I waited for her to ask me when I was applying to grad school, if I’d signed up for the GRE yet, as she’d done every week since we graduated from Stanford, but she only went on about her job. Sounds like you’re having a great time, I texted, before falling asleep and waking up to another wasted day.
Several days later, after Ben learned that I was subsisting primarily on coffee shop bagels, he started cooking me dinner. “It’s the least I can do,” he said to me on his bed. When I told him I didn’t need to be fed, he held me close, nuzzled my neck, let me feel how hard he was even though we’d just had sex. Where he got so much energy—in bed, in work, in life—remained a mystery to me. Could I actually be the thing exciting him, I thought, skeptical and semirepulsed, even as a warm buzz settled in my chest. I inched even closer to him, and his arms tightened around me to the point of impracticality. I wanted his hot breath all over my entire body.
Dressed only in our underwear, Ben and I relocated to the kitchen. The modern style of the apartment, with its platinum surfaces and minimalist furnishings, struck me as clinical when populated by our bare bodies, like we were test subjects in some well-financed medical study.
“Isn’t life great?” Ben said, chopping some chili peppers. “I mean, look at this view!” With the knife still in his hand, he pointed at the single window that stretched across an entire wall, the view ogling the Bay Bridge, the expanse of water it crossed, all the opportunity bursting from the iron seams of that wide span.
“Yeah, I think the view from my apartment is just this building,” I said from the dining table.
Ben laughed. He was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said. “How do you not have a boyfriend?”
“Boys can’t handle me,” I said flippantly. He smiled in response, and part of me felt tender, too much so, my insides exposed to the air. I had the perverse desire to test the limits of his optimism.
We ate a traditional Cambodian meal that Ben had altered to be healthy. He squirted raw honey into the coconut milk instead of adding sugar, sheared the extraneous fat off the pork belly, and swapped the white rice for cauliflower smashed into bits. The dish tasted good. The essential ingredients were there—the spices, the fermented fish, the lemongrass. But it looked disfigured, like it’d been extinct and was then genetically resurrected in a petri dish.
“I want to know everything about you,” Ben said.
“I’ll show you my LinkedIn page if you want,” I said, chewing flavors mutated from my childhood.
“You like the prahok?” he asked. “One of my aspirations is to disrupt the Khmer food industry with organic modifications.” Hearing a man with 4 percent body fat talk about health, in tech speak, using disrupt without sarcasm, all in his underwear, it made my head hurt. “I wanna curate a series of online video recipes that lay out well-balanced diets for Khmer folk,” he continued. “See, my mom died from diabetes. And most Khmer folk have no idea white rice is unhealthy. It’s basically sugar!”
“I’d pay twenty bucks for this,” I said, taking another bite for emphasis. Commodifying his work seemed to please him. “So that’s the app you’re working on? Healthy Khmer food?”
“No, no,” he said, as if brushing off an overzealous compliment. “That’s more like the ten-year goal versus, say, the five-year goal.” He said goal with the same intonation as my sister, with the complete confidence that donning a growth mindset was undeniably a virtue. My sister could go on and on about her life plan—MBA from Wharton, Forbes 30 under 30, three kids before she turned forty—to the point that my own meandering life had become a casualty of hers. Halfway through college, after I’d proved incapable of handling my own education, she started mapping both of our career goals on a shared Excel spreadsheet. She would be the CFO and CEO of her own marketing analytics firm; I would become an Ivy League professor in philosophy. Our whole lives we’d been geniuses, role models, twins destined for greatness. We were the only kids in our neighborhood, basically the only Cambodians in general, to make it as far as Stanford, and my sister was intent on maximizing this potential. She kept the two of us elevated in a stratosphere of legible success, with internships and research opportunities—anything to prevent us from falling to our old lives, to the poverty shackling almost 30 percent of Cambodian Americans, a statistic that she readily cited in all her job interviews, making sure to note that it was more than twice the national rate. As for the goals she projected for my future, it had been a while since I checked our spreadsheet, not since she moved to New York anyway, and the thought of it left me exhausted.
“So you wanna hear my pitch?” Ben asked. He’d finished eating and was holding his stomach with his hands, as if measuring how many calories he would need to burn during his next workout session.
“Sure,” I said. “But if you ask me to sign an NDA, I swear to fucking god I’m leaving. In my underwear and everything.”
“Ha. Ha. Don’t worry, I trust you enough,” he said, and I cringed without his noticing. “Okay, so you know what cruising is, right?”
I furrowed my eyebrows.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said in what sounded like a rehearsed voice. “So one day while I was, you know, looking, it dawned on me: Why can’t we take the idea of cruising—of seeking intimate connections that are marginalized by the public—and apply it to other aspects of our society, you know? And, specifically, to the lives of those hidden from the mainstream.” He paused for dramatic effect, spreading his arms wide in a controlled movement. “How often do you walk through life wishing for a space you can immediately feel at ease in? Right? Imagine filtering through profiles of people who share similar identifying factors with you. People only a message away from becoming a new point of cultural connection. Imagine using the technology of Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, for building a new community, a new future. My app seeks to forge pathways between individuals and safe spaces through a cutting-edge algorithm and a network of thoroughly screened members. Think of it as a digital interface that allows people of color, people with disabilities, people identifying as LGBTQ, to cruise for safe spaces—spaces not specifically for sex, but for the whole of their lives.”
He finished and stared at me. The whole time he was speaking I’d done my best to project that I was taking him, and his idea, seriously. And it wasn’t even like I thought Ben’s app was unfeasible. After my freshman-year roommate received a million in VC funding, for a fucking dog walking app, I stopped judging people’s startup ideas in terms of their viability for success in the field. He just—and I tried, really I did, not to care—sounded like a clueless kid during his pitch, like he’d learned something new at school and was now obsessed with talking about it. Buzzwords rolled off his tongue as naturally as a robot trying to act human—LGBTQ, people of color, safe space.
“So what do you think?” he pressed. “Pretty awesome, right? Being able to find Khmer folk wherever you are, whenever you want?”
I forced a smile. “Sounds like a cool idea.”
SOMETHING IN OUR CHEMISTRY—in the way I saw him—shifted after Ben explained his app to me. When he cooked extravagant meals, I felt guilty, because, honestly, it would’ve made zero difference to me if we ate frozen pizzas instead of his thoughtful culinary creations. He had this notion that I always wanted to eat Cambodian food, as if it provided some critical nourishment to my soul. “Doesn’t it feel good to eat what we’re supposed to be eating?” he’d ask, and I’d nod, wondering how long he was going to last as a worthwhile distraction.
And then our sex became more—how to say this?—more deliberate. Thrusting into me, he’d fix upon me intently with his eyes, with an unwavering sympathy, without breaking his gaze, and ask if he was hurting me, even when I was penetrated by all of two fingers. I would have preferred him to be rougher, of course. Sometimes, though, I was completely disoriented by how comfortable I felt in his presence, how easily shocks ran up and down my spine as he fucked me.
A few weeks
passed and I realized my only social interactions now involved Ben. He spent his days having phone conversations with all kinds of different startup employees, reading articles about diversifying Silicon Valley with more brown faces, as if that brown-ness could make the whole tech industry any less absurd, grotesque, and frivolous. About six hours of his day he dedicated to vigorous typing as he stared into his laptop—the morning was for his freelance work; the afternoon for his “safe space” app. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how he always broke into a sweat while coding.
On the weekends, Ben met with another gay Southeast Asian man dedicated to fitness and tech. Vinny was helping with the development of Ben’s app. He was Vietnamese. Our first encounter, I asked if his parents had hoped the alliteration of his name and his ethnicity would make it easier for him to assimilate. He laughed so hard that I regretted saying anything at all. Though Ben concluded that we—the three of us—would get along from then on out. “This is gonna be fun,” he said. Several times I watched Ben and Vinny code as I planned lessons about Ahab’s inexorable hunt and Ishmael’s never-ending musings. Waiting for Ben to stop working and slide his hand up my thigh, I wondered if the only thing that distinguished me from Vinny, that kept Ben’s hands sliding up my thighs, was the fact that I was Cambodian. How easily could I be replaced by a different gay man who also happened to be Cambodian? Who could say? I listened to Ben and Vinny debate about memory issues and algorithms and recursion, observed their comfort in massaging each other’s shoulders, and didn’t care to know the answer to my question.
What I did know was that Ben’s “safe space” app unsettled me. I was offended by it, really, how it struck me as something I should want, something masquerading as objectively good, a solution to all our problems. It reminded me of the established curriculum for my Human Development class. It evoked for me the lee shore in Moby-Dick, these supposed safe spaces in which we’d be forever bound, or even the white whale himself, that failed promise of closure. Ben wanted technology to offer people a sense of fulfillment, to rush them to shore, secure everyone to land, and I wanted to be indefinite, free to fuck off and be lost.
Even so, Ben’s genuine enthusiasm impressed me. He seemed not to care if he made money, only that his vision be fully realized. And he was so hyper focused that I felt especially productive around him. Or was my strengthening drive to teach Moby-Dick just a product of how stupid I thought Ben’s app was? I was doing meaningful work, right? Changing the lives of the younger generation? Who knew? But in ways both tender and ugly, Ben allowed me, for once, to feel good about myself. Was that what drew Ishmael to Ahab? That he saw clearly how futile Ahab’s mission was, how there was no world in which he could actually kill Moby Dick? Did he watch Ahab scream into the unconquerable face of the white whale so that his own life might have meaning?
At the end of June, a month after Ben and I first hooked up, my sister texted me: it sounds like this relationship is pretty fucking serious.
I responded: if it is idk how it happened.
She texted back: sorry I haven’t been able to skype. shit’s been crazy.
It’s ok, I texted. I’ll find another Cambodian twin who also went to Stanford.
She texted: lol. tell Ben I want to meet him.
I never asked Ben how serious he thought we were, as I felt apathetic about asserting any expectations onto our dynamic, but he did want to meet my sister. When he found out my twin had also attended Stanford, I almost thought he was suffering the rupture of a brain aneurysm. “Jesus, man, this is just so great,” he said, recovering from the news, caressing my ass like a prized object. “Your family is breaking new ground for Khmer folk, you know? Now the younger Cambos are gonna know it’s freaking possible to get into a school like Stanford.” I didn’t feel like explaining to him that Stanford had allowed me to escape my hometown, my neighborhood, my Cambodian life. There was no point.
“Maybe you should meet my sister,” I told him.
Flattered, he interlaced his fingers into mine. Then he climbed on top of me, pushed my face deeper into the mattress, whispered something about how he couldn’t help himself when he was around me. His dick rubbing against my lower back, he slipped his hands under my stomach, grabbing for my inner thighs, and spread my legs open, for once with neither concern nor apology. I surrendered to his body, and for a brief moment, I thought, Why not? Maybe I could go on like this forever. I felt safe when I was pinned under him. Ben made me feel safe.
“Can I run some ideas by you?” he asked the next morning, before launching into a ten-minute monologue about the pros and cons of the color teal as a method to optimize user engagement. “On one hand,” he started, wide-eyed, serious, “it’s calming and unique because it’s not just a regular blue or green, and that’s symbolic of safe spaces, right? They’re supposed to be these special and unique, calming communities. On the other, do you think a more unique color, like, sacrifices the security of using a simple color everyone’s accustomed to? There’s a safety in familiar colors, right? And what am I doing if not trying to make people feel safe?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call teal unique,” I said, curtly, looking down at my book.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah . . . maybe not. So what color should we use?”
“Honestly I don’t think it matters,” I said, not caring that he’d sounded hurt. “Anyway, you should ask your partner,” I added, with some spite, though he took this suggestion at face value. For the next hour, he proceeded to consult with Vinny on the phone. And I pretended to read Moby-Dick.
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Ben and I went to a picnic in Dolores Park, another Stanford affair, only this time hosted by a gay softball team. Ben was the one who had wanted to make an appearance. He kept calling it a “networking opportunity.”
Dolores Park was packed and unreasonably warm for San Francisco. It seemed like the entire city was drinking beer and smoking pot on the grass—desperate hipster trash, elitist Marina snobs, vapid gay cliques, and so on. “Do you also wish Dolores Park would fall into the ocean,” Ben asked, nudging me in the ribs, “or is it just the bridge you hate?” We stepped through a cloud of smoke created by a group of teens in expensive-looking tie-dye shirts. He gripped my hand and dragged me into the dead-hot center of Bay Area gentrification.
“I just wish it was less crowded,” I said. “If we keep bumping into sweaty shirtless guys, we’re gonna get ringworms.”
Ben laughed and then immediately integrated himself with my Stanford peers. They played drinking games, threw footballs around, dished about the latest gossip among VC firms. He tried to get me involved, but I told him I was too tired, that I was bored by all the talk of the future. I could see he was disappointed and I expected him to get mad, to snap on me for belittling his passion. The fact that he didn’t felt like an intrinsic flaw in our relationship.
A group of guys arrived with a beer pong table, and not long after that, Vinny popped up out of nowhere, forcing me into a hug. “Sup guys,” he said at large, so good-natured it vexed me.
“You invited Vinny?” I whispered to Ben, almost hissing.
“Why not?” he responded. “He’s gonna help me network.”
These are my friends, I wanted to say, though it struck me as false. Instead, claiming I needed to clear my head, I split off from them. For the first time in a month, I felt that Ben and I were untethered, and I walked around the park, sipping from a cup of straight vodka, until the idea of casual conversation stopped feeling alien. I thought of my sister, how she always knew exactly what she wanted at any given moment, down to a disturbing power to order off menus perfectly, and how I’d always been swept into her hunger for life. I thought about what I wanted to do now—if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd.
Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing. Then, not paying attention, I bumped into someone,
literally, painfully, and fell over onto the grass. A burly hand picked me up, and I realized the man apologizing for knocking me over was the guy from the last party—the one who’d witnessed himself get blocked, by me, on Grindr.
“Fuck, I’m sorry.” He brushed the grass off of my shoulders, and I felt my muscles contract at his touch. “I’m such a klutz—spilling water over you, it’s not cool at all.”
I shrugged. “It’s vodka.”
“Wait, you’re Annie’s twin bro,” he said. “Anthony, right?”
“That’s me,” I answered.
“Jake,” he said, smiling, forcing me into a handshake. “Damn, I like hardcore miss Annie. She was a blast, you know?”
“Yeah, she’s a fucking asshole for leaving,” I said, and he laughed.
“I guess it must be nice in some ways, though,” he said. “Now you can be seen as, like, individuals, and not just twins or whatever.”
“You could see it like that,” I responded.
“Look, I feel bad—you’re drenched.” He patted my side to test the dampness. I felt nervous, animated, and then guilty at finding him so attractive. I couldn’t help but feel drawn to his casual manners, the way he made the very act of being relaxed somehow noteworthy, as if answers simply manifested in his mouth while speaking, plain and perfect. He seemed like the type of person who harbored no desire to prove anything, to be anything but himself. I looked around the crowd, tried locating Ben among the other bodies.
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