Versions of the Parking Lot

October 9th, 2:47 AM, the Rite Aid parking lot on Camelback Road, I was driving a 2004 Civic with no insurance and a quarter-tank and my teeth hurt. That’s the version. That’s one of them. I hit the cart corral doing maybe thirty and sat there with the airbag powder on my tongue like communion wafer, like the inside of a condom, like nothing, like a chemical I didn’t have a name for. The horn was stuck. Somebody inside the Rite Aid looked up from the register. The parking lot had those orange sodium lights that turn everything into a memory before it’s finished happening and I thought this is the last clear thing but it wasn’t clear and it wasn’t the last thing and I need to start over.

October 11th, the parking lot, but this time it’s the strip mall on Indian School where the nail salon is. Was. I had a passenger. I didn’t have a passenger. She was someone I used to sleep with before the pills turned sex into a math problem — you calculate friction coefficients, you locate the nerve, you perform the algorithm, you wait for something to register behind your eyes. It never does. You try again. This is what people mean when they say addiction is doing the same thing and expecting different results but what they don’t tell you is that the doing feels different every time, the doing has texture and variation even when the result is the same flat nothing, and so you keep doing it. Anyway the passenger wasn’t there. I’m putting her there now because the version where I’m alone in the car is the version where nothing means anything and if I’m going to write this down in the fucking composition notebook the county gave me I need meaning. I need a passenger. I need a body next to mine so the crash has a witness.

Her name was. Okay. Her name doesn’t matter. The passenger is a structural device. I was an adjunct. I know what a structural device is. I taught Intro to Composition for two semesters at the community college on 7th Avenue and I could diagram a sentence like I was defusing a bomb. Subject, predicate, object. Person, action, consequence. The students wrote essays about their summers and I wrote comments in red ink about thesis statements and none of us believed in what we were doing. I lost the position and then I lost the apartment and I keep saying and then like there’s a sequence but the truth is I can’t remember which came first, the eviction or the firing or the thing with my father or the first time I crushed the Adderall and put it up my nose in the bathroom of the Circle K on 19th Avenue which is also a parking lot, now that I think about it, they’re all parking lots, every surface in this city is a parking lot and I’ve been crashing into all of them for two years.

The child. There was a child in the crosswalk near the cart corral. The child was wearing a red coat and I

There was no child. There was no child. I write this twice so the notebook knows I mean it.

Patient in room 6 not sleeping. Third night. She writes in the composition notebook without stopping, filling pages in handwriting so small you’d need a magnifier to read it. I brought her a cup of water at 3:15 and she didn’t look up. The pen kept moving. She has the kind of hands that make you think of birds — not the pretty metaphor, not doves, but the kind that hop around parking lots eating garbage. Starlings. She has starling hands.

She told the intake counselor her name was Dahl. First name or last name, unclear. We wrote DAHL on her chart and she looked at the letters like she couldn’t remember agreeing to them.

I mop the hallways at 2 AM because that’s when the tile is honest. During the day it’s covered in sneaker marks and spilled Ensure and the particular gray scuff that institutional furniture leaves when you drag it. At 2 AM with the wet mop it becomes just a surface. It gives back the light. I like the weight of the mop handle, the way my arms know the motion without my brain having to participate.

The fluorescent in the hallway outside room 6 hums at a frequency that lives in my back teeth. I’ve submitted three maintenance requests. The hum continues. It is the ward’s one continuous sound. At night when everything else goes quiet the hum becomes the largest thing in the building and I think about the woman in the car.

Not Dahl. The other woman. The one from the call.

I was a paramedic for six years. I was good at it. I was good at touching people with precision and saying you’re going to be okay in the voice that means I am performing competence so you don’t panic. None of it was love. All of it was tenderness. I learned the difference on the job: you stabilize the cervical spine, you apply pressure to the wound, you do not let your hands shake. A woman on Camelback Road. 4 AM. She had driven into the light pole in the Walgreens lot and when I got there the sodium lights were making everything amber and the blood was black on the asphalt and she was still in the car with the seatbelt on and the airbag deflated across her lap like a failed parachute. She said something as I leaned into the car. She said I did this on purpose. I said you’re going to be okay. She said that’s not what I said. I never learned her name. The ER took her and I went to the next call and the next and two years later I quit and now I mop floors in a detox unit and I think the mop handle weighs the same as a human head. I don’t know why I know that.

She drove through the city at night with the windows down and the radio tuned to static because static was the only station that didn’t lie. She had been driving for three hours or three days. The fuel gauge read empty but the car kept moving the way a body keeps moving after the brain has decided to stop — on chemical momentum, on the residual electricity in the nerves, on sheer refusal to be finished.

She was looking for something. Not a place. Not a person. A particular quality of light she remembered from a parking lot in another city in another year when she was a different woman wearing a different name.

ITEMS RECOVERED FROM VEHICLE (MPD INCIDENT #2025-AZ-44891):

• Composition notebook, mostly blank, water-damaged
• Three pens (two dead)
• CVS receipt, 47 inches, purchased: gum, lighter, acetaminophen
• Paperback novel, no cover, pages 1-30 missing
• Left shoe, women’s size 8, no matching right
• Hair elastic with four strands of dark hair
• Photograph, faded, two women on a porch, one laughing

The photograph was not of her. She had stolen it from somewhere she couldn’t remember or she had been given it by someone who no longer existed or it had always been in the car the way certain objects precede their owners, sitting in glove compartments and under seats, waiting patiently for the person who will eventually need them to arrive.

The mechanics of a human body against a windshield: the skull is harder than you’d think. The glass is softer. The glass wants to give. It’s designed to shatter in a specific pattern — tempered, they call it, which is a word that also means restrained, controlled, which is a word that also means brought to the right hardness by heating and cooling, which is what they do to you in detox, isn’t it, they heat you and cool you and heat you until you are the right kind of breakable, until you shatter in the pattern they want.

From the paperback, page 87: “Dahlia pressed her face to the glass and the glass was cold and she thought about the word pane which is also the word pain with an e on the end like a dress someone put on it to make it presentable for company. She had been pressing her face to glass her whole life. Windows, windshields, the glass doors of pharmacies at 3 AM, the observation windows of institutions where they kept people who pressed their faces to glass. She wanted to go through. Not to break it. To go through it the way light goes through it, without breaking, without leaving a mark, without being stopped.”

This was not in the book. This was in the notebook. The difference had stopped mattering on the second night.

My body. I should describe my body because this is supposed to be a record and my body is the evidence.

The amphetamines ate me from the inside. Teeth first — my dentist said significant erosion and I said significant erosion of what and he said enamel and I wanted to say no, significant erosion of the person who used to floss, who used to show up for the cleaning every six months, who used to believe the mouth was worth maintaining. My skin went paper. My cunt dried out. That’s not metaphor, that’s pharmacology — you can’t come on thirty milligrams of mixed amphetamine salts, you can fuck for four hours and never arrive anywhere, you become a machine for generating friction with no product. I wrote a whole essay about this once. “The Machinic Body Under Late Capitalism.” I submitted it to a journal and the rejection letter said this reads more like confession than criticism and I thought yes, you idiot, the confession IS the criticism, my ruined mouth IS the argument.

I found the book in the common room. Between a James Patterson and a water-stained Bible. No cover. No first thirty pages. The spine cracked at page 112 like someone had held it open there, pressing down until the glue surrendered. I started reading because there was nothing else — they took my phone and the television in the common room plays only a channel that sells jewelry and the jewelry is always described as stunning, which is a word that means to be knocked unconscious.

Page 31 began mid-sentence: —never forgave her for the parking lot, for the way she’d turned the wheel deliberately, not toward anything but away from the last version of herself that still—

The character’s name was Dahlia. Close enough. The events were wrong but the body was right — the same ruined mouth, the same dead hands, the same inability to stop writing. I read passages out loud in group therapy. The counselor said Dahl, we’re doing something else right now. I said this is the something else, this is the only thing. I kept reading. A woman named Dahlia drives through a city. A woman named Dahlia fucks a man in a parking structure and feels nothing and writes about feeling nothing and the writing feels like something, which is the trap.

I copied sentences from the book into my notebook without quotation marks because quotation marks are a form of property law and I don’t believe in property, not anymore, not since everything I owned fit in a car I couldn’t drive. I changed Dahlia to Dahl. I changed the parking structure to a parking lot. I changed the man to a woman because that was truer. The sentences were mine now. The sentences had always been mine. Every book I’ve ever read was written by me in a language I hadn’t learned yet.

My father put his hands on my

A woman named Dahlia has a father. Every woman in every book has a father. The father is the first structural device. You learn the word no from his hands. You learn the word boundary from the place where his body ends and yours begins, except it doesn’t end, except the boundary is a fiction you tell yourself in therapy with the laminated worksheets, the boundary is a line drawn on a map of a country that no longer exists.

I had a father. I had two fathers. One was the real one and one was the one I wrote in my Intro to Composition class when the prompt was “describe a person who shaped you” and I wrote a father who was gentle and distant and smelled like Old Spice and was nothing like the actual man. The students didn’t know. The professor didn’t know. The essay got an A. The lie got an A. This is what writing teaches you: the made-up version is always better than the true one, and the true one will kill you if you let it sit on the page unrevised.

I am writing this in room 6 of Maricopa County Behavioral Health. The pen is county-issued. The notebook is county-issued. My body is, at this point, county-issued. I am property of the state for another 41 hours. They took my phone and my belt. They left me the language, which was a mistake, which is the most dangerous thing I own.

I am three people: the woman in the car, the woman in the book, and the woman in the notebook. She. I. You. You sit in a room and you write yourself into existence and the version you produce is the version that gets to live and the other versions die on the page and this is what they don’t teach you in Intro to Composition: every sentence you write is a murder of the sentence you didn’t.

I watched her through the observation window at 3 AM and the fluorescent light made her look like something that had been set down on a bed with great care by something not human — the way we used to place people on gurneys, with precision that looked like love but wasn’t.

Tonight I stood outside room 6 for eleven minutes. I timed it by the clock above the nurse’s station. I put my hand on the door. The metal was warm from the heating vent. Through the window I could see her writing. Her mouth was moving. She was saying the words as she wrote them, or she was saying different words, or she was praying, which is a thing I’ve seen patients do at 3 AM when they think no one is watching — their mouths move and you can’t hear what comes out and it doesn’t matter what comes out because the mouth moving is the thing itself.

I wanted to open the door. Not to help her. To read what she’d written. To see if her parking lot was my parking lot. To see if the woman in her notebook was the woman from my call — the one who said I did this on purpose — and if so, what that would mean, and if not, what the coincidence would mean, and in either case whether meaning was even the right word for the thing I was looking for standing outside that door with my hand on the warm metal at 3 AM with the fluorescent humming in my teeth.

I did not open the door.

She read the book until the book was inside her. She read the book until she was inside the book. There is a specific medical term for this condition: it is called reading. It is also called possession. In the fifteenth century they treated it with fire. In the twenty-first century they treat it with laminated worksheets about coping strategies and a seventy-two-hour hold and a composition notebook that says on the cover YOUR RECOVERY JOURNAL in a font designed to look handwritten but isn’t.

A woman sits in a room. She writes. A man stands outside the room. He watches. Between them a door, a window, a sheet of glass that is also a version of the windshield she drove through, that is also a page of the book she stole from the common room, that is also the surface of the parking lot where everything happened or nothing happened or the happening was so small, so internal, that no police report could contain it.

Last version. I’ll make this one plain.

October 9th. 2:47 AM. The Rite Aid parking lot on Camelback. I was alone. I was driving and then I was not driving. I pulled into the lot and turned off the engine and sat there with my hands on the wheel. Nothing was hit. No cart corral, no light pole, no child, no passenger. The airbag didn’t deploy because there was no impact. I sat in the car for two hours. The parking lot was empty. The sodium lights buzzed. A cat walked across the asphalt and looked at me through the windshield and I thought it could see every version of me and didn’t care about any of them.

I called 911 at 4:50 AM because I couldn’t make my hands let go of the wheel. The dispatcher asked what my emergency was and I said I stopped. She said stopped what, ma’am. I said everything, I stopped everything and she sent someone and the someone was kind and the kindness didn’t mean what I wanted it to mean.

I’m leaving the notebook on the bed. The orderly watches me through the glass. I know because I can feel the quality of his attention the way you feel someone reading over your shoulder. Let him have it. Let him hold the versions. I’m walking out of here tomorrow with nothing in my hands.

I found the notebook on the bed Tuesday morning after she was discharged. The sheets were still wrinkled from her body and the pen was on the pillow. I read the whole thing standing in the doorway. Twenty minutes. The handwriting got smaller as the pages went on, like she was trying to fit more of herself into less space.

I put the notebook in my locker. Combination 12-34-08. I did not return it. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. She didn’t leave a last name. She left versions of a parking lot that might be my parking lot, that might be the Walgreens on Camelback, that might be the Rite Aid or the strip mall or every lot in this city.

I read one passage three times. She had written it in handwriting so small I had to hold the page to my face: The orderly came in. He read what I wrote. He recognized it. This is how I know it’s true — when someone else’s face breaks. But I didn’t come in. I stood outside the door. I didn’t read it until now. She wrote my recognition before it happened. She wrote me into her notebook the way she wrote herself into the book she found in the common room — without permission, without accuracy, without caring whether it was true. She needed a witness so she invented one. And now here I am, witnessing. And I can’t tell if I’m doing this because she wrote it or because I chose it or if there’s a difference.

The fluorescent still hums. I have her notebook in my locker and I don’t know what to do with it. I thought I would know by the time I finished writing this down.