Chapter 4: The Interview

They took an arm each, one man to a side, and walked him out of the room.

“If you keep this up,” the one on the left said, “we’re calling the police. Or the dean’s office. Or both.”

“Anything.” The body said it over its shoulder into the room as the door came down to a hand’s width. “I’d do anything for you. Just look at me—“

The door closed.

He flexed his fingers.

All four of them, then the thumb. The wrist rolled when he told it to roll. He turned his head and the head went where he aimed it, and he lifted his right foot and set it down somewhere he had picked himself, and then the left, and then he was standing in a hallway that smelled of cleaning foam and somebody’s microwave, in possession of himself again.

Two data points now.

The first night, the lines had run all the way to the end, and he had walked out of a hotel room on his own feet. Today they had stopped halfway — two men had stopped them for him — and here he was anyway, twenty feet from a door he had been carried out of, with the whole body back on the books.

His working rule had been simple: get to the end of the lines and the body comes back. Today had just been handed to him as a second data point, and it did not fit.

He looked at the closed door of Julian Prescott’s room for a while, and did not knock.

What would the pitch even be? He ran it out to the end and heard it the way the two men on the other side of that door would hear it: the asking hadn’t worked, so here came the same asking in a smaller voice, plus an explanation that could not possibly be true. He would have read it the same way. He would have thought what they were thinking — that this was a longer game.

And every word of it had come out of a mouth he was renting. Julian Prescott had turned him down flat, evenly, without cruelty, in front of witnesses, and there was nothing left to do with that except walk away from the door.

So he walked away from the door.

Halfway down the hall, somebody’s door stood open and somebody’s phone was up, and the lens sat on the back of his head like a patch of sun. Four days in, and he had that one down: the prickle that meant a stranger had just found something worth photographing. He didn’t turn around for it. There was nothing to turn around for.

Two floors and one hallway. In the other life, four minutes.

It took him fifteen, with two stops.

The first was at the stairwell door, one hand on the bar, waiting for the feeling to come back into his legs. The second was three steps down the next flight, sitting with his head against the wall while a girl came up past him with a laundry basket, looked at him, stepped around him, and didn’t ask. He appreciated that more than he could have told her if she had asked.

Then he got up and finished the walk, and stood outside his own door and missed the keyhole twice.

Sam was out.

That was the first good thing that had happened to him since the hotel, and nobody had aimed it at him — just a room with nobody in it. Made bed, closed laptop, sneakers under the desk, nobody sitting up when the door opened.

He showered until the water went cold.

Then he stood at the mirror and did the inventory, the way you check your pockets after a night you don’t remember.

Knuckles: four, scabbed, right hand, from the corridor wall on the first morning. Chin craned around into the glass: the mark, still there, still not faded, still not anything he could use. Both wrists, inside, in the light over the sink: thin pale lines, one on each, even and deliberate, that he could not match to any night he remembered.

He dried his hair with Sam’s towel and hung it back where he’d found it, and lay down on top of the blanket with the phone face-down on his chest.

Then he went back through it, because lying still wasn’t going to do it for him.

He had tried the first thing a person tries, which was distance. He had put a flight’s worth of country between himself and this city, and the body had bought a return ticket while he watched and walked him back to a dormitory four minutes from Julian Prescott’s door.

He had tried the second thing too, and it had a name. Sam Renner had gotten a hand around his wrist and hung on for six seconds, and the arm had gone on doing what it liked with a hand around it.

And Sam Renner had walked up to him on the path that afternoon meaning nothing but well, and gotten the kind of answer nobody walks back from. Elliot still had no idea what he was going to say to him when the door opened tonight. He would find out when it opened. He was getting good at that.

One more fact, filed with the true and useless ones: when Sam said his name out loud, the body had stopped for a second and a half. Not a stop. A pause, over before anybody could use it, and then the arm had resumed as if nothing had interrupted it. Six seconds of grip had not held the arm back; a second and a half of surprise had not either, and he could not build a plan out of somebody happening to say his name at the right second in the middle of somebody else’s scene.

Which left one thing he had actually watched work, once, by accident, in a room he had walked out of without looking back.

The memory wasn’t much. A dark suit. A silhouette against a window. A bed that cost more than his semester. There had been a card, and he had not read it, and by the time he thought about it he was already outside with the doorman’s good night behind him and the card left where it lay. Somebody at that front desk had seen a name on it. He could walk back into that lobby this afternoon and ask.

He had gone four days without doing it, which was a decision and not an oversight.

Because the plan, when he let it come, was this: the next time the lines arranged themselves in front of his eyes and something else took his hands, find that man, and get close enough to find out whether close was what did it.

He knocked the heel of his hand against his own forehead twice. The empty room did not react.

He was not going to solve a hijacking by climbing into bed with somebody. That was not how a normal novel worked. If it was how this one worked, he’d take his chances with the door and whatever came through it.

So the plan had a hole in it, and the hole had a name on it that he had chosen not to read.

There was also the rest of it, the part that made any of this matter beyond tonight. By next week there would be a version of the fifth floor moving through somebody’s group chat, and it would go into rooms he wasn’t standing in. He needed to be a person with a job and a schedule and an explanation. He needed a name that a building could account for.

He was almost asleep — actually asleep, for the first time in four days, sinking into his own mattress — when the phone went off against his sternum.

A local number. Under it, in capitals, the way a phone writes a thing it has decided is not a person: HALE GROUP.

He looked at it for four rings, and then he answered it.

“Hello — is this Elliot Vance?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Bianca Hoyt. I’m in HR at Hale Group.” Something turned over behind her voice. A page, probably. “You put in an application with us, for the summer assistant program. Is now an okay time?”

“Sure.”

“Great.” Then the small questions, which he answered with the fewest words that would carry: yes, that address; still interested; Thursday works.

“So we’d like to bring you in. It’s three conversations back to back — a screen with me, then the team, then the manager. Call it two hours.” A pleasant little pause. “Business casual, so you don’t need to go buy anything.”

He almost laughed at that, and didn’t.

He said thank you and hung up and lay there with the phone on his chest, telling himself the truth in the order he was willing to say it out loud.

Money first, because that’s everybody’s first answer. There was enough in the account to finish the semester and not enough to finish the summer, and after the summer it stopped being a question about money and became a question about staying in a country where his name was on a piece of paper.

Bellhaven. He had tried leaving once. He was back.

Then the one that was actually true. His days had no shape in them. A job was a place a person was supposed to be — a place people would look for him, and then stop looking, because he was where he was supposed to be. He wanted to be supposed to be somewhere, and he had wanted that before Bianca Hoyt ever said her name.

He put the phone down and slept.

Nobody called the police. Nobody from the dean’s office sent an email, nobody from campus safety came up the stairs, and Julian Prescott did not appear in any of the places he had previously appeared. By the second day he had downgraded the whole thing from a threat to a piece of information about how this place worked.

One of the two days went to the résumé.

The version on the laptop had been assembled by the previous tenant of this body, on the theory that length was proof. Three pages. At the top, an objective: To obtain a position with a dynamic organization where I can apply my skills and grow. Under EDUCATION, the high school he had graduated from two years ago, with the GPA to one decimal place. Under SKILLS, in bullets: Problem solving. Team player. Diligent. Microsoft Office. At the bottom, References available upon request.

This was the document that had gotten a phone call out of Hale Group. He decided not to think about that part.

He read all of it, and then deleted the third page, and then the second, and then wrote a new one. One page. No objective. Nothing on it that he couldn’t say out loud in a room with three strangers in it.

The other day went to Hale Group, which didn’t take much research, because in Bellhaven the company worked like weather. It had a tower and a foundation and its name on the ballpark, and there were four thousand people in the metro whose mortgage had the company’s initials somewhere in the paperwork. He read about the divisions and the board and the last two quarters until half a dozen names had set up in his head and stayed there.

Wednesday afternoon he rode two stops up the line and bought a shirt. White, fifty-nine dollars, the most he had ever spent on a single item of clothing. He took the tags off on the platform and dropped them in the trash before he could do the arithmetic twice.

Thursday at ten past nine he was in the lobby of Hale Group with a paper badge clipped to his jacket that had his name spelled correctly on it.

Two stories of pale stone and hard light. New carpet and lemon cleaner layered over the coffee coming from somewhere behind the security desk, and everything in it sized for the assumption that you had an appointment.

On the way up he wondered whether any of this was in the book at all. There was no way to check, and it made no difference, because the interview behaved exactly like an interview.

He was on twenty-two by twenty-five past nine.

Bianca Hoyt was small, with a lanyard and too many cards on it. She shook his hand and told him to call her Bianca, and then asked him questions that had answers. Where do you see yourself in three years. Why Hale Group. When could you start. Is there anything in your background that would complicate a check. He got through the first round in about ten minutes, because he had done this before, in a building in a city nobody here had ever heard of, and because the answers were easier than the fact of having them.

The second round was a woman from the marketing floor with a printed sheet of behavioral questions she saw no reason to hide. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. He gave her one. A real one, from the other life, names sanded off and the industry abstracted until it fit inside a room with a parking structure in the window: a supervisor who took credit twice in one quarter, what he had done about it, which had not been going to HR, and what it had cost him — a year of small retaliations he had priced in advance and paid for.

“Would you handle it the same way now?”

“No.”

“Okay. Why not?”

“Because I won. And then I had to work there for another four years.”

She wrote something down. She looked like she was writing down the good kind of thing.

The third round was two at once — a man in his forties with his sleeves rolled up, and a woman who never once opened her notebook — and they asked the one they always ask, which is when were you wrong. He gave them a decision he had made too fast three years into a job and the four months it had taken to unwind, and he did not oversell the lesson at the end of it, because he had learned that the lesson was the part they were watching.

Then the man with the rolled sleeves leaned back.

“One more. You interview better than this job. Why this one?”

“Because it’s the one I applied for,” Elliot said. “And because I need to be somewhere at nine.”

The man nodded slowly, as if that had been an acceptable answer, and maybe it was.

They were done before noon. The man with the rolled sleeves stood and shook his hand and said they were still seeing people and he’d hear something by the end of the week. Nobody smiled in a way that meant anything. Bianca walked him to the door of the suite and told him to keep the badge, he’d need it at security on the way out.

And that was it.

He stood in the hallway with the suite door closing behind him and did the accounting. It didn’t take long. He had done about as well as he was capable of doing, the answers had all been the right answers, and it had the flat feel of a process that would take exactly as long as it wanted to take.

He wanted the job. He noted that on the way to the elevators and filed it without comment.

The elevator bank was at the end of the hall, past a break room he hadn’t been shown, and the whole floor smelled of the coffee coming out of it.

Twenty past eleven on a working morning, between rushes. Two people were waiting. One had a phone up and was reading it with more attention than a phone requires. The other had drifted half a step to the left and did not appear to have noticed doing it.

The man at the front of the bank was tall. Broad through the shoulders, a plain navy suit cut to them and to nothing else, nothing in his hands — and in a building where everybody carried something, that was its own kind of information. His back was to the length of the hall.

Elliot had no idea who he was.

His feet slowed before he told them to. His hand came off the strap of his bag and he was angling, without deciding to, toward the two cars at the far end of the bank, where the floor was clear and nobody had stepped back from anything and nobody was reading a phone with that much attention. He was prepared to wait however long it took. Whatever was going on at the front of the bank was above his pay grade, and he did not currently have a pay grade — a condition he intended to maintain.

Behind him, somebody said, “Excuse me.”

He turned around.

Suit, and a backpack worn on both shoulders, both straps up, a bag he clearly had no plans to take off. A folder under one arm. Young. Awake. The same look on his face as everybody Elliot had sat across from all morning.

He was already talking.