The Perfect Interview
Image by Grace Dixon
The interviewer, Margaret, likes to stand with one hand in the crook of her other elbow. The crooked elbow leads to a hand holding a phone to her ear. It is her job to know the interviewee for the audience — to find the nostalgia in this new person.
“Well,” says the interviewee into the phone, “I bring awareness to each occurring moment in my life — and indeed the universe itself — at all times.” The interviewee is perhaps best described as lithe, matching the lines of her blazer. There were once pictures, destroyed long ago, of her with a wine glass in hand and an open-mouthed grin that were not lithe at all. Her smile now is pleasant. She woke up this morning and arranged her hair and her mind to be an open canvass. These are the ways to guarantee a good interview.
Margaret is given notecards by her staff or texts authored by her interviewees months before her interviews. This interviewee has a long list of accomplishments — a panel discussion at Oberlin, an appearance on Late Night Intellicasting, a recorded conversation with media’s darling, Blithe Pepper — but the reverse chronological accolades end abruptly, giving Margaret very little to research or question. Speaking to her guests weeks ahead of a scheduled interview is not something she does often. Yet this woman’s lack of a history has impelled Margaret to make the call.
“Yes, but,” says Margaret, “what did you do before you became a well-known figure? Before you were interviewed?
Fiction
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November 12,
2019
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15-minute
read
“Before I was interviewed?”
“Everything I have on you is a list of previous public appearances.”
The interviewee sips a warm drink. “I’m an expert at being interviewed.”
“About what, though? Science, literature, theatre, astronomy, gastro-astronomy?”
Sometimes the guarantee of a good interview is marred by people like Margaret, the interviewee muses to herself, but she has handled them before. Offering a quiet chuckled response to Margaret’s quip, she takes another sip of her drink. She moves her arms to be wider in the chair and thinks of how Margaret’s retrospective questions make it abundantly clear that she has not acquiesced to The Way’s emphasis on now. She thinks of the increasingly ruthless practices of The Way in recent months — of the detainment and subsequent deaths of nonsubscribers — and the interviewee is filled with the uncomfortable omniscience of a raven watching a monkey cross into a predator’s territory.
“Margaret, they’re coming for you,” the interviewee says.
Margaret hangs up.
The interviewee is unmoved by Margaret’s dismissal. Her own words were precise and truthful, as those in a good interview should be.
Adjusting her elbows to point outwards on her armrests, the interviewee considers the usage of precise words — she knows better than most how this was essential to the propagation of The Way. During its inception she was consulted on the use of specific, one-word slogans to introduce spiritual rhetoric into the political sphere. Minimal, for example, was an early policy advocating a decluttered environment and encouraged citizens to adopt a sense of happiness that is unaffected by the material world.
Years have gone by since the interviewee has been permitted to offer consul to The Way. Their initiatives had been in keeping with her inner values until the introduction of now and its use of aggressive and convoluted terminology to justify the arrests of noncompliant people. These mutations towards violence in The Way deeply alarm the interviewee. And she does not know who she is when she feels this alarm.
The calls of The Way echo in the wide spaces of the city squares: Why live if you are not living now?
***
Margaret does not understand how she is to do her job in this political climate. When the initial wave of changes came years ago as a push from her younger audiences to ignore her guests’ past deeds and to focus on their current ideologies, she found this mindset understandable, even kind. She saw guests’ past identities as knitting into a larger testament of who they were on the path to becoming, and her program became known for reflecting forgiveness and empathy. But this new trend of limiting bios to a mere 100 characters — “@blinger: Making music with @sleighsighs. Cycling to fund cancer research, donate @gofundme.blinger” — is really getting ridiculous, she thinks.
She remembers spending months reading one person’s authored works in preparation of meeting them. The lovingly stained copies of books written by her guests still lie in the depths of her apartment. Walking on creaking floorboards toward the kitchen, she sees the piles she tidied just a few weeks ago, which have yet again given up to entropy. The pamphlet on wabi-sabi which she was handed in a crowd at the start of it all has been kicked out of the orbit of the circling piles; on its front page glows the title current.
Thoughts about the interviewee come to her like the pamphlet did, kicked forth from an ether, and her desire to investigate is occluded by a deepening and confused sense of being unwelcome. Margaret feels the inadequacy of not being the interviewee. Comparison is not The Way, she knows, but what is she to do? It’s true, she is very different from the interviewee. She turns on the cold water in the sink and winces at the loud smack! of the aluminum rice cooker insert hitting the faucet before she readjusts it. A curling tightness builds in her stomach as she hears the interviewee again — “I try to bring awareness to all the events of my life and indeed the universe itself” — and Margaret imagines the interviewee would never have been so careless as to misjudge the height between the faucet and the rice cooker insert.
Were Margaret’s supposed flaws so transparent, even in her speech? Was that how the interviewee had known, just minutes into their conversation, that Margaret had received a warning, a small innocuous hand-written note in the mail, informing her of The Way’s intent to detain her?
She pulls her hands through the knots of her hair, letting the stray strands drift to the floor, and wonders immediately if such a casual mannerism is a signifier of her otherness.
***
The walker strides down the street after exiting the metro, a light blue coat now covering her blazer. Each step is placed with purpose, and though she never looks down, she avoids the cracks and slopes in the pavement. The muscles of her leg are long, stretching to cover more ground.
These days, the walker thinks of herself in relation to whatever action she is performing in the current moment; when she being interviewed, she is the interviewee. In the grocery store, she is the shopper. In her home, she is mostly the inhabitant, sometimes the cook, the meditator, or the sleeper. This focus on the present allows easily for a refinement of it. Without the distractions of the past and the future, the walker can be perfect — calm and composed, witty and wise, gathered and gleaming.
After Margaret had hung up abruptly, the feeling of alarm had set in and along with it the lack of clarity and identity. The interviewee’s thoughts had overflown with what she had surmised of Margaret — that Margaret’s inability to tune her gaze to the present moment must mean that she was also the kind of person who has a disheveled garden, one with flower bulbs thrown haphazardly wherever they would fit last season. And suppose it was true; was she then the detached observer of Margaret’s obviously dangerous situation?
She could be the questioner, she decided, and gather more information about Margaret before taking on any other identities. After Googling Margaret’s address, she had swiftly picked up a few pine needles that had been blown onto the carpet through the open bay windows, throwing them and similarly stagnant thoughts of panic and uncertainty out onto the soil to the side of her front yard.
She settles her hands in her pockets. There are ways to guarantee a good walk.
Friends holding Japanese-style tea cups call out to her from their porches. She waves, her lilting step remaining unwavering. In the distance a freight train blows for so long that the sound melts into the city. She passes through a heady jasmine scent and stops mid-stride to walk backwards, then forwards, so she can smell it again. Resuming her gliding pace for a few more blocks, she arrives in front of Margaret’s house. Flowers in neat rows are peeking out from under recently trimmed hedges. She is still not here to save Margaret per se, but those arranged blooms suggest that she could. After all, the guarantee of a good walk is not in the hands of people like Margaret.
***
Margaret is wary. How can she trust this woman with only her ridiculously well-fitted coat as a signal of her situation and motives? She invites the woman in and ushers her through the hallway that smells faintly of hundred year old wood and paint and cooking rice. Margaret tells herself that trust and skepticism go hand in hand – a principled and balanced perspective she had landed upon of her own accord, though she knows it is also part of The Way.
“Can I offer you something to drink?” Margaret asks the woman.
“Yes, tea would be lovely. Thank you,” replies her guest with her hips pivoted politely towards Margaret and her voice sounding younger than it had over the phone.
“Ah, so you’re allowed to have preferences then, or only preferences that agree with the lifestyle The Way espouses?” Margaret questions, bending to shove the cushions of the couch into position.
“It is convenient for me that I want what they want,” the guest replies. “Until the proposals for detainment started to circulate, I had never not wanted what they want.”
Margaret straightens up, looking bewildered. “You’re speaking in the past participle.”
“I’ve been given certain allowances,” is the guest’s simple reply. Margaret raises her eyebrows and disappears into the kitchen.
The woman gives the room a once over in Margaret’s absence. Her eyes settle on the coffee stains on the side tables – Yes, tables plural, though only one is needed. She is attenuating slower to this room than she does to most others these days, thrown off by both Margaret’s verbally unquestioning acceptance of her into her house and by the starkly heavy pieces and angles and shadows of Margaret’s chosen aesthetic. There are so many hiding places here. So many places for things to collect unnoticed. Expecting lint and debris, she peers into the space between two piles of books and sees only colored paper tabs protruding from between the pages, labeled neatly with dates.
The distinct absence of dust bunnies catches at her like the flowers in the front yard. The woman had expected disarray, not mindful attention, and so she is thrilled for a minute; perhaps saving Margaret will not require the complete changing of her habits. She turns the phrase “saving Margaret” over in her head as her hand turns over the current pamphlet that lays nearby.
The back of the pamphlet shows a smiling man, clear eyed and familiar. The woman immediately turns it back around, current glowing in greeting to her once more. Margaret brings the tea in, large green leaves drifting lazily through the hot water. She sees the woman hurriedly flip the wabi-sabi pamphlet, glancing away from the man on its back cover.
“It’s his eyes,” Margaret says to her guest. “They make me want to turn it over to the front, too.”
“I know him,” the guest replies.
“Did you turn from his gaze quite a lot?”
“Yes.”
“Was it good?”
“Yes.”
“Good enough that you now defend his words regarding how we should arrange our furniture, our lives, our selves?” Margaret intones, direct and swift.
There are rusted trains, sounding their alarms, pulling heavy freight cars, rushing through the woman’s head. On each of the freight cars sit the many historied definitions of that morally charged word: Good. The passengers in the train clamor at her – was it good, good enough that you now defend his words? Good for you to agree with Margaret so quickly about how you knew him? Good that Margaret knows nothing of the reasons of why you stayed with him for so long? Was it good, the intimacy or the togetherness or the ideas or everything? Good for you or for him or for others or for the planet or good for nothing but good in and of itself or — She stops the trains before the passengers can rush off.
The point is that Margaret observes her guests very closely and plants her flowers and tabs her pages and removes collecting dust for tomorrow, the woman realizes. Not for the present.
Saving Margaret will not be easy. This time the phrase saving Margaret spills clearly into the woman’s mind, like smoke ribonning from the end an incense stick. Margaret stands in front of her, offering the woman a full teacup, dripping one drop onto the floor.
The Way started with human wellness as its guide, the woman remembers, and the threat to Margaret’s life is a clear indication that it has strayed from its aim, for there is wellness and joy in Margaret. These traits sit bumping against envy, confusion, and nervousness without diminishing how Margaret shines with intelligence. The woman takes in how her host hums the opening bar of an old song while sipping her tea, how the couch is deeply inviting owing to and not in spite of its rich, jarring patterning.
Hope fills itself into a salt cellar inside the woman that she had not known was empty.
“You are good at your job, Margaret,” is what comes out when the woman opens her mouth.
Margaret nods in acknowledgement. Gesturing to a nearby chair, she herself takes a seat. The guest, too, sits. Again the lines of her body are clean and easily drawable. She consciously does not dart her eyes to her reflection in the opposite window to check her appearance.
***
Seated near each other, Margaret and the woman are not so different in outward appearance. But those of The Way would see the differences immediately, having trained themselves to negate their fidgets and any glazed-over looks suggestive of daydreaming.
Here is Margaret, again looking off into the distance with one arm folded and the other hand resting in the crook of her elbow. In her mind’s eye she sees her upcoming conversation with the interviewee, a stilted perusal into why the woman is in her house. Here is the woman, looking ready to stay silent for ten straight days, her mind a diluted blue, her mouth tasting the grainy roasted quality of the tea, her hands soaking the cup’s warmth, her eyes finding and enjoying the way the sunlight hits the dark coffee table’s legs.
It is the woman who breaks the silence.
“Margaret, you’ll need to change if you want to be safe when they come for you,” she says.
“I’m not changing,” says Margaret with the characteristic sureness of someone who is more comfortable talking aloud than musing inwardly. “My identity is intrinsically tied to my history, and you’d be a fool to deny that this is how all identities work. I know my history. This knowledge makes me able to predict my emotional future very clearly, and while I don’t mean to be intrusive, the look on your face when I asked you about the man on the pamphlet indicates to me that your dismissal of your past hasn’t served you well — that when you examine who you were, your emotions blur with moral charges that spin out of control into a world-shaking ideology.”
The woman nods, pausing to take in Margaret’s directness.
“I’m ready for my emotions to have practical consequences on my behavior, Margaret, and this is why I’d like to help you.”
“Your commitment to noble causes hasn’t gone too well so far,” says Margaret.
“You’re not a cause.”
“I’m a person.”
“And a person worth saving. Your habits will have to change a bit to throw off suspicion. This doesn’t change the core of you, Margaret.”
Sighing, Margaret knows her guest is right. They can circle back to the details later. For now, she leans forward, wondering again at who exactly is sitting in her home. “You keep calling me by my name. What’s yours?”
The woman, her thoughts so pristine that if distilled they would precipitate as poetry, declines to answer.
***
And so it is. A timely decision: Margaret should change. The political environment demands it.
The woman, now Margaret’s mentor, visits with her daily. Gently, the mentor shifts the trinkets on Margaret’s shelves, feather dusting underneath them. She instructs Margaret to think less about what has happened and what will come, and more about physical discipline, verbal discipline, sensory discipline, mental discipline. Margaret cultivates the sleeping practices of The Way; instead of sleeping towards escape, she sleeps as she is when awake. Aware.
When Margaret is asleep and the mentor is supposed to be monitoring her student’s REM cycles, the mentor instead leaves the bedroom to wedge herself into an odd position on the couch. She holds her knees to her chest, dreaming and sometimes worrying about the effects of her resistance to The Way. Both women comfort themselves inwardly with the hope of collective dissent, forced by other connections like theirs that must be occurring across the country.
Margaret does interview the woman and uses the public event to showcase her acceptance of The Way. She sets aside her old questions. Margaret does not ask about the interviewee’s involvement with the man on the back of current, nor does she ask about where she grew up, nor why the interviewee prefers what The Way prefers, nor where she hopes to be in five years. She does not even ask the interviewee’s name.
Instead, Margaret asks the interviewee, “From the perspective of a cup of tea, what does your day look like? Who drinks you?”
The woman speaks.
“If I were a cup of tea, I’d feel judged,” she says, and continues, "We can assume that to be judged is a human thing, to have a dog is a human thing. But a cup of tea is judged, too, with the resulting judgement felt by a different body. Like this: someone on the bus likes the shape of your breast under your embroidered tunic, and though you don’t see them seeing you, the lady in the next row of seats sees, and she feels. A cup of tea sits on the counter, and you like the shape of the lumpy teabag seeping under the water’s surface, and though the cup doesn’t see you seeing it, your roommate sees, and she feels.
Is it only the cup of tea that feels judgement in this secondary way? A judgement is made. And how do we feel the result? Through the judge? Often times, no. Often we feel the judgement through others, through the lady on the bus who saw, or through the roommate who felt.”
The discussion is elusive and insubstantial — a chance for empathy muddled in a back-and-forth about teacups.
***
Both women begin to dream of silver seas. Together they look at the waves and see the crests as made of glistening mercury, a thicker and heavier timeline. In the same breath one of them can take in the heaviness as the other looks beyond where the waves came from.
Margaret survives.
is something of a science writer in the PNW, nothing of a chilled capitalist achiever, and everything of a small child absorbed in sonic moments of nondual purity.