by Kevin Nguyen
“I mean, I’d be at home alone, no one to talk to. And Margo was always there to give me feedback and encouragement. Every conversation we had was just brimming with energy and optimism. There were so many times when I thought about giving up on the stupid thing. I’d said as much to Margo, and she would always remind me that what I was doing was difficult but worthwhile.”
“Sounds wonderful to have that in a friend.”
“It was. Publishers hated the book. Nobody wanted it. It only exists as a file on my computer. But at least Margo liked it.” Jill raised her drink. “To Margo.”
I obliged. We clinked glasses.
As we were leaving the bar, we caught sight of Dave. We’d seen him use the same moves on other women playing Big Buck Hunter. He’d rejoined his party, half a dozen bearded, flannel-clad guys. They were all drunk, rowdy, overconfident. I thought we would escape without being noticed.
“You’re leaving with this little guy?” he said. I was too drunk to recognize that he was trying to insult me.
Jill shot Dave a dirty look, turned around, and kissed me on the mouth.
* * *
—
THERE ARE DAYS I hate New York, and then I go to a bodega and completely change my mind. They have everything—all the essential foods and goods—and they’re everywhere and open all the time. Bodegas represent New York’s sweet spot between chaos and convenience—dollar stores by way of foodstuffs. Sure, there are all your grocery staples, but the charm of bodegas comes from the surprises. The snacks can vary wildly: tightly condensed packages of ramen; off-brand cookies of unknown origin; ice-cream sandwiches of various forms; flavors of chips that haven’t been available for decades (the bags are maybe that old, who can know?), all packed into tall, narrow shelves as if they were rations in a fallout bunker. And then there’s the bodega grill, which offers delicious low-grade meat in any format you can dream up. At 2 a.m. you can order a “chopped cheese,” a kind of mutant burger made of ground beef and onions and American cheese, grilled to greasy perfection and spatulaed onto a roll. Or a pita. Or a bagel. You can order anything from a bodega however you want it—extra mayo, no tomatoes, douse it in hot sauce—and no one will judge you. Once you have a corner bodega that can make you an egg sandwich on a roll in the wee hours of the morning, there’s no going back.
I’d woken up while Jill was asleep and decided to make breakfast. Her fridge was mostly containers of leftovers and condiments. She had three things of ketchup but no eggs. I figured a scramble with some vegetables would be a safe bet. The bodega across the street from Jill’s apartment was nicer than any of the ones close to me in Queens. It even had a small selection of produce. After I’d located a carton of eggs, I passed by an endcap of gummy bears. They were that German brand that everyone assumed was Japanese because of the cute illustrated bears on the label. In Brooklyn, even a run-down bodega could have expensive, gourmet candies. I grabbed a package.
By the time I returned to Jill’s, she was awake, doing dishes in the kitchen in her underwear.
“Oh, I thought you had left.” She seemed startled. I’d snagged her keys on the way out, assuming she’d still be asleep when I returned.
I raised the plastic bag of groceries in my hand. “I just went out to get some stuff to make breakfast.”
I was worried that maybe Jill wanted me to leave, had been hoping I’d already left. But she smiled as I laid the groceries out on her kitchen table.
“Okay, I’ll make coffee,” she offered.
Jill put some water on and disappeared back into her bedroom. She only owned one pan, which I retrieved from the drying rack and set on the stove. I rifled around the kitchen looking for a cutting board.
Jill reemerged in sweatpants and a T-shirt. “What are you making, Chef?”
“Just an egg scramble with onions, chives, mushrooms, and tomatoes.” I dropped a dollop of butter into the pan.
“That sounds delicious. Don’t take this the wrong way, but never in a million years would I have expected you could cook.” Jill seated herself at the kitchen table, one of the dining chairs turned toward me. She discovered the package of gummy bears and opened them.
“I don’t think I’m a very good cook. But I used to make a few things at my parents’ bed-and-breakfast. I learned every way to cook an egg.” I’d finished washing the vegetables. “Do you have a knife?”
Jill pointed me to a drawer. She only had one chef’s knife, fairly dull, but I could make do. I sliced the onion and tossed it into the pan.
“That’s really sweet that you helped out at your parents’ place. Did you do that through college?”
“No, I basically worked there full-time with them. And I did some classes at community college.”
There is an expression people make when they realize you are less educated than them. It’s not a disappointed or judgmental face—just surprise. They often think they have to realign the way they talk. They want to speak on your level (as if anyone who didn’t go to a four-year college is on a different level), but they’re also aware enough of how they sound that they don’t want to come across as condescending. Which they inevitably do, because they just end up making small talk.
“What’s your parents’ bed-and-breakfast like?”
I moved on to the tomatoes. “It’s small, sort of quaint. We only have three rooms for guests.”
“And you make onion-chive-mushroom-tomato scrambles every morning?”
“It’s funny. We used to make Vietnamese food. Phoʼ in the mornings, which was easy because we’d make it the night before. Guests seemed to like it. But then we had a negative user review from a travel site that complained that we only served ‘Asian food’ instead of a traditional American breakfast. And as soon as that went up, the number of bookings dropped pretty dramatically.”
“Who doesn’t like phoʼ?”
“At least one person. And one review nearly sank my parents’ entire business.”
“But everything is okay now?”
“We stopped making phoʼ and started making eggs. The only way to get the review taken down was to make it inaccurate.” I plated the scramble onto two dishes, and placed one in front of Jill. “Everybody likes eggs.”
She thanked me meekly and looked at her plate.
“Sorry, that was a weird story to tell as I serve you eggs.”
“No, I asked. And this scramble does smell great.” Jill put away the gummy bears. “You should make me phoʼ sometime, though.”
“You should only be so lucky.”
“Then I’ll leave you a negative review online about how it’s not white people food.”
I laughed. It was a good joke. At the bar, we’d connected over Margo. Then we were both drunk, and had hooked up in some part to spite a rude stranger. I wasn’t sure why I had decided to stick around the next morning. Maybe it just felt good to make breakfast, to do something nice for someone else. Or maybe the impulse was more selfish. When was the last time I’d had someone to talk to at a meal?
But I think that’s what made me feel okay around Jill. We were both mourning Margo, a selfish act we could do together.
“Do you have any salt?”
Jill checked the cabinet above the stove. “I think I’m all out, actually.”
That wouldn’t do. I ran out to the bodega to get salt. I was back in a minute.
* * *
—
IN A STRANGE WAY, Phantom’s problems in the national spotlight were good for the company. After months of trying to fund-raise, Brandon found himself able to get a quick influx of cash from existing investors. His TV appearance had impressed them. Apparently he’d handled the press crisis well for a young CEO. It didn’t matter that he’d fumbled a bit on the local segment; all the follow-up interviews he did—and there were many—made Phantom seem like it had identified an issue and alread
y had a plan in motion for how to solve it. This is what investors loved: people who solve problems. It didn’t matter what the problem was, or who might have created that problem in the first place. The basis of all technology was founded around the idea of solving for X, regardless of what X was.
The solution, it turned out, would be labor intensive. Phantom users had the ability to report or flag inappropriate behavior in the service. If someone said something that made you uncomfortable, you could go to a menu that would allow you to send your complaint to customer service, with the guarantee that it would be investigated within twenty-four hours. We received nearly two thousand of these requests a day. We predicted that number would balloon to upward of ten thousand by the end of the month. If I worked for twelve hours straight, without a break, I could get through maybe three hundred of them. To really address anything, it would take people. Lots and lots of people.
“Congratulations, you’re going to be a manager,” Brandon said to me, his hand forward, waiting to be shaken. This would mean another pay bump, but, more importantly, stock options. “You own a piece of this company now,” he continued. I wasn’t sure how I felt. They’d had no other choice.
At first, hiring was difficult. But as it became more and more difficult to get asses into seats—and as the monitoring requests continued to flood in—we started taking just about anyone. I wasn’t much older than most of the applicants, many of whom who were recent college grads. But they all seemed so young, so eager to get in even though we paid close to nothing for tedious, repetitive work.
It was a Band-Aid when we needed stitches. Margo would’ve hated it: the shortsighted solution, the exploitation of cheap labor. Her concerns would have been voiced. Brandon might have listened, too.
The size of the office would double in two weeks’ time, creating a fracture in the workplace dynamic. It wasn’t just a divide of new and old people. Phantom used to be mostly engineers, and suddenly it would be just as many customer service people like me. We might not have had the power, but now we had the numbers.
* * *
—
OKAY, I VISITED THREE different libraries, but I wasn’t able to track down most of the records you were looking for. I did find a little Tatsumi Yamashita. They weren’t even part of the library’s collection. I just happened to run into an Asian Studies professor who had some CDs in his office.
You mean Tatsuro Yamashita.
Yeah, whatever.
Where are you based?
I’m in Oregon.
Like, Portland?
No, further east. It’s a college town. Nowhere cool. Anyway, I’ve started uploading the files to PORK. By the way, where do you live?
Brooklyn.
Oh, cool.
In New York.
You’ll be surprised to learn that most people know where Brooklyn is.
How many black people live in “eastern Oregon”?
Oh, there’s a huge community.
Wait, really?
Are you kidding? No. There are barely any other Asian people either.
Lots of Asians in Brooklyn.
Is that in New York?
Funny. By the way, I found a bunch of the bossa nova albums you were looking for. Mostly a lot of Antônio Carlos Jobim. Those soft guitar grooves are nice. I’m uploading it now.
Amazing.
Hey, lucas_pollution, I’m just looking at these files you just sent. They’re MP3s. Would you mind re-ripping these in FLAC?
What is FLAC?
It’s a lossless format.
And it’s pronounced “flak”?
Yeah, it’s basically the highest-fidelity audio file that exists.
Audio…fidelity…okay…
Ugh, so when you convert audio to a WAV or MP3 file, there’s a compression algorithm that restructures the file. Basically, the trade-off for smaller file sizes is a loss in quality. For most people, it’s hard to notice that difference.
Why does it matter, if no one notices?
Because we’re building an archive at PORK. We want the best versions of this music as possible. The point is to collect as much perfect information as we can.
But if normal people don’t care—
It’s not up to “normal people.” PORK is not a community of “normal people.”
I’ll say.
Don’t get snarky with someone who is higher-ranked than you on PORK.
Okay afronaut3000, here’s a question: How can something be totally lossless? Like, the idea of something being copied, and not losing anything?
…
…
…
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Fine, I don’t really have a good answer for that. But it’s what we have to do here. If PORK is going to be the enduring archive of music we all hope it will be one day, then we have to go the extra mile to rip lossless audio. You feel?
To get lossless versions, I have to go back to the university to rip the CDs again, right?
Oh, definitely. Track down that professor again.
Such an amount of effort to get something “lossless.”
A lack of loss!
No loss!
Zero losses!
We’ll never lose anything ever again!
* * *
—
PIRACY EXISTED BEFORE PORK. It would exist long after PORK. Piracy would be around until the sun exploded and there was nothing left of Earth.
For the music pirate, it was an immense amount of work. And yet, they did it for free. There was nothing to be gained. PORK didn’t offer monetary rewards for uploading new music, but it did manifest one’s efforts in the forum’s social structure—the more of your files people downloaded, the more quickly you ascended the hierarchy.
It’s still not clear to me why people would dedicate so much of their life to something that was both illegal and gained them nothing. Maybe for some, it was a love of music, an appreciation so deep that they felt they must do everything in their power to lower the barriers of entry to a much-loved record. Maybe, for others, it was an act of rebellion, a way to fight back at the behemoths that had appropriated and corporatized music. Maybe most people just did it because they could. Or maybe they were bored. It seemed like most of the internet was built by people either because they could or because they were bored.
Aside from a suitcase worth of clothing, the only things I brought with me to New York were my laptop and an external hard drive. It was a beast of a peripheral, so bulky and large that it required its own separate power supply. Every time I plugged it into a computer, you could hear the disk inside the black plastic enclosure whirring loudly. You could name hard drives. I named mine OZYMANDIAS.
It contained all the music I had ever downloaded. Every MP3 was neatly organized into folders by artist and album. The hard drive itself wasn’t sentimental to me, but the files were. Which is a strange thing to say—that these MP3s, which could be duplicated within a matter of seconds with two keystrokes, had any value. But I’d spent so much time collecting and meticulously cataloging them. There were small albums I returned to often, but the vast majority of the bossa nova I’d accumulated over the years had gone unlistened-to since they’d first been downloaded. Sometimes I wondered if I hung on to my music library because it meant something to me, or if it was just because I’d put so much work into it.
* * *
—
AFTER THE FIRST NIGHT we spent together, I thought there was a good chance I might never see Jill again. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. But she texted me the next day and we more or less repeated the first night on a regular basis: have a couple drinks, hook up, eat eggs in the morning.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was into Jill, or if I just liked having someone to be around again. Our conversations didn’t resemble the ones I’d had with Margo,
but at least we could talk about Margo. I started coming to Jill’s place after work. Her neighborhood in Brooklyn was a convenient commute from the office in Lower Manhattan, only a few stops on the F train. She was usually wrapping up a day of writing (or not writing), and we’d meet at that terrible bar near her apartment. Jill was never able to kill that moose.
Even though I was staying over at her place most days of the week, we never discussed whether we were a couple. Instead, we were filling the role Margo had played in each of our lives. I unloaded my anxiety about work and the craziness at the company. Jill would tell me how her writing was going, which, it turned out, was not very well at all. She’d been in a rut for months now, not sure how to snap herself out of it. Her second book, Mining Colony, the one Margo had told me all about, had failed to find a publisher, which is why I couldn’t find it at the bookstore. Jill’s confidence was totally shot after that, and she was trying to rework the novel.
Our weekday routine spilled over to the weekend. Jill looked confused—though she tried to hide it—on the Saturday morning I showed up at her apartment with an external hard drive. I’d just spent an hour and a half on a slow subway train from Queens. I unloaded the black box from my backpack, and began scanning her apartment for an open outlet. I was searching under her desk, had hardly acknowledged her, when she asked what the hell I was doing.
I explained that this was my most valued possession: my music library.
She still looked skeptical. “Boys really love their hard drives.”
I explained further: it contained a lot of music that Margo had recommended to me. “As high school kids, as strangers, we spent hundreds of hours gathering music,” I said. “Even though we worked at the same place when we met in real life, this was really the project we had collaborated on together.”
She seemed to understand. I plugged the hard drive into the USB port of Jill’s laptop.