Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  Bond grabbed a favor and examined it. He scoffed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just realized how hungry I am.”

  “The BRIDE was fucking stingy about the food, am I right?” Marlon said. “What was up with those portions?”

  “Give a bunch of Cambos money,” Bond answered, “and they’re still gonna believe a coup d’état’s coming for us.”

  “And that, my beautiful brother,” Marlon said, “is what makes the Cambo world go round.”

  Bond unwrapped the wedding favor. He popped the stale chocolate into his mouth. “I do find it strange, though, that we ended up where we, like, ended up.”

  “Yeah, it really is,” Marlon said. “Glad you also think it.” He threw an empty favor into the street, and Bond, without even thinking, elbowed Marlon’s side for him to stop.

  Bond took a deep breath. He felt calm, but his hands were shaky. Dizzy from the alcohol, he could feel a headache coming. He focused on his shoes, held tightly on to his bottle, and when the sky stopped spinning, he assembled the words he’d intended to say all night: “I . . . I thought you were doing better.”

  And Marlon, having expected this, exhaled. “Yeah. I thought so, too.”

  The brothers faced one another, each giving that look they had been exchanging ever since they could remember. Even when you’re the biggest fool, I got you.

  “I mean,” Bond started, “I know it’s just alcohol and weed, but Mom—”

  “You know how many jobs I’ve tried applying for?” Marlon asked.

  Bond shook his head. “I didn’t know you were doing that already.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t keep track anymore,” Marlon said. “And it’s not like I don’t get interviews, but I just . . . I can’t formulate thoughts anymore, you know? I get asked these questions over the phone, like ‘What are you hoping for in a team’ or ‘Describe your strengths and weaknesses,’ and my brain—my brain’s totally fucked.”

  With no words to say, Bond placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  “Also not helpful we got autogenocided,” Marlon said, falling back onto the grass.

  “Not at all,” Bond responded, “sure as hell isn’t.” Then he found himself, yet again, breaking into laughter, which in turn made Marlon crack up, and after a moment of more giddiness, of this necessary nonsense, after they finally settled down, they soaked in the silence, let it collect over them.

  “When’s the next time I’m gonna see you, anyway?”

  “Not sure,” Bond answered, registering a disappointment that Marlon could barely disguise. “But when I visit, maybe we can actually do something for a change. Like, go bowling or something.”

  “Now that would be hella fun. Nice, really.”

  “Right? So let’s make it happen.”

  Before returning to the house, the brothers emptied the rest of the favors, methodically unwrapping the mesh around each, until not one chocolate was left uneaten. And they imagined aloud all the nice things they could do together. They imagined a future severed from their past mistakes, the history they inherited, a world in which—with no questions asked, no hesitation felt—they completed the simple actions they thought, discussed, and dreamed.

  Human Development

  I was at a Memorial Day barbecue in the Mission, barely drinking but using my cold beer as an excuse for belligerence, screaming about the math prodigy from our freshman dorm who had been, and probably still was, a white predator of Asian women. “It needs to be said!” I shouted, as half of a gay kickball team scowled at me from the beer pong table. The only difference between college and adulthood was that my peers could now afford custom tables built for drinking games.

  We were three years out of Stanford, most of us clinging to the Bay Area, and I was the only one not working in tech, and thus the only one without tech money. My life was also pathetically devoid of tech catered lunches, tech laundry services, tech Wi-Fi commuter buses, tech holiday bonuses, tech personalized yoga sessions, tech subsidized gym memberships at Equinox, tech health and dental insurance and unlimited tech PTO, and of course those tech company T-shirts and hoodies that never fit well on anyone, unless the CEO had sprung for a corporate partnership with Lululemon or Patagonia. Not that I felt left out; though I should have, given the state of my bank account. My job was to teach rich kids with fake Adderall prescriptions how to be “socially conscious” at a private high school in Marin. The Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity—that was the official title for my two-year-long position, of which I had just finished the first, and the class I taught for the service learning department was called Human Development. To my knowledge, this kind of indoctrination existed exclusively at the most elite of private high schools, the ones whose names started with a capitalized The and ended with a capitalized School, as if only the wealthy possessed a real capacity to “develop.”

  Most days I tried to forget that my salary was less than a year’s tuition, which many of my students paid for through their trust funds. Summer break had just started, and I wasn’t even tutoring, though I needed the extra cash, and probably the social interaction. Still, the concept of high school tuition made me sick.

  “Why the fuck would you say something like that?” asked my twin sister’s friend, the one who’d invited me to the party, and who was, among other things, a Taiwanese woman working at Google. “Give us a trigger warning next time, Anthony—Jesus.”

  “Why’s the goal of this party to reclaim the culture of closeted frat bros?” I snapped, to make sure she registered my intention of tanking the enterprise of our conversation.

  My sister’s friend scowled at me. “Why’d you even come tonight?” she asked with contempt. “You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

  Absent an answer, I chugged the rest of my beer. I was in a bad mood.

  The entire afternoon I had already wasted trying to overhaul my Human Development class for the upcoming school year. My plan was to abandon the glib lessons on microaggressions, the cringey videos of teenagers role-playing scenes of consent, the PowerPoints that neutered “big” political issues into handy vocabulary terms—everything that was deemed by the social learning department, which was hilariously Caucasian, as “fundamental yet appropriate.” After a lacrosse player in my previous class had equated using the N-word to the tone of liberals saying “conservative voter,” I decided that high school sophomores would learn more about being decent humans by reading Moby-Dick. I felt very serious about this new direction for my pedagogy as the Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity, so serious that I was altering the established curriculum without informing my white woman boss. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do the work. I hadn’t even started rereading Moby-Dick.

  Five beers later, I was sitting on the couch next to a mob of backend engineers, all of them wasted, lurid in their stated heterosexuality, and deep into a Super Smash Bros. tournament. I texted my sister: this party’s in the gay capital of the world and straight incels are playing video games. I waited for a reply until I remembered New York City was three hours ahead. I texted her again: still can’t believe you left SF you asshole.

  Then I actually got drunk and yelled at a former philosophy classmate. An ex-co-op dude with bleached hair and mediocre stick-and-pokes, he had sold out to become a technical writer for Palantir because his parents had stopped paying his rent. Nobody wanted to hear him talk about Hannah Arendt, I kept asserting, with aggression, to him and his VC consultant girlfriend. I actually loved discussing Arendt—she was the topic of my senior honors thesis—but I was too drunk to recall that. When my former classmate began reciting the first sentence of The Human Condition, I muttered something about needing ketamine to disassociate from his very existence, then returned to the couch and scrolled through Grindr, blocking the profiles of every kickball player who was at the party. It was a political statement, not a sexual preference, and regret punched me in the dick when I looked up and realized the guy I
’d just blocked was also on his phone, staring directly at me, disappointment slapped across his face. He was hotter in person, too, with broad shoulders, tanned skin from all the kickball, but I got over it. I felt like bottoming. And didn’t feel like being a hypocrite by letting a white predator colonize my rectum.

  It took real intuition and finagling to sift through the preponderance of white-on-white-on-white-on-white profiles—the white muscle daddies and sparkling white twinks, the white otters and white gaymers, the white gym rats trying to sell steroids to doughy white tech bros. What can I say?—I chose six-dollar lattes over the premium fee that empowered gay racists to segregate their sex lives. I messaged ten profiles of color in a row with some combination of “hey,” an emoji, and a few nudes so they could see I was decently attractive from more than one angle. One Asian guy replied immediately: hey, I’m also Khmer! Can’t believe I found you on this app. You know only .0009 percent of America is a gay Khmer man. Hope we’re not cousins cause you’re cute as fuck.

  Beer rushed up and seared my throat, producing a painful burp. I had forgotten writing “I’m Cambodian” in my profile so that guys would stop asking me what I “am.” Forgot because guys never read my profile anyway, and still dragged me into ethnicity guessing games all the time, as though our Grindr messages were a trivia night hosted at a previously hip bar. People of all races, even other Asian men, thought my exact ethnic composition impressed a specific bearing on the way I handled a penis.

  I reread the message and cringed, then Instagram-stalked his photos to make sure none of my family members were featured. Ben Lam, he was called, his haircut looking expensive, bone structure chiseled. He was manicured and presentable, wearing tight-fitting clothes in every photo—Christ—even his bedroom selfies. Like many Cambodian people in the Bay Area, he was from my hometown in the valley—not Silicon Valley, I should make clear, but the insufferably hot and arid one two hours east. We appeared to have zero blood relation. That was good. Though at forty-five—two decades older than me—he looked young the way older gay men do when they hit the gym twice a day, seven days a week, with monomaniacal drive.

  Hoping I wasn’t taller than him, that he was at least five ten, I messaged back: can u host?

  Thirty minutes later, I was riding the 14 bus down Mission Street and into Soma, staring out the window and trying to ignore the gay couple in a screaming match. One of them had broken the rules of their open relationship by sleeping with the other’s ex. It sucked that my budget had absolutely no leeway for taking Uber pools to my hookups. As the sidewalks transitioned from trendy restaurants to homeless encampments to glassy corporate lobbies, I tried to remember the point in the night when I’d decided to have sex. Mostly I didn’t want to mope around my apartment, where I would lie awake doing nothing because my Internet was too slow to stream anything, the Filipino guy who’d moved into my sister’s room having crippled the apartment’s Wi-Fi with his online gaming. It appalled me that he paid San Francisco rent only to play video games all day and night, every goddamn weekend, and never go outside.

  Ben lived in a luxury apartment complex, the kind with amenities, with doormen, a saltwater pool even, according to the billboard outside, and he answered the door in nothing but sharp white briefs. Unsure if he was trying to be sexy, I greeted him with a one-armed side hug. We were the exact same size and height, only my muscles had a normal-looking density.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. “What’s your name? Your profile didn’t say.”

  “Can I get some water?” I asked, dizzy and ignoring his question.

  He pointed into a room. “Sure. Just wait for me there. You can sit on the bed.”

  After hydrating, we kissed until I pushed Ben down, straddled his body, and asked if he wanted to fuck me. “Sure, of course,” he said, so after struggling a bit with the condom wrapper—he insisted on the protection—we covered his dick with latex and lube. Then, as I eased him into my body, I let out a soft, involuntary moan, which startled him into a look of cautious bewilderment, as though he’d just received praise after worrying he’d been doing less than a good job. His apparent inexperience suddenly made me feel inexperienced, too, but our energy was good, intimate even, and we settled into a natural, fumbling rhythm.

  I’m not sure if that look ever quit his face, because we ended up in some version of doggy style. He had wanted to do missionary, but seemed oblivious to the differences between heterosexual missionary and—for lack of a better term—gay hookup missionary. When he pulled out and unwrapped his dick, he asked me where I wanted him to finish, and I told him wherever he wanted, except I wasn’t in the mood for swallowing. It wasn’t long before a jet of lukewarm semen landed across my back, and he collapsed on top of me. For a second, our bodies were like a grilled cheese sandwich glued together with not quite enough cheese.

  Rolling off me, he landed in the bed, then caressed my back. I didn’t know how to transition into this new dynamic, felt awkward that we weren’t still having sex. It seemed bizarre now to launch into conversation, to interact by sharing biographical facts rather than saliva, semen, and touch. He was Cambodian, from the shittier valley. Same as me. What else, really, did I need to know?

  “What’re you up to tomorrow?” he asked, his right leg thrown over me, along with an arm. “I’m gonna walk the Golden Gate Bridge with some friends.”

  “An earthquake can send the bridge right into the bay,” I answered, “and I wouldn’t care, not at all.”

  He looked at me with confusion, his silence conveying total uncertainty in how to respond, so I laughed to make sure he knew I was mostly joking. It was a laugh I often forced when dealing with students. This triggered a laugh of relief from him.

  “What did the Golden Gate Bridge ever do to you?” he finally asked.

  Surprised by his response, that he was invested in my reasoning, I laughed again, genuinely this time. Usually people dismissed my contempt for the biggest tourist attraction of the Bay Area.

  “During the school year I commute across it. The sights get old, real quick.”

  “That would do it.”

  “Let’s do this again,” I found myself saying. “My name is Anthony, by the way.”

  He smiled and kissed me before leaving the bed to take a piss. I took the time to make sure the sheets weren’t stained by cum or shit. I wanted to keep things feeling clean.

  THE NEXT THREE DAYS I slept at Ben’s place. Something about submitting to his body, the permanent newness of his luxury apartment, and the beginning of June, it all knocked me into a kind of productivity. Every morning I walked to my regular coffee shop and read Moby-Dick, marking up passages I could teach, until the late afternoon, or until Ben texted me to come back, whichever came first.

  It felt nice, in Ben’s clean clothes, to become reacquainted with Moby-Dick. It was the first novel I’d ever read that didn’t care for resolutions. It validated for me the experience of confusion, of exploring something as stupid and vast as a white whale, as an ocean. Or, at least, it made me feel okay about the philosophy major I’d settled on after failing all my classes in chemistry, first, and then economics. Equipping teenagers to sniff out the nonsense of society, I told myself, that was the logic behind this new curriculum. I wanted my students to understand the doomed nature of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick, the profound calm of Ishmael’s aimless wandering, the difference between having “purpose,” like Ahab, and finding “meaning,” like Ishmael. I thought my students should learn the best ways to be lost.

  The morning I finally took the Muni back to my Inner Sunset apartment, my regular coffee shop was booked for a networking mixer targeted at single coders. I was pissed off by the mixer because stickers reading QUEERS HATE TECHIES were pasted all over the bathroom. The pointless stickers had previously made me laugh because every “radicalized” gay guy I knew worked for Apple as a UX designer, but now, seeing this mixer, I became furious at the management for leaving them up without committing to their politics
, or, hell, even just the aesthetic. In terms of San Francisco subcultures, the coffee shop was trying to have its cake and eat it, too, and I texted my sister that the place was dead to me. Then, for good measure, I sent her a picture of Ben, dubbed “the first Cambodian guy to fuck me.”

  By the time I reached my apartment, my sister had thoroughly interrogated me about Ben—about the minutiae of his life that couldn’t be gathered from a straight statistical analysis of his LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. I told her what I knew, that Ben was a recent online MBA grad and a late bloomer who’d started living as openly gay in his late thirties. He had moved to San Francisco to network with venture capitalists, after taking care of his mom until she died of a diabetes-related stroke, which was part of why he’d been such a closet case. These days he was living off life insurance money, freelance data-base coding gigs, and renting out his dead mom’s house on Airbnb.

  My sister texted me: he sounds like a guy mom would arrange-marry to me.

  I texted back: yeah he’s low key infuriating but his apartment has working Wifi.

  She responded: lol, still using sex for free shit. Glad to know you haven’t changed.

  My sister never commented on the fact that Ben was Cambodian, or that he was almost twice my age, though she was probably used to my flings with older men—my daddy phase hit hard in college, when I’d loathed everyone our age even more than I did now. Still, I felt a pang of resentment toward her, for not acknowledging the strangeness, the idiotic sadness, of my finding a Cambodian dude to fuck me a decade too late, long after I’d stopped fantasizing about the perfect boyfriend who would just “get” me.

  I texted: I hate everyone, quit your job and move back.

  She answered: stop being dramatic, you’re the Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity. Also, fucking shit, I love my new job.

  Back in my own apartment, I lay in my bed, surrounded by stacks of dusty books from college. All these classic stories and groundbreaking theories I was too lazy to throw out or even organize. The next big earthquake—fuck, even a door slammed too hard—would’ve buried me in a mountain of recorded thought no one gave a shit about anymore. I stared at the ceiling while my sister texted me about the eccentric new boss who’d convinced everyone on her marketing team to do a juice cleanse, about the unmatched congeniality of her coworkers, the shocking number of employees who also happened to be women of color, how every other Thursday the company rented out an entire bar for happy hour, even though their office kitchen was stocked with craft beer on tap. It had been totally worth the semipermanent dislocation, this dream job of hers.