by Kim Fu
“Essentially,” the lawyer said.
“You don’t all have to make the same decision,” Brenda said.
“But we would like a decision by tomorrow,” said the VP.
Shen, Victor, and Jim found their way to downtown San Jose and a steakhouse on a tourist strip, set among museums and luxury stores. The sense of emptiness and oversize buildings and streets persisted. The businesses seemed quiet, the sidewalks lonely. It had begun to rain.
Shen ordered a bottle of sparkling wine. The waiter asked, “Celebrating something?”
“Fuck yeah!” Shen said. “We’re about to be rich!”
The waiter smiled politely. “May I see your IDs, gentlemen?” After they passed their licenses over, the waiter asked, “Where is this, exactly?”
“Canada.”
“Ah. Pardon my ignorance. Three glasses?”
Jim waited for the waiter to leave before saying, “Not rich. But certainly not a bad graduation present.”
Shen looked over the menu. “Rich enough for a good steak.”
Victor stared out at the rain. California! Land of optimists and dreamers and perpetual sunshine. He’d wanted to live here his entire life. Had that changed in the last twenty-four hours? Victor had also thought—perhaps foolishly, perhaps as every entitled young person did—that he could escape working somewhere like Jacquard, a nine-to-five job in a claustrophobically grim, fluorescent-lit office, a computer on a little desk. His parents had. His mother had been a real estate agent and his father a contractor, tag-teaming properties in the real estate holy land of British Columbia’s southern coast; his stepfather was a retired classics professor. He knew Shen and Jim thought the money was their way out, that this would happen again, they’d turn ideas into gold and forever be the masters of their own destiny, smoking pot in their boxers in a basement apartment.
But it was less than what he’d make in a year if he took the job. And what was a year? Victor was twenty-two. He had, it seemed, a million years in front of him.
Isabel and Victor moved with just one backpack and one suitcase each. They arrived on a perfect day in June, emerging through the doors of the San Francisco airport to a blue sky and a breeze, like a habitat engineered for mankind.
That first weekend, they stayed in corporate housing in the financial district, a large but sterile set of rooms with a view of the bridge into Oakland. They walked to Fisherman’s Wharf, and the teeming crowd of Saturday tourists and the smell of the bay and frying oil told Victor he’d made the right decision. They smashed crabs in a restaurant where the shared bench-tables were lined with newspaper, under a river of butter and lemon wedges. They rented bikes and rode along the water to the Golden Gate Bridge, across, through the winding residential streets of Sausalito, and back. Victor started work on Tuesday. On Monday, Jacquard arranged for the couple to tour apartments with a broker. They settled on a tiny, obscenely expensive studio in the Mission, a Spanish-style building with a persistent smell of mold from the damp air and galvanized rubber from the tire store next door. They bought painted terra-cotta dishes off a guy in the park who had them spread out on a blanket. The paint came off on the third washing and made their food taste faintly of turpentine. They decorated their windowsills with seashells and animal bones, both bought and found.
On the weekends, they rented a car and drove for hours up and down the coast to beaches where Victor could surf. At work, he usually kept the tide report open in a window in one corner of his screen, noting where the waves would be good, what the weather was like, where it would most likely be crowded. When he rode, he felt like his blood was on fire, a high like nothing else. Afterward, out of the full-body exhaustion, he knew a kind of peace and clarity that lasted all week. Sometimes other surfers struck up a conversation as they paddled inland, or as Victor and Isabel sat at a beachside bar shack in the late afternoon, but they were mostly adrenaline junkies, who invited him to snowboard, raft, climb, cliff-jump, BASE-jump, skydive. As with programming and with Isabel, when Victor found something he loved, he stuck with it, unwavering as a blinkered horse.
Later, Isabel would remember these as their happiest years.
Isabel’s roommate Zoe found an internship for a company in Germany, Lisa went to grad school, Kelly moved back into her parents’ house in Ottawa while she looked for work. Graduation had brought on the kind of panic that accompanies a governmental regime change. On the patio of every pub, on the fields, students sat around and asked one another: In the new world order, who will you be? Will we be friends or enemies? The dependable progression of one year to the next, the way time had worked since kindergarten, became now versus the rest of your life. Keeners with five-year plans held smugly fast. Everyone else grabbed what they could or began the journey home.
Isabel had an excuse. She couldn’t work. A piece of white card stock stapled into her passport said so: H-4 SPOUSAL VISA. Theoretically, a company could sponsor her the way Jacquard had Victor, but she told herself the odds were too low to bother.
One afternoon, as Isabel ate lunch at a café, she got a text message from Victor saying he’d be working late. How late? Before midnight, he hoped. As he hoped on many nights. Seated at a neighboring table was a group of women about Isabel’s age, who stood out among the tech workers, tourists, young mothers, and aging hippies who frequented this café, a place Isabel had mentally marked as welcoming to those who eat alone in sweatpants. All four wore high heels, pencil skirts, and tucked-in silk blouses, with blazers and light sweaters over the backs of their chairs, a high-fashion gloss to their hair and nails. One arrived later than the others and announced, “I’ve been looking forward to this all week,” and the others exclaimed their assent. They looked like a piece of art, a carefully constructed tableau. Rather than conversing back and forth, they seemed to take turns telling long stories. Only one person would speak at a time, with urgency and drama, the suggestion of great triumphs and cosmically unfair losses, while the others gasped, laughed, and cooed sympathetically.
Isabel recalled a morning when she was seven years old. Her parents left for work. They trusted her to make her own breakfast and walk to school alone, her house key tied to the mitten string on her coat. A routine morning. It never occurred to her to be afraid or to rebel, to eat ice cream for breakfast or skip school, to worry about burglars and monsters. Before Forevermore, she’d had a happy child’s narcissism, a solid belief her parents would return in the evening.
She listened to their car pulling out of the driveway and suddenly thought: What was it that grown-ups did all day? As she had trouble imagining her teachers outside of school, she couldn’t picture her parents outside of the house, or indeed the totality of any adult’s life. Once, she’d been out with her father and run into one of his co-workers; another time, she’d seen her first grade teacher eating alone in a McDonald’s. Both incidents had disquieted her, a break in the laws of the universe as she understood them.
Eating beside these women, Isabel felt like she’d never found an answer to that question. What did grown-ups do all day? What did these women do for a living?
Victor told her he was convinced some of his co-workers lived in the office. Even if he came in at seven and left at midnight, he’d see the same people at their desks. Others were digital ghosts: he got their emails, internal IMs, and code reviews, but he never met them, could never find them or get them to show up to a meeting. People either ate at their desks, still working, or quietly slunk away alone in their cars, as there was nowhere to eat within three miles of the business park. One of the senior engineers didn’t eat at all—he subsisted entirely on nutritional shakes he made by blending oil, oats, vegetables, protein powder, and bulk synthetic vitamins.
When Victor returned to their studio apartment each night, Isabel was invariably there, dinner on the table or a plate put away for him, which he wolfed down cold right out of the fridge, standing there with the door open, in its light. Then he took off his jeans and slid into bed. She turn
ed and pressed her face into his back until his warmth and smell blotted out all thought, until she stopped wondering how long love could be enough, how long it could count as meaning, how long it could structure her days.
The year Victor and Isabel turned twenty-five, Isabel’s parents went on a trip to Mexico with a seniors’ group. Between Chichén Itzá and their compound hotel in Cancún, their charter bus was stuck in traffic at the bottom of a hill, behind another tourist bus. Behind them, the brakes of a fruit truck failed. The truck collided with the back of the bus, forcing it against the bus in front, compressing the accordion folds of the frame. The Wens, asleep in their travel tracksuits in the back row, were the only casualties.
Victor and Isabel spent a month living in Isabel’s childhood home, crying with the aunties, uncles, and cousins who came. A surprising number didn’t come, Isabel thought, too busy or too old to travel. One of her father’s sisters took care of everything. She had the bodies transported, arranged their cremation, and had been named executrix of the will. She sorted the flowers and made pot after pot of tea for the stream of relatives passing through. She didn’t consult Isabel about anything, nor did she ask for her help, letting Isabel clutch Victor in her childhood bed and muffle her wails with his chest, or hang uselessly in the kitchen doorway, pale and emptied out. Auntie hadn’t seen Isabel since she was a child and perceived little difference.
After only four weeks, Auntie told Isabel to mark things of her parents’ that she wanted to keep, because she was going to donate or throw away the rest. Isabel didn’t have the wherewithal to take anything beyond a couple of photo albums, her father’s toque, and her mother’s gloves. Auntie sold the house within six months. She mailed Isabel several checks with no explanation. Holding the first one in her hands, Isabel wished she had kept everything. It was more money than she’d ever seen in her life, but it seemed like a paltry amount to have traded for her parents’ lives.
That same year, their green card process began. In another year, Isabel would be able to work. But Victor couldn’t bring himself to mention it, not while Isabel was fighting the chill of the San Francisco summer in her parents’ hat and gloves.
She dreamed one night of the fruit truck. In her vision, the radio played a jaunty mariachi tune as the truck rolled down the hill, unoccupied, driverless. The back doors burst open upon impact. Mangos and papayas tumbled into the wreckage, their skins shredded, their brightly colored flesh smeared across the asphalt, sweet juices running in rivulets.
In the morning, after Victor left, Isabel called Auntie. Auntie was the tallest woman in their family of stubby-boned southern Chinese, with a steely countenance that Isabel envied. “Isabel,” she said, “I know the way they died was sudden and violent. But for them, it was quick. And they were not young. They were happily married for forty years. They loved each other, and you. You gave them no trouble. They left this world together. They were very lucky. Most people are not that lucky. Do you understand? You are very, very lucky.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” Isabel said.
“You are. You’re young. This is not the worst thing that will happen to you.”
Later, Isabel will remember this sentence as a curse.
For Isabel did believe nothing worse would ever happen to her. She emerged from her grief feeling immunized against further tragedy. The ordinariness she had seen in herself since she was a teenager meant there could be only petty sorrows from now on.
Isabel wanted something she couldn’t describe. She wanted to be bound more permanently to the earth.
A house.
They wanted to buy a car and have a place to store Victor’s boards, which made staying in the city out of the question. They found a three-bedroom California ranch in the suburbs, closer to Jacquard. When they emailed the listing to Victor’s mother, the real estate magnate, rather than answering any of their questions, she responded with only: HOW CAN YOU AFFORD THIS YOU ARE SO YOUNG?????
They sold all of Victor’s Jacquard stock, and, combined with Isabel’s inheritance, it was just enough for the down payment as prices started to soar across the Valley and the Bay. They were young and rich, believing they would only, somehow, get younger and richer still.
5
Isabel’s phone is ringing.
The doorbell is ringing.
They’re always ringing, producing a soft, melodious, distant series of chimes that say, “It’s not important. It can wait. It will go away.”
The mail slot in their front door feeds onto a heap in the entryway. The heap grows until Isabel opens the door, which swings inward. The bottom of the door sweeps the mail into a corner and creates a secondary pile.
Her voice mail is full. The little icon at the top of the screen tells her so. It begins as a number that counts upward, one through nineteen, and then becomes an exclamation point. She can delete them all at once with a couple of sweeps of her index finger. The icon disappears, reappears later as the number one. The swipes feel soothing. A monastic exercise, like filling a water bucket with an eyedropper, emptying it out, and starting again.
When she was still charging Victor’s phone, it rang and rang. She finally let the battery drain completely. His phone rests on the table in the entryway, where he’d see it if he were leaving the house.
Her brain is made of mesh. Occasionally a question gets caught: What day is it? It doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t know. She could find out easily, but it doesn’t matter. The difference between Wednesday or Saturday, April or May.
Automatic withdrawals keep the lights on, her phone on the network. She imagines their checking account ticking down in the same manner that her voice mail ticks up, equally abstract. She lives in the slippery now, with no future. It will bottom out in its own time.
She spoke to Victor’s mother at some point, now living full-time in a condo in Hong Kong with Mr. Davies and a nurse/maid, unable or unwilling to travel. There would be some kind of ceremony there. Victor’s name written on a banner and burned. For family.
But Isabel is not family. She’s not blood. She’s more than that. She is flesh. One body and soul.
She said yes to a lot of people at the beginning. People in and out of uniforms, people in beige-and-gray rooms, people who wanted information or money or to know if someone was coming to pick her up. They kept asking yes-or-no questions and she just said yes until they let her go.
Isabel is in their SUV, in the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour minimart. The digital clock on her dashboard says it’s just after three in the morning. She doesn’t remember driving here. She’s gone too long without eating. She’s been led by her body, a survival instinct honed for the suburbs.
She goes inside. The mechanical bell dings. She takes a red plastic basket. The shelves are bright and abundant, a bottomless cornucopia. Glass doors reveal row upon row of bottles. She feels a gut-rumbling anticipation, a sense of wonder. She stuffs the basket with instant noodles and cookies and chips, glossy packages with enticing pictures. She pays. She tenses—does her card still work? Has the world changed, does it use a whole new method of currency?
As she’s putting the bags in her trunk, she’s suddenly, sharply aware of being outside. From here, the store glows gleaming-white, like a giant refrigerator. She gulps the cold air. An engine revs aggressively in the distance. She’s outside. The dam holding her thoughts at bay begins to buckle. She can hear her inner voice gathering strength, the enormity of her grief and despair. She’s outside. She leaps in the car and drives frantically home, running a red light along the way.
Inside the garage, out of her car, she hurls herself at the inner door as though being chased, fumbles with her keys. Her breathing is fast and irregular. Staccato panic.
She falls inside and slams the door shut. Immediately the feeling subsides. She’s safe now. In her house. Behind its walls. She tears open a package at random and pours the contents directly into her mouth. Salt shreds her palate and tongue.
TV has changed.
Isabel discovers a new genre: game shows without prizes. Aspects of people’s regular lives—job-hunting, moving, clothes-shopping, finding out if they’re pregnant—presented as game-show-style challenges, with no reward beyond the job, the home, the shirt, the baby. She keeps expecting the host to surprise them with a free renovation, a novelty-size check, a crate of diapers and formula, but it never comes. The contestants get nothing out of having the camera pressed in their stricken faces other than being on TV.
TV has changed. She remembers when the programming ended for the night, the test pattern rainbow and its continuous tone. The first time she saw it, as a young teenager, she imagined someone on the other end, like a lighthouse keeper: the man who lives in the broadcast tower and flicks the switch. Now TV is infinite. It streams from the internet, and she can have anything she wants, as much as she wants, anytime. Time speeds and ceases at will. Reverses.
She’s back there. She remembers sitting cross-legged on the ground, on a beach, the fire before her, her back to the open tent, mumbling to herself as though talking to Jan. Tending the fire carefully, as Jan had taught. The wind blew the popping embers away from her as she prodded it into shape, feeding it new wood from Jan’s pile until there was nothing left.
She ate half of the sandwich and left the other half for Jan, just in case. She wrote HELP on the sand in letters made of rocks and pinecones, the way they did in cartoons, in case a plane flew overhead. It took hours to gather enough and arrange them just so.
She reentered the tent only when it was fully dark and too cold to stay outside. She kept her flashlight on all night, and found a corner of the tent where she could lie balled up and see the yellow of Jan’s sleeping bag only out of the corner of her eye. She feared bugs would be drawn to Jan and she’d have to brush them away, she feared Jan’s smell would worsen, she feared the yellow sleeping bag would swell and burst like an overfilled balloon, that Jan would change in some monstrous, undreamed-of way.
