douglain - The Interview- by H.V. Chao

—Come in. Sit down.
—Thanks.
—Have a mint.
—Thank you.
—So… you’re leaving us.
—Yes.
—Have you thought this over carefully?
—Yes.
—Where will you go?
—I don’t know yet. Haven’t really thought about it.
—But you’re sure about this. You’re sure you want to quit your job.
—Yes. It’s been too long. I’d like to do something else.
—What will you do?
—Something else. Not this. Not anymore.
—What else is there?
—Anything but this.
#
—Why are you quitting?
—Because this… is not what I want.
—What you want? I’ve never had what I wanted, but I’m not quitting.
—We’re different.
—We’ve always been different.
—From each other, I mean.
#
—You used to like it here.
—I had friends. I had a wife. Kids.
—No, no, no: you were good at your job. You enjoyed your job.
—The job isn’t the same.
—The people?
—The people aren’t the same.
—The places?
—The places no longer look the same.
—People, places: these things change. Others accept that.
—I refuse to do so.
—The job remains unchanged.
—No, the job is… somehow altered.
—The job remains unchanged; perhaps it’s you who’ve changed. Have you considered that?
—Maybe it’s true.
—So why have you changed?
—Maybe I don’t want the job any more.
#
—Why have you come to me?
—I didn’t. You asked me here.
—Would you have come to me?
—Yes.
—Why?
—I felt you deserved some explanation.
—Well?
—(silence)
—Do you consider me your friend?
—That would’ve had nothing to do with it.
#
—Let’s see, let’s see, your first assignment, what was it again now?
—You know quite well.
—But these things must be done accordingly, there are protocols, paperwork must be filed, after all you started this lengthy process… ah yes. Yes, you were always one of the best.
—Thank you… I think.
#
—What is it that draws you away now, after so many years?
—It’s always been the same thing. A slight but certain unease. The initial unwillingness, so long suppressed. An early memory of violence. The earlier intimation of purity. A distasteful ease and expertise. A genuine regret, sullied by complicity. The revelation —- sudden, sharp —- like pain, or a truncated cry, that I’d considered this at first and in all later ways only an alternative —- what is that noise?
—Noise?
—From the next room.
—Oh, that bland and tended sound? That’s our new machine. You know our motto: One hand at the bellows!
—…that I’d considered this at first and in all later ways only an alternative, while in the pasture beyond, something else shimmers into being… I’ve always been mistrustful of what we consign to automation.
—Panic drives you, then?
—I admit to a slight panic. Sometimes, a surreptitious tingle of panic, when I am opening the refrigerator or crossing the street or late at night, in the last dance at the nightclub, when the string arrangement rises above the bridge of the song like the pale day after.
—What does this panic come from?
—You know as well as I.
—Tell me.
—Panic derives from fear. The unsettling, uprooting fear that what I did only to pass the time while waiting, while wanting, has become my life, and altogether more addicting, more menacing. I dislike this. The insinuation of a venom in the veins. To look up and think, after all these years, I’ve come no closer.
—Why, then, did you wait so long?
—I don’t know.
—I have a theory. Many theories. All at once.
—I’m curious.
—Fascination. Violence. The slippery and alluring promise of success. The company of friends, professionals, educated men, men of character, or others like yourself. Honor. Tenure. Tradition. The promise of a beginning. The promise of an end. The very same thing you believe you’re seeking now. Or something dead and hollow, hurt and moist, warped and ruined within —- the ignoble and most unignorable part of yourself.
—Perhaps. (pause) That was very eloquent.
—Thank you. I allow myself these little lyrical interludes.
#
—Have you thought this through, then? Your departure, its effect on people? Who will be left behind?
—A woman.
—What awaits you when you leave?
—A woman.
—The same?
—No, different. The same. Different.
#
—You realize that it won’t change anything, leaving us?
—Yes, it will. It will.
—Many men before you have tried this.
—It’s an old story.
—The oldest?
—Almost. There was a time…
—Before it was necessary.
—Yes.
—Yes.
#
—So what will you do after you quit?
—Find a wife. Have a family. Raise some kids.
—You?
—All right then, no.
—(shrugs) Why not?
—(shrugs) Why not?
#
—May I tell you about my dream?
—Please.
—In this dream I own a fenced parcel of land, one in what seems an endless ladder of farms extending down to where I can’t see and up to what I can’t imagine. But I can’t escape the feeling, even with both feet on the springy turf, that what’s more important than this arable land is the fact of the fence, the spindly line of reason which whispers to us all our place.
—Perimeter.
—And all this, all my thoughts on this, I’ve written on the ceiling of the farmhouse in roughly ten point font. The ceiling lowers imperceptibly every day, which has greatly eased my task, but even as I now lie abed, scrawling madly the minutiae, the ramifications of ramifications, the caveats spiralling aside, the nota benes, the see alsos, I fear perhaps it’s being made too easy for me. What’s the difference between honor and obedience?
—I —-
—You think I’m evil.
—I think nothing of the sort.
—Perhaps I’m evil.
—It’s up to you.
—Just a dream. I’m surprised I remember it, frankly.
#
—Now tell me one of yours.
—In D– the treetops sink roots only once a year, in spring, staying anchored through the summer as, flush with leaves, their foliage takes the clumped and cottony shapes of what we know as clouds.
—The breeze that makes them shiver reminds them of the skies they roam in the remaining seasons.
—In autumn, with a great creaking and a snapping of twigs, they break away from trunks grown thick with bark and phloem, which become husks with jagged tips, or later often topple from sheer grief.
—Men gather these and from them fashion ships to cross the seas in imitation of the constant traffic of the skies, which they cannot attain, for as we know the waters are the heavens’ paler mirror.
—All through the fall, the treetops travel on the winds that bring their leaves down in rains of orange, red, and yellow, which the poets have identified with lament and melancholy.
—Who knows when a treetop will drift by above, filtering the light, and suddenly shawl the sorrows of young love in a swirl of gold? This is considered the most picturesque of seasons, though gardeners bemoan it, for across the rolling hills are left, like scattered remnants of a treasure, traces of the treetops’ passing, and in this time, treetops visit the world’s every corner, even the desert where they take no root, even the goat’s mountaintop, so that all may gaze up and know wonder.
—In winter, one looks on treetops that barely suggest, with stark and stricken branches, forms rounded like the clouds with which they share the skies. Instead, stripped of substance, frozen in a moment of shock, they seem tumbleweeds, and one imagines an accompanying lonely moan or, amidst shriek and buffeting gust, expects to hear the scrape of naked branches, like nails on a blackboard, or the clatter of twig ends, on the eggshell blue, but finds instead, in its absence, a reminder of how high and far away is the vault of the heavens.
—That was satisfying.
—It’s like an old song we sing.
—You remember —-?
—Always.
#
—About the women—
—Let’s leave the women out of it.
—You needn’t worry.
—… well then, what?
—About the women —-
—They have an imagination.
—Certainly, certainly, imagination, yes —-
—They have a suppleness.
—What do they want?
—But we don’t believe them, really.
—What, then, is a man?
—A man is a kind of death.
#
—But, please forgive me, this woman in the bar—
—I said nothing about work. I said I’d come to save the world, staggering from a burning Volkswagen in the middle of a field of neat furrows. She thought I meant I woke up with no idea how I got there, or how the hood got dented.
—Did she give you her number?
—On a napkin, slipped across the bar. I watched as dampness bloated the nine, and tried to remember if, looking down before, I’d ever managed to spot a Volkswagen from space.
—Why did you come to us, really, all those years ago?
—To save the world.
—(laughter)
#
—You realize, of course, that finally I cannot let you go.
—I was afraid you might say that.
—Afraid?
—No, not really.
—I will do all I can to stop you.
—Of course.
—Because I cannot let you go.
—You?
—They would not allow it.
—They?
—I can’t let you go.
—If necessary, I will die trying.
—There is a certain nobility in this.
—I didn’t say it.
—…nobility arising from the man who is unable, or unwilling, to transcend his circumstances. And yet refuses… There is, of course, a way out.
—Not for me.
—No?
—No.
#
—You’ve been with us a long time.
—A long time.
—As long as I can remember.
—Me too.
—Even longer.
—Yes.
—We go back a long time, you and I, don’t we?
—And still you will try to stop me.
—You have many friends in the business, don’t you?
—Yes.
—You realize they will all try to make you see the error of your ways.
—I’ve considered it.
—Failing this, they will turn against you.
—I expect nothing less.
—I may not be able to stop you. If I fail, you will be a free man. Then again, it is possible that I might succeed.
—The possibility exists.
—The possibility exists, too, that you may stop me, because you know me so well. Because we go way back.
—We go way back… but not far enough.
—No, I suppose not.
#
—Suppose, then, that there are two doors.
—I’m listening.
—I’m going to let you go through one of them peacefully.
—No strings?
—No strings.
—And the other door?
—The other door… you’d have to go through me to get through the other one.
—That’s it?
—No.
—Then I would choose the other one. Not the first one.
—What would possess a man to do such a thing?
—What would possess a man?
#
—I could be persuaded not to keep you. Could you be persuaded not to leave?
—No.
—I could be persuaded…
—No.
—Very well, then.
#
—Very well, then: a deal. One more service.
—I’m familiar with this. It will be the one I can’t perform.
—You haven’t heard it yet.
—Nevertheless, I accept.
—I had hoped at last, that you would be moved to undertake this out of heroism.
—I haven’t decided, yet. (pause) The possibilities of the heroic are not dead to me.
#
—So you will do this for me, then?
—Yes.
—I detect a languor in our tone. A certain reticence.
—Z was languorous. K was reticent. These words are not new to me. These words have been used to describe others.
—But it’s not the same.
—Yes it is.
—This time?
—No, it isn’t. (pause) What is it you want me to do?
—(whispers)
—Ah, I see. But I would have done this without coercion. It was never a question.
—You will die trying.
#
—You realize, then, that many have tried.
—Few have succeeded.
—Yes.
—The story, surgically excised from its particulars, hair nails teeth and fingerprints, abstracted from the table and the lamp, remains compelling. Without the force of actual, physical representation one would think it—the story—might lose a certain appeal, a certain…relevance. I must admit I myself find it…
—Undernourished?
—Skeletal.
—Simple.
#
—No. It does not lack poetry.
—Why does the story,
—This story—
—This story, reduced to an algorithm, its subtle shifts and equations of power, why does it continue to excite us? What is it that captivates?
—The outcome.
—… now now, we know the outcome already.
—(silence)
—Don’t we?
—It’s like an old song we sing.
—(hums)
#
—So…you’re leaving us.
—Yes.
—Have you thought this over carefully?
—Yes.
—Where will you go?
—I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere far away. Somewhere without you. Somewhere before here. Somewhere I am forgotten, or not yet dreamed of.
—We’ll find you.
—Somewhere farther away than that.
—We’ll find you. There’s no place that far.
—Well. A man can hope.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.