You open the door and step inside.
Across the room, an old lady sits behind a large desk. Unlike the concrete columns and
open air of the foyer thirty floors down, the office is claustrophobic and the fluorescent lights overhead immediately begin to give you a headache.
The woman beckons you forward. In the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind her, you watch yourself cross the office, clutching onto your resume, looking nervously from side to side at the yellowed posters of entertainers and magicians from Las Vegas yesteryear.
“Sit down, sit down,” the woman tells you. A nasally voice, an accent that seems out of time. You do as you are told.
“I am Miss Florsheim,” she says. “Like the shoes.” She has Coke bottle glasses and a hairstyle decades out of date. In the mirror, you see the door swing closed behind you.
You tell the old woman that you saw the ad in the paper. You slide your resume across the desk. She pushes it to the side and says, “I need to ask you some questions to see if you’re the right girl for the job.”
The questions she proceeds to ask strike you as odd for a job interview—your hopes and dreams, your sleep patterns, your darkest fears—but you have never interviewed in an office before, so you speak from your heart. The old lady writes everything down on a yellow legal pad. Looking at yourself in the mirror, you wonder if someone is watching you from the other side. When you look back at the woman, she is holding a phone to her ear and nodding. You suddenly feel not quite yourself.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Miss Florsheim asks when she puts the phone down.
“Husband,” you say. Then, because you have heard it before, you say that you may seem young to be married, but you want to prove them wrong. Like the Chuck Berry song.
“What does he do?” she asks. “Your husband, not Chuck Berry.”
“Truck driver,” you say. You tell her how he’s long haul, traveling vast distances across the country. He sends you a postcard from each state. You just got one this morning showing the Alamo.
“The Alamo,” she repeats. The glare on her thick glasses obscures her eyes and reflects the world back to you. “The job is yours. You are the one.”
“Wonderful,” you say. But the fluorescent lights are flickering wildly overhead, a blinding kaleidoscope, and you don’t want the job or even to be in this room any longer.
Miss Florsheim gestures to one of the posters on the wall.
“That is your new employer,” she says. “Mister Flowers is a great man.”
“We used to watch his TV show,” you say. There is not enough air in the room.
“Yes, yes, everyone knows him.”
But what is little known, she continued, is that his was one of the first families to settle this frontier. Here, in this very desert, they brokered peace and trust with the native peoples. Then, when they gained their friendship, they massacred them to the last man, woman, and child. As their civilization was being decimated, the tribes prayed to their gods for salvation and justice. But even though they had been here for thousands of years, they did not know that they lived in America. There was no one coming to save them.
“Jesus,” you say.
“Well, that is our history,” she says. “Best to look at it plainly, right? About the job.
There will be a probationary period. Thirty days of initiation. For you and your husband.”
“My husband?”
“He’s hired, too, of course.”
“I told you he has a job. Long haul.”
“We can discuss the details later. Now, it’s time for you to meet someone. No, no, not Mister Flowers. That will come later. His assistant wants to meet you first. Ah, speak of the devil.”
In the mirror, you watch the door open behind you—and when you see what comes through it, you scream.
***
It is dark by the time you come home.
After being up for 36 hours straight, pushing through the last stretch up I-40 from Texas all the way back to Vegas, you are dead tired. The wind outside is howling as you step inside and close the door. It beats at the door after you.
You slip off your shoes and step from the cramped entranceway into the kitchen.
Through the open bedroom door, you see your wife asleep in bed. The covers pulled over her head. The sheets rising and falling with her breathing.
You wonder how the interview went. She is embarrassed by what she sees as the
smallness of her dreams, but when you first met, she was just a cocktail waitress at the casino. Then she moved up to food. Now she is going to work in an office. With the long hours you worked, the two of you were like ships passing in the night. But you see the better days to come. You feel it in your heart the way you can feel the glacial coolness of the linoleum through your socks. The future is an island on the horizon and you are rowing to it.
There is a strange smell when you come into the bedroom, but you take off your clothes and slip in beside her. You feel her body heat under the sheets and close your eyes, ready to be washed away on a tide into sleep.
The phone on the nightstand rings. You reach over and pick it up, hoping it did not wake your wife. But the voice you hear on the other end is her own. She is saying your name. She can’t seem to say anything else, just your name, which does not leave your ear until you lower the phone and turn to the shape lying next to you in bed. Which turns to meet you.
And a voice strange and familiar says, “Well then.”
It says, “Shall we begin?”
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