The Night Shift

The Night Shift

The pharmacy at 3 a.m. is a confessional with fluorescent lighting.

Nobody comes in at 3 a.m. because things are going well. This is the first thing you learn, working the overnight at a 24-hour pharmacy, and it sounds obvious until you're six months in and you've developed the specific, involuntary literacy that comes from being the person on the other side of the counter at the hour when the performance of fine has finally exhausted itself and people arrive as what they actually are.

You learn to read them.

Not the prescription. The body carrying the prescription.

The prescription tells you what the doctor decided. The body tells you everything the doctor didn't have time for, or didn't ask, or asked and wasn't told. You stand on your side of the counter and you fill the prescription and you counsel the patient as required by the board of pharmacy and you say any questions and you watch the body decide how much to give you.

Usually: not much.

Sometimes: everything.

The everything is what stays with you.

The everything is what I am going to tell you about.

---

My name is Sylvie Okafor and I have worked the overnight shift at Gateway Pharmacy on the corner of Clement and 9th for nine years, which means I have stood behind this counter for nine years of 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. and the particular quality of human being that those hours produce.

I want to be careful about how I describe what I've learned to see.

The careful matters because what I am describing is not a supernatural ability. It is not instinct in the mystical sense. It is pattern recognition developed through nine years of standing very still behind a counter at the hour when most people are asleep and the ones who aren't are here, at the counter, handing me a piece of paper that tells me one thing while their body tells me another.

I am going to tell you what the body says.

I am going to try to stay inside the language the profession allows.

It will be insufficient.

I am going to try anyway.

---

On the pharmacy at night:

There are two pharmacies.

The day pharmacy and the night pharmacy occupy the same building, the same counter, the same fluorescent lights that were calibrated for efficiency rather than mercy and illuminate everything with the flat, democratic brightness of a place that has no interest in shadows. The same shelves of aspirin and cold medicine and the seasonal display that transitions from Halloween candy to Christmas cards to Valentine's Day to Easter with the cheerful, frictionless optimism of a business that believes in the calendar's ability to organize experience.

The day pharmacy is a transaction.

The night pharmacy is something else.

At night the transaction is still there, the prescription, the insurance, the copay, the take with food and the avoid alcohol and the may cause drowsiness, all of it still present and still necessary and still the job.

But underneath the transaction, at night, something else is present.

The unmanaged quality of people past the point of management.

The day pharmacy gets the version people have prepared. The night pharmacy gets what's left after the preparation has run out.

What's left is considerable.

What's left is what I have learned to read.

---

2:07 a.m.:

The man who comes in every other Thursday for his wife's pain medication comes in tonight instead of Thursday, which is the first deviation in eight months of Thursdays. He is wearing the clothes of someone who went to bed and got up again. He hands me the prescription without speaking, which is not unusual, he has never been a speaker, but tonight there is a quality to the not-speaking that is different from the previous Thursdays.

I fill the prescription.

I run the insurance.

I say: any questions.

He looks at the counter for a moment.

He says: she's not doing well.

I say: I'm sorry.

He takes the bag.

He goes.

This is the full extent of what happened.

This is also not the full extent of what happened.

The full extent of what happened is in the shoulders, the way they carried the weight of eight months of Thursdays and the weight of tonight being not-Thursday, the weight of a man who has been coming to this counter for eight months and has not once said she's not doing well and said it tonight because tonight it became the only true sentence he had left.

I know this because I have been standing behind this counter for nine years.

I know it in the way you know things that accumulate through the body rather than the mind.

The prescription is in the system.

Any questions is in the log.

The shoulders are not in anything.

The shoulders go home with me.

---

On what the body says at 3 a.m.:

The body says things the voice has decided not to.

This is not deception, not usually. This is the gap between conscious communication and the information the body is transmitting below the level of conscious control, the nervous system doing its honest, continuous, unedited work regardless of what the mind has decided to present.

Nine years behind this counter at this hour has made me fluent in the gap.

The hands that shake slightly when they hand me the prescription, not from cold, not from age, but from the specific tremor of a system under sustained stress that is doing its best to appear unsustained. The eyes that don't quite make contact in the way of someone who has recently been crying and doesn't want it read. The deliberate quality of the normal voice, the voice that is working harder than normal voices work, the voice that has been coached by the person using it to sound like everything is fine.

Everything is fine is the most common thing the body is saying at 3 a.m. and the least convincing.

The body at 3 a.m. is not fine.

The body at 3 a.m. is here, which is a different thing, which is sometimes the bravest thing, which is all I can tell you with any certainty because the rest is the gap and the gap is not mine to fill.

---

2:43 a.m.:

The woman with the child.

The child is four, maybe five, wrapped in a blanket that has a cartoon character on it I don't recognize, the specific, beloved raggedness of a blanket that has been important for several years and shows it. The child is half-asleep against the woman's shoulder with the complete, trusting weight of a body that has not yet learned to be anxious about the 2:43 a.m. pharmacy or why they are there.

The woman hands me the prescription with the hand that isn't holding the child and the prescription is for a children's antibiotic, amoxicillin, the reliable first-line response to the ear infection or the strep throat or any of the several things that spike a small fever at midnight and require a parent to drive to the 24-hour pharmacy with a cartoon blanket and a half-asleep child and stand at the counter at 2:43 a.m. trying to hold everything at once.

I fill it fast.

This is something I can do. Speed is something I can offer. Speed says: I know you need to be somewhere else. I know what you're carrying. I will do my part quickly.

Speed is the only language the situation has room for.

I hand her the bag.

I say: amoxicillin, twice daily, finish the full course even if symptoms improve.

I say: hope she feels better soon.

The woman looks at me.

She says: thank you in the voice of someone who is thanking me for more than the amoxicillin.

I know what she's thanking me for.

I nod.

She goes.

I watch her go through the sliding doors into the 2:43 a.m. parking lot, the child's blanket trailing slightly, the automatic doors sliding closed behind them, and I stand at the counter and I think: I will not remember her name. The prescription is in the system. The child's name is in the system. I will not remember them specifically, they will become part of the accumulated archive of the overnight, part of what nine years has built in me.

But right now, at 2:44 a.m., I remember them completely.

---

On the ones who take longer:

Most of them don't take long.

The overnight pharmacy customer has usually decided, by the time they arrive, what they are going to do and say and how much they are going to give the pharmacist and how quickly they are going to leave. The 3 a.m. errand is not a social occasion. It is a necessity, and necessities want to be completed, and most people complete them with the focused efficiency of someone who would like to be back in bed.

Some of them take longer.

The ones who take longer are the ones who came for something in addition to the prescription. Not the counseling, not the take with food, not the avoid alcohol. Something else. The specific something of a person who has been alone with the 3 a.m. thing and needs, for one minute, to be in the presence of another person who is also awake, who is also here, who is not going to ask them to explain themselves.

I have learned not to rush these.

I have learned to fill the prescription at the speed the speed requires and then to be still at the counter, available, not performing availability but actually available, actually present, in the way that the overnight requires a particular quality of presence that the day shift doesn't need because the day shift has noise and light and the social scaffolding of a world that is awake and moving.

At 3 a.m. I am frequently the only scaffold available.

This is not in the job description.

It is the job.

---

3:17 a.m.:

He has been here before.

Not a regular, not in the way of the man with his wife's prescription or the woman with the cholesterol medication she picks up on the first of every month. But I have seen him, twice before, in the last year, at this hour, and I have the pharmacist's memory for faces and the overnight pharmacist's memory for the specific faces that come in at this hour, because those faces are fewer and the fewer they are the more completely they are held.

He looks worse than last time.

Not sick exactly. Not the sick that has a prescription. The other kind.

He hands me the prescription and the prescription is for nothing alarming. An antidepressant, a common one, a refill. I run it through. The insurance processes. I fill it.

While I fill it he stands at the counter and he looks at the display of vitamins to his left with the quality of attention of someone who is not looking at the vitamins, who is looking at the thing that is not in his field of vision and is using the vitamins as a surface to look at while he looks at it.

I come back to the counter.

I put the bag down.

I say: any questions.

He looks at me.

In nine years I have learned the difference between any questions as a regulatory requirement and any questions as an actual question, and I am asking the actual question, and he knows I am asking the actual question, and we are standing on either side of the counter at 3:17 a.m. in the fluorescent light that illuminates everything with its flat, democratic brightness, and he is deciding.

He says: I'm having a hard time.

I say: I know.

He says: how do you know.

I say: nine years.

He almost smiles. Not quite. The almost is something.

He takes the bag.

He says: thanks for being open.

He means the pharmacy.

He means something else.

I say: that's what we're here for.

He goes.

I watch the sliding doors close.

I stand at the counter.

I breathe.

This is the job.

This is also not the job.

This is the space between them, the gap between the transaction and the thing underneath the transaction, the place where nine years of overnight shifts has put me, permanently, in the position of the person who is awake at 3 a.m. when the performance has exhausted itself and the body is saying what the voice won't and the only thing I have to offer is a bag with a stapled receipt and the willingness to be here.

I am here.

I have been here for nine years.

---

On what happens at 4 a.m.:

At 4 a.m. it gets quiet.

Not the quiet of nothing happening. The quiet of the deepest part of the night, the hour that is furthest from both the previous day and the coming one, the hour that belongs entirely to itself, that has no morning nostalgia and no evening residue, that is simply and completely the dark middle of things.

At 4 a.m. the counter is usually empty.

At 4 a.m. I stand behind the counter in the fluorescent light and I restock and I verify and I do the administrative work of the overnight and I exist in the particular solitude of a person who is awake when the world is not, which is a solitude that after nine years has become a kind of home.

I think about them.

Not all of them. Not the archive. The specific ones, the ones from tonight, the man with the Thursdays and the woman with the cartoon blanket and the man at 3:17 with his antidepressant refill and his hard time.

I think about what they left on my side of the counter that they didn't mean to leave, or did mean to leave, or couldn't help leaving, the residue of the overnight, the accumulation of what it costs to be a body at 3 a.m. and still be moving through the world.

I think about what it means to be the person who receives that.

What it does to a person, over nine years, to be the one on the other side.

What it builds.

What it costs.

---

There is a thing that happens, after enough years, that I do not have clinical language for and am going to describe anyway.

You start to feel them coming.

Not supernaturally. Not with any ability that would survive scrutiny or peer review or the reasonable skepticism of someone who has not stood behind this counter for nine years at this hour. But you feel the shift in the air before the sliding doors open, the particular quality of the 3 a.m. night outside, and you know, below the level of knowing, that someone is coming in who needs more than the prescription.

The doors open.

They come in.

You were right.

You are always right.

This is not a gift.

It is what nine years makes.

It is what standing in the fluorescent light at the hour when the performance exhausts itself makes, when the bodies arrive as what they are and you receive them, and you fill the prescription, and you say any questions like you mean it, and sometimes they answer and sometimes they don't and either way you are here.

You are here.

That is the whole of it.

That is, at 3 a.m., everything.

---

The pharmacy closes at 6 a.m.

It doesn't close at 6 a.m.

It is 24 hours.

That's the point.

That someone is always here.

That the fluorescent light is always on.

That the sliding doors open
regardless of the hour
regardless of what you're carrying
regardless of whether
what you came for
is on the prescription
or underneath it.

You come in.

I am here.

I have been here for nine years.

I will read what your body says
and fill what the prescription says
and offer you the gap between them
in the only language available:

any questions.

I mean it.

I always mean it.

That's what the overnight makes you.

That's what nine years
of 3 a.m.
makes.

Someone who means it.

Someone who is here.

The doors are open.

Come in.