He gestured magnanimously, letting us have it. Employees always concede to me, when what I crave is a little fight.
We watched the door close.
“Why are you here?”
“To pick up a SportConch.”
“Why?”
“I need you to give me SportConch. The prototype. You offered to fill me in on all kinds of stuff. I think this would be very helpful.”
I gave her a long, searching look. It didn’t make any sense. “You don’t want the damn prototype. You barely care about haptics and energy harvesting.”
“Don’t you want me to care?”
“This is bullshit,” I said, in a soft, understanding, empathy-filled voice. “Tell me what you did to my Conch.”
She looked surprised. She put her finger to her lips. Are you wearing your thing? she mouthed, tapping her neck.
“What are you saying?”
“Shh!” If you are, take it out. She mimed the removal of something from the neck area.
“I’m not wearing my Conch,” I said. I brushed back my hair and lifted my earlobe to prove it.
“You’re so smart!” she cried. “I knew you were smart.”
A rap on the door. It opened and Willow leaned in. “Hey, Brad’s on the phone.”
“I’ll call him back.”
“He’s on his phone, in his car, turning into our parking lot.”
“Give me a minute.”
“Do you want a Cobb salad for lunch?”
“Um, sure.”
“I’ll replace the egg with one I hard-boil myself in the microkitchen.” Willow made a show of saying it, though she does this all the time for me, it’s NBD. “I know you don’t like the ones that come pre-peeled—”
“I can live with that today.”
“Is it because you don’t like the gray around the yolk?” Michelle commiserated.
That’s not why. Willow and I both ignored her. Willow left. Michelle and I looked at each other.
“Do you want to go to prison for fraud?” I demanded. “For breaking and entering, for identity theft, for probably other things I can’t even think of? I’m going to call the police unless you give me a full explanation, right now.”
She covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, please, don’t cower. The way to my sympathy is to be clear, concise, and give a sharply drawn overview of what is going on. I’m not into shrinking violets.”
She pressed her temples. “Ask me questions,” she suggested. “You know, about what your father does for a living, or your favorite kind of ice cream sundae. Butterscotch, right?”
I shrugged. I really didn’t know what my favorite sundae would be. Maybe peanut butter for the protein.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she said. “I can be useful.”
“When I showed you my Conch back at that bar, what did you do with it?”
“I gave you a different one. I switched them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because they told me to.”
“Who’s they?”
“The people I worked for. They told me to switch your Conch and I did it, but I don’t want to keep working for them. Can you help me?” Plaintive pause. “I liked you.”
If she thought this would resonate, she was wrong. I would rather be respected than liked. “What kind of job was this?”
“As a sort of…actor. I was cast in a role. To meet you at a bar and exchange your Conch for a different one.”
I went tense inside. “The one I had on last night?”
“I guess? They all kind of look the same to me. My part was just to take the one you had and give you that one.”
I blinked hard. My mind went back to the bar. It was an elusive memory. Swaying, clinking mugs overhead and a paper napkin splotched with blood. “You switched them?”
“Remember, you showed it off to me?”
I often showed off my Conch to young people, as a way of stoking interest in the product among a demographic that’s a bit squishy for us, but I did remember.
“I told them what a good job I’d done,” Michelle went on. “I might have bragged too much, because—”
“Women tend not to self-advocate as much as men, but it’s a complicated issue because they pay a social price when they do,” I said knowingly.
“They wanted me to keep going, do more. I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t want to get typecast either; I feel like I have a lot of range. They want that new thing you guys are making. SportConch. I told them to send me here, and I would do it. But I was having doubts, and you know, I’m done. I’m not feeling it anymore. It’s not a role that stretches me.”
“You put something in my Conch to intercept data and track me.”
And then her voice got very definite. “I didn’t.”
Cullen opened the door and leaned in. “Shelley, sorry to break up the party but we need you out here.”
“Just wrapping up.”
Cullen raised an eyebrow, looked at her and back at me. He hesitated in the doorway. “Everything OK?”
“Excellent,” I said, with a waver in my voice that he took as a joke.
As soon as the door closed she brightened. “What’s he really like? Do you think he likes me?”
I shook my head. “I need proof. I need to know how you got in here.”
“Uh…” She emptied her bag onto the conference table: a scrunched receipt, some loose dollar bills, a plain-Jane kind of business card with a wave-shaped logo on it and a long Malaysian address, and a U.S. passport. I snatched up the passport and opened it. For one second I thought, wow, she really does look like me. I looked back at her, and then back at the passport. There was a truly disorienting second when I couldn’t figure it out. To be fair, I had a lot going on.
“It’s yours,” she said finally. “Duh.”
“Oh.”
“I took it at the hotel. Remember, you showed it to me? I’m sorry.”
I tried to remember, but the memory squidged out of view. It’s not that I’m repressing it, exactly; it just isn’t there, as if someone forgot to run the backup. It’s as if data is missing, or—to be analog about it—as if the film were spliced with Scotch tape, and I’m spinning back and forth across the splice, trying to land on a frame that was taken away.
“So how’d you get in here?”
“Into the building?”
“Yes. Through the scanner. Was the guard there?”
She looked shifty. “I might have waited till he wasn’t.”
She sorted through the pile of crap on the table, then lifted a finger in a weak give-me-a-moment gesture and reached down into her bag. I watched her and wondered if she had a gun. I doubted it. I had a brief faint extraneous thought-flicker: If she shoots me in Fritter will it be A1 in the newspaper or just inside the business section?
But when she withdrew her hand, it was with a small, folded-up piece of paper. She handed it to me.
I unfolded it. “What is this?”
“This is what I used,” she said.
In her nervousness, the area under her eyes had gotten thin, veiny, and shone with sweat—a glint of fear. This happens to my friend Christine too. I thought, people are similar even if they aren’t the same. Then I thought, what a fucking fascinating insight, Shelley, you’ll have to remember to put that on LinkedIn, where it will attract dozens of sycophantic comments, albeit in substandard English. I tried to make sense of the paper she’d handed me.
It was a photo of a pair of eyes, so close up that the image had pixelated. There, composed of tiny squares, were blue irises flecked with green and gold, and black pupils. The eyes were surrounded by a cropped-out face.
“Eyes?”
“They’re yours.”
“You used that to get in?”
“You can do it if the photo’s good enough. Iris scanning is not that secure,” she said. “You know that, right? The scanner isn’t even heat-sensitive.”
“It works?”
I rubbed my own actual, heat-sensitive, bloodshot eye and raked a lock of hair away from my face. I gazed at the photo. My eye doctor, was he in on it? My official-events photographer who sprinted around with deeply bent knees recording official Conch milestones? I tried to recall the last time I’d had my photo taken. The problem was I had my photo taken all the time.
I practiced my calm breathing. My bladder was beginning to twitch in a way that it had never, despite whole days without bathroom visits, twitched before; I was having a new stress reaction just when it seemed like my body must have no emergency flags left to fly.
“You’ve fallen in with some bad types,” I said. “Infiltrating a company is a big deal. You need to listen to me.”
Willow knocked aggressively on the window, and I opened the door and leaned out to see what she wanted. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Brad’s here.”
“Shelley, what the hell were you thinking?” Brad called, striding toward us, past the door to Gumbo. He was wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt with a pepperoni pizza pattern; is it a joke to satirize his love of Hawaiian shirts or a genuine commitment to the Hawaiian-shirt format regardless of content? I don’t know, but it makes me want to vomit.
I came out of the conference room, Michelle following, and nodded at the group from marketing who’d been waiting for the room. I gave them what I hoped was a cordial, taking-care-of-business smile. I caught up to Brad in the beanbag/collaboration area. “Wait, what?”
“You could’ve been killed out there.”
“What?”
“That video.” He must have noticed how genuinely puzzled I was, because he pulled out his massive phone (Rafe: “Please don’t ever say phablet, I can’t stand that word”).
“Not out here,” I said. “People are working.” People were all too willing to stop working to listen to our conversation, is what I meant. Brad, Willow, Michelle, and I jammed inside a pitch pod, which is where PR people go when they’re annoying each other. We were squeezed together, Brad pressed against me.
“So what’s this video…?”
“Watch,” Brad said. He cued up the video on his phone and held it out so we could all see.
You’re making me nervous, I mouthed. Willow wouldn’t meet my eyes; she must have already seen it.
“Wow, that’s a crazy number of likes,” I said.
“The people I worked for make videos too,” Michelle remarked. Brad was cupping her shoulder, ostensibly for support.
The video started out with me addressing an audience. It looked vaguely familiar. I recognized my outfit, colorful jacket over neutral pants, and the setting, perhaps a graduate classroom at Stanford. Then a cut, and I was bicycling on a path through a field, lightning crackling all around me. I had a fiendish look in my eye.
“That’s Photoshop,” I said.
“You can’t do that in Photoshop,” Brad said. “Photoshop’s for photos.”
Look how skinny I am, I thought, and then I thought, social conditioning is such a powerful force, and then I said, “Well, some other program then, that’s what it is. It’s fake. I would never do that.”
Later in the video I said, “I am a brave leader!” and cycled through a river in a storm to the tune of a catchy pop song, which I am sure they did not have rights to use.
“So dangerous!” Brad said. “A totally unnecessary risk.”
“You can’t believe that’s real,” I said. “It’s not.”
“I’m not sure,” Brad said slowly. “I’ve seen you make that expression.”
I thought back to the hotel lobby in Barcelona and Enrique’s app. He really did it, I thought. He made it all look real. It was stupid but innocuous. “Who cares?”
“I care,” Brad said. “Conch’s investors care. A CEO shouldn’t take risks like that. We don’t have a succession plan. Nobody wants to ally with a company whose CEO is endangering herself.”
“It shows poor judgment,” Willow said, emboldened by Brad. “There could’ve been a twister.”
The last screen of the video was just a title card: “So proud of you and your company!” It was ridiculous. I noticed with casual, detached surprise that my left arm was trembling. Sometimes this happens after very intense strength training: I wake up the next day and the muscle twitches and flutters. I can type through it, but when I’m not typing my arm levitates briefly on its own twitch-muscle power. But I had not done especially intense lifting yesterday. I grabbed the arm with my other arm, steadying and squeezing. “It isn’t real!” I said, and my voice came out more loudly than I intended. Willow opened the door of the pitch pod, and one of the office labradoodles ambled up to me, lifted its front paws sympathetically, and, standing on its back legs, gave me a soft, curious, only mildly judgmental look.
“It’s not Shelley in that video,” Michelle said sharply.
Brad raised his eyebrows.
She went on, dismissive. “I can’t believe you guys are so uninformed about this. This is not a brand-new thing. It’s an app that is totally common in my age group. Aren’t you familiar with it?”
Brad shook his head and took a second look at the screen.
“It’s catching on with older people like you,” Michelle said crisply, “but it’s so lame, I hate it. I stopped using it months ago.” Michelle went on, telling Brad about this purported app, and he listened and softened.
“I guess we just have to contextualize,” Brad said. “Just treat it as the bizarre thing it is. Make clear it’s parody or register a complaint and get it taken down.”
“It could happen to any of you,” Michelle said. “You should see what people did with it at my high school.”
I looked at her in admiration.
She was infuriating, sure. It was alarming she’d been able to get through security at Conch, but watching her cut through Brad’s objections and make the video into a nonevent, I couldn’t help but feel a connection. It was like something I would have done, back when I was doing well. Have you ever read your own email message, tacked onto the bottom of someone else’s reply, and thought: that is awfully strong, decisive prose, I’m intrigued by this person, let’s LinkIn with him/her, and then been disappointed—all in a sliver of a second—by the realization that there was no such other person to network with? Have you ever read the minutes of the board meeting and thought, what on-point questions that person is posing, glad somebody was asking that—who? Oh yes. Me. Or stumbled across your own dictated voice MP3 and thought, what deft phrasing and crisp, clear signposting. I’d had that experience all the time, and it was so nice to recognize ability in someone else. I knew she was a fraud but couldn’t help but be impressed. Had I been interviewing interns, I would absolutely have chosen her. I could even see going to a happy hour with her, as an end-of-summer intern-executive group thing. I wanted to mentor her, even though a large proportion of my mentorees have left the workforce to become stay-at-home moms.
“It’s just sloppy,” Brad said. “The last thing we need is for you to look unserious about Conch’s future or take silly risks. I don’t care how it came about, it’s not what we need right now. I just want a day with no more problems coming out of Conch. You guys are taking up too much of my time.”
“Do you think Phil’s seen it?” I asked tremulously. “I feel like Powerplex is the only one who would really care.”
“Jesus, Shelley. You’re slow today. He’s seen it. He sent it to me.”
* * *
—
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said to Michelle once Brad had taken off. “I want to take you someplace where we can talk alone. Willow! You need to manage things. I’m not taking calls. I’ll be back later.” I ignored the many backs of heads that were listening to me while pretending to work.
“But you have an eleven o’clock to talk about new product features. Do you want me to move it?”
“Tell the team I had to postpone and run home. Say that a family thing cam
e up. I’m sure they’ll understand.”
Willow frowned. “Is that a joke? This is the team that stayed up all night getting the demo ready for you.”
“Tell them whatever you want to tell them. Make it work—it’ll be a good challenge for you.”
Willow cowered as I steered Michelle out.
“You’re very hard on her,” Michelle said. Not as hard as I’m going to be on you, I thought.
I took her down the stairwell. I didn’t want to risk seeing anyone in the elevator. Our footfalls reverberated off the concrete stairs and walls. The back stairwell at Conch lacks innovation because the fire codes in our town stifle creativity; without the suspended opalescent panels and pops of color, our building’s stairwells are just as utilitarian as any insurance company’s, which disappoints me whenever I use the stairs. I scanned us out a back door and we went out to the parking lot, through the misty fog and to my car. I started it and felt the thrum underneath me and made no motion to move. It was like the last time we had been in a car together. I didn’t know where to take her.
Chapter 17
It’s important to remember that being a decisive leader doesn’t require having all the information. You just have to be comfortable managing through ambiguity. I thrive on it. “We’ll drive around while I decide where we should go,” I said candidly. After a couple of stop-and-go lights I realized I was driving toward home. It seemed the best place to go. Home is the place where, when you don’t want to be seen in public with someone, you take them for lunch. Your lawyer’s office is also an option.
But home would work. Rafael would be at his office, Blazer and Melissa on one of their educational morning outings to the science museum or the zoo or one of Blazer’s music, foreign language, art, pre-chess, or preliteracy classes. Afterward they would pick up Nova at preschool. I had done it a time or two myself. Nova’s teachers, Clay and Vanessa, had been beamingly glad to see me, and touched my forearm gently as they shared their gladness. It made me feel nice when they looked into my eyes and touched me, like they could see, deep down, what a lovable, fun, and special person I was, but then I had to stand there as Nova changed out of her school peace slippers and put on regular shoes. Adults weren’t allowed to help, not even Clay and Vanessa—it was all part of the school’s process. The time I went, it was difficult to stay peaceful, watching it unfold.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 26