Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  Dedication

  For my family

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I. San Francisco

  II. Road Trip

  III. Ithaca

  IV. A Father Without a Home

  V. Return

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I.

  San Francisco

  When I read the book, the biography famous,

  And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?

  And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?

  (As if any man really knew aught of my life,

  Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,

  Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections

  I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

  —Walt Whitman, “When I Read the Book”

  People think I’m smaller than I am. For example, my feet. In fact, I wear size 8.5 or 9. According to Google, these are the most common sizes for American women. Average is good, I reason. It means that wherever I end up in this country it will be easy to find someone whose shoes I can borrow.

  Everything in our house smells of mildew, even with the dehumidifier running. In the morning, while J still sleeps, I take out the full tank of water collected from the overnight air and dump it in our front yard, a place full of sand and desert plants. The fog hangs low over the street of families and retirees. To the east, Sutro Tower juts through the clouds. If I walked west to the end of the block, then up the long, zigzagging stairs to the top of Grandview Park, and if not for this early fog, I’d be able to see all of the Sunset with its rows of pastel houses and, past that, the vast green of Golden Gate Park, where in the northwest section, the all-female herd of bison roam their paddock.

  I’ve come to cherish this ritual. In front of our small yellow house, watching the water pool dark, then sink into the ground. I know where I am and what I am doing.

  But now we are preparing to leave this all behind.

  This is the place and time in which the most average person is average in their own special way, or learns to believe it. The ordinary can be powerful. The flower, the sidewalk cone, the clouds in the sky, the sunset, so many sunsets and skies, new shoes, a haircut, overheard pieces of conversation, pets and food, for sure. Anything is up for curation, if that’s the story you want to tell. People you’ve never met can reach into the snippets of your day-to-day life, add it all up to make meaning. At least that’s how it feels. Here, now. I know there are people who choose to opt out. Though not many in this city, the center of pressure, where an office of somebodies came up with the notion of people being brands. Sharing and shouting isn’t the issue so much as the corruption of living in real time. People experiencing everything at a remove through the eyes of a consumer (actual or potential), a future audience to judge. Some are adept at this anticipation; they gain massive followings. I do not fall into this category. I am on the other side. Those long stretches of getting lost in a giant, sticky web of other people’s earlier moments. It’s true not everyone lives like this or that. Only almost everyone I know.

  I write about gadgets for people with money to spend. I consider this my first real job. It feels good to have one place to go five days a week, to see the same faces, to receive a steady paycheck. It’s been a year and, among many other things, I’ve learned that journalists love to gossip. I’m not immune, I love it, too. Maybe gossip isn’t the right word—we merely enjoy talking about each other. What’s that if not some form of affection? I don’t understand or like the reporters who don’t do it. They’re the less driven ones, the ones too oblivious or too precious for the job. The ones who want to be friendly with everyone, as if that doesn’t also make them untrustworthy to most. It’s part of our work description: Trading information for information. Leveraging vulnerability to gain trust. Determining not only who knows what, but also how to coax those people into telling. Our office is its own microcosm of drama. It gives me almost everything I need to feel a part of the world. My title is Consumer Technology Reporter.

  “Everything we do in life matters,” said the tech billionaire to the famous portrait photographer. The photographer chose an angle to make the man’s head and hands look disproportionately gigantic. A leader. A genius. He was already a very large man. He stared off into the distance, making a pensive expression. The photographer asked him to elaborate. “How we communicate and interact with society matters,” the billionaire continued. “How we travel on this very planet Earth matters. We have to realize that no matter how small or large our actions, everything we do matters. The moment you forget that, the moment you put that aside, your life becomes erratic, chaotic.”

  Weeks later, the photographer gave a short talk about his experience working with the titans of tech, in which he drew attention to this particular man as the one who rose above the rest. Exceptional, the photographer said with a quiver in his voice. The most authentic and soulful person he had ever met.

  I tell Tim the plan. He is a senior writer, my deskmate, and I think, too, a friend, who might help. How, I’m not sure, except that he is in a better position than me. He squints his eyes at the news. He wears clear-framed glasses and a slicked-back undercut, which make him appear much younger than the father of three children that he is.

  “You know you could stay. Let him go alone, establish yourself. Are you two getting married? Where are these grad programs anyway? You could end up in the middle of nowhere, then what’re you gonna do? You’re young. You’re up and coming. The editors like you. You’re at the cusp of your career. What’s gonna happen if you follow this guy, especially to the middle of nowhere? Might be a different story if you’re getting married. My wife, she followed me here, but we were already married. You’re not too young. How old are you again? Jesus, you’re young. I mean, I got married at twenty-four, and my wife was twenty-one at the time. That’s how it is in the South, though.”

  “I don’t want to get married,” I say.

  “You wanna go to the middle of fucking nowhere for a dude you don’t even wanna marry?”

  “I mean I don’t like the institution of marriage in general.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah. Very San Francisco of you. Look at Adam over there. He’s with his girlfriend sixteen years. No plans for marriage, then he just shows up one morning, knocking his desk so we can hear the click of that ring on his finger, like ‘Hey, look at me, I got married. Happy me!’ That’s gonna be you soon enough.”

  “That’s not the point,” I say. “What do I do jobwise?”

  “Okay. Here versus the middle of nowhere. Pretty easy, if you ask me.”

  “Where’s the middle of nowhere? Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Fucking Michigan or Indiana.”

  “It’s possible he could get into school here or in New York City.”

  “You better hope so.”

  Tim looks back at his computer, where columns refresh themselves in his custom social deck. The words tick down at a steady speed. He is one of those, the ones adept at cultivating a following.

  “So when would you move if you move?” he says, still staring at his screen. He clicks, smirks at something.

  “Not until summer.”

  He continues clicking, then begins typing, faster, faster, moving his right hand back and forth between keyboard and trackpad. I go back to looking at my emails. Conversations between us often end this way, abruptly and without ceremony, the courtesy between deskmates. Many minutes later, he turns to me and says, “Here’s what I’m thinking. Don’t tell the e
ditors yet. Wait. Until you know for sure where, or if, you’re even going.”

  OH (office, two interns):

  “Where’d you learn to make this?”

  “From a photo one of my friends posted on Instagram.”

  “Is your friend a chef?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a lot of chef friends on Instagram?”

  “Yeah, a bunch.”

  “Wait, are they really your friends? Or just people you found on there? Like, do you really know and care about them?”

  “Oh, sure. They’re my good friends and I care a lot about them. They just don’t know I exist.”

  J works in a lab with scientists and mice. The lab breeds genetic deformities into the mice—bad eyes, basically. He observes the rodents, how they handle their disabilities, which ones can lead “normal” mouse lives, which ones become too ill. The goal is to make discoveries that will translate into curing eye diseases in humans. As someone with severe myopia, I should appreciate these small sacrifices for the greater good. He tells me there are protocols for how to humanely kill the animals. These protocols vary based on size and age. One option is to put the mice into a chamber and overexpose them to CO2 until they pass out and die. This is the most standard procedure, and relatively efficient (five mice at a time), but they struggle for a couple of minutes before dying and it is terrible to watch. Another is to euthanize the mouse with an overdose of chemical anesthetics, like the pound does with unadoptable strays and lost animals never retrieved. This is painless when administered correctly, but gets expensive and time consuming to perform with each individual mouse. Then there is the option to decapitate the mouse, if it is small enough, with a pair of very sharp scissors. This is cheap and fast. J has to lay a sheet of plastic and paper towels on his lab bench to catch the mess. Yes, small sacrifices for the greater good. This is what he wants to do for the next five or so years. It’s something I can believe in, in concept, but I would never be able to get my hands bloodied. His title is Research Associate II.

  In bed, we talk of the future. Maybe we’ll get to stay. Maybe we’ll go to New York City. And then . . . But what if . . . How about . . . We excite and exhaust ourselves with hypotheticals.

  I tell J what Tim suggested.

  He wraps his arms tightly around me and says, “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Exactly. I’m staying right here, and you’ll go somewhere else.”

  “No! You know what I mean.”

  “Right, that I’m not going anywhere and then you can come back to visit me in this house.”

  He squeezes me tighter and I try to wrestle myself free.

  “You think you’re so funny,” he says.

  “I am the funny one in this relationship!”

  “Hey, stop wiggling so much. Be nice.”

  I tuck myself into him, the way it feels right for both of us, my head on his chest and legs wrapped around his. We lie quietly for a while. He says, “Good night, little sweetheart,” and falls asleep. His body twitches. I’m not little, I tell him in my mind. My legs are thicker and stronger than yours. I close my eyes and listen to the movements inside him. It does not matter how many times I hear them, it is like receiving dispatches from another realm.

  I, too, should apply to graduate school, according to my mom. About J, she doesn’t question whether I will follow him. (“You will cry if he is far away,” she says matter-of-factly.) If I am also in school, however, we can both be doing something productive and respectable at the same time.

  “You can change jobs, go really work in technology. At a tech company that can pay a lot. Marketing. Or finance. Management. These writing people doesn’t respect you. They don’t pay what you deserve. You have knowledge about technology now. Business school likes that.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not? More money.”

  “No. I don’t want to work with those people. They’re all weird and have social problems, too! Have you ever talked to one of them? You feel like you’re dying inside! Everything is, ‘How can you benefit me?’ I just want a fair raise and to somehow keep this job. I hate it when you tell me to do something that doesn’t make any sense and that I don’t want to do at all!”

  “Geez, calm down. Why none of my kids care about making money? How did you become like this?”

  “Sorry, Mommy.”

  But something in her voice tells me she is at least a little proud.

  Hundreds of thousands of clicks on my stories, the data states. On some, more than a million. The charts do not capture how many of those millions scroll down past the first paragraph, or even the headline and photo, but that doesn’t affect ad revenue or the amount of praise one receives from the editors. Everybody gets excited when a story trends on Google News or goes viral. Once a week, the digital side posts a list by the office entrance of the most-clicked-on pieces. Writers gather around to stare; they trace their fingers down in hopes of reaching one of their own. It is meant to breed healthy competition, they tell us. I am consistently middling, with the occasional bump, which is better than being at the very top one week and off the list the next. Those writers have no sense of their value.

  In the car with Jasmine, a staff photographer and my closest work friend. We’re headed down the 101 to some product launch announcement in the South Bay—me to write, her to shoot. She’s driving, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the car even though her window is open. It’s her car, so I don’t say anything even though I am sick and coughing.

  “The other night I slept with a guy,” she says. “A white guy.”

  Me: “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me if I was being overly sensitive, but after we had sex, we were lying in bed and he goes, ‘Man, I could really go for some Chinese food.’” Jasmine turns to look at me as she drives and smokes. “Like, what the fuck, right? So I say, ‘What the fuck, man?’ And he goes, ‘What? What did I do?’”

  I nod. I worry that she might swerve out of our lane on the highway and we will crash to our deaths. I point at the road ahead. She scoffs, flicks her butt out the window, and lights a new cigarette.

  “So, what do you think? What would you do if somebody said that?”

  “I think I need more context. Like, what time was it?”

  “There’s nothing more to say about it. Is that racist or not?”

  “Did he end up getting Chinese food?”

  “Fuck no!”

  She fumes, smoke swirling out of her nose, like a dragon. I shake the thought, knowing she’d be upset if she knew I had thought it. I already know I haven’t said what she wants to hear. And to myself I say: That would never happen to me.

  Our little house is sparsely furnished, not many steps up from a college dorm. We are, after all, only two point five years out of college. The kitchen/living/dining room walls are lavender and the bedroom walls are mint green. The colors don’t bother us anymore. We have a short white couch and two white chairs, a small wicker coffee table, and a small TV, all free hand-me-downs from J’s parents and grandparents. There was one splurge: a round, solid oak dining room table with pedestal feet, bought off Craigslist from a young family for $100. Once in the little house, we realized it took up too much space. We preferred to eat our meals on the couch, in front of the TV. We pushed the table against a wall, and now it is stacked with books and papers and jackets and random junk accumulated over time. The backyard is bigger than our house, and wild. There are tall grasses and weeds, two trees: one leafy, one peach, though the peaches never sweeten in the fog. When we first moved in, J tried to hang a hammock between them, but the trees were too far apart. The hammock was boxed up and returned. There is a lot of unused space back there, which is sacrilege in this city. But the rent is a steal, so we don’t feel too bad.

  “What are you doing?” J asks this Sunday morning as he hand-grinds coffee beans in the kitchen. He is the type to delve into side interests and hobbies. Currently, he has the coffee and mountain biki
ng and bike building and cooking and mushroom growing. He bought the grinder after a week of research into third-wave coffee rituals. He wants to do it right. He wants to make the perfect cup. Me, on the other hand, I don’t have hobbies. I focus on one thing at a time. I like coffee, however it’s made. What I like more is to make plans.

  “I’ve created a spreadsheet of all the schools you’re applying to with checklists for all the documents you’ll need and emails for professors to contact,” I say. “And I want to rank them for likelihood, like on a scale of one to five. Will you tell me what you think?”

  The coffee beans crunch loudly in the machine, so I shout the names of the schools to him. For some reason there are two schools in Pittsburgh, though neither of us has ever been to Pittsburgh or knows anyone in or anything about Pittsburgh. We like the sound of it, though, two solid smacks of our lips. He shouts back numbers, though he refuses to go above three, which I often bump to three point five or four. The goal is to have a range. When I shout the names of the Bay Area schools, he stops grinding and tells me, quietly, that they are probably ones or, more likely, zeros.

  “Why do you think that?” I ask.

  “I’m not competitive. I’m not that smart,” he says.

  “Don’t say that. There’s still a chance.”

  He shrugs. He walks over with a full cup. “Here you go. Thank you for helping me.”

  I nod. “Thank you. The coffee’s really good.”

  OH (bus, two young women in blazers):

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s not to understand?”

  “Okay. You eat more, it turns into added weight in your body. But what happens when you lose weight?”

  “You eat less and you lose weight.”

  “But what happens to the weight? Where does it go?”

  “You burn it for energy.”

  “But where does it, like, go?”

  “It goes away in your waste, like urine and sweat and breath.”

  “Is it shit out? Or is it shat? Shitted? But what you’re saying is that you eat yourself? And that’s how people lose weight? They eat themselves?”