by Kevin Nguyen
“We’re not talking about what you think we’re talking about,” she assured him, jokingly.
The bartender backed away.
Margo leaned in close. “We have to delete everything. And pretend it never happened. Got it?”
“Okay, but—”
“We’re not talking about this anymore. That’s that.”
She pulled away and returned to her beer. And true to her word, that would be the last time she and I would ever acknowledge what we had done. I had a million more questions, but part of me was relieved, and I imagined Margo was too. In the sobriety of daylight, stealing data from Nimbus now felt horribly misguided. Dangerous for us both.
“Okay, now are you ready for the good news?”
“There’s good news?”
Margo paused for dramatic effect.
“Phantom offered us both jobs.”
“Us both? What do you mean?”
“Well, you have to go meet Brandon tomorrow morning.”
“Who’s Brandon?”
“Oh, the Phantom guy. The CEO. Brandon.”
I was confused.
“When I went in, I told them I had just ‘quit’ Nimbus and they offered me a job. And I said I would only work at Phantom if you could come along too.” Margo started picking at the beer label. “Only if you want to.”
She continued to sell me on it. The work might be the same, but Phantom had promised it would at least be a full-time role, meaning I wouldn’t have to be a contract worker anymore. It was a much smaller company—just over a dozen people—so we wouldn’t feel so isolated. And perhaps the best news: no foosball table.
“What happened to Tokyo?”
Margo laughed. “It’s a nice idea I think about whenever I’m drunk.”
“You think about it all the time then, huh?”
She looked away, hurt or insulted or annoyed, I couldn’t tell. She took a big swig of her beer. “Take this job. For me. You’re the only thing that keeps me sane at these places. So you’re really doing me a favor, letting me drag you through all the same shit I have to be dragged through.”
It was a weird way to say “you’re welcome,” but that’s just how Margo was.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I sat down with Brandon, Phantom’s bright-eyed CEO. He couldn’t have been much older than me. Twenty-four at most. Conventionally handsome: a tall, strong-chinned white guy with a smile most people deemed “winning.” He wore a pastel green polo. He had a noticeable tan line around his eyes, the shape of ski goggles.
He said my name as he shook my hand and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Lucas Nguyen. Nguyen, that’s a Vietnamese name?”
“Yes,” I said, “my dad’s Vietnamese, but my mom is Chinese.”
“I was going to say, you look kind of Chinese.”
White people often took pride in identifying which kind of Asian I was. On more than one occasion, people have tried to tell me I looked Korean, as if this was something I could be convinced of. When I told Margo how often this happened, she explained that white people spent an exorbitant amount of their energy saying racist things to prove they weren’t racist.
Brandon continued to scan my résumé. It was clear he hadn’t looked at it before now.
“So you did two years of college and dropped out?”
Before I could correct him and explain that community college was just two years, he continued, “I admire the bravery of people who drop out of school.”
He explained his vision for Phantom. All the ways we communicate digitally—email, text, instant message—were methods that left a permanent record. Since you could always go back and see an archive of past conversations, it affected the way we talk to each other. With Phantom, all messages disappeared after they’d been read. They were self-destructing. The ephemerality of Phantom was more like in-person conversation.
Brandon had been inspired by a particularly bad breakup, he went on. Afterward, he spent hours scrolling through text messages, looking at old pictures of them together—all the digital remains of the relationship. It made everything worse. If they had been communicating in something like Phantom, he wouldn’t have been able to put himself through that. (Later, when I described this exchange to Margo, she would ask me why men were so inspired by their ex-girlfriends, the women they had treated like shit.)
There were more important applications for Phantom, he continued. Government or corporate whistleblowers could communicate in secret to journalists. (Margo, upon hearing this, mimicked the motion of a man jerking off.)
The language Brandon used was lofty, but I couldn’t deny the idea’s appeal. Compared to Nimbus’s obsession with user growth and accumulating venture capital, Phantom sounded downright noble. (Margo pointed out that Phantom was also dependent on private funding.)
“You’re aware of the conditions of Margo’s employment?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“She said she won’t work anyplace where you don’t work,” Brandon said. “Which I think speaks to her remarkable character.”
A moment passed and Brandon further clarified: “Loyalty.”
This wasn’t an interview, I realized. Brandon clearly wanted Margo, and was just trying to figure out what the hell I could do at his company. He asked me what I currently did day-to-day, how I saw myself fitting in, where I thought I would be in five years. “I see you have some customer service experience at Nimbus.”
“I answer a lot of support emails. Most of the questions we receive are redundant, so it’s a lot of copy-and-pasting form responses,” I said.
“This is what I’m thinking: We’ll start you on email marketing, and then we’ll move you around to whatever needs doing after that. You’ll be a jack-of-all-trades guy. We’re young and we’re lean”—I couldn’t tell if he meant the company or people like himself—“so everybody has a lot of different responsibilities. We’re mostly engineers here, so having someone with a different perspective involved with everything is exactly what we need.”
I knew this meant I’d be doing the work no one wanted to do, but I wasn’t any worse off than I was before. Brandon looked at my résumé one more time.
“So when can you start?”
* * *
—
AFTER THE INTERVIEW, I met up with Margo in Crown Heights, close to the house she grew up in. Because she’d lived there her whole life, she talked constantly about how much the neighborhood had changed, how nobody really knew about “the real Crown Heights.”
It’s true. When white people thought about Crown Heights, they mostly associated it with the street that made up its westernmost edge, where the past three years had seen nearly a dozen new bars and bougie restaurants open. A traditionally Caribbean neighborhood, it had become one of the many faces of gentrification in Brooklyn. In a decade, rents had skyrocketed faster than in any other neighborhood in the city, and the people walking along its streets had become progressively whiter too.
At a Trinidadian bakery, she suggested that we order doubles, a fried flatbread sandwich filled with curried chickpeas. It was salty and sticky and sweet. They were a dollar each, so I ate four. We washed them down with drinks at a bar nearby and I told her about my meeting with Brandon. I was impressed with his vision for the company, and Margo was skeptical of me, of how easily I was charmed. We toasted our new job prospects anyway. Here’s to something not quite as bad as before.
My phone started ringing.
“My mom’s calling.”
“Do you want to answer it?” Margo asked.
The ringtone kept jingling while I thought about it. The vibration of the phone rattled violently against the bar.
“I’ll call her back later,” I decided, knowing I would probably forget to.
I let the
phone keep ringing until it stopped. It felt somehow less definitive if I let it finish instead of cutting it off.
“Do you often screen your mom’s calls?”
“Sometimes.”
“I talk to my mom every day.”
“Yeah, but my folks live across the country. You live with your mom. That’s not fair.”
Margo laughed. “I am a grown-ass adult who lives with her mom. So: no, it’s not fair.”
We went for more food. Just a few blocks away, we each got a plate of saltfish—salted cod cooked with a Ghanaian fruit called ackee, served with rice and beans and a side of fried plantains. We sat on a bench facing Eastern Parkway.
“This is how I prefer to dine,” she said. “Outside, not being waited on. Restaurants are so fussy.”
“You know I used to work at my parents’ bed-and-breakfast, right?” I said. “It’s really not that bad.”
“I just hate the idea of serving someone,” she said. “Or someone serving me.”
I watched Margo devour her entire plate. For someone so tiny and skinny, I’d never seen anyone put away food like Margo. She’d been blessed with the sort of superhuman metabolism that is impervious to the caloric burden of beer and fatty, greasy foods. Margo joked that she had the dream body of a white girl—no ass, no tits, long legs like twigs.
It was summer, so the sun was still out at 8 p.m. The after-work joggers were out in full force, running up and down the pedestrian alley of the parkway like some kind of disorganized infantry. The workout outfit was a uniform: dark athletic leisurewear with neon accents, white headphones in ears. And then there was us, our asses parked on a bench, sweating from the spicy food we’d just eaten.
“Are we going to do this? Are we going to Phantom?” I asked.
“I don’t see any reason not to,” Margo said. “But let’s decide over dessert.”
I wasn’t sure I could eat any more.
* * *
—
MARGO AND I STARTED at Phantom the following week. Brandon introduced us to the rest of the company. Still, they were interested in who I was, where I had come from. I was flattered. Brandon constantly referred to the employees of Phantom as a “family,” and I watched Margo roll her eyes every time.
We settled in quickly. And although most things were better than I’d found them at Nimbus—warmer, more efficient, friendlier—we’d traded in a foosball table for a ping pong table, and that was worse. The foosball table was noisy, but at least it was confined to a small area. The Phantom office was smaller, and now ping pong balls were often flying past my desk. I tried to remind myself it wasn’t a big deal. Each time an errant ball bounced across my keyboard and onto the floor, I’d take a deep breath and chase it down, to show I was a good sport.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS LATER we’d settled into a routine at Phantom, which meant we’d found a new bar to drink at close to work. It was called Gainsbourg, an Irish pub with an inexplicably French name. Margo was playing a Pac-Man machine tucked in the back corner of the bar. She was usually the late one—always by ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty. I’d give her a hard time about it and she’d tell me that everyone in New York is always late.
“Not me,” I’d say.
“You’re the only person I know that’s punctual to a bar,” she’d say.
“If you’re someone who’s on time, you’re on time to everything.” Margo would ignore me and march over to the Pac-Man machine.
But on this particular day, I was the late one. I’d been called into a meeting that went long, and clearly Margo was frustrated. She barely acknowledged me when I approached. I don’t think she was mad because I was late, but that I’d chosen work over her.
The Pac-Man machine, which I never saw anyone use besides Margo, had a cup holder attached to the side of the cabinet. Margo picked her beer up out of the holder, lapped up the last few sips in one long chug, and handed me the empty glass.
“Next round is on you.”
When I returned I carefully placed a full beer into the cup holder, making sure not to disturb Margo’s intense concentration. She played her fair share of Pac-Man at Gainsbourg. Often she would order a beer and ask for the bartender to split a few dollars into quarters for the machine. The way she played was meditative. Concentrating deeply, she methodically planned her routes through the blue 8-bit labyrinth, looking up only to sip her beer.
I’d spent a number of hours watching Pac-Man over Margo’s shoulder.
“Why do you love this game so much?”
Margo didn’t respond immediately. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking of an answer or if she was too focused on the game.
“The illusion of teamwork.”
I pointed out that she was playing by herself.
“No, the ghosts,” she clarified. “They’re all programmed in a way that creates the illusion that they’re cooperating.”
I stared at the screen. The four ghosts appeared to be tailing Pac-Man. “Aren’t they just following you?”
“Not exactly. Each ghost is controlled by a different simple logic. Blinky is always pursuing you; Pinky is always trying to occupy the space in front of you.”
“The ghosts have names?”
“Clyde, the orange one, is a little more complicated.”
“Clyde is a terrible name for a ghost.”
“It bases its behavior on how close it is to Pac-Man, and flees if you get too close.”
“Why does it run away?”
“I don’t know. Every team needs a coward?”
Now I was staring intensely too, trying to make out the patterns. I didn’t quite see them, but it wasn’t the first time Margo saw something I didn’t. Her brain understood the world through rules and reason—she could find patterns anywhere and exploit them.
She continued. “The trickiest ghost is Inky, though. Like Pinky, Inky tries to get ahead of you. But Inky’s movement is relative not just to Pac-Man, but also Blinky. So Inky’s movements appear random until it gets close, and then it looks like Inky is trying to trap you.”
I watched Margo play for a few more minutes. Now that she had identified the personalities of the four ghosts, they seemed obvious: one is aggressive, one is conniving, one is cowardly, and one is volatile.
“The ghosts have two modes. All the behavior I just described was Chase Mode, which is how most of the game is played, with ghosts in pursuit of you. But when you eat the big pill”—Margo had timed it so as she said this, her Pac-Man swallowed up the power that made her invincible—“the ghosts go into Scatter Mode.”
All four of the ghosts’ paths suddenly changed and they began fleeing in different directions.
“And when they’re in Scatter Mode, all the ghosts run to a different corner of the screen. When they’re in danger, they completely abandon the logic of teamwork.”
Margo beat the level, then turned away from the arcade machine, gesturing that I could take over.
“Anyway, I didn’t answer your question really. Why do I like this game?” she said. “I like all arcade games. I enjoy how cynical these machines are. The incentive behind making them is to suck as many quarters out of a player as quickly as possible. So there’s an adversarial relationship between the software and the user, but you have to design it in such a way that the player never notices.”
A moment later, Margo said, “Maybe players just don’t care?”
I was only half listening. By this point the ghosts had reverted from Scatter Mode to Chase Mode, and they were stalking me around the grid. My Pac-Man was twitchy and nervous and eventually the ghosts had me in a corner.
Margo continued. “Think about it this way: you don’t spend much time designing the mechanics of Pac-Man. Players are always going to act unpredictably. They’re both more clever and more stupid than
you can plan for. So instead, you put all your energy toward what you can control. You work hard to engineer the ghosts.”
The thought distracted me from the game. The ghosts eventually pinned me down in the bottom left corner of the screen, blocking all of my possible escape routes. They closed in on me and, on contact, Pac-Man’s mouth opened up and folded in on itself. The game celebrated my death with an 8-bit chime. The arcade machine had earned itself another quarter.
“The orange ghost got me. Which one is that again?”
“Clyde.” The coward.
“Fucking Clyde.”
* * *
—
MARGO HAD A PHONE with a shattered screen, a constellation of cracks that fractured the light of the display. She often dropped her phone, usually while drinking, and had done it so often she got tired of replacing it. She began to take a perverse pride in having a broken phone. Our new colleagues began to ask her why she wouldn’t get it fixed, and at first she laughed it off but one day she let ’em have it. I’d seen Margo on this tirade before.
“Everyone has been seduced by the beauty of new technology. There’s that fresh-out-of-the-package moment when every computer and phone is pure, uniform: smooth silver metal bodies, clean lines. And they feel good in your hands, like they haven’t merely been built, but formed, like the word ‘sleek’ has only existed for hundreds of years to finally describe these devices.
“But what’s beautiful in a store is often hugely impractical when it has to endure life outside. These are beautiful things made for impossible lives—”
Usually, here, Margo would have withdrawn her phone and started waving it around.
“This was designed by some men of some means who live in a specific part of California and believe technology should reflect their needs. Beauty can only be defined on their terms.”
I remember, on one night, another Phantom engineer named Jared decided to challenge her.
“Okay, but is that wrong?” Jared asked. “These phones have sold enormously well because people want them.”