The Glitch That Laughed
Glitch cinema presents,
The Glitch That Laughed
A man walks into a pharmacy and asks for something to stop the feeling that he’s already been here before.
The pharmacist says, “Aisle three.”
The man says, “No, I mean cosmically.”
The pharmacist says, “Yes. Aisle three.”
His name doesn’t matter. Let’s call him Tariq because his mother did, and she was usually right about things she had no business being right about. She once told him the washing machine would break on a Thursday. It broke on a Thursday.
She said his marriage would last exactly as long as the aloe vera plant on the windowsill. The plant died in eleven months. So did the marriage. The aloe vera was more graceful about it.
Tariq works in insurance. Not because he believes in protection, but because he discovered early that people will pay enormous amounts of money to pretend that the future is negotiable.
Every morning he takes the 7:42 train. Every morning the same woman sits across from him reading a book she never finishes. He’s watched her read page 114 for nine months. He’s thought about saying something. He hasn’t. This is what civilization is — the distance between impulse and action filled with absolute cowardice dressed as politeness.
The glitch begins on a Tuesday.
Tuesdays are when most glitches begin because the universe has already used up its patience on Monday and isn’t yet drunk enough for Wednesday.
Tariq is brushing his teeth when his reflection blinks before he does.
He stops. Stares. His reflection stares back. Normal. Foam dripping. Eyes tired. The face of a man who has said “I’m fine” four thousand times and meant it maybe six.
He blinks again. This time they’re synchronized. He decides it was nothing. This is what humans do best — witness the impossible and immediately file it under “probably the lighting.”
At work, his colleague Sheila is talking about her cat again. The cat has its own portrait on her desk. The cat receives more attention than Tariq has received in his entire adult life. He doesn’t say this out loud. He says, “That’s lovely, Sheila.” Civilization again. The whole species running on that’s-lovely-Sheila energy.
Then his computer screen flickers.
For exactly one frame — maybe less — his spreadsheet is replaced by a single sentence:
Shuba guba dum dum dum
And then, from somewhere he can’t locate, a song begins to play.
Then the screen flickers again.
YOU LEFT THE STOVE ON.
Tariq did not leave the stove on. Tariq hasn’t cooked since the aloe vera died. He eats cereal standing up over the sink like a man in a witness protection program for joy.
He stares at the screen. The spreadsheet returns. Row 47. Premium adjustments. The ordinary swallows the extraordinary and doesn’t even burp.
On the train home, the woman is on page 114 again.
But today something is different. She looks up. Directly at him. And she says:
“You saw it too, didn’t you?”
Tariq’s brain offers him several options. His mouth, which has never consulted his brain on anything important, says: “The stove thing?”
She nods. “Mine said I LEFT THE IRON ON. I don’t own an iron.”
They stare at each other the way two people stare at each other when reality has quietly slipped a note under the door and neither wants to pick it up.
“I’m Noor,” she says.
“Tariq.”
“I know. You’ve been watching me not read this book for nine months.”
He wants to disappear. He wants the train to derail into another dimension. Instead he says, “It’s a good book.”
“It’s terrible,” she says. “I just keep reading page 114 because it says something I’m not ready to understand.”
That night Tariq can’t sleep.
He gets up. Walks to the bathroom. Looks at the mirror.
His reflection is sitting down.
Tariq is standing. His reflection is sitting on a chair that doesn’t exist in Tariq’s bathroom, legs crossed, looking thoroughly bored.
“Finally,” the reflection says.
Tariq does what any reasonable person would do. He closes the door, goes back to bed, and pulls the blanket over his head. This is the most ancient human technology — the blanket. Older than fire. Monsters, gods, and reflections that sit down uninvited are all defeated by the blanket. Everyone knows this.
“The blanket doesn’t work,” says the reflection from under the blanket.
Tariq screams. But quietly. A polite scream. A scream that doesn’t want to disturb the neighbors. He pays rent in this building. He has a reputation as a quiet tenant. He will not let a metaphysical crisis compromise his deposit.
“What do you want?” Tariq whispers.
“What do YOU want?” says the reflection. “I’m you. I want what you want. Which appears to be cereal and the avoidance of all meaningful human connection.”
“I connect,” Tariq says, offended.
“You said ‘that’s lovely, Sheila’ fourteen times this week. That’s not connection. That’s a man impersonating a greeting card.”
“Sheila’s cat is genuinely—”
“The cat has more emotional range than you do, Tariq.”
Silence.
“Who sent the stove message?” Tariq asks.
“I did.”
“I didn’t leave the stove on.”
“I know. But it got your attention. I tried subtler things first. I made your left sock disappear every laundry cycle. I made that one song play on the radio every time you were about to cry. I made Noor sit across from you on the train for nine months reading the same page. NINE MONTHS, Tariq. That’s a full pregnancy of hints. I was delivering a baby of meaning directly to your face and you just sat there thinking about premium adjustments.”
They look at each other.
“So you’re what — my subconscious?”
“I’m the part of you that still finds this whole thing hilarious.”
“What whole thing?”
“Being alive. You used to laugh, Tariq. Not the laugh you do now, which sounds like a man apologizing for having a mouth. A real laugh. The laugh you had before you decided that being serious was the same as being safe.”
Tariq remembers. He remembers laughing so hard once that tea came out of his nose and his mother said he was possessed and his father said leave the boy alone he’s just happy and his mother said same thing.
“What’s on page 114?” Tariq asks.
The reflection smiles. “Go ask her.”
The next morning Tariq gets on the 7:42. Noor is there. Page 114.
He sits across from her. His heart is doing something his insurance policy definitely doesn’t cover.
“What does page 114 say?” he asks.
She looks at him. Looks at the page. Looks back at him.
“It says: ‘The funniest thing about being lost is that most people are not even here. Mentophysically.'”
Tariq blinks. “What is mentophysically?”
Noor closes the book. “Body and mind — same thing. Above and below — same thing. In and out — same thing. You’re not a person carrying a body around. You’re not a mind trapped inside skin. It’s all one movement. One thing pretending to be two so it has someone to talk to.”
Tariq opens his mouth to respond but inside his head the song starts playing again.
Shuba guba dum dum dum.
Right there on the 7:42 train.
Tariq laughs. Not the greeting card laugh. Not the that’s-lovely-Sheila laugh. The real one. The tea-out-of-the-nose one. The one his mother called possession and his father called happiness and his mother said same thing.
Noor laughs too.
The train moves. The world glitches. Nobody notices because everybody is pretending everything is normal, which is the funniest glitch of all.
That evening, Tariq walks into his bathroom. His reflection is standing this time. Same as him. Perfectly synchronized.
“You’re back to normal,” Tariq says.
“No,” says the reflection. “You are.”
Somewhere in the city, Sheila’s cat posts a selfie. It gets four thousand likes. The cat feels nothing. It’s not trying to be a cat. It just is. This is enlightenment, but nobody is ready for that conversation.
