GLITCH
By Alex (Alan) L. Bounville
The sky was to remain a rigid gray. He arrived early anyway to park his struggling hatchback under one of the lonely, anemic oaks that dotted the lot, its roots gasping for life beneath the crisp asphalt. One last voyeuristic glance at his phone to the day’s aggregation of remnants of mostly women and children, and away it went into the compartment never used for gloves. His eyes caught the notice on the passenger seat, another increase for an already ungodly expensive hole in the wall.
Tensing and releasing his shoulders three times, he walked towards the entrance and tapped the ID card, blue background fading to white at the edges. Past a ghostly reception and the special people bathroom, he made his way to the cubicle on the same floor where he would spend seven-and-a-half of the next nine hours to drop off his small bag and grab his tumbler, passing a few earlier birds, staring ahead, already clicking and clacking.
Next, to the room, empty at this time, where he filled the tumbler with regular and a dash of sugar. He eyeballed a freshly printed proclamation on the fridge. “Don’t be mean; keep it clean!” If only he dared rip to the ground this infantilizing condescension. Averting it further, he put his lunch in the thing, returned to the desk with his coffee, booted up, and joined the chorus of clicks and clacks.
He got lost inside the dissonance over the next hour as it grew to a roar, muted only by the padding in the partitions that isolated each worker. Then, a rarity. Each keystroke from those within earshot aligned. Some shared time and space, while others danced alone in the air. Sometimes, it could go on for a few seconds; once, it felt like ten. Today, only a nanoparticle of oxytocin would be dosed before the sounds of work being done switched back to those of isolated individuals. Bob half sighed.
The names and numbers streamed by as he coded, though he was careful not to deplete too much energy that accompanied the early hours of the day. His hands froze. A name, more than familiar. One he would never—could never—forget, though he did his damnedest to try, appeared before him. 61512 was one of the needed codes. This was going to be a battle as great as, if not greater than, the brain cancer itself, the chances of Glen getting the care he needed without bankrupting him and his family. And all to—maybe—have a few more months. A few more hugs and memories, walks in the park, trips to the beach. Did Glen still enjoy those activities? With a tremor in his fingertips, he carried on with his duties, burying all thoughts of Glen back to where they had cowered for the past nearly sixteen years, barely noticed, and, as commanded, never felt.
His tumbler began to feel light and his bowels heavy, so he moved towards the sanctuary, insulated lifeline in hand. Five or so minutes of privacy and quiet in a stall, save for the others in theirs who shared his schedule. Out of embarrassment, he believed, the others never gave anyone so much as a passing notice should they confront each other inside the overall space they were made to share for such an intimate activity. Bob saw this solitude as a humiliating reward for getting himself to ten, but one he was always sure to take.
Post evacuation, he did the dreaded walk back to the ostensible communal space, believed to be so, he imagined, by those loitering there each day at this time. He never knew what was really between their ears, for at first sound of them talking about the day’s this or that they heard on the radio or podcast on the way in as he would open the heavy wooden door, his chest and throat would flutter and a cold begin its overtake, spreading down his arms and up his neck. The blabs would blur as ice shards grew in his ears, causing the sounds to ping and pong around as well as through these bergs, waves breaking apart as they struggled to reach the drums, dissipating to a jumble of dins and zaps by the time they shattered against them.
He would fill up as fast as he could without drawing attention to his biting interior, perhaps making momentary eye contact and giving a nod to shroud his state. Beyond the inability to hear them clearly, he had no intention nor interest to do so. He just needed to imbibe the stinging heat to suppress what he alone was not able to extinguish. As he exited, often a silence would befall those with whom he may or may not have exchanged a glance or nod, followed by the resumption of whatever frail notions they were desperate to brace through their chit and chat.
Today was as indistinguishable as any Monday. Something said by someone about some accident that morning or political something or other that may or may not have even happened or had an impact on any of them or anyone for that matter, perhaps a sludge of it all, who knows, who cares. A glance at the woman with the big hair. A refill. A nod to the man with none. A hush fell when the door was an inch from closing behind him as he looked over his shoulder at it, since no one was at the nearby print station to notice, hearing the word “Trump” before the door sealed whatever idiocy followed inside this perversion of a town square. He walked back towards the workstation, hands warming, ears thawing, chest and whole trunk filling again with artificial life.
The clicking and clacking were at a simmer. Swiveling clockwise in the black ergonomic chair, a sick joke since he never felt more uncomfortable than when he was in it, Bob scanned. First to the left partition, gray as the rest of them, on which were skewered meaningless pieces of paper, rules and regulations, policies and procedures, by primary color push pins, one per corner, to the middle partition pressed against a wall and above to its ledge to count the new dust particles that had gathered there overnight, which from his lower position he saw five. A clear sign, as the accumulation from the day before and from at least a month before that were evidence, the cleaning crew was doing the bare minimum. Eyes now to the right partition on which, like the central one, nothing hung and finally to the two half partitions behind him that gave just enough room for one person to enter or exit the confinement, but no autonomy for its entrapped once inside.
Bob continued his inspection, this time from the corner where the wrap-around desk met the right and right half partition. This corner was a purgatory for memos and whatever-a-thon flyers, a limbo before enough time had passed and it felt safe for them to meet their demise in the disappearer. He made his way back to facing the corner between the central and right partitions, where on the gray desk sat the monitorer. He glanced at it, and then to its left to the rarely used black phone beside which was a weighty clear glass monument, four points of a hand-sized star emerging from an irregular polyhedron, noting with a particular disgust not before felt to this extreme, its chaotic design. “Employee of the Year” and his name scrawled to fill the base with the company logo emblazoning the center of the emergent star, a screaming reminder of his station. He did all of this each day, save for the two-and-a-half years he was allowed to stay away during the weak people's plague, to grip a shred of reality from the stale air as his energy was set to wane.
While crossing his left hand in front of him to rouse the mouse just in case a passerby peeped, he reached his right behind the papers and began picking at the fibers from the partitions that met in that corner, a project in which he had been engaged for some time but never extended past this area, so that the knowledge of its existence did not spill into public view. It replaced a previous endeavor whereby he rubbed his feet on the gray commercial carpet below the desk until the marks became ever so slightly noticeable, which itself replaced a chipping away at the underside of the pressed board below the computer screen until he grew fearful that the monitorer was soon to collapse through to the floor. Fibering was the 127th such behavior, so far as memory served. As the coarseness of the extraction softened while rolled between his fingers, Glen crossed his mind, then crossed his mind again.
He glared through the puerile accolade as he loosened more fibers, rolling the gray mass with immediate ferocity. “Fifteen years in this prison,” he muttered. The statement, the first of the day, cracked open a gape to reveal a torrent. Squeezing his fingers while twisting, a deluge rushed by: fifteen years keeping as low a profile as is humanly possible; keeping health insurance by propping up a system that denies it; suffering the same fate, walking out fourteen years ago with a $60,000 fuck you; settling for $6,000 paid over a year’s time when healing was prescribed. He felt the pearl’s perfection, fingers now filled with blood and instantly relaxed, plucked it, and rolled it a few seconds more to incorporate its tail. He let it fall atop the small pile of other perfect pearls hidden behind the stack of waste. Out came a near audible, agitated expiration mixed at its end with an acerbic stroke of the keyboard resealing the past. And again: Twist. Pluck. Incorporate. Drop.
“Hey, can you look at this?” the subject asked as the notification infiltrated the screen. He opened the email to see Glen’s name staring at him again. He couldn’t have coded this wrong. What was there to review? It was always the people who checked his work who were defective, never him. The memory was thrust further into view. The night he was scheduled to meet Glen at the restaurant he knew of Glen’s intentions. He knew because he found the receipt for the ring a month prior. It was why he had already secured a cheap room across town and a transfer from the convenience store where he worked to one close to his new lodgings. A medical coding class and half a year later, Bob was where he was now, where he was being forced, if only for a few seconds longer, to confront his past. A few clicks and clacks and on to the next code and the one after that until one minute remained before the hour of yard time.
Flushed, he rubbed his chest. A flash. Then another. What must it have been like for Glen to sit at that restaurant, ‘their’ spot, waiting? How long was he there? An hour? Two? An anvil of a “Nope” slammed onto the desk, rattling all but the award, silencing these intrusions. A “What was that?” by a woman across the office, followed by an assortment of I don’t knows and jokes of an earthquake leading to no further inquiries, let alone investigations.
Outside, the current within carried his husk around the retention pond twice, maybe three times, and to a bench in the grass near the wood’s edge. He ate his tasteless food, popped a pill from the small bag, and sat as he did during many food dumps, watching the water striders go about their day on the black glass unaffected by human concerns. He yearned to be one of them, living no more than one calendar year, less if luckier and eaten by the underneath. The striders here lived full lives, Bob imagined, as this synthetic body was, outside of them, a void. For that, he pitied the critters. The striders blurred as hollow tears found themselves seeping from his ducts.
When he and Glen met, Bob was young, quite. And Glen was old, quite. Neither of them questioned the years between them. They seemed to fit well enough, so that’s all that mattered. Glen always told Bob how happy he was when they were together. Bob would agree. Bob would always agree. “Do you want to go to California for a week?” Glen once asked. “Why not” was the cute yet casual reply. “Do you want to go to that new breakfast place downtown?” “Why not.” “What do you think about us considering our future together?” “Why not.” “You’re so easygoing.” “Why not.” Glen laughed and gave Bob a big ole bear hug, smothering the petite frame inside his three hundred and fifty pounds of love.
Glen never questioned whether or not the cuteness and casualness were compliments of each other. And it goes without saying Glen would pay for everything, including all the expenses of the house they shared from the third month to the night Bob vanished, backpack slung over his shoulder. He was careful not to accumulate more than an escape’s worth, not an uncommon survival strategy from a childhood where no one ever committed to him.
A wince as a piece of black paint from the bench lodged into the skin between the right hand pointer finger and its nail. Instinct led the thumb of his left hand under the injured finger to scrape out the shard, already wetted by the forming droplet of blood. He was not in the slightest aware that he had been chipping off the paint nor for how long, the moderate pile of small to medium-sized flakes at his feet the only evidence.
Head forward, eyes raised, puddles within them obfuscating the polished concrete structure with windows reflecting the dark water and surrounding topography, especially on days like this when the murk in the firmament halted the blaze, he rummaged. Up there somewhere was sure to be the man or above him some other creature on or above that rung watching, noticing the onset of his temporary disability. With a rapid succession of blinks, he transmuted the salty liquid into action.
He swiped and crumpled the paper bag, snatched the one for pills, and with haste made his way around the pond towards the corner of the building where a trash can was strategically placed for convenience. In went the paper ball, and on the side of the building he stepped, suspicious that leers were hidden among the stationary shadows within. A pace above usual carried him, as the now throbbing digit encouraged further acceleration.
A quick scan and he was washing his digit in the special people bathroom. Bob was the last person to violate such a hallowed restriction, using the enclave reserved for upper and uppermost management. But cleaning the now clotting blood from under his finger among fellow underlings was no option. The finger hung under the cool water, and Bob, glimpsing himself in the mirror, turned his gaze to the floor where he noticed his shoelace coming untied. Another rarity added to the day’s list, since he was sure to double knot them each morning. He reached down to tie it, only to raise with a thud, connecting the back of his skull with the underside of the sink. Hunched, he cradled it with both arms, yearning to crush. Whipped upright, he finished rinsing, snatched a paper towel, dabbed and tossed, and found himself back in the entrapment, a flash of the past pressed against the eyes.
He was beside an adult in the third row from the front, scraping off the waxy substance from the underside of the back cap of the pew in front of him every time he and the rest of the congregation were led to the kneeler. When they were ordered to sit back in the pew, he lingered for a second longer than most in an attempt to get in one last good scrape without anyone noticing what was missing from the pew and now lodged under his fingernails. While sitting, he folded his hands in his lap, surreptitiously removing the waxy substance from under his nails with his nails and dropping it to the floor. He swept it under the pew on which he sat while the priest droned on, so that by the time he and the adult left, the evidence of his vandalism was well hidden.
The perfect crime, he smirked as he and the adult exited, the adult being sure to present him to the priest in the narthex as if he were a brownie point to be earned, if only the father put in a good word with Father above. The following day, Bob was off to the next imposter home, as he called the fetid arrangements where he existed from age three until his eighteenth birthday present from the brutal system forced him out of it and into a shed behind his first job. Quite the inconvenience behind a store for convenience. If not for the dim, obese customer for whom he played coy one day, it is uncertain he would have ever left that shed.
A scratch at moisture collecting between the collar and neck, the salt reigniting the sting. Several seconds to a minute passed before realizing the injured finger was being sucked. A loose tissue retrieved from the bag and used as a wrap. A delicate touch of the keys as muscle memory lurched the hands into motion. Four hours remained, fifteen of which were another suspension of time, all of which would absolutely need to be filled with the same caffeinated mind-numbing activity. A sip from the tumbler, another account processed, another sip, another person’s life in the balance off to billing somewhere else. Sweating more now. Another sip. 99214. Sip. Empty. Refill. Another sip. Gulp. Fuck it. A sip. A medium-sized swallow. 96413 + J9190 + C18.9; 96365 + J9022; 99214 + Z51.55; 96417 + J9355 + C61; 99213 + Z85.3; 96372 + J9312 + C79.51; 96401 + J9217 +C71.1; fuck it. The sweat was dry. 99204 + C79.9. A scratch of the chest. 99214 + Z51.11; 96374 + J9263 + C34.91; 99212 + Z08 + Z85.41; fuck it. Refill. Outside, a fifteen-minute statute.
He woke to see several more perfectly rounded pieces of fuzz atop the hidden pile. The finger was throbbing, as was the head. Careful afternoon mumbles, dampened by the partitions, were filling the periphery. He stretched the eyes as wide as possible as the drudge began its overtake. Another 99214 + Z51.11 and another eye stretch, this time followed by the ingestion of a yawn, forgetting that the time had come for the daily waft of Old Spice to hook the nose. He held back the urge to shrug and continued to type.
“How’s it going?”
Each time, the question chipped off another spec. “Meeting my numbers,” he said as he swiveled to face the man.
“What was that typo earlier today? The 61512. You entered 61511. Bob’s supervisor looked down to see the tissue wrapping the finger. “Got a cut?”
He looked at it himself, removed the tissue, and threw it in the trash under the desk. “Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Why didn’t you grab a Band-Aid in the breakroom?”
“I will.”
“Don’t get anything on the keyboard.”
“I won’t.”
“Keep an eye on things. Weird, something like that coming from you.”
The man glanced at the award as Bob swiveled back to the monitor. The stench persisted as he walked off and was heard a moment later harassing a few stations away.
The clock on the taskbar turned three; two more hours.
4:00 PM, this time an unexpected waft.
“Bob?”
Swiveling from the exact position as an hour before, an annoyed “Yes?”
A pregnant moment followed by “Can you come with me?”
A covering smile, then “Uh, yeah.”
He stood and followed the man, scratching the chest, which began to fill with prickling static. Catching himself, he pinned hands in pant’s pockets as they passed other workers, heads fixed on screens, their rhythms leaning towards a gruel. They made their way one floor up to the man’s office, and in the elevator, behind him, with lightning celerity, went one shoulder shrug.
When they reached the door, the man stepped aside for Bob to pass before he closed it behind them. A swift “Have a seat” followed by an extended open arm and hand gesture towards one of the two chairs on the powerless side of the desk. Bob did so, heart pumping towards explosion. He snuck in a couple of rapid and tense partial nasal inhalations as the man rounded the mahogany-colored desk, most likely some knock-off wood, which is all Bob could wonder. The man sat in the faux leather chair, swiveling back and forth a few times as he settled, a sound like tape sticking to itself reaching the ears. He looked at the piles of papers on the surface between them as if to say he was important and busy. Bob studied the face until it tilted up, causing an aversion to the pond and bench beyond.
“Bob?”
Bob brought the eyes back to the general direction of the face.
“Bob, we’ve got a problem.”
Bob sat silently, awaiting the problem to be revealed and his fate.
“How have you been feeling today?”
With a quickness, “Been good.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what the numbers say. You’ve got five code errors. That's on top of the weird thing this morning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“AI.”
“AI?”
“Yup. Corporate instituted new AI tools. We’re overlapping them with the manager checks just in case.” He leaned back, rocking himself, crinkling the air with each back and forth, a diaper wrapping him, a caustic sound, Bob internally opined.
“What’s that?” the man inquired, taken aback, causing another crinkle.
“I didn’t say anything.”
He seemed to quickly recover from Bob’s peculiar mumble, for he continued with his trite way of doing things. “You’re a good worker, Bob. I get it, maybe your finger caused you to make mistakes today. But five errors—we gotta write ya up.” He leaned forward towards the keyboard with a squish and began the process, the keys hard, staccato, with great space between each strike. Bob sat there, knowing it was not necessary that he witness the punishment, but now frozen. A minute passed, maybe, then two. A final, hard smash, and the printer behind the man whizzed and whirled as it swallowed the paper and spat out its scolding. A glance out the window again, the swoosh inside pulsing down each arm. In fifteen years, he had never received a write-up because he was as perfect a worker as was ever made. “Here ya go,” the man said with a patronizing grimace as he placed the paper and a pen on the desk in front of Bob. To reach them, he scooted forward in the chair and stretched out the right arm, grabbing the pen and placing it heavily on the line at the bottom, careful not to put pressure on the injured digit and staring at both. “You can read it,” the man said as if, to justify his existence, he were encouraging Bob to do so.
“Oh, yeah.”
The eyes glanced at the page. None of the markings on it seemed to form a syllable let alone a full sentence and at times not even a letter. A tickle dropped onto the right ear from the hairline above. With no certainty if enough time had passed nor too much, a random assortment of strokes upon the line were made without concern for their likeness to a signature, something he wished did not exist, since it seemed more times than not it was applied to further seal the fate.
“I’ll get you a copy by the end of the day. Get back in the game, OK? This isn’t like you. You’ve got this.”
A nod while standing, stiff, then at the door. The walk back to the workstation was brisk. Sitting, resumming, then stopping, then beginning again, then stopping, then pulling the shirt away from the burning chest, then wiping the sweat from the top of both ears, finger stinging as before. With less than twenty minutes before escape, walking past the elongated row of fellow clickers and clackers, whose clicks and clacks had reached their daily lethargy. Water rushed out of the faucet. Water streamed down the face. The mirror reflected nothing. Staring ahead, ears ringing, screensaver of company logo bouncing about, no clicking, no clacking. From behind.
“You’re still here?”
Bob’s chest burst into flames.
“This AI business got me behind today.”
He ran a hand down the ridge in the center of his chest, a constant hostage reminder.
“I was gonna leave this on your desk for tomorrow. Turns out, there was a glitch. You only had t—”
Bob snatched the award, corkscrewed counterclockwise to standing, and smashed the top point of the star into the temple. The man stumbled as shock froze the gaze, followed by a whimper. This repulsed Bob, so he wasted no time knocking the man in the chest with the full force of his exceptionalism, the ergonomically useless chair still spinning. The man fell back while clasping the top of the neighboring partition which then began to fall, causing another stumble. Seeing the blood bubbling at the entry wound, Bob struck it again and again and again as the man attempted to scramble away. The scramble turned into a pathetic kind of run, arms flailing, blood draining. Bob lunged from behind and bludgeoned the head, seized the collar with his one good hand, and catapulted the entity into a wall, gray as the rest of the place, now speckled and streaked with crimson, and stabbed the head—while his hand and the wall viced it—again and again and again until there was stillness. Bob stood above, unsure if he had stabbed enough. The man twitched and wheezed, blood sputtering from the mouth, so he stabbed it and stabbed it and stabbed it, on the last stab forcing a swallow of any possible life as he shoved the award well past the Adam's apple, and held it there for a good eleven seconds. Eleven seconds Bob held it there, and ten times Bob stabbed. He knew exactly because as Glen once told him while in less than five minutes he balanced the fat fuck’s checkbook, doing so to hide the money he was stealing from the idiot, “You’re good with numbers. Fast too.”
The award dropped onto the head, making for a haphazard tombstone as he walked back to the desk and sat down, the death assurance support company logo continuing its happy dance. A rapid shake of the mouse, smearing it and the keyboard with the man’s remnants, and a moment later, a resignation. The printer near the room for breaking revved. He stepped over his former boss to retrieve the gibberish, only to drop it into the disappearer, microcutting it into oblivion. One final glance at the heavy wooden door, relieved he would never have to open it again. As he walked out through an emergency exit, causing no alarm, his eye caught the woman with the big hair and the man with none peering over their stations. The sun streamed through a pinpoint in the silver clouds, highlighting the blood dripping from his face.
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