THE INTERVIEW

18: The Exit

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The hallway was longer than he remembered.

Dale walked, one foot in front of the other, past door after door after door. All of them closed. All of them unmarked. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, flat and shadowless, and the carpet absorbed his footsteps without sound.

Had there been this many doors before? He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember much of anything from before—the walk in, the waiting room, the receptionist who had smiled and said she'll be with you shortly. It felt like something that had happened to someone else. A story he'd been told about a man named Dale Kinney who had come here looking for a job.

He kept walking.

The hallway seemed to stretch as he moved through it, the exit perpetually ahead, never getting closer. But that was impossible. Hallways didn't stretch. Buildings didn't rearrange themselves around you. He was tired, that was all. Disoriented from sitting in a room for eight hours, answering questions that—

That he couldn't quite remember now. There had been questions. Many questions. He'd answered them honestly, he was sure of that. And at the end, he'd signed something, and Ms. Vance had shaken his hand, and now he was employed. Now he had somewhere to go on Monday. Now he could tell Linda—

Linda.

The name rose in his mind, familiar and strange. He had a wife named Linda. She was waiting for him at home. She'd said something to him that morning, standing in the kitchen doorway, and he'd meant to do something in response but hadn't. What had she said? What had he meant to do?

He kept walking.

Finally—after minutes or hours or no time at all—the hallway ended. A door stood before him, and beyond the door, visible through a narrow window, was the waiting room. The burgundy chairs. The low table with its magazines. The water cooler in the corner.

Dale pushed through the door.

The waiting room was empty.

Not just empty of people—empty of presence. The receptionist's desk sat against the wall, but no one was behind it. The computer screen was dark. The chair was pushed back, as if someone had stood up and walked away and never returned.

Dale stood in the doorway, looking at the empty desk.

She'd been here when he arrived. Young, mid-twenties, with a professional smile and a voice that revealed nothing. She'd told him to have a seat. She'd typed at her keyboard while he waited. And when he'd followed Ms. Vance down the hallway, she'd been—

She'd been watching him. He remembered that now. The memory surfaced unexpectedly, vivid against the fog that surrounded everything else. She'd been watching him go, and something in her posture had been—

Wrong.

Something had been wrong.

He couldn't remember what.

Dale crossed the waiting room toward the exit. The carpet was the same gray as before—the same gray as the unemployment office, he'd thought that when he arrived, hadn't he?—and the walls were the same beige. Everything was the same.

Except the receptionist was gone.

Except the building was silent.

Except he couldn't remember most of what had happened in the past eight hours.

He reached the exit and pushed through, and the late afternoon air hit him like a physical thing—warm and golden, smelling of exhaust and cut grass and the particular end-of-day quality that said the world had kept turning while he'd been inside. The parking lot spread before him, mostly empty now. His Camry sat where he'd left it, alone in the far corner.

5:15 PM. Eight hours.

He walked toward his car. His body moved automatically, legs carrying him across the asphalt without conscious direction. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows, and somewhere a bird was singing—a mockingbird, maybe, running through its repertoire of stolen songs.

He unlocked the car. Got in. The seat adjusted around him, familiar and uncomfortable, catching wrong against his spine the way it always did. He sat for a moment, hands on the wheel, staring through the windshield at nothing.

He'd gotten the job.

The thought surfaced, clear and simple. He'd gotten the job. After eleven months, after 247 applications, after twelve interviews that had led nowhere—he'd finally gotten the job. He should be happy. He should be relieved. He should be reaching for his phone to call Linda, to tell her the news, to hear her voice break with the joy she'd been holding back for almost a year.

He didn't reach for his phone.

He started the car. The engine turned over, caught, settled into its familiar rhythm. The radio came on, tuned to the same station he'd been listening to that morning—classic rock, something he half-recognized, something that should have meant something.

It didn't mean anything. It was just sound.

Dale pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward home.

---

The drive was forty minutes. I-85 to the Greensboro exits, then surface streets through neighborhoods he'd driven a thousand times. He knew the route automatically, the way you knew the route to anywhere you'd been going for years. Left at the light. Right at the Baptist church. Straight through the four-way stop where the mailman had hit a dog last summer.

He didn't think about any of it. He didn't think about anything. The road unspooled before him, and he followed it, and the radio played songs that meant nothing, and the sun crept lower toward the horizon.

He tried to remember the interview.

Ms. Vance had been—what had she been? Professional. Patient. She'd asked him questions, and he'd answered them. She'd taken notes on a legal pad, small precise handwriting he couldn't read. They'd talked about—

His career. Yes. Thirty-two years of warehouse work, the companies he'd worked for, the positions he'd held. Morrison. That was one of them. He'd worked at Morrison for—for some number of years. A long time.

What else?

His family. She'd asked about his family. His wife—Linda—and his daughter. He had a daughter. Her name was—

The exit approached, and Dale merged right, signaling out of habit. His daughter's name was—

He knew he had a daughter. He knew she lived somewhere else, not with him, not in the house he was driving toward. She'd grown up and moved away, the way daughters did. He'd failed her somehow—that part was clear, the guilt was there, a familiar weight in his chest—but the specifics were—

The specifics were gone.

Dale turned onto his street. The houses slid past, one after another, identical in their suburban sameness. Lawns that needed mowing. Cars in driveways. The ordinary detritus of ordinary lives.

He pulled into his own driveway and stopped. Cut the engine. The radio died mid-song, and the silence that replaced it was total, absolute.

He sat in the car and looked at his house.

White siding. Blue shutters. The porch light was on—Linda must have turned it on before she left for work, not knowing how late he'd be. The lawn needed mowing; he could see that even in the fading light. There was a crack in the front walk that he'd been meaning to fix for—for some amount of time.

This was his house. His home. The place he'd lived for—

He couldn't remember how long.

Dale got out of the car. His legs were stiff from sitting, from the drive, from eight hours in a chair answering questions he couldn't remember. He walked up the front path, past the crack he'd been meaning to fix, onto the porch where the light buzzed softly against the coming dark.

He put his hand on the doorknob. The brass was warm from the day's heat.

Behind this door was his wife. Linda. She'd be in the kitchen, probably, or the living room. She'd hear him come in and she'd look up, and her face would do something—hope, or fear, or the careful blankness that was worse than either.

He'd tell her he got the job.

She'd be happy. She'd cry, maybe, the way she did when something good finally happened after a long stretch of bad. She'd wrap her arms around him and say she knew it, she knew he could do it, she never doubted him for a second.

And he would stand there and let her hold him, and he would feel—

What would he feel?

Dale stood on his own porch, his hand on his own doorknob, and tried to imagine what he would feel when his wife embraced him.

The answer was slow in coming. And when it came, it was small and quiet and final.

He would feel nothing.

He would feel nothing at all.

Dale opened the door and went inside.