The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  I redialed. This time the phone got picked up right away, before I was ready.

  “Hi,” a voice said.

  I waited to see if I recognized it. It was a female voice. I neither recognized it nor didn’t. Her “Hi” faded before I could decide. “Hello,” I said, more confidently than I felt, my practiced phrases kicking in. “Shelley Stone speaking. Is this—”

  “This is Michelle.” She did not seem surprised to hear from me.

  “Hi, Michelle, great to talk again,” I said, in the assured tone of a thousand investor calls when, quavering on the inside, I projected confidence and leadership and refused to let a speck of doubt infect my speech.

  I saw myself reflected in the glass-sheathed skin of the office building. I squared my shoulders and breathed. My silhouette was impeccable in its tailoring and fit. My hair lay smooth upon my head. My expression—to the extent I could see it, shadows on the topography of my face—was fixed, impenetrable. Firmly closed lips, tightened eyes. I felt tense, but my voice still sounded mellifluous, supple, relaxed. Faking it, the same as doing it.

  “So you called my office. What can I do for you?”

  I heard some breathing on the line. She seemed unprepared for the directness of my question.

  “You abandoned me,” she said. “I have no money!” Her voice rose. “I mean, a little but by no means enough. Not even any traveler’s checks! What was I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?”

  I held the phone away from my ear and watched a young woman, slim, in black tricot, hold a headstand. Her forearms lay on the mat and her legs were nearly perfectly straight over her head, only a few degrees off 180 at the hip. I watched with satisfaction as the instructor came over and guided her into perfect verticality, which she held a moment, before her legs scissored down. I breathed in and out, paying attention to my breath. I took a moment to regain mindfulness and choose my response.

  “Tough situation. However. I believe very strongly that everyone is responsible for their own life. When I said you were me, I was obviously very tired from my responsibilities in Barcelona. You correctly doubted me; it was a fantastical idea. I had jet lag and hunger and a head injury, and clearly something about you reminded me of me. That’s a wonderful, fortuitous connection for us to have. These are the unexpected joys of travel. But it’s also a very tenuous connection. In fact, by providing you a ride and dinner, not to mention some informal career mentorship, I would say I’ve acted quite generously toward you. I’d be happy to go even further and provide occasional—say, once annually—quick feedback on your professional direction as your career develops, but I think that is probably the extent of the relationship we’ll have going forward. And of course—it goes without saying—that that’s dependent on you ceasing to harass my employees.”

  I admit that when I finished this speech I felt a kernel of satisfaction at how neatly I’d put it. Especially considering the stresses of the situation. Pride is one of the sins with which I struggle. Meekness doesn’t get you far professionally, yet pride can take you down. Like everything, it’s a tightrope.

  “Ask me a question,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Ask me a question.”

  I hesitated and said the first thing that came to mind: “After this latest round of funding, what will Conch’s valuation be?”

  She sighed impatiently. “Not that. Something about our childhood or our past. You told me stuff. Don’t you want to know what I know?”

  “There is no ‘our childhood.’ That was just silliness.”

  “All right,” she said. “Be that way. You want to bet on that?”

  “I have to go.”

  “There’s something I need from you,” she pleaded.

  “I suggest you get a job. Even if it’s menial, you could intern on the side to build your résumé.”

  “You can’t ignore me. You’ll be sorry. I’m not a kid. I’m about to turn twenty.”

  “That wasn’t much of a birthday for me.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  Did she not know what had happened to me? I wasn’t going to tell her. “Please don’t call my office again.”

  “I know about the problems with those ear things.”

  “Yes, it’s been amply covered by the tech press.”

  “That’s not all I know.”

  “Well, I should hope not,” I said dryly.

  “I know about your daughter being kidnapped.”

  Every muscle in my body tightened; I felt my heart beating in the air in front of me. “She wasn’t kidnapped.”

  My vehemence unnerved me. I blinked rapidly to regain control over myself. Silence on the line. I listened for some clue that she would take this back.

  She didn’t. “I want one of the new Conches. The ones that aren’t in stores yet.”

  I hesitated. “Do you mean SportConch?”

  “The self-charging kind, the ones you’re developing—” She hesitated. “Yes, SportConch.”

  “You do? Why?”

  Again, with hesitation. “Because they are the future. Also, it would be cool to have one before everybody else.”

  I accepted this. Who wouldn’t want one? They were going to be a global phenomenon and anyone would want to get in early on that.

  “You can’t have one. The prototypes are highly secured. Even I don’t take one home.” I did not tell her that we’re a little behind schedule, so they aren’t even here yet.

  “Please send me one, and also one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  She ignored this. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take part of the money now, part of it later. Get the ear thing ready and I’ll tell you where to put it. For the money, you can wire me the first half. I’m going to give you a number. Ready? Write this down.”

  “Why do you think I would?”

  “I know you can afford it. I read an article about you.”

  I breathed in and out. “But why would I give it to you?”

  “That’s not the question I’d be asking if I were you.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I was outwardly nonchalant, but feeling the cold shiver of a negotiation that is going to flop.

  There was silence on the line.

  “I knew about Chili,” she said.

  I said nothing. I’m sorry, being able to name-check someone’s childhood pet does not prove a thing.

  “Remember that time we sold tickets for the sixth-grade play and charged everyone extra and took the difference?”

  “That was profit,” I protested. “And compensation for time spent selling tickets.” But I was shaken. Nobody had known about that. I’d brainstormed it once for a corporate blog post about entrepreneurship, and then one of the editors said it would reflect poorly on me, so I had parking-lotted that idea. Nobody else had, as far as I’d known, ever found out. I remembered all those nice crisp fives that I’d kept flattened under the plastic kitchen floor of my dollhouse.

  “Why don’t you just write down the wire number,” she said, pleadingly. “You can think about it. I’m going to tell you it now.”

  “I have no intention of thinking about it,” I said. “Zero. Do not call me again.”

  “Call me back when you change your mind. This number is good. Incidentally, where did all the pay phones go? How do people call each other?”

  “Real cute,” I said.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  She had hung up on me. I stared at my phone. The garden was still and quiet. A breeze lapped at the pansies in the planters, and their hundreds of yellow eyes seemed to turn on me, bobbing, expectant, waiting to see what I would do. I gazed bleakly back at them. Why did we spend so much money on pansies? And why pansies? The very name clashes with our brand’s core values. We’re not pansies here at Conch, and I mean that
in the least offensive way possible. Why not impatiens? I would rather see impatiens. How fast could we switch them out?

  I tried to do some strategic blue-sky thinking, focusing on our Conch mottoes and corporate touchstones: ship and iterate. Moonshot thinking. Fail better. They were starting to seem extremely tired.

  A woman from the exercise class came past me with her water bottle and rolled-up yoga mat. “Hi!” she said, in the upbeat tone that Conch employees I don’t recognize use to ask about my weekend. “Hi,” I said back, realizing that she had recognized me before she came down the path, that the whole yoga class had noticed me, that everyone at Conch would soon know, if they didn’t already (word spreads fast on our intranet chat board, ConchKlatch), that I was doing something sneaky and private on my phone, down in the garden. I looked up at the building. Conch employees in engineering, data-information systems, and sustainable packaging might, even now, be looking out, through the green-glass skin of the building at me, down here and suspiciously alone.

  My Conch buzzed in a reminder pattern. “Finalize the board deck,” it whispered. “Confirm travel arrangements for your trips to…Kansas City, Austin, New York, Shenzhen, Brussels, Toledo. Schedule one-on-ones. Review employee handbook update and reply to HR.”

  “Remind me later,” I said. I turned back toward Conch’s entrance. As I walked, I hummed.

  My Conch buzzed in a recognition pattern. “Identifying…tune. Do you want to listen to…‘Theme Song from Car 54, Where Are You?’ ”

  “Yes,” I said. “I totally do.”

  There it was, a song in my ear. As we all say a thousand times a day, what did we ever do before Conch? I strolled across the plaza in front of Conch’s main entrance, past our single, unobjectionable piece of outdoor sculpture, a gigantic spring made of powder-glazed red metal. We say it represents the inner ear, but it was here when we assumed the lease. I’m not sure what it represented for the previous tenants. I personally love its coiled energy and extreme bounciness.

  I walked across our parking lot and down the sidewalk as far as the stoplight. Across the street was the trail, the marsh, the Bay, and the salty, swampy smell. I have always meant to cross the road and walk down the path to see what is at the far end, but I’ve never been able to justify the time involved when there is so much pulling me back to our building.

  “Make notes from call,” my Conch reminded me. I sighed. I didn’t want to give it a second’s thought. It made me feel awful inside. But I ought to do it, to recap the phone call the way I would if it were a product call or an interview. It was a fallacy to treat this as something different from anything else—that had been my misstep in Barcelona. I had longed for something else, another kind of experience. But there was only one kind of experience, and that was work. “We had a brief convo,” I recapped to myself. “She hinted at blackmail and made an aggressive ask. I refused.” What was the upshot, the takeaway, the next step? Well, if I’d had any doubt, I knew now it was a scam—her request for money proved that. And so I had put her on warning. No further action necessary. Cross it off. I could move on. Right?

  She was just a blackmailer. I felt a little crushed realizing this, but it was an irrational feeling. I was satisfied with my life. It was plenty. It was awesome. I had a feasible family situation and the satisfaction of a challenging number of problems to solve at Conch. My job presented me with a succession of meaty, complex, global business problems, and there was no kind of problem I relished solving more. And yet even these were predictable kinds of problems, variations on existing ones. I had gotten my hopes up that there might be something more. I had hoped her motives were pure. Motives so rarely were. That was basically the definition of a motive.

  I tried to remember what she looked like. I tried to recollect her voice, from just a moment before. “Ask me a question,” I said to myself, in my own voice. Then I tried to say it the way my mother’s sister, Aunt Letty, would have. “Ask me a question!” (“You betcha! Where’s the bubbler?”) Was that different, or similar? I could have kicked myself for not recording the call.

  Why hadn’t she requested to spend time with me? If she had really believed she were me—if I, to put it differently, were her—wouldn’t she be desperate to know all the things I’d done? I had done well in difficult situations, I had made some tough (but correct!) calls, even the Silly Valley blog acknowledged that, or had before the new, mean-spirited editors had come on board.

  I watched a particularly joyful off-leash Bernese mountain dog come barreling down the path. Conch was malfunctioning and I couldn’t fix it. The code was apparently a mess. My best hope was to close the Powerplex deal, do what I could to pump up the valuation of Conch, and then get out. We’d do better as part of one of the big players—that was a nice way to put it. I felt a strange indecisiveness in my head, a muddiness to my thinking.

  I tried to gain control: I should ignore her utterly and never speak of it again. It was odd she’d brought up the Conch problems. Even weirder she’d brought up Nova. My daughter, kidnapped. I’d told the audience at my Barcelona speech about Nova going missing, but I hadn’t told anyone about Enrique. Rafe and I didn’t talk about it. The conversation might slip too easily into other things we didn’t talk about, like who was to blame that day.

  There was a large triangular rock in the park with a flock of seagulls on it. I watched them fly off the rock, swoop through the sky, and come down for a landing. It reminded me of a park at the edge of San Francisco where we’ve taken the kids, where hang gliders take off, one after the other: a running start and then a satisfyingly predictable disappearance into the blue. Like the seagulls, all the little paper planes of my problems arced through my consciousness, came to rest for an instant on a rock, a promontory, a potential answer, and then when I looked over and regarded them, they flew away, unsolved. I went back inside to attack the rest of the day.

  * * *

  —

  A couple of years ago, I was feeling professionally stuck and was looking for an opportunity to level up and stretch myself. So I put out some feelers to Brad Barsh, the chair of Conch’s board, who had been on the board of Gorvis during my time there.

  I knew Brad was bullish on Conch. He had been talking a lot about the product and even invited me to beta test it. In its early days, Conch had a program in which a handpicked group of high achievers wore Conches, and not only did it help publicize the product among clout-rich global influencers, but it also allowed the company to gather data on time management best practices. The Conch engineers used this data to fine-tune the product. I was happy to participate, to get a peek at the product, and to share my daily rhythms so other people could benefit.

  One day a couple of months after I’d entered the program, Brad called about getting together for breakfast—nothing important, he said, just want to stay in touch, catch up a little, see what you’ve been up to, have a chat. Well, as you can imagine, this put me on guard.

  Brad tried very hard to seem easygoing. His hair was always tousled, as if he’d just walked off a windy beach, and he wore Hawaiian shirts on occasions when other people wouldn’t, which was to say, ever. He was surfer-esque, to the maximum extent possible for a nearsighted Jewish boy from Washington, DC. The guy in the office next to Brad’s, at their VC firm on Sand Hill Road, dressed better, had neatly gelled hair, and was more punctiliously polite, always conniving to arrive first at doors and make a production out of opening them, but he also kept a speculum on his office windowsill to pick up and ratchet open during conversations with women entrepreneurs. So comparatively, Brad seemed like a prince.

  At our breakfast, I buttered my rye toast as Brad sliced his cantaloupe smile.

  “How are you liking the Conch?” (We still used “the” in those days.)

  “I love it,” I said, always the correct answer. Though the way the beta testing program had been billed to me, I thought Conch was supposed to love me.

  Brad seemed pleased, however. He laid out the situati
on with his usual concision (typical problems, founder in way over his head), alluded to a search for more experienced management, and said, with a glint in his eye, “If I put you up, will you do it?”

  I finished buttering my toast—a little back-and-forth sweep of the soft butter, a satisfying slide back across the brittle surface creating a very fine sprinkle of crumbs on the plate. I thought about it. For a moment I felt scared and worried—what if it was too much for me? But I looked into his eyes and said, “Yes, of course.” I didn’t say: honored, grateful, me? Those are the things women tend to say. I said, “Thanks for your support. I agree I’d be the right choice.” Brad smiled with a little reptilian smirk, signaling that he was pleased.

  Later, I made a trip in through the underground parking garage to meet the board, hush hush, and then we negotiated for a few weeks, as their lawyers and mine reviewed the comp package.

  I went into the negotiations with an aggressive ask, because studies argue persuasively that women are undercomped for these kinds of jobs. A woman will say, a bonus of $x million and y-percent equity is plenty! Why would I need more? A man will push back. And it compounds, because your future comp is based on your current comp.

  Pay equity is something you read about sometimes, and it makes you feel guilty about earning so much more than the cleaning people, but by negotiating hard for the maximum package I am fighting the good fight for gender equity, so I can’t let myself get distracted by other fights.

  When it was all official, I felt anxious, but also excited by all the challenges I was about to take on. I felt like it was a great pick for Conch: I’d hire me too.

  * * *

  —

  I was thinking about this while watching Brad during the board meeting that evening. He seemed unengaged, even though you’d think he’d relish this opportunity for a substantive strategic and tactical discussion of Conch. Cass’s article didn’t come up till the meeting was almost over. I gave a credible answer, blamed the story on a rabid tech press, and reassured the board that great work was being done all around the wheel.