The Pharmacy at Midnight. What a Night Queue Teaches About a Town

The pharmacy on Allenby Street closes at eleven. The one on the corner of the market stays open all night, and at two in the morning it collects a very particular crowd. I joined the queue there once with a fever and a prescription, and stayed forty minutes, and I have thought about that line of people more than about the medicine. A night queue is not a day queue. During the day, everyone in the line is performing their errand, their schedule, their importance. At night the performance is over. The man in front of me held a small plastic bag of someone else's clothes, folded with the care you use when the person who owns them cannot fold anything anymore. The woman behind me argued gently with the pharmacist about a sleeping pill she did not want to start taking. A taxi driver came in, did not join the queue, put money on the counter, took a box, and left, and nobody objected. The queue accepted that he knew the procedure. Regulars of the night have their own law. What struck me was the patience. Not the tired patience of the daytime, where every minute in line is a theft from something more important. The night queue has nothing more important waiting. People read the shelves. They watched the rain start. A teenager asked the man with the plastic bag what the hospital was like, and he answered her honestly, and she said thank you like he had given her something. I think a town is only really visible between one and four in the morning. The daytime town is a brochure. The night town is the book itself, with its margin notes. The night pharmacist knows which doctors write prescriptions they do not mean, which families are carrying someone, which streets are unsafe after the clubs close. That knowledge is a kind of municipal infrastructure, and it is invisible on any map. Since that night I have made a small habit of it, maybe once a month, buying something unnecessary at a twenty-four hour place and standing in the queue without my phone. The conversations that happen there do not happen anywhere else. People tell night queue strangers things they would not tell their neighbors, precisely because they will never be neighbors. The queue is a confessional with fluorescent lighting. There is also the arithmetic of it. A night queue is short because almost nobody is out. Every person in it has a reason to be. That makes the line dense with story in a way a supermarket line never is. You can stand between a nurse ending a shift and a father buying formula, and if you pay attention for ten minutes, you understand your street, your city, better than any report about it. The medicine worked, by the way. The fever broke the next afternoon. But the prescription I keep is the queue itself. When people ask me how I really learn about a place I live in, I tell them to skip the museums. Go stand somewhere at three in the morning, where a handful of strangers are waiting for something they cannot postpone. Listen. The town will introduce itself.