I had almost but not totally stopped chewing my greenroom saltine, and I took advantage of the clapping to suck the remains off my back molars and finish it up. Expectation pressed down on me, and my own small, fit body pressed back.
At the edge of the stage were modern boxy planters welded from sheets of copper, with low desert-y plants in them. Succulents. At the cocktail reception last night in the rooftop garden, the conference organizer had told me this venue has the world’s largest photovoltaic installation. Wonderful, I said, sipping my mineral water. We had some panels put in at our house in California, I told her. They make enough electricity to power our pool pump. I think these planters were meant to symbolize the future, the vastness ahead. They reminded me that I was thirsty. Someone had provided me with a water glass on the dais, which I couldn’t use, because despite many years of practice drinking water out of cups I feared that, with my intense focus on meaningful content delivery, I might this time accidentally pour it down the front of my sweater. That would be eminently GIFable, and also kind of damp. Couldn’t risk it.
I was nervous, true. By which I mean exhilarated. Always a little, even after all this time.
They say you should visualize the audience in their underwear. Why would that help? I am less nervous giving keynotes at global thought leadership conferences than I am changing out of my bathing suit in locker rooms. I don’t understand how that feels normal to some people. I am no longer appalled like I was as a kid, or traumatized like I was as a young adult, but I still lay out the clothes and, in my imagination, flip them around like Tetris pieces, rehearsing their directions and studying their entry and exit points before I strip. I rarely go into locker rooms, to be honest. I know there are people there who know me or work at Conch, even if I don’t know them, or who would be only too happy to snap a photo and send it to the Silly Valley blog. My gym has a no-cell-phone policy, but there are people who might get a righteous sense of satisfaction from knowing they have taken a mental picture of my wrinkly nipples, the dimples of my bare pale cellulite-y flank, all my scars. For a male CEO to go to the gym would be OK, but somehow it’s different for me. I’m in good shape, of course. Fitness is so important for image perception and energy, and having the stamina to work hundred-hour weeks. I don’t have the time, but I make the time. I shower at home and get to change in privacy. So, no, I was not scared or intimidated by this: an audience of fully dressed people, reaching down to touch their conference tote bags, to steward their freebie pens and five-tip highlighters and ecru cards entitling them to a free drink at the hotel bar.
There were empty seats scattered around the auditorium. Not many. But an opportunity to do better next time. Maybe if my program description had been more concise or incisive I could have filled those empty seats.
“Good afternoon, and welcome,” I said, to a satisfying burst of concentrated applause. It crested like a wave just off the edge of the stage. Just over the withdrawing roar (the late adopters), I made a little hand gesture, a little open palm with both hands that welcomed, acknowledged, and turned off the stream of applause. I am good at this, the warmly cool, the coolly warm. She’s so warm, people say. Or cool. Whichever is needed. I am versatilely temperate.
This conference lasers in on challenges for women entrepreneurs, so there were lots of women purse/sunglass moguls in attendance, and so many unbelievably sleek women, with their glossy straight hair, big encrusted stud earrings, “pops” of color, and fjordic clavicles. The venue was thronged with women in close-fitting suits with slim tanned legs. So many high-heeled booties and eye-gouging pointy pumps swinging restlessly, poised to spear actionable key takeaways.
“This talk,” I said, “is about that pleasant emotion: fear.” There was a smattering of laughter. When I practiced this in the shower it was funnier.
“This isn’t how I planned to start,” I said. I gestured. “I didn’t plan to talk about this, but something happened to me a few days ago and I want to tell you about it.” I paused to project gravitas, to let their attention collect on me. I whispered calmly, “It scared the daylights out of me.” The silence seemed to hollow out.
“I was with my husband and children. We were on the beach not far from here.” (Well, a short flight, close enough.) “A beautiful day. You can imagine the breezes, the feel of the sand, the delight of my children as they toddled around with their buckets, scooping the sand.” The audience smiled. The fact that I have children is not unknown to them—I am often profiled as having a family; it’s part of my brand. “And my husband and I were having a conversation, just enjoying this time together, when all of a sudden, I look up and there’s the sand, and there’s one of my children, and the other is…gone.” I’m getting ahead of this story. I’m getting it out there—just in case. You have to use your material.
I paused to listen, for flicks or rustles of boredom, for sighs. I didn’t hear any.
“My son’s a baby, my daughter’s only a little older, and they’re at that age where if you’re walking somewhere with them, to a place you want to go, it takes you ten times as long as it should to get there.” (Gentle chortling.) “But when they want to go somewhere, they zip off and they can just…disappear. That’s what happened—one of the kids was gone.
“Just imagine for a second, the open ocean, and a missing child. I know many of you have children, or nieces or nephews, or caring personalities. I don’t have to tell you what I was thinking, or how it felt. Pure terror. Fear of the deepest kind.” I didn’t quite intone it as confidently as I meant to.
“So I walk out toward the ocean, and we go this way and that. Now you can probably guess, by the fact that I’m here today”—I indicated myself on the stage—“giving this speech, that this story has a happy ending.” The audience twittered, but they were still a little nervous. Until they’d heard it, it hadn’t really happened. That toddler, head tipped up, a look of fear in her black eyes, was still flailing somewhere off the shore.
“And it does, it’s very ordinary. I’m incredibly grateful that is so. Just seconds later, we turn around and there’s our child, on the sand, safe and sound, not even a drop of water on her. It turned out to be, after all that heartache, nothing, just a sight line issue.” What is that? Well, whatever. Don’t give them a beat to think about it. “But thank God, right? Thank God.” I clasped my hands together reverently but confidently. Religion is fine for currencies and crises. “Because in those moments, and we’ve all had them, the intensity of fear makes us willing to bargain, willing to do anything, willing to betray ourselves, just to push away the fear. Just to feel ourselves get free of it. Even all these years later, even though I know how important fear has been to me, I still feel it. I still feel it. I’m not going to lie to you about that.”
I clicked my first slide and it appeared behind me, so that I was a tiny dollhouse figure in the universe of my own PowerPoint: 260,000 people are struck by lightning each year. Fifty people in the U.S. die each year from lightning strikes.
“Two hundred sixty thousand people,” I said. “Do you ever think you’ll be one of them?”
I paused as if I wanted to take time to consider, as if I wanted them to feel shame for not having thought about this enough.
“As many of you know, I am one of them. The odds are about one in seven hundred thousand that a person will be struck by lightning. Not quite one in a million, but pretty close. Those odds don’t seem so long when it happens to you.”
I shifted from the ball of one foot to the ball of the other, transferring the clicker from one hand to the other, the universal signal for moving on to a new section of one’s inspirational thought leadership talk. The place along the top of my toe, which these heels strafe, attempted to claim my attention. I ignored the pain, as always. I ignore it so hard I continue to wear these shoes, even though they leave a sore spot every time, even though it’s become an actual lesion. Once I came back from a long day of meetings and went straight into my bathroom and took off my shoes, f
irst one and then the other, and poured blood out of each shoe into the toilet, until my bathroom looked like the climactic murder scene in a multipart BBC detective drama. (Those shoes I had to trash.) Tonight, after all this is over, I will sit on the bed and snip away at a square of moleskin to construct a protective dam to barricade the sore. I transferred my concentration onto this—the comfort that will eventually come, a cognitive behavioral technique useful in situations of physical discomfort—and let the thought float away.
I clicked to another slide: One out of ten people struck by lightning dies.
“Not bad odds, right?” I was speaking a little too fast and stepped on my own laugh line. I let it go.
“When I was nineteen—more years ago than I like to count—you wouldn’t have noticed anything special about me. No particular motivation or drive. Nah, nobody would have called me an overachiever. I liked clothes, hanging out with my friends. I’m going to date myself here, but I spent a lot of time talking on the phone.” I paused, inviting the audience to snicker. “In my defense, this was many years ago!
“Time seemed…ample to me. I didn’t worry much about the future. I didn’t worry much about the present, truth be told. I didn’t have big ambitions. I was hesitant, and shy, so sure I wouldn’t succeed, convinced that as a girl from a small town in the middle of nowhere, no exciting paths were open to me. Oh, one other thing you should know—those of you who are around my age might remember that, although this seems crazy, it was the style then for girls to wear men’s boxer shorts. Sidenote: I have to tell you, my dad found this horrifying. He used to hate it when my friends came over and we were all in these baggy T-shirts and boxer shorts. We used to say, ‘Don’t worry, they’re totally decent. Look, we’ve pinned the flies closed with safety pins.’ Just hang on to that thought.
“My parents were out that night. It was the night before my twentieth birthday. It was a night almost exactly twenty years ago—it will be twenty years, exactly, next Friday. And yet I remember it like yesterday. I had just finished finals and come home from college for the summer. I was excited to get together with my high school friends. It rained a lot in Wisconsin, where we lived. There were storms all the time in Marathon County. It wasn’t unusual. So I was outside with a good friend in a rainstorm, just under the eaves of our family’s house, sitting on a picnic cooler, just watching the rain streak down the side of the barn. We were catching up, talking, and I was holding a beer can and drinking lemonade (just kidding—you ever heard that line? No? You’re not from where I’m from). So. Now. We’re watching a big old sycamore tree between the house and the barn and all of a sudden it glows purple. I am not kidding—a purple light surrounds the tree like a halo. That’s weird, my friend and I say, and I look over at him and notice that his hair is standing on end. I had never seen that before or since. “Your hair!” he says, because he’s equally startled by mine. Or that’s what he says he said. I couldn’t tell you for sure, because at that moment the purple surrounding the tree surges into a brightness that for years afterward I saw every night when I was falling asleep, and that even now, twenty years later, I can still bring forth when I close my eyes, the exact cut of it, and the next thing I feel is a surging explosion inside my body as if every single piece of it, including bits I was unaware of, were being blown apart, as if—this is the best way I can describe it—my organs were bursting out from inside my skin. The pain rose out of pain into a form of obliteration. It ate the part of me that could feel pain. Then, absolute darkness. I could hear nothing and I could see nothing. So this is death, I thought. I’m dead.”
I paused to listen to the audience. They were looking at me with concern.
“But what happens when you die? Who knows, right? I just existed for a moment, and then another moment, with no feeling in my body, no pain at all, nothing to see or hear, wondering what was going to happen. Was this it? There is no backup copy of your life. I understood that for the first time at that moment. There is no backup copy. You run in real time, and soon you are obsolete. You get one little handful of years that you are entitled to, and not even entitled, let’s be honest, and probably not as many as you’d want. All this occurs to me in these long moments, as I exist, just this lonely tiny match-flame of consciousness in a vast dark. I wait. Nobody’s coming for me. It goes on for a long time. And then I think, maybe I’m the one who has to take the initiative and move. Maybe even in death we have to be the ones who act.
“It sounds very profound, doesn’t it? It could be, right? None of us here really knows.”
I let the darkness sit with them for a moment. Let them try to imagine.
“I try to wiggle a foot. I can’t tell if it’s working, but meanwhile something’s happening to the darkness. It is, very slowly, lifting, as if a giant cloth over me is pulling away. And after a long time, I can see a shape close in front of me, dimly, on a black field. And I hear something, like a whimpering moan, and I realize it’s coming from me.
“Or part of me. The part of me summoning this vague, sleepy awareness isn’t feeling any pain, but far away, as if from somewhere else, I can hear someone screaming, and it sounds bad. It’s like a moaning scream, sometimes just a moan. There’s this girl, and I recognize her voice, and she’s screaming. On some level I realize I know this person, and I even know that this girl’s voice is me. But I don’t even feel sorry for her, I’m that disconnected. I just want her to shut up.” (New slide, audience gasps.)
“At the hospital, I was put into a medically induced coma. It would have been too excruciating to be awake, even with morphine. I was under for eleven days. At the end of that time, when I was awakened, I had missed my twentieth birthday. I woke up and nothing was the same. Burns covered the left side of my body. The lightning had arced from the tree to my body, entering near the safety pin, traveling through me, and out near the beer can. And that, I tell my kids, is why you should never drink beer.”
Light twittering. They were a little too shell-shocked to laugh. I don’t actually tell my children that yet, because they are too young. Also, it’s a little flippant, considering the topic. But aggressive flippancy works OK for me; it’s a trademark.
Tight smile. I wasn’t laughing either. I went on in a didactic, wisdom-earned-through-pain tone:
“When a person is hit by lightning, the shock travels through your body, it perforates your intestine, fries your neurological system, makes holes in the very walls of your cells—it’s called electroporation—and it leaves along your skin a very delicate fern-like red rash called a Lichtenberg figure, which looks a bit like a very elaborate henna tattoo.” (Click slide. They ooh, and then stop abruptly as if they feel guilty for oohing.) “It’s almost beautiful, isn’t it? Graceful. Like a fractal, very strange. A manifestation of randomness, stemming from a random event. In almost every case it fades after a few days or a week. But I still have mine, very faintly. Most of the time I don’t see it, but it shows up in strange situations, under certain light—I noticed parts of it this morning in the hotel bathroom, under the overhead light. It’s still there. I still have a large scar at the exit and entrance sites, also. And some other effects.”
I turn brisk, analytical, almost argumentative with myself: “But what can we learn from this? Why does it matter? So what?”
(Click new slide.)
“When I came to from my coma, I was the same yet not the same. Pieces of me were missing. I would try to recall things and there was nothing there. Things like my name. Can you imagine? It was like going into your office and taking the most important file folder out of the drawer, opening it, and finding nothing inside. Like in the old days, remember, when you arrived to give a big presentation, put the CD-ROM into the optical drive, opened the folder, and there were no files, and you realized you’d forgot to burn them to the disc. Remember? Am I the only one that happened to?
“I had to relearn everything. I had lost much of my capacity to taste or smell, or experience sensation. And most of all, I knew th
at time was not infinite—these minutes, you will never get them back. I knew I did not have the luxury of messing around. I knew that death comes, I knew (or had a pretty good idea) of what it feels like, and I knew that my ordinary, messing-around self would never be able to cope with the challenges ahead. She was the past. She was outdated. I had already wasted a lot of time. I was not ready to die, and I made myself the person I had to be to get ahead—myself, version 2.0. I even adopted a new nickname for myself—I decided to start over with something fresh. The new me was going to go by Shelley.”
Sometimes I feel like this part is the weak link of my speech, the connection between this odd and horrible event and the singularity of my later life, of my ability to drive forward a multinational corporation. I sometimes wonder if the connection is there at all, but it must be, mustn’t it? The unusualness of the experience, the way it disassembled my brain and rewired it, the way all of my insides were affected…it must explain something. Women hold the CEO job at less than five percent of Fortune 500 companies, and that rate only climbs slightly—I think it’s five-point-one percent—when you expand that to the Fortune 1000. Women have around sixteen percent of the directors’ seats in corporate America. Ten percent of companies have no women directors at all. Surely there’s something here that has given me this ability. Everyone sitting in the audience takes it on faith that it does, that the shot of electricity and the resulting agony were what it took for me to get here. Or that I am special, chosen in some way, which is why when that beam of lightning came down, it jumped from the sycamore to me.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 6