Edge Case

by YZ Chin

  Never had I focused on something that hard before. The moments went by, pulled and stretched. Curiously, the top of my head began to tingle. As soon as my attention darted from the pendant to the tingling, I felt a strange knowing settling into my chest. This is what happened, it declared. Marlin wasn’t worried about having to declare me “helpless from sickness” to the government. In fact, it was the opposite. He thought I was beginning to see him as the sick one.

  I thought about what Eamon had said—Marlin loved his father, far more than I ever knew. Marlin’s turn to dowsing was a desperate attempt to continue their bond in some form, but I had been too shocked and judgmental to understand that. I couldn’t accept how Marlin could change so much. He knew his attempts to deepen his relationship with his dead father were alarming to me. Maybe Marlin was the clear-eyed one, after all. He’d become a different person, and he saw I couldn’t keep up. And so he’d chosen to leave, freeing me from having to answer the question of whether he was well or unwell. Unburdening me.

  I opened my eyes. The tingling had vanished. Unsteadily, I maneuvered my limbs until I was on my feet. Yes, that was it, the mystery unraveled.

  After

  Day Fifteen (Wednesday)

  I wrote Marlin another email. I titled it “I dowsed and now I know,” hoping this would intrigue him enough to at least read my words. In my email I described what had happened in Eamon’s guest room, the conclusions and understanding that had hit me from out of nowhere.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from you again, I wrote. If I don’t, I’ll hold on to this version of what happened between us. You left because I was starting to see you as a problem. You thought I would label you “helpless.” I can’t blame you for that.

  As I hit send, I thought briefly about how Katie provoked responses from her manager by making unpalatable suggestions. I wasn’t deliberately saying something to Marlin that I didn’t believe, but I wasn’t a sudden convert to dowsing either. It was true I didn’t have exact words to describe what had happened. My best guess was that when I tried dowsing, my mind simply synthesized the information I’d gathered over the past few weeks and made it cohere into a narrative. But I still didn’t believe in dowsing—at least not in the way Marlin practiced it, with spirit guides providing answers. So was I just manipulating Marlin into talking to me? Even so, I like to think that whatever puff of sincerity I’d had while my eyes were closed counted for something.

  After

  Day Sixteen (Thursday)

  I was going to claim illness again and work from home, but Lucas messaged me early in the morning, asking if we could move our one-on-one up a day. I took the subway in, calculating my arrival so that it would coincide with lunchtime. As expected, the bullpen was deserted. Trying my best to be inconspicuous, I paused by Josh’s desk and rolled my eyes upward so I could observe the ceiling without angling my neck.

  There. A camera, not directly over his desk, but opposite and three spots down from it. How long did they keep footage around? A week?

  Afterward I pretended to work in the building lobby until it was time to meet Lucas. The sofa reserved for visitors was surprisingly firm. I eyed everyone who came through the glass doors, on alert for anything like a uniform, but there was none. At some point a fire truck drove past, slowly by the sounds of it, its honks brassy and indignant.

  I went to the one-on-one fifteen minutes early and sat waiting. To my surprise, my breathing was steady when Lucas walked in and closed the door. It was easier than I’d thought, being an agent of destruction.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. “You don’t look great. Is everything all right?”

  At first I was startled, thinking he was referring to my weight gain. Then I thought: Maybe I’m not as calm as I think. Perhaps the stillness I felt within me was not the tranquil repose of a river-polished stone but that of a hunted animal, frozen in shock.

  “You can tell me,” Lucas said, leaning forward and clasping his hands together. “Did something happen?”

  “I’m worried about my visa situation.” The words emerged on autopilot. I’d rehearsed the phrase so many times that my body now supplied it reflexively when I was at a loss for words, wanting only to avoid confessing to sabotage.

  “You are?” Lucas raised both eyebrows. “Oh, why didn’t you say so earlier? What’s the lowdown?”

  I told him The Date on my visa and described what needed to happen for a green card, as succinctly as I could. I knew he had no idea about any of all that, even though he was supposedly responsible for my career.

  “Okay, let’s get started, then,” he said when I finished. “I’ll shoot an email to the HR and legal guys right away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said there’s a deadline, right?”

  “You’re sponsoring my green card? Just like that?”

  He laughed. “I know it’s been an uphill battle for you here, but you’ve done good work. You’ve caught some major bugs. And you don’t let things get to you. I could tell from the beta test.”

  I blinked, trying to read between the lines. Was I being rewarded for tolerating the engineers’ absurd behavior? Not letting things get to me—was that what the path to a green card entailed?

  After the meeting I walked right up to Josh. He was standing, working with headphones on. I tapped one of his monitors, startling him into looking at me.

  “Send me the next installment of your novel,” I said. I walked away without waiting for a response. With every step I resolved further to be honest this time, completely. I would tell him what I really thought about Radmonsius and his adventures.

  AFTER WORK I CALLED MY MOTHER. SHE WOULD BE DISAPPOINTED BY the green card news, I knew. But I rode the buoyant wave of the day’s unexpected turn, finally ready to lay it all out with her. I wanted to tell her how her past life stories had both helped and wounded me.

  While the dial tone continued, I imagined her naked again. This time, instead of picturing her body as some ideal that mine could never contort itself into, I saw the bow of her shoulders and the compression of her rib cage, as if she walked through life holding her breath. I saw, too, the wrinkles crackling across her folds, the cellulite mottling darker skin like egg sacs fermenting some secret sorrow. My mother, frail.

  She didn’t pick up. I left a message. “Call me back,” I said. And just like that I was transported to the day I first left Malaysia for America. We were in the airport. My mother was weeping, one hand loosely clasping my arm.

  “You’re never coming back, are you?” she sobbed. “You’ll marry an American and never return, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  I remembered the force of my head shaking out vehement denials. No, I swore. Never.

  Can promises be kept in halves? Quarters? Slivers?

  She flagged down a passing traveler with a rolling suitcase. Would they please take a photo of us, at the moment of our separation?

  The stranger looked at my mother’s tear-soaked face and refused.

  After

  Day Eighteen (Saturday)

  I was not surprised at Marlin’s response showing up in my in-box, strangely, just as I wasn’t surprised he wanted to meet at the Korean deli. The developments on the green card front had overloaded my capacity for shock; I had a sense of floating around in an asteroid-dotted space, my movements not entirely under control, the possibility of impact always looming. Marlin’s note was brief, asking me to meet him later that day.

  There were hours yet before our meeting. I smoothed the torn halves of Marlin’s modulo proposal on the floor. Flipping them over, I wrote on the other side:

  QI LING % EDWINA % AMERICA == ?

  Shortly after we’d first met, Marlin and I had entrusted each other with our birth names. The exchange felt almost sacred, even though, halfway across the world, our parents had called us by those names for almost two decades—to praise us, to scold us, to bid us home when darkness began to loom.

  For a few mon
ths, heady with fresh love, Marlin insisted on calling me Qi Ling instead of Edwina. He wanted to be the only person in America to do so. It was a secret, a claim, and a spell all rolled in one. How thrilling it was, to be Edwina under fluorescent office lights, tugging at the revealing neckline concealed under a modest mustard sweater, imagining Marlin’s reaction when we would meet after work, in a few hours’ time. Then I’d transform into a different, luminous being when he put his hand on my cheek and called me Qi Ling, while the sweater lay limp across the back of my office chair.

  He stopped when we started introducing each other to friends and family. Too confusing, he said, giving in to the engineer’s need for efficiency at scale. And so that name was put back into a box, reserved for official government business.

  I loaded the dating app Katie had installed on my phone the night we had whiskey. I wasn’t looking to do anything, or find anyone. Never did I imagine I might soon have French food for the first time with someone I met off the app (thanks for suggesting that, by the way). At that moment, I just wanted to explore my state of preternatural calm.

  At Buddhist camp, we’d sat in a loose circle around a camp instructor who told us stories from Buddha’s life in forty-minute installments. On the last day, we gathered around her for the climax. I was looking forward to it, yearning for holiness and purity to cap off all the disease, death, and suffering Buddha had witnessed along the way. I wanted to know it had all been for something.

  Buddha was well on his way to enlightenment, sitting under the bodhi tree. It had been seven times seven days since he had first crossed his legs among the tree’s roots. He had not moved once. Into this tranquility broke in Mara, a demon hell-bent on thwarting Buddha’s ascension. When his grotesque visage failed to quail Buddha, Mara summoned his three beautiful daughters. One by one the daughters stripped, parading their lovely naked bodies in front of Buddha, posing in the most tempting positions. But he paid them no mind, whatever pleasures they promised. And that was how Buddha achieved transcendence. He passed his tests.

  I thought I, too, could put myself through a trial of enticement. Hands clutching my smartphone, I kept swiping away people of all genders on the dating app without really looking at their faces, using them like worry beads. I don’t know how long I swiped for; it felt like an age, smiling faces flashing unceasingly by, the carousel never depleted. It might have gone on forever had my finger not slipped.

  I stared down in fascination. I had accidentally swiped yes on a person. It was you, and in your profile you said you were a therapist, a good listener.

  I picked up the nearest book and fiddled with its manifold frontiers. Mary Shelley. How I rooted for the monster’s impossible dream, ached for it on his behalf, even as I knew what he wanted would hurt him and others. Did I still have the capacity for it, that cruel sympathy?

  I remembered my first days in America: lawns of cut grass, chalk scribbles on sidewalks, wind that trembled trees free of their leaves.

  All avenues to love, I realized, were acts of imagination. My tenderest bursts of affection for my mother happened when I associated her with death in my mind, as when I imagined her frail, naked flesh. All my unresolved anger toward her, I short-circuited by picturing her dead, beyond communication, so that I could call up waves of regret at not telling her how I really felt when I had the chance. That red-hot ball of future regret powers currents of love in the present, and I think: I do love her after all.

  And is that love so pathetic?

  America demands yet more supreme leaps of fancy. I juggle forked lives in my head: an intense love for the great nation of the United States should my green card come through, and a heavy loathing for this uncaring, capricious machine of a country should I fail to be legalized. It is an ice cube that never melts on my tongue, and every hour I turn it this way or that, unable to let it sit in one position for too long because of a burning freeze that builds up.

  And Marlin. I saw again his face, somber and pinched, as he sat twirling a purple crystal over a diagram of words. His air of concentration gave him a look of grit. I thought maybe we were not so different after all. Who knew what love lay concealed behind his made-up spirits. Just as I ventured into imagination to love my mother, he could be calling forth love for his father using a pendant.

  I hoped that one day he would imagine a way back to me, though I had no idea who I would soon become. Since young I’d opened wide to a gush of influences stripped of their contexts. Was I now taking cues from a government form in the same way? Learning how to be a person, a wife, a daughter, from numbered questions? Maybe that was precisely what Marlin was resisting. I imagined him hunched over Form I-485, carefully marking it with green ink.

  Looking at your profile picture, I decided I would try to retell the story of Marlin and me. It was the closest thing to time travel. I would venture to alter how I thought about the past, and maybe it would somehow change my present. No matter how my meeting with Marlin would go, I already knew the way I wanted the story to end. I clicked “Message” under your smiling face.

  After

  I was paying for my corn silk tea when the Korean deli’s door tinkled. I turned and watched Marlin nod to the man who worked there, the mopper who must have told Marlin how I’d asked after him.

  I finally felt a squirt of fear when Marlin paced toward me, his expression neutral. My first impulse had been to yank him into a hug, but that impulse was now squashed by terror. I didn’t want to start believing he was here to reconcile. If I did, that runaway hope would destroy me later. So I leaned against a shelf of seaweed snacks and chocolate, trying to just look at him without feeling anything.

  His hair seemed longer than it should be, given the time that had passed since I last saw him. When he glanced down to put his phone away, I saw streaks of silver fanning out from his crown. He’d always had the stray strand or two of those, but now there were enough that I could easily visualize him with a head full of gray.

  “Marlin,” I said. I unscrewed the tea bottle so I could have an excuse for tilting my head back. I’d already vowed not to cry.

  “You figured it out.” He smiled very slightly.

  “About you staying in the office? That was Eamon, really. He did a lot.” I attempted my own smile. “We were both worried about you.”

  “I mean dowsing. But—thank you.”

  I shifted against the shelf. Behind me, plastic packaging crackled. “Was I right?” I asked.

  “Mostly.” He nodded. “Not bad for first-time dowsing.”

  “You could have told me you were trying to communicate with your dad. You could have tried to explain—how much he meant to you.”

  “Would that have changed anything?” His eyes flashed, that familiar glint when he was confident in his reasoning. “Would you have understood why I was dowsing if I’d told you?”

  “Maybe. Or—I don’t know,” I confessed. It was hard to admit it out loud. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry too.” His voice softened. “The important thing is, now you get it. Now you see why I spent so much time and energy learning to dowse. I’ve learned a lot. I’m good at it now. Once we move back to Malaysia, I’ll be able to contact my dad.”

  “Move back?” My hand trembled. I set the tea down on the floor.

  “That was one of the things your email didn’t mention. I guess that’s why you look so surprised.”

  “My boss just agreed to sponsor my green card. I can’t. Remember when we joked about racing each other, see who would get sponsored first?” I put two fingers on his wrist, trying to adopt a joking tone.

  Marlin looked lost. “But the spirits said you would come,” he said quietly.

  My heart broke for him then. How I wanted for him to be right, to get what he was told he would. But it was impossible. I might manage to go along with his vision for a moment—this moment—or maybe even an hour, a day, a week. Yet even if I didn’t know myself very well anymore, I was certain I would forever regret not finding o
ut whether that green card would materialize.

  I was trying to work out how to explain it all to him when I looked up and read his expression. I saw that he already understood. His brows were dragging down, his mouth a grim hyphen. There was a bit of the old him left after all, the person who quickly grasped the facts at hand and adjusted to the new reality.

  My Marlin.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to—

  Sara Birmingham, for listening and understanding, for many brilliant ideas, and for saying that you laughed. I’m so glad to have worked with you on this novel. Alexa Stark, for ushering in numerous early reincarnations of this book, each better than the last. I’m grateful for your patience and frankness.

  The design and production teams at Ecco, and Na Kim, for their care.

  Somesuch Stories for publishing part of this novel in a different form, and for thought-provoking prompts.

  Generous early readers: David Joseph, Lim Kai Ling, Cheryl Loo Qi Ying, Mui Poopoksakul, Johnny Schmidt.

  Editors and others who have helped shape my prose: John Amen, Sharon Bakar, Sybil Baker, Michelle Cahill, Andy Cox, Andrew Day, Joanna R. Demkiewicz, Todd Dills, Tammy Ho Lai Ming, Lauren Rosemary Hook, Lee Hope, Jee Leong Koh, Charles Lambert, Jo Lou, Brian Mihok, Meghan Murphy, Jyothi Natarajan, Suze Olbrich, Debi Orton, R. B. Pillay, Christina Thompson, Jess Zimmerman.

  Writers gracious and encouraging: Tash Aw, Brian Bouldrey, Amanda DeMarco, Hanna Alkaf, Caitlin Harper, Z Kennedy-Lopez, Catherine LaSota, Mira T. Lee, Chia-Chia Lin, Lisa Locascio, Juan Martinez, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Preeta Samarasan, Jeremy Tiang, Jeannie Vanasco, Sunny Xiang, Hilary Zaid, Authors ’18.

  Founts of support: My family, Chlump Chatkupt, Gia Gan, Pamela Ibarra, Saadia Imtiazi, Usman Jafarey, Ruchir Khaitan, Tina Kit, Jimmy Tang, Sarah Wang, everyone at Feminist Press, the RTP crew (no engineers in this book are based on you, don’t worry).