The Orientation

Morgan parked her car a few blocks away from the building. She was too early, so she parked far enough away to give herself some time to walk and think.

It was summer, late July, and even though it was early in the morning the air felt sticky and too thick to breathe. Morgan could see the building in the distance. It was a weird color, a kind of orange, and the edges seemed to shimmer slightly in the pale light.

She wondered what would happen when she got there. She didn’t have much information on the job itself, only a slightly cryptic email alert she received late the night before – “08:00. Orientation.”

She could only vaguely remember the interview. It had happened months ago, maybe in February. She hadn’t heard back from them since and assumed the position had been given to somebody else. Which was fine, she’d applied on a whim anyway. Until yesterday, that was, when she got the email.  

Her heels made a clacking noise on the sidewalk. The air was too sweaty and her briefcase kept slipping out of her hand. Fucking briefcase, Morgan whispered. She’d only brought the thing because it was what people did when they had jobs, and it had already become annoying. She thought about maybe leaving it on the sidewalk or something but she kept walking instead.

The building was across the road now. It was a horrible shade of orange, like a wrinkled pumpkin. The bottom floor was all glass doors. Morgan looked in and couldn’t see anybody there, but she assumed they were waiting for her on the second or third floor. She crossed the street and looked inside again. Empty. The door was locked, but she pushed it regardless just to make sure. Nothing. She checked her watch. 07:50. Okay. She leaned her back against one of the doors to wait.

It was really quiet. There was nobody else on the street. A few trees lined the sidewalk but they all looked spindly and slightly unwatered, an almost chalky gray.  

She checked her watch again. 07:50.

Morgan closed her eyes and tried to think about the job interview. No luck. It almost seemed to be evading her memory on purpose, like it was something her brain was trying really hard to forget. The sun was hitting her face in a way that made her forehead crease.

There was a shuffling noise behind her. Morgan turned around. A man was sweeping the floor inside. Morgan knocked. He didn’t look up. Morgan kept knocking. The man looked up.

“What?” He mouthed.

Morgan pointed to her ears and smiled.

He shuffled to the door and unlocked it slowly.

“What do you want?”

“Hi, I’m here for the job orientation.”

“The what?”

“Um, the job orientation?”

The man looked at her for a while. “Okay.”

He closed the door and started sweeping again.

Morgan stood, facing the door. She held her hand up for a second and then knocked again.

The man looked up. They looked at each other. He walked up to the door.

“What?”

“Um, could I come inside?”

“Okay.”

Morgan walked to the middle of the floor. There was a bench on the left side of the building and what looked like a reception area on the right. The walls inside were the same shade of orange as the ones outside. Nothing about it looked like an office, but she thought it was likely that different floors had been rented out to different people.   

“Should I wait here?” Morgan pointed to the bench.

The man shrugged.

She sat on the bench. “What is this building?”

“Don’t know.”

The man continued sweeping. He walked closer to her, motioned her to lift her feet up, and swept under them too. Morgan checked her watch. 08:01.

“I think I’m going to go upstairs.”

“Okay.”

She walked further down to where the elevators were. She pushed the button to go up. There was a cardboard sign propped up next to it but all it said was ‘Floor 2’.

The metal of the elevator doors distorted her reflection. She couldn’t stop looking at it. The doors dinged open. Inside, all the buttons apart from 2 had been blocked out. She pressed 2. The elevator was claustrophobically small, much smaller than it had looked from the outside. It made a wheezing noise as it rose up.

When the doors opened, the floor they opened to looked exactly like the other one. Bench on the left, reception on the right.

“Hello?”

Nobody responded. It was empty. The blinds were drawn on all the windows, and the light creeped out from the cracks in streaks that stained the floor underneath. Morgan walked to the bench and looked around. There were no cubicles or desks. Just an expanse of empty floor space. She sat down.

She figured she would wait for an hour. Maybe the orientation was patience. Was there paper anywhere? She had paper in her briefcase. Was she supposed to write them something? Or maybe she was supposed to solve a math problem, like in Good Will Hunting. But she hadn’t done math since high school, and anyway if they wanted her to do that surely they would have made her do it in the interview.

She sighed deeply and rubbed her eyes. She wanted to roll the blinds up but was worried she would set off an alarm. Maybe it was part of the orientation to leave them down.

Morgan thought about the interview again. The one thing she remembered was that they’d said the job was “creative”. Her mother had warned her about creative jobs. She should’ve just sent her CV to Merrill Lynch.

She unlocked her phone and read the email again. All it said was “08:00. Orientation.”, and the address of the building underneath. 62 Rutherford Drive. Morgan looked up the definition of the word orientation. Were they expecting her to orient herself? Was this supposed to be some sort of self-discovery thing?

The shadow her head made on the floor was broken up among the streaks of light; she imagined she was pixelated.

She unclasped her briefcase and splayed out the two halves, took out her papers and placed them next to it. Then she spread them all out in a line across the floor. She counted all her pens twice, then removed them too and organized them by color. Then she put them all back in her briefcase and locked it again.          

08:35.

She lay down on the bench, spread out her fingers, and looked at the ceiling through the gaps.

08:45.

She thought about the man and whether he was still sweeping.

08:55.

She got up and started walking to the elevator. She wondered, briefly, if she had taken a lot of hallucinogenics last night and forgotten about it, or if she was really sick and this was all just some strange fever dream. As she waited for the elevator she decided that she wouldn’t come back, even if they sent her an email explaining the orientation. Going down she noticed that there was no mirror inside it, only the metal doors, and they were so warped Morgan was starting to forget what she looked like.

She left the briefcase on the bench upstairs.

The ground floor was completely empty. The man had gone somewhere, she could no longer hear him sweeping at all, and the building was quiet in a different, more overwhelming way.  

The door was unlocked but she waited inside for some time longer. Leaving still seemed like too much of a permanent decision. Should she email them back? She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to or not.

She stood looking at the door for a while before she left. It felt like walking out would make the building stop existing.

On the way back to her car, Morgan deleted the email and turned her phone off. It took longer than she expected, walking back, but when she got to her parking lot everything seemed normal. And when she turned around to look at the building, it was still there.