Edge Case

by YZ Chin

  “This morning I looked into it. Log inspection shows that AInstein detected that I’m a woman, and tried to calibrate some of its jokes to fit that assessment. Unfortunately we have not trained AInstein on much data that would make it successful in that area. One thing that it did not pick up on was my reaction expressing disapproval. I took a look at the code. It should be a quick fix to . . .” I trailed off when I saw his expression.

  “What are you doing, looking through code? That’s not your job.”

  “I just thought this might be low-hanging fruit, and I have some free cycles. I’ve been working with the codebase for a while now—”

  “You’re a QA analyst, not an engineer. Your job is to test things.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “The fact that you didn’t find AInstein funny—do you think it might have something to do with the fact that you’re from a different culture?”

  I blinked. The more I did, the faster the anger rattled inside me.

  “What I mean is, maybe Asian humor is different.” Then he added, hastily: “Or like, all foreign humor is different.”

  He didn’t say the phrase “inscrutable Oriental,” but it nevertheless vibrated between us like a hard disk drive whirring to life. I blinked so much that the borders of my contact lenses hardened and cut.

  “So we’re not going to fix AInstein? It’s getting launched as is?” I could see how this would all end. I just wanted it over with.

  “Right, about that. As you know, the engineers held a meeting to discuss the issues you raised. After a robust discussion, they determined that the issues are more edge cases that are outside the scope of an MVP first release.”

  I blinked more, forcing myself to nod.

  “Minimally viable product, you know? So the conclusion is, they hear you, but they have their own concerns with scope creep. You know what that is?”

  “No,” I said, exhausted that, once again, it came down to words and phrases in English I didn’t understand.

  “No problem at all. It’s terminology from project management. Scope creep is when a release gets sidetracked by demands on resources that were not allocated in a project’s original design. So we planned for X amount of effort from engineers to do Y amount of work, right? And now we have to stick to that. Don’t worry, your suggestions are all documented in our backlog. They’ll be reassessed once we’re finished with the MVP.”

  “Can I look at the backlog and add my clarifications?” It was an alarming thought, my concerns represented solely by an engineer paraphrasing me.

  “Of course.” Lucas leaned forward, relaxed and carefree. “By the way, you’re coming to the team outing tonight, right?”

  “Team outing?”

  “Yup, party’s tonight! Perfect time to bond with the rest of the team, let some steam off. I’m counting on you to be there!”

  Why? I wanted to ask. But I just nodded again.

  THE NIGHTCLUB STAFF LOOKED AT US ASKANCE. THERE WE WENT, TROOPING into an establishment owned by Jay-Z with our company-branded backpacks and company-branded vests, office building key cards still clipped to retractable badge holders that dangled off our untucked shirt hems. What were we thinking? Half of the engineers had never listened to a single Jay-Z song in full, while the other half were way too into him.

  It was loud in there. I fell back as Lucas led all of us along, winding our nerdy way deeper into the club’s neon bowels.

  “Here we are!” Lucas shouted. He gestured at a couple of bar-height tables in a particularly dark corner. “It’s ours for the night!”

  “No seats?” Ben asked, sounding a little apprehensive.

  “We’re here to party, not to sit!” Josh gave a little whoop. He put his backpack down on the floor, leaning it against a tulip table’s base. Everyone else followed suit, piling identical backpacks on top of his until there was a little backpack fort. I was grateful I’d left mine behind in the office.

  “Come on, let’s get some drinks!” Lucas said, heading for the bar.

  “I’ll watch our bags,” I said, but no one acknowledged me. They’d all followed after Lucas. I stood there, trying to calculate the minimum time I needed to kill before I could leave and still say that I’d been at the team outing.

  When Lucas came back, he sliced a palm in an arc around his body, indicating the nightclub’s tall posts, decorative LED arrangements, clustered beams of neon lasers, and, for some reason, crystal chandelier. “It’s something, right? Huh?” Wave after wave of light washed over us, changing colors midjourney, making me feel trapped inside a police car’s beacon.

  “Here.” Ben squeezed past Lucas to hand me a drink.

  “What’s this?” The liquid was a bright, warm brown, a lemon peel dunked gracelessly into it.

  “An apology.” Ben looked left, then right, lowering his voice. “Sorry about the lemon. It was supposed to be decoration, but it fell in.”

  “Oh. You don’t have to apologize for that.”

  “No, the apology . . .” A new, louder track started playing, drowning out his words. I leaned in to hear him.

  “. . . it’s just not a good place to be. I’m going to leave, and you should think about it too.”

  I stepped back, confused. “You’re leaving now?” I strained my voice to be heard over the music.

  “No!” He looked alarmed, ducking his head to my level and making little flutters with his free hand. “Not so loud, please. I just started looking this week. I’ll probably start interviewing next month.”

  He gave me a strange look then, peering into my face. We were standing too close, but it was the only way to have a conversation. I wasn’t sure what to do with what Ben had just told me. Why the trust in my discretion now? I’d never had an in-depth conversation with him.

  “Anyway.” He seemed resigned at my lack of reaction. “I just want to say I’m sorry again for how the Bike Shed meeting went. I don’t think the decision was right. Sorry.”

  He turned and wedged his way into the crowd, which consolidated more and more into a single mass every time I looked. First the back of his head was blue, then it was red, and then I couldn’t see him anymore.

  I put my drink down on one of our reserved tables and headed after him. I should have been thrilled by his apology, but I wanted to know exactly what he was sorry for. The decision wasn’t “right”? What was Ben’s perception of “right”? I felt on the cusp of some great discovery. Muttering excuse-me’s and sucking in to pass through the nightclub goers, I began to believe that a vague, hazy part of my self was about to come into focus. It was just a feeling I had, but I pursued it through pulsing tunnels of warm, sweaty arms.

  When I emerged, I headed instinctively for the one part of the landscape that wasn’t gyrating. It was a long bar, spanning my field of vision like a barrier.

  “Edwina!” A hand clapped on my shoulder. I turned; the hand fell away.

  “Didn’t I see you the other day?” Josh shouted. “At the climbing gym?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t climb.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t climb!”

  “Likely story.” He scoffed. “Next you’re gonna say you don’t have a crush on Ben, am I right?”

  “I don’t! You have to stop saying I have a crush on everybody.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I saw you two together earlier. You were looking at him with, like, Bambi eyes.”

  “I’m getting a drink.” I pointed behind my shoulder. There was no point falling into his trap. The more I protested, the more he’d make fun of me.

  “I’ll get one too,” he said, herding me with his body, advancing one sure step at a time, until I was backed against the bar. I felt wetness spread along my spine: spilled beer, pooled wine, leaked spirits.

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  He laughed, spraying hot breath into my face. “Of course I’m drunk. It’s a team outing. We’re here to CELEBRATE!” To demonstrate, he did a version of dancing, wagging his shou
lders and knees in place. Smoothly, fluidly, he transitioned from his dance to planting his hands against the bar, one on each side of me.

  “So. You wanna tell me why you lied about the climbing gym?”

  All around us, people packed into each other. I tried to look past Josh’s shoulder to locate the rest of my coworkers, but saw only scattered limbs and epileptic heads, all anonymous. Even if I did find, say, Darren, what would I do, and what would they do? We worked for a startup barely a year old. We had no code of conduct defined, nothing that said Josh might not corner me against a bar at a team bonding event. Nothing, too, that instructed me on what to do when a teammate such as Josh circled my waist with one arm, as he now did. There were no best practices for how I could handle the situation without jeopardizing my job, my elusive green card, my last hope of making it in America.

  “You know what I think? I think you keep saying you don’t have crushes on those other guys because you have your eyes on someone else.” Josh shuffled forward, affixing his body to mine.

  “I’m married,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” He smirked. “No one on our team is married. What’s his name, your husband?”

  “Marlin. His name is Marlin.”

  “Lemme guess. A white guy. Am I right?”

  “You’re wrong. And that’s kind of offensive. Can you give me some space here?”

  “You’re so funny, you know that?”

  With that he leaned in, eyes flickering shut. The world was green, then it was orange. All those talk show hosts, polished and coiffed, had not prepared me for this. I’d thought that if I could make Americans laugh, then I would be accepted, foreign accent or not. I would be embraced and admired. Well, Josh had just called me funny. What had I accomplished?

  His kiss landed half on my lips and half on my chin as I twisted my neck to see, I am ashamed to say, whether there were any unwanted witnesses. Not seeing any, I levered my arms up so that they were between us, holding Josh off my torso. The moment he slackened, I shoved him and crabbed sideways out of his embrace. His face yellow, then purple. I ran, tracked by searchlights, across the club’s trembling floors all the way to the exit.

  IT WASN’T A BIG DEAL. IT WAS A BIG DEAL. I SAT AT HOME, CRAVING VEGETABLES but finding my fridge stocked with only meat. I salivated over the imagined crunch of raw cauliflower dipped into cool ranch. Snow pea leaves sautéed with garlic, their delicate leaves and hollow veins succumbing to my teeth. Asparagus brutally snapped and smothered in butter. Eggplant blistered beyond recognition into pulp.

  I wasn’t actually hurt, I reasoned. It was more or less just a peck on the cheek. Maybe Josh was so drunk he wouldn’t even remember it by morning, so it would be like nothing had happened. I exhorted myself to think about all the actual suffering that other immigrants went through, the ones who didn’t have my privileges. ICE raids. Family separation. Neglect and death in detention centers. Real sexual abuse. I was lucky, so lucky.

  What if Marlin had been there? Watching from the crowd?

  My mind broke down when this electrifying image flashed in. He would have been grimly triumphant, what he’d foretold manifesting into truth—I was indeed an unfaithful wife. I tried to brush the thought aside as nonsense. But what did it mean, that he had predicted this situation? It couldn’t possibly be actual powers of premonition. So then, what? Had I been walking around with the look of vulnerable prey, inviting attack? Thoughts blinked and buzzed, a slender beam of attention roving and rotating among them. Nightclub brain.

  After

  Day Eleven (Saturday)

  Seven missed calls and a voice message from last night. The voice mail was from Eamon.

  “Hey, I called a few times but you didn’t pick up. Anyway, Cachi wants to interview me on Monday. I told them during my phone screen that I have other offers waiting. Guess it worked, since they’re fast-tracking me.” A pause. “Call me if you hear from Marlin, okay?”

  Two of the missed calls were from Katie. When I called her back, she chirped that she was on her way over.

  “For what?” I pinched the flabby part of my elbow, trying to calm myself down.

  “Girls’ day out! No husband, no baby.”

  I noticed the “husband,” singular, and felt a brief pump of despair. But she meant well, I knew. She was going to all this trouble for me. And anything was better than marinating in further thoughts about Josh, wondering what he would do next.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Awesome! You’ve earned it!”

  As if there existed some kind of employer who accepted anguish as labor, who doled out little treats to those who put in their hours at suffering.

  Following Katie’s lead, I stood in line on a sidewalk for pastries whose names I could not pronounce, such as kouign-amann and schnecken. It was a windy day; I could feel my hair tangling. By the time our position in the snaking line crossed the threshold into a tiny storefront, I was ready to declare whatever the bakery sold as the best thing ever.

  Perhaps that was what I needed, I idly thought. I should create some easily surmountable hurdles and then surmount them.

  “So? Have you checked out the dating app yet?”

  “Katie, it’s been less than two weeks.”

  “I’m not saying you have to sleep with anyone! Just make a new friend or two.”

  “You’re my friend.”

  “Yes, and I’m here for you, but I also know that I don’t spend as much time with you as before, since Su-Ann and everything. It doesn’t hurt to have someone else to talk to.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Knowing you, you’re probably keeping things to yourself because you don’t want to burden other people.”

  I cringed. It was true I’d decided not to tell her about Josh at the nightclub. But I was nowhere near as selfless as she was making me out to be. I simply couldn’t bear to admit that after Marlin questioned my fidelity, I’d stood, stunned and silent, while a man I didn’t even like put his mouth on me.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” Katie said, trying again, “but maybe it’s time to move on. It doesn’t look like he’s coming back.”

  “How do you know that?” I stared into her eyes, challenging, letting indignant righteousness wash over me, even though I knew it was unfair. Anything was preferable to plain old pain.

  “Okay, I’ll drop it.” She hefted her croissant bag higher on her shoulder and looked away. I was disappointed. Secretly I wanted her to keep up her persuasion. It would let me briefly hold the power to frustrate and disappoint for a change. Let me be cruel, to see what it felt like.

  Or maybe, just like I’d done with my mother, I simply wanted to do the opposite of whatever Katie wished for me.

  After we brushed crumbs of baked goods off our faces, Katie led the way to a spa. As soon as we entered, a room full of Asian faces swiveled toward us, some of them partially obscured by surgical masks. A woman with permed hair stood up and said: “Yes?”

  I let Katie handle the talking. I would never be in my element at a salon. I zoned out, thinking about why it was that Katie never seemed to visit the same salon twice. Each time she bent my arm for a “spa day,” we always ended up in a different spot, and I could never tell what made one place preferable to another.

  Katie ticked off a list of services she wanted while the woman with permed hair assented. Their conversation dissolved into the hum of the space, blending in with the AC unit’s rattles and the tinkle of what I believe is called “crystal music.” Sometimes the soft whirs of massage chairs joined the music. I was spacing out, lulled, when suddenly a sentence jumped out from the background hum, automatically highlighted by my brain:

  “Where are you from?”

  The question was directed at both of us. The salon employee who’d asked wore her hair in a ponytail, showing off the pointy elven ears holding up the straps of her mask. Katie gave me a Look. “New York,” she said, throwing in some attitude.

  “Speak Chinese?”
Ponytail asked.

  “No.” Katie was positively frosty.

  I demurred. I didn’t even want to be here.

  “Pick a color,” Ponytail instructed us.

  I stood in front of the rows and rows of miniature bottles and felt a rising sense of panic. It was chaos, overwhelming. True, the bottles were organized according to their places on the spectrum of light. But they all also bore a secondary identifier that had tangential connection to their essence. For example, what looked to the human eye (admittedly deficient when it came to color detection) like an uncomplicated red was labeled “Vamp It Up.” This then required my brain to perform work and unpack the allusion, something like: (vampires-> blood-> red) * (to vamp-> to seduce) == a pun meant to put in mind femme fatales, “fatale” because of the vampiric angle, c.f. man-eaters, end goal being to produce a feeling of sexy badassery while applying coats of paint to unfeeling parts of fingers.

  And it was like that for two entire shelves, one after another, exhausting exercises that stoked my fear of not fitting in or “getting it,” summoning flashbacks of when I’d first arrived in America and had no clue what ER (the show) was, plus had never made the acquaintance of one Ferris Bueller, whom my college classmates kept name-dropping in conversations. Any number of quotes from movies, songs, and breakfast-cereal commercials sailed past my head. It was like I’d learned English from a dictionary that had huge chunks ripped out. In reaction, I doubled my efforts to be fluent-sounding. I even took a Middle English seminar, all so I could feel like I was gaining an upper hand in some way. I would wield the language more properly than native speakers could, I thought. But here I was, made uneasy again by pop culture in a nail salon.

  Dizzy, I forced myself to stop my eyes from sweeping over the endless parade of bottles. I clutched an edge of the display shelf.

  “What’s up with you?” My turn to be on the receiving end of a Katie SooHoo Look. “You’re acting like a robot.”

  Numbly, I floated along with the word association (robot-> metal) and picked up a bottle of silver polish. I resisted looking at the label for as long as I could, but the technicians who would be working on us were busy with the footbaths, making me think of pots prepared for lobsters. I gave in.