by YZ Chin
Where had these false feelings come from? I stared at the ceiling. Maybe he’d been such a grounding force of pragmatism for me that I didn’t know how to be rational on my own.
We had a conversation about intelligence once. Marlin, to my amused annoyance, was being falsely modest. He waved off my insistence that he was extremely intelligent and said he was merely smart enough to realize he wasn’t that smart.
“Isn’t that like saying ‘I’m a good person because I don’t claim to be a good person?’” I asked.
Marlin frowned very seriously and kept saying no, no, there’s a difference. I wish I could remember what his arguments were. In my memory, I gave myself the last word.
ON THE SUBWAY, I LEANED AS FAR AWAY AS I COULD FROM A BRIEFCASE poking into my butt. I scrolled through my smartphone with one hand. Lucas had canceled our meeting today. As the train lurched around a corner, I brought up Josh’s latest novel installment and picked a section at random.
Radmonsius leans into her face. “You don’t mind if I call you Kathleen, do you, doctor?”
Kathleen lets out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Yes, she is a scientist, but she is also a sensitive, romantic woman! She has been waiting for this moment for so long, and now it has finally arrived.
“You can call me anything you want,” she murmurs as she stands on her tiptoes to press her lips against his. In the background, the ghost of Lt. Col. Coiler pumps his fist.
I figured I’d read enough to tell Josh what he wanted to hear. Hero slays alien, hero gets girl. I could probably extrapolate from that.
The stink of a fart blossomed in the train car. I looked around and unintentionally met the eye of a woman in a pencil skirt. She pinched her nose and grinned, so I did too, before glancing awkwardly into someone else’s armpit. It felt unnatural to smile.
Once, Marlin and I were stuck on a stalled 7 train. We were on elevated tracks suspended high over Long Island City, on our way back from visiting Flushing for good food. Through the train’s dirty panes we could see the sun setting, a purplish pink that seemed innocent but also somehow gravely wrong, like a birthday party full of zombie children.
A middle-aged man at the other end of the car stood up and declared he could no longer hold it in; he was very sorry but he simply had to relieve himself. A commotion started, strangers uniting in aggressively expressed admonishments for the man to sit back down and “chill.”
The man sulkily plopped back onto his hard, shiny seat. A minute later he sprang up and made again for a corner of the car, wagging his hands and head to show he was not listening, no, really, he was going to do it. Two youngsters in sports jerseys stood up and puffed their chests out imposingly, and for a moment I thought the man would simply pee on them, but instead he turned around and marched quickly toward our end of the car. Groans of alarm immediately took up our side of the train, and the passengers across from us tried to dissuade the man, now red in the face, except his body could no longer be stopped. It would do what it had to do. As people started moving away from him, the man unzipped his pants. In his hurry he yanked on his trousers too hard and they fell to the ground, exposing his bare ass. The hems of his pant legs darkened with the backsplash of pee.
Marlin grabbed my face and overlaid his on top, blocking the man from my view. He could be old-fashioned sometimes when it came to nudity, prudish almost, even though he was very liberal-minded about everything else. I thought this was because he’d grown up in a country that regularly censored nudity and sex scenes from movies, if not outright banning them. Then again, I’d been brought up in the same country and was not bothered by naked body parts unless they happened to be my own. It was interesting how the same forces of influence and pressure could produce something so dissimilar in different people. I thought about all this, and a tenderness for Marlin suddenly washed over me. I found him special, charming in the ways he diverged despite our many overlapping experiences. I nuzzled his neck and whispered into his ear: “It smells bad in here.”
Then we were kissing, our lips furiously working. I felt his tongue spread like jam and our teeth bumped, while four feet away a man beset by his fellow New Yorkers let it all go.
I FLICKED MY COMPUTER TO LIFE IN THE OFFICE AND TYPED UP A PARAGRAPH of gushing “feedback” for Josh. I figured that by sending this to him digitally, I’d preempt another lunch invite. I’d also be saved from having to keep a straight face.
I hit send when I saw Josh walk toward his desk, messenger bag bouncing. I decided I’d give him until lunch before I asked after his ex at Cachi I/O.
“Exciting night?” Josh asked, eyes serious and trained on his screen, smirk mismatching.
“Me?” I looked up. The typing to my left stopped. Maybe he meant Ben, the quiet one who kept his head down and worked with a grimace of concentration.
“Aww, it’s okay, I don’t judge,” Josh said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Ben let out a squeaky, obviously fake cough. “Your hair, ah, is a little messy.” His voice was even quieter than usual.
Had I forgotten to brush my hair? Were there nugget crumbs tangled in there? I pushed back from my desk, my ergonomic chair rolling into Ben’s with a muffled crash. I was at the women’s bathroom door as Josh’s voice rang around the open-floor office: “Hey, Phil! What were you up to last night?”
I ran the tap so I wouldn’t have to hear anything else. In the mirror, I did indeed look frightful. My hair was tousled on one side but flattened on the other, where I had fallen asleep on the couch learning about ants. I found just a single flake of desiccated nugget, a blessing I counted out loud in the empty bathroom: “One.”
I combed wet fingers through my hair, my back to the oversize mirror. I could feel a scowl distorting my face. There had to be something I could do to Josh. Some way to hit back. But I still needed to get into Marlin’s office. My nape burned as I mentally recited the obsequious praise I’d just sent Josh for his inane novel.
Pursuing a half thought, I took out my phone, navigating to Stack Overflow, the hub for programming-related dumb questions. “List of common edge cases,” I typed in the query box. Edge cases are rare situations or use cases that engineers might miss when they write code, resulting in ugly bugs. It was simultaneously the engineers’ responsibility to anticipate these edge cases and the bread and butter of my job as testing analyst to catch them. I scrolled through Stack Overflow posts, making note of potential gotchas to try on Josh’s code. Some of them must trigger flaws in his work. I imagined filing virtual reams of bug reports, writing up taunting descriptions, and assigning them to Josh. I’d present it as a problem to Lucas, and maybe, just maybe, Josh would get a stern talking-to. It’d take him down a few pegs. After he connected me to Cachi I/O, of course.
JOSH DID COME THROUGH WITH A NAME AND A PHONE NUMBER, AFTER a lunch break from which he returned humming. I read his email and glanced at his serene expression from the corner of my eye, wondering if he felt bad about his innuendo-laced comments this morning. Since then I’d bought an I ♥ NY cap from a street vendor, hoping it would make me look less ragged.
I took a break from my hunt for Josh’s coding errors to contact the Cachi I/O connection. He had provided only a first name, Meg. Outside our office building, two competing halal carts stood at opposite ends of the city block, spreading a smell of charred meat that nauseated me in my nugget hangover. I tried my best to stand equidistant between the carts, fingers hesitating over my phone’s dial button. It was probably better to text, so Meg wouldn’t detect my “foreign” accent. Who knew what she’d be like? She had some kind of relationship with Josh, after all. Then again, was it wise to leave evidence of my probing in writing?
I hit call before I could waffle further. I didn’t think people still answered unknown numbers, but Meg picked up after a few rings. I introduced myself in my best movie-American twang, deepening my voice and thinking Scarlett Johansson, Scarlett Johansson.
/> “Oh, it’s you,” Meg said with a light laugh. “Josh told me you might call.”
Next to me, someone lit up a cigarette. I moved away from it, past the P.C. Richard & Son somehow still in business in the age of Amazon.
“Thank you for taking the time.”
“It’s about the WIT meetup, right?”
“Wit?”
“Women in Tech?”
“Yes, I’m a woman in tech,” I said woodenly, unsure how to steer the conversation to Marlin.
“Do you want the email to RSVP?”
“Actually, I was wondering if you know a coworker named Marlin.” There was no good way to do it, I decided.
“Marlin? Yeah, why?”
“Is he—there?”
A white van with AMBULNZ emblazoned across its side approached, blaring its obnoxious horn. I watched passersby frown as they tried to puzzle out the ambulance that couldn’t spell.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” I said.
“I said I just checked, and I don’t see him. He’s been coming in pretty late these days. Something about commuting all the way from Queens. Are you a friend? You’re not, like, a stalker, right?”
“No, please don’t worry.” Queens? Eamon lived in College Point, but he hadn’t seen Marlin. How many hotels were there in Queens? Probably fewer than Manhattan, so maybe a search was actually feasible?
“Then what is this about?”
“He was the one who told me about the WIT meetup,” I said, pronouncing “WIT” carefully. This part was almost true. I’d seen the flyer for it, after all, tucked among the papers on his desk.
“That’s nice of him.”
“You said you had the email for RSVPs?”
She spelled out the address and I memorized it, pretending all the while that I was writing it down. I thanked her. Just before she hung up, I added quickly: “Please don’t tell Josh about this.”
She waited for me to say more.
“I don’t want to give the wrong impression,” I said.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going between you two. Just know that Josh can come across, eh, a bit of a dick? But once you get to know him, he’s not that bad.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you again.”
I bought some prosciutto from a deli before returning to work. Back at my desk, feeling somewhat grateful, I decided to stop scrutinizing Josh’s code and work on the AInstein master test plan instead. The plan was a long document laying out every common scenario that a user could possibly encounter with the AInstein robot, with corresponding test cases to make sure AInstein behaved as expected in said scenarios. I checked my calendar. I was supposed to present a completed plan to engineers next week. Once they signed off, I would then actually write the tests and run them against both production and upcoming code. If I did my job right, my tests would catch errors and flag them for fixing before our September launch.
It was nearing the end of July, and I was behind on finishing the plan. The problem was the engineers kept veering off their specs, surprising me with modified implementation methods and new expected behaviors. Not to mention the biggest headache so far, stemming from the mass reneging of comedy writers.
You see, AInstein’s artificial intelligence did not extend to writing original jokes. The plan had been to pay up-and-coming comedy writers a modest fee in exchange for material that would become part of AInstein’s database. Then one of the contracted writers, who must not have read the nondisclosure fine print, tweeted about how he had been personally invited to contribute to AInstein because he was the “king of eggplant jokes.” This drew ire from another writer, who had also been approached by the company with the same compliment (I suppose). A Twitter war ensued, with other writers and completely unaffiliated parties leaping into the fray. Many emojis and gifs were abused. The company, also angered, sued the most high-profile instigators for breach of contract, which turned into a backlash against AInstein and led to almost all the comedy writers withdrawing their content. Which is how we came to be trawling Reddit and other online message boards for copyright-free jokes two months before launch.
I went to visit our AInstein prototype on a whim. It had its own dedicated room named Bond, after the English spy. As soon as I walked in, AInstein trained its facial recognition cameras on me. An engineer must have just been in here, talking to it, tweaking.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hello! The time is: two oh four p.m.”
“My husband left me.”
The robot whirred its bulky head side to side, a motion meant to mask the delay in AInstein’s response as it calculated the user’s emotions based on facial expression, body language, and tone of voice.
“Congratulations!” it said. “I’m sure you don’t mind getting divorced—”
I waited, watching the row of LED lights standing in for AInstein’s mouth flash to the rhythm of its speech.
“—but I bet you’d much rather be widowed!”
WHEN I RETURNED TO MY DESK, I WAS TAKEN ABACK BY A WALL OF WHITE-ON-BLACK text scrolling rapidly down my terminal. I must have launched the tests I’d slapped together to find Josh’s bugs, I realized, even though I didn’t remember doing it. And there was a hit. I leaned in. In tech, the ability to understand where errors come from is called “introspection.” This part never got old, the high of a detective finding a key clue.
The failure conditions showed that Josh had broken AInstein’s ability to de-duplicate jokes. AInstein was never supposed to tell the same joke twice within a certain time parameter. Josh’s latest branch in code review violated this constraint, serving up more-or-less identical jokes with only a couple of words swapped out. I stared, savoring the victory on-screen: “AssertionError: Expected false to equal true.”
Then the rush receded. I stood up, shocked by a sudden realization. Marlin had been commuting from Queens, Meg said. I had assumed this meant he was staying at a hotel. But Eamon could have been lying, couldn’t he?
I typed in Eamon’s College Point address and watched Google draw colorful lines connecting him to me. The lines crossed water, Manhattan to Queens. One hour and fourteen minutes by train and bus combo. Four hours and twenty-six minutes by foot.
After work, I got on a rush-hour train and transferred at Grand Central, settling in for a long ride. A couple of stops in, a man walked on dangling a tiny child-size scooter by one handlebar. The scooter’s lime-green deck sported a sticker of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I stared at it, thinking about the Hollywood practice of giving male action heroes beautiful wives and sometimes adorable children, all so that these men can have something to fight for. Even without much (or any) time spent detailing how the couple met or what made their relationship work (it is always a given that they are blissfully in love), audiences instinctively understand and accept without question the motivations of these action heroes, who have to prove that they can single-handedly fight off twenty-five foes with nothing but a car key, yet who never have to demonstrate the authenticity of their picture-perfect love. How had these rough-and-tumble men all successfully maintained loving relationships, while mine had fallen apart?
It was night proper when I got off the bus closest to Eamon’s place. I had no plan. A summer breeze dried my nervous sweat into a kind of casing, reminding me of the salt-baked chicken I used to watch my mother devour.
I’d grumbled about the trek out here to Marlin once, complaining that Eamon lived in the middle of nowhere. Marlin, kind, understanding Marlin, said Eamon had a very straightforward dream. He wanted to become a homeowner before thirty, and he’d achieved his dream. It was a big deal.
“Why does he want to be a homeowner before thirty?”
“He’s American.”
I pulled on Marlin’s hand. I could always tell when he was leaving something out.
“What else?”
Marlin sighed and rubbed his chest with a palm, a sign that he was giving in with reluctance. “He had a fiancée in college. She was
from the Midwest, I don’t remember which state. They had this grand ten-year plan with major milestones all marked out, and the house thing was one of them. Then she left him after they graduated.”
“I had no idea!” I gasped, feeling for Eamon.
“He told me not to tell anyone.”
“But I’m your wife.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t keep secrets.”
“Okay, so I should or shouldn’t bring up his fiancée when we see him?”
“Don’t be rude now.”
I stuck my tongue out at Marlin, and he kissed it.
I’d been unimpressed by the fruition of Eamon’s dream. The house was squat and boxy. Under streetlights, its washed-out baby blue looked like the color of childhood corrupted. Instead of a porch, four stone steps barely wider than the front door jutted onto a cement path that ran straight into the main road. The windows had grilles over them. Inside, not even a tiny skylight and antique ceiling fans could endear the house to me. My heart did lift when I glimpsed the clawed feet of his impressively large bookcase—a family heirloom, Eamon said. But then I curtsied to look at the spines on the lower shelves, and was dispirited to see neat rows of paperback Barnes & Noble classics, bought in bulk with no apparent wish other than to fill space.
On that first visit and on subsequent ones, I’d always brought whatever Instagram recommended as gifts (orange wine, succulents), but on this mission to find my husband I arrived empty-handed. When Eamon opened the door, I had to resist the urge to place my hands on his wrist and squeeze, hard.
“Tell me where he is.” I tried to channel The Rock, Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves.
He didn’t close the door on my foot, which was at the ready to wedge against the frame. He simply stood tall, arms relaxed, surprisingly unfazed.
“Come in,” he said. “Would you like to see him?”
