Chapter 1: The First Call

You answer the phone because you always answer the phone. It's 11:47 PM on a Tuesday and you're standing in your kitchen which is not really your kitchen but a kitchen you rent in a house owned by someone who lives in Austin and has never seen this place and probably never will. The phone is buzzing and the number is your number. Your exact number. The same ten digits that you give to doctors' offices and online forms and the woman at the coffee shop who asked for it last week and you gave it to her even though you knew nothing would happen and nothing did.

You answer.

"Don't," the voice says, and it's your voice but older, or not older exactly but worn, like a shirt that's been washed too many times, like something that used to fit better. "Don't go to the interview tomorrow."

You're holding the phone and looking at the refrigerator which has three photographs held up by magnets shaped like states you've never visited. Nebraska. Idaho. Delaware. The photographs are of people you don't talk to anymore and you keep meaning to take them down.

"Who is this?" you say, which is stupid because you know who it is. You can hear yourself in the breathing.

"You know who this is."

"This is impossible."

"Yes," the voice says. "It is. And I'm calling anyway. Don't go to the interview. Take the other job. The one you think is beneath you. The one at the bookstore."

You sit down at the table which is also not your table. Everything in this house belongs to someone else. Even your thoughts feel borrowed lately, like you're living inside someone's idea of what a life should look like.

"The bookstore job pays nine dollars an hour," you say.

"I know."

"The interview tomorrow is for forty-seven thousand a year. Plus benefits."

"I know that too."

"Then why would I—"

"Because at the bookstore you'll meet someone. And at the other place you'll meet someone else. And one of those meetings leads to a life you can stand to live and the other leads to me, here, calling you at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, trying to fix what I already broke."

You stand up. You sit back down. The refrigerator hum is the only sound in the house that feels true. Everything else is performance. The couch you bought because it looked good in the catalog. The artwork you hung because the walls seemed empty. The plants you keep almost-killing because you read that having plants makes you seem more stable.

"You're saying if I go to the interview, my life goes wrong?"

"I'm saying if you go to the interview, you meet someone who makes you believe that wanting things makes you weak. And you'll spend the next eight years proving you don't want anything. And by the time you realize that wanting things is the only way to stay human, everyone you might have wanted will be gone."

The voice breaks on the word gone and you can hear yourself crying in the future and it's the worst sound you've ever heard. You hang up.

You stand in the kitchen which isn't yours, in the house which isn't yours, in the life which is definitely yours even though it doesn't feel like it, and you think about the interview tomorrow and the job at the bookstore you already turned down, and you think about wanting things, about whether you even know what you want anymore, and the phone is still in your hand and it's 11:51 PM and you have six hours and sixteen minutes until you have to decide what kind of person you're going to be.

You don't sleep.