Edge Case Read online

  Dedication

  For David

  Epigraph

  Her memory, like her guilt and early love, is involuntary, but her choice of the United States is willful.

  —Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  After: Day One (Wednesday)

  Before: February 2014

  After: Day One (Wednesday)

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: 2016—?

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: January 2018

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: October 2017

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: March 2018

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: January 2018

  After: Day Two (Thursday)

  Before: May 2018

  After: Day Three (Friday)

  After: Day Three (Friday)

  Before: January 2018

  After: Day Four (Saturday)

  After: Day Four (Saturday)

  After: Day Five (Sunday)

  After: Day Five (Sunday)

  After: Day Six (Monday)

  After: Day Six (Monday)

  After: Day Seven (Tuesday)

  Before: June 2018

  After: Day Seven (Tuesday)

  After: Day Eight (Wednesday)

  After: Day Nine (Thursday)

  After: Day Nine (Thursday)

  After: Day Nine (Thursday)

  After: Day Ten (Friday)

  After: Day Eleven (Saturday)

  After: Day Twelve (Sunday)

  After: Day Thirteen (Monday)

  After: Day Fourteen (Tuesday)

  After: Day Fifteen (Wednesday)

  After: Day Fifteen (Wednesday)

  After: Day Sixteen (Thursday)

  After: Day Eighteen (Saturday)

  After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by YZ Chin

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  After

  Day One (Wednesday)

  I know I can really talk to you because you’re a therapist. You’ll keep everything I tell you confidential, I’m sure.

  Yes, I know, you’ve said. You’re not a therapist yet. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s close enough. My friend Katie SooHoo said bouncers started letting her into clubs with her real ID two or three months before her twenty-first birthday. Your situation is isometric. You’re basically a therapist at this point. All you lack is paperwork. You did say my story sounds fascinating, so here it is, everything leading up to the disaster.

  By the way, I realize I sometimes have the foreigner’s way of speaking too formally—believe me, I’m self-conscious about that. But I grew up reprimanded by elders for mixing up my T-V distinction (as in tu and vos honorifics, which exist in both Chinese and Malay), and that has caused me to default to formality in America. When you are a foreigner, everyone else can take on the intimidating aura of an elder, especially if they are in uniform. Being very polite to train conductors and building security guards for the past decade has made my deferential way of speaking second nature. Though what an odd saying. What is my first nature?

  But back to the story. It all fell apart the day of the steam pipe explosion. I was at work. The air-conditioning was cranked up too high, even for July. Someone came by our coworking pod to announce that we should go home early. This was unusual: the launch date for AInstein was in September, less than two months away, and we were behind schedule.

  “Check the news.”

  I pulled up a New York Daily News article and read that a steam pipe had exploded near our office.

  “Did you hear it happen?” Josh asked, pushing a button to lower his standing desk so that his face was slowly revealed, hairline first, then blinking eyes, all the way down to his jaw. Our desks faced each other, but his question wasn’t directed at me.

  “I thought that was just one of your famous earthshaking farts,” Darren cracked from behind me. I did not bother pretending to smile at the joke. Being the only woman in the entire startup, I’d long given up trying to participate in the men’s banter.

  They surrounded me, the software engineers, engaged in a lengthy and loud debate about whether it was better to go home early as suggested or to stay in the office. They kept saying “smarter,” never “safer.”

  “Think about it. If an explosion just happened, and we can’t rule out terrorism, then it’s a much smarter move to lie low instead of running around out there. The Twin Towers were hit by more than one plane, remember?”

  “Okay, but acting on the information available, we know that the city evacuated people from a small radius around the explosion. Why would they do that? Hmm, let’s see, maybe a small thing called asbestos, which was used to line these old steam pipes? So the smart move would be to quit the area while we’re still not completely saturated by poison.”

  “Really? ‘Poison’? Such a lazy and inflammatory word choice.”

  “Fine, smart-ass. Hazardous airborne material, whatever.”

  The debate had the tone of people placing bets on Fantasy Survivor brackets. The way they squabbled, it was like the incident had no possible chance of affecting their lives, or anybody else’s lives for that matter. I left them to it and made for the exit. I would not be missed. The only reason they even created a quality assurance analyst position in the first place was to appease VC investors after a code release gone wrong, one that had angered the company’s first customers and cost the investors a nice chunk of change in make-good credit. My job was to write tests that would catch the engineers’ bugs before they could make their way out to customers. The men regularly referred to me in the office as “the tester.” It always made me think of the sad labeled tubes of lipstick at Sephora, mauve heads battered and ready to transmit oral herpes.

  It wasn’t that every single man on my team was virulently sexist. In fact, more than a couple of them seemed quite decent on their own. Whenever something cringeworthy happened, the better ones hunched over their keyboards more, and their typing grew a little louder. I am sure that if I ran into them outside of work—grocery shopping at Eataly, let’s say—we would have perfectly civil exchanges.

  The problem was that as a group, the tone was set by the two or three guys who seemed to think women were ill-equipped by nature to do certain things, like coding. The others did nothing to rein in the “jokes” or the snide condescension dressed up as “constructive feedback,” the holiest of communion in tech startups. The men congealed bloblike around me every weekday, viscous and suffocating. It made no difference that some ingredients of the blob were less harmful than others—when they were all mixed together, a uniform consistency took place. The texture ran throughout.

  Outside on the streets of the Flatiron District, ash was falling from the sky like celestial dandruff. The breaking news report had mentioned an enormous plume of smoke that developed in the explosion’s aftermath. My instincts told me to steer clear, but I still felt a strange desire to see the plume with my own eyes, mainly so I could tell my husband, Marlin, about my brush with death. Things hadn’t been great between us. I was hoping the threat of physical danger could get him talking to me again.

  “America is getting more and more unsafe,” we might say to each other, shaking our heads, his palm sketching calming circles on my back. We’d take turns bringing up other recent incidents in Flatiron, like the suspicious package outside a hardware store that turned out to be a decade-old hulk of a printer, abandoned on the sidewalk. Or the real, actual bomb found in a dumpster outside a facility that serves the blind. We sighed over the calcula
ting cruelty of banking on blind people being less likely to discover the bomb. It chilled our hearts. “America,” we would say, looking at each other, our mouths downturned.

  This kind of talk soothed us, made us feel slightly superior to our fates. We were both on H-1B work visas, and we were running out of time. Unless our employers could be persuaded to sponsor green cards, we would soon have to leave the country for Malaysia or become undocumented when our paperwork expired. But if America was so rife with danger, then leaving was no hardship, right? Exiting would be the safe thing, the smart thing, wouldn’t it?

  I decided not to go toward the flashing lights and police tape. Instead, I walked into a Duane Reade far from its namesake streets, wondering if it too felt helpless, so removed from home and yet bearing such obvious marks of it. I paid for a box of surgical masks advertised as “99% effective.”

  On my walk home from the subway station I sweated and practiced my “America,” intoned with fear, disappointment, and flippancy. I huffed the word into the moist cave created by the mask. Overtaking a couple of slow tourists, I texted Marlin: “You won’t believe what happened. What do you want for dinner?”

  No answer. When I left our apartment that morning, he’d told me he was working from home, which wasn’t unusual for a software engineer like him. In this tech hub sometimes referred to as Silicon Alley, engineers were treated like kings (from my perspective as a nonengineer, anyway), and flexible work arrangements were part of the bare minimum requirements for attracting coding talent, especially for the kinds of companies that could not afford Google or Facebook compensation packages.

  So I didn’t worry right away. I thought about getting something a little extravagant for dinner, like sushi. I’d walk in with this luxury incommensurate with hump day, and he’d ask what for, and I’d go through a dramatic telling of my narrow encounter with mortality. Maybe, in deference to a force such as loosed asbestos, he would act like his normal self tonight. We could have a nice tension-free evening like we used to, united against our host country.

  But he wasn’t there when I got home, paper bag dangling heavy from one hand. I sensed his absence as soon as I unlocked the front door. A weak glow suffused the otherwise dark entryway. It took me a second to realize that Marlin had left the light on in the hallway closet.

  “Hello?” I put the sushi down by our shoe rack so I could knock on the closet door. Marlin might be holed up in there. Nothing would surprise me anymore. Over the past six months, his behavior had grown so erratic, I wouldn’t put it past him to be sitting on the closet floor in a trance.

  I opened the door. My head brushed the light’s pull chain, setting it going in a pendulum rhythm. It swung meaningfully overhead, indicating a bare patch of floor marked off by a border of dust. No Marlin. My heart responded first. By the time I remembered that a suitcase used to stand where the clean square was, my chest was growing hot from racing, tripping beats.

  A book lay just outside the blank space, forlorn and dusty. The title made me flinch. It was K. S. Maniam’s The Return, a novel we had both been assigned to read at seventeen by the Malaysian government. Was the book his copy, or mine? I saw that it had fallen off a tottering tower of books we couldn’t fit on our shared bookshelf. When we moved in, we’d jammed them into a corner of the closet, optimistically telling ourselves it was only a temporary arrangement.

  So it had come to this. He’d left me. I sat heavily down on the shoe rack, the toe boxes of Marlin’s winter boots digging into my butt. What should I do? Should I give him some time apart? To cool off, as people say, as if my husband were a piece of bread fresh from a toaster. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I mumbled. The aphorism seemed to echo back at me, a phrase as empty as the apartment.

  I lifted a plastic tray of cucumber and avocado maki from the bag by my feet. I ate a piece reflexively, hoping that food would make me feel better. As I swallowed, I eyed the tray of sushi. The negative space where the piece had been looked like a suitcase disappeared.

  Maybe that was what Marlin needed at this time—space. Manhattan real estate being what it was, we’d been penned together for two years in our six-hundred-square-feet apartment. He would come back to me once he’d gotten a chance to stretch his limbs and take some big breaths. I wouldn’t launch myself after him. He would get a taste of life without me, and maybe that would be enough to bring about his return.

  The incomplete tray of sushi presented an intolerable visual. I ate the rest of the pieces quickly, hastily chewed blobs forming knots in my throat on their way down. On my last piece I choked, spraying rice as I coughed.

  I made for the bathroom, one fist pounding my chest. In the mirror, the folds of skin on my neck made shadows so deep I almost questioned my breathing. They looked like rings choking my throat, suffocating me. I hacked into the porcelain sink, waiting for the pain to come.

  I used to fret, when I looked at myself in our bathroom mirror, that I was aging rapidly, but Marlin insisted that the lights were unflattering. He said it wasn’t just me; they brought out the worst features in him too. We both crowded into the bathroom at once, looking back and forth at our mirror images and at each other in the flesh. The lighting made us sallow, almost actually yellow, which was quite a feat considering Marlin is half Indian and half Chinese, his skin a dark brown. In the mirror, my uglier husband grinned at me: See? When he raised his eyebrows, the lines on his forehead looked like the ruled exercise books we’d grown up using.

  We conjectured: Perhaps the lights were designed with milder skin tones in mind. Perhaps, just as TV had its color girls, bathroom illumination technology had its mirror models who set the tone for all of America.

  Later, when he first started acting strangely, Marlin told me that if a person had a wrinkly neck, it meant they had been suicides in their previous lives. The more rings, the more times they had taken their own lives, the opposite of how rings on trees worked. That was one of the first signs I was about to lose my husband. The Marlin I knew would never have said something like that.

  I turned off the bathroom light. In the darkness, I thought about wandering the streets shouting Marlin’s name, like someone looking for their lost pet. But the odds of success were so low. Maybe we could both use a break. I was exhausted by the daily adjustment of reality Marlin had been imposing on me during the past months. Day after day I came home wondering who my husband would be at that moment, bracing myself to find out how much further he’d drifted away from the person I love. Just the previous week he’d told me I was harboring a lot of unresolved negativity within my heart.

  “That’s why you’re so anxious and angry all the time,” he had said. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I consulted the charts on your behalf. It’s not too late. I can help you.”

  Six floors down a fire truck wailed, and I became aware of how hot it was. I groped my way to the AC unit next to our bed and found it nearly warm to the touch. When the AC came on I listened to its cranking, sweat running down my temples.

  I pulled my shirt over my head, wiped my armpits, and tossed the shirt on the floor. Then I saw it, our Difficult Fruit and Vegetable Knife lying on the bed. A duplicitous jolt of hope sparked through me as I imagined that Marlin had simply stepped out for groceries, that he would return soon with a bag jostling with firm vegetables, ready to make me dinner.

  “What’s a huge butcher knife doing in the home of two vegetarians?” dinner guests would ask, when we used to have them over. “Actually, it’s one vegan and one vegetarian,” my husband would say. “For now,” I’d pipe up tartly, tilting my chin. They lapped it up, our guests, especially the ones who found the idea of not eating meat absurd. A vegetarian trying to corrupt a vegan into loosening his dietary restrictions! It was funny to them.

  Marlin and I would explain. The Difficult Fruit and Vegetable Knife came into our lives after a frustrating day trying to cook dinner together on our first wedding an
niversary. It was fall and gourds were in, according to food bloggers. We’d planned on butternut squash soup and “pasta” in the form of spaghetti squash. Per Instagram, it seemed like the appropriate middle-class American thing to do. We were just two immigrants trying to fit in.

  Except we never got past the first step of the recipe, which was to peel and cut the vegetables. The butternut squash bent our only knife crooked. The spaghetti squash body-slammed the coffee maker before escaping onto the floor.

  “Gourd damn it!” I exclaimed dramatically, while Marlin rolled his eyes. We took off our gingham aprons and went out, resigned, for our usual pan-Asian fare. On our walk home, sated by “Singapore” noodles and Tiger beer, we passed a gentleman hawking wares on a street corner. He was wearing a bow tie, and we were just tipsy enough to stop and listen.

  “Cuts anything,” he promised.

  “Even butternut squash?”

  “Anything!” He held up a block of wood, threatening to demonstrate. Already there were wood chips and splinters all over his lap, spilling onto the tarp he’d spread out under him. “Or, sir, if you still don’t believe me, hand over your shoe and I’ll prove it to you! Cuts anything!”

  We bought the knife. It looked like a horror-movie weapon and worked like a charm. We obtained all sorts of difficult fruits and vegetables just for the sake of testing the knife. We had the pleasure of eventually conquering not only all manner of squashes but also fruits from home we’d missed, like jackfruit and durian, though not without some bloodshed for the last of these. Marlin and I turned to each other and joked: Is it still vegetarian if it’s spiked with blood? Well, surely our own blood doesn’t count?

  But I hadn’t seen the DFaVK for a while. We hadn’t cooked together in months. Really, we hadn’t done much of anything together for a while.

  On our bed, the DFaVK seemed almost to shine. An A4-size index card lay pinned under it. I slid the card out, and it spawned a copy of itself. No, it split off in the middle, one half in my hand, the other still trapped under the knife. The card’s mutilation was executed cleanly, the border of severance straight and neat. Dread settled low in my stomach as recognition struck. Over two years ago, Marlin had proposed to me using the card. Now he’d sliced it in two.