A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0027

Chapter 27

Jack opened his eyes at six o’clock and, for the duration of a heartbeat, didn’t know what life he was in.

It happened to him every morning now, on that thin line between sleep and day. His body awoke before his mind, and his body remembered the mornings of yesteryear, those that had shaped him, and prepared itself for them. He was preparing for the peculiar cold of a mattress flattened in the middle. For the smell of mold and diesel rising through a window that never fully closed. For the ceiling fan spinning in the warm darkness like something too tired to stop, and for the alarm he couldn’t ignore, and for the long bus ride toward another twelve hours refueling other men’s tanks under a sun that hated him. In that first instant, the new room seemed like something borrowed that he was about to get back, and somewhere beneath his ribs, a small animal trembled, certain that when his eyes finally opened, he would be back there, in the cubicle by the sea, in the life he had spent eighteen years learning to survive.

Then the light reached him and the fear disappeared.

The light streamed in softly, filtered through the cheap curtain Kevin had hung crookedly over the high window, a clean, golden-gray hue that had nothing to hide. It fell on a real bed, wide, with its firm frame and new mattress, and on the floor he himself had swept, and on the opposite wall where the morning had begun to warm the bare bricks to the color of bread. He stood still and let his eyes wander over everything like a man who runs his hand over something he fears to find altered during the night, and finds it exactly where he left it, and exhales. The old life hadn’t come back for him. It was just the day, and the day was his.

He couldn’t help the slight movement his mouth made at that moment. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but it was, more than anything, the intimate expression of a man who had received something he should never have had and who still hadn’t stopped fearing losing it. Because that was the truth, and he forced himself to accept the truth along with the relief, just as he had trained himself to accept every good thing along with its price. He wasn’t sure. He had read enough stories like that in his previous life, the long serialized fantasies he had devoured by the hundreds on cold nights, to know exactly what form his situation should take inside. A nobody who receives a swindle through some impossible mechanism, a golden finger emerging from the darkness to lift him above the crowd.

He knew the genre inside and out. He knew it so well that he knew he wasn’t living within it. In the stories, the protagonist’s path was paved before his feet even touched the ground. Power arrived clearly and precisely, and the world, in the end, organized itself to be bearable. Jack had a system that fed on what he was willing to risk and returned whatever it pleased, and a suit that demanded his body pay in advance for every second borrowed for free, and an enemy environment full of things that could end him without them even noticing, and he understood that nothing there would be simple. His chances of dying young weren’t low.

He had done the calculations more than once in the dark, sober, as he did with everything, and the numbers were not in his favor. Even so, when he opened his eyes, he smiled. Because, for the first time in his life, the danger pointed to something instead of nowhere, and a man walking towards his own death by choice is a completely different creature from a man being slowly consumed by it.

He sat up, lifted his legs off the bed, and stood the next morning with a long arch in his shoulders that caused a series of small sounds to emanate from his spine.

The mirror was bolted to the wall near the door, a relic they’d ripped from the foreman’s office downstairs and cleaned of decades of grime, and he stood before it as he had been doing from the beginning, not exactly out of vanity, but out of a disbelief that hadn’t yet completely dissipated. The man in the mirror was still learning to be himself.

Two months ago, the reflection had been an apology, pure length and no mass, a structure of pale skin stretched over bones with the hollows of a boy who had never eaten to his heart’s content. He had carried that body for so long that he had stopped seeing it as a body and had begun to treat it as a fact about himself, like his height or his name. The reflection, since then, had ceased to agree with that fact. He was still thin, he would always be thin, his physical constitution had been defined long before the system found him. But the hunger had disappeared. His shoulders had filled out and become more square.

His chest had broadened and taken on the flat plates of someone who worked hard to live, and a tenuous architecture had begun to emerge on his stomach, where for eighteen years only the gentle tension of skin had gripped a hungry belly. His arms now had cords that caught the grey light when he turned. None of this had been achieved gently. Every gram had been forcibly ripped from him on the warehouse floor, in the dark hours, his body bound to armor and forced to surpass the limit that nature imposed on ordinary men, compelled to expend a strength he did not possess and then compelled to develop the strength necessary to repay the debt, repeatedly, until growth became a habit.

But it was the face that still stopped him.

His body had been conquered, and conquered was something he could believe in. His face was a gift, and gifts he trusted less and less. The cream had worked on it every night for two months without rest, erasing everything as it went, removing the small ruins that poverty leaves on a person before they are even old enough to choose any of them. The dry patches, the ashen tone of sleepless nights and even worse food, the slight, permanent dark circles under his eyes that he assumed were simply the natural color of his skin.

All of that had silently undone. What emerged from beneath was not the simple, functional face he had expected to find restored. It was the face of someone who belonged to that kind of poster he used to see passing by the bus window, the chin, cheekbones, and forehead line well-defined, with a symmetry that didn’t seem entirely accidental, the green eyes now contrasting with skin that no longer seemed to be recovering from anything. Beauty was the only word honest enough, and it embarrassed him a little to use it, even silently. He had become, without asking, an incredibly handsome young man, and the strangest thing was that beauty had nothing to do with him; it had been poured onto the anxious old man like varnish on raw clay. He held his own eyes in the mirror for a moment longer than necessary, and the corner of his mouth curved again, and he looked away before his gaze could become something useless to him.

He walked out the door of his room into the spacious upper hall, and the space welcomed him in the same way it had every morning since they took him, with a kind of cavernous patience.

This place had once been an office floor, a long mezzanine above the factory proper, and they had been slowly persuading him to transform it into something more. A home, was the word Jack couldn’t pronounce aloud, though it was what he sought whenever he hung another secondhand lamp or leaned another mismatched chair against the wall. It was still more of an idea than a reality. The end of the hallway remained empty and echoing, a territory of exposed brick and cold concrete waiting to be occupied. But the nearest end had begun to soften. There was furniture now, none of it matching and most of it repurposed. There was a rug. There was light falling where they wanted it to fall. It was the first place in his entire life that no one could take from him, no landlord, no father, no boss, and he was building it as a man builds what he was never allowed to have: slowly and with more care than the materials deserved.

From behind the second door in the hallway came the sound that indicated the morning was proceeding normally. Kevin snored loudly, a long, irregular snore that rose, broke, and rose again on the scale, the sound of a man sleeping as he did everything, without reservations. Jack walked through the door without slowing his pace. He had learned, in two months of living together, that nothing but the smell of food would wake his friend up like that, and that trying only earned him a pillow thrown on the floor and a hurt look.

He went down the iron stairs to the factory floor and crossed them towards the bathroom, which was inside the building.

The old factory had been designed, in its operating days, for men who arrived filthy and left clean, and the bathroom reflected this purpose with a kind of austere institutional generosity. It was located at the back of the structure, far from any windows, a long, tiled room built for simultaneous use by an entire shift. A row of showers ran along one wall, more than two illegal occupants could possibly need, the fittings with rusty but otherwise sound joints, the water that flowed from them, once opened, hotter and stronger than anything Jack had ever experienced in the cubicle near the port.

On the opposite wall were the lockers, two rows of battered steel, the paint worn down to the metal of the handles, where thousands of vanished hands had opened and closed them over the years. Most were empty and ajar. Two were not. He had claimed a locker for himself when they moved in, for no reason that could justify it, and Kevin immediately claimed the locker next door. At the time, the gesture seemed somewhat absurd to Jack: two men occupying two lockers out of a total of forty. Later, lying awake, Jack thought of something different, something for which he couldn’t find adequate words. The long row of empty doors remained open along the wall, like an invitation neither of them had uttered aloud. There was room for more. A building made to house a multitude, housing only two, with the space for whatever they might become, remaining open and waiting.

He took a quick shower, got dressed, and went back to the kitchen, his day already full and his stomach beginning to rumble.

The kitchen was the part of the project he was most proud of, which said a lot about how small a person could be taught to desire. It was little more than a countertop, a stove with a temperamental burner, a refrigerator that hummed in a tone you forgot after the first week, and the table. He put a heavy frying pan on the fire and started with his own breakfast, because his was quick. Six eggs, cracked with one hand in the fat, and bacon, plenty of bacon, placed to crisp and curl while the eggs set at the edges. Breakfast for a man rebuilding himself from scratch. He ate the way he had learned to eat in those two months, deliberately and until he felt satisfied, overriding the old reflex that still, even now, wanted to leave food on the plate for a more meager tomorrow that would never come.

Next, he started working on Kevin’s meal, which ended up being less of a logistical problem and more of a planning issue.

Forty eggs. A whole kilo of bacon. For weeks he had stopped being surprised by the numbers and had simply incorporated them into his household arithmetic, as one incorporates any large recurring expense. The fruit that had transformed his friend hadn’t come cheap, and one of the prices it demanded was an unlimited appetite. The pot couldn’t hold even a fraction of what was needed, so the preparation happened in waves, batch after batch sliding into a dish the size of a hubcap, the kitchen filling with smoke, salt, and the strong smell of frying pork.

He was almost finished, and he was slightly amused by it, as he was every morning, with the only detail of the arrangement that no one, looking from the outside, could ever understand. Bacon. He was at a stove frying a kilo of pork for a man who, when he felt like it, transformed into a boar the size of a small car. The first time the contradiction occurred to him, Jack laughed out loud alone in the kitchen and then went to research it, because he was the kind of person who researched things, and the answer only improved the situation. A boar in the wild wasn’t a delicate vegetarian. It ate what it found, and what it found included, with a regularity that nature programs delicately mentioned, the meat of other boars. There was nothing strange, in the cold logic of the animal, about a pig having a meal with another pig. He had saved this information to use against Kevin at the first opportunity, and this morning, with the plate turning grey-gold and the snoring upstairs finally silenced, he felt that perhaps this was the ideal morning for it.

He didn’t need to wake him. He never needed to. Kevin woke up when the food was ready, not a minute before, with the infallible instinct of a creature whose entire nervous system had been reorganized around the question of where the next meal would be, and Jack heard the door open in the hallway and the heavy, slow sound of the iron steps, and then his friend was at the kitchen door, wiping the sleep from his face with the back of his hand and following his own scent the rest of the way inside.

Two months had been kind to Kevin, but in a different way than they had been to Jack. He was still short and broad, still not quite reaching Jack’s shoulder height, still retaining the round, affable face that made strangers underestimate him, exactly the way that had so often served him well. The transformation was now happening beneath the surface, not on it. His arms had lengthened and thickened, stretching the sleeves of all his clothes; his chest had expanded, becoming wide and deep; and the large stomach that had once jutted out in front of him and slowed down every movement had shrunk and become firmer, no longer a hindrance, no longer an obstacle. It was still substantial. But it had ceased to be a burden and had become a characteristic, a kind of reservoir, as Jack understood it, a place to store the frightening volume of fuel that the body demanded for the hours when it would be called upon to become something larger and much hungrier.

“Good morning, mate,” said Kevin, his voice still a little high-pitched for his size and pleasantly husky at the ends, and he said this in the middle of a yawn that covered most of his face.

Jack took the last piece of bacon off the stove and turned around. “Good morning.” He paused. “What a night, huh?”

“Don’t even think about it.” Kevin crossed the kitchen toward the table, wiping the back of his wrist across his eyes once more, and sat down in the chair, which supported his weight with a complaint it had been making for two months and would continue to make until it finally gave way. It was a pitiful piece of furniture, that table, bought for next to nothing from a man who was emptying out the house of a deceased aunt, its top scratched, marked, and furrowed by the lives of other people long before it became theirs, and Jack had become more attached to it than to anything else in the house. Kevin rested his two heavy forearms on the marked wood and smiled at himself, the weariness already dissipating, replaced by the simple, radiant pleasure he felt for almost everything. “Thank goodness it arrived. I spent the whole way home expecting it to fall apart. But it doesn’t.” He shook his head slowly, marveling at his own good fortune. “I can barely stand still during the roll. When are we going to do the roll? How do you think it’s going to be today, with a load like this?”

Jack brought the platter and placed it in front of him, forty eggs and a pound of pork piled up forming a small greasy mountain, pulled his own chair from the other side of the ruined table and sat down.

“A sincere answer?” He picked up his coffee cup. “I can’t tell you. Nobody can. That’s the problem with what I have, and you know it as well as I do.” He swirled the cup in his hands. “Value gives you better chances, not a better outcome. We’re feeding the system more than ever, so the floor is higher than it’s ever been, and the ceiling too. But between the floor and the ceiling there’s a lot of space, and what decides where we end up in there isn’t me, or you. You can give us something that changes everything. You can give us another jar of moisturizer. I’ve seen both happen.” He took a sip. “So, I’m not going to stand here promising payment, because the day I start promising things the system doesn’t promise me is the day one of us will die.”

Kevin absorbed the information with a slow nod, a nod of someone who had heard the speech one way or another and ended up believing it. The anxiety didn’t disappear from his face, but it dissipated, giving way to the underlying conviction. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, all right.” Then the smile returned, irrepressible. “But the upstairs is higher. You said so yourself. I prefer a higher floor.” And with that, he turned to his plate and devoted himself to it with a concentration that put an end to any conversation, the fork moving in a steady, uninterrupted rhythm, the small mountain immediately beginning to disappear.

Jack watched him eat for a moment, like someone checking the weather forecast, and decided the bacon could wait for another morning. Some jokes got better with time. He finished his coffee and let the kitchen fill with the familiar sounds of two men starting a day in a place that was theirs.

. . .

An hour later, the dishes were washed, the upstairs swept, and the two returned to the factory proper to see what the night had in store for them.

They had hidden the van well, that is, they had hidden it like two amateurs hide something and then spend the entire next day preparing for the raid that would prove they had hidden it poorly. It was in the deepest corner of the floor, where the old loading and unloading area was, leaning against the brick wall, and over it they had dragged a thick tarp, a large gray shroud that transformed the vehicle into nothing more than another anonymous pile in a building full of anonymous piles. The precaution had been Jack’s, against the possibility of unwanted visitors, strange glances coming from the street asking questions. Nobody appeared. The night passed exactly as quietly as they needed. But the tarp let them sleep, and something that lets you sleep is worth it.

Kevin grabbed a handful of the tarp and pulled it back in a single tug, and the van emerged from beneath it into the grey light of the industrial setting, black, smooth, and completely unmarked, exactly as the men who had owned it before had wanted it, a vehicle built to be forgotten the instant it vanished.

He walked the entire length of the wall, tapping the panel once with his open palm, and glanced over his shoulder. “She came home clean. Is everything alright?”

“Always,” said Jack, which was the answer he always gave, and the two went to the back and opened the doors.

Boxes awaited them, stacked from the floor of the cargo compartment to the ceiling, crates upon crates of rough, unfinished wood, so tightly packed that there wasn’t an inch of space anywhere in the load. Kevin steadied his feet and began to unload them, and even for him it was hard work. The crates had a weight that no box of that size should bear, the unmistakable density of compacted oiled metal, and he grunted as he dropped the first one and stopped pretending it was easy after that. They descended two by two onto the concrete, the pile on the floor growing as the pile in the van dwindled, and when the compartment was empty, there was almost a small arsenal between them and nearly 803 kilograms of cargo had passed through Kevin’s hands.

So they opened the lids and did what Jack had been waiting to do ever since they left the port with their hearts in their mouths. They took inventory.

They worked from the catalog, the battered price guide Kevin had obtained through one of his contacts, a worn, coffee-stained document that assigned a black market value to practically anything one could point to. Kevin listed the contents of the boxes, and Jack checked the balance, pencil and notebook in hand, a cumulative total rising up the page in his small, careful handwriting.

It all started with the submachine guns. Two dozen Uzis, short, ugly, and heavier than they looked, each with three full magazines. Jack found the item in the catalog, did the math, and wrote it down. Eight hundred dollars each. Nineteen thousand two hundred dollars, even before they opened the second box.

The rifles were better. A dozen AK-47s, originals and not the cheap imitations the catalog warned against, five magazines each, fifteen hundred each on the proper market, eighteen thousand on the production line. Then, eight AR-15s that someone had modified without a license, the modifications raising the value above the basic rifle to eighteen hundred each, plus fourteen thousand four hundred. Jack underlined the subtotal of the rifles and felt the number both in his stomach and in his head.

“Shotguns,” Kevin announced, holding up a clearly visible one and twirling it against the light with genuine appreciation. Ten Mossberg 500s, fifty cartridges stacked beside it, six hundred per gun, six thousand in total. He placed it back on the ground with the care of a man handling something he had grown fond of in the last thirty seconds.

The pistols continued in sequence. Twenty Glock 17s, three magazines each, five hundred per unit, a total of ten thousand. Ten Beretta M9s followed, four hundred and fifty each, another four thousand five hundred. Jack’s pencil kept pace, and the page filled up, and neither of them said much beyond the numbers, because the numbers spoke for themselves.

Then came the loose ammunition, which Kevin picked up last. Twelve thousand nine-millimeter cartridges. Eight thousand 5.56mm. Six thousand 7.62mm, the same ones the Kalashnikovs devoured. Two thousand five hundred 12-gauge casings. Jack added up the value of the ammunition based on catalog prices and arrived at a total of nine thousand eight hundred dollars in bullets alone, more ammunition than the two of them could have fired in an entire year of attempts.

Besides the weapons, there was other equipment. A dozen bulletproof vests, three hundred for the set, three thousand six hundred. Eight portable radios which, according to the catalog, were worth about a thousand a pair. He wrote the two lines and drew the ruler below them.

And then, in the last box, under a layer of packaging that should have been imperceptible, the discovery that transformed a good night into the best night of their lives. Cash. Four bundles of bills, hundreds of them, tightly packed and well-protected, the kind of working capital a serious operation kept on hand for things that couldn’t be recorded, like paying suppliers, bribing contacts who kept suppliers quiet, solving the next problem before it got worse. Kevin picked up the first bundle and held it up without saying a word, and Jack approached and they counted the money twice to be sure, and it came to forty-eight thousand dollars.

Jack sat on his heels with the notebook and added the columns.

The weapons, in total, amounted to seventy-two thousand one hundred. Ammunition, nine thousand eight hundred. Equipment, four thousand six hundred. The cash, clean money ready to spend, without the need for receiving stolen goods or justification, was another forty-eight thousand. He checked the final amount twice because a number like that didn’t seem reliable the first time, and both times the result was the same.

One hundred and thirty-four thousand and five hundred dollars.

He read aloud, monotonously, and then there was a silence in the cold factory floor as the figure lingered in the air between them, and the two simply stared at it. It was more money and more value than Jack had ever touched in his entire life. It was more than the gas station would pay him in a decade bent over under the sun. It was there, before him, on the concrete, in oiled steel and braided paper, because one night had gone as planned, the first big night that had ever happened.

Kevin was the first to give in. It started deep in his chest, a kind of incredulous hiss, and from there it rose until it transformed into a hoarse and delightful laugh, the most genuine sound he possessed. She sat face down on the cold floor, between the open boxes, threw her head back and let the laughter take over. Jack, who didn’t laugh easily and who had learned, over two months of caution, to consider every good thing with an eye on the price, saw his cautious gaze overcome for the first time.

The number on the page was too big, too real, and hard-won, and his guard let down without permission, and the expression his face had been rehearsing all morning finally emerged completely. He smiled. Not that discreet smile he saw in the mirror. All of that, broad, defenseless, and youthful, the smile of a boy from Huntington who had just counted a third of a million dollars in stolen war money on the floor of a building he owned, and for a moment of carelessness he hadn’t thought about the system, the probabilities, or the long list of things in this rewritten world that could still come in and take it all back. He just looked at what had been stolen, at his friend laughing among the boxes, and allowed himself to feel joy.