The ceiling tile above my bed has 1,440 holes in it.
I know because I counted them. Eleven times, across four years, at roughly three in the morning. The first count came out at 1,438, so I recounted on principle. My name is Maren Lisowski, I was thirty-six, and I had not slept a full night since the spring I was promoted.
The promotion was to senior account manager at Corvel Packaging. Corvel made corrugated boxes. We made them in a plant outside Dayton and sold them from a beige office park near the interstate. The company motto was painted in the lobby: We Think Inside the Box. Marketing had been very pleased with that for about nine years.
I was good at my job. I knew every client's flute grade and every client's birthday. I also knew the exact sound my refrigerator made at 2:47 a.m. These two facts were related, and not in a fun way.
I had tried everything.
Chamomile, lavender, a white-noise machine with settings for "Ocean," "Rain," and "Gentle Stream." All three sounded like someone running a bath in another apartment.
I tried a weighted blanket, which made me feel like a sandwich nobody intended to eat. I tried a podcast where a man read train timetables in a soft voice. I learned a great deal about connections through Pittsburgh.
"Have you tried just closing your eyes?" my mother asked.
"Mom. I have closed my eyes for four years."
"And?"
"And then I open them and look at the ceiling."
My desk neighbor, Rafe Delacroix, had suggestions too. Rafe was twenty-nine, a sales coordinator, and he kept a running tally of everything on yellow sticky notes.
How many times the copier jammed. How many emails began with "Per my last email." How many times I said "circle back" in a single meeting.
"Fourteen," he told me one Tuesday, peeling a sticky note off his monitor and handing it over. "That's a personal best."
"I don't say it that much."
"You said it to the vending machine."
"The vending machine owed me a granola bar."
He looked at me with real concern. Rafe had a kind face and terrible posture.
"You look like a screen saver," he said. "Go see a professional. Not a podcast."
The professional was Dr. Inez Harrow.
She was sixty-one, a licensed clinical psychologist with a certification in clinical hypnosis. She had a corner office above a bakery in the old part of town. It smelled faintly of cinnamon rolls, which I decided to count as a credential. Her shelves held textbooks, a jar of lemon drops, and a framed license I read twice, in full, while she wasn't looking.
She had short white hair and reading glasses on a green cord. Whenever I said something alarming, she leaned forward and said, "Interesting." It was the warmest "interesting" I had ever heard. She said it the way other people say "Oh, a puppy."
"Four years," she said, after I had told her everything. "And you've counted the holes in your ceiling tile."
"Fourteen hundred and forty."
"Interesting." She wrote something down. "That's a very orderly kind of not sleeping."
She explained what hypnosis was, and what it wasn't. It wasn't a stage act or a swinging pocket watch, and nobody would make me do anything.
It was focused relaxation, she said, a state I'd been in a hundred times without noticing. Zoning out on a highway. Losing an hour to a good book.
"You'll be aware the whole time," she said. "You can open your eyes whenever you like. If you want to stop, say so, and we stop. Fair?"
"Fair."
"We'll also build you a cue. A short phrase that tells your body it's allowed to rest. You'll say it to yourself at bedtime. It's like a key you can carry home."
"Can I choose it?"
"You must choose it. It's yours." She tapped her pen on the notepad.
"My one rule is to pick something you don't hear every day. Not 'okay.' Not 'good night.' Something with a little personality."
I thought about my father in the parking lot of St. Bernadette's, the summer I was sixteen. He was teaching me to drive our old station wagon.
I had stalled it eleven times. The twelfth time, he had put his hand on the dashboard, very calm.
"Park it, kiddo," he'd said. "Engine off. Breathe. We've got all day."
It was the most relaxed I had ever felt in a vehicle.
"Park it," I told Dr. Harrow.
She wrote it down. "Lovely. Very concrete. Nobody's going to say that to you by accident."
I want to be clear that I agreed with her. I want that on the record.
The session itself took forty minutes. I remember most of it.
Her voice was low and even. She had me picture the station wagon, the empty lot, the engine ticking as it cooled.
She asked me to notice my shoulders, then my jaw, then my hands. I noticed that all three had apparently been clenched since my second year at Corvel. Somewhere in there she said, "And when you're ready, you can park it," and I felt my whole body exhale.
Then she counted me up from one to five. I opened my eyes. The cinnamon smell was still there.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Heavy," I said. "In a good way. Like a box with the right flute grade."
"I'll take your word for it." She handed me a lemon drop and a printed sheet. "Tonight, lie down, say your phrase, and let it work. Call me Thursday and tell me what happened."
That night I lay down at 10:30. I looked at the ceiling tile out of habit. I said, quietly, "Park it."
I woke up at 7:15 the next morning.
I lay there for a long time, not trusting it. The light was wrong, too bright and too yellow. Then I understood: it was morning light.
I hadn't seen it from a horizontal position since my early thirties. I cried a little. Then I made pancakes, on a Wednesday, like a lunatic.
It worked the next night, too, and the night after. By the weekend I had slept thirty-one hours in four nights.
I went to the grocery store and smiled at a stranger's baby. The baby looked startled. So did I.
On Monday I walked into Corvel Packaging like a woman in a vitamin commercial.
"Whoa," said Rafe. He peeled a fresh sticky note off the pad. "Who are you?"
"I slept."
"You slept?"
"Nine hours. Every night. Ask me anything."
"What's your name?"
"Maren."
"What's the capital of Ohio?"
"Columbus."
He wrote SLEPT on the sticky note and stuck it on my monitor like a medal.
The Monday sales meeting was at nine in Conference Room B. Our boss, Duncan Pryor, ran it the way he ran everything: politely, thoroughly, and without ever deciding a single thing.
Duncan was fifty-four, VP of Sales, with a gray beard so neatly trimmed it looked drawn on. He was a genuinely nice man. He remembered your kids' names. He also never made a decision in a room if he could avoid it.
Instead, he parked things.
On the wall of Conference Room B was a whiteboard labeled, in permanent marker, PARKING LOT. Anything that might lead to a disagreement went up there.
A new pricing tier. The broken parking gate. Whether the breakroom needed a second microwave.
Items were numbered. The current number was sixty-three. In my four years, nothing had ever left the Parking Lot. It was less a whiteboard than a cemetery.
Duncan's emails were the other thing. They arrived at 3:12, 3:40, 4:05 in the morning. I knew because I was always awake to receive them.
I'd lie there counting holes, and my phone would light up. Quick thought on Q4. I'd wondered more than once what was on his ceiling.
That Monday, Rafe raised the Fisk Orchards account. Fisk was our biggest client, an apple grower out past Troy. Their contract was up for renewal in two weeks. Rafe thought we should offer them a discount on the new produce crates.
Everyone looked at Duncan. Duncan stroked his beard.
"Good thought, Rafe," he said. He uncapped his marker. "Let's park that."
He wrote 64. FISK DISCOUNT? on the whiteboard.
I remember the squeak of the marker. I remember thinking, warmly, how nice the conference chair felt, how supportive it was in the lumbar region. I remember the gentle tick of an engine cooling in an empty lot.
Then I remember opening my eyes.
My cheek was resting on the Q4 sales forecast. Someone had slid a box of tissues under my elbow. The room was silent.
Eleven people were staring at me. Duncan was frozen, marker still raised, the cap held delicately between two fingers.
Rafe leaned in close to my ear and whispered, "Four minutes. I timed it."
Up next: Four Minutes Exactly
Continue to Part 2 →