Family Trust

by Kathy Wang

  In the evening, after the kids had gone to sleep—or at least been installed in their respective rooms, alternately muttering to themselves and wailing at the injustice of bedtime—Kate walked through Francie, moving from space to space. She wore Ethan’s and Ella’s small backpacks on each arm for the exercise, which allowed her to easily pick up and deposit misplaced thermos bottles, books, and stray items of clothing. The routine was one of those crucial time-savers that were supposed to make life bearable for working moms with young children, a small item on a long list of suggestions Kate always found inane but still couldn’t stop herself from reading online.

  Linda had left the house an hour earlier, after covering dinner and the first half of the bedtime rush while Kate dropped off two books and multiple bags of produce at Stanley’s. Her father had been insistent that she come in and watch as he performed a series of stretches, all while Mary hovered nearby, every few minutes aggressively offering up a variety of tasteless red bean pastries. It was the sort of imposition that would have driven Stanley crazy in earlier years—as a child, Kate had felt hot pinpricks of nervousness whenever someone took too long to check out at the grocery store or back up from their parking spot, as there would inevitably come a point when Stanley’s annoyance abruptly spilled over to rage, and he would start barking that they needed to hurry up, hurry the fuck up, who the fuck did they think they were? But his illness had accelerated the relaxation of former standards that very strict adults tend to go through as they age, and now Stanley seemed to not care at all that she had mentioned she couldn’t stay when he’d answered the door. Instead he’d sat cross-legged on the white shag carpet in the family room, slowly contorting into a position he called the “praying butterfly.” As the delay extended, Kate had felt an increasing sense of panic, as she imagined Linda eyeing the wall clock in her kitchen. She’d been careful to obscure the exact nature of her outing, couching it as a series of quick errands, since she knew Linda viewed Stanley’s requests as inane, a list of useless demands of which only the lowest-hanging fruit should be given consideration. When Kate finally returned home, however, her mother had immediately struck at the heart of her obfuscation. “And how’s your father?” she asked, posing the question as if indulging a child an imaginary friend. “You just saw him, mmm?”

  Kate hesitated for only a moment before deciding against lying, which rarely worked with Linda anyway. “He’s fine. In a good mood, actually. He’s been seeing a lot of friends, going out, watching movies.”

  “Oh? So he’s doing very well now?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. He’s supposed to return soon to Kaiser for a few more tests, to see what kind of treatment they can pursue. I was dropping off some fruits and vegetables I picked up at the farmers’ market; apparently his doctor said he should try to eat healthier.”

  “Why can’t he go get his own food? Since he has so much time to have fun?”

  “There were also a few books he wanted me to buy. You know how he loves reading.”

  “Huh.” Linda snorted. She held a dim view of Stanley’s literary prowess. “He doesn’t read, just flips pages on the treadmill. He’s not exercising now, is he? He should be resting!”

  “So you do care. Why don’t you have dinner with us? He asks about it literally every time I see him. It would really make him happy, improve his spirits.”

  “His spirits? Didn’t you just say he’s in such a good mood?”

  “You know what I mean. And who knows how much time he has left?” Kate paused, waiting. “We should make the most of it, regardless of what happens.”

  “Hmm.” Linda sniffed the air, as if a particularly strong odor had just passed. “And my time isn’t valuable?”

  In the kitchen now, Kate went to the fridge to toss out old food. She guiltily upended a large bowl of Thai chicken stir-fry, slamming down the garbage lid so as to avoid witnessing the waste. She had cooked it herself, in a rare hour of domestic experimentation, but neither Denny nor the children had liked it, and she’d only been able to stomach eating half before she gave up and shoved it toward the back with the cold beverages. She tried not to be irritated by the fact that she was always the one who ate the unwanted leftovers, busily calculating the days of meals remaining and their relative shelf lives, whereas Denny thought nothing of bringing home an extra chicken shawarma just because he happened to be driving by Dish n’ Dash. Why not? What was the point of stressing over $43 of wasted wild-caught turbot, sacrificed so the family could indulge a craving for pizza? Life was short, and then you died. The ultimate argument.

  As she riffled through the retrieved mail stack, Kate saw little of importance: the usual flyers and catalogs, many of which were inexplicably mailed in duplicate. She had long ceased shredding credit card applications, figuring anyone looking to steal her identity could find easier routes to do so, and chucked them intact in their envelopes. There was a long-overdue holiday card from her college roommate, an angry Missourian named Lizzy who now lived in Piedmont. Lizzy was a copywriter who worked from home while caring for her three young children and spent her days getting into fights on social media. Kate made a note to ask her over for brunch the following weekend—she’d time the invite with sufficient advance notice to still be polite but close enough that most likely Lizzy would turn it down, thus earning herself credit for having reached out without actually needing to endure another rage-filled soliloquy over the agony of raising twins. “I am not a spectacle!” Lizzy liked to declare. “Motherhood is not an event!”

  Halfway through, Kate noticed she had already set aside two issues of The Economist, as well as a smattering of other titles. This was highly unusual. Even during his most slovenly periods, when the mail accumulated for weeks, her husband still did drive-by snipings. Denny firmly believed that reading was an integral part of his job as a start-up CEO, a practice routinely overlooked by the multitude of entrepreneurs he competed against on a daily basis, the twentysomething wunderkinds with bad skin and good PR who’d begun coding shortly after elementary school. He lamented there was something seriously wrong about a generation that assumed it could simply absorb necessary knowledge on demand, as if years of life experience and study could be distilled into an hour-long TED Talk or thread on Reddit.

  Kate made her way to the attic, where she deposited the issues in their proper stacks. Normally the converted workspace had the atmosphere of a frat house in early morning: food and cables scattered about, a scent of human omnipresent in the air. It was only the previous year that Denny had started to allow the cleaners to tidy up during their visits—prior to that, conditions had been even worse, with Kate surreptitiously creeping up each week to clear out crusted dishes and dirty mugs. It was gross, but there’d also been a charming element to the task: a glimpse into a hidden sphere of her husband, his daily belongings accumulated in messy piles only he knew the system behind.

  Now the long desk was almost entirely bare, aside from a warehouse-size box of sparkling water bottles. Kate tried to recall the last time she had come up. A month? Longer? She used to regularly ask Denny about how his work was progressing, though as the plans for CircleShop had advanced she found him increasingly pricklish on the topic. “It puts pressure on me when you nag,” he complained. “I enter a shitty headspace.”

  She wandered over to the blank monitor screens. Next to them, Denny’s agenda lay open. She thumbed through it, taking care not to wrinkle the paper. Apart from a few meetings, there was remarkably little for the past two and upcoming six months.

  Where was all the work for CircleShop? Normally the dry-erase board was filled with the scribbled momentum of Denny’s brainstorm sessions with his team of hired-gun programmers, and the counters were strewn with articles of interest, partner pitches, and sample term sheets. (Denny was in the middle of fund-raising, supposedly close to securing an angel round of hard commitments.) Kate looked around and noted with alarm that even the standing easel that acted as the scrum board was empty, entirely d
evoid of black permanent marker and the neon sticky notes that outlined tasks to be done, in progress, and finished. Had the concept imploded? Undergone a dramatic pivot? But it was a crucial period, and it was unlikely that Denny—who had plowed the past year of his life full-time into CircleShop’s current business model—would suddenly give it all up before the platform had even launched. Just last weekend she had ventured a gentle inquiry into the work’s progress as they prepared breakfast—she had been relieved to find him optimistic, even cheerful on the topic. “I feel like a crucial stage’s been passed,” he said. “I can breathe.”

  So then why were Denny’s days empty?

  What was her husband doing, up in the attic?

  * * *

  Sonny Agrawal was a genius.

  That at least was the undisputed party line within X Corp, the technology behemoth where Kate had worked for more than a decade, an eternity in Silicon Valley. While it was true that X Labs—the so-called moonshot group Sonny headed, where projects such as the eradication of entire insect species were studied—was located not at headquarters but at one of X Corp’s auxiliary buildings, where high-cost, low-revenue divisions were shuffled to by their parent after they’d lost their initial luster, it was a dire mistake to underestimate him, an error that had been made only by the least politically savvy over the years.

  Sonny had already been decades into a lauded career as one of MIT’s most renowned physics professors when Alexei Sokolov, then an impressionable undergraduate, had enrolled in his much-heralded and oversubscribed course on special relativity; eight years later, after Alexei had launched X and it was clear the start-up was well on its way to deca-unicorn valuations, he’d been insistent on bringing on board the professor he’d worshipped in college. Sonny’s official title was EVP, executive vice president, but he was known throughout X Corp for possessing the highest status of all: FOS, or Friend of Sokolov. Each quarter he was threatened with public career flagellation before acquiescing to being hauled in front of a skeptical board of directors to explain an ever-widening gap between R&D and revenue—that he survived each time, seemingly without consequence, only further cemented his position.

  Possibly it was the decades of ingrained experience with an explosively tempered parent that made Kate such an ideal employee for Sonny, or maybe it was one of those mysteries of personality combination, the fact that she required little stated praise or verbal recognition to remain motivated (for which she gave thanks to Linda Liang). Whatever the reason, at three years as a director in product management, Kate had enjoyed a tenure multiples of length longer than any of Sonny’s other direct reports, the rest of whom had either quit or been fired during one of his more furious sulks. So far she’d outlasted the number-one-ranked mathematics graduate of Tsinghua, two of Sonny’s first cousins, and a mouthy quantum computing engineer from NASA; the latest casualty, a postdoc specializing in the bewildering field of contemplation, had left of his own volition to return to male modeling.

  Even with Sonny’s idiosyncrasies, Kate didn’t mind her job. It provided a degree of freedom convenient for the operation of a household containing two young children; most days, Sonny legitimately followed through on a stated disinterest in micromanagement and gave little care if Kate left early or arrived late. It was only during the rare periods when the Labs were close to launching a viable product—and thus subject to increased scrutiny from corporate overlords—that Kate put in the sort of hours she used to, earlier in her career, before kids. On those occasions Denny did the pickups from school, the feeding of dinner, and the bedtime routines, while Kate stayed late at the office harassing factories and browbeating engineers into submission.

  Two years earlier, when Sonny appeared at work after the Christmas holiday on crutches—the aftermath of a minor skiing accident in Lake Tahoe—the entire office had held its breath. Sonny was the sort of academic-cum-executive who even in the rosiest periods of health found a task like brewing tea inexplicably frustrating; after his injury, such minute yet indispensable chores became nearly impossible. His residence, a renovated cottage in Menlo Park with a myriad of thresholds and a layout that bizarrely had all the bathrooms located on the second floor, had become a deathtrap; in response, he began to keep increasingly long hours at the office, where as the senior man on the totem pole any passing employee could be finagled into doing his bidding. This practice was quickly halted by human resources, however, after an employee complained of carpal tunnel brought on by the repetitive motion of pushing Sonny for hours back and forth in the office hammock; afterward his mood, generally pleasantly imperious before, descended into morose and biting.

  “Why should I help mankind,” he carped, “when man does not help me?” He refused to make any product decisions, ditching meetings and executive reviews; as Sonny was the crucial linchpin for nearly every engineering and research milestone, work slid to a halt.

  X Corp eventually solved the problem by hiring a team of geriatric nurses, a pair of six five identical twin Samoans, to assist Sonny both in the office and at home. The nurses were issued temporary employee badges, and at least one was usually found within arm’s length of their charge at all times, caddying various electronics or occasionally Sonny himself to his next destination. Once Sonny’s leg healed, the Samoans moved on, but by then he’d become obsessed with the concept of a personal assistant to perform a variety of tasks, adapting to learned preferences over time. Sonny was convinced he should be able to arise each morning, call for hot chai, and have the kitchen kettle immediately switch itself on; if he accidentally left his X Corp pullover by the front door the night before, he wanted it transferred by drone to his bedside by 6:00 a.m., so as to not suffer the indignity of walking downstairs without a layer of fleece to combat the frigid morning air. It had taken the Samoans nearly a week of daily attempts to learn exactly how he liked breakfast; once they mastered eggs over easy, he bemoaned their failure to execute requested amendments.

  “Sometimes a man wants something different!” he howled, having usurped a program review to launch into a monologue of his latest personal frustrations. “Did I not state very clearly the night before, that I would like oatmeal and slippers by the door in the morning? And yet what do I get instead? Eggs, again. On a blue plate, the first thing I see when I wake, those disgusting, quivering little yolks. Fucking eggs. Fucking idiots.”

  Everyone had looked nervously around for the Samoans, who were both thankfully out of earshot, examining dried mango snacks in the break room. “If I had a machine, a real AI operating off a universal platform like I’ve been saying we need to develop,” Sonny continued, “I wouldn’t need to say anything. It would already know from my latest digestive results to offer something high fiber and to gauge from temperature readings that my feet would feel cold in the morning, and everything would have been executed to perfection. A dream! But because we’re stuck with humans, with all their revolting errors, what do I get? Runny eggs and cold feet. Do you know how that feels, when you are recovering from a knee injury? Like the devil himself is pushing tiny hot knives into your soles, and I will no longer tolerate. . . .”

  The latter half of the rant eventually led to the genesis of Slippers, the code name for the machine learning project soon fast-tracked to the highest priority levels within X Labs. Sonny proposed Slippers as the central “eyes and ears” of the home, though his long-term vision had it everywhere: at the gym monitoring posture via smartwatch, at the office in the laptop as a minutes recorder and fact-checker, and in the air via drone, tracking children on their way to school while scanning for activity from known pedophiles nearby. A perfect virtual assistant to manage every irksome detail of a busy person’s life, its multitude of functions enabled by the design of Slippers as a pure software platform, compatible with any hardware host meeting its specifications, rendering it universally ubiquitous.

  “This will be the greatest achievement of our lives,” Sonny had boomed at the kickoff, which featured a Hawaiian barb
ecue and Elvis impersonators wearing blue suede moccasins. The crowd had been restless that day; even in those earlier times, the employee base was jaded about the idea of their ill-functioning hoverboard and X-ray vision goggle prototypes ever hitting the market. “You will tell your grandchildren about how you worked on Slippers.”

  Nate Singleton, an associate product manager with the look of a valedictorian, who’d reported to Kate at the time, had rolled his eyes. “Million to one this thing dies a quick and painful death,” he predicted. “Come next season, Agrawal will be all gung ho again about his floating country on the sea. And any evidence of this little project will have been removed from the premises.”

  Singleton had been the early foreshadowing of a certain breed of cynical millennial, a tiresome species soon to invade the halls of the Labs in force, but he hadn’t been entirely wrong. Two years later, while the pair of wireless devices Kate held in her palm were a direct result of Slippers, they hadn’t come from the Labs. As soon as Sonny’s tinkerings had given indications of wider commercial applications, they’d immediately caught the attentions of Ken Bullis, the company’s chief brand officer, a marketer who spent the majority of his time marketing himself both internally and externally as a “product guy.” Bullis was notorious for trawling the halls of X Corp, seeking out products to glom on to; though he rarely succeeded in sucking his targets into his direct sphere of command, he had acquired a reputation for a certain instinct, a nose for those projects most arousing to executive management and investors. Once Bullis began to inquire into Slippers, the project had immediately piqued the interest of the greater leadership team, setting off a round of political jockeying.

  The ultimate victor of the beauty contest was the consumer hardware group, led by its general manager, Ron Fujihara, who claimed his team had previously reviewed a similar idea and thus had jus primae noctis to the entire initiative. Once Slippers passed concept review, Fujihara—usually accompanied by Bullis, who had attached himself to the project like a barnacle—made a quarterly trek to the Labs to pet Sonny’s ego and present the latest updates. Though isolated geographically, Sonny was still a Friend of Sokolov, and thus an enemy best avoided. That morning, Ron had presented Sonny with a set of wrapped engineering samples, neatly placed in a gift bag with a bottle of d’Yquem.