The Glitch
The closing line will stay with me as long as I walk this earth: There always seems to be some medley of things I shouldn’t or should be doing that I am presently doing or not doing, respectively.
Now, I realize that I should have wondered, Why are you telling me this? Why try to tell him? Don’t you know he doesn’t care? But, then, I didn’t question it.
Exiting the train, I walked past a wiry, sharply dressed man typing frantically. He didn’t look up. It was Maxon again, blue eyes glued to his iPhone, like last time, like always. I’m meant to be part of the screen-obsessed, nature-fearing generation, but his inability to tear himself away is noteworthy even to me. Even more unlikely on this point than his age is his stature; Jones checks his phone when it suits him, when he needs something, but mostly he has people like me to resolve the demands of incoming messages. By contrast, Maxon, a man of equivalent prestige, types away madly while his aides sip coffee and make their notes on paper.
Jones hated talking about Maxon and avoided it whenever possible, with the characteristic whimsy of a man whose conversational partners were mostly just happy to listen to him talk. But when he did, he claimed that any disdain he seemed to have for the man was merely frustration, perhaps so far as pity; how could he possibly feel fulfilled without the kind of post Jones enjoyed, without the stability? In truth, I think he couldn’t bear not being cared about by someone who was thought of as his intellectual equal, someone who no longer had any use for his charm or influence, if he ever did. It fundamentally offended his own conception of self, ever dependent upon the collusion of others.
I was curious. At one event where their paths overlapped, in Atlanta this time, I went about cornering the person I thought was Maxon’s assistant as inconspicuously as I could manage.
“Does he ever put that thing down?” I asked, nodding to the perpetually illuminated phone.
“God, no. Not even when he sleeps,” he said. “If he ever does.”
Rooms at the Waverly had booked up far in advance. Most of us were relegated to a smaller hotel about half a mile away. I hung around the bar for a while. Maxon and I walked together back to the hotel where we were staying. We drifted through the Galleria Garden. He wasn’t slurring or swaying, but he was looking at the greenery like he had never seen a hedge before. For my own part I felt bold enough to ask about his name.
For some reason, he whispered: I changed my name when I was eighteen. I was like … who’s going to stop me? Let’s make these geniuses really think about it. Like a Mason or something but, you know, with the X. X is so mysterious. They pick the most absurd names, so desperate, their own rules and it’s not enough. Let them figure it out.
This seemed like pure fatalistic sense to me at the time.
In the bar, eyes locked on his phone, he had complained about being given a room on the first floor of the hotel despite a specific request to the contrary. I remembered this just as he stepped out onto the fourth floor. Words failed me, but I must have looked confused. He winked at me, laughed to himself, and walked off.
Back on the fifth floor, I slept so deeply I dreamed empyrean dreams of light and grace. My mother, exhausted yet imbued with energy through sheer force of spirit, reached down to pull me up into her arms, my face buried in the crook of her neck, coils of honey-scented sable hair, the briefest moment of deathless stillness in motion.
The next day Jones ran up and down the corridors in Hartsfield-Jackson, stopping at three or four different establishments collecting bits of meals, the best chicken sandwich, the best biscuits, the best lemonade: optimizing an airport meal with a terrific sense of importance while I agitatedly arranged and rearranged his upcoming holiday travel.
I took a mite of comfort from Cara’s uncharacteristically ruffled demeanor. She was slumped in her seat across from me, wearing wrinkled black joggers, an oversized purple sweater, and gray sneakers. No jewelry besides her wedding ring, and her makeup was faded. It seemed like at least one of us, usually me, was always absorbing some wellspring of feverishness that rightfully belonged to someone else.
The night before my term of employment abruptly ended, I attributed my vague sense of uneasiness to the impending conference, which was to be dominated by the discussion of a PTSD study in which Jones’s involvement was both well documented and functionally nonexistent. Jones never worried about these things or, as far as I could tell, anything, but I had visions of people asking basic questions he would not be able to answer, laying bare the whole ruse. And it wasn’t as though there was no one in his life who would be gratified or at least amused by his comeuppance.
I was at my computer, dumbly watching the screen, refreshing periodically, when the final email rolled in. I felt like I could have written it myself. There was a sublime quality to it, almost orphic.
It turned out I was jumping at shadows, blind to the real threat, not for the first time. Sitting in the final conference room, I knew it was coming. Perhaps, subconsciously, I had been looking forward to it all day, maybe all my life. But there was no sustenance in that gesture, only malaise, like the traitorous dyspepsia of a longed-for meal after a period of fasting.