The Exit Interview

The fluorescent lights in Conference Room 3B hummed at a frequency that suggested they were perhaps three days away from finally giving up entirely—a timeline Rebecca understood intimately, having spent the last forty-five minutes watching Darren from HR attempt to conduct an exit interview with something that was, technically speaking, no longer entirely present in this dimension.

"So if you could just initial here," Darren said, sliding the Non-Disclosure Agreement across the laminate table (Ikea, the BEKANT series, battleship gray, purchased in bulk during the 2019 fiscal year office refresh that had also brought them the aggressively ergonomic chairs that pinched everyone's thighs). "Standard boilerplate. You agree not to disclose proprietary information, trade secrets, client lists, or—" he squinted at the document, which Rebecca had drafted herself during last month's legal compliance training "—the specific metaphysical circumstances of your departure."

The thing that had been Jeremy Richardson, Senior Account Manager, Marketing Division, shimmered at the edges. Not in a poetic, heat-wave-over-distant-highway kind of way—in the distinctly unsettling manner of a JPEG artifact, like reality's rendering engine was struggling with his particular polygon count.

"This isn't what I signed up for," Rebecca said, not to Darren or to Jeremy-who-was-transcending, but to the universe at large, which she suspected was listening with the same detached interest it brought to all middle-management crises. She'd meant it rhetorically—everyone said it during team restructuring announcements and mandatory sensitivity training sessions—but the truth was she'd actually read her employment contract when she signed it three years ago (unlike most people, who just scrolled to the bottom and clicked "Accept" with the same mindless efficiency they brought to iTunes updates), and nowhere in the seventeen pages of legal boilerplate had there been any mention of dimensional instability, spontaneous employee ascension, or the proper procedure for off-boarding staff who were actively becoming partially incorporeal.

Darren cleared his throat with the precise tone of someone who'd attended the "Difficult Conversations" workshop but remained fundamentally unprepared for conversations this difficult. "Jeremy, we really do need you to complete the paperwork before you, uh—" He gestured vaguely at Jeremy's increasingly translucent torso. "Before you finalize your transition."

Jeremy flickered. His voice, when it came, sounded like it was being played through a phone with one bar of service in an underground parking garage: distant, compressed, occasionally cutting out entirely. "The... Kroger Plus Card... in my desk drawer... tell Linda... she can have it... still got... seventeen cents per gallon... saved up..."

"Very generous," Rebecca said, making a note on her tablet. She'd been brought in specifically because Darren, dear god love him, had tried to handle this himself initially and had promptly hyperventilated into a conference room trash bag (which she'd then had to catalog as "Contaminated—Unusual Circumstances" for facilities management). Someone needed to maintain professional composure, and apparently that someone was her, despite the fact that her job description said "Senior HR Generalist" and not "Metaphysical Crisis Coordinator."

The thing was—and Rebecca had thought about this extensively during the seventeen minutes she'd spent pretending to look for the updated exit interview forms while actually having a small, private breakdown in the supply closet—Jeremy had been fine until today. Fine-ish. Meeting his quarterly targets (barely, but still), showing up on time (mostly), demonstrating basic competency in Excel (the low bar that separated the office workers from the chaos). And then this morning he'd simply... started phasing.

Sharon from Accounting had noticed it first during the 9 AM stand-up. Jeremy had been giving his update about the Stephenson account when his left hand had begun to glow faintly, emanating light the exact color of the fluorescent bulbs humming overhead—a sickly, slightly greenish-white that made everyone look either jaundiced or recently deceased, depending on the angle.

"Should we call someone?" Sharon had asked, which was a reasonable question that presumed there existed a someone whose job description included handling spontaneous employee luminescence.

"IT?" Brad from Sales had suggested, because Brad's solution to every problem involved either IT or taking the client to lunch at that steakhouse downtown (Morton's, not Ruth's Chris—he had standards).

But IT had proved spectacularly unhelpful—Miguel had shown up, taken one look at Jeremy, run a speed test on the conference room WiFi (which was, to be fair, also struggling), and announced that this fell under "hardware issues, probably," and hardware issues required a ticket submitted through the ServiceNow portal with a minimum 48-hour response time.

By lunch, Jeremy had progressed from glowing to partially transparent. By 2 PM, he'd started phasing through his desk chair, which had created an urgent ergonomics concern (could you get workers' comp for dimensional instability?). By 3:30, Darren had invoked the Crisis Management Protocol, which mostly involved calling Rebecca and asking her to "handle it" with the implicit understanding that "it" encompassed everything from paperwork to existential dread.

"Jeremy," Rebecca said, using her Serious Professional Voice (the one she'd cultivated through three years of telling people their health insurance didn't cover that, actually), "I need you to focus for just a few more minutes. Did you complete your knowledge transfer documentation?"

Knowledge transfer documentation was the company's elegant solution to the problem of people leaving (voluntarily or otherwise) without passing along critical information—basically a Word doc template with sections for "Key Responsibilities," "Important Contacts," and "Where Things Are Kept." It was, Rebecca suspected, largely ignored by people with normal departures. But Jeremy's departure was shaping up to be distinctly abnormal, and she'd be damned if she'd let interdimensional transcendence become an excuse for shoddy documentation.

"The... login credentials..." Jeremy's voice was getting fainter, like someone slowly turning down the volume on a podcast you weren't that interested in anyway. "Taped under... the keyboard..."

"Under the keyboard," Darren repeated, typing furiously on his laptop. "Got it. And the password is?"

But Jeremy had progressed beyond passwords. He was flickering faster now, strobing in and out of visibility like a supernatural strobe light, except instead of enhancing a dance floor vibe, it was giving Rebecca the kind of headache that suggested her brain was actively protesting its current reality.

The thing about exit interviews—and Rebecca had conducted maybe two hundred of them over her career, from interns who'd realized they hated marketing to that one guy who'd set the break room microwave on fire and claimed it was "a statement about corporate lunch culture"—was that they followed a script. You asked about their experience, you gathered their feedback (which you would file away and never look at again), you reminded them about COBRA coverage and their 401(k) rollover options, and you shook their hand with the appropriate level of professional warmth (genuine but not familiar, pleasant but not intimate, firm but not aggressive—the Goldilocks zone of corporate farewell gestures).

None of her training had covered employees who were actively vibrating out of phase with baseline reality.

"Rebecca," Darren said. Something in his voice made her actually look at him instead of at her tablet. "Is he... is he going to come back?"

And that was the question, wasn't it? Not could he come back, or should he come back, but the simple, terrifying uncertainty of a future unwritten and unwritable, of a situation so far outside the employee handbook that they were all just making it up as they went along.

"I don't know," Rebecca said, which felt like the first honest thing she'd said all day. "Jeremy, where are you going?"

The question hung in the air and for a moment Jeremy solidified just enough to make eye contact with her. His eyes (brown, ordinary, the same eyes that had glazed over during budget presentations and lit up when someone brought birthday cake to the break room) held something that might have been understanding, or exhaustion, or the cosmic awareness that came with seeing beyond the veil of mundane existence.

"Somewhere," he said, his voice distant and close at once, "that doesn't have fucking Casual Fridays."

And then he was gone—not dramatically, not with a flash or a bang or any of the fanfare one might expect from interdimensional departure, but with the quiet anticlimactic certainty of a Microsoft Teams call dropping unexpectedly. One moment Jeremy was there (sort of), and the next moment the space he'd occupied contained only air and possibility and the faint ozone smell of reality closing a loophole.

Darren stared at the empty chair. "Do I... do I file this as a resignation or a termination?"

Rebecca looked at her tablet, at the half-completed exit interview form with its dropdown menus and required fields and the tidy categorical thinking that presumed all departures could be neatly sorted into predetermined boxes. She thought about Jeremy's Kroger Plus Card and his adequate performance reviews and the way he'd always said "good morning" even on Mondays when no mornings were particularly good.

"Medical leave," she said finally, selecting the option from the dropdown menu (which did not include "Transcended Beyond Mortal Employment" as a category, though she was absolutely drafting a memo to corporate HR suggesting they add it). "Indefinite."

She saved the form, closed her tablet, and stood up, her joints protesting with the specific ache of someone who'd spent too long sitting in ergonomically questionable furniture while watching a colleague phase out of existence. Darren was still staring at the empty space, his face doing complicated emotional mathematics.

"Darren," Rebecca said, not unkindly, "you should probably go update his manager. I'll handle the paperwork."

After he’d shuffled out with the defeated posture of someone who'd confronted the vast absurdity of existence and found it lacking a clear procedure manual, Rebecca sat back down. Conference Room 3B hummed around her: the dying lights, the broken thermostat, the ghost-smell of someone's leftover pad thai. She pulled up her laptop and began drafting the incident report, choosing her words with the careful precision of someone who knew this would eventually be read by Legal, by Corporate, by people who would demand clarity from a situation that had precious little to offer.

Employee Richardson demonstrated increasing signs of dimensional instability beginning approximately 9:07 AM...

No. That wasn't right.

She deleted it. Started again.

This is to document the departure of Jeremy Richardson, Employee ID #4729...

Better. Cleaner. The kind of language that made the impossible sound merely irregular, that transformed cosmic horror into bureaucratic inconvenience. She was good at this—the translation of chaos into forms, the domestication of disorder through proper documentation. It was, she'd realized somewhere during her third year of processing people's life transitions (new hires, departures, leaves of absence, the endless churning of bodies through corporate space), perhaps the only real job any of them had: making sense of things that didn't make sense, creating narrative coherence from the fundamentally incoherent experience of showing up to an office five days a week and pretending any of it mattered.

Outside the window, the sun was setting in a gradient of colors that probably had proper meteorological explanations but looked, in that moment, suspiciously like Jeremy's final glow before he'd disappeared.

Rebecca saved the document, scheduled a follow-up meeting with Darren for tomorrow morning, and made a note to check Jeremy's desk for that Kroger Plus Card.