The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  When I released the eel it dove rapidly into the water with a very satisfying splash. Its chest must have hit the bottom of the tub. By chest I mean the part under its lips. The eel’s big mouth stayed in position, observing, expecting the worst, an expression much like people in my town have at permit variance hearings—dour, disdainful, making it clear they are watching to make sure you don’t violate your impervious-surface limits. Of course, this is the fish’s expression all the time; it just fit well at this instant.

  I watched the water—so clear—swirling in the white tub. Clarity, I thought. That’s the final C. Get clarity about the situation. And have confidence. That isn’t one of the four Cs, but it’s a good one, I told myself. Nobody else picked up that eel, but you did. You can withstand shocks. You aren’t scared. You’ve been through worse. This, my dear (an atypical pet name for myself, but I was feeling tender, the post-electrical afterglow), is a true differentiator. It’s good to be tough.

  Cullen leaned in the bathroom door. He watched the eel swim in vigorous circuits. “They do pretty well out of water,” he said. “They can stay out for hours, even. They secrete a kind of slime to protect themselves.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  He watched me affectionately from the doorway as I straightened the bath mat. He wasn’t going to admit how pleased he was, but I could tell. “Come have a piece of cake?”

  Then the world, which had seemed to have turned against me, relented: deep in the service shaft of Cullen’s building the elevator gears ground, my phone buzzed, and my Conch read me a text from Rafe in its cool, woman-of-the-future voice (Sorry, held up, be there in a few). I dried my hands and smoothed my wet dress, refolded Cullen’s brown towel and hung it neatly, and went back out into the party. I wanted Michelle to see me, calm and triumphant. I strode across crunching glass and pooled water; the crowd, deferential and no longer talking about the Clitch, parted to let me pass. I looked around for Michelle. The party had thinned, and people were drifting out. There was no sign of her. For a moment I was disappointed. Then the door opened, and there, coming across the loft, was Rafe, warm, solid, and familiar-smelling as he leaned over to kiss me.

  Chapter 15

  I couldn’t sleep. I was too excited. The shock had been a reminder that I was made of what my ancestors called sterner stuff (never just stern, mind you—I come from a competitive lineage). I lay in bed, trying to extinguish the inner light, but part of me couldn’t settle down. I wanted to make use of this feeling of power and competence, this sense of being back on it. I replayed the evening, reveling in my triumph, freshly annoyed by the irritating comments. You learn so much from the failure process. I’m having a failure party, won’t you come?

  Get a grip, Shelley, I told myself. You’re overexcited. None of this stuff matters. The kind of people whose opinions shift every time Silly Valley posts a new story aren’t worth thinking about. My arms ached, sore from the shock. That’s one of the worst parts of being shocked—the feeling afterward.

  She’s a fool to think so. The voice that had said that was a woman’s—it might not have been about me. But it bothered me, and what-if questions churned in my head. What was causing the Clitch? Why hadn’t we picked up the problems earlier? Why didn’t Cullen know what was wrong? Why were so many people happy that an innovative product like Conch might be broken? What if Walter and I had just stayed inside that night, would we be together today, me acting in community theater while he made wooden bowls and knew how to fix things under the sink?

  Beside me Rafe’s snore whickered. The cool green bars of the digital clock on my bedside table rearranged themselves over and over into new patterns, but it was too early to get up. I’m an early riser, but there are limits. After a while I knew it was pointless to lie there any longer, so I got up and went down the hall. I listened outside Blazer’s door and then peeked into Nova’s room. She lay sideways on her bed. Moving very slowly so I didn’t wake her, I reconfigured her covers to keep her warm. Then I inched downstairs in the dark.

  I felt unsettled and uninterested in working on budget numbers. I wandered through the house, putting things in their place, although most things were exactly where they were intended to be. My restlessness only resulted in moving the small stone turtles on the console table into a different arrangement of stone turtles, less appealing. I rotated a vase of begonias to display another façade of begonias, with wiltier petals.

  The lights were off and I navigated through the house on the strength of familiarity and the watery light from outside. Everything was calm. I poured myself a glass of water, and mopped up a little spill with a tea towel that had been a freebie from a nutrient-pellet company. Their slogan is “Never empty the dishwasher again.” Since fourth grade that has pretty much been my slogan too.

  When we saw the house for the first time, the realtor had told us that the kitchen would be great for entertaining. Ah, yes, entertaining, Rafael and I repeated to each other blurrily, as if this were a startup we’d heard was gaining market share but whose case statement we hadn’t yet had time to pore over. We looked at her to give us the pitch.

  “For holidays,” the real estate agent prompted. “Big gatherings. Having people over. Super Bowl parties. Board game nights. Birthday parties for the kids.”

  “Oh, right!” I’d said. “Family time, or my women’s leadership accountability group.” Entertaining: I had a firm grasp on the concept but a hard time applying it. It brought to mind an image of faceless people thronging (who? our professional network? our direct reports?). I imagined myself vaulting atop the kitchen island, being handed a microphone, and delivering quippy motivational remarks to the people below, who, because I could not picture friends in such extensive aggregate, I filled in from the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut (tuxedos and G-strings).

  It was a far cry from my parents’ brown kitchen, with the checked curtain snapping at the open window, the note (“Eat!”) taped to the browning bananas. At my parents’, there was always a pile of browning bananas on the counter, and pressure to consume them before even more browning bananas arrived.

  A plop on the back stairs, a rustle, the clink of a collar. Hello, Eggs. It was way too early to say that word. I have an ambivalent relationship with eggs, the food, as well as Eggs, the dog. On one hand it (the food) is a great source of protein, but the way it comes out of a chicken bothers me. The dog cocked her ears and stretched into a perfect downward dog pose. Then she turned and trotted back upstairs.

  She always was a—rhymes with witch. It was amazing how decades later you could still hear someone’s voice in your head, even saying words you’d never heard him say. Walter hadn’t used to be a prude about swear words; I could cite examples.

  I thought about Michelle, wearing my dress. Nobody who’d seen us had said it was uncanny, or that we looked like twins or sisters (or, thank God, mother and daughter). How much had she looked like me?

  In the library is a chest where we store the photo albums people give us, to commemorate our service to their board or org or whatever. Once you get high- (or medium-) profile, people start giving you photos of themselves with you to remind you they exist. I tried to find a personal album, and from the bottom of the chest, I hauled out my baby book. On the first page was a photo my mother had captioned “On top of the world!” I was wearing a diaper and smiling from the top of a bookcase I’d climbed. There weren’t many photos of me later on. This was before phone cameras, so we took pictures rarely, only on occasions when we looked least like ourselves: Halloween, formals, sprawled on the beach in sunglasses. It was hard to tell.

  Dawn approached eventually, and with it a hangover of tiredness. Normally when I wake in the morning I restrain myself in bed for ten seconds and spend them bullet-pointing the most important things I will accomplish that day, and it fills me with joy to consider and then spring out of bed to act—to make a plan and know I’ll see it through. But that morning I felt sandbagged and nauseous.

  I went
to the kitchen to make tea. I shook cereal into a bowl and chewed an oat cluster contemplatively. In the back hallway near the kitchen we have a conglomeration of family photos, selected and hung by our decorator: parents, grandparents, old people who may not be our genuine relatives but add gravitas (I believe one of them is Thomas Edison). I was suddenly aware of one photo. A faint but familiar violet glow. I went over and knelt down for a closer look. It was one of me. I was in my early twenties, wearing a bathing suit and standing on a dock fishing for walleye. In an Adirondack chair behind me, my father holds up a copy of a magazine and points at it—it’s an issue of Forbes with a squib inside in which I was quoted. (Can I still remember the quote? Yes.) It was a funny picture, nostalgic the day it was taken. I knew then my first appearance in the business press wouldn’t be my last.

  With a rush of emotion I leaned in to study the photo now, the furry pine trees, the lustrous lake, and me looking cheery, slim, and optimistic about my future (but not irrationally so, as time has borne out). I remembered being proud and a little embarrassed that the quote in the magazine hadn’t been bigger. I had been pleased to be spending a weekend with my parents, because work was going well and I was excited to tell them all about it.

  My parents were extremely hardworking, though their ambition confined itself to hopes of affording retirement. They grew their own vegetables and recaulked their own bathroom. My newfound relentlessness worried them. They treated it somewhat like a urinary tract infection I’d picked up in the hospital: likely to go away, awkward to talk about. They encouraged me to see my doctor and eat a lot of yogurt. Inquired delicately from time to time if the burning was still there.

  My father looked young. I squinted at the photo now. I can still play back his voice, though only certain phrases now (the throat-clearing hmph he used to do every time I called him on the phone). Time went by, economies grew and shrank, companies were founded, bought, and sold, got funding or didn’t, went public, went bust. A person stayed the same but not really. I had been the girl on the metal cooler who’d wanted to kiss Walter, and now I wasn’t. I thought about how lucky I was, to have come so far.

  The girl in the photo didn’t look as much like Michelle as I’d have thought. Reminiscent. Similar. But not to an amazing degree. How had I not noticed? It was suddenly impossible to see us as the same person.

  I try to avoid bombarding Willow with emails in the middle of the night (it’s not as satisfying when she doesn’t respond ASAP), but I sent her one instructing her to order me four sets of tires from a certain tire store in Wisconsin for our corporate hybrid fleet and have them shipped. Also, there’s a man there who makes hand-turned wooden bowls, I think his name is Walter. Please purchase fifty, I want to do something unique for our corporate holiday presents this year. If he can’t make fifty, that’s fine. Pay in advance. Thanks!

  I hesitated. Ask if he can do a hundred bowls, I wrote, and please don’t use my name.

  Blazer’s rooster cry pierced the quiet house. I went upstairs. The surprised night nanny gasped when she saw my shadow in his doorway. She put down her knitting needles and handed him over reluctantly.

  “Should I go get him his milk?” she asked. She said it clearly hoping I would say no (which I did).

  I took Blazer downstairs, gave him his milk, and sat him on the carpet with a basket of intellectually stimulating toys. He threw himself into building a tower with the joyous energy of someone who had been in bed since 6:30 p.m.

  I lay on the sofa, gazing at him, watching the multicolored tower ascend. It wasn’t just that Michelle had looked like me, was it? It was because my Conch had said—and kept saying—she was me. And she knew things about me, all sorts of things. It was as if she had had a rich trove of current and archival data about my life, available to her in real time: Tate Bromberger, the name of our dog, my tendency to steal cash in small denominations from my classmates.

  “It’s going to fall,” I warned Blazer. He smiled sagely and added a stacking cup. The tower (briefly) held, before it collapsed.

  I thought of the two dresses, and how you could mistake one thing for another. Double and doubt. They were not dissimilar words. You wavered between two things.

  Could they be etymologically linked? I went to Conch that question. Just as I was about to tap my Conch it fell into my palm.

  Blazer had crawled over. He pulled up to a stand between my legs, balanced on his own feet, and reached imperially for my Conch, as if it were a squished blueberry. I moved it out of his grasp. He said something I couldn’t decipher, probably an idiomatic expression in Mandarin. I didn’t repeat it back so I wouldn’t throw off his tones.

  “Mine,” he said, reaching for my Conch, undeterred. “Miney mine mine mine.” And his declaration dissolved into a puddle of desirous consonants and a sharp, agonized squeal. Blazer is extremely smiley right up until the moment when he switches over to rage.

  “Nope, buddy, these toys are yours. This is mine.” I looked down at it again. My Conch. I gazed at its soft silicone housing.

  It was as if she’d had my Conch, I thought, or been able to access all the information that was on it. I squinted at the Conch and, thinking hard, rotated it between my fingers, too distracted even to notice its finger feel, or that Blazer was about to eat a penny off the couch.

  It was almost, I thought, as if she’d had a copy of my Conch.

  Chapter 16

  “Hi there, Tony,” I said, entering the lobby at Conch. It had been a long night, and despite a pot of coffee and some sun salutations I was feeling about ten percent human. That morning in the car I’d had another panicky voicemail from Phil. The Silly Valley blog had doubled down on the Conch river-jumper story and run a follow-up. I’d have to call Phil back. But first there was the lobby to cross, Tony to greet, the brushed steel doors to part with my gaze.

  “How’s it going? How are you?” I said wearily to Tony.

  “Not bad!” he chirped. I nodded and he turned back to a conversation he was engrossed in. I went up to the scanner and leaned in, widening my eyes so the camera could get a clear view. I waited for the usual chime. Instead there was a quick, jarring triple beep. I flinched (odd numbers make me wait, on edge, for a final bell that doesn’t ring). I looked over at Tony, but he didn’t seem to notice the aberration. I tried the door myself—locked. God, now I couldn’t even open the door with my own irises. My skillset was decaying rapidly indeed. Tony stepped over to yank at the door for me. It didn’t open.

  We tried again and the door stayed closed.

  “Get someone out to take a look at this,” I said. “This is ridiculous.” I leaned in again. A triplet of staccato beeps, all on the same note, issued from the box. I cringed and audiated a fourth matching tone. Tony, who’d gone back behind the desk, made a long, low whistle. He came over with his tablet.

  I tried the door again. Unbudgeable. “Tony, I need you to work your magic. This thing—”

  “Hey, you’re not wearing your Conch today. What’s going on?”

  “You noticed.”

  “I always notice. I have an eye for it. I check everyone.”

  “I’m having a problem with it. It’s totally my fault. My daughter was eating breakfast and spilled…well, you don’t need the gory details. I need to pick up a spare. Can you help me get in?”

  He looked at the tablet and then up at me. “Now this is interesting. I’ve never seen this before.”

  “How hopeful that sounds.”

  “Look, Shell. A fly in the ointment. Something’s going on.”

  “What?”

  “It says you already entered.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “It says you’re in the building. It thinks you’re inside your office.”

  “What? But I’m here.”

  “I’ve never seen this before. You jump out the window last night on your way out?”

  I shook my head, still not seeing where this was going. “Nope,” I said curtly. My interior timer was going
off. I had exhausted the time allocated for lobby conversation. Banter is fine, it serves a purpose, I enjoy these brief interludes of hearty back-and-forth with Tony, they give me a semblance of a social life ever since my women’s accountability networking group fell apart, but I’d had enough.

  “Hang on. There’s got to be a way to override it, since you’re clearly right here…”

  There was a problem with my Conch, and now there was a problem with the door. Someone could be forgiven for wondering if we were really in the technology business.

  “It’s not like there are two of you,” Tony joked.

  “Of course not,” I said. A tiny shiver ran down my spine. Of course not.

  “Can you tell on that thing what time it thinks I came in?”

  “Yeah, that’s what it’s good at. See, we just need to go down here, a little more, oops, not that much. There! You left the building last night at seven thirty-four and you reentered at seven twenty this morning. Twelve hours to rest, twelve hours to work, and all may be…how’s the rhyme go? Socialist shit, pardon my French. Came back in at seven twenty on the dot. And now it’s seven fifty-six and you’re entering again. But—two entries, no exits: you see the problem.”

  Distant thunder. No. It couldn’t be.

  “So it shows me coming in this morning?”

  “Exactly. The machine likes a one-to-one ratio between departures and arrivals. That’s how we know you aren’t sleeping in here, like that guy Arnold in QA.”