Glitch. Part 3

"I saw one. He said I'll be fine." On my computer, my desktop picture flashed on-a picture of Mario jumping over a koopa troopa. I ignored Sarah's staring and pulled up my schedule for today. An interview in the morning and a policy development meeting in the afternoon.

"At least put on a sling or something," Sarah said.

I nodded and mumbled something. I put away the calendar on my computer and called up the Stranger Danger website.

The s.h.i.+rtless Santa article stood at the top of the page. My name and Greg's ran in the byline. Sweetness.

I skimmed through the article. It looked good. I'd edited and formatted it last night. The style changes looked okay.

"I'll be right back," Sarah said. She got up and left with her purple lunch bag.

I scrolled down the blog post. Even the pull quote looked good. And at the bottom of the article Greg had included the video retrieved from my phone.

I clicked the video.

It went as normal. The Santa, the screaming, the door kick. Except...

On my screen, the Santa kicked the doors, and froze. The video stopped there.

Greg had cut out the bit with the stars.

I rolled over to Greg's photo of the Santa. I don't know if Greg had done it by accident or on purpose, but the photo was cropped to hide the black sky.

Interesting.

Sara came back in with a tube of saran wrap.

When I went to interview applicants that morning, I wore a saran wrap sling across my arm and chest.

Sarah had pinned my arm to my chest and wrapped the plastic around my shoulder and back.

"It won't hold," I'd said.

"It will," she'd replied, and made another loop past my chest and around my shoulder. After two loops she cut the plastic and stuffed the frayed end into the crook of my arm.

I told Sarah I couldn't move my hand.

She told me that was the point.

For the next hour, my arm turned a variety of colors. A low pain burned through my wrist, tunneling through my bicep, and terminating in an unpleasant tingle at my shoulder.

The pain followed me throughout the day. By eleven, I was waiting to interview a new intern in the TEB interview rooms, and seriously pondering investing in mechanical limbs.

The interview rooms at TEB financial are small and motivational. The one I had to interview in was about the size of a washroom. There was one desk and two flimsy office chairs at either side of it. I sat at the chair closest to the door. A stack of papers rested on the desk for me to leaf through. Most of the pages were blanks I brought in to look important.

Across from me, a large poster showed a group of young men and women in business wear jumping. The yellow and black TEB logo ran across the bottom of the poster, along with the legend: TEB can take you places.

To distract myself from the steady, digging ache in my arm, I leafed through today's applicant's resume and cover letter.

The guy's name was Gary Geare. Swim captain, fourth-year commerce grad, lots of club experience. Under the "education" heading of his resume, he'd written in St. Joseph's Academy under his York University degree. I'd researched St. Joseph's, and found out it was the name of a fancy private elementary school.

This interview was not going to be fun.

Someone knocked at the door.

"Yep?" I asked.

"It's Rohit." Rohit was the most senior, non-supervisor member of the HR office. He stood five foot seven, a 40-year-old man who followed world cricket and How I Met Your Mother. He perpetually wore a red sweater vest that made him look like someone's father from the fifties.

"Hey, Rohit," I said. "What do you have?"

"One Gary Geare." Rohit opened the door wider and revealed a tall, chiseled Dolce and Gabbana model with no obvious indications of a soul.

The thing named Gary smiled. He wore a black suit and red tie and had his brown hair gelled and swept up. "Nice to meet you, sir," he said.

"Likewise," I smiled back and offered my good hand. Gary took it and gave a weak handshake. His eyes fell across the sling pinning my arm to my chest. He ignored it. Good man.

I sat Gary down. Policy said Rohit and I had to tell a joke to each other to make the potential intern feel at home. Neither Rohit or I were good at jokes, so he just nodded and headed out the door. The door clicked shut behind him in time with the ticking clock behind me.

I leafed through the stack of papers on the desk and pulled out the page with the interview questions on it. We weren't allowed to ask interviewees questions of our own devising.

"So, what can you tell us about yourself?" I asked Gary, reading verbatim from the script.

Gary folded his hands in front of him. He lowered his head like he was praying, or deep in thought. More likely he was trying to remember the answer his girlfriend had written for him the night before.

"Well," Gary began. "I guess my story starts back in high school."

Gary went on. I clicked my blue TEB pen, pulled out a blank page from my stack, and began to doodle.

Gary continued his story, tying his high school lacrosse team into a meaningful picture of perseverance in the face of hards.h.i.+p. I'd heard his story fifteen hundred times already from the identical jock-accountants TEB loved so much. After I died, Gary and his twins' stories would be the soundtrack to my personalized h.e.l.l.

I drew a cow, a turkey, and another cow on my paper.

"But I really realized that, you know, having a dream is fine, but you need stability to back it up," Gary continued.

"Amen," I agreed, not listening. I wasn't supposed to say "amen". We were a secular workplace.

Gary went on talking, and I began to draw a starry sky.

I've never been good at drawing, but even if I was, I don't think I could have captured how the sky appeared in my phone's video, and in Greg's photograph. The sky in those recordings looked... eerie. The perspective was off in a way I couldn't even remember. The most accurate way to describe it would be like how sky appeared in a video game: flat, like a painting, without the depth or sense of s.p.a.ce. The sky in the video was more like a wall, pressing down on the world.

I drew a ripped Santa Claus below the night sky. I sketched out a speech bubble and had him say, "ho ho ho I'm a douchebag."

Gary was staring at me. I realized he'd stopped talking about a minute ago.

"Uhhh..." I flipped back to the question sheet. "It says on your resume that you were chair of the commerce society?"

When I finished the interview, Rohit came by again to give Gary another tour of the place.

Alone again, with only the ticking clock for company, I loosened my tie and scribbled "2nd interview" on top of Gary's resume.

I picked up my page of doodles, stared at it for a while, and crumpled it up. I threw the ball at the recycling box. It rebounded off the wall and bounced in.

I put my forehead on the desk.

Seven hours until I would get to leave.

The door opened.

"Sam! How's it going?"

I looked up. A short man in dress pants, a s.h.i.+rt, and a blue hoodie flas.h.i.+ng the TEB logo came in like he owned the room. He did. This was Henry, the exec in charge of the interns.h.i.+p program, my boss.

Henry bit his lips and shook his head at the papers fanned across the desk. He sat down in the chair opposite me. I didn't do anything to straighten my posture.

Henry frowned. Wrinkles blossomed on his forehead under greying brown hair.

I didn't straighten up.

"What's this about your arm?" he asked.

"Oh," I said. "It's nothing."

He pointed to my sling. "Well, what's that then? It isn't business attire."

I shrugged. He had a point. I stuck my thumb into the saran wrap and tugged it off my shoulder.

The sling came loose. My arm flopped to my side.

Oh my G.o.d.

"Oh my G.o.d," Henry said.

I looked away.

"My doctor said it was just a sprain," I said. I closed my eyes.

"How does it feel?" Henry asked.

I tried moving my arm. It didn't.

"I-I think I lost feeling in it," I said.

TEB Financial hadn't had a nurse since 2003; Henry clocked me out to find a doctor. If my arm exploded, it wouldn't explode on company property.

But by the time I rode the elevator down and entered the parking garage, my arm had improved. It still looked monstrous, but the feeling had come back.

By the time I got in my car I could move it again.

And when I drove into the bright afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, it just looked bruised.

The saran wrap sling had probably cut off my circulation. Now, the wrist and arm hurt bad-when I moved my wrist, it felt like nine different tendons were tearing-but I could move it.

In fact, it looked a lot more like a simple sprain now. I'd banged up my ankle when I was a kid, and this wound looked comparable. An injury like this needed frozen peas and Advil. Not a doctor.

A normal person with normal thoughts would have gone home and watched daytime television.

My head was not filled with normal thoughts. It was filled with starry skies, projected at strange angles.

I gunned my car, raced away from the TEB building, navigated onto Mavis Road. I turned on to the highway, heading west-to Toronto.

The construction pit looked the same when I got there.

I didn't see any workers nearby, but the foot traffic on the side street had increased since yesterday. A lot more men and women in frumpy business suits pa.s.sed by with briefcases with gold locks and s.h.i.+ned leather shoes. Losers; I'd changed out of my leather shoes when I swung by my apartment.

Cars rolled by. People came and people went. No one stopped to notice me, a crazy man in runners with a bruised arm and an orange backpack.

The pit was as I'd left it: no construction workers, no added supplies, no progress toward whatever was supposed to fill this hole. The piles of pipes and the pools of water hadn't changed. The paper bag still sulked at the bottom, where Greg had thrown it.

The only thing that looked different was the darkness: this morning, clouds had fanned across the city, bringing back a cold fall bite to the air. The clouds made the shadows come out; they made the darkness drift out of its corners and stretch out its long, thin fingers.

I unslung my backpack and laid it gently on the ground. Electronics thunked inside of it.

I eyed the paper bag at the bottom of the pit.

I pulled out my blue TEB pen. I flipped it around my hand a couple of times, testing the weight.

I tossed it in.

The thin plastic tumbled, incomparably small against the hugeness of the pit. The pen dipped, pointed down...

I held my breath.

It hit the ground. I didn't hear the impact.

No invisible floor.

f.u.c.k.

I jammed my hands into my pockets and let out a long, seething breath. I looked up to see if anyone was staring.

When I looked back at the pit, the pen was still at the bottom. It was so small I could hardly see it in the dirt and clay.