She became more alert and cheerful as we walked through the glass doors of the hotel into the plush lobby. It was a high space with filigreed panels letting in interesting patterns of light during the day. At night golden light spilled from under the edge of every surface.
“This is a fancy hotel,” she said appreciatively. The bellman and I caught each other’s eyes. Though we were both, in our way, jaded hotel professionals, we enjoyed her enjoyment.
Upstairs, in my cool white suite, the bedside light was on, the shades were down, and the coverlet had been folded back in one corner. A gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bar had manifested on the plate where the apples had been.
If the chicken salad had come, it had also gone away. I called down to room service and ordered her a cheeseburger and myself two pieces of rye toast, a green salad, and a glass of wine.
My food failed to hold my attention—there were no sesame seeds on the rye bread—but she ate hers rapidly.
“You’re welcome to my salad, Michelle,” I said. She was eating her burger and fries in an off-putting style, with the hotel bed duvet drawn up over her lap. It was weird to say “Michelle”; it was what I sometimes called myself when rehearsing my remarks for meetings while putting on lipstick.
I opened my laptop and flicked through my inbox. “Ship and iterate,” I read. This is one of the Conch mottoes we use on our internal email signatures. We take advantage of that real estate to make every email an occasion to prompt each other to dig deeper, focus more intently, and innovate more. Another one is “moonshot thinking!”
“That’s an amazing computer.”
I glanced down at my lightweight, titanium, best-of-class, but utterly ordinary laptop.
“And what’s that thing?”
“What thing?” I looked, alarmed, out the window.
“The thing glowing under the sheet,” she said. She leaned across the bed and pointed.
“It’s a cell phone?” I said, in a duh-Valley-girl voice. “I’m sure you’ve got one too. Yours is probably faster. Kids are always on the bleeding edge with mobile.”
She shook her head and whispered, “Where am I?”
“Barcelona,” I said. “The City of Gaudí.” I had read this in the conference packet.
She nodded slowly, as if this helped. “Why am I so cold? And so, so tired?”
I shrugged. “I’m always tired. Tired is…”
“Oh, Vienna sausages! I can’t believe you have those. So revolting and yet, I’ll tell you something, I actually kind of like them.”
I raised an eyebrow, nodded, and gestured toward the jar on my desk.
“I used to buy them at the QuikTrip. They came in handy. That way if my mom caught me doing something worse I could pretend I was hiding out so I could eat gross canned meat.”
I turned to look curiously at her.
“Say hello to Shelley Stone,” my Conch said.
And then the answer came to me. I was struck still by the simplicity of it. I heard within myself the loud crack of a glacier breaking apart, and with it a bright warmth, as if a shaft of light were crossing a flat rock. Ship and iterate. Moonshot thinking. I felt disappointed with myself for not having thought of it earlier. I had been letting the status quo dictate my range of options. I had been failing to bring sufficient imagination to bear. I had foreclosed the truest, most elegant and simplest option without considering it, simply because it seemed unfeasible, outlandish, and impossible. Nothing is impossible. I had been dismissing a potential opportunity rather than meeting it head-on. That’s not how you get to the top. Sometimes you have to face facts, follow the data, and squeeze through the narrow slit of opportunity, however tiny and poorly situated and illogical it is. You must have total confidence in your own vision. This is how I’ve gotten to where I am.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because you’re me,” I said calmly.
Her jaw dropped. She leaned back against the headboard of the bed as if she were stunned, or trying to move far away from me. I had never felt more awake. It’s not every day someone who reminds you of you materializes in your life, and it’s even less likely (simply because it is more specific yet, and more specific scenarios are always less likely, logically, than more general ones) that it be a manifestation of yourself at a different point in time. Amazing, I thought. Also, how can I leverage this?
The more closely I looked at her, the more I saw the resemblance.
It was curious. Of course I’d seen myself in the mirror. But seeing Michelle, I realized how limited that mirror-view was—not just reversed, so my side part and freckles appeared on the wrong side, but when you look at yourself in a mirror you are always having to look. You might catch yourself on occasion out of the corner of your eye coming down a staircase to a mirror you didn’t know was there, or reflected in a store window in a posture that doesn’t instantly communicate it is you, but you never had the moments I was having, the long stretches of seeing yourself from an outside perspective, from angles the mirror can’t reach, taking in yourself not through a flat surface but in three-dimensional space, watching yourself respond and react without creating those responses, those expressions.
It’s so odd that normally you never see yourself, except in stipple portraits in the Wall Street Journal (not to be vain, but are my lips really that bulgy?) or headshots in conference programs or photos in business mags or in YouTube clips from thought leadership talks. It struck me as funny that you see strangers and take them in all at once in a very quick and informative snapshot, but with yourself there is always the blocked view. In those seconds, seeing her from the outside, I felt I knew myself better than ever before.
I saw her twitchiness, the way her expressions came one against the other, like train cars bumping, the way she blinked, on and on, as if taking it all in. She had a way of languidly leaning back to assess what I was saying that unnerved me, it was so cool and analytic and careless. I had never comprehended the effect before, as I did now, instantly, as part of the package of personality, the way I did all the time with strangers.
I understood all at once some things I hadn’t really understood before, like the way people have described me over the years. Handsome (why not ever pretty?), intense, restless: certain adjectives the tech journalists like to lean on, certain constellations of specks and lines in caricatures that I never saw the point of, till now.
She was not unattractive, but it was a certain steeliness that was her predominant quality, and I realized that it was effortless, it was always there. Part of my forcefulness was just something about my jawline, something baked into me, the way merit ratings are baked into our compensation calculations at Conch. Along the way I had picked up on how people perceived me, perhaps, and become more and more that way. And she hadn’t even yet been through the…I shut down the thought.
She was much younger, of course, with the pretty hair I still missed, that had changed abruptly and unfairly after the lightning strike and which I now had dyed to achieve a less satisfying result. She had a different body, sort of, though not, to the eye that knows it so well, fundamentally different—we had the same bones. She had a fuller face, untamed eyebrows, and a lack of the finishing touches I didn’t even think of as finishing anymore; they were perpetual, they were little part-time jobs. Her fingernails were bitten, her fingers ringless. Her watch was, surprisingly, digital. A scuff of peeling skin clung to her bare heels, like the whiff of Grana Padano left behind on the microplane grater when Rafe makes pasta.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “I don’t believe it. You’re scaring me. I’m leaving as soon as I finish these French fries.” When her voice came it was not exactly familiar, but close—low and confident, daring, lively, a little breathy. I almost laughed—I knew it, from voicemail greetings, corporate training videos, webinars, and, in a smothered variant, through my own clogged Eustachian tubes.
“Weird we have the same scar,” I said, unzipping my jacket and pulling my T
-shirt off one shoulder to show it. Hers was pinker and more prominent, but the same shape. She took a second look at it, and her lips wrinkled up unhappily. “What?”
“It’s the same.”
“It’s sort of similar,” she said, correcting me.
She obviously did not recognize me, nor see in me any strands of herself. You never think you’ll become an old person, and by old I mean a vibrant and ambitious thirty-nine with a BMI under twenty-two and the bone health of a young golden retriever. It simply doesn’t occur to anyone to scan a room of elderly people and think, who is the most like me? Which white-haired lady will I most resemble? And yet the elderly do point out young people to each other and say, I looked like that. The ratchet of self-recognition only goes one way. Even Rafe has done it—we don’t have many photos from when he was a child, and I’m curious about how much he looked like Nova and Blazer. Once in a while, when we’ve been out somewhere, he’s pointed out a little boy with big dark eyes and said, I looked like him. The resemblance hasn’t been clear for me, and each time I’ve stopped to look back at the child, and felt a little doubtful, wondering if Rafe is right, and what it is he sees.
“It’s more than the scar,” I said.
She presented a fascinating opportunity. I wanted to watch her, check her out, evaluate her. I wanted to examine her in every particular, every mood, the way I had gazed down at baby Nova, watching expressions flit across her newborn face—adult, complicated expressions, the whole alphabet of mature emotion, from abashed to bewildered to consternated and so on, like a slideshow. I had wanted to know exactly what Nova’s infant motherboard was up to, trying to listen to its whirring, the clicks, and predict where it would all lead. Which I couldn’t—Nova was a mystery. But this was not at all like having a child. A child is more inscrutable than other people, always becoming something just out of reach that neither she nor you can see emerging. With a child, there is always the sense of someone moving away from you—to college someday, a management training program in a distant city, B-school, corporate relocations, until eventually their connection is fainter and fainter—come visit at Thanksgiving? Maybe next year. But I knew what shore Michelle was swimming toward; I knew what the future held for her.
Years ago, after my accident, I had seen a therapist to help me deal with my overwhelming fear of thunderstorms. The therapist had asked me if I ever had hallucinations or saw things that weren’t there. I had had migraine auras—always of a few specks and lines, like bits of code superimposed on my visual field, but nothing I’d call a hallucination. “Is that common?” I asked.
“It’s not unheard of,” she said. “Depersonalization syndrome. It happens.”
“Not to me.”
“Well…” She looked past me to the clock, deftly signaling that it was time for me to leave. “Life is long.”
So I wondered, momentarily flicking back to memories of her office and the almost-forgotten therapy, if I were undergoing some sort of psychic collapse, but I didn’t think I was inventing this.
I turned my Conch off and on, reset some of the default settings, and pointed it at her. “Say hello to Shelley Stone,” it murmured, this time with the bass-xylophone timbre of a famous movie actor’s voice. I felt proud and impressed.
“Can you hear that?” I said. “See, it knows you. That’s pretty impressive. I’ll have to text Cullen. I’m surprised the bioauthentication is that consistent across time. It’s tracking off something besides my Conch—what could it possibly be, it’s not like you have a Conch?—but it’s a great feature to talk up, an example of amazing engineering.” But then I stopped, because I realized I could never tell Cullen about this.
“Hate to say it,” she said, not hating it. “But I am not convinced.”
“OK.” I looked around the room, and dug into my bag for my passport. It was old, nearing expiration, with a photo of me taken almost a decade ago. In the photo I have better skin and fewer stress lines in my forehead, and the sharp sleek bob that was popular at the time and now looks like we were all confused about which way was front. “Look,” I said, pointing. “See. Michelle Stone. That’s your name, isn’t it?” I looked into her eyes, and something shifted in her face, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
She examined the passport with an intensity entirely unlike, in my experience, a passport examiner’s. She flipped through the stamped-up pages: London, Singapore, KL, Mexico City, Tokyo. The stamps and visa stickers. I have the thicker (fifty-two-page) U.S. passport, which you have to request specially. When I have a few consecutive weeks stateside I have Willow send it in to get extra sheaves of pages stapled in. It was thick. “You travel a lot.”
“Yes,” I said. “Flip back to the front. Looks like you, doesn’t it?”
“Not that much.”
“Not not that much. It has your name on it.”
“It’s a common name,” she said softly. “Lots of people have that name.”
“This is your birthday, isn’t it?”
She gazed at it, and then at me. Her expression collapsed and swiftly resurrected itself. “Passports are fakeable.”
We sat on the bed in silence. I couldn’t let it go. There was too much here to leverage, if I could get buy-in. My biggest limitation in life is lack of time, and here was more time, a doubling of time, potentially accessible to me. “What would you like me to tell you? Your social security number? I’m just going to give you the last four digits for security. Where you grew up? Your parents’ address: 18 Pond View Drive. Your father’s car is…a Honda Accord, or used to be.” I hesitated. “Or will be soon. It’s green. The dog…”
She looked tearful. “None of that proves anything!” she said. “You could have found all that out. What’s my favorite color? What’s my favorite food?” She sighed and blew her bangs up her forehead in a gesture of contempt and defiance.
I sighed and blew upward to lift my bangs, a trick I had not done in a dozen years. I actually had no idea. “Um. Orange. Lasagna.”
“Wrong! I mean, I like it, but it’s not my favorite.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s a terrible security question. Favorites are so squishy and guessable and subject to change. Let’s step back and concentrate on irreducible attributes that stay the same over time. Your mother’s maiden name, that’s a good one.”
“She still uses it,” Michelle protested. “That’s not hard to find out at all.”
“OK,” I said, thinking. “Let’s drill down. Let me think. Do you want to quiz me about old addresses? Friends, teachers?”
“That’s all stuff you could dig up. It doesn’t prove anything.”
It seemed sufficient proof to me. Names and dates—as data points, what else was there? “We could compare our fingerprints,” I offered. “We could go grab a cheek swab gene test—my friend’s the CEO of a company that does fascinating things with that. The test tells you how Viking you are, how Neanderthal. I’m slightly more Neanderthal than average, and I was upset when I read that, but I did a deep dive and learned that Neanderthals were smarter than people often—”
“Tell me something nobody else would know,” she said. “Something only I would know. Something I’ve never told anyone.”
My mind flicked to the hospital room where I’d spent months after the lightning strike.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Almost twenty.”
So OK, not yet, I thought. What else was there? What other kinds of data existed? “I can’t think of anything else.”
“There’s nothing?”
“Wait.” The leaf pile of memory stirred. Something moved underneath. “When you used to fall asleep at night, when you were very little, you used to try to imagine a dog jumping over a stile—a gate. You never could do it. In your mind’s eye you’d imagine a path with a gate at one end, and a dog at the other, and then try to imagine the dog running up to the gate and jumping over. Always, at the last minute, the dog would jerk away and go bounding back the
way he came. You never could imagine it as you wanted to. Isn’t that strange? You couldn’t control an imaginary dog. It didn’t matter what kind of dog you thought up, it simply wouldn’t behave. This was intensely, intensely frustrating to you. You couldn’t control it, even in your head, even though it seems like other people, even less self-disciplined ones, can.”
She blinked. She didn’t nod, but she did seem interested. I went on.
“You can’t really picture people’s faces. You never have been able to. Only photos of them that you’ve seen. If someone says, picture your mother, you have to think of a photo you remember, like this one where she’s wearing a ski hat. You can’t summon up faces from life. Even though you are perfectly good, and this has been borne out on aptitude tests, at spatial thinking.”
“That’s true!” she said.
“Of course it’s true,” I snapped. It bothers me that I can’t. It seems like a cognitive disability, in a mind that is otherwise very sharp. It’s something I’ve considered bringing up at my annual executive physical.
“More,” she said. “Tell me more.”
Panes of life zoomed past like computer windows in cascade mode—lake, camp, birthday candles, record player with creaky arm. It all seemed interchangeable, like anyone’s past. “Surely that’s enough.”
She shook her head, but there was light in her eyes.
I heard myself speaking. “You used to pretend there was an owl that lived on the inside of your eyelid.”
“What?”
“I really think so. I know. It somehow did. Folded right in there. Anyway, there was a knot in the wood on the inside of your closet door and you imagined it could fly in.” I couldn’t believe this was coming back to me. It was amazing these memories were suddenly present, as if they had always been there—it was as if I could feel new doors in my mind blowing open, the night breezes sweeping in. “You used to think about the knot when you were falling asleep, about going inside.” I yawned, amused. “You were a very imaginative child.”
The Glitch_A Novel Page 10