The state hired me in February to work nights at the Tenmile Rest Area, westbound side of I-84, about forty minutes east of Portland. It is two restroom buildings, a vending alcove, a picnic shelter nobody uses in winter, and a big backlit map of Oregon under a little roof by the walkway, with a red dot on it that says YOU ARE HERE. The job is ten at night to six in the morning. You clean, you restock, you check on anybody who has been parked a long time, and you call the state police if something is wrong. The pay is fine. The quiet is the real benefit.

The man who had the job before me was named Gil Ostrander. He’d done it for nineteen years and retired, the district supervisor said, “sort of suddenly.” He left a sheet of lined paper thumbtacked inside the supply closet door, above the mop sink. I’m copying it here exactly, spelling and all, because a couple of people on a road-workers forum asked me to after I mentioned it.

FOR WHOEVER IS NEXT

The hand dryer in the men’s room by the door sticks on. Unplug it at the outlet behind the panel, don’t try to fix it, the district knows.
Paper towels go in the left closet, TP in the right. If you put them in the same closet the mice get into the TP. Don’t ask me why mice care.
Trucks park in the long lot. Let them sleep. If a car has been in the short lot more than four hours with somebody in it, knock on the window. If nobody answers and you can’t see them breathing, call it in. Don’t open the door yourself. I did once. It was fine but don’t.
The vending guy comes Tuesdays around 3 am. His name is Roy. He’s ok.
The wind off the river will slam the north door. That’s just wind.
The map. I’m going to explain this once.
The red dot on the big map under the roof is supposed to be at the Gorge, on the river, about an inch left of Hood River. That’s where we are. Every time you walk out to empty the walkway trash cans, look at the map and check the dot is there. It will be there almost every night. It’s printed on, it can’t move, I know. Look anyway.
If the dot is NOT where it should be, do not go further than the walkway. Go back to the building you came from and stay inside it with the door shut until the dot is back. You can check through the window. Usually it’s back in under an hour.
While the dot is somewhere else, people will pull in. They’ll seem normal. They will ask you for directions. Tell them you’re new and you don’t know the area. Do not tell them where we are. Do not tell them what town is next. Don’t point.
If the dot is off the map completely, meaning it’s out on the plastic border or past it, don’t look out the windows at all. Do the restrooms. Do them twice. It will be morning eventually. It always has been.
Do not touch the dot. Don’t put your finger on it. Don’t try to “push it back.” I know you’ll want to.
Roy knows. Ask Roy if you have to but he doesn’t like talking about it.

Good luck, it’s a good job mostly. — G.O.

I read that on my first night and laughed out loud alone in a supply closet, which is a strange sound to hear yourself make. I assumed it was the kind of thing you leave for the new guy. A joke with a long fuse.

The first two months were exactly what the supervisor said. Truckers and their idling engines. A family once at two in the morning, a little boy carried asleep into the restroom over his father’s shoulder like a sack of laundry. A woman who sat in her car and cried for an hour and then knocked on the building to thank me for leaving the lights on, which I had not done for her but let her think so. I unplugged the dryer. I kept the towels and the paper apart. I checked the map every time I went out, mostly because it was funny to me, and the dot was always an inch left of Hood River, printed in red ink on vinyl under a pane of scratched plexiglass. It can’t move. It’s a sticker.

On the night of April 9th I took the walkway trash out at about 1:40 and the dot was in the Wallowa Mountains.

I want to be precise. I don’t mean it was blurry, or that the plexiglass had a reflection, or that I misread it. The map is printed with the dot in one place. I had looked at it maybe a hundred times by then. That night there was no red dot by Hood River. The printed arrow and the words YOU ARE HERE were still by Hood River, pointing at nothing. The dot itself was three hundred miles east, on the green of the mountains up in the northeast corner of the state, exactly as bright and exactly as round.

I stood there holding a trash bag. I remember the bag was dripping on my shoe. I remember deciding that I would just put the bag in the dumpster, because the dumpster was only past the shelter, and then I remember that the walkway lights ended at the shelter and that past them the dark was very complete, the kind of dark you only get in the Gorge on a cloudy night, when the river is right there and you can’t see it, only hear it.

And I could not hear it.

That’s the thing I keep returning to. You can always hear the river at Tenmile, and the interstate. That night it was silent the way a room is silent. The wind wasn’t moving. I turned around and went back into the men’s building and shut the door and stood with my back against it, feeling stupid, and then not feeling stupid, because a car pulled into the short lot.

It was a silver hatchback, I think. Ordinary. Its headlights swept across the window and stopped. The engine stayed running. Nobody got out for almost twenty minutes. I watched through the little wire-glass window in the door. When the driver did get out he was a man in a gray fleece, maybe fifty, and he walked straight across the lot, up the walkway, past the map without looking at it, and knocked on my door.

I didn’t open it. I spoke through it. I said, “Help you?”

“Hey,” he said, friendly. “Sorry. I’m a little turned around. Where is this?”

The voice was right. It was a regular man’s voice. But he was standing very close to the door, closer than people stand, close enough that I could see in the wire glass the top of his head and nothing else, and his breath didn’t fog the glass, and it was cold enough that mine did.

“I’m new,” I said. “I don’t really know the area.”

“Sure. But what’s the next town? Just west of here.”

“Sorry.”

“Which way’s the river?” he said.

That was when I understood that Gil had not been joking, because it is the strangest question you can ask at Tenmile. The river is a hundred yards away and it is the biggest thing in the world. It’s why the rest area exists. You can’t be at Tenmile and not know which way the river is.

“Sorry,” I said again.

He stood there for a long time. Then he said, quite gently, “That’s all right,” and walked back to his car, and I watched him not look at the map again. He sat in the hatchback with the engine running and the lights on for another forty minutes, facing the building. Then he pulled out and I heard nothing, no engine fading, no tires. Just not there.

At 3:15 I looked through the window at the map and the dot was back by Hood River, and I could hear the river again, like someone had taken their hands off my ears.

Roy came Tuesday. Roy is about sixty-five and wears a back brace over his uniform and does not want to talk to anyone at three in the morning, which I respect. I helped him wheel the snack pallet in and when he was loading the coils I said, “Gil left a note about the map.”

Roy kept loading. Pretzels, pretzels, the peanut butter crackers nobody buys.

“Gil was here a long time,” he said finally.

“Has it ever been off the map? Off the edge?”

He shut the machine. He wrote something on his clipboard that I’m fairly sure was not related to inventory. “Once that I know about,” he said. “Two thousand eleven. Gil called me after. Asked me to come up the next night and keep him company.” He tucked the pen behind his ear. “You doing the restrooms twice is good advice. Gives your hands something.”

“What happened when it was off the edge?”

“He said the cars kept coming in. All night. Lot full. Nobody got out.” Roy looked at me with that tired neutral face older working men have when they’ve decided you’re all right but they’re not going to make a thing of it. “He said they all had their dome lights on. So he could see they were looking at him.”

He left. I did the restrooms.

I’m writing this down because of what happened two nights ago, and because the district supervisor still hasn’t called me back.

The dot was gone again at 12:50. Not in the Wallowas this time. I checked the whole map twice with my flashlight. Then I found it. It was in the bottom right corner, in the legend box, sitting on top of the little printed scale bar where it says 0 — 25 — 50 MILES. As if it was trying to measure something. As if it was trying to work out how far.

I went back inside. Nobody came all night. That should have been better and it wasn’t. At about 4 a.m. I went to the window to check and the dot was on the plexiglass.

Not the map. The plexiglass. It was on the outside of the cover, a red circle the size of a quarter, at about the height of my face, as if it had been pressed there by a thumb. And as I watched, it slid. Slowly, the way a drop of water goes down a window, except it was going sideways. Toward the edge of the frame. Toward the walkway. Toward the building I was in.

I stopped watching. I did the restrooms twice and then a third time, and at six the day guy, Hector, came in and found me scrubbing a sink that was already clean, and I told him I hadn’t slept, which was true.

When I walked out to my truck the dot was back by Hood River and the morning was bright and wet and the river was enormous and loud.

I’ve been thinking about rule 11. Don’t touch the dot. Don’t try to push it back. Gil wrote, I know you’ll want to. I thought for a long time that meant I’d be tempted to fix it, like straightening a crooked picture. I don’t think that’s what he meant anymore.

I think he meant that when it gets close enough, you’ll want to know where it’s trying to tell you that you are.

The supervisor said Gil retired sort of suddenly. I asked for a forwarding address so I could ask him a couple of things. The supervisor said he didn’t have one. He said the last anyone heard, Gil had called in from a pay phone and said he’d be back as soon as he figured out which way the river was.

I go back on tonight. The dot is where it should be, as of this afternoon. I drove out to check. I stood in front of the map in daylight for ten minutes, and a woman walking her dog from a minivan asked if I was all right, and I said yes. She asked me where the nearest gas was. I told her Hood River, east, twenty minutes.

I told her. I pointed.

It was daylight, and she was real, and she had a dog. I’m almost sure it was fine.