5. The stock market goes way up in 1999. But get out of tech by July 2000.
6. As discussed, keep wearing your retainer.
7. Sunscreen (60+) and remove makeup every night.
8. Brush up on multiple regressions before the departmental comprehensive senior year. But don’t freak out—you pass.
9. Try to maintain good sleep habits. I’m not sure this is possible. But try.
10. Start working on your Mandarin tones.
11. I’m giving you a list of big IPOs—see if you can invest early in any of them. They’re not going to let you in easily so show some hustle. Also, these are some great companies for a first job.
12. Remember you won’t always have the time you have now, so this is the time to learn Arabic.
13. Remember that greatness is difficult but worth it.
14. There will be plenty of time for boys/men/romance/dating once you’re a VP. There’s no point before then.
15. Remember, with men, the key quality you need is that they’ll put your career first, since it’s hard to both be extremely ambitious.
16. But men who don’t want to be #1 aren’t going to be exciting enough for you.
17. I haven’t figured out how to reconcile those two either, but maybe you can.
18. Having a killer work ethic is worth more than riches.
I sighed, looking it over. It seemed paltry. “Things are often for the best,” I added encouragingly. “And when they’re suboptimal you can work to improve them.”
I wondered if I should say something to her about Rafe. “Keep an eye out for a tall, dark, handsome stranger”? If a man comes up to you at a party and puts his hand on your arm and asks you whose party it is, tell him, but when it turns out he’s supposed to be at a different party, celebrating the launch of a different company’s product, try to get him to stay with you instead. Although I hadn’t needed to be told. I had done it without any prior warning. I had even incentivized him to stay by filching him drink tickets. He’d come up to ask me a question, but I just liked the way he looked. That’s so superficial, but you know, product packaging totally affects your user experience, and I found him enticing, almost uncomfortably so. It was uncharacteristic of me to flirt, but it had happened. Maybe I just needed to make sure she went to that party that night. I hesitated. If I’d known it was going to be such an impactful night, I don’t know if I would’ve handled it so well. I wouldn’t have felt so free. There’s irony there, in that I’ve often thought about how, if Rafe had been wearing a Conch that night and had its reliable direction-giving at his disposal, he never would have ended up at my party at all. That bothers me, that I’m helping people operate more smoothly and arming them with the information they need, but sometimes users are going to miss out too. I wasn’t sure what to tell her.
But if she met someone else, there would be no life with Rafe. What about Nova and Blazer? I felt a pang, thinking of a world in which they didn’t exist. Though Blazer didn’t exist eleven months ago, in current form, and I hadn’t known what I was missing.
And should I say something about the lightning? Yes. No. I touched the scar on my abdomen and trailed my fingers across my body. The list was missing the one thing that really mattered. When it’s a rainy night, and you are with a friend, don’t go outside and sit on an aluminum cooler during a thunderstorm. I hesitated. I let my mind skate over the memory, very lightly: the pain, the feeling of tight burned skin, the heavy shuffle of my useless left leg, the boring grid of squares on my hospital room ceiling, the agony of lying in bed and hearing distant thunder as summer arrived and departed outside my hospital window. The Spanish soap opera I watched, every day, gradually gaining a sense of its meaning the way you wriggle on a very tight-fitting turtleneck. The endless hours of loneliness, lying immobilized, with only my laptop for company.
It had been awful. I couldn’t tell her.
But when it did happen, when she was lying on the ground, flattened by the surge, would she think of me and wonder why I hadn’t? In the days afterward, when she was suffering in the wheeled bed, would knowing I hadn’t spared her make it worse? Could it have been any worse?
I thought of her—guileless, unafraid, Nova-ish in her contrarianism and curiosity. It was too bad. It was really a shame. But if she didn’t go through the experience, awful as it was, she would not become me. It had been difficult, and yet it had been…I prompted myself to finish. Worth it. Hadn’t it been? I could not quite say that, even to myself. But this was how it had to be, and difficult calls are difficult; that’s why they are difficult calls. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, or that you are wrong. I tore the page off the pad, folded the paper over and creased it, and put it on the desk.
This was an interesting development. It was unusual. It could be an edge. How could I use it?
Chapter 7
I woke up that morning in my bed, in the hotel room, fully dressed and with something wadded against my head that I determined, after unballing it, to be Nova’s Cannes sweatshirt. I shook it out and gazed at it, surprised to see it. It was stained with dried blood and its small size made that especially gruesome. I held it out in front of me and my mind flicked to a kind of imagined live footage of the kids getting out of bed, starting their day, peeking out from behind large bowls of oatmeal, and then I remembered the time change—they were still asleep; I was ahead of them by hours. Rapidly, I tried to rewind the mental tape. It was no good: the image dissolved, the realness and sense of connection were gone. I gathered the sweatshirt into a tight ball and hurled it across the room. It unfurled in the air and sank into a heap by the wastepaper basket, with an inglorious wave of one arm. Nova wouldn’t care. Life was a mystery to her, what she owned, what was going to happen next. Willow could get the festival to send another. Conch is a sponsor.
I gave my scalp a delicate examination with my fingertips (it had acquired a disconcertingly crusty patch, and although I wanted to rip off the scab I didn’t let myself) and then got up and started the shower. I got under the stream of water tentatively, but it felt OK on my head. At home, I have switched to a kind of shampoo that is free of some bad-for-you ingredient, which, it turns out, plays a key role in making lather. The hotel’s shampoo was the kind that has it. The glop I shook out onto my palm smelled lemony and pleasantly unfamiliar, and when I worked it, gingerly, into my hair, it did not sting and puffed around me like a dream.
The car, the girl, the café, the cigarette—elements of a very strange dream. I did not feel upset by it. I just felt like I was probably suffering the results of overwork, which is a cliff I’ve been approaching for a long time and have been warned about by Greer, Cullen, and my doctors. Even my 360 review hinted at it: while admiring my prodigious work capacity, an anonymous reviewer said, “It’s hard to see how she can sustain this long-term.” When I read it I thought, just you watch. And, also, I wonder if I can ID you from your prose style. Yet feeling this fired up felt good. I felt more alive, like I had reached levels of transcendence only available through this path, and that my imagination and dream life were in some kind of overdrive as a result. The feeling I’d been left with was not one of anxiety or distress, just a calm, matter-of-fact sense that it had been interesting and enjoyable, as it often is, to have an intense, weird, vividly rendered dream. I was gratified by my creativity, by the powers of my unconscious. It gave me a sense of contentment, like diving into an absorbing financial model and losing all connection with the world outside Excel for a whole day and night, sustained only by the old wasabi peas rolling around my desk drawer. It reinforced for me that the human mind is truly an exceptional machine, with capacity and potential that continue to awe me.
When I came out of the bathroom in my towel, I went into the living room to find the power cord for my laptop. There was nobody on the floor, nor any sign of a pillow or blanket. I had not expected there to be. Of course there wasn’t. I chided myself for even having a part of myself that had wondered, that had invented a p
retext when I still had one-quarter power remaining in my laptop battery.
I thought I had left the car key on the table beside the door, but there was no key either.
* * *
—
I checked out of the hotel and got into the car Willow had arranged to take me to the airport. As we pulled away from the hotel, I looked back and thought, for just a moment, that I saw the slimmest sliver of the car, glittering. I thought about whether to have the driver turn down that street, just to take a look. I hesitated—I could inquire at the hotel’s front desk about whether they’d noticed a girl leaving, or try to track down Enrique, or even go back to the bar in the mountains. But what would that get me? I had a flight to catch—I’d been invited to fly back with an acquaintance in his private jet, and I didn’t want to chance missing the flight and having to fly commercial. There was no time, even if…well, it wasn’t worth going down that trail of hypotheticals. Paperwork, shipping fees, back-and-forth with my assistant, who could barely figure out which SIM card to switch out in my phone depending on where I was going to be. Why even think about any of it in these terms, as if it were real? And perhaps—not perhaps, most likely (“Live in the world of data, not delusion,” my mentor in business school used to say)—it had just been another car I was seeing, and something about its shape or color had snagged the hem of my dream and was pulling it back into view—it was not unusual, was it, to have a dream that took place in the foreign city where you were staying? I’d bet it was likely. Almost inevitable, even psychologically healthy. It was probably the mind attempting to synthesize so many disparate threads and create synergies. Perhaps my dream had been too powerfully rendered and the excess imaginative capacity had seeped into my waking hours. The demands on me all day were such that I didn’t have time to obsess or worry about the car or—this part I didn’t even want to think about, wasn’t prepared even to say to myself—the girl. That’s the good thing about having such a demanding schedule. Even the most tenacious problems are like barnacles sliced off the rocks by the swift, sharp force of urgency. There’s no capacity in the schedule for low-priority emergent items. Those get delegated or forgotten or cast out to sea.
* * *
—
I never thought I’d adjust to living with jet lag, but you do; it’s just a chronic feeling of nausea that underlies every other experience. An embellishment, like italicization or font color, that doesn’t affect the content. You can get used to anything. I have a protocol of Unisom and B6 capsules to take before bed, which helps. Sometimes I do that; more often I advise others to.
It was a pleasant flight without the usual hassles of having to line up and go through rigmarole. There’s a nice man who takes care of everything in the private plane terminal. I would have preferred to work the whole time, but I was socially pressured to drink French 75s and chat with the other fliers on board. On the bright side, I made a promising new contact. Flying private improves just about every part of the air travel experience, but jet lag is still a challenge.
Soon I was back in the United States, alone and striding through a crowded public airport. I visualized/strategized: bathroom, nasal squeeze, listen to voice messages while peeing (my pee streams out twice as fast as other users of the women’s bathroom and I listen with pleasure, thinking about the time I save), customs, hydration, car, ten almonds.
I did a standing nap in line at passport control—I didn’t close my eyes, just loosened my muscles, concentrated on my breath, and invited the cells of my body to refresh themselves. Afterward I felt totally rested. If not totally, then improved.
Slight hiccup at the passport counter. I couldn’t find it.
“It must be here,” I said. My wallet fanned out. A stack of cards. License, let’s see, ID card for the gym I never go to, pool card for the pool I’ve been to once, no, credit card, credit card, fancy department store charge, frequent customer card at a noodle shop in Malaysia, punch cards to coffee shops, punch card to balsamic vinegar shop in beach town (one punch), frequent flier cards, crumpled UAE dirham note, fro-yo VIP card, investment bank debit card, a brick of business cards given to me by other people, corporate ID from the old scanner system, aha, oh, dear, that’s not it.
“I always leave it in this pocket,” I said. My mind went back to the hotel. My body prepared itself for a crisis.
“Actually,” I said, very calmly, “I must have taken it out at the hotel. I laid it on the desk. I probably put it down with some papers and it slipped inside.” I flipped through the briefing book in my bag, aerating the pages. No passport. “It was here, and it’s not. This is very concerning to me.” I did not say how much so. “I think it may have been stolen. What do I do?”
Quickly, I conferenced with myself. The missing passport presented a multifaceted challenge. One prong was that it invalidated or complicated my understanding of yesterday’s situation. In my dream, I had taken it out of the pocket. The second was that its absence prevented me from crossing into the United States. Of the two problems, only one demanded immediate attention. “What now? I have a critically important meeting in two hours and I have to be there, so I’m motivated to do whatever I need to do. I’m Global Premier Plus Rhodium Elite—does that help? I flew once from Denver without my wallet and was asked a series of questions about my previous residences, which I assume were pulled from government records…I suppose this will be similar? And I apologize to you, because I realize this is extra hassle.” I paused and looked the customs guy in the eye, to build a connection. He was heavyset, with appraising eyes under smoky-tint glasses and a brown-and-gray mustache. We viewed each other seriously: we were both on the same team, committed to safety and American greatness. Saw myself reflected in the glass divider. I was makeupless, hair pulled back into a severe bun, wearing a V-neck black sweater made of sustainable bamboo lyocell. My face was open, honest, and tired-looking but with a kind of lyrical focus. I looked impassioned and purposeful, like an Oil of Olay ad.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but would you step this way.” Had I really taken out the passport? I must have. Or maybe it was still in there, caught in a fold of my bag.
“How long might this take? I’m trying to make a meeting.”
“Might be a while, ma’am, I couldn’t say.”
“Wait, are you wearing a Conch?” I said suddenly.
“I am,” he said. “I just got one from my daughter.”
“That’s my company!” I said. “Do you like it? Here—see, I’m wearing mine.” I lifted my earlobe up to show him. I’ve had these experiences before, where fellow Conch users—the Conch Community—come together to compare experiences, and yes, you might think that both of us owning the same consumer product is a slim foundation on which to build a personal connection, but in fact true friendship and connection can be forged on such a basis: Disney, Apple, and Jeep are all leaders in this way, in creating strong individual brands that consumers identify with as an extension of their personal values. Why not Conch?
“Do you like it?”
He hesitated. I tried charm, of the direct sort: “Please say yes.”
“It’s not bad,” he said. He rubbed behind his ear. “I’m not used to it yet.”
“The voice, you mean?”
“Yeah. It makes fancy suggestions. It doesn’t really fit my personality. It gives me a headache.”
“That’s great feedback. I’ll share that with our team. You know what? If you look straight at me, it will say, ‘Say hello to Shelley Stone’—that’s me. Then you’ll know it’s me.”
“Yeah, it did that a few minutes ago.” He shrugged, unimpressed, and scratched around his Conch. “I get some neck sweat right here. It’s a good idea, but—”
“We have a new model coming out in October that will address the needs of heavy perspirers. Let me send you one.”
“I can’t accept gifts, ma’am,” he said. “But that’s good to hear, I might look into it.”
“I hope you will.” I studied his nam
e tag, committing the name—Kurt—to memory.
Occasionally I have had an experience where my attention is tugged to some detail, and I realize I should pursue it without really knowing why. It’s like a purple glow affixes to some item—a cell in the spreadsheet, certain stock symbols, a suite number in a building’s list of occupants, a bullet point in a presentation. “That’s an interesting last name, Kurt,” I said, seeing his name tag pulse, very faintly, in this way.
It wasn’t really pulsing. I didn’t really believe it was surrounded by a violet haze. I knew that my unconscious mind, a kind of built-in highlighter, was pressing down a little till the conscious me noticed. But I haven’t talked about this phenomenon—not with Rafe or Greer or even my best friend, Christine. It’s just too intimate, and perhaps it reminds me too much of that day with the purple glow on the tree, and everything after.
He glanced down at his tag as if he didn’t know what it said.
“I knew a Heidi with that last name in high school,” I said finally. “That was in Wisconsin, though.” Something fluttered deep in my mind. Without the dream, would I have been thinking about Wisconsin or remembered Heidi, a person I’d barely known, and so long ago? It was strange—a new synapse seemed to have opened up.
“Yeah, whereabouts?”
“A small town,” I said. “I grew up there. You probably haven’t heard of it.” Nevertheless, I told him.
“No kidding,” he said. “That’s where my aunt and uncle were. Used to spend my summers there. They lived right near that square in the center of town.”
“Courthouse side or bandshell side?” I asked, the way I’d overheard my mother ask a thousand times, using a special friendly voice that had once driven me batty.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 12