New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  It had been a week since Louise asked me to turn off her dead daughter’s Facebook profile. I’d tried to find ways to become Margo’s “legacy contact.” I contacted Facebook’s customer support and was told that I would need to summon a death certificate, which I was too sheepish to ask Louise for. I didn’t need to ask her for proof her daughter was gone. But then I realized that I didn’t need to become a legacy contact. I could just sign into her Facebook account. After all, I still had a giant file of stolen usernames and passwords from Nimbus—the-take.csv. We had promised each other that we would each destroy our copy of the database. But I never did. Getting rid of it would have felt like deleting the greatest secret we shared.

  When I got home from work, I opened the file on my computer. The spreadsheet software chugged, stalled, and crashed. I restarted. This would take a few tries.

  I was working under the assumption that Margo used the same password for her Nimbus account as she did for her Facebook profile. Did she use the same password for everything? I certainly did. Variations on it. A lot of people did that. It seemed reasonable that Margo might as well. But I knew there was no middle ground for this. I either had access to all of Margo’s things, or I had none.

  On the fourth try, the spreadsheet finally loaded. I filtered by Margo’s first name. There were thousands of Margos. I then filtered by her last name. Still several dozen accounts. I had forgotten that, as an engineer, Margo used a lot of test profiles. But the passwords for all her throwaway accounts were things like “test1234” and “dummyaccount22.” I scanned the list until I found the real one: M4v15B34c0n.

  I wrote it on a sticky note. Writing it down on a piece of paper seemed less of a violation; something was lost in the transfer from digital to analog. In the moment, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong. In fact, I felt the opposite. Giddy almost.

  I grabbed Margo’s computer off the stack of mail it had been resting on. When I opened the laptop, it confronted me with the same log-in screen I’d been stuck at before. I took a deep breath and entered the password slowly.

  It worked. I was shocked by how quickly—so quickly that I didn’t realize I was now looking at Margo’s desktop. Her wallpaper was a beautiful nebula, its pinks and blues spiraling like spilled neon against the blackness of space.

  It terrified me. I closed it and vowed never to look again.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE I MOVED TO New York, I lived with my parents. They ran a modest bed-and-breakfast in a small town. Most of the guests were parents of students at a local private liberal arts college, which I had applied to and been promptly rejected from. It hardly mattered anyway because there was no way I would’ve been able to afford four years of tuition. Since it was a bed-and-breakfast, cozy and local and homey, guests felt strangely compelled to talk to me. When I served dinner or came to their rooms to change the sheets on their beds, people asked if I was a student, like their son or daughter, at the local college. I used to explain that, no, I went to community college. But over time, I just started lying to make the conversation less embarrassing. I did go to the local school. I was studying English literature with a minor in economics, I was part of the debate team. Yes, I had heard of your son or daughter. I hadn’t met them in person, but I heard they’re great.

  In the evenings, there was always plenty to prepare for the next morning’s breakfast. My mother cut up fruit in the kitchen, while I cleaned the dining area and set the tables so they would be ready well ahead of our 9 a.m. serving time. Once the day’s duties were finally done, I’d spend the rest of the evening on the family desktop computer in the basement, scouring the internet for jobs, applying, and never hearing back. I had turned down beds and set tables and vacuumed the hallways of this dusty house since I was old enough to walk. I was twenty-three and ready to move out.

  My parents were also ready for me to move on. My older brother was in his second year of graduate school, studying to be a pharmacist, having earned numerous scholarships along the way. He had always been a much better student than me. In fact, he’d really been better at everything. Straight A’s, a king of extracurriculars, even a decent athlete. He looked and lived the way Asians were supposed to: lean and charming and gifted in the classroom. I possessed none of those qualities. I was above average in height, but always on the heftier side. My mother said she was to blame, that she overfed me as a baby. But I didn’t eat more than anyone else in my family. I was just bigger.

  I wasn’t a terrible student by any means, but there was little I could do to distinguish myself. There had always been an expectation at my high school that I would do well in the maths and sciences, even though I never showed an aptitude for either subject. The high school guidance counselor urged me to take advanced placement classes my senior year for calculus and chemistry—both of which I nearly failed out of. My GPA dropped so significantly that any hope of financial aid or a scholarship was out of reach. I told the guidance counselor that I shouldn’t have been in those classes. He said he’d expected more of me. That made one of us.

  I was finishing up two years at community college in eastern Oregon the spring after the housing market crash. Finding a job without a bachelor’s degree was hard enough. I knew it would be damned near impossible in a faltering job market.

  Since we were only a fifteen-minute drive from the private college, the week of graduation was always a busy month at the bed-and-breakfast. Once, as I was on my way out the door, I told Mom I was headed to school and was overheard by two guests, Helena and Paul, a white couple who were in town to visit their son Michael, a student at the college. I’d made the mistake of telling them, when I had served them breakfast, that I was also a student there. They offered me a ride.

  “Oh, it’s really fine,” I said, trying not to get caught in my lie. “It’s just thirty minutes on a bike.”

  “Nonsense, we’ll take you there,” Paul insisted. “Michael is an English major as well.”

  My mother shot me a confused look but said nothing as she collected Helena and Paul’s plates.

  I found myself in the back seat of their massive SUV, a rental, which reeked of lingering cigarettes and the stench of whatever chemical had been used to try and remove the cigarette smell. Helena talked about how proud they were of their son, that he had a wonderful job lined up back in Santa Fe, where they were from. She asked me what my plans were after graduation, and I said I was weighing my options.

  When we arrived on campus, I thanked them and quickly wandered off. I could catch a bus back to town, which might only take forty-five minutes, and then I would just have missed a class and a half. But as I headed toward the student center, I caught a glimpse of a bulletin board with various flyers for jobs. So far, my job search had been fruitless.

  I hadn’t been to the campus since I’d applied there. I’d known then, as I walked across beautifully manicured quads and toured the various ivy-adorned brick buildings, that I had no chance of being accepted. Today, students were splayed out on picnic blankets eating lunch they’d brought from the cafeteria. There was a couple that had fallen asleep in a hammock together, textbooks shielding their faces from the sun. It was a gorgeous late spring day, and the campus looked like something out of a brochure—truth in advertising, after all. I didn’t feel regret. It was a world I’d never earned.

  I approached the bulletin board. There was a bright flyer urging students to visit the guidance counselors at the career center. Maybe there were job postings there. At this point, I had nothing to lose.

  It took me a little while to find the career center. I was able to locate the building, but I meandered up and down several floors before realizing the career center was in the basement. There were some chairs and magazines and little else, like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. By the door was a receptionist, clearly a student just doing her homework. She took off her headphones and ask
ed if I had an appointment.

  “No, I just, uh, wanted to…look at some of the materials,” I said.

  I walked over to a shelf of leaflets and printouts and pretended to be interested in them. I picked up a brochure titled “Getting Results from Your Résumé” and waved it at her. She didn’t seem convinced, but she also looked like she couldn’t give less of a fuck. The headphones went back on and I kept looking around the room, looking for another job board. No luck. I headed toward the exit.

  “Are you my ten o’clock?”

  I turned around. It was a white woman, likely in her early sixties. She wore a cardigan and cargo shorts, an outfit that reminded me of a first-grade teacher chaperoning a field trip.

  “No, sorry, I was just looking around,” I said.

  “Well I guess that means my ten o’clock appointment isn’t coming,” she said. “Which means I’m free, if you’d like me to look over any résumés or cover letters.”

  I don’t know why I went along with it. Maybe I was just flattered she believed I was a student there.

  As she led me to her office, she barked at the woman behind the desk, “Laura, take off the headphones.”

  The office was what you might expect from a guidance counselor who gives career advice to wealthy students who had probably never had a real job before. Encouragement was key. Motivational posters with famous quotes covered most of the wall space—as if Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream to apply for an unpaid internship. Stacked on her desk were pamphlets, alongside what appeared to be a stack of résumés. There was very little light, just fluorescent bulbs casting a harsh shadow. She introduced herself as Riley, and, summoning all the wells of my imagination, I came up with a pseudonym for myself.

  “John,” I said, shaking her hand.

  Riley asked me what I wanted to do in life, and I confessed that I would probably take any job, that I’d already applied for dozens and my response rate was dismal.

  “It’s a difficult time to find a job, but you’ll always be rewarded if you’re persistent. Many students think that just because they’ve earned a bachelor’s degree they’re entitled to a job.”

  Little did she know, I hadn’t even earned the right to feel entitled.

  She continued: “But the upside to a tough job market is that it forces young people like yourself to take bigger risks. Are you looking at things mostly in this area?”

  I told Riley that my parents were here, but I would be willing to move somewhere else.

  “Where have you always wanted to live?”

  I paused. The idea of leaving Oregon had never crossed my mind—not because I loved where I’d grown up, but because it seemed so unlikely that I’d ever make it anywhere else. Even my brother, with all of his academic success, had stayed in the state. Like the patrons of my parents’ bed-and-breakfast, Riley was another white stranger that I found myself not wanting to disappoint, or embarrass myself in front of.

  “New York,” I said. It wasn’t an honest answer, but it was a believable one.

  “And why do you want to move to New York?”

  I knew nothing about New York. I’d certainly never been. I had no idea what it really looked like or the kinds of people who lived there. I had, however, years ago, imagined that all my friends from PORK lived there. It was subtle, but sometimes people would reference specific neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Fort Greenpoint, I thought it was called. To me, it was the place where music existed.

  “I have friends there,” I finally said, “in New York.”

  “That’s never a bad starting place. And careerwise, why do you want to be there?”

  “There’s so much music in New York. It’s, like, a scene.”

  Riley laughed. “It’s definitely a scene, that’s for sure.”

  She told me she had lived there years ago. The city was so different, dangerous really. Disgusting, dingy. Her apartment had rats, and at night she heard them scurrying through the walls. She lived with half a dozen other people and they basically slept on top of each other. She was miserable, but never happier.

  “That was so long ago, though,” she said, leaning back in her chair.

  “So I should or shouldn’t move there?”

  Riley began typing, then clicked a couple times. She turned her computer monitor around so I could see the screen.

  “Here are some music jobs in New York.”

  We talked through “opportunities” for a while. They were scant. Riley seemed surprised. For anything I did find, she promised she’d write me glowing recommendations, which was kind of her but would be an impossibility once she figured out I did not attend that college, that I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

  She regaled me with more stories of her time in New York. She’d been there in the ’70s. The blackout happened just a week after she’d moved there, caused by a lightning strike that tripped up a power station. It only lasted a day, but it threw the city into chaos—looting, arson, bedlam—and yet she still spoke about it fondly.

  “It’s funny. I’m nostalgic for everything that was bad about New York.”

  “I guess the hard things in our life are what define us,” I said.

  She laughed. “You’re a hoot. I think you’ll do great in New York.”

  Just before I left, she gave me one last piece of advice: “Success comes to those who are confident and organized.” She handed me one of the pamphlets from her desk: “Be Confident, Not Cocky: Penning Your First Cover Letter.”

  I didn’t know how to summon confidence, but the bit about being organized stuck. I could definitely be organized. Since I was in middle school, I’d managed the accounting for my parents’ bed-and-breakfast—a process that involved Mom reading out receipts and bills while I entered them into a spreadsheet. Later that evening, I opened the spreadsheet software. The computer fan whirred intensely as I created my first document that didn’t involve my parents’ business. I listed dates of when I had first sent in my applications, dates I had followed up, more dates of when I had followed up again. I could see that at first I had been picky about listings. But as days and weeks went by, I applied for anything that was available. I took Riley’s advice and began looking at jobs in New York, but I still didn’t hear back from anyone. I’d become more organized about my search, and all that had led to was an increase of pitying responses from employers thanking me for my interest.

  I maintained the spreadsheet meticulously. It grew and grew until I realized I had applied for over a hundred jobs. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would thumb through the spreadsheet row by row, column by column. A catalog of my failures.

  At the time, journalists were still piecing together what had happened to the economy. New York banks, housing and greed and something or other. As the story unraveled, it did so through a string of nonsensical terms. High-risk subprime mortgages had been packaged as collateralized debt obligation, whatever the hell that meant. But as I read deeper into it, hoping to understand, to not feel like such a loser, I could see that all the obtuse language was just a disguise for relatively simple things. By pooling risky assets into larger batches, they could sell worthless loans for a small amount of money. Banks did this over and over, until it was no longer a small amount. Shuffling deck chairs for massive profits.

  But what did it actually mean for a bank to sell debt to another bank? That was even simpler than I could ever have imagined. Individual debt was just a line item. Packaged together, such debts were represented by hundreds of rows in a spreadsheet. New York bankers were trading fucking spreadsheets, I realized. These spreadsheets were massive, but they listed all the pertinent information a debt collection agency might need: names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of delinquency. It reminded me of my awful job applications spreadsheet. The information was similarly organized, and it all added up to very little. I had several thousan
d dollars’ worth of student loan debt from community college, which also lived in a cell, in a spreadsheet, somewhere.

  I dragged my spreadsheet into the trash. I bought a plane ticket to New York. I didn’t have a job yet, but I would figure it out when I arrived. Besides, if I was going to be jobless, I might as well be jobless somewhere else.

  * * *

  —

  EVENTUALLY MARGO’S ARGUMENTATIVE POSTURING in the Nimbus office caught up with her. Or so she suspected. A third-party firm had done a survey of Nimbus’s user demographics, revealing that a disproportionately high number of the users were African American.

  “You can say ‘black,’ ” Margo said.

  One of the two men from the consulting firm—both tall, blondish white men in their early thirties—said he was more comfortable referring to the demo as African American. It was how they had self-identified on the survey.

  Margo pushed. “It’s more inclusive to say ‘black.’ ”

  They ignored her. But the results of the survey had shocked the mostly white execs at Nimbus. The service they had created was being used primarily by people who did not look like them. It became clear that this was seen as a negative. It was a problem, and they were struggling to find the language to express why.

  To Margo, the takeaway was obviously that Nimbus should start working on features that appealed more to black people. The company should start hiring more black product managers, black engineers, maybe even some black leadership. The room, mostly white, did not take kindly to Margo’s suggestion, and instead saw it as an affront. The CFO, a British man in his fifties who had previously worked at a bank, informed Margo, with the kind of condescension that is only worsened by a British accent, that Nimbus was raising another round of funding, and that a product which appealed to African Americans—“just twelve percent of the U.S. population, mind you”—would never appeal to investors.