A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0023

The sofa survived the move better than any other possession he had.

She had spent years leaning against the wall of a rented apartment too small for a grown man, bearing the shape of a thousand nights neither of them spoke of, and now she rested against a new plaster wall in a building that didn’t appear on any map, and the only thing that had changed about her was the view. The pillows still sank in the same two places. Her left arm still wobbled where a screw had stripped long ago. It vaguely smelled of the old place, and that smell was the closest thing to a memory the room held, because everything else there was new, stolen, or both.

In front of her was the low table.

Jack rarely allowed himself to think about what that table had been. There was a night, weeks and an eternity ago, when something cosmic turned upon that cheap laminated surface, when a power he didn’t yet fully comprehend opened upon it like a mouth and delivered to them both the complete form of life they now lived. He wiped the table afterward with a dishcloth, as one wipes a countertop, because there was nothing else to do with his hands and the alternative was to sit there trembling. It was a coffee table again. He preferred it that way. Something that had been a door was easier to live with if you used it to carry mugs and clean your gun.

A square, ironed, immaculate white cloth covered everything, and on top of the cloth lay the broken pistol.

The bolt. The barrel. The recoil spring, the frame, the magazine, all set aside, like a thought kept in reserve. He had arranged them in a row with the unconscious organization of a man who had done this hundreds of times, something he hadn’t done, not even once, not in the life that had actually belonged to him. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa, his forearms resting on his knees, and looked at the disassembled weapon as one looks at a word written so many times that it has lost its meaning, and the strange iridescent fabric moved with his breath, capturing the blue light of the television and reflecting it in oily colors that no ordinary fabric would have the right to contain.

He used the suit to clean the gun because, without it, he didn’t know how to do it.

That was the lesson he had learned that week, the small, humiliating truth he now ruminated on in silence. Knowledge did not belong to him. He wouldn’t know the names of the parts in front of him, even if they woke him in the dark and asked him. He didn’t understand the spring, he couldn’t explain why the bolt slid along the rails that way; never in his real life had he held a firearm long enough to learn its weight. And yet, his hands, encased in his suit, had disassembled the pistol twenty minutes earlier with the calm certainty of a surgeon who had been performing the same operation since he was young, and he had sat and watched his own fingers perform a task he couldn’t follow, like someone observing a stranger who happens to be wearing his skin. Competence resided in the fabric. He was merely the object to whom it happened.

The week had taught him the other half of the lesson on the warehouse floor, and that lesson had been worse.

They had built the target together, he and Kevin, with what the place offered them. A human silhouette made of pallets stacked at the bottom of the swept concrete, a feed bag stuffed with rags for the head, an old paint can hanging where the heart would be, all spray-painted by Kevin, forming a crude silhouette with a smile, because Kevin couldn’t leave a sad thing alone. Jack was a reasonable distance away, ten meters, no more, the kind of distance a child wouldn’t miss, he took off the costume and unloaded the clip into the opposite wall.

He had hit dust. He had hit the air. He had hit a support beam two meters to the left of the silhouette and a stack of boxes a meter high, and the gun twitched in his hand like a living being that despised him, and on the last shot he stopped trying to aim and just tried to point, and that last shot grazed the painted shoulder of the smiling man and disappeared whizzing into the darkness, and the sound it made was the sound of the only hit he had managed in seventeen attempts. Kevin didn’t laugh. That was Kevin’s kindness, he didn’t laugh, he would just stand there with his arms crossed over that broad chest and say, calmly, that perhaps they should keep the safety on Jack and not on the gun.

Then Jack put his suit back on.

The difference wasn’t improvement. Improvement was a word for the abyss between bad and good, and there was no abyss, only a precipice. With the cloth over his skin, the weapon ceased to be a tool he didn’t know how to use and became part of his arm, simply doing what he intended, as his hand did, without the intention needing to pass through something as slow as thought. He had emptied all the projectiles into the paint can. Then, he let Kevin tie a strip of black cloth over his eyes and emptied all the projectiles into the paint can again, in the darkness behind his own eyelids, with nothing but the memory of where the world had been and the certainty that the suit transmitted back to him down his spine. Then he walked the entire length of the warehouse, the forty meters from one wall to the other, turned around and, with a pistol that had never been made to reach so far, a short-barreled weapon made for enclosed spaces and not for long distances, he hit a projectile into the painted smile with such precision that the head, made of a feed sack, jumped onto the nail.

The weapon hadn’t improved. The weapon was exactly as mediocre as it had been when it laughed at him from ten meters away. He had become perfect, and a perfect man with a bad weapon was more dangerous than a bad man with a perfect weapon, and Jack stood there in the dusty light grates, blindfolded, and understood, in a cold, silent way, that the suit hadn’t given him aim. It had given him all the technique. All the techniques. He was a pseudo-super soldier, a borrowed competence wrapped in a body that, naked, missed its target from ten meters away, and the only honest thing he could say about himself was that he knew which of the two he was.

On television, a woman in a gray blazer told the city that it was no longer safe to be on the street after dark.

Jack picked up the slide from the cloth and turned his attention partially to the screen, like someone eyeing the weather forecast. He had long since stopped trusting broadcasts for the truth, but had learned to read them like someone reading a liar, searching for the form of what the lie concealed. The banner at the bottom read “CURFEW,” in the white on red that the channel reserved for things it wanted you to feel before you understood them. Behind the presenter, a graph rose, a bar graph in aggressive colors, and the number at the top of the tallest bar was a number that Jack and Kevin had been writing by hand on the wall of their own apartment for two weeks, only the channel’s number was higher and continued to grow as he watched.

Ten a week. That was the silent arithmetic of the city when they started nailing the dead to the plaster wall, with their names: nine or ten people a week feeding the soil of the worst neighborhoods, a stray bullet through the kitchen window, a body abandoned in a vacant lot, the constant hum of a place that had decided some of its citizens were just the weather, not people. It had been terrible and stable, and stability was a kind of mercy, even when it was the stability of a wound that had stopped deepening. That was over. The bar on the screen tripled and kept rising, and the woman in the gray blazer read the new number on the teleprompter in the monotone voice they used for things too big to execute, and somewhere beneath that voice, Jack heard the sound he had been waiting to hear for two weeks without admitting he was waiting for it. The sound of a city’s seams beginning to open.

Next, the mayor entered, behind a podium, looking like a man who hadn’t slept in ages.

He announced the curfew like a man announces a death for which he is somehow responsible, each word costing him dearly, and the reporters threw him the question they had clearly been asking for days, the question disguised in six different ways, but always the same question at its core. Why don’t you accept help? The help had a name, and the name was on every street sign in town, and the mayor refused to say it, and Jack watched him refuse to say it, watched the little muscle twitch in the man’s jaw joint, and felt, for the second time in two weeks, that strange, unwelcome thing that was almost respect.

Because the mayor was right. That was the part no one on screen could afford to understand. He’d received the offer that all cities ended up accepting—the partnership, the glowing beings falling from the sky to stand between the citizens and the darkness in exchange for a contract, a logo, and a slice of the city’s soul—and he’d said no, and he was being slaughtered for it on television, and he was right to say no. Jack knew what those helpers were.

He had spent years of his former life watching them closely, on his own screen, in a story he loved like nothing else, and the story was anything but kind about what the helpers really were beneath the surface. The men and women the city now begged for, those whose faces sold grain and whose fights went viral before their bodies even cooled, were not protectors who happened to have flaws.

They were the flaw. Vain, chemically driven, and broken in ways the cameras were paid not to capture, the kind of people who killed what they were saving more often than what they were saving, and who did it with a smile because the smile was in the contract. The truth was bad. The truth was sometimes worse than bad, worse than anything a news report could contain, and there was no version of it the mayor could tell into a microphone, because the city didn’t want the truth, the city wanted to be saved by the wonderful people it had already decided to love.

So, the man on the podium absorbed the conversations about the impeachment, the drop in opinion polls, and the rising death toll, and maintained a position he could never explain, for reasons he would take to his grave and that this city was striving to provide him. Jack would never know him. Even so, observing him, he felt a faint and pure affinity, the affinity of two men who defended correct positions, but who could not prove them to anyone.

He placed the slide back onto the cloth.

The parts lay there, in their neat row, framed by the white square, the magazine disassembled and empty because the magazine was always disassembled and empty within those walls, the ammunition locked in steel outside, in the van, where it couldn’t possibly become a mistake. Jack looked at the broken gun and thought, without any particular drama, that he had no idea how to reassemble it. None. The man inside the armor couldn’t do it. And then he stopped thinking, because thinking was the slowest way, and he simply wanted it whole.

His arms became a rumored weapon.

There was no point in doing it. That was the part he hadn’t gotten used to and suspected he never would: the effortlessness at the heart of it, the way desire and possession arose in the same instant, with nothing between them for him to witness. His hands became a blur that his eyes couldn’t hold, a blur of iridescent fabric and movement on the white square, and the pieces left the table and met in the air with small, precise sounds, too quick to count: click of the slide, the spring, the frame, and before the air he had inhaled had finished leaving his body, the pistol was whole, clean and gleaming in his right hand, assembled in less than three seconds by a man who wouldn’t know how to name its parts. He didn’t remember the steps. There were no steps to remember. There was only the empty table and then the ready gun, and the silence that followed, and his own heartbeat, which hadn’t had time to adjust.

He was ready. As ready as could be. The bolt slid smoothly, the mechanism was perfect, and every tolerance was exactly where it should be. The only thing missing was the only thing that mattered, which wasn’t the ammunition locked in the van, nor the skill the suit already possessed fully. What was missing was a target. Jack slowly spun the pistol under the blue light and understood this with great clarity, like someone understanding something they’ve been observing for two weeks. He didn’t lack a weapon. He didn’t lack the hand to use it. He lacked a reason to be there, a body the suit could read as if reading the darkness behind a blindfold. And the suit wouldn’t need that body to be lethal; that was the cold luxury of perfection. He could land a shot in the shoulder, the thigh, or the hand and leave the man breathing, screaming, and disarmed; he could choose the exact degree of destruction he would inflict; he could turn a gun into a scalpel instead of a hammer. He wouldn’t need to kill. He would only need to decide.

He hadn’t made up his mind yet. But the city on the screen was deciding for him, one climbing obstacle at a time.

The door at the back opened, and the heat and smells from outside came in with it, and Kevin followed them both, slipping sideways through the frame, because he never quite remembered being smaller than the world had made him, even when he wore his normal clothes. He carried a brown paper bag in each arm, with the week’s groceries, the folded lids on the bread and cans, and he kicked the door shut and stood there, blinking to keep the daylight out of his eyes in the dim blue light of the room.

“You’re back,” Jack said, which wasn’t a question, and then he asked the question he really wanted to ask. “How was it out there?”

Kevin went to the kitchen counter and placed the bags on it with the exaggerated care of a man who had learned the hard way about the price of groceries because of his willpower. He let out a long sigh and ran his hand through his red beard, the old gesture, the one that belonged to the boy he had been before all this.

“It’s a circus,” he said. “It’s a circus, and someone set the tent on fire.” He began pulling cans from the first bag and lining them up, speaking with his back to the room. “They announced the curfew on the radio about an hour before I got to the store, and man, you should have seen it. People weren’t shopping. They were hoarding. Carts full to the brim, two or three per family, as if they weren’t getting a curfew, but the end of the world with a set date.” He shook his head, and a can fell so hard that he looked at it, checking. “The lady in front of me had eleven packs of water and a face that looked like she was already in mourning. For water. In a city with taps.”

“Fear anticipates what you fear,” Jack said. “It’s always been that way. The curfew didn’t scare them. The curfew told them they could finally be afraid, and they’d been suppressing that fear for weeks.”

“Sure. Whatever it is.” Kevin folded the empty bag, patting it twice with his large hand. “That wasn’t even the part that bothered me. What bothered me were the walls.” He turned, leaning against the counter, and the humor faded slightly from his face, giving way to a more cautious expression. “The graffiti, Jack. The tagging. Two weeks ago, you’d see a mark here, a mark there, you knew whose every corner was if you knew where to look. Today it’s everywhere. Fresh. Sometimes still fresh. New colors I didn’t see, emerging over the old ones, scratching them out.” He paused to think. “You don’t paint over another group’s mark unless you’re saying something to them. And you don’t do it all over the city in a week unless everyone is saying the same thing to everyone else at the same time.”

“What is it.”

“Seriously,” Kevin said bluntly. “Whatever was simmering, it’s about to explode. The whole map is being redrawn, and they’re doing the design with spray paint before they use blood.” He paused, and the caution on his face turned into a wry smile, as always happened when he had something more serious to explain and needed a lighter hand to lean on. “One of my friends contacted me, actually. A guy from before, from my old life, the kind of person who owed me money from back when owing me didn’t mean anything. He got my number somehow, which I don’t like, and used it to tell me something and hang up.” He opened his arms wide. “He told me to stay off the streets. Said it like he was doing me a favor I couldn’t repay. And then disappeared.”

Jack raised an eyebrow, a slight movement, and let the corner of his mouth follow the gesture, also slightly raised.

“How kind of him,” he said.

“That’s what I thought.” Kevin scoffed, almost laughing. “The whole city is learning to be scared at the same time, and a guy who would normally sell me to a stranger for a taxi ride suddenly remembers my number to let me know. That’s not kindness. He’s a man so scared he’s giving things away for free just to feel lighter.” He shook his head slowly. “The situation is bad out there. It’s that kind of bad situation where people start doing decent things by accident.”

Jack hadn’t moved from the edge of the sofa. The pistol was still in his hand, whole, useless and waiting, and he looked at it and then at his friend on the other side of the dark room, and the cold logic that permeated everything he was had already finished its work while Kevin spoke, had taken the curfew, the panic, the fresh ink and the strange mercy of the frightened man and arranged them in a row as organized as the parts on the white tablecloth, and watched the shape they created.

“Then let’s not waste it,” he said.

Kevin frowned. “Waste what?”

“This.” Jack twirled the gun against the light once more and placed it delicately on the cloth, next to the missing magazine. “Everything. The city is falling apart, and everyone left is doing the same two things: hiding or fighting for what’s left.” He stood slowly, his suit, with its strange colors, following his movement. “The gangs will spend the next few weeks killing each other for territory. Killing their own soldiers, emptying their own hideouts, moving money, weapons, and drugs in a panic because they think the danger is among them. Each one will be too busy watching the gang across the street to pay attention to the darkness behind them.” He let the thought complete itself in the silence of the room. “Nobody’s guarding the back door during a fire. And these houses are full of exactly what we need, and they’re run by exactly the people we’ve already decided the city is better off without.”

He watched the object land. He watched Kevin follow it in the same way Kevin had begun to follow it over the past two weeks, not shivering from the cold as he would have a month ago, but sitting beside it, weighing it, ascertaining that it was in good condition.

“We didn’t start a war,” Jack said. “We entered the one they started. We took from them while they were too distracted to keep control. Their resources become ours, their reach diminishes, and the men we leave alive are men who harm this city for a living and who won’t harm it so much tomorrow morning.” He paused. “Tell me where the mistake is.”

For a long moment, Kevin was silent. The refrigerator hummed against the back wall. The woman on the television gave way to a map of the curfew zones, with red marking the districts they already knew by heart, the same districts circled in permanent marker on the wall behind him, with the names of the dead written between them.

Then the smile appeared.

It started slowly, and it wasn’t that ironic, somber smile he used to avoid the worst things from a distance. It was something firmer and more satisfied, the smile of a man who had finally received a job that fit him perfectly, and that smile spread through the small, bright certainty in his eyes, and when he stepped away from the counter, he had the expression of someone who had gone from being warned to being the target of criticism.

“I’ll tell you where it’s wrong,” Kevin said. “It’s not wrong anywhere.” He walked across the room toward the wall of string and names, and held up one of his large hands toward it, to a red circle with the word written next to it in his own handwriting, the first place any of them had marked. “And I already got the name right to begin with.”

Jack picked up the pistol from the white cloth and stuffed it inside the suit, where it disappeared so perfectly as if the fabric had swallowed it.

“Great,” he said.