Spoilers on Page Thirteen

By A.J. Payler

After being laid off, Jamie Okuda quickly realized that he had better find something to do with his days, and soon. Otherwise, what he optimistically referred to as his life would quickly degenerate into a downward spiral of depressive isolation, existing eternally in some twilight netherworld comprised solely of his dank beige one-bedroom apartment, sleeping ten hours or more at a clip, waking only to sit motionless on the couch staring blearily at his phone or television through a cloud of cannabis vapor, then shuffling back into the constantly darkened bedroom to disappear into the womb of rumpled sheets.

It was truly unfortunate that the marketing industry had been devastated so quickly. Only a year ago, there had been ten firms in town that he knew of. Now there were four. So even on the rare occasion a position did open up, there was never a shortage of competition.

Being honest with himself, Jamie had never been one of the top performers, even when his former employer had been riding high. Luckily he’d never deluded himself about that, so at least he’d banked enough of his earnings to keep himself afloat for a while. More forethought than many of his former co-workers had exhibited, several of whom seemingly did little but repeatedly blast increasingly distraught pleas all over social media.

Cringeworthy. And desperate. Never a good look, but fatal in a copywriter. You had to be able to sell yourself before you could sell anything to anyone else, that was the key.

To his credit, Jamie knew that was the part he wasn’t so great at. He’d never be a top seller until he came to grips with that. And speaking frankly, it was beginning to look like it’d be a lot easier to get out of the marketing copy game entirely than face up to the deep-rooted insecurities, fears, and neuroses that kept him within that sphere.

Sure, doing so would theoretically be ‘good for him’, and ‘healthy’, and ‘a positive sign of real personal growth’, but fuck, who wanted all that? Sure, marketing opportunities in the San Diego area had dried up like the county’s water supply in summer, but there were lots of things out there he could do. Much easier to find something to distract and occupy himself with rather than look inward and face the abyss beneath every floor.

Or so one would think, anyway. So the search began.

First, he established a daily routine for himself, figuring imposing the most basic level of discipline could only help get him back on track. Whatever his next step might turn out to be, he’d never get there if he continued letting himself go to pot.

He began getting up at nine a.m. sharp, almost without exception. He didn’t always hop directly into the shower, but he showered once a day, most of the time. Often enough that he began to notice the accumulated musty smells of the cramped apartment he’d marinated within for the past several weeks, the whole place rankling like a festering pile of months-old unwashed laundry, and started throwing the windows open first thing after waking to let fresh air and sunshine in.

Swiftly, this produced sufficient improvement in his mood that he added a more-or-less daily walk into his routine, as the cheapest and most readily available form of exercise he could conceive of. Plus, it came with the added benefit of getting him the hell out of his apartment for as long as his will and his feet held out. Which was good, because the more he looked at the popcorn-textured beige walls, the surer he was they were gradually driving him out of his mind.

On one of his walks, he stopped at the convenience store at the corner five blocks down, brought home a family-size pack of lemon-scented plug-in air fresheners. That helped too.

Over the next few weeks, he noticed an array of minor but noticeable improvements in his life. His shorts didn’t fit quite so tightly, his appetite bent towards healthier fare and away from the saturated path of least resistance, his sleep was more restful. Even his dreams seemed more invigorating somehow, though he could never quantify exactly how, as they invariably vanished from his mind directly upon waking.

Once, he put on a collared white shirt and a tie to do a spirited round of job hunting at his laptop. Afterwards he felt faintly silly for doing so, thinking he probably wouldn’t do it again. But he was still proud of himself for trying something, anything, new, even if was something ridiculous.

The next morning, a Tuesday, his phone chimed sprightly as he chewed his instant cinnamon-and-apple oatmeal, announcing an email appearing atop his inbox. Before, he would have let it go, figuring he would get around to it later, his unread inbox numbers often building to triple digits before he knuckled down and dug into the amassed hoard. But he was making an effort not to be that guy anymore, and he was looking at his phone anyway.

His eyes bulged at the subject line.

“Recruitment: TECHNICAL WRITER NEEDED REFERRALS APPRECIATED”, it read, effectively shouting at him through the screen. “Dear Mr. Jamie,” the email read. “My name is Argenta and I am a recruiter with Pinacles, a leading business and technology talent and solutions firm. While you may not have heard of us before, we have offices and opportunities located throughout the United States. I stumbled across your resume during my search for potential candidates and found your professional experience to be relevant to one of many consulting and contract opportunities. One specific opportunity is for a Technical Writer located in San Diego, California. Following is a brief job description.”

Technical writing? Why not? If someone would tell him what he was supposed to write, he’d write it. Couldn’t be much more difficult than dealing with a bunch of impatient clients who never knew what they wanted but always claimed they’d know it when they saw it, which they never did.

Jamie read over the list of responsibilities and requirements, none of which seemed to preclude him from the job. On the writing side of things, it was all pretty basic stuff like being able to use the most common word processing software. And on the technical side of things, well, he wasn’t totally certain what they were looking for. But they weren’t demanding applicants hold advanced degrees or any particular area of scientific specialization, at least. So maybe he could bullshit his way through the rest.

Besides, what would it hurt to give it a shot, even if he turned out not to be right for the role? He’d been out of practice for long enough that it would do him good to get some practice interviewing for new positions. And he’d never worked in that industry before, so who knew what the norms were there?

A few emails exchanged, a few stilted telephone conversations, and before he knew what was happening Jamie found himself wearing his nicest button-down shirt and his most formal pair of pants, hands clasped on his knees as he waited in the lobby of Pinacles Industries, Mission Valley branch. The couch was stiff and unforgiving, a sleek modern design covered in thick white leather that smelled like fresh vinyl. Marbled tiles stretched from wall to wall, the ammonic tang of recent sanitization faintly detectable beneath the bubbling coffeepot behind the reception desk where a short, stout man sat sorting papers into piles.

“Jamie Okada?” asked the stout man, looking around the lobby briefly before beckoning the only person in it to him. “Are you Jamie?”

“That’s me,” Jamie said. “I mean, yes, I’m Jamie Okuda.”

The man looked down at his screen, back at Jamie. “I have Okada here.”

“Okay, well,” Jamie said, hoping the man didn’t notice him wiping the sweat from his brow. “I was only just contacted about this for the first time this morning. I’m sure it was just a miscommunication. People misspell the name all the time. They called out a table seating for Jane O’Kane once over the intercom at the Lasagna Mill.”

The man behind the desk seemed neither to notice nor care either about him feeling overheated or the mistaken name. “Here’s your badge, Mister Okada,” he said, pushing a plastic nametag across to him. “Please pin it above your waist and keep it visible at all times.”

He picked it up. There was a picture of himself he didn’t recognize on it, next to big red letters reading GUEST.

“Where did this picture come from?” he asked.

The stout man shrugged. “I don’t make them, I just hand them out. Social media, if I had to guess.”

“Hm,” Jamie said, pinning the badge to the pocket of his shirt. “Quick work.” He’d deleted all social media some time ago, both for his mental health and for the good of his job search. Not that he’d ever posted anything too scandalous, but you couldn’t be too careful.

Maybe he’d been tagged in some former acquaintance’s photo and missed the notification. Maybe he’d just forgotten ever seeing this photo. But he didn’t think so.

There was no time to worry further about it at the moment, anyway. The stout man shoved an array of papers across the desk at him, reached beneath the desk.

The door behind the man buzzed and its lock withdrew with a loud click.

“Take your packet and a pen, if you don’t have one, please,” he was saying, his tone conveying that he’d repeated the words so many times they were merely a pattern of syllables to him. “Down the hall, third door on your left. And on behalf of all of us, let me thank you for coming to Pinacles Industries today.”

He pronounced it Pin-a-klees, like a name belonging to Hercules’s pinafore-loving sibling. Up until that moment Jamie had assumed the company’s name to be pronounced like the word ‘pinnacles’, with one of the ns taken out for copyright purposes; he was almost certain the recruiter he’d spoken to had pronounced it that way. Hearing differently was slightly disorienting in a way he couldn’t quite quantify, as if the place he was interviewing at was a parallel, distorted version of what he had thought it to be.

Jamie was nearly to the open door when the man spoke again.

“Coffee?” he asked, eyes wide and questioning.

“Uh, no,” Jamie demurred. “I’d take a water if you have one, though.”

“I’ll bring it in to you. Just go on in and I’ll catch up,” he said, waving Jamie inside.

The doors shut behind him, deadbolt sliding home with a loud mechanical thunk. The hallway was clean, empty, anonymous as any workplace.

Not another person in sight. No background music. It was like stepping into an airlock.

He counted one, two three doors on the left and swung the sturdy wooden door open, expecting to find an office or another waiting room.

Instead, behind it was a miniscule chamber barely large enough to accommodate the simple wooden table and chair it housed. It smelled dusty and dry, like the door wasn’t opened very often and the ventilation system was directed elsewhere. A single buzzing fluorescent bulb hung from the ceiling; a two-foot screen was mounted on the wall opposite the chair. That was the extent of the room’s features. There wasn’t even a second chair to accommodate an interviewer.

The screen flashed on as he took his seat. “PLEASE FILL OUT YOUR PAPERWORK AND A REPRESENTATIVE WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY,” it read, followed by what he assumed to be the translation of those words into Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Korean, and Tagalog.

He set the paperwork on the desk before him, flipped through it. There were quite a few pages. The last time he’d done a round of job interviews, maybe five years prior, he recalled doing a one or two-page application at most places. There had to be ten or twelve pages or more in the packet the stout man had handed him.

The first page was all basic stuff, name and address and contact information he was certain he’d provided multiple times over already. Nothing special.

Then they wanted job history, educational background, all the typical information employers usually wanted to collect. This was a little more detailed than some, offering blanks for extracurricular activities, grade point averages for all schools, and dates of employment down to the day.

Luckily, Jamie already had all the information he might possibly need compiled in an extensive background check document he had received during a brief period subcontracting for the United States Navy recruitment center. He remembered being surprised at the time at all the stuff they needed to know just to let someone write bullshit ad copy to entice dumb teenagers to sign up for the military. But if Pinacles was a military contractor working on top secret classified projects—far from unheard of in San Diego—that might explain the exhaustive nature of their forms.

Jamie wouldn’t be thrilled about working for the U.S. military again—a particular occasion on which an officer had questioned his patriotism and loyalty merely for disagreeing with him over a round of edits stood out in his mind as emblematic of the experience—but he’d do it if it meant the difference between being able to pay his rent and being booted out on the street. And as he didn’t have any other offers on the table at the moment, he decided he’d better answer whatever they had to ask if he wanted to get offered the job.

The third page asked for the last twenty years of residential addresses, requesting a name and phone number for a reference who could personally verify the applicant had actually resided there during that period. A little more difficult, but Jamie had kept current with sufficient friendships throughout his life that he was able to complete this section by referring alternately to his background check paperwork and the contact information stored in his phone.

As he finished the last line of the references section—digging deep to unearth the current phone number of a former roommate who had been a notorious drunkard and party crasher in their college days, and now served as a municipal judge thanks to robust family connections—the lettering on the screen blinked out, replaced by a smooth, jazzy instrumental tune and what appeared to be an aerial drone shot of the office building he was sitting in.

“Welcome to Pin-a-klees Industries,” a singsong female voice intoned, so uninflected he couldn’t tell for certain whether it was actual human narration or AI text-to-speech. “And thank you for dedicating this portion of your time on this planet to our screening process. By this point you should have nearly finished your induction paperwork. If not, please complete it as soon as possible and a representative will be with you shortly.”

Jamie felt his neck grow warm. He was barely a third of the way through the packet.

Armpits dampening, he flipped to the fourth page to find a dense list of questions sprawling down both sides of the paper. And the fifth, and the sixth… all the way to the thirteenth page.

“Jesus,” he mumbled, then placed the tips of his fingers to his lips involuntarily, wondering if they might be listening in.

Oh well. He was there already, and it wasn’t like there was anything waiting for him back at the apartment but another load of clothes to toss in the washer and a sinkful of dirty dishes.

‘What is your biggest weakness?’ read the first question.

He rolled his eyes, wondering if anyone was ever stupid enough to answer that one honestly on a job application. After carefully inscribing “I work too hard and too long and tend to neglect work-life balance”, he scanned down the page, reading ahead to see what other queries awaited him. From the looks of it, the questions only got more and more detailed as the forms progressed.

Do you prefer working by yourself or with a team?’ He was always more productive when uninterrupted, but knew they were really asking if he would harmonize readily with other workers, so the correct answer was team.

‘What are you passionate about?’ If he knew more about the company and its mission statement, cobbling together some mishmash that mentioned as many of their key buzzwords as possible would be the smartest answer. Lacking that, some horseshit about providing value to customers and fulfilling corporate benchmarks would do the trick.

‘Describe the last event that angered you’… hmm. Anger wasn’t an emotion that had much place in a work environment. They were probably just trying to screen out the volatile and easily triggered, so he’d gin up some mawkish baloney about having witnessed some trivial, easily corrected injustice like a clearly able-bodied lout parking his life-sized toy truck in a spot reserved for the disabled.

The door swung open, jolting him from his preoccupation.

“Here’s your drink,” the stout security guard said, slamming an opened bottle of spring water on the table, splashing droplets across his papers.

“Thanks,” Jamie pronounced acidly, blotting the errant wetness with the edge of his sleeve, taking care not to smear the ink or stain his shirt.

The door shut firmly behind the stout man. Just now realizing how parched his throat was, Jamie sipped lightly from the bottle. It had that mineralesque flatness one often found in bottled water but went down smoothly enough for him to smack his lips in its wake.

Before he could return to his paperwork, the screen flashed on with a fanfare of trumpets and the appearance of an attractive, dark-haired woman of indeterminate ethnicity clad in a sleek, dark blue business suit. The chyron declared her to be Melanie Mechner, executive director of human capital for Pinacles, whatever that meant.

“Good afternoon, Mister Okada,” she enunciated, her trained voice rich and mellifluous. He jerked upwards, straightening his spine at the mention of his name—well, nearly his name—and smoothing his rumpled sleeves before realizing the video was pre-recorded.

“By now you should have completed your induction paperwork,” she continued, “and probably built up a few questions along the way. This presentation is designed to answer those questions and give you a bit more background on Pinacles Industries, our goals and our history. So let’s get started!”

Sweat pooling at his temples, Jamie pawed through the remainder of the stack of papers spread out on the desk in front of him. He was nowhere near done, but maybe he could zip through while the presentation was going.

‘Are you prone to rumination on errors or failures in your past?’ Weird, but okay. Obviously they were looking for a no on that one.

“Here at Pinacles headquarters in the beautiful Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, top leaders strategize concepts to push society forward while maintaining the grand traditions that have led towards the sublime culture we all enjoy,” Melanie Mechner’s voice was narrating over a spectacular flyby of a towering building that could easily have served as a government seat or religious temple.

Trying to focus on his paperwork while also keeping up with the video, Jamie read on.

‘Do unidentified sounds or phenomenon occurring within your proximity tend to cause you disturbance?’ He wasn’t even sure what they asking there. Like ghosts? Or just, like, the noise of a house settling?

Whichever they meant, he marked no and kept reading.

“Here at Pinacles,” her smooth voice intoned, “the human spirit is paramount over all. That why we encourage all Pinacles applicants to lay their passions bare, in order that they might pursue those ends that will enrich them most in life, while also performing useful functions that will benefit both them personally and humanity as a whole.”

By now thoroughly flustered by how badly he was behind, Jamie flipped the seventh sheet over, squinting at it in frustration. The line of questioning was only getting more incomprehensible and esoteric, to the point he was beginning to get concerned he’d stumbled into either a cult recruitment operation or a multi-level marketing scheme.

Wouldn’t have been the first time for him to have encountered either while on the hunt for a job in San Diego. Such an occurrence was always disappointing, but somewhat enlightening how much the two cases have in common: both, broad appeals designed to resonate with nearly anyone and funnel the most gullible and easily led into spiraling funnels of behavior within which they could be exploited.

He flipped to the last page—page thirteen. If this was going to end in a pitch to sign his life away one way or another, he wanted it spoiled for him now.

“What the fuck?” he blurted, gripping the paper between clenched fists as Melanie whatsername droned on in the background.

‘What coping skills did you develop when your parents divorced in the third grade and you changed schools three times during the course of a single schoolyear?’

‘Do you think Elisabeth Wu turned you down for a date during your sophomore year at college because her family made significantly more money than yours, or simply because she found you unappealing? If the latter, was the issue physical, mental, or psychological?’

‘Would you be more content and satisfied if you’d had the guts to open that comic bookstore with your friend Geoff Wiesen six years ago? Had the store been successful, do you think Geoff would still have died of that overdose?’

He stood up, knocking the chair out from behind him, waving the paper in one hand.

“What the hell is this?”

On the screen, Melanie Mechner stopped midsentence, turned to look directly out at him.

“What the hell do you think it is, Mister Okada?”

“Okuda,” he said. “It’s Okuda. If you know half of what’s here, you damn sure know my name. So do me the favor of not pretending otherwise.”

She smiled, wherever she was. He wondered if any of what she’d been going on about in the video was true.

“I don’t know what you think you read there, sir. But if you’re Jamie Okuda, not Jamie Okada, that would explain the disparity in your reaction.”

She closed her eyes, nodding towards camera. “Please forgive the regrettable error.”

The fluorescent bulb went out and the screen turned red, lighting the room up scarlet. From the door, he heard a loud thunk like electrically controlled deadbolts sliding home.

Uselessly, he grabbed at the knob, twisting it futilely. It spun like it wasn’t connected to anything. And if he tried to break the door down, he’d only shatter his shoulder or foot against the solid wood.

From the ceiling, he heard the hissing of concealed jets.

“What is this?” he demanded. “Let me out of here!”

Melanie Mechner smiled indulgently. “Mister Okuda, I am pleased to assure you that when you awake, you will find yourself far from this room.”

The screen blinked out and the room was plunged into darkness.

Jamie tried to hold his breath, knowing that was a game that always ended the same way.

He couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if he’d rolled with it, pretended to be Jamie Okada, blithely answered the questions as if they were standard requests for information and just given them what he thought they were looking for, like every other job application question he’d answered in his life.

If he could have done that, though, he would have had to have been a different person entirely. And even though he knew things probably would have worked out a lot better for him in the end, he took some small solace in knowing that was the one thing he was truly incapable of.

A. J. Payler is the author of novels The Killing Song, Lost In the Red, Terror Next Door, and Bank Error in Your Favor; his writing has been published by Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, Flipside, Cloaked Press, Songwriter's Market, and Razorcake. He has also performed as vocalist/guitarist/songwriter for bands Vulture Shock and Daisy Glaze and released five solo albums. Born in Hawaii, he lives in California with his family. He has shaken hands with both Motörhead's Lemmy and Kurt Vonnegut, but not at the same time. Further detail is available via linktr.ee/ajpayler and ajpayler.com.

Spoilers on Page Thirteen

By A.J. Payler

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