* * *
—
My Conch guided me around a tricky turn and down the narrow road. The little car thrummed as a motorcycle roared past. I had the sensation that I was stalled, hovering, and it was only the motorcycle that was moving.
My sinuses were streaming. Pressure had built in my head from the ascent. All at once it reached an unbearable level and I sneezed. My eyes closed, and just as they reopened (and in an instant of relief I saw that there was road ahead, and all looked good), I sneezed again. The sneeze shot out snot that caught in my nose and made me sneeze again. With each propulsive sneeze, my eyes closed. A car was coming around the bend toward me. I lifted my arm off the steering wheel to wipe my nose and stop the unbearable tickle. The car came faster and without meaning to I veered, then skidded. Suddenly there was a crack. I felt a bang under the car as the other car whooshed by. I braked fast and hard. My body lifted off the seat as my foot dug down farther and farther on the brake, till my whole body was pouring itself down onto that pedal. My forehead hit the ceiling of the car.
An instant of nothing: an ominous pause in sensation, gravity, and sound. Then nausea, clear and sharp, arrived and knocked me back into the seat. I pulled over on the very narrow road and turned the car off. I rubbed the sore spot under my seat belt and probed the top of my head. My fingers came away wet with blood, but the cut wasn’t deep. A car whipped around the curve, and gingerly, after it had passed, I lowered myself out of the car and looked around, examining it. From the outside it looked all right. The trunk—I should have checked before—was empty. I sprang the hood, feeling a pain along my scalp as I lifted it. My hands were blackly greasy before I found the pole to wedge under the hood. I scanned the tubes and pipes and unknown sealed containers for…well, anything unusual. Would I know unusual if I saw it? Depends, I suppose, on how unusual. I did not see anything that reached that threshold. I banged the hood closed again. A car came fast around the curve, kicking up a cloud of dust and pebbles. I watched a rock catapult off the edge of the cliff. That was probably it, I thought. Just a stone. Aren’t you twitchy. It was nothing.
I stood beside the car and had the strangest vision of a corner of the sky near the horizon pulled up and back like the white duvet of my king-size hotel bed, to expose something underneath. I had a flickering sensation of being on a stage set, or that I was meant to be somewhere else in other surroundings, but it was probably that the atmosphere was thin. I had done too much; it was probably the time change or hunger affecting me. “Navigate back,” I instructed my Conch, and was reassured by the confident sound of my own voice.
“Calculating directions,” my Conch said. “Rerouting. Nearby café is open till two. Ready for directions?”
I was a little surprised, because I hadn’t experienced the Conch suggesting a new location before. But we’re adding product features all the time.
“Back to hotel,” I said.
“Taking a moment to rest and rehydrate is advisable,” my Conch urged. “Let’s go!” I’ve never heard it be so insistent, either, but I was grateful for the input. A drink would be nice. Steadying. Clear the head.
“Sure,” I said. A moment of rest. I Conched a note to myself: this would be a great example to share on the corporate Conchblog about how Conch was helping me. (“On my recent trip to…”)
The café was not far. It was up against the road, with a tile roof and lights shining in all the windows. I had thought I was very far from civilization, and it was a disappointment to realize it had been there all along, parallel to the road I’d been driving. The building was two stories, and cars were parked close beside it. A chalkboard by the door advertised tapas, and something involving xocolata.
“Hola,” I said inside. I ordered a beer, mostly by pointing.
The bartender turned to me as he poured it. “Y para tu hermana?”
I thought of course he was speaking to someone else, so I did not answer. He repeated it, looking me right in the face. “For your sister,” he said, this time in English. “What do I get for her?”
I shook my head. “I have no sister.” It seemed like a pickup line, maybe—and for your sister? Some kind of insouciant inquiry, except that he seemed uninterested in me, so, well, souciant.
He slid a mug across the bar and pointed past me. “She’s your daughter?” He shrugged. “That’s nice. I had kids young too. All grown now. Nice to finish early.”
I gave him the stink-eye and pulled euros from my wallet, not bothering to try to count them out, letting him take from my hand what he wanted. I settled on a barstool. An itch came over me, perhaps better to say a chill.
He gave me a look as if there were something wrong with me, that I was mentally damaged in the part of the brain where family relationships are managed, and he gestured past me to a girl—young woman—standing just behind us. He turned his attention to her, addressed her directly.
Overhead were dark beams with hooks screwed into them, and dozens, hundreds of identical silvery mugs hanging from the beams. The mugs had names on them, if you looked closely—Josep, I made out. Enric. Vincent.
Was it surprising that the bartender spoke English, that he’d known I was an English speaker too? I felt a kind of click in my head, in which an image pulsed forth for a moment and filled my whole consciousness, like a screensaver taking over my field of vision. Then, with the tiniest movement, it fell away. It had been just like a real screensaver, an image of a white snowy field with icy ridges, abstracted by the close and unfamiliar angle. And then it was gone. This was happening more often, these blank moments. I blinked and stretched, rotating my shoulders, drawing infinity signs in the air with them (“Infinite possibility is within you,” says Greer, or possibly that is from the tag from my green tea), and I reached to steady myself against the armrest, but it was a stool so there was none and I tipped a bit. The beams overhead creaked, and the dangling mugs struck each other with aggravated, tinny clinks.
The girl had ordered her drink and received it, and then she dug in her pocket and looked to me apologetically. “I don’t have money,” she said, in English, to me. “You’ll have to pay.”
It was like a dream in which nothing can surprise you. I held up some bills and coins, silently, and again let the bartender select from my palm the ones he wanted. He took the money and nodded, satisfied. She was my sister, or my niece, and I had conceded it by paying for her. He didn’t care why: we all have secrets we like to think we’re keeping. She sat next to me in the dark, windowless room and sipped her beer. I watched it slosh back and forth as the cup traveled between the bar and her lips, which had a little foam stuck to them.
She had long, russety hair, a color that mine had once been, until the lightning strike, when, along with every indignity possible, it grew in a nondescript brown. Brown doesn’t seem so bad now that it’s heading toward gray. I dye it, of course. The perception of youth and energy is crucial in business.
Seeing her made me homesick for the hair I used to have. I looked at it. I felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. She was young, a teenager or young woman. Her lips were chapped and the lower lip was a little cracked at its center. She tucked her hair behind her ear. She had pierced ears with no earrings in the greenish holes (lint? discoloration from cheap earrings?). She had that fleshy, smooth face that you have until your mid-twenties or your first major acquisition, whichever comes first.
I could see a resemblance to someone—maybe a cousin of mine? She looked a lot like, of all people, my brother. Señor Barkeep, I could say, I do have a brother. He is a gastroenterologist in Minneapolis. It was curious. She was like the female version of him, with his smile and hefty eyebrows. She had bristly, full eyebrows, which if I were being very charitable I could compare to Brooke Shields’s—BS has cleverly converted a liability to an asset, similar to what my husband, Rafe, does with troubled banks. There was maybe a tiny resemblance to my son, Blazer, through the eyebrows. She looked like a lot of people on my side of the family, th
e Stones, but I couldn’t place her.
Who did she look like? Someone.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
Did she look at all like me? I did wonder, even at that moment. But I didn’t really think so: I didn’t think I was ever so messy, so sloppily dressed, with that hangdog expression of pouty indecision. And there was no reason to think she would have any relationship to me. But I could admit there was a bit of a resemblance.
My eyebrows are as shorn as the shrubbery of a newly retired barber, and my skin, with many developing problems I did not realize would assail me at the tail end of my thirties, is rigorously cleaned and enriched with products prescribed by the top-flight dermatologist I Snapchat my skin problems to. I also have occasional laser surgeries, peels, and treatments that are not even cosmetic surgery, just healthy maintenance and an investment in myself in an ageist society. But if I didn’t do these things—
“We haven’t met,” she said. “Thanks for the drink. I didn’t think you’d mind paying. You sort of remind me of my mom.”
I was nonplussed. “Do I?”
“A little,” she said—and then, quickly, indignantly—“It’s not an insult. My mom is very attractive. She was the homecoming queen at her high school.”
“Mine was also,” I said, lifting an eyebrow.
“Mine was in Wisconsin,” she apologized, as if that meant less.
I looked back at her. “Tell me your name?”
“Michelle,” she said.
“Hi, Michelle. Great name.”
“Thanks. I’ve never liked it much.”
I cut her off. “Little advice: learn how to accept a compliment. And, also, it’s my name.”
“Your name’s Michelle?”
“Shelley,” I said. “I go by Shell. My real name is Michelle, but I stopped using it. I like Shelley better. It’s snappier. Michelle, what brings you here?”
“I’m on a trip, but the person I was traveling with…It didn’t work out. Somebody dropped me off here. I don’t know where I put my wallet. I’m very tired. Can we get back in the car?”
“What car?”
“Yours,” she said. “I can’t stay here all night, can I?”
“Where are you staying?” I said.
“I don’t have that worked out yet,” she said. “I guess I should find my wallet first.” She seemed unconcerned. Not unconcerned, but less concerned than the situation warranted. I admired her coolness under pressure, but it seemed mildly delusional.
“Is there a hotel near here? I could drop you off and you could call your parents.”
“It’ll work out,” she said. “It always does. I don’t stress.” She laughed in a slightly strained way. “If I have to sleep in a barn somewhere on some hay or something, that would be all right. It’s all experience, right?”
I gazed at the girl. There was something peculiar about her, about meeting her. My Conch buzzed in an alert pattern. “Say hello,” it said, “to Shelley Stone.”
“What’s wrong?” the girl said.
I pressed my Conch: two light touches, a query pattern. This was very strange. Could my Conch have gone bad? Was it the electrical storm? I shook my head. “Just thinking about something. Sorry. What were you saying? You don’t have a place to stay?”
I pressed my Conch to reset it. “Say hello to…” it said. I took the Conch out and turned it over, examining it for defects.
“What’s that thing?”
“Michelle, are you familiar with Conch and situationally aware technology? It’s an amazing way to optimize your experience in the world. It’s very simple, very powerful, and it changes lives.” I gave her my escalator speech, which is like an elevator speech but ten seconds longer and said a little louder.
She shook her head. “Can I see it?”
She took the Conch from me, looking at it carefully. Crafted from a ballistic polymer to our specifications in our factory in Malaysia, it’s an organic shape that looks a little like a shell you’d find weather-beaten on the beach. It’s flattish and curved, small, and weighs just a few grams. When people pick up a Conch for the first time they almost always balance it on their fingertip—it sits very comfortably there; users are always delighted by what our engineers call the finger feel. There are different patterns and strengths of vibration for different functions, and increasingly we can communicate more and more just through these tactile patterns—some users hardly use the phone app at all, they can get so much richness from touch.
“If you’re interested in trying out a Conch, I can have one sent to you. I’d let you try this one, but it’s specially configured for me and runs a next-generation iteration of our software that hasn’t been deployed publicly yet. And it isn’t working right.” I wondered if it could be the high altitude. “I’m happy to give you one to try. Conch is great for busy students, and if you love it as much as I think you will, you can evangelize it to your friends.” As the timeless nugget of wisdom on the wall of Conch’s sales department says, “Don’t be like 7-Eleven—you always gotta close!”
“I’m not religious,” she said primly, and then, “Oh! Your head is bleeding!” I dipped my head and sorted out my hair, which was disconcertingly crispy and clumped close to the scalp.
“I’m fine,” I said. “The head has many small blood vessels close to the surface. The blood doesn’t mean much. Don’t worry.”
She went over to a different part of the bar. “Here.” Some wadded paper napkins. I took them, dabbed very lightly, feeling it all through my jaw. I touched behind my ear.
“My Conch!” I said, realizing she still had it. “I feel naked without it. I need mine back, but I’ll send you one. I usually carry a few extras on me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Where did I…?”
She reached into her pocket and fished it out. I took it, perplexed by why she had put it there. “There you go.”
I slipped it back in and felt instantly more settled. I watched her.
There was definitely something familiar about her. A small pink scar marred her upper arm. I recognized that scar.
I touched my own shoulder, and through the technical fabric of my moisture-wicking, body skimming jacket, I clamped my hand over the spot where I had a very similar scar. I tried not to stare. I got mine from a vaccination. It wasn’t strange, was it, that we both had such similar scars in the same places on our arms? That is where vaccinations are given. There must be something about that location on the body that makes it scar easily. Perhaps that spot is especially vulnerable, or the skin there is unusually slow to heal, and something about the muscles of the shoulder creates a scar that curves in that precise way. Probably almost everyone has a scar like that.
Chapter 6
I put her in the car. What else could I do? It wasn’t safe for her to wander around, sleeping in barns. If there were barns. It was preposterous and risky. It worried me she was not more worried for herself. Anything could happen to her—did she not realize that?
She did not seem all that curious about who I was or where we were going. She had an air of sedated tranquility, and a few minutes after we pulled away from the café, I glanced over and realized she was asleep, slumped against the passenger door. Apparently, I was not interesting enough to keep her awake. Many young people would have felt differently. I wanted to tell her that. It doesn’t sound humble, but it’s true. When I went to UCLA to speak, I was besieged, as I told several people afterward, by young people reeling off their elevator pitches. A very forward young man even followed me into the women’s restroom and pitched while I peed, and you know, while I told him it was over the line, and that that kind of intrusion is unprofessional, part of me admired his gumption. Well, this one didn’t care.
She shifted, letting out a drawn-out, soft moan. I glimpsed too much of her thighs as she drew up a knee and resettled herself. Her face tipped out of view, hidden by the cascade of hair, and she submerged back into sleep.
While driving, I recorded my GPS coordinates
and sent them to my assistant. I wasn’t sure what Willow would make of them, but at least the record was there, whatever happened.
This sleeping girl was a problem of an ambiguous nature. A watch-and-wait situation? An emergent threat? A status quo disrupter? I pondered where to take her. It was getting late, and I had a full day tomorrow. Should I just put her in my hotel? She seemed too lazy and disorganized to be dangerous.
What’s a case study I can harvest for insight in handling the situation, I asked myself. I scanned through my mental list: supply chain issues due to natural disasters, disruptive innovations, strategic human capital changes, the introduction of the cell phone touch screen into the mobile market…none seemed like perfect parallels. What came to mind was not anything from a business periodical, but something I’d seen in one of Nova’s books. This, I thought grimly, was a Goldilocks situation (it’s good to have a wide range of reference). What had the bears done? Avoidance. Mostly just talked about it with rising anger until at last she woke up (ineffectual and reactive, not proactive, as I’d told Nova). The kernel of my annoyance came from her deep, rude sleep. I had not slept like that in years. Since I had started working, really. Since the lightning strike, even. Maybe she was a drug addict.
I drove back into the dark city, my eyes addled by all the neon, and I parked around the corner from the hotel.
“Time to wake up,” I told her. I said it mostly for my own benefit, to feel on top of things, which does work. (“ ‘Fake it till you make it’ is a truism but a true one,” my mentor at my old company used to say.) But when I glanced over, there she was, her gray-blue eyes open, glazed and still, like a baby who has opened them and will, any second, if you are very quiet and just keep typing your presentation, re-succumb to sleep. I did that a lot when Nova was small—it worked, though I feel ambivalent about it now.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 9