Edge Case

by YZ Chin

  It was halfway between gum and Jell-O, the kind of consistency that fooled you into thinking it was giving in, when really it made you work your jaw much harder than you’d bargained for. There wasn’t much flavor beyond a slight saltiness. I thought about all the meat, red, white, and in between, that I had put into my body over the past week. I chewed the clot, relishing it for what it was: a texture conjuring up no associations beyond itself. An experience devoid of memories, good or bad. New. Clean. Unrooted. A blank slate.

  After

  Day Nine (Thursday)

  I was dreaming about Marlin, I think, when my phone rang.

  “Marlin left,” the voice said. I took the phone off my ear and squinted at the screen. It was Eamon calling, at not even 8:00 a.m.

  “Hello? Did you hear me? Marlin left,” he repeated.

  “Well, I know,” I said, indignant that he was calling just to taunt me.

  “No, I mean he left my place. He moved out.”

  “What? When? Where did he go?” I sat up and haphazardly shoved bedsheets off me.

  Eamon sighed heavily into the phone, a whooshing in my ears.

  “That’s the thing, I don’t know. I think he left in the middle of the night. I woke up, and his suitcase was gone.”

  “Did he leave a note? Anything?”

  “I haven’t found one.”

  “Did he . . . did he receive a letter from me? Is that why he left?” It’d been three days. The letter must have arrived by then.

  “I don’t know.” A long pause. “I’m sorry, Edwina.”

  “For what?”

  “Maybe we should talk in person. Can you meet me near my office?”

  “Where’s that again?”

  “I’ll text you.”

  I hung up and emailed in sick to work. Immediately after, I sneezed almost a dozen times in a row, as if my body were corroborating the lie. My head began to pulse, an epicenter of pain growing at my left temple. When I looked down at my hands, I saw nicks on my knuckles. I had no idea how I’d gotten them.

  The commute uptown was a haze. I had no memory of getting on or off trains. Suddenly I was struck by the smell of street kebab and I looked up, astonished, at a window ledge crusted unevenly with pigeon shit. I resisted the urge to reach out and touch it, to ask with my fingers: Is this really where I am?

  In my head I had been imagining Marlin opening an envelope, his fingers drawing out my letter. His eyes taking in my handwriting, neurons lighting up his brain like fireworks.

  A businessman shoulder-checked me on the sidewalk. Someone swore. I looked around, dazed. I was in Manhattan, with its sour garbage stench and weary, irritated energy lapping at glassy storefronts, revolving doors doing their best to filter all of it down into clean luxury. Marlin was here, too, somewhere. At least I hoped so.

  “WE SHOULD CALL THE POLICE,” EAMON SAID. HE’D GOTTEN TO THE NONDESCRIPT café near his office before me. I sat down across from him at a wobbly table on the sidewalk. I watched as he dunked a tea bag repeatedly into a white paper cup. “Do you want to get something?” He’d noticed me looking.

  “No, I’m okay. So you have no idea why he left?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. His gaze shifted from his tea to the ground.

  My headache had grown into a dome that squeezed the top of my head. I pinched the skin and flesh between my thumb and index finger, alternating hands. It helped a little.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can take it. It was my letter, wasn’t it?”

  “What did you write?”

  It was my turn to look at the ground, at the crooked curl of a cigarette half smoked.

  “The wrong thing, apparently. Or he wouldn’t have left.” I wondered what the right thing was, if it existed.

  “No, no,” Eamon said. He pulled at his shirt collar. “Even if it was because of your letter, I was the one who told you to write it. It’s my fault.”

  “So he did read my letter.”

  Eamon ignored me, plowing on ahead. “I wrote a long letter to my fiancée after we broke up. I didn’t notice at the time, but afterward I realized I felt a lot better after writing it. It helped me move on.” He looked at me, gauging my reaction. “I was hoping it would help you too.”

  “Did she respond to your letter?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “For her, we were done. She just wanted to start a new chapter of her life. And that’s exactly why I don’t think Marlin left because of your letter.”

  “Why did he leave, then?” I challenged. “You really think the timing of the letter is just a coincidence?”

  Eamon sighed, a big, dramatic breath. I watched ripples float across the surface of his tea. “To be honest, Marlin and I . . . argued.”

  “About what?”

  “His spirit guides. He said they knew what had really happened between Emily and me. He told me they wanted to help me find love.”

  I was stunned by how matter-of-fact Eamon sounded when he talked about Marlin’s spirits. Was it really just me who had trouble accepting this new side of Marlin?

  “You believed him? About the spirits?” I asked.

  “You know me, I have my own beliefs.” He touched the first button of his dress shirt. There was a cross made of hammered silver underneath, I knew. “I never push mine on him. I just wish he’d done the same for me.”

  “You fought because he wanted you to believe in his spirits?”

  “‘Fought’ is too strong. He said I would find love soon, according to the spirit guides. I told him I’m not interested in dating. I’m fine how I am. But he kept giving me these random predictions. Like, he was telling me I should pay attention to people I meet in the next two months, because one of them will fall in love with me.”

  “Did you tell him you don’t believe him?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that.” He gave me an odd look. “He’s entitled to his beliefs. Normally I would humor him, but I felt like this was a low blow, right. I was really down for a while after Emily. He knew that. I told him about it.” He frowned, a faraway look on his face. “Anyway, I told him to stop. I said I wasn’t interested.”

  “Did he stop?”

  “He did, but he seemed upset.”

  “Then he left?” Muddled feelings rose to the surface. On one hand, it pained me that Marlin was not in a better headspace. On the other, Eamon couldn’t make Marlin stay either. I felt vindicated.

  “Yeah. Today I woke up, and he was gone. I looked in his room, and a lot of his clothes are gone too. I tried calling him.” He shook his head.

  “Last time he left, I made a list of places he could be at. We could split it between us and look for him.”

  “We’re just two people.” He looked doubtful. “I still think we should call the police.”

  “No! First thing they’ll do is check with his office. That will just get him in trouble. He might lose his job or get deported. Do you know that we have to file a form with the government every time we move? We, as in immigrants?”

  His face told me he didn’t know.

  “See? We’re supposed to have a known address at all times. If we get him in trouble with the authorities, who knows what will happen to him?”

  “So we’re just going to let him wander around out there on his own?”

  I wanted to tell him that I wished I could be bombastic. I wished I could take out billboards declaring my love for Marlin, or obscure subway ads with my own pleas, a thousand repeating reminders: Don’t forget. I’d storm his office and make a scene, demanding that he speak to me. I’d personally fly a plane trailing cloud puffs that spelled out our names.

  And if I failed to win him back, I wouldn’t have to hold in my desperate sadness the way I was doing now. If I didn’t need to be perfectly law-abiding, I could flail in some illegal warehouse speakeasy, washing down Ecstasy with Four Loko; I could climb water towers somewhere in Dumbo, dive into the Gowanus, smoke weed on a stranger’s fire escape, drink on the streets, right out in
the open, until I puked, bending and convulsing, into one of those New York City green wire mesh trash cans that were such a perfect height for me. I could even punch Eamon in the nose.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like.” I glared at him.

  To my surprise, he rubbed his eyes and said: “Maybe.” We sat in silence for a while. I could feel both of us softening, bound together by our respective encounters with the puzzle that was Marlin.

  “I didn’t cheat on him,” I said eventually, into my lap.

  There was a long silence. When I gathered up the courage to look at Eamon’s face, it was a picture of unease. I wasn’t expecting that.

  “I know,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  “I thought it would make him feel better to talk about it.” He shifted awkwardly in his seat. “Since I’ve—I’ve been through something similar. I could relate.”

  “And?” I leaned forward.

  “At first I thought it was too painful for him to share any details. Finally I realized he didn’t have any details. After I asked a few times, he said he had no proof yet that you were, umm, cheating.” He glanced off to the side, at the stalled lanes of cars idling before a red light.

  I did the guesswork. “That was what you argued about?”

  He flapped his right hand weakly. Inches to the left, inches to the right. “I thought what I said was pretty mild. But maybe he didn’t feel the same.”

  “Do you think he came around in the end? About me not cheating?”

  My face burned while he considered. I regretted asking, but now that the question was out, I needed an answer. At last, Eamon said: “I think so.”

  We looked at each other. For a moment I was confused. Who was comforting whom?

  “You don’t think he’ll hurt himself, do you?” I asked.

  Eamon considered this. “No,” he said. “A few days ago he was telling me that he was excited about something. A big change coming his way.”

  “According to his spirit guides,” I said wearily.

  Eamon nodded. “He said everything would be much clearer. He’d understand what happened to his dad.”

  “His dad? He died of a heart attack.”

  “You know what I think? I think this is all part of Marlin’s grieving process. He was super close to his dad. They messaged a lot. I think they sent each other a picture a day, kinda like a diary thing.”

  “Really?” This was news to me. Every day? “How come he never told me?”

  Eamon grimaced at his tea, then drained it.

  “I think he didn’t want to rub it in. He told me he was always worried about reminding you of your dad dying young. He said it was a sore spot for you. It made your relationship with your mom difficult.”

  “When did he say this?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember. Years ago.”

  I sank into my own memories of years-ago Marlin, back when I thought we knew each other and ourselves. I looked up only when Eamon said he had to go. He was already late for work.

  “Let’s talk again tonight?”

  “Okay.”

  AFTERWARD I WANDERED THE STREETS AIMLESSLY, LOOKING AROUND now and then to see if a miracle would happen and conjure Marlin before me. A little past noon I dialed Meg’s number. I wanted to ask if Marlin was in the Cachi I/O office, but she didn’t pick up. I kept on drifting until I realized I was dangerously close to my own office. I was supposed to be home, sick. I couldn’t be seen. Just before I ducked into a subway station, I thought I saw Phil from the corner of my eye, but I didn’t dare turn to confirm. I quick-stepped through the turnstiles and walked to the end of the platform, my eyes firmly on the darkness of the tunnel ahead.

  My phone buzzed when I surfaced back aboveground. It was a text message from Meg.

  “Hi, I’m on vacation in Hawaii. Need something?”

  I put the phone away, a sense of loneliness building. Eamon had shown up at the café in a dress shirt, all business and prepared for work, his routines undisrupted. Katie was at work too. Meg was off sunning under big umbrellas while sipping drinks that came with tiny umbrellas. Everyone’s lives hummed forward.

  Back home, I went online looking for answers, or at least sympathy. I typed “what to do when spouse walks out,” then discovered that I was afraid to press enter. It felt like escalation to connect my so-far private problems to the chaos of the World Wide Web.

  After a few moments, I took a breath and hit the return key. I saw at a glance that the search results were mostly pertinent to Americans. I knew the results were customized based on my IP, but I couldn’t help wonder whether Americans did in fact have more marriage trouble, as my mother surmised. Perhaps they simply turned to the internet more for answers?

  I clicked on a few of the top results. They all leapt straight past soul-searching and into legalities. Divorcedmommies.com said to hire the best lawyer I could afford and “prepare for the worst.” Wevorces.com had a tagline plastered at the top of every page: “Divorce: changing how we do things for the better.” A blog post by a law firm contained this advice: “You must determine whether you failed in fulfilling your obligations as a husband or wife and make a list for consultation,” it counseled, so that the opposing lawyers wouldn’t catch you unawares.

  None of these results were what I wanted, but I was unsure how to further tailor my search query. What to do with my heart when spouse walks out? What to do with my hands? My thoughts? My tears?

  I tried a different search term: “husband left me,” I typed. The tone of the results changed, now that there was a gendered word in the query. Half of the pages told me I should move on, anonymous internet voices echoing what Katie and Eamon had both urged me to do. The other half gave me extremely specific advice about how to win my man back. Eventually the two sides converged, both the move-on and get-him-back camps issuing the same commands on what to do with my mouth and body. Exercise to be attractive again! Don’t let yourself go anymore! Diet to a revenge body! Here’s how many grapefruit slices to eat for breakfast. Here’s how many times to cat-cow on the mat. Here’s where to get vaginoplasty.

  Reading these posts, I felt superiority and abjection blending into a slurry. Surely I was better than these people with their loud, false bravado. Yet wasn’t I on the internet precisely because I wanted someone to give me a to-do list? I objected to the content of the lists, found them laughable, but still—I wanted my hand held, didn’t I?

  I decided the problem was that none of the results mentioned meddling by spirits. But when I typed in “spirits told my spouse to leave me,” there was a tidal wave of marriages troubled by alcoholism. And when I tried swapping out “spirits” for “ghosts,” the results were about how people had been ghosted by their partners, which, true, fit the bill in my case, but the underlying circumstances were vastly different. I felt cheated of something. Wasn’t everything supposed to be on the internet now? Why couldn’t I find anyone who had been through my exact situation?

  I jumped ahead on the pages of search results, scrolling all the way down and clicking 9, 10, 13, 17, until a particular result caught my eye. “I feel like I don’t know him anymore,” the title read.

  hi, I’m new here. Husband left and I’m devestated. How could he? We had a beautiful wedding and he wrote his own vows. Now it’s like all that never happened. He said there’s no one else, he just doesn’t love me anymore. Should I wait for him to change his mind?

  The commentators piled on, other people at various stages of “moving on.” Have some self-respect! Don’t be a doormat! Stand up for yourself! Don’t let him treat you this way! Never beg! You can do better! Plenty of fish in the sea! If you can’t love yourself, how can you get someone else to love you? I wasted the best years of my life waiting, don’t repeat my mistake!

  The OP lashed back, wounded. I thought this was a forum for support. You of all people should understand. What good is marriage if you can ju
st cancel it like cable?

  I leaned back in my chair. I saw now that I was just like OP, trawling forums for someone who agreed with what I had already decided. It wasn’t guidance I craved after all, but confirmation. There was so much editorial hand-wringing about how millennials were exposing the entirety of their private lives online, when the real danger lay in us bringing the weight of the whole world’s judgment into what should be our personal decisions. Am I the asshole? Yes, if I choose to outsource my morality to a horde of strangers.

  It seemed like a paradox to me. Americans were raised on a diet of individualism, but they still sought approval from the amorphous presence of their peers online. And even though they were told to “be yourself because there’s no one like you,” they were trying so hard to craft “relatable” content that would resonate with as many people as possible. I couldn’t hope to find what I needed from the American corner of the internet, I in my transitive state, trying to outrun a self that was so unoriginal it had been recycled hundreds of times in many past lives.

  I closed all of my open browser tabs, exhausted and smug. I had seen through the lie that was the contemporary version of grieving, in which we bounced around online, swimming in a sea of information, trying on various data for size in order to find something that spoke to us. Grieving in the form of doing research, because we believed in productivity above all else.

  I was better than this, I thought. There were far more sensible things I could do. I went on Cachi I/O’s website and scrolled around until I found their Careers page with a list of job openings. I copied the link to their Senior Software Engineer posting and messaged it to Eamon with a note: “Call me, we need to talk.”

  I’M SORRY AGAIN THAT MY APARTMENT IS SO DIM. I’LL DEFINITELY REPLACE the dead bulb before our next video call. It was good to finally “see” you, even though I don’t express myself as well verbally, as you have probably noticed. Maybe that’s why I try to be so “extra-eloquent” in writing, as you put it.