Edge Case Read online

  It hadn’t always been like this. When I got the job last year, I’d been beside myself with excitement. I would be working not just in tech, but at a company focusing on artificial intelligence. AI was hot, a sexy buzzword on par with blockchain or big data a few years ago. The cherry on top: my new workplace had a mission to bring laughter into people’s lives via the power of AI. I would be part of a team of young, smart people developing a robot that told jokes to those who needed some joy in their lives—the bedbound, the lonely, those who woke up each day wondering how to spend their hours. Thanks to our innovation, the halls of nursing homes and hospital wards would ring with cheer.

  I was particularly sold on this idea because of my early months in America. I’d arrived in the fall of 2008 with what Americans called “an accent,” which apparently rendered me unintelligible to many of them. That first despairing year, I repeated myself often and dejectedly. I was here for college, to learn, but I found this difficult to do when professors and TAs couldn’t understand my questions. The less they could comprehend me, the more polite with mortification I became, which meant my sentences became longer and even harder to parse, embellished as they were with pleases and thank-yous.

  “Watch more TV!” my mother advised from half the world away. “It’s like this: you have to learn to speak like them.”

  I started tiptoeing into my dorm’s common room at the end of my long days. Often the TV would already be on, half watched by shadowy figures slumped sideways, homework piled up on their laps. So began my acquaintance with late-night talk shows. It started off bewildering. Men wearing suits and ties, telling jokes that were often childish or uncouth? That was not what I’d previously associated with formal attire. But something happened as I watched. I began to understand that, for Americans, making others laugh was itself a kind of elegance. What do you think? Is that an accurate read? The men wore suits because they wielded power and demanded respect, stemming from their ability to elicit an involuntary physical reaction from their audiences.

  It solidified in me an ambition I have carried since: if I could make Americans laugh, then I would be accepted. I would be embraced and admired. I harbored some anxiety, though, that this ambition might clash with another secret resolve of mine, which was to master the English language until I could wield it like a shield against any prejudice. I would read the thesaurus, learn big words, coax my tongue into projecting an aura of intellect around my person. Could one be considered funny and erudite at the same time? After observing some typical banter that took place in the dorm halls, I decided that I would pursue both strategies, but prioritize laughter.

  That was how my friendship with Katie SooHoo started. One day near the tail end of freshman year, she happened to sit down next to me in the dining hall. I had an open book pressed flat against the table. I was so immersed in the story that I didn’t take my roving eyes off its pages as I ate. Absentmindedly, I shoved a cold french fry into my nose.

  “Wow, must be a really good book,” Katie said. “What is it?”

  I was embarrassed, but also pleased. Closing the book on a greasy placeholder finger, I showed her the cover.

  “Hangsaman? What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. Then I added, a little desperately: “Maybe a new superhero? Something erotic?”

  This set her off into boisterous laughter. When she finally stopped, my ears rang full of the soft-serve machine’s rattle and hum.

  “You’re so into this book, and you don’t even know what the title means?”

  “It’s an accurate depiction of how college feels if you can get past the title.”

  “But it’s by Shirley Jackson. Doesn’t she write horror?”

  “Exactly?” I replied.

  She laughed again, and a warmth flowed across my chest like a cape. I was doing it; I was succeeding.

  You can understand why I was so eager to work at AInstein. A robot that could intelligently tell jokes! A selfless companion that would lift spirits, albeit in the form of a crude metal head attached to a (so far) immobile body. When I first started looking into tech jobs, it was solely because I knew that the industry was the biggest sponsor of green cards, and I needed one. Imagine, then, how lucky I felt to land a job that aligned with my more secret ambitions.

  But now I was shuffling into the office with my head bowed, avoiding everyone’s eyes. For the day after a steam pipe explosion, the bullpen was pretty packed. That’s what our open-floor workspace was called—the bullpen. Very moralizing stuff.

  “Hey, tester,” Josh greeted me as soon as I slid into my ergonomic chair.

  “Hi,” I mumbled. I busied my hands aligning my trackpad such that it would be perfectly parallel with my keyboard, but he didn’t take the hint.

  “So what do you think? Ready for the next installment of Gone with the Galactic Superwind?”

  I winced. Like AInstein itself, Josh had seemed so promising in the beginning. I had arrived for my first day of work full of optimism. My manager Lucas (“not Luke”) took me around the bullpen, introducing me to everyone. When we reached Josh’s desk, he shook my hand and said, “Nice to finally have a female in here.”

  Before I could respond, he continued: “I saw your résumé. You majored in literature?”

  I nodded. “Yes, but I took a programming class in senior year, so I have a little bit of experience.” Confident but with the right touch of modesty, or so I thought.

  “Uh-huh, cool. I’m writing a novel.” He leaned back expectantly, arms crossed.

  This caught me off guard. I’d spent the previous night reading up on AInstein so I could be prepared for intelligent work conversations from the get-go. Novels were far from my mind. “What kind of novel?” I asked, just to be polite.

  “I see you two have a lot to discuss,” Lucas said as he walked away. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Here, sit.” Josh patted the edge of his desk.

  “Oh, I’m okay, I’ll stand.”

  “What I’m about to tell you is confidential.” He patted his desk again, his gestures weighty. I relented and perched. I didn’t want to annoy a coworker on my first day.

  “I had this genius idea,” he began, leaning forward. His loosely clasped hands hung an inch from my knees. “I’m going to write a combination of all the best-selling genres: sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance. That way it’s guaranteed to be a hit.”

  “How would you do that?”

  He looked at me with a sly expression. “See, you’re already hooked.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you, but remember it’s confidential, okay? You can’t go and steal my ideas.”

  I wondered if he was about to ask me to sign an NDA. His expression was that somber.

  “It’s about a group of astronauts sent on a mission to investigate reports of life on Mars. After liftoff, one of them is killed. The main character has to find the murderer. It could be anyone, even the scientist he’s falling in love with. It’s a locked room mystery, but in space! The scientist is a girl, by the way.”

  Good for her. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked a question. “What about the fantasy part?”

  He looked momentarily taken aback. Then an idea seemed to strike him. He waved his hands in the air, slamming one against my leg.

  “The victim haunts the spaceship as a ghost.”

  At least I had interesting coworkers, I thought, trying to keep my first-day enthusiasm going. Josh barreled on.

  “The problem is, I’ve spoken to a few publishing people, and there’s a pattern. They all get excited when they find out I’m an engineer. Write about that! they say. Apparently the only way for me to break through is to write a book about coding and startups. They want a takedown, of course, since the elite literati like to feel superior to us soulless STEM drones.” A roll of eyes. “Satire might work. I’ve gotta have just enough jargon for them to believe they’ve been given a behind-the-scenes. But not so much jargon
that it’s off-putting, like I’m lording it over them with deets that’re gonna fly over their heads. The target audience is people who say ‘I’ve done a bit of coding myself,’ and then you find out they meant HTML or CSS.”

  He stopped there and stared at me, eyes full of something like challenge.

  “Right, HTML? What is this, GeoCities?” I said. He turned away, satisfied.

  I began to regret my initial interaction with Josh almost immediately. That first encounter turned into a lunch invite the very next day, so he could “bounce ideas” about his novel off me.

  “Why don’t we book a meeting room?” I asked. I had brought my own lunch, and was also wary of wasting time on something not directly work-related when I really wanted to make a good first impression.

  “Come on, my treat,” he cajoled. Was it smugness I saw in his expression?

  “I’m not very hungry, actually. We could do coffee?”

  “Oh, so you’re okay making me starve?”

  “No, no, of course not!” I shook my head. I could feel my face start to burn.

  We barely talked about writing during that lunch. Most of the time was taken up by Josh explaining what each word meant on the Italian menu, and then, after we ordered, by effusive accounts of his previous and future planned trips to Tuscany, Naples, the Amalfi Coast. As he was signing the check, he said: “Well, that went by fast. We didn’t even get to talk about my book. Wanna do this again next week?”

  So it began, the semiregular lunch “meetings” accompanied by requests to read the manuscript-in-progress for his sci-fi-fantasy-mystery-romance mashup. The idea was that I could give him honest feedback face-to-face.

  “I thought you were writing a startup tell-all?” I asked.

  “I am, I am. I’m working on Gone with the Galactic Superwind on the side, though, so that by the time I sell the startup bullshit I’ll have my real book ready to go.”

  I wanted to get along with people at work, so I agreed. Out of all the men, Josh was the only one who regularly said more than “Hi” to me.

  Now, preoccupied with thoughts of where Marlin might be, I found my heart sinking as Josh gave me the “heads-up” about a third installment of his manuscript ready for my “reading pleasure.” Having already read the first two, I was pretty sure I had run out of nice ways to say “drivel.” Not that he ever seemed to catch on.

  “I’m sorry, Josh, things are a little hectic right now. Maybe I can read it later?”

  He frowned. “What are you so busy with?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw the tech recruiter Phil (“Philip is my father”) stroll in. My eyes must have widened in excitement, because Josh said, unkindly: “Got a crush on Phil?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  “Okay, then why do you look so happy to see him?”

  Because Phil was a recruiter, and recruiters were supposed to be familiar with other tech startups in the area, companies from which an engineer or two might be poached. He would know about Marlin’s workplace. Most startups of the size that employed Marlin and me didn’t have receptionists on staff, so I’d have to get creative to gain info on an employee or access to the office.

  As I thought through how to approach Phil for help, I deflated. I obviously couldn’t share with him the actual reason I wanted to snoop around Cachi I/O. But there were no other plausible excuses that I could think of either. Whatever I said, Phil would likely assume I was itching for another job. Then word would get to Lucas, and there would go my one shot at a green card. I squeezed my knuckles, one after another. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Marlin and I had discussed a plan, before he became unrecognizable. We were to be on our best behavior at work and then both ask for green card sponsorship around this time, July, nine months before our visas expired. Was it still a goal worth working toward? Right at that moment, wasn’t it possible Marlin was sitting down with his manager and executing on the plan without me?

  “Do you know anyone who works at Cachi I/O?” I asked Josh suddenly, desperate. He wasn’t Phil or my manager, and that seemed good enough given the situation.

  “Why?” His eyebrows shot up, wary.

  “I just, I heard they have a meetup there once a month? For female engineers?”

  “Oooo.” He visibly relaxed. “I thought you’d heard some rumor about me.”

  “What rumor?”

  He shrugged. “I guess there’s no harm telling you. I used to date a girl there. It ended badly. Not my fault.”

  I didn’t want to wade deeper into this line of conversation, but I had no choice. “Does she still work there? Can you connect me?”

  “Why? You’re not a female engineer.” He laughed and lifted a gigantic set of headphones over his head.

  “I’ll read your next installment.”

  Still laughing, he aimed an index finger at me. “There we go. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Before

  2016—?

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been married. The app doesn’t let you specify, does it? All we can advertise on our profiles are our current statuses and what we’re looking for. Nothing about our pasts.

  The Marlin I fell in love with was intelligent, logical, and curious. If I’d been asked to list the attributes of my ideal partner before I met Marlin, I never would have mentioned those qualities. I suppose I had no idea what I wanted. After I met him, I was charmed by his methodical care when interacting with the world, from researching the best way to unclog stubborn drains—“Never Drano, it hurts older pipes”—to understanding the minutiae of space travel. None of this made him wooden or boring. What I mean is, he liked understanding how things could work as much as he liked actually making them work. A representative tome on his side of our bookshelf was Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories.

  Categories. We used to proudly tell everyone how well we, an engineer and a liberal arts major, complemented each other. “I bring the order and she brings the chaos,” Marlin joked. “It’s called spontaneity,” I retorted.

  Now there was no more order. My last memories of my husband are of him shouting accusations at me and going on about ghouls from an unseen world, an occult-looking crystal in his hands. Supposedly it let him communicate with spirits, and supposedly those spirits warned that he must distance himself from me. In short, Marlin had started to believe in ghosts, and not just in a passive, hands-off way. His ghosts gave him instructions and advice.

  In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough. One day he called out across the living room, asking if I’d seen his phone. Before I could answer, he said: “Never mind, I’ll try the rod. See if it works.”

  “Try the what?” I thought I’d misheard.

  He waved me off, disappearing into the bedroom and closing the door.

  Another time, when I complained of a case of the blues for no reason I could think of, he offered to “read the charts” for me to understand why.

  “Like star charts?” I was confused. Marlin had nothing but disdain for astrology.

  “No,” he scoffed. “This is way more sophisticated.”

  He wouldn’t clarify beyond that. “I’m still figuring it out. Once I get the hang of it, I’ll teach you. For now it’s better for me to practice and get better by myself.”

  I let it go. I left him alone at the slightest signal from him those days, assuming that what he wanted was space to grieve. Had that been a misstep? Maybe I should have been watching him closely for signs of—what, exactly? Was it or was it not normal for people to behave differently after the death of a parent?

  Perhaps it’d started even earlier than the examples I just gave. It might have been the day we walked by a big furniture chain store, and he stopped to closely examine a taxidermied downy woodpecker mounted on a low stand.

  “I wonder what Daddy thinks of that,” Marlin mused.

  I didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back now, the present tense seems ominous. His father had been dead two mont
hs.

  So you see, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact beginning to the end. You know, scientists have still not managed to figure out how life began. Yet some researchers claim to have solved certain mysteries of death. The speed of it, for example. The rate of dying has been measured as one-thousandth of an inch per minute.

  After

  Day Two (Thursday)

  On my lunch break, I stood in line at a Pret a Manger near the office and dialed Eamon’s number. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him. It must have been before the funeral. Afterward, Marlin had preferred to be alone. At first it’d seemed expected, maybe even beneficial. I thought Marlin just needed to grieve in solitude. Then a couple of months passed, and I started dropping hints that he should hang out with Katie and me, or at least spend time with his own best friend. But Marlin never did meet up with Eamon, as far as I could tell.

  “Help me brainstorm something fun for a double date,” I had begged Katie a few weeks into Marlin’s self-imposed isolation. I was over at her apartment to meet her baby, but I couldn’t help unloading my troubles on her.

  “Marlin doesn’t like the kind of stuff we do, though. Like paint and sip? Remember last year when we invited you, and he didn’t want to come? He only likes boring shit, right?”

  “Wow.” The hurt I felt was personal. “You sound like you almost hate him.”

  “No, no!” She waved her hands emphatically. “When you two started going out, I thought he was perfect for you. Solid, dependable, you know? I’ve known you what, nine years? You definitely started coming out of your shell much more after you met him. Like you could be more fun and wild because you had him in the background. I thought it was great that he’s so boring!”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t known that was how Katie saw the dynamic between me and Marlin. It was clear she meant no insult, but still I struggled to accept what she said as complimentary. I set it aside, though, to focus on my mission.

  “How about a compromise? A medium-boring activity.”