Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

He had to hold up appearances, or else his appearances would turn deranged. “I’m not kidding, no.” Maybe they could keep this short.

“Are we going to be pretending today?” Hannah asked.

“Pretending what?”

Edward looked longingly at his window, wondering if he could get up enough speed for it to shatter if he threw himself against the glass.

Hannah stood. She spoke calmly, but she was seething. “I seriously question your ability to be fair here, given what happened. Last night I did my job. I did my job. And today when I very much need this position, a position I am ridiculously qualified for, here you are, mister fucking policy dodger, ready to dole out a punishment because I followed instructions in a difficult situation.”

“I’m sorry,” said Edward. “What punishment have I doled out?”

“Not hiring me,” she said. “I saw your eyes when you knew it was me. You knew you weren’t going to hire me.”

“That’s not true.”

It was, for the most part, true.

“I wonder if I could interview with someone else. Is there someone else on the hiring committee so I could be assured a fair shake?”

“Well, it’s only me. There’s no committee. This is my company. If I recuse myself from the interview, for my intense bias, my inability to evaluate your suitability for a position in the company that I created from nothing, a company I understand better than anyone else in the world, you’ll be in this room alone. Shall we do that?”

Hannah didn’t laugh. “I’d like to continue this interview under protest,” she said.

Was that a real thing? Was there a form you could fill out?

“Listen,” said Edward. “I would understand completely if you didn’t feel comfortable going forward, if you maybe wanted to try somewhere else.” Please, please, try somewhere else.

“You sound like Frederick now. Get the person to believe her rejection is actually her own idea. Classic Frederick. Old school. I bet you’ve been told that before.”

“Never.”

“I guess it’s no secret about me and him,” Hannah said, grinning.

Edward stared at her.

“That we’re involved. I mean, everyone must know at this point.”

He wished he didn’t. That was knowledge he’d very much rather not have. He picked up her résumé, waving it at her. “Shall we?” he said. “An actual interview, and to hell with the past?”

Hannah Glazer was right. She was qualified for the position. Edward was crestfallen. She was smart, articulate, preposterously experienced, and when he challenged her with difficult production scenarios—bottlenecks on the front or back end, human error, acts of nature—she produced a staggering arsenal of troubleshooting strategies, more sophisticated than any he’d ever heard, which she rattled off casually, as if they were too simple to be of interest anymore.

“You know,” she said, “Frederick is good at this sort of thing, too.”

This sort of thing? Was his job just a hobby to her, something to perfect in the off-hours?

“But of course he’s more of a manager/leader/boss type. As you might imagine.”

“Of course,” said Edward, even though what did he know about Frederick and his life outside the workshop?

“So…” said Hannah. “I mean, if you ever thought of taking a leave of absence, or retiring or something like that—not that you’re that age yet—Frederick could be a really ideal person to take over.”

He could only stare at her.

“I mean, of course, only if, you know, that sort of thing has been on your mind. Taking a break. Succession. Lineage. You know. Just don’t forget about him. About Frederick. He could really do your job, and still have time left over for his other work.”

On her way out Hannah looked at his couch. “Is that where you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Fuck them.”

“What?”

“All of the desperate people who come looking for work. Is that your casting couch?”

“This isn’t like that. It’s just a couch.”

“You didn’t think, when I walked in, that within twenty minutes, if everything went well, you’d have me down on it?”

Edward couldn’t answer. Was that an option that he’d somehow missed? Two minutes into the interview she was yelling at him about his bias. Was that some deeply veiled flirtation?

“So you’ve fucked no one there? I’m curious.”

She didn’t seem curious. She was yawning.

He looked at the brown couch and thought back, and back, and back. The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location—or, in fact, on any couch ever—was, indeed, zero.

His phone rang that night and this time he wasn’t going to screw it up. He grabbed his bag and headed over to the high school, alone.

The roads were quiet, streetlights shining so fiercely the neighborhoods were bright as day. A siren issued into the night, deep and low. He’d never heard this before. The closer he got to the high school, the more the sound became like an engine rather than a siren, rumbling beneath the ground. When he reached the turnoff, he came upon a sea of abandoned cars, doors jacked open, hazards flashing.

Edward stopped fast. The cars racing behind him closed in, trapping him there. He could do nothing but leave his car and walk, as the others must have done. When the drill was over, it would be one hell of a mess driving out of here, but for now he had to get inside.

He was one of the first to check in with Sharon, and it seemed she almost smiled at him. She looked strange and excited, her face glazed. Maybe he could show her that last night was a fluke.

From across the gymnasium he watched Hannah’s settlement grow, waiting for a sign of his parents. Now that he had checked in, he wasn’t supposed to leave, and since this was a drill, since it didn’t matter, he resolved not to care. Probably his parents hadn’t been called. This was some new thing they were doing, a test of loyalty he would fail no matter how he responded. Anyway, he’d long ago given up trying to understand the methods of the workshop. Even if his parents had been called, the phone was broken, and how would they know? It couldn’t matter. But Edward kept looking over to Hannah, even as the gymnasium filled with bundled-up people, and children, and, of all things, animals—smooth, golden dogs—a few of them wandering sleepily across the hardwood floor, moaning. He’d never seen it so crowded. The generator roared over the chaos—something felt different tonight.

To be fair, he’d had that feeling before. Maybe he always had that feeling. They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing, at last. No matter how false and strange things were, Edward always thought it was smarter, in the end, to believe they were real. You’d better not get caught thinking something was only make-believe.

Finally, Edward spotted his father joining Hannah’s settlement. He was alone. Hannah waved him in and he vanished into the crowd. The gymnasium lights never switched on and Frederick never appeared to praise and chastise them, to bark strange phrases about a future none of them could imagine. Instead the settlements headed outside to get in line for buses, which were departing from the back field of the school.

The siren was so loud that when Edward tried to speak nothing came out. Some terrible noise cancellation was at work. Was this intentional, a trick of Frederick’s to keep them from understanding each other? Edward looked at Thom—who was terminally available for eye contact, lying in wait for it—and Thom smiled, giving a thumbs-up. Thom was excited. He’d wanted to leave for years. He was ready to roll. He had no parents, no wife, and it was as if he was waiting to start a new life somewhere else where they weren’t drilling for escape day and night. Unless in their new location, too, wherever in the world that ended up being, they’d have to pretend to leave all the time, just as they’d done here.