New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  It was rustic country lodge meets dark Victorian opulence. I had never been to a restaurant like this, one that was as concerned about its mood as it was with its food. My family rarely ate out, not that there was much in the way of fine dining in eastern Oregon. Sure, I’d been to nice restaurants before in New York. But nothing quite like this. Who could afford it?

  We were seated near the fireplace. A waiter asked what kind of water we’d like: our choices being still, sparkling, and tap. I was about to ask which one was the free option when Jill said we’d both prefer sparkling. “Very nice,” said the waiter, as if it was a thing worth complimenting.

  The menu was intimidating. Swordfish would be plated on a potato emulsion, topped with an herb-and-chili vinaigrette, also dandelions. The potatoes were “young potatoes,” and they came with three-year aged gouda, caraway, whey-cured fennel. Even the ravioli would be a combination of cheese and pumpkin, served with preserved citrus. It all sounded very appealing, even if I couldn’t imagine how anything would taste.

  Jill must have caught my expression when I looked at the prices on the menu, because she assured me that dinner was on her.

  I was embarrassed. “Oh no, I was just…You don’t have to pay for dinner.”

  “Relax, it’s my treat. I’ve been meaning to come here for a while anyway. It’s nice to eat an expensive meal with good company.”

  The waiter came back with our sparkling water.

  “I’ve honestly never eaten at a place like this before,” I admitted.

  “A farm-to-table restaurant?”

  “No, like, a fancy restaurant.”

  The waiter laughed. Jill smiled.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you here. I’m happy to guide you through any items on the menu. Is there anything you like in particular?”

  “I like spicy food. Is anything on here spicy?”

  The waiter thought for a moment. He then picked up my menu to scan it himself.

  “I don’t think we have anything spicy, unfortunately. We’re more about the fresh, locally sourced ingredients.”

  I went for the ravioli. Jill picked the swordfish and a bottle of wine for us to share. The waiter nodded approvingly.

  “Do you eat at places like this often?” I asked.

  Jill told me that when she worked at her last job—well, the only job she’d ever had, years ago—she would get expensive dinners paid for by publicists. It was the best perk of the job, the chance to eat at some of New York’s finest restaurants, many of them the best in the world, on someone else’s dime. I was surprised by the specificity and accuracy with which Jill could recall these meals, like old friends she hadn’t thought about in a while.

  “This place is fancy, but it’s not, like, a three-Michelin-star kind of place,” Jill said.

  Right, not a three-Michelin-star kind of place. Sure.

  “I can see you’re uncomfortable. We can go somewhere else if you want.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just not something I’m used to.”

  “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal to go out for a nice dinner.”

  “This is the type of place that Margo would’ve hated,” I said. I immediately regretted it.

  “How do you know that?” Jill poured herself more wine. “Sometimes I wonder if we really knew the same Margo. It seems like your Margo hated everything. I only know the things my Margo liked.”

  “Would you have taken Margo to this restaurant?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But I didn’t take Margo here. I took you.”

  I had more to say, but our waiter arrived at the table, this time with another server. In unison, they placed our dishes in front of us. I bit into my cheese-pumpkin ravioli, its preserved citrus. The thing was too salty.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER, WE DIDN’T talk much. We went to bed without saying much either.

  The next day things were better. We woke up, pretending the night before never happened, with the exception of Jill’s hangover. She apologized vaguely for being too drunk, which explained away our argument at dinner. It worked. I said I was sorry too, though neither of us said why.

  We decided to sneak into the indoor pool of a local hotel, a trick she’d learned from her luxury magazine days. The key, Jill said, was to act confident, like we owned the damn place, like we were entitled to it, and no one would doubt that we’d paid to be there.

  To my surprise, the plan went off without a hitch. In the pool, I told Jill she looked good in her swimming suit, a black two-piece. She said thanks and that I just looked okay in mine. My stomach hung just over my board shorts.

  “I look like a teenager, huh?”

  “With the belly of a dad.”

  We both laughed.

  “My mom always said everyone is either a lake person or an ocean person.”

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “Definitely an ocean girl. We spent a lot of summers driving up to the beaches in Newport, Rhode Island. Waves and Slushee lemonade. The best.”

  “We only have lakes in eastern Oregon, obviously. So no waves. Just lots of calm, clear blue lakes.”

  I splashed water in her direction. She splashed back.

  “Can I get either of you anything?”

  From nowhere, a waiter had materialized. The man was wearing a flannel and jeans—an unassuming uniform for a server.

  “Two beers please,” Jill said.

  “I’ll get those for you right now. What room are you staying in?”

  “Two forty-two,” I said.

  Jill shot me a look.

  “Very good. I’ll be back with two beers.”

  “You’re gonna charge our drinks to someone’s room?”

  “If we didn’t say anything, they’d know we don’t belong here. Plus, anyone who can afford to stay here is not going to notice two beers.”

  “You’re a bad influence.”

  “Me? I’m not the one who ordered beers at ten a.m.”

  “Oh Jesus, is it only ten?” She splashed me again. “You’re a lake boy. I’m just an ocean girl. It’ll never work.”

  We started making out in the pool. I lifted Jill up by her hips, and she wrapped her legs around my waist. The beers arrived. We downed them immediately, and put two more on the tab for room 242. We were drunk by noon.

  * * *

  —

  THE REST OF THE weekend was delightful. We had grand plans to go for a hike, but realized we would rather lounge around at the house. I cooked dinner while Jill read on the couch. It was the first time in a long time that I wasn’t preoccupied by work. Occasionally I checked my phone, expecting a missed call or a text from Brandon. But he hadn’t reached out. It was a relief.

  Everything went smoothly until our ride back Sunday afternoon. We got caught in traffic just outside the city.

  “Can you put some music on, or something?”

  We’d been listening to MP3s of Margo for most of our trip back.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, pausing the iPod. “What do you want to listen to?”

  “I don’t know. Just not Margo right now.”

  I flipped the stereo to the radio. I hit the SCAN button, which cycled through FM stations five seconds at a time. There was very little music. We mostly heard ads for car dealerships in New Jersey. The point of scan is to let it go until you hear something you like, but we rarely did, so the radio mostly skipped through its frequencies for the rest of our drive.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN the office on Monday morning, I found the customer service floor completely vacant. All of the equipment was still there, an array of computers and monitors propped on the folding tables we’d gotten in lieu of desks. Had we done that to save money? Or because this entire operation was
never going to last?

  Upstairs I found Brandon at his desk, clicking around on his computer like nothing had happened.

  “Where is everyone? Where’s my team?”

  “Lucas, let’s step into the conference room.”

  “No, I want to know where everyone is right now.”

  “We let everyone go. We’re no longer doing customer support. I can explain. Let’s just go to the conference room.”

  “What do you mean we’re ‘no longer doing customer support’? Why wasn’t I consulted?”

  “Don’t be hysterical. I knew you were on vacation, so I thought I would do you a favor by taking care of the layoffs myself. I called everyone over the weekend and told them we were terminating their temp contracts early.”

  “That was my team.”

  “They were just bodies, in seats, on a floor below this one. I really think we should talk in the conference room.” Now Brandon wasn’t suggesting.

  Brandon had taken my proposal to make the customer support team full-time employees very seriously. He said I was right. The way it existed currently was untenable and shortsighted. If we were going to moderate Phantom’s messages, we needed to either commit or not do it at all. And the solution, apparently, was to not do it at all.

  More articles had broken over the weekend. I hadn’t been checking. Soon, all the details of our moderation process would find their way to the public. All of our guidelines and policies would inevitably leak. Everyone would not only know that Phantom was censoring its users’ messages, but exactly how we went about doing it. A PR nightmare.

  “We stand behind our policies, though,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. The fact that we’re doing it at all is enough to make people upset.”

  “Is the plan to deploy Emil’s system? Because it is so far from ready.”

  “We’re not using Emil’s algorithm either. We’re trashing that.”

  “What? So without people responding to flagged messages or Emil’s algorithm, how are we supposed to protect our users?”

  “We don’t.”

  “At all?”

  “We take no responsibility for users on Phantom anymore. We produce the platform, the technology that people use. We’re not accountable for how people use it.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Look, even with a team of a hundred, or a thousand, moderators, or if Emil’s algorithm actually worked with 99.9 percent accuracy, we still wouldn’t be able to catch everything. And every time something slips through the cracks, we’re going to get called out on it, no matter how hard we try. People are always going to find new ways to be terrible and cruel.”

  “You’re just giving up?”

  “Ever since the first story about Phantom having a bullying problem broke, we have spent countless hours—and a huge swath of our budget—trying to solve it. And even though we’ve made progress, publicly no one has noticed. We’re still the messaging service with the bullying problem.”

  “It’s worse than that. It’s harassment, it’s violence. People get death threats.”

  “That’s our problem unless we declare, outright, that we are no longer responsible for it. Use Phantom at your own risk.”

  “You’d rather willingly make Phantom a worse, a dangerous environment?”

  “We can’t keep taking these hits. We need to raise capital, and I can’t do that if the press is going after us every week.”

  And there it was: Brandon’s real motivation.

  “I started Phantom with lofty principles, and I haven’t given up on them,” he said. “But we’ll never achieve those ideals—never make a real difference in the world—if we run out of money first.”

  The situation was more dire than I had realized. Without major cost-cutting, Phantom would be cooked in six months, if not sooner. Brandon assured me that he had really given thought to my proposal. But the cost of salaries, benefits, and vested shares of the company would cut the lifespan of Phantom from six months to three.

  “Plus, I can’t go out and raise money from investors and tell them that half of the people I just hired are on the customer support team.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a tech company is supposed to be making technology, not apologizing for it.”

  * * *

  —

  BRANDON SAID I COULD take the day off, but really, it was an offer predicated on the fact that I no longer had anything to do in the office.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of going home and sitting in my apartment, so I wandered around the city, trying to find a way to distract myself. I had three frozen margaritas at the Mexican place down the block, the only place serving alcohol before noon. I stopped by a movie theater, but nothing playing sounded appealing. I thought about texting Jill, but couldn’t imagine how to explain that I had the day off because I was a complete failure as a manager. Instead, I wandered around until I found a quiet park. I sat on a bench, put my headphones in, and there was Margo.

  “Earth is burning up. Each year, the global temperature rises three degrees. The sun bears down across the planet, its rays blasting through an atmosphere that has been decimated by just a couple short centuries of pollution. Ah, ‘pollution’—such a great euphemism when really what we mean is the consequence of humanity.

  “In just a decade, Earth will be uninhabitable. Hot. No crops will grow. The oceans will dry up. Human life, as we know it, will cease to exist.”

  I still had plenty of un-listened-to Margo stories, but there were a handful I kept returning to every time I was stressed out from work. I would never describe Margo’s voice as soothing, but the familiarity was calming. There was one about a tribunal of the world’s smartest people who oversee the planet’s affairs from an orbiting space station. Their job is to observe Earth objectively, from a distance—quite literally—and act as a council that can advise world leaders from a non-terrestrial vantage point to prevent future geopolitical conflicts.

  Decades pass and the situation on Earth doesn’t improve. In fact, things only get worse, and after witnessing years of violent, cruel, and selfish human behavior from space, the tribunal comes to the conclusion that man’s only achievement is the ability to inflict pain and suffering upon itself. People are irredeemable. The planet is doomed. The smartest thing the tribunal can do, it decides, is to put the human race out of its misery. They realign the space station’s orbit so it collides with the Earth. The impact will shatter the Arctic ice cap, causing the tides to rise across the Earth, the seas to swallow civilization whole and end human suffering. “And that was humankind’s last great act: taking matters into its own hands.”

  The audio file ended with Margo laughing. In the park, sitting alone, I laughed too.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT I WENT to Jill’s, but was reluctant to tell her about what had happened. The next morning, we both took the N train, a subway that connected both Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Chinatowns and extended upward toward Queens. I was headed back to the office, and Jill had to meet with her agent in Midtown. We decided to grab some food somewhere around Canal Street, maybe dumplings.

  After we boarded the subway, Jill fished a pair of white earphones from her jacket pocket. They were tangled, scrunched together tightly like a dry brick of instant ramen. Jill went about trying to pull the strands of cord apart.

  “Are you listening to music?”

  “Oh sorry, force of habit. I usually just wear headphones on the train to make sure nobody talks to me.”

  I realized we’d rarely ridden the subway together before. Usually, I met Jill at her place, and we wouldn’t go anywhere.

  The train car was mostly full of Asians—likely Chinese, given the trajectory of the subway. Standing by the door was a large white man, dressed in the outfit of a construction worker
: boots, paint-splattered carpenter jeans, a neon yellow T-shirt.

  “This train is full of chinks,” he said to himself. “Chinks everywhere, as far as the eye can see.”

  He continued on, shifting into an impression of Chinese.

  “Ching chong chang, chinky chink chink.”

  It was the kind of lazy racism you witnessed on the train every once in a while. I’d certainly seen it before. It shocked me the first time I heard the word “chink” on the subway. But in the months I’d been in New York, I’d learned to tune it out.

  “Excuse me, sir”—it was Jill—“what you’re saying is extremely offensive.”

  Out of nowhere, she had leapt up and was walking across the car toward the man.

  “What does it matter? These people can’t understand. They only know Chinese.”

  “First of all, that is an assumption you’re making.”

  “Lady, why don’t you just mind your own business instead of yelling at strangers?”

  “You’re being racist.”

  “Come on, it’s not racist. They don’t speak English. If you come to America, you better talk the way the rest of us talk.”

  “I speak English,” I said.

  “Who is this? You’re just saying this to me to protect your yellow-dicked boyfriend.”

  “How fucking dare you—”

  “Jill, come on, it’s not worth it.” I pulled her back.

  “Yeah Jill, come on, it’s not worth it,” the man said, kicking his voice up an octave. “Listen to your chink before you make him upset.”

  “I’m technically more of a gook,” I said, figuring that I could end this before it turned into a confrontation.

  “Now who’s the racist?” The man began to laugh.

  The train came to Canal Street, and the doors opened.

  “This is our stop.”

  Jill and I exited the train. She was livid—partly at the man, partly at me.