I pick up the bottle. I've held this bottle a thousand times. Two thousand. Eleven years of mornings, opening the cap, taking the pill, closing the cap. I've never looked at the label. Not really. Not the way you look at something when you're trying to see it.
I look at it now.
The pharmacy name: Pemberton Family Pharmacy. The address: 1847 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
I've never been to this pharmacy. I've never called this pharmacy. Linda always handled the refills. Every bottle arrived with the same label, the same address, the samedosage instructions: one daily, with food or water, for anxiety management.
I pick up my phone and type the address into Google Maps.
1847 Spruce Street is a parking garage.
No… no, no. This can’t be real. Some kind of mistake, surely.
I stare at the screen. I zoom in. I zoom out. I switch to street view. A five-story concrete parking garage between a dry cleaner and an office building. No pharmacy. No storefront. No sign. Just a parking garage with a monthly rate posted on the entrance and a gate arm and a strip of LED lights along the ceiling of the first level.
I type the pharmacy name into Google. Pemberton Family Pharmacy. Zero results. No website. No Yelp listing. No phone number. No record of a business by that name anywhere in Philadelphia, anywhere in Pennsylvania, anywhere in the country.
The pharmacy on my prescription label does not exist.
I put the phone down. I pick up the bottle. I read the label again. Pemberton Family Pharmacy. 1847 Spruce Street. One daily. For anxiety management.
The pharmacy doesn't exist. The address is a parking garage. The medication I've been taking every morning for elevenyears was prescribed by a doctor I don't remember, filled at a pharmacy that isn't real, and supplied by a foster mother who hasn't returned my calls in five days.
My finger taps the pill bottle. Fast. Faster. The plastic rattles in my hand because the bottle is empty and the tapping makes the sides vibrate and the sound fills the quiet apartment.
I think about the girl on the floor. My hands on the concrete. The tapping.
I think about the pills that kept me from seeing her.
I think about Linda's voice on the phone.Don't forget your vitamins. You've been on them since you were a girl. Your body depends on them. Don't try to go without.
My body depends on them.What does that mean? What happens when I go without?Headaches, nausea and shaking and fragments of a life I don't remember, a room with no windows, a floor with no warmth, a child's hands doing the thing my hands still do twenty-four years later.
What were the pills keeping quiet?
What am I remembering?
I put the bottle down. I pick up the phone. I don't call Linda. I don't call Carmelo. I don't call Javi or a therapist or a doctor. Anidea just smacked me in the face and for some reason there’s an urge to jump down the rabbit hole with it.
I open the browser and I type:pharmaceutical memory suppression.
The results load. I read the first three links. I read them again. I read them a third time. My tapping has stopped completely. My hands are still. The apartment is dark and quiet and I'm sitting on my bed with an empty pill bottle and a phone screen full of information that is dismantling every assumption I have ever made about my own life.
Memory suppression. Pharmaceutical intervention designed to prevent traumatic memories from consolidating into conscious recall. Experimental. Not commercially available. Used in classified military and intelligence applications. Side effects of cessation include: headaches, nausea, tremors, dream disturbances, fragmentary recall, emotional dysregulation.
Headaches. Nausea. Tremors. Fragments.
Every symptom I've had is on this list. But that doesn’t make sense.Military and intelligence operations? Why… how would I be on them?And yet, even as I think it, I know it to be true. I can’t explain why, but my body is remembering things and that feeling of rightness is hitting me square in the chest.
The pill wasn't for anxiety. It was never for anxiety. It was for forgetting. Someone gave me this pill when I was thirteen years old and told me it was for anxiety and I believed them.I took it every morning for eleven years and it kept me from remembering a room with no windows and a child's hands on a concrete floor.
My phone buzzes. A text from Carmelo. I’d forgotten I gave him my number:Are you okay?
I stare at the message. I think about last night. His body above mine. His mouth on mine. The way he held me when I screamed. The way he said, "Your body remembers things your mind doesn't" and I heard comfort in it and now I'm hearing something else.
He wasn't surprised. When I screamed in Italian, when I had the flashback, when I curled into a ball and shook and cried. He wasn't surprised. He pulled back immediately. He knew what to say. He knew how to hold me. He knew what was happening.
How did he know what was happening?