks. I'm sorry for that too. I don't know if you can be sorry to somebody who's always had cancer. I'm doing it anyway.

Rule one broke first, that's the honest sequence. I missed an open on Monday. Slept through it. I haven't slept through anything in three years, I have alarms on alarms, and Monday I opened my eyes at 9:40 with Kate standing in my doorway saying "you're going to be late," in a voice that already knew I was, and I was. There's a write-up. Third note in my file, which is the number where they start using the word pattern. My manager said it kindly. She says everything kindly now, since Tuesday under the clock, she talks to me like I'm the one who's sick.

Then the paycheck. Wednesday. Direct deposit, and I looked at the number on my phone on the bus and it was short. A hundred and some change. I know my number, I know it the way I know the clock, and it was short, and I looked at the bus window and looked back and it was right. Full number. And I looked at the window and looked back and it was short. Three times. Back and forth. Ping pong with my own paycheck. I got off the bus and it was short and I've stopped looking.

I went back through the log. All of it, two months. And the wrong things aren't random, they're not evenly spread out over the floor like lint. They pile up, and they pile up in a very specific place, and the place is: wherever it's already tight. The count that was short. The pills I couldn't get. The paycheck. The blouse we were missing was the one in the size we were always missing. The size run that was all medium was the run that never gets restocked because the vendor shorts us. Marisol's shift, two to close, the one nobody wants. The seams show up where the Front is thinnest, and the Front is thinnest where somebody's already losing. That's not a coincidence. That's not the copier making mistakes at random. It's making mistakes where it's stretched, and it's stretched where we are.

And it patches hardest there too. That's the big part. The paycheck corrected three times in a minute. Nobody's ever fixed anything for me that fast.

So I went into the back. Tuesday, 2:10, rack of go-backs I picked off the floor for the purpose. I'm sorry. I said I'm sorry. I went.

It ran long. I didn't even have to look twice this time, I pushed through the door and the hall was already the hall, drain, tile, drain, tile, and I want to tell you it felt like being expected but I don't know what that feels like, I'm not sure anybody does.

I went further than in March. Past the stockrooms with the racks on racks, past the garment bags holding the shape of nothing, past all of that, and the doors kept coming and I started opening them.

I'm going to tell you what's in the rooms.

It's the shortfall. That's the only word I've got. Every room is a stockroom and every stockroom is full, this time, full, and what it's full of is the stuff that isn't out there. There's a room of blouses, navy, medium, the one we were missing, rack after rack, thousands, more than the vendor's ever made. There's a room of hangers with two hooks. Bins of them. There's a bin of price tags with one bar. There's a shelf, an actual shelf, this is the one place in the whole back there's a shelf, and it's got baskets on it. Woven. Horn-shaped. The kind that goes behind fruit. Hundreds of them, stacked, like they'd been taken off of something and put here for later.

And I stood in that room and I understood that it doesn't throw anything away. Whatever it takes out of the Front, when somebody looks and it fixes the rack, the thing that was on the rack has to go somewhere. It goes here. It goes in the back. The tails go here. The extra letter in my street name, the one I never had, it's in a bin in here somewhere with a thousand other letters.

And I want to say I looked for a room of curls in claw clips but I didn't, I didn't go looking, I want that on the record. But at the end of a hall, by a drain, on the floor, there was a claw clip. Brown. The cheap kind. The kind with one tooth already broken off. It's a claw clip, there's a million of them, every girl at every store I've ever worked at has dropped one in a back hall. I didn't pick it up. I stood over it, and I did the thing, I looked away and looked back, and it was still there, and I left it there, and I walked out, and it took forty minutes and there's a fourth note in my file now and I'd do it again.

Here's the theory and then I'm done. This is the one I've been circling since the bus stop, since the fridge, since the lobby with one floor, and I think I've finally got hold of it, and I'm going to say it plain because I don't have the strength tonight for the cathedral voice.

Everybody agreed how much it's supposed to hurt.

That's what the Front is. It's not just what things look like, it's how hard they are. It's a consensus. It got built out of everybody's memory, and everybody remembers struggling, and everybody remembers that struggling was about this much, enough to feel like you earned something, not so much you quit, and so that's what it makes. That's the setting. That's the dial. And it's not set by anyone. It's set by all of us, the way the tail was, the way the basket was. We all remember the same amount of hard and so that's how hard it is.

Nobody set the dial. The dial is us.

And it's fine, or it would be, it would be exactly as fine as everything else, except.

Except the paycheck corrected three times in a minute. Except the online thread got a banner in twenty minutes. Except the store's been perfect for two weeks with somebody's hands on it, and Deb doesn't say hi, and a woman stood at fixture 14 for ten minutes and looked at my hands. Except a dial is a thing that can be turned, and if enough people remember a little more hard, it goes up, and if you knew that, if you knew which room the dial listens to, if you could get into that room and just, talk, loudly, for a while… or get everyone to remember the same thing at the same time…

I don't think they built it. I don't think anyone built it. I think somebody found it, the way I did, by looking too long, and instead of writing it in a notebook they did the other thing, the thing you do if you've got budget instead of a blog. And I think it's been getting harder out there, slowly, for a long time, for everybody I've ever stood in a line with, and I think we all just remembered that's how it was.

Kate said "did you take it?" this morning. Twenty-eight days. Same words, same beat early, and today for the first time I didn't say yep. I just looked at her. Red hair. Robe. And she looked at me, and it was the half second, the deciding one, and then she said "okay," and made her tea.

Four views. Nobody new.

I left the claw clip. I want somebody to know I left it.