The Midnight Interview

The sign on the building said MIDNIGHT DISPATCH in letters that used to glow blue but now just glowed half blue. Half lit. Half dead. Felt about right for how I was feeling, standing in the parking lot of an industrial park at eleven at night in a blazer I hadn't worn since my cousin's wedding.

I'm Kev. Forty-four years old. Delivery driver. Twenty-one years of driving a van and saying yes sir, yes ma'am, package for you, sign here. And I'd let somebody talk me into an interview for a supervisor slot at a logistics hub I'd never heard of until two weeks ago.

The somebody was Cleo Robins. We went out for about six months when we were both twenty-three. She was doing graphic design then. I was driving courier. It ended clean, no drama, she moved on, I moved on, and then twenty years later she calls me up out of nowhere and says, hey, you still driving boxes?

I should have said no. I said yes. Because at forty-four you start wondering what else you're for.

So there I was. Eleven o'clock. Blazer. Tie loosened. Shoes that pinched. The wind off the parking lot smelled like wet asphalt and whatever they put in dumpsters behind office parks.

I checked my phone. 11:04. Interview was at eleven sharp. Great. Late to the waste of time. That's a new personal low.

I pushed through the glass doors and the lobby hit me with that office smell. Stale coffee. Carpet cleaner. And something else, something green and faint, like somebody was steaming herbs somewhere in the back.

The lobby was huge and empty. Rows of chairs. A dead TV bolted to the wall. One light on behind a reception counter that had nobody behind it.

"Cleo?" I called out. My voice went flat against the ceiling.

"Back here, Kev."

She came around the corner from a hallway, clipboard in hand, and I swear she was already smirking. Cleo was forty-four now, same as me, and had not softened one bit. Short gray streak in her black hair. Glasses on a chain. The same half grin she used to give me when she knew she was right about something.

"You're four minutes late," she said, looking at the clipboard.

"You said eleven. It's eleven-ish."

"Eleven-ish." She wrote something. I know she wrote something because the pen made that scratch sound people make when they want you to know they're writing something. "How you been?"

"Nervous, apparently. I wore a tie. I haven't worn a tie since."

"Since my going-away thing, maybe. You looked terrible in it then too."

"Thanks, Cleo."

"Anytime." She looked up over her glasses and did the full grin. "You want the truth?"

"I drove forty minutes. Give me the truth."

"HR's not running this. I am. It's not a normal interview. The company doesn't do normal interviews for this kind of position."

"What kind of position?"

"Night operations supervisor. The night side of this place is different. You'll see." She turned and started walking, and talking over her shoulder like I was already following. Which I was. "You remember how you used to be at the courier place? The one who'd stay till two if a route went sideways?"

"That was a long time ago."

"It wasn't that long. You were twenty-three, I was twenty-three, and you were the only guy there who didn't bitch about the night runs."

"Everybody bitched about the night runs."

"You didn't." She stopped at a set of double doors and swiped a badge. The doors opened onto a long corridor, lights off, just the glow of exit signs at the far end. "That's what this job is. The person who doesn't bitch."

I looked down the dark hallway. My stomach did a thing. "How long is this interview?"

"As long as it takes."

"Cleo, I gotta drive home."

"You'll drive home. Or you won't. Depends how you do." She said it so flat I laughed, and she didn't, and then I stopped laughing.

We walked the corridor. Our footsteps sounded weird in there. Not echoing right. Like the floor was eating some of them. The fluorescent tubes overhead were off but a couple flickered as we passed under them, which I told myself was wiring, because I was forty-four and I had an interview and I was not going to get spooked by bad ballasts.

"Tell me about the company," I said. "Website's thin. Like, suspiciously thin."

"Company's thin. We move things. Things that need to move at night, quietly, to places that don't want a lot of questions on the receiving end."

"Like what? Medical?"

"Sure. Medical." She said it the way people say sure when it isn't.

We came out into an open floor, the call-center side. Rows and rows of desks, dark monitors, little foam dots on all the keys. The air was colder here. I could hear something hum, low, steady, like the building was idling.

"There's nobody here?"

"Night crew's in the east wing. We stay out of it. What happens tonight happens in this side."

"Who's we?"

"Me and Faith. She's operations. Senior. You'll meet her. She knows you a little already, actually. You two got stuck in an elevator once, during a fire drill, over at the Halverson building."

I stopped walking. "That was like a year ago. How do you know about that?"

"Because I was consulting there that month. Small world. You stood in that elevator with her for twenty minutes and didn't say one word except 'you okay?' and she remembered it."

"She remembered that?"

"She remembers everything." Cleo said it with the flatness of a weather report.

We stopped at a conference room. Glass wall, big table, dead TV on the wall inside. The door had a little paper sign taped to it that said, in neat block letters, PHASE ONE.

"You're kidding," I said.

"Do I kid?"

"You used to."

"Twenty-three-year-old me kidded. Forty-four-year-old me runs a test." She handed me a folder. It was heavy. Heavier than a folder should be. Manila, one tab, and a printed label: PHASE ONE: PATIENCE.

"What's in it?"

"Rules. Read them when I'm gone. Then wait."

"Wait for what?"

"Wait. That's the phase. That's literally the name on the folder." She checked her watch. "It's 11:21. I'll come back when it's time. There's water in the little fridge. Don't open the door until I come back, no matter what you hear."

"No matter what I hear. Cleo, what's that mean? What am I going to hear?"

"Nothing, probably. Maybe something. Either way, door stays shut." She gave me the grin again, but smaller. "You were always good at waiting, Kev. You just forgot you were."

She walked off down the dark row of desks and I watched her until the exit-sign glow swallowed her, and then I went in the conference room and shut the door.

The room smelled like dust and old toner. That hot-paper smell from printers that have been running for a decade. There was a plate-glass window on the far wall but outside it was just the parking lot and the dark, and my own reflection, which looked tired and overdressed and a little older than I felt, which was its own insult.

I sat down and opened the folder.

One page. Typed. No letterhead.

RULES OF PHASE ONE, it said. 1. Remain in the room. 2. Read the file. 3. Do not turn on the overhead lights. 4. If the file asks you a question, answer out loud.

I looked around. Read the file. There was no file. Just the rules page.

Then I felt the folder again. Still heavy. Still wrong. I reached back in and there was a second sheet now, way at the bottom, that had not been there when I shook the folder in the lobby. I would bet my van on that. I'd shaken it. Nothing rattled.

The second sheet said, in the same block letters:

WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE, BEFORE YOU BECAME SENSIBLE?

And I sat there in the dark with the toner smell and the hum of the building, and I read it about five times, and then I heard myself say, out loud, like an idiot, like a guy talking to a piece of paper in an empty office at eleven-thirty at night,

"A pilot. I wanted to fly freight."

The lights in the hallway outside flickered once. Something far off, maybe the HVAC, maybe not, made a sound like a long breath being let out.

I didn't open the door.

I'm proud of that part, at least.

I sat there maybe twenty minutes. Maybe more. Time got funny in that room. The hum of the building changed pitch a couple of times, like it was clearing its throat.

Then the door opened. No knock.

A woman came in. Faith. I recognized her from the elevator, from the cookout where we'd both stood at the drinks table not talking. She was maybe five-eight, dark hair pulled back, cardigan over what looked like scrubs, which is a weird combo for an office. She was thirty-eight, I'd learn that later, and she carried herself like the floor owed her money.

She didn't say hi. She pulled out the chair across from me, sat down, folded her hands on the table, and looked at me.

"Hi," I said.

She didn't answer that. She said, "What are you willing to ignore to get what you want?"

Just like that. No warm-up. No how's the weather.

"Sorry?"

"You heard me. You're not deaf. Answer."

I looked at the folder. Looked at her. The overheads were still off, so the room was lit by the parking lot lamps through the glass, and her face was half shadow, and it should have made her harder to read but it did the opposite.

"Is this the file asking me a question?" I said. "Because rule four says if the file asks, I answer out loud. I've been following the rules."

"Good instinct," she said. "But I'm not the file."

"So you're the part where I get tricked into talking?"

"I'm the part where you find out what you're made of. Same thing, most nights." She leaned back. "Answer the question, Kev."

And this is the point, or one of the points. Twenty years of delivery driving teaches you to read a room fast. Which customer is going to sign and which is going to argue. Which dock manager wants small talk and which wants you gone. And every read I took on this woman said she was not going to fill the silence for me. So I talked.

"I don't know," I said. "Depends what I want."

"Try wanting the job."

"Fine. The job." I rubbed my eyes. "What would I ignore. I'd ignore that the company's weird. I'd ignore that my ex from twenty years ago called me up out of nowhere and is running interviews at eleven at night. I'd ignore that the folder grew a page. I'd ignore the breathing."

"What breathing?"

"Nothing. HVAC." I stopped. She was still looking at me, patient, like she had all night, which maybe she did. "There was a sound. After I answered the question on the sheet."

"What did you answer?"

"Pilot," I said. "Freight. I wanted to fly freight."

Something moved in her face then. Not a smile. More like a door opening a crack somewhere behind her eyes and she chose not to shut it.

"That's a good answer," she said.

"It's an honest one. There's a difference, I guess."

"There's always a difference." She stood up, smoothed the cardigan. "For what it's worth, most people lie at that question. They say firefighter, astronaut, some safe little dream they already gave up permission to want. You said freight. Ugly, practical, specific. Freight goes places passenger stuff doesn't."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's data." She got to the door and stopped, hand on the frame. "The elevator. A year ago. You asked if I was okay. Twenty minutes in a dark box with a stranger and that was the only thing you spent words on."

"You remember that?"

"I told you I would." Wait, no, she never told me anything. Cleo told me she remembered. Faith just looked at me like she'd heard me think it. "Hold that thought," she said, and she was gone, and the door swung shut soft behind her, no click, which doors do, they click.

I sat back down. My water bottle was warm so I didn't drink. I checked my phone. 11:52. No bars. Full bars at 11:04, dead at 11:52, in a building full of desks with computers. Sure.

At 12:01 the door opened again and it was Cleo, and she had her glasses down off her face, hanging on the chain, and she was smiling like the night had gone exactly to plan.

"You're still here," she said.

"You told me not to leave."

"People always leave. Nine out of ten, they're gone by midnight. They hear the breathing and they leave."

"So there IS breathing."

"There's a building, Kev. Old buildings breathe. Don't make it spooky." She pulled the chair out and sat on the corner of the table instead, which is a supervisor move, casual, I'm in charge of my own