Glitch. Part 29

"No." Josh said, as if he heard my thoughts. "I think they're very, very close."

The car jumped. I started. I jammed the brake but the car sped up. The trees whirred by. The tires whined. I moved the wheel but felt the car swerve too fast. We were in a skid.

Josh's entire chest was on fire. It was spreading to his arms now. The fire slowly eclipsed his elbows, his forearms, his hands. It washed over the back of his head and spilled onto his face. Josh was made of light now: an angel.

"Do you know what r.e.t.a.r.ds say about death?" Josh asked. The fire covered his eyes but it turned red. Red eyes in blue fire.

"They say death gives us life. That a coin can't exist without its other half."

The car was going fast. Too fast. I jammed the break but nothing happened. Too much speed.

The engine roared in the pit of my stomach.

"They don't know we don't live. Not really."

Too much momentum.

"Just like Jonathan."

So much noise.

"Just like you."

Breaking gla.s.s. Spinning headlights.

Cold air and cold snow.

Darkness.

My vision blurred. Blue lights. Red lights. Yellow lights. Cold wind. So cold.

I moaned and felt carpet on my palms. Not my carpet. I could tell foreign carpet from authentic homestyle carpet. This carpet felt ropey, made from thick, corded fabric. Not like my threadbare IKEA rug.

I bent double. Sleep pushed out at my face. My eyelids swelled shut. I fought them open. Had to see. Had to fight.

A cold breeze blew down my neck. I shuddered.

Where was I?

A room, a small and dirty bas.e.m.e.nt. Concrete walls with neon orange spray paint marking buried utility pipes and the smell of old furniture soaked with countless beer-spills.

I rolled against a sofa. It was a threadbare yellow futon with white stuffing peeking out.

Darkness hung like cobwebs in the corners of this room. White pine beams criss-crossed the

white stucco ceiling.

This was not my home.

But it was someone's home. A TV sat in the corner, and a laptop perched on a stained mahogany coffee-table. I saw a lime green Gameboy Colour, which was strange because I'd thrown out my own watermelon-pink one when I was in the sixth grade.

A staircase with a bare bulb hanging over it led upwards. It looked like I was in someone's bas.e.m.e.nt. A gla.s.s door to the side led out into a small garden area, flanked by a black wooden fence. It was early morning outside-in the garden white petunias were bobbing in grey earthen pots.

My a.s.s shifted. Whatever I was sitting on crackled. I looked down.

Magazines I didn't recognize: a big white one called Lapham's Quarterly with a strawberry on the front, a thick orange journal with the words NEW THOUGHT in tiny yellow letters at the bottom. I tugged at the bottom of the pile and brought out a crumpled copy of National Geographic.

That cold wind blew back at my neck again. Something mechanical kicked inside the walls.

Who's room was this?

Maybe it was mine.

I chuckled. I leafed through the National Geo and saw a few high-res photos of a hummingbird.

I threw the magazine to the side.

Maybe it was my room.

Maybe I wasn't myself. Maybe I'd dreamt of Samuel J. Flautt, Level Zero, the Stalker Men.

I grinned.

A cold wind blew at my neck.

It was really cold. Painful.

I knew what cold meant.

I looked behind me.

The Stalker Man.

It hung on the ceiling, its double-joints compressed its spider-limbs in half. Its fingers and toes curled around the beams, but I think that it wouldn't fall even if it let go.

The Stalker Man's eyes stared, as always, right at me.

They were red now.

I didn't want to run; I didn't want to give it the satisfaction of fear. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to ignore it and make it meaningless.

But I knew its eyes would keep staring. So I stared back.

I thought it would be less freakish if it was smaller, but it wasn't: the folded arms and legs just brought it closer to a human shape. Disgusting. I hated it. I hated it in my gut with caveman fear of the deformed.

There was a little bit of regret: it was real, my life was still f.u.c.ked up.

There was a bit of sadness.

Not a lot though. I was past sadness.

We are concluded.

The voice was a thought. It went into my head without the gurglings from the Stalker Man's gut.

I'd heard the thought-voice before, but had never known why it sometimes used that, or the forced intonations from its pervert-biology.

"Why are you talking to me now?" I asked. I forced my voice level. I couldn't show my revulsion at this thing that shouldn't exist in daylight.

The Stalker Man's shoulder's rotated. The joints clicked and slid like breaking bones. The eyes never stopped staring. Did they ever stop staring?

I do not speak to what is beneath me. I do not speak to dust. Now I speak to you.

"Dust?" I asked.

A white hand darted to the wall. A white foot smacked the ceiling. The Stalker Man soundlessly, and with that impossible speed, aligned itself like an arrow towards the gate.

Finally, the thing's head looked away.

No longer.

The Stalker Man reached down.

We are concluded?

A wave of dizziness pa.s.sed over me. It started at the back of my neck, crawled over my scalp and cascaded down my face. It earthed itself in my guy. I stomached it. Static overwhelmed my eyes. I felt sick, and the crazy, meaningless question asked itself: how was I going to get back home?

Except I was home.

I was on the floor, leaning against my bed.

My room was as I'd left it last night. The customary mess of clothes, papers, and TEB flyers lay in a heap that was sure to fuse into sedimentary rock one of these days, my computers stuttered on my desk as they woke and went back to sleep, birdsong came from outside.

The sun was up. A beam of light lit the floating dust above my bed.

The coffee machine whirred in the kitchen. I heard Greg's footsteps pound down the living room. The front door creaked open and squealed shut. Greg forgot to turn the TV off-I heard Breakfast

Television talking about banana milkshakes in Streetsville.

My mouth tasted like a.s.s. The rest of me smelled pretty bad.

A horn honked outside. Traffic was always a b.i.t.c.h in the mornings.

My alarm clock spelled out the time in green. It was 7:42. My alarm hadn't gone off.

It was Monday morning. I was late for work.

You have 3 notifications.

I checked the HR office. Empty. I leaned back and took a long, careful look down the hallway. Empty. I rifled through my Gmail account for any business mail. Empty again.

I clicked the link to Facebook.

I had an hour to go before lunch, and most of the HR staff were giving tours to the fleet of interns that started today. The HR team had a new intern, a girl named Sally. Sarah wrote her name, and a task list, on the whiteboard with the rest of us. My name near the far left was s.p.a.ced comfortably away from it.

The office was usually depressed on Mondays; no surprises there. The sound, the air, the environment all seemed weaponized. The phones rang too loud, the air ran too cold, and the unnatural light knocked our body-clocks into a circadian rhythm.

This Monday had the added joy of interns; I heard more laughter than I wanted, and a lot more mistakes: jammed copiers, calls for help, Gmail-beeps telling me so-and-so was late, so-and-so forgot to punch the time-clock.

Facebook popped up. It disappointed me right away; no interesting notifications. Thierry Reeves, an annoyance from university, had invited me to protest against some war criminal being held in Serbia; Lana Epcott had invited me to a Falun Gong meeting; and Rohit had liked a colourful comment I'd made about interns.

No messages from the Level Zero crowd.

I tried not to think about it.

I gripped my mouse and the plastic creaked.