I Count Things for a Living, and One Night Won't Balance

I count things for a living, and I am good at it. That is not a personality quirk I invented for this write-up. It is a certification, a job title, and sixteen years of my life. I am a pharmacy technician in Bend, Oregon, and the part of the job nobody thinks about is that twice a day, and always at shift change, somebody has to count the controlled substances and make the number in the drawer agree with the number in the computer. That somebody is usually me, because I am fast and I do not round. If the perpetual inventory says 487 tablets of oxycodone 10 milligram and the drawer has 486, we do not go home. We pull the fill records, we pull the returns, we pull the invoices, we find the one. There is always a reason. A tablet dropped behind the counting tray. A partial fill entered as a full. A tech who typed 60 and dispensed 90. In sixteen years I have never once ended a discrepancy investigation with a shrug. The count balances or you find out why it doesn't, and the why is always boring, and the boring why is the whole point of my profession.

I am telling you this so you understand what kind of person is about to tell you the rest, and so you understand what it cost me. Because since November of 2021 I have been carrying a discrepancy I cannot resolve, and it is not in a drawer, it is in me, and I have pulled every record I have access to and the count does not balance.

I also want to say that I have never cared about UFOs. I need that on the record because the first thing people do when you tell a story like mine is sort you into a bin, and the bin has Coast to Coast AM in it, and blurry photographs, and grown men in Mulder t-shirts arguing about Bob Lazar in hotel conference rooms. That is not my bin. My ex-husband went through a History Channel phase around 2014 and I used to leave the room. Not out of fear. Out of the specific irritation a person who reconciles numbers for a living feels watching a show where nobody ever checks anything. So when I tell you what I am about to tell you, know that every sentence of it embarrasses me. I have written this out three times and deleted it twice. My sister finally said, write it like one of your incident reports, Renee, you're good at those. So that is what this is. An incident report. Long one.

Some background, quickly, because the background matters more than I understood at the time. I was 41 when it started, 45 now, divorced since 2017, no kids. I live alone in a two-bedroom rental off Purcell in Bend with a yard I keep meaning to do something with. I have worked at the same retail pharmacy for eleven of my sixteen years, a high-volume store, four to five hundred scripts a day. My sister Dana lives in Klamath Falls with her husband and my niece. It is about two hours and forty minutes door to door, almost all of it on US-97, which if you have not driven it at night, is one of the emptier experiences available in the lower forty-eight. Between the little towns there are stretches where it is just you, the lodgepole pines, the odd logging truck, and however you happen to be feeling about your life at that moment.

I drove down on Friday, November 12, 2021, for my niece's ninth birthday, which was the 13th, a Saturday. I stayed the extra night because Dana and I split a bottle of wine Saturday and I don't drive after drinking, at all, ever, which is relevant later because people have tried very hard to make that night about impairment and there was none. I left Sunday evening, November 14. I remember being annoyed with myself for leaving so late. Dana wanted me to stay for dinner and I said yes to be agreeable, so it was almost 7:30 before I got gas at the station on Washburn Way and pointed the car north. I had work at 8:45 Monday morning. The plan was home by 10:15, laundry going by 10:30, bed by midnight, because at that time in my life midnight to 5 was when I lay in bed not sleeping, which was its own long-running situation I will get to.

The car was a 2013 Corolla, silver, bought used in 2016 with 41,000 miles on it. I am not a car person but I am a maintenance person. Oil every five thousand, tires rotated, the sticker in the corner of the windshield always current. That car had never once failed to start. I am aware that every breakdown story ever told includes the sentence "the car had never given me any trouble," and I am aware of what that sentence is worth as evidence, which is nothing. I'm including it anyway because it is true and because the mechanic will back me up, for whatever his part of this is worth, which is also, I have come to accept, close to nothing.

North of Chemult the highway straightens out and the towns quit. There is a stretch I have driven probably two hundred times in my life, maybe more, flat and straight with the pines set back from the road on both sides, and a long low ridge to the east you can only see in daylight. No houses. One rest area, closed that winter for a plumbing issue, which I only know because I looked it up afterward, because afterward I looked up everything.

At 9:38 or 9:39 the radio cut out. I know the time the way you know things afterward, by reconstruction, not the way you know things when they happen. I had the radio on for company, some classic rock station out of Bend fading in and out, and it did not fade, it stopped. Then the dash lit up, every warning light at once, the way it does for half a second when you first turn the key, and then all of it went dark. Dash, headlights, radio, the works. The power steering went heavy in my hands. The engine was just gone, no cough or sputter, nothing you could call a mechanical event. It was like the car had been unplugged. I want to be careful here because I have told this part enough times that it has gotten smooth, and smooth is what happens to stories, not to memories. So let me rough it back up: I do not actually remember steering to the shoulder. That is a gap and it is the first gap and I have flagged it in my records as such. The next thing I have is the car stopped on the gravel, straight, parked as neatly as if I'd done it in a lot, and my hands in my lap.

And here is where I have to slow way down, because this next stretch of time is the center of the whole thing and it is exactly the part I can say the least about.

The car was dead and I was sitting in it, and my memory of the next twenty-some minutes is that the car was a place I was waiting in. That is the most accurate sentence I can build and I have tried many. Waiting the way you wait in an exam room. Not afraid, not bored, not thinking about being late for work, which is not like me, being late is one of the four or five things I actually fear. I did not try the key. I did not reach for my phone, which was in the cupholder, charged, two bars, I checked it later. I did not put the hazards on, which would not have worked, but the point is I didn't try. I sat there with my hands in my lap like a person who has been told, kindly, that it won't be long now.

I need to be precise about what I am claiming and what I am not claiming. I am not claiming missing time in the way the paperback books mean it. I can account for the time in the sense that I was, as far as I know, in the driver's seat of my own car for all of it. What I cannot account for is me. There is no content in those minutes. Not darkness, not a blank like sleep. Sleep leaves a seam, you can feel where the night was stitched out. This had no seam. It was more like a page in a ledger where the entries are in someone else's handwriting, and the handwriting is neat, and the totals carry forward correctly, and it is still wrong, because you did not write it.

At 10:04 by my phone the engine was running. I do not remember starting it. I have the phone time because the first thing I did, and this at least is completely in character, was pick up the phone and look at the clock and start doing arithmetic, because I am always doing arithmetic. 10:04. I had left Klamath Falls at 7:34 by the gas receipt. The stretch I was on is about ninety minutes from that station at my speeds. So the car died a little before 9:40 and now it was 10:04 and the engine was idling like nothing had ever been wrong with it, heater blowing, headlights on, and the radio playing the same station, and I looked at the clock on the radio and it said 9:38.

Twenty-six minutes behind my phone. I sat there and I did what I do, I tried to reconcile it. The radio clock in that car was the kind you set by hand with the tuning knob, and I had set it myself the previous spring when daylight saving started, and it did not drift, or if it drifted it drifted the way dashboard clocks drift, a minute or two a year. Twenty-six minutes is not drift. Twenty-six minutes is an outage. A dashboard clock that loses power forgets everything and flashes 12:00. It does not politely stop for twenty-six minutes and then resume. I knew that even then, sitting on the shoulder, before I knew anything else. The clock had experienced the interruption and my phone had not, because my phone carries its own battery and gets its time from the network. Which means, and this was the first genuinely cold thought I had that night, the interruption was real and had a length, and the length was about twenty-six minutes, and I had been present for all of it and could report nothing.

I drove north. What else was there to do. The car ran perfectly. I stopped at the first place with lights, a 24-hour gas station and mini-mart at a junction I'd passed a hundred times, Loder's, the one with the plywood elk on the roof, and I parked under the canopy lights and took a photograph of the radio clock with my phone held next to it so both times were in frame. Phone: 10:31. Radio: 10:05. I have that photo. It is the only physical evidence I possess of the strangest night of my life, and I want to be the first to tell you everything wrong with it, because someone in the comments will do it anyway and I would rather it be me. A photo of two clocks proves that two clocks disagreed. That is all it proves. Phones resync their time off cell towers, and if you want to argue my phone had been wrong all evening and corrected itself somewhere north of Chemult, I cannot fully rule that out, I can only tell you the gas receipt from Washburn Way says 7:34 p.m. and my phone said 7:34 when I got in the car, because I looked, because I was doing the arithmetic about getting home. You will have to decide what my word on that is worth. That is in fact the whole problem with everything I am about to tell you. Almost none of it exists outside my word. I have thought about that more than anyone reading this ever will.

Inside the mini-mart I bought a coffee I did not drink and a package of peanut butter crackers I did not eat. I know because I found them both in the car two days later, the coffee molded into the cupholder. The kid at the register said something to me, something friendly about the Ducks game probably, and I answered him, apparently normally, because he did not look at me the way you look at a person in trouble. I have thought about that kid a lot. He is the only human being who saw me inside the first hour, and to him I was just a tired woman buying crackers. Whatever I was carrying out of that stretch of highway, it did not show. I find that worse, somehow, than if he had asked me if I was okay.

I got home at 12:20 in the morning. No laundry. I sat at my kitchen table with my coat on for a while, I could not tell you how long, and then I did something that I can only describe as the first symptom, though I didn't recognize it as one. I got a legal pad out of the junk drawer and I wrote down a timeline. 7:34 gas. 9:38-9:40 radio out, car dies. Approx 10:04 car running. 10:31 photo at Loder's. And then under it I wrote, in my own handwriting, which I have kept, "26 min. Where is it." No question mark. I don't know why no question mark. It looks like an inventory note. It looks like what I write on a cycle count sheet when a number is short and I haven't found it yet, because a question mark implies the possibility that there is no answer, and professionally I do not admit that possibility. Short 26. Where is it. Find it.

I went to work Monday morning on four hours of bad sleep and told exactly one person, Kayla, who worked drive-through, and I told her the boring version, car died on 97, scared me, no idea why, started again. Even the boring version made me feel like I was handing her something I would want back later. Kayla that fall was in the middle of a divorce that was going badly in ways she narrated to us daily, in installments, like a radio drama, her husband and the boat, her husband and the storage unit, her lawyer who never called back, and Kayla's divorce has nothing to do with anything in this story. I am including her because she was there, every day, being ordinary next to me, and because in the version of that winter where nothing happened on Highway 97, Kayla's divorce is what I would remember about November. The boat. Him listing the boat online while the filing was still pending. That was the world I was supposed to be living in.

Tuesday I took the Corolla to my mechanic, a two-bay shop off Division that a guy named Ed has run since before I moved to Bend. I trust Ed because he has told me, on three separate occasions, that something I was ready to pay for did not need doing. I told him the honest mechanical facts, total electrical death at highway speed, dead maybe twenty-five minutes, restarted, drove fine. He kept it two days. He called Thursday and the call cost me forty dollars in labor and here is the entirety of what it bought me. Battery was deeply discharged, he said, which made no sense to him given the alternator tested fine and the battery itself, load-tested, was healthy. No corrosion, no parasitic draw he could find, grounds all clean, no stored fault codes, and this is the part I wrote down while he was saying it, because writing things down is what I do with my hands when I'm scared: "It's like the car sat for a month with something on. But everything else says it didn't. Charged her up, she's fine. If it does it again put a meter on it, otherwise drive it and forget it."

Drive it and forget it. Ed found the automotive equivalent of what I would eventually find everywhere else, an account that was short with no transaction to explain the shortage. A battery is a ledger. Charge in, charge out. Something had drawn that battery down and there was no record of the draw. He wasn't troubled by it. Mechanics live in a world of intermittent faults and unexplained one-offs, they have made their peace with a universe that is approximately 2 percent slop. Pharmacy does not extend me that privilege. In my world if the record says nothing came out, and something came out, that is called diversion, and people lose licenses over it, and somewhere there is a fact of the matter and your job is to walk backward until you step on it.

I want to describe the next couple of weeks honestly, which means describing them as almost normal, because they almost were. This is the part the movies get wrong. Nothing swirled. I did not have nightmares, which, hold that thought, because the opposite of nightmares turns out to be its own problem. I went to work, I counted, I came home. Thanksgiving happened at Dana's, I drove down and back in daylight and I will admit my hands were not relaxed on that stretch but nothing occurred except that I caught myself slowing down as I passed it, the way you slow down past a house you used to live in.

Two things from those weeks that I only recognized as data later, and I want to log them even though at the time they were nothing.

First thing. The Monday after it happened, our barcode scanner at pickup started bothering me. If you have not worked retail pharmacy, the scanner beep is the sound of your entire day, hundreds and hundreds of times, a short high chirp, and after your first month you do not hear it anymore, it goes wherever the refrigerator hum goes. Mine came back. Not louder. Earlier. I know how that sounds. I would reach for a bag off the will-call shelf and my shoulders would come up before the beep, a full flinch, the kind that makes a customer glance at you, and then the beep would happen. Kayla noticed it before I did. She said something like, you keep doing a little jump. I told her too much coffee. But I stood there that afternoon and did an experiment on myself, because that is apparently who I am, I scanned twenty bags in a row paying attention to my own shoulders, and the flinch came first every time. Roughly a quarter second before, if I had to put a number on it, and you know by now that I have to put a number on it. My body had started treating that beep as the second thing in a sequence. I could not tell you what it thought the first thing was. It knew the rhythm of something, and the scanner beep happened to sit where one of the notes went.

Second thing. My sleep changed, and I need to lay out the before to make the after mean anything. I have had insomnia since my twenties, the standard kind, no trouble falling asleep at 11, wide awake at 2:30 with my brain running payroll on my entire life, then thin gray sleep from 4:30 until the alarm. Twenty years of that. I had a routine for it the way you have a routine for a bad knee. Melatonin sometimes, no screens after 10, a boring book, all the hygiene, none of it more than 20 percent effective. It was as much a fixture of my life as my job.

In early December 2021, and I cannot give you the exact night it started, which bothers me, my insomnia inverted. That is the only word for it. I began falling asleep at 11:58 and waking at 3:40. I do not mean approximately. I had a sleep tracking app on my phone, one of the free ones that listens to you breathe, I had it from years of insomnia troubleshooting, and I still have the exports. Sleep onset between 11:54 and 12:01 night after night after night. Wake at 3:38 to 3:42. No alarm. Eyes open, done, rested. And I do mean rested, that is the terrible part. Three hours and forty-some minutes and I would wake up feeling the way I am told well-rested people feel, clear, level, no grit behind the eyes, and I would lie there in my level clarity at 3:41 in the morning absolutely rigid with a feeling I still cannot name properly. The closest I can get is: scheduled. I felt scheduled. Twenty years my body would not hold a schedule for me, not for melatonin, not for sleep restriction therapy that I paid actual money for, and now it kept one to the minute for something, and nobody had shown me the schedule, and I had not signed it.

You will notice I have not yet said anything about the dome light, and there is a reason, which is that in November and December I did not know about the dome light. The dome light is a January problem and I am trying to keep this in order, because order is the one thing I can still offer. But since I have raised it I will say this much now. When I tell you later that I recovered a detail from that night months after the night, I am fully aware of what recovered memories are worth. I am more aware of it than the people who will bring it up. Sit tight.

December also gave me the first of the drawings, though I did not call them drawings then and I did not call them anything, because the honest description of how they arrived is that they did not arrive at all. There was no moment. I want to be really careful here because this is the center of everything and it is also the part that sounds the most like a person coming apart, and I have practiced saying it in a way that keeps my hands still.

At work, the paper that is always in front of me is the cycle count sheet, a printed inventory list, and the backs are blank, and everybody who works a pharmacy counter doodles on the backs of something. Mine had always been boxes. Rectangles, divided, subdivided, little grids, ask my coworkers, it was a joke, Renee draws spreadsheets to relax from spreadsheets. Sometime in December I noticed that what my hand had been doing during hold music was not boxes. It was an oval. A shallow oval, wider than deep, drawn with the long axis level, and always the same three additions. A line inside the oval following its curve, set in from the wall, at what I somehow understood to be hip height, though the drawing had no scale and no reason to have a height at all. A hatched band across the middle of the floor. And a notch in the upper left of the curve, a recess, drawn with harder pen strokes than anything else on the page, gone over two and three times the way you ink over something you are certain about.

I found four of these before I caught my hand making the fifth. I want that on the record too. I did not sit down to draw what I remembered. There was nothing to remember. I found the drawings the way you find out about a payment you don't remember authorizing, statement first, memory never.

Here is the difference I need you to hold onto, because everything depends on it. I did not remember that room. I knew it. Those are not the same thing and the entire time I have been living with this, the hardest part has been getting anyone to sit still for the difference. Remembering has a direction, it points backward, it comes with a where and a when attached, however corrupted. I remember my niece's birthday. I remember the plywood elk. This was not that. This was the other kind of knowing, the kind you never audit because it never gets challenged, the way you know your own kitchen in the dark. Nobody remembers learning where the silverware drawer is. Your hand just goes there, and the knowledge has no date on it, no acquisition record, it is simply in inventory. Sometime between November 14 and mid-December, a room I have no memory of ever standing in got entered into my inventory as if it had always been stocked, and my hand kept going to the drawer.

I could tell you, still, today, without closing my eyes, that the rail is not for holding. It is at hip height and it runs along the wall like a handrail and it is not for holding, it is for leaning back against, and the correct posture is leaning back against it with your hands at your sides. I could tell you the floor in the hatched band has give. Not softness. Give, like the platform of the big freight scale at our wholesaler's dock, a surface that accepts your weight and reports it somewhere. I could tell you that the notch in the upper left, the alcove, is where the cold instruments live. That exact phrase. It surfaced whole, with "live" in it, and I want on the record that "live" is not my word. I do not say instruments live somewhere. I say instruments are stored somewhere. In sixteen years of inventory work I have never once said an item lives in a bin. The phrase came to me the way a fact comes, and it came in a vocabulary that is not mine, and honestly that one detail frightens me more than the oval, the rail, and the floor put together, because you can argue an image into someone's head a dozen mundane ways, but I do not know the mundane way a locution gets in.

And no, before anyone asks, I have never seen the room in a movie. I know the movies. I made myself watch the big ones, Fire in the Sky, communion, the fourth kind whatever it was called, in the spring of 2022, like homework, with a notepad, looking for my oval room, hoping to find it, because if I found it I could file this whole thing under contamination and go back to my life. The rooms in the movies are wrong. They are cluttered. They are dressed like sets, all dangling hoses and gurneys and dentist lamps, they are art directed. The room I know is almost empty and completely obvious. Everything in it is where it is because that is the correct place for it. I recognized the logic before I recognized anything else, and the logic is the logic of my own profession. It is a workspace, organized by someone who thinks the way I think. That is the other thing I have never been able to say out loud to anyone except Dana. The room is not alien to me. That is the problem. Whoever keeps that room keeps it the way I keep the vault.

January 2022 is when the dome light came back, and I am going to be as exact about this as I can, because this is the detail I trust least and think about most. I was at work, mid-January, a Tuesday or Wednesday, standing at the counting bench doing a cycle count on lorazepam, and the overhead fluorescent at the far end of the pharmacy was going bad. It had that end-of-life behavior where it dims and browns for a second and comes back. It flickered like that maybe three times in an hour, and on the third one, standing there with a tray of pills and a spatula, I had the dome light. It did not come back like a photograph developing. It came back like a line item. One moment my account of November 14 had darkness in the car, because the car was electrically dead, and dead cars are dark, that is not memory, that is inference, and I had never even examined it. The next moment the account said: the dome light was on. The whole time. The car was dead in every circuit, no dash, no headlights, and the dome light was on, a steady even yellow, and, this is the part that came with it, unattached to anything, I was not surprised by it at the time. Sitting in my waiting car with my hands in my lap under a light that had no possible source of power, and feeling about it the way you feel about the light in an elevator.

I put down the spatula and went and stood in the break room. I would like to say I handled it better than I did. There is a fifteen-minute stretch where I apparently just stood by the microwave, because Kayla came in and asked if the microwave was broken, and I said no, and she waited, and I was not able to produce a next sentence, and she microwaved her soup next to me in what I can only call a very kind silence.

Now. Everything wrong with the dome light, stated by me, before anyone else gets the satisfaction. It is a detail recovered sixty-some nights after the night, under a flickering fluorescent, by a sleep-deprived woman who by then already believed something had happened to her. I have read about memory. Not skimmed, read. When this all started I did what I do with any discrepancy, I went to the literature, and the literature on human memory is a horror story all by itself, worse than mine. Elizabeth Loftus putting whole false childhood events into a quarter of her subjects with nothing but a typed paragraph and some family names. Lost in a mall. People producing rich, tearful, detailed accounts of things that never occurred, and the detail and the tears meaning nothing. I know that a "recovered" detail is the least reliable object in the entire evidence room. I know my dome light is exactly the kind of thing a brain manufactures to give a shapeless bad night a face. I hold both of those things, and I will also tell you: it does not feel like the other memories feel. My actual memories of that night have edges that have worn smooth from handling. The dome light has never worn. It came back with a hard edge and it has kept it, and every time I inspect it, it reads the same, steady even yellow, no surprise. Make of that what you will. I genuinely do not know what to make of it, and I have had four years.

The other January thing was the calf, although the calf may have been earlier and I missed it, which galls me. Left calf, outer side, a patch of numb skin. Not tingling, numb, the way your lip is numb after the dentist, a region where touch arrives as pressure and nothing else. I found it in the shower, and once I found it I could not stop finding it, the way your tongue finds a chipped tooth. It had a shape. I am not going to pretend I discovered the shape innocently, because by then I owned a fabric measuring tape and no innocent reason for it, and I mapped it, standing with my foot up on the toilet lid like an idiot, dragging a toothpick along my own leg and marking where the feeling stopped with a makeup pencil. It was a triangle. Sides just under two inches, one and seven-eighths by my tape, near enough equilateral that the difference was inside my measurement error, one vertex pointed down toward the ankle. The skin itself, normal. No mark, nothing to photograph, which is of course this whole story in miniature. Every instrument I point at my own life comes back reading normal, and meanwhile the leg does not feel the toothpick.