by YZ Chin
The sky was a dull gray now, streetlamps and car headlights the brightest objects around. Marlin could have gone in and out of his building ten times and I wouldn’t have noticed, my mind dithering.
I turned to trudge back to the subway stop, but a deli/Korean takeout combo two doors down caught my eye. Bulgogi, I thought, the craving hitting me instantly.
The door tinkled when I entered the store. A man pushed a mop around the floor, a yellow sandwich board near his feet. It smelled like bleach. The man glanced up but didn’t say nothing. He adjusted his cap and went on mopping around the sandwich board, which showed a stick figure with limbs akimbo. It looked like it was trying to bust out of the board’s frame.
On a whim I took out my smartphone and unlocked it. I opened the Gallery app and scrolled through grid after grid of colorful pain, wincing at Marlin’s face beaming or pensive or playful.
“Excuse me,” I said, greeting the mopper, phone cradled loosely like I was holding a dying palm-size animal. “Have you seen this man?” I turned the screen to him. He leaned on his mop, or maybe it was the deli’s and so wasn’t his his, just like my husband wasn’t mine mine.
“Yeah, I seen him.”
“When?”
“He comes late. Very late. We’re open twenty-four/seven.”
“How late?”
“Sometimes three a.m., four a.m. Buys a sandwich.”
“Where does he go after that?”
“Cross the street.”
“Into that building? The brown one with the, the gargoyle statues on the second floor?” I wanted to reach out and touch him, try to absorb his knowledge through skin contact.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Could be.”
My phone fell out of my loose clutch, narrowly missing the bucket of water next to his mop.
“Sorry,” I said. He bent down, and I didn’t stop him from picking up the phone for me. I’d come on this stakeout on a hunch, and now that my hunch had proven correct, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was true, had to be: Marlin was squatting in his office’s coworking space. Mostly I felt a crushing sadness. Was using company-branded sweatshirts folded over as pillows really preferable to sleeping by my side?
BACK HOME I SLID OUT MY IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS FOLDER AGAIN, GOING through the stack until I found the blank green card application form. I tore it in two and walked into the kitchen to shove the halves into the trash can. When I returned to the Important Documents, my eye caught a corner of creamy ivory peeking out from the folder. My heart thrummed. At first I thought it was our wedding invite, but when I pinched the corner and drew it out, slowly, I recognized my college diploma. “Bachelor of Arts,” it read. How strange that phrase sounded now.
I hadn’t thought about her in so many years, that young woman who’d wanted to spend the rest of her life reading. No, not just reading, but exercising dominion over a language that she was told didn’t belong to her. One more way to outrun her fate.
I saw her again walking across college campus, feverishly happy, hugging books that her American classmates had yawned through in high school. That girl had been fanciful and ambitious. When she read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at nineteen, she immediately identified with immigrant scholar Victor Frankenstein, who worked day and night to prove himself master of his field at a foreign university. She, too, was constructing a monster of her own, a creature she meant to pass off as an accepted member of her adopted society, only to have the whole experiment go horribly wrong. And somewhere along the way, her painstaking creation, that unique blend of invention and mimicry, veered off course. Became me. I couldn’t say when the last time was that I’d picked up a novel. All my efforts since graduation had been pointed toward maximizing my chances at a green card—attending Toastmasters, going to meetups and networking events, paying to join professional organizations that promised to empower me as a woman in male-dominated fields.
My ears wouldn’t stop ringing. I looked around the room, trying to calm myself by taking stock of the objects around me. Floor lamp. Framed picture of us. Smoke alarm. Wall socket. A long groove across the wooden floors, where Buster had had an accident.
When I felt a bit better I spread the folder’s maw wide, my hands shaking. Essential tremors. I put my Important Documents back in, the seal on the diploma reflecting light at the very top of the stack.
After
Day Fourteen (Tuesday)
I walked into AInstein Inc. with my jaw clenched. Josh had beat me to the office. I stood at my desk, facing the back of his monitors, willing him to look up. But he didn’t. He continued pounding away at his mechanical keyboard, completely absorbed, or pretending to be.
All morning I waited, tension coiled in my body. Would he say something? When he got up for more kombucha on tap, I stiffened, wondering if he would look at me and sneer. At his slightest movement my shoulders inched rigidly up. When the engineers stood and stretched, one after another, I was surprised to see that it was already lunchtime.
At fourteen minutes past noon the office was empty, everyone out to lunch except me. All the wound-up tension I’d been tamping down since morning jostled within, seeking an outlet. Did Josh think that if he ignored me, the nightclub incident would fade away? How long was he going to keep this up?
There had to be some acknowledgment, at least, of what had happened. I scanned the empty office space. One good thing about an open floor plan: I could see anyone coming from a literal block away.
Josh’s monitor blinked to life as soon as my hand touched his ergonomic mouse. I navigated to AInstein’s GitHub page. When Josh’s password keychain manager popped up, I clicked “Yes” to sign in.
My agitation crescendoed into anger, and I could feel an imminent dam break. I wanted Josh to feel a fraction of my pain. Some of this burden was his to share. The mouse flew to Settings > Danger Zone. I stared at the “Delete this repository” button. My finger itched to click it, even though I knew full well that there were many versions of AInstein in local branches on the computers surrounding me. Deleting the repo would barely slow them down, satisfying as the act would feel.
Instead I pulled up Josh’s Emacs and found the file where the team had coded in exemptions for when AInstein detects children, or “non-adult users,” as the product manager insisted on calling them. In such scenarios, AInstein had been programmed to adhere to a small pool of pre-vetted, age-appropriate jokes, mostly of the knock-knock variety.
I toggled the default setting to turn off parental control. I pushed the change under Josh’s name and titled the commit message something innocuous like “convert tabs to spaces.” Then I went to Darren’s computer. In the code review UI, I had Darren approve Josh’s change and merge it, committing my sabotage to the next production push. The company was nearing a release date, and the engineers were in a merging frenzy. This commit would be just one among many, and it wasn’t like the engineers were organized enough to generate and monitor release notes. They didn’t have time for such mundane administrative tasks. Move fast and break things: just fine by me.
As the tension in me ebbed, I felt a brief pang of apprehension. Some children exposed to AInstein were going to be . . . confused, although most of them had probably already heard all there was to hear by age seven these days. It was the parents who would be outraged. That’s what I was counting on, anyway, parents foaming at the mouth and coming after this shoddy product. That could be my meaningful contribution, couldn’t it? It might even be enough to atone for all the nonsense I’d enabled in this strange country, helping these men have their fun.
I looked down at my shirt, an impulse purchase from a pasar malam shortly before I left Malaysia:
NEW YORK
IF I CAN MAKE I THERE
I CAN MAKE IF ANYWHERE
I’D RATHER BE
IN NYC
Sitting in the empty office, I laughed out loud.
After
Day Fifteen (Wednesday)
If stori
es can indeed inspire our behavior in real life, then perhaps I owe my surge of recklessness to my mother, after all. I’d digested the narratives of the banana tree girl and the mother in the fire and taken what I wanted, and now I had tampered with AInstein.
Though there was also a flip side. They say that to write a story, all you have to do is put down one sentence at a time. No one teaches how to unwrite a story. I wish I could undo the tales I told about myself in America.
I MENTIONED TO KATIE OVER THE PHONE THAT I WAS GOING OVER TO Eamon’s to clear out Marlin’s things. She asked if I wanted help or company. I told her not to worry about it.
“I’m proud of you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For starting a new chapter.”
I didn’t correct her.
Another memory: Katie and I had just started becoming friends and were trading family history. I mentioned my grandmother used to be a rubber tapper. This confused Katie to no end, which delighted me for some reason. I toyed with her, painting a picture of women with beautiful hands going around rubber trees and blessing them with gentle taps of their fingertips like fairy godmothers until rubber flowed out, forming perfect Kate Spade rain boots by the time it hit ground.
“Rubber is liquid?” she asked, awed.
“THANKS FOR COMING,” EAMON SAID WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR. HE had asked me to come collect Marlin’s things, now that it seemed virtually certain Marlin would not be returning. Looking at Eamon’s glum face, I felt a surge of gratitude. Here was a corroborator of my interpretation of events. Eamon, too, had lived with Marlin and found his change unreasonable. More importantly, Eamon also still cared for Marlin despite their fallout. I could tell from how eagerly he asked: “So you’re sure he’s camping out in his office?”
I nodded. “I think so. I don’t know how to confirm it, though.”
He waved me into his living room. I sank into his stained leather couch that was too deep for me. No matter how I sat, I ended up either slumping or slouching.
“You’re vegetarian, right?” Eamon asked, coming out of the kitchen with a serving tray.
“Yes, that’s right.”
I ate the crudités he offered, double-dipping baby carrots and celery sticks into the hummus bowl. He sat next to me on the couch, not touching the food.
“I’m still waiting to hear back from the recruiter. I could ask for another tour of Cachi.” He looked intently at my face, as if asking permission. I realized with a start that he’d taken to heart what I said about alerting the authorities.
“But you’re worried he’ll see you and leave?” I guessed.
“Yeah,” he said, finally averting his eyes. “I don’t want to be the reason he ends up sleeping on the streets or something.”
I pulled him into a hug because he had voiced my fear, and because I didn’t know what to say in response. His head weighed heavy on my shoulder for a few seconds before his hands came to rest on my back. I cried, my tears darkening Eamon’s shirt. When the dampness soaked through, he leaned back and broke our hug, coughing awkwardly. I opened my mouth to apologize. No words emerged. Instead I stuffed more crudités into my mouth to stop it, the crying. We sat side by side on the couch until I felt ready, and then I stood up.
“All his things are in there.” Eamon gestured at the guest room.
It was the same room and also not the same room, now devoid of Marlin’s resolutely turned back. My body insisted on raising my heartbeat when I walked in, and I experienced Marlin’s rejection all over again. I wondered when scientists would get around to discovering the antonymous equivalent of serotonin, its opposite. I didn’t buy that depression was caused by low serotonin levels. No, what I felt was way more aggressive than a simple deficiency of certain neurotransmitters. There had to be another neurotransmitter that carried sadness, that handed out hopelessness like drugged candy. After all, even matter had antimatter.
I started with the clothes hanging in the closet. I yanked a dress shirt off its hanger brutishly, hands shaking, which set off a chain reaction that made all the other clothes dance, like someone had started playing a song in a room full of drunks. I swiped them all into a heap on the floor.
The trash bag was almost full by the time I got to the IKEA desk with two drawers. I leaned the bag against one end of the desk and opened the first drawer, wondering why Marlin had left behind some of his clothes. It was true that as a software engineer he could alternate between the same two T-shirts and not raise an eyebrow at work. And having just a few changes of clothes with him while squatting was probably less troublesome than trying to hide a bag somewhere in the office.
I crouched on the floor and peeked under the bed. I’d looked everywhere else and hadn’t seen a sign of Buster. I hoped Marlin hadn’t gotten rid of him. It made my heart ache to think of our joint creation destroyed.
“Do you need help?” Eamon asked from the doorway.
I guessed at what it must look like to him, me motionless, kneeling, head almost touching floor.
“I just need a moment,” I said. He nodded and left.
I still hadn’t decided what to do about Marlin. I wavered between different daydreams. In one of them, I lurked by the Korean deli and confronted Marlin when he emerged for his food run. Sometimes he was silent the whole time I said my piece, exactly like when I’d found him here at Eamon’s. Other times he begged me not to expose his squatting as I stood and felt powerful waves of benevolence wash over me.
I thought, too, of dropping off anonymous care packages addressed to him at his office. I’d send nail clippers (he was fastidious that way, or at least he used to be when he lived with me), ramen packets (the fancy, super spicy ones, not the kind that tasted like boiled water someone had farted in), a throw, maybe even a handheld gaming console.
The first drawer of the desk in Eamon’s guest room was sparse, holding just a few takeout menus and promotional leaflets. The second drawer was a mess of thick papers variously stapled together. Most of them looked like white papers that Marlin was probably reading for work. Near the bottom of the drawer was something familiar, and it took me a while to process why a feeling of apprehension was welling up within me. I’d held the exact same document in my hands just the other night. What was it doing here?
I pulled it out from the pile: “Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status.” Another of its names: USCIS Form I-485. When I fingered its pages they felt soft and well-thumbed, some corners curling up on themselves like they just wanted to protect their heads in a brawl. What did this mean? Had Marlin been promised green card sponsorship by his employer? Did he see it as a golden opportunity to ditch me while he alone ascended from impermanence to permanence?
I made for the bed and sat down clumsily, Form I-485 deforming in my clenching fist. I flipped through the creased document automatically, the way I’d done so many times before. It was blank; he hadn’t claimed it with his name yet. No, it wasn’t entirely blank. All the pages were clean except for one. I stared at it. In green ink, Marlin had circled one and only one of the form’s many, many questions.
74. Are you accompanying another foreign national who requires your protection or guardianship but who is inadmissible after being certified by a medical officer as being helpless from sickness, physical or mental disability, or infancy, as described in INA section 232(c)?
An avalanche of possible interpretations trembled inside me. I felt my world dissolving once more into signs. I realized I couldn’t see anything, and discovered I had my hands over my eyes. I freed them and blinked at the empty room. The form lay by my feet.
I stood up in a daze and walked over to the door to close it. Nearby, lying on the floor tiles, was my tote bag. I squatted and rummaged through it unthinkingly, pulling out fistfuls of wadded restaurant napkins, loose cough drops, drugstore coupons, not one but two squashed granola bars, and, finally, a folded piece of paper.
I spread open the paper and tried to make sense of the dense p
aragraphs. Slowly, the context returned to me. The words were instructions, steps for how to perform dowsing, given to me by Carol at the end of my fruitless visit to the Dowsers Society of America.
I skimmed the paper, forcing my vision and my breathing both to slow down. Avoid windows, the handout advised, so that external vibrations do not influence the results. I scooted until I had my back against the door, as far away from the guest room’s two windows as possible. Steer clear of electrical equipment. Wildly I flitted my eyes around the objects in the room, before remembering my own cell phone. I took it out of the tote bag and slid it across the floor until it skidded into Form I-485, still on the floor.
I crawled to retrieve the form, then settled back against the door. Beyond, the house was quiet. I hoped Eamon was occupying himself with something.
There were more dos and don’ts on the sheet Carol gave me, but I couldn’t wait anymore; the interior churning was becoming unbearable. As calmly as I could, I took off my necklace and looped my front door key through it, the way I had done in front of Carol at the Dowsers Society. With a shaky breath I closed my eyes. I stretched out my arm, hovering my pendant over Form I-485, and began.
It was rough going at first, the pendant lurching erratically and without rhythm. Soon it began spinning in smoother circles that felt independent of my manipulations, even though I understood intellectually that it was simply going off momentum. Since I didn’t have a pen, I mentally decided that the left side of the immigration form represented the answer “Yes,” while the right side would be “No.”
Did Marlin circle number 74 on the form because of me? I asked silently.
The pendant whirled and tugged at my fingers. My eyes still closed, I tried to gauge whether it was listing in any particular direction. Yes? No? I screwed my eyelids together tighter, trying to shut out all other sensations except those of the pendant’s arcs.
