New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  The headier, smarter stuff comes in the second half of Jill’s book. But it feels, on the whole, uneven. The first half is funny, even jaunty, as the mystery propels us forward, but all the vigor and humor of the first half disappear in the second, weighed down by each family member’s increasing unhappiness with themselves and one another.

  After I finished the book, I looked up its reviews. Most people felt the same way.

  * * *

  —

  MARGO’S RECORDINGS SPANNED HUNDREDS of hours. Together, we’d listened to many of them by this point. I’d spent an afternoon meticulously compressing all the WAV files into MP3s so I could listen to them on a hand-me-down iPod Jill had lent me. I listened to Margo’s stories on my commute and scribbled notes on loose paper, to report them back to Jill later that evening. Sometimes the stories were incomplete, names of characters and planets inconsistent. In many of the recordings it was clear that Margo was drinking, and though those stories were often slurred and on occasion total nonsense, some of them were my favorites, reminders of our meandering nights rambling in bars together. In these recordings, Margo’s sentences would trail off, sometimes punctuated by a burp or a giggle.

  Our plan was to transcribe all of Margo’s stories, though when we decided to do that we hadn’t quite realized just how many of these recordings there were. It became clear that Margo must have done this nearly every night for several years. Years of telling stories, seemingly spontaneous and without preparation, from the way she spoke. Jill joked that she herself had enough trouble writing one science fiction story. Sure, not every one of Margo’s stories was a winner. But taken altogether, her body of work was stunning.

  We usually finished working around midnight. If we weren’t too tired, we’d hook up, or at least we would fool around. One night, as we were both half clothed, Jill had an idea.

  “You know what we’ve never done?” She got out of bed and began digging around her closet, retrieving two towels. “We’ve never used the sauna.”

  There were luxury amenities available in Jill’s condo, she explained. The building was new, built of showy metal and glass to disguise its cheap structural bones. Brooklyn was full of brick brownstones that had lasted the better part of a century, if not more, and still looked good; now they were surrounded by tacky-looking high-rises like Jill’s. In her words, she lived among “the cheapest rich people.”

  “How can you afford this apartment?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, embarrassed, before admitting: “I can’t.”

  I assumed that meant her parents were helping her with rent. Or she was living off a trust fund.

  “Do your parents help out or something?”

  “What? I would never let my parents pay my rent.” She seemed pissed off.

  I shrugged. “Hey, if my parents were in a situation to help me pay rent and they offered? I would accept that help in a heartbeat.”

  We walked to the sauna barefoot, in our towels; I had grabbed a couple beers. Despite all its extravagant amenities, the building was a ghost town. I almost never saw other occupants. The condo had been finished for the better part of five years, but still more than half of the units remained unsold, and many that had been sold remained unoccupied—supposedly purchased by people somewhere outside of New York as an investment.

  The few apartments that were occupied were a block of units reserved for affordable housing. By law, new buildings like these had to offer a small percentage of their units to poor tenants. To get them, you had to apply through a lottery system controlled by the city.

  “Tens of thousands of people apply and very few get anywhere. Getting this apartment is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Jill said. “Maybe the only lucky thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “But isn’t affordable housing for actual poor people?” And maybe not intended for a well-educated white girl from a middle-class family in the suburbs? I didn’t say it.

  “I don’t think you realize just how little money I have. My income was way below the threshold to apply.”

  Though I’d rarely seen anyone else in the building, Jill said she’d had numerous encounters with residents who turned their noses up at her because she didn’t own her unit.

  “None of the affordable housing folks are allowed to use the amenities,” Jill said. “But it’s really easy to steal one of these.” She held up a small, black piece of plastic—a key fob—and swiped it on the keypad by the sauna door. It made a satisfying beep, and the LED light on the lock changed from red to green, granting us permission.

  The heat relaxed my muscles, cleared my head; it made a cold beer taste even better.

  “When’s the last time you were in a relationship?” Jill asked.

  I was surprised by the question. “A while ago. When I was living in Oregon. This girl and I would hook up a couple times a week, which was a lot, considering I lived with my parents and couldn’t bring her home,” I said. “You get pretty good at having sex in confined spaces. Like a car.”

  “So it never got serious?”

  “She actually told me, ‘Lucas, you are not a serious person.’ Which was rude, but also, not wrong.”

  “Mmm. Definitely rude, at least.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I lived with a boyfriend for a while. Since then, I’ve only dated casually. I think it suits me, mostly.” Then Jill asked, “What are we doing?”

  I didn’t want to answer, so I played dumb. “Sitting in a sauna, drinking beer?”

  “No, I mean, like, what are we doing?”

  “Like, with Margo’s stories?”

  That clearly was not what Jill was asking about, but she sipped her beer and let out a resigned “Sure.”

  “The stories are good.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Maybe it’s selfish that we’re keeping them to ourselves.”

  “Do you want to put them on the internet?”

  “No, like, we should collect them into a book. Get them published. You’re an author, you know how that works, right?”

  “Well, sure.”

  Thinking back…Jill never agreed outright.

  I leaned over and kissed her when she smiled—either I was too caught up in the moment, or maybe I didn’t care if she thought it was a good idea. I ran my hands under Jill’s towel, up her back.

  “Oh, this is why you wanted to use the sauna,” I said, realizing she hadn’t worn a bathing suit. Jill removed her towel and lay down on her back.

  “So you’re good in confined spaces, huh?”

  The heat of the sauna had us breathing heavier and louder than usual. I worried that somebody might see us, but of course, nobody ever came.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, YOU HAVE TO watch this video.

  I have a bunch of emails to get through, Margo.

  Watch it now.

  You know it’s hard for me to open a video with my boss breathing over my shoulder. I swear, he spends more time bothering me about what’s on my computer monitor than actually doing any work at Nimbus.

  Okay, I’ll just describe this video to you:

  There’s a white guy wearing a black hoodie and black beanie. He’s on the roof of a single-story house. He approaches a trash can.

  A metal one?

  No, like one of those big plastic containers. The kind you probably see in the suburbs.

  So he’s going to jump into a garbage bin?

  Seems that way. He’s walking toward it. He does a flip in the air, and about halfway through his rotation, he just yells “fuck,” and lands ass-first in the trash can.

  I can hear you laughing from the other side of the office.

  It’s so good. Okay, here’s another: There’s a white guy, also in a hoodie, swinging around a pair of nunchucks.
Oh, he’s kind of good at them actually? He’s doing a bunch of nunchuck tricks.

  Does he hit himself in the crotch?

  Oh my god, he just whacked himself in the dick with nunchucks.

  You are laughing so loudly over there.

  HE HIT HIMSELF IN THE DICK.

  Margo, everyone is staring at you.

  It’s so good. Okay next video.

  I don’t understand why you like these clips so much. It’s just video after video of dudes accidentally hurting themselves.

  First of all, they’re called “fails.” And second, they are so goddamn funny. There’s nothing funnier than failure.

  I don’t get the appeal. Like, you’re just watching people get injured and laughing at them.

  We work in tech, an industry that fetishizes failure. We celebrate men who start companies and fail spectacularly. People who run startups that don’t work out—they are lauded as men who have come out smarter and more confident for it. It’s not even failing upwards. It’s failing…omnidirectionally.

  I suppose there’s something subversive about watching videos of dudes getting it in the nuts. It’s satisfying to see failure as just failure, and not part of a redemption arc afforded only to white guys.

  Yes, exactly—Oh my god, Lucas, look at this one!

  I’m not clicking that.

  Click it.

  No.

  Click it.

  Fine.

  Good boy.

  Okay so it’s…footage from the dashboard of a car.

  Yeah, it’s called a dashcam.

  It’s a dashcam. Great. Someone is driving their car and—oh, they just got hit by another vehicle. Oh, this isn’t one video. It’s a series of car crashes. A dashcam compilation. Margo what the hell, this video is twenty minutes long.

  Wild, right? I’m so glad I can’t drive.

  Why are all of these Russian?

  I read that everyone in Russia owns a dashcam. Apparently laws are so lax, plus traffic enforcement is so corrupt, that everyone has these cheap video cameras on their cars to protect themselves in the case of an accident. Like, if you get rear-ended, the person that hit you can claim you’re at fault. Or maybe they have more money and can pay off the cops to favor their side of the story. But at least the system respects firsthand footage as evidence. Therefore, everyone has a dashcam.

  So the solution is: everyone is surveilling each other.

  The best offense is a strong defense, and in Russia, a strong defense is a dashcam.

  Who has the time to compile all these car crash videos and then set it to a rap-metal soundtrack?

  Lucas, we spent our high school years ripping and uploading music to a forum.

  Fair. I can still hear you laughing from the other side of the office. Are you still watching this car crash video?

  Oh, I’m going to watch all twenty minutes.

  How do you get away with not even pretending to do work?

  It’s the privilege of being the most intimidating engineer in the office. Who is going to mess with me if I’m obviously the best programmer here?

  Margo, you’re so humble.

  Listen, there’s nothing more humbling than watching video after video of people fucking up.

  * * *

  —

  NINA WAS THE MOST competent person in my growing pool of customer service reps. And a close second was Thompson, who didn’t work quite as briskly, but I’d taken a liking to him just for the way he made the office laugh. No one ever stresses the importance of humor in the workplace. Thompson was a little older—maybe mid-forties—and was less computer literate than the rest. As a form of motivation, there was an extra fifty-dollar incentive for the person who got through the most support requests in a given day—a sizeable amount of money, considering that a day’s base pay totaled less than a hundred dollars. In the first week, Nina won the bonus cash four out of the five days. At 5 p.m., when our support was officially offline, I’d hand her a crisp bill in front of everyone, a small ceremony that would hopefully encourage others to compete for the same honor the next day.

  But outside of Nina and Thompson, the cast of characters on the service floor rotated quickly. By the second and third week, nearly everyone from the first training class had moved on. They’d either found better jobs or they’d burned out. Or they weren’t cutting it, and had to be let go. Or, as was the case with Lion, they’d been fired after being repeatedly warned about getting high at work. I worried about one day losing Nina and Thompson, so after much pleading with Brandon, I was able to up their hourly salary. They were both happy. I felt like I was doing a good job.

  Brandon was satisfied with the work we were doing downstairs, but Emil said we were not producing results.

  “Your team is getting through thousands of support requests a day,” Emil explained. “For there to be enough information to feed an algorithm, we need to be churning through tens of thousands each day.”

  I resented the way Emil described his algorithm as needing to be fed, as if it were hungry, as if it were a person—more a person than the people downstairs who were literally hungry and using our meager pay for actual food. But he was understandably frustrated. In the month or so since we’d scaled out the support team, Emil had made very little progress in his attempts to automate the review process.

  “If you want more signals to feed your algorithm, then we need to hire more people,” I said. “My team is working as fast as humanly possible.”

  “Humanly possible,” Emil said. “That’s why we need to let the algo—”

  “Shut up, Emil,” Brandon said. “Don’t blame Lucas and his people because your software can’t tell the difference between a death threat and Eminem.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Emil left the room in a huff.

  “I keep pushing Emil to make this system smarter, but he believes the only way it can get smarter is if it can ingest more data.” Brandon added, “Machine learning, you know?”

  Brandon showed me several tests where Emil’s algorithm had scanned several hundred thousand messages, using a combination of language analysis, results from customer service support requests, and a list of flagged words to identify whether a message was acceptable or a threat. The results were wildly inconsistent. Oftentimes “bitch” got marked as inappropriate, regardless of context. “Breast” was an issue, even when used to refer to a chicken breast. The system had flagged nearly every instance of where a racial slur was used—not a violation of our guidelines, since it was impossible to determine if, say, a white person was saying the N-word or if a black person was saying it. But, embarrassingly, it seemed to struggle most with hip-hop verses, even when they came from extremely popular Top 40 songs. (Emil said his future solution would be to integrate a song lyrics database for exemptions.) Overall, when it came to conforming with our policies, the algorithm had been correct only 17 percent of the time. It was clear that Emil’s system could only identify things at word level. It still couldn’t wrap its head around sentences.

  “It will get better over time. Hopefully.”

  “Well, until then, I think we need another dozen people if we’re going to keep up with the support queue.”

  “Obviously, we can’t just keep adding people to our customer support team forever. But in the meantime, keep up the good work down there.”

  He granted me the employees. Before I headed back downstairs, I asked if I could see Emil’s list.

  Blacklist (750 terms)

  a55, a55hole, aeolus, ahole, anal, analprobe, anilingus, anus, areola, areole, arian, aryan, ass, assbang, assbanged, assbangs, asses, assfuck, assfucker, assh0le, asshat, assho1e, ass hole, assholes, assmaster, assmunch, asswipe, asswipes, azazel, azz, b1tch, babe, babes, ballsack, bang, banger, barf, bastard, bastards, bawdy, beaner, beardedclam, beastiality,
beatch, beater, beaver, beer, beeyotch, beotch, biatch, bigtits, big tits, bimbo, bitch, bitched, bitches, bitchy, blow, blow job, blowjob, blowjobs, bod, bodily, boink, bollock, bollocks, bollok, bone, boned, boner, boners, bong, boob, boobies, boobs, booby, booger, bookie, bootee, bootie, booty, booze, boozer, boozy, bosom, bosomy, bowel, bowels, bra, brassiere, breast, breasts, bugger, bukkake, bull shit, bullshit, bullshits, bullshitted, bullturds, bung, busty, butt, buttfuck, butt fuck, butt-fucker, buttfucker, buttplug, c.0.c.k, c.o.c.k., c.u.n.t, c0ck, c-0-c-k, caca, cahone, cameltoe, carpetmuncher, cawk, cervix, chinc, chincs, chink, chinks, chode, chodes, cl1t, climax, clit, clitoris, clitorus, clits, clitty, cocain, cocaine, cock, c-o-c-k, cock sucker, cockblock, cockholster, cockknocker, cocks, cocksmoker, cocksucker, coital, commie, condom, coon, coons, corksucker, crabs, crack, cracker, crackwhore, crap, crappy, cum, cummin, cumming, cumshot, cumshots, cumslut, cumstain, cunilingus, cunnilingus, cunny, cunt, cunt, c-u-n-t, cuntface, cunthunter, cuntlick, cuntlicker, cunts, d0ng, d0uch3, d0uche, d1ck, d1ld0, d1ldo, dago, dagos, dammit, damn, damned, damnit, dawgie-style, dick, dickbag, dickdipper, dickface, dickflipper, dickhead, dickheads, dickish, dick-ish, dickripper, dicksipper, dickweed, dickwhipper, dickzipper, diddle, dike, dildo, dildos, diligaf, dillweed, dimwit, dingle, dipship, doggie-style, doggy-style, dong, doofus, doosh, dopey, douch3, douche, douchebag, douchebags, douchey, drunk, dumass, dumbass, dumbasses, dummy, dyke, dykes, ejaculate, enlargement, erect, erection, erotic, essohbee, extacy, extasy, f.u.c.k, fack, fag, fagg, fagged, faggit, faggot, fagot, fags, faig, faigt, fannybandit, fart, fartknocker, fat, felch, felcher, felching, fellate, fellatio, feltch, feltcher, fisted, fisting, fisty, floozy, foad, fondle, foobar, foreskin, freex, frigg, frigga, fubar, fuck, f-u-c-k, fuckass, fucked, fucked, fucker, fuckface, fuckin, fucking, fucknugget, fucknut, fuckoff, fucks, fucktard, fuck-tard, fuckup, fuckwad, fuckwit, fudgepacker, fuk, fvck, fxck, gae, gai, ganja, gay, gays, gey, gfy, ghay, ghey, gigolo, glans, goatse, godamn, godamnit, goddam, goddammit, goddamn, goldenshower, gonad, gonads, gook, gooks, gringo, gspot, g-spot, gtfo, guido, h0m0, h0mo, handjob, hard on, he11, hebe, heeb, hell, hemp, heroin, herp, herpes, herpy, hitler, hiv, hobag, hom0, homey, homo, homoey, honky, hooch, hookah, hooker, hoor, hootch, hooter, hooters, horny, hump, humped, humping, hussy, hymen, inbred, incest, injun, j3rk0ff, jackass, jackhole, jackoff, jap, japs, jerk, jerk0ff, jerked, jerkoff, jism, jiz, jizm, jizz, jizzed, junkie, junky, kike, kikes, kill, kinky, kkk, klan, knobend, kooch, kooches, kootch, kraut, kyke, labia, lech, leper, lesbians, lesbo, lesbos, lez, lezbian, lezbians, lezbo, lezbos, lezzie, lezzies, lezzy, lmao, lmfao, loin, loins, lube, lusty, mams, massa, masterbate, masterbating, masterbation, masturbate, masturbating, masturbation, maxi, menses, menstruate, menstruation, meth, m-fucking, mofo, molest, moolie, moron, motherfucka, motherfucker, motherfucking, mtherfucker, mthrfucker, mthrfucking, muff, muffdiver, murder, muthafuckaz, muthafucker, mutherfucker, mutherfucking, muthrfucking, nad, nads, naked, napalm, nappy, nazi, nazism, negro, nigga, niggah, niggas, niggaz, nigger, niggers, niggle, niglet, nimrod, ninny, nipple, nooky, nympho, opiate, opium, oral, orally, organ, orgasm, orgasmic, orgies, orgy, ovary, ovum, ovums, p.u.s.s.y., paddy, paki, pantie, panties, panty, pastie, pasty, pcp, pecker, pedo, pedophile, pedophilia, pedophiliac, pee, peepee, penetrate, penetration, penial, penile, penis, perversion, peyote, phalli, phallic, phuck, pillowbiter, pimp, pinko, piss, pissed, pissoff, piss-off, pms, polack, pollock, poon, poontang, porn, porno, pornography, pot, potty, prick, prig, prostitute, prude, pube, pubic, pubis, punkass, punky, puss, pussies, pussy, pussypounder, puto, queaf, queef, queef, queer, queero, queers, quicky, quim, racy, rape, raped, raper, rapist, raunch, rectal, rectum, rectus, reefer, reetard, reich, retard, retarded, revue, rimjob, ritard, rtard, r-tard, rum, rump, rumprammer, ruski, s.h.i.t., s.o.b., s0b, sadism, sadist, scag, scantily, schizo, schlong, screw, screwed, scrog, scrot, scrote, scrotum, scrud, scum, seaman, seamen, seduce, semen, sex, sexual, sh1t, s-h-1-t, shamedame, shit, s-h-i-t, shite, shiteater, shitface, shithead, shithole, shithouse, shits, shitt, shitted, shitter, shitty, shiz, sissy, skag, skank, slave, sleaze, sleazy, slut, slutdumper, slutkiss, sluts, smegma, smut, smutty, snatch, sniper, snuff, s-o-b, sodom, souse, soused, sperm, spic, spick, spik, spiks, spooge, spunk, steamy, stfu, stiffy, stoned, strip, stroke, stupid, suck, sucked, sucking, sumofabiatch, t1t, tampon, tard, tawdry, teabagging, teat, terd, teste, testee, testes, testicle, testis, thrust, thug, tinkle, tit, titfuck, titi, tits, tittiefucker, titties, titty, tittyfuck, tittyfucker, toke, toots, tramp, transsexual, trashy, tubgirl, turd, tush, twat, twats, ugly, undies, unwed, urinal, urine, uterus, uzi, vag, vagina, valium, viagra, virgin, vixen, vodka, vomit, voyeur, vulgar, vulva, wad, wang, wank, wanker, wazoo, wedgie, weed, weenie, weewee, weiner, weirdo, wench, wetback, wh0re, wh0reface, whitey, whiz, whoralicious, whore, whorealicious, whored, whoreface, whorehopper, whorehouse, whores, whoring, wigger, womb, woody, wop, wtf, x-rated, xxx, yeasty, yobbo, zoophile