The town we’re in is mine, but the interview is my wife’s. I scope the address beforehand dutifully, out a ways on a broad boulevard that might be called Country Club. She’s driving.

We exit the highway onto the boulevard, and I tell her, straight ahead a few miles up, and lean the seat back as if to rest a moment. Perhaps my sleep has been troubled.

When I rouse myself it’s because we’re going up and up on a small dirt road, and that can’t be right at all. Turn around, I tell her with some urgency, and she does. It’s night and I can see the lights of the city far away at the end of a valley. No, no, what the hell …

I say to her, bewildered, that the right direction to go in, is down, and down we go, around curve after rural curve.

Around one more bend, suddenly we’re on foot and indoors. In a hallway, in a sort of … office building?

This is it, I say with a growing conviction as she starts to walk up some stairs, This is very much the exact right building, I recognize it … But … no. It’s on the first floor, my dear, we have to go down, that’s the right direction.

She looks at me as if I can’t be right, but still my certainty grows. Come on. Come on down. How late are we? She looks at her watch. Twenty minutes, she says.

I begin to rehearse a speech to the employer. I’m going to tell him before she goes in that it’s my fault. I’m concerned, because the employer is in business as a psychic, that he will know I’m lying–it’s not my fault, it’s no one’s fault, we’ve been through some kind of rip in time and space.

The words come out in a very working-class British accent.

He replies, amiably enough, in posh.