Brett Warnke The Interview 

 

 Now, of course I am the most qualified.  

Admittedly, it’s a rather strange setting for an interview but, alas, in these times, what choice does a man have to determine the venue by which he “pitches himself,” or pithily articulates his whole life and all of the aggregate expertise of his days?

This glass tower is intimidating, truly, but so is the view in the elevator of Lake Michigan, glowing azure and aquatic below along a serene ribbon of beach. I’m here for the interview (though with the merger’s name change, I don’t exactly the name—but it’s no matter). Place is incidental to the position. Access is all now. And I achieve the interview. 

My charming suit is impeccably free of any trace of besmirchment—no unaccounted dust mote or stray hair follicle would dare to drop idly upon a cut so fine. Forgive my grandiosity. I’m not a grandiose man. I’m a regular man, actually. Perhaps it is the worry I feel, the anxiety of an education, like being on a precipice looking down on the deep.

I grew up in Gary, Indiana. I know where the plummet leads. Smokestacks and railroads were the sights and sounds of my youth. But I learned quickly that screens and commerce were the future. From Joliet and Buffalo, to Ontario and the English Midlands, there are a thousand towns like mine. Help is not on the way. Consequently, those who can flee. 

This suit is a rack purchase, of course, but a fortunate fit! The intensity I feel for this prospective position, my last real chance to prove myself, is so intense that no flake of dandruff, no stray seed loosed from a dandelion blowball, nor even the odd leftover lint would dare approach me because, quite frankly, I am a man experiencing a kind of demonic possession for a departmental position. I haven’t eaten. My refrigerator is empty and the rent is due. 

I walked into the hall only a few moments ago after rejecting the coffee—accenting to my future employers my glacially calm nerves, you see. The door clicked shut behind me with the sureness of my confidence. 

Now, the hallway is cheaply inelegant in that faux minimalism style, with its loud carpets and mass-produced prints of black and white flowers.

I walk and remember that since I am here I am, well— I am relevant. It rises in me, my presence, my relevance. It actually comes from the Latin relevare, “to raise up.” Shall I? Of course! I stomp my foot to remind myself that I am tangibly here sometimes, don’t you? Looking at the hall’s series of doors, I reflect upon the closed doors of my own life up to this point: the stubbed toes and blind alleys. Those crammed and curling Dan Ryans to nowhere. 

Hasn’t it all felt strangely vaporous and inanimate, as if the alp of work I’ve completed and the iron relationships I thought I’d forged from all the dinners, booze, and time evaporate like the morning mist.

Permanence is a dream, of course, but without access, man is simply dirt in a hallway waiting to be swept up. But the awareness of your own irrelevance is the theme of our times:  irrelevant people, irrelevant work, irrelevant knowledge. Vast libraries of human understanding could be razed and burnt into nutritious powder for our fields (if there were any left) for all the resonance those authors and words and texts have with the clicking and beeping populace today.

The coin of our realm is no longer the word (which of course I treasure like a rare jewel) but the boss’s digit, the transferable image, the widget’s  graph. And I possess all of them, here in my briefcase, at the ready. Would I sell my soul? Swiftly. And on the cheap.  

Perhaps I am a pretender, but I am possessed in that effort. I am here.  

I pass the photographs of those coneflowers, the lenten roses, and the goldenrods—all holding the summer grandeur of a midwestern summer, but in that odd black and white, as I approach the door, the hall propels me forward in that subtle demand of our architecture to move a man where he is directed rather than where his fickle desires intend.

My tidy files are perfectly prepared. Appearance is the passport to further access, the key to maintaining my relevance, the key-ring which can unlock the vault of a man’s future. My handkerchief is invisibly pinned in my pocket, emergent as the jaunty puff of a jellyfish sail. 

I am ready. Nothing has been left to chance, not even my metaphors.  

I polish my front teeth clean with my tongue. Finally, I knock. I prepare a smile so that upon opening, the interviewer will see my enviable dentition, my pole-straight posture, my prepared arm ready for the glad-hand. But nothing.  

I offer a firmer knock—this will show my persistence, of course. A man from Gary, a man who climbed from community college to university and now to this hallways knows the value of patience. The tone of the knock is not overtly aggressive. I am merely seeking acknowledgement of my arrival, a confirmation that I am here. But still nothing.  

I glare at my watch, a glittering nearly perfect fake but a stylish one that tells me I’m on time. For a few moments I wait. I even set down my briefcase, cradling my laptop like an egg carton.  

Emotion is a dangerous drink.  And while I’ve prepared for all possibilities—the discussion of my background, my experience, my intentions and ideas—I had not anticipated abrupt solitude at the end of the hallway.  

I knock again. Minutes later, much more firmly. Admittedly, I may have offered the door a kick (with my heel as to not scuff the mirror sheen of my Florsheim leather.) Still nothing. But it is an even greater nothing than a moment before.  

I begin knocking firmly and then loudly on other closed doors. I run down the hall and pound each one harder and harder so that the gods could have been rousted, again, a means by which I am demonstrating my resolve to my august employers-to be. I loosen my tie which has become something of a noose.  

I pound, louder and louder. I begin kicking the doors on either side of me. I scream. I take my briefcase and pound it against the door, then over my head like a lumberman.  I pummel it like a steel-driver pounding a spike until the clamps burst and all my ordered files fly like moths and my computer crashes to the floor, its internal glittering parts metallically tinkling against the linoleum.  

I scream. I rage. I curse and turn and slap my palms against the door knobs and finger and kick as they rattle in their fixed and permanent positions, forever secure and nestled into these closed doors. Oh, to be a doorknob!  

I remove my wettening jacket and I begin running up to every one of the closed doors. I remove my shirt and pound and scream until my tears stream down my flushed face and I rip at the eyeholes of the doors with my fingers. My hands begin bleeding. I smear my blood on the white doors and feel its stickiness, present and entirely mine. I throw my shoes against the blood-spattered walls and I take the ridiculous photographs, those black and flowers of evil, and tear them down and crash them against the closed doors.  

But the fierce tonic of my adrenaline is spent.  

And I breathe. Then, exhausted, I lie down in the empty hallway and stare at the eye hole of the closed door and I weep for myself. No one else will. Defeated, I cry in shame and humiliation and feel the dry judder of my soul creak to a stop.  

I cry and exhale a snotty whimper until, with closed eyes I hear the click of a lock.  

Whether the key is before me or behind me, whether it is securing me into the new world of a career, or preparing to usher me back out to the bleak shadows of Michigan Avenue, I do not know.  But I am here.  Aren’t I? DSS

 

  Brett Warnke, of San Diego, Calif., is an MFA student at San Diego State University.   He's worked as a public school teacher in Gary, Indiana, New Orleans and San Diego. He was a newspaper reporter in Rhode Island, and an  intern at the Nation magazine in New York.

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