Thursday, 29 January 2009
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The Interview
There has never been so high a concentration of exceptionally successful and at the same time hopelessly unfulfilled people as there is in the business district of Grand Marque. I am walking to my scheduled job interview through this overwhelmingly depressing block of buildings and emotionally suppressed biomass when I come to this sad, but true conclusion. It is like wading through a lifeless cornfield after a hand-harvest. The fat golden ears of vivacity and enthusiasm are gone from the gray, swaying stalks that slouch by me on every side in pumps and loafers and shoulder-padded business attire, murmuring huskily into tiny mouthpieces that hum inaudibly with the pulses of radio waves and satellite signals, like tiny aphids and weevils nestled comfortably between the shriveled leaves. My destination is a streamlined, darkened-glass building with a tapered form suggestive of the ability to blast off into the hazy skies above. With a deep breath to calm my gradually escalating nerves, I enter a gleaming, thoroughly Windex-ed door and begin my confusing trek through the labyrinth of offices and department directories that conceal my final stop.
This turns out to be located on the fourteenth floor of the building inside a glass box, identified by a helpful customer service automaton as the manager’s main office. The door is ajar, and, as the sole occupant of the glass anteroom and its single, clear plastic chair just beyond, I can hear and see all that is occurring within…
“Let’s be honest, Olli. You’re just not what the company needs right now. You don’t fit the profile we’re looking for.” Angie Lewis, public relations specialist and the company’s pretty representative face, whom I have before met to arrange today’s meeting, bites her richly glossed bottom lip apologetically and slides a portfolio across the hardwood surface of her desk into the quivering fingers of a young man who has yet to become acquainted with the concept of a haircut in the short space of his adult life. His red tongue darts reflexively over his dry, cracked mouth, and his eyes appear sunken in twin pits of black-blue—possibly the result of sleep deprivation or even violence. He gives her a jerky nod, blinks quickly a few times, and then takes his portfolio and leaves the room.
I try to look very interested in the smooth, black floor beneath my feet as he exits into the waiting chamber. He seems not to notice my presence, however, and instead looks left and right and then slumps against the see-through wall, dropping his head into his hands. His folder falls to the carpeted floor and erupts like a fountain of paper. It appears to contain not a résumé, but instead a wealth of beautifully detailed and lifelike illustrations, demonstrative of some prodigious artistic skill. Though encircled by dark rings, his eyes are totally dry when he lifts his head, which he rests against the cool glass wall behind him. He takes his right hand and places it firmly on one of his pictures, a meticulous sketch of a songbird of unidentified species, and tenses every muscle from his elbow down to his fingertips. When he lifts his trembling fingers from the page, the image is gone. He has burned a hand-shaped hole straight through the thin paper and onto the dark floor. Oliver sighs, and then gathers up the remaining pictures, stuffing them into the folder as if he has done nothing extraordinary at all…
Finally he realizes my presence and looks somewhat embarrassed for his display. “This is my seventeenth job interview,” he explains with a face as inscrutable as a blank slate. “My seventeenth, failed job interview. I don’t know what I’m going to do…” His voice, too, is devoid of all expression. Hopelessness, anger, dejection… All are carefully hidden and totally undetectable in his composed, low monotone.
At a loss for words, I reply, “May I see your drawings?” A shadow of a feeling brushes his brow and the corners of his mouth like an artist’s misplaced stroke for but a fleeting moment, and then he hands me his work. Our fingers meet briefly as the folder changes hands, and I am surprised to feel no unusual warmth in the pale, graceful fingers that so incinerated the beauty of his illustration. “These are beautiful. These are breathtaking,” I inform him as I thumb slowly through the delicate pictures. “It’s hard to accept that they’re not real, that they’re rendered in ink and charcoal and-and-and graphite…” I come to the sheet with the hand-shaped hole, where once a bird sang from the dry, scorched page, and pause. Oliver says nothing, gives nothing away with his face, and I lay my hand in the empty, burned space. In another instant, the bird sings once more. I remove my slightly sweaty palm and return the portfolio, fully restored, to the boy. For the first time, his face changes, his eyes growing wide with discovery and a glimmer of understanding lighting them from behind. “I won’t be long,” I promise, and stand to enter the office where Angie has looked up from her paperwork in an expectant manner. Olli remains seated on the floor and nods quietly, waiting.
Copyright 2009 C.B. Sanders
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