New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  At 6 p.m., I was almost always the first person at the bar, but one night there was a man sitting with his laptop before I arrived. He looked like, well, any guy, not dissimilar from that awful dude whatshisname that gave me a hard time when I didn’t accept his drink the week before. He was asking Charlotte if they had wifi, and when she said no, he said that most of the places he went in San Francisco, where he was from, had internet access for patrons. Charlotte said sorry, but she wasn’t really apologizing.

  I sat down and she served me a rum and coke.

  Usually I read a book at the bar. But this evening I had gone to a copy shop and printed out every single one of Margo’s stories that Lucas and I had transcribed. Some of them I had begun to rewrite—clean up the language, make them into real stories. But Lucas had outpaced me with his transcriptions, so most of the stack had not been edited—or even looked at yet—by me. I had hit a sticky point in my work that day. I’d written myself into a corner and needed a break. Maybe I’d find some inspiration in Margo’s stories. Skimming through the printouts, I marked passages that I liked with a highlighter, doodled notes in the margins.

  “Are you a student?” asked the man.

  I looked up, made eye contact for a second, and said, “No.”

  “Lawyer?”

  “Certainly not.”

  He nodded to himself, seemingly to acknowledge that he understood I was to be left alone. He ordered another drink and closed his laptop, having conceded that, without internet access, he wasn’t going to get any work done. I went about my business.

  From his messenger bag, the man pulled out a book. I recognized it immediately. It was the paperback of my book.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Huh?”

  “That book. Where did you get it?”

  “I took it out from my bag?”

  “No, why are you reading that book?”

  “Is this book bad or something? I don’t know. A friend lent it to me for my trip, and now I am reading it because there is no wifi at this bar.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I clearly don’t.”

  “I wrote that book.”

  “What?”

  “You’re”—he looked at the cover—“Jill August?”

  “In the flesh.”

  The back cover of the book had a small black-and-white portrait of me. He held it up next to my face, squinted. “Okay, I guess I see it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, now that I know you wrote it, I’m obviously going to say I like it.”

  “You can be honest.”

  “I like it.”

  “Oh really.”

  “No, I really do. I honestly don’t read much, and I am flying right through it. I read, like, the first one hundred pages in a row on the flight here.”

  “You’re from San Francisco?”

  “Yeah. The Bay Area, at least.”

  “That’s a five-hour flight. It took you five hours to read only a hundred pages.”

  “I’m a very slow reader. Watch me sit at the bar all night and knock out another twenty.”

  I don’t know why I laughed, but I did. I shouldn’t have but it happened, and it was too late to do anything about it.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  Charlotte moved toward us like she was just seconds away from telling the guy off. I put up a hand to wave her off. She nodded and went to make the drink she’d assumed I wouldn’t want.

  He introduced himself. “Michael.”

  We shook hands for some reason.

  “I’m Margo.”

  “Not Jill August?”

  “That’s a pseudonym,” I lied.

  “A nom de plume,” he said, like he was correcting me. “Okay, ‘Margo.’ It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Charlotte plonked down our drinks.

  * * *

  —

  HE HAD A STARTUP and was in town for work, trying to raise money. He’d already hit up every investor in San Francisco. Maybe there were folks who would be willing to take a risk on him in New York.

  “The last thing a woman wants to hear at a bar is a guy telling her about his startup,” I said.

  “Fair point.”

  “Like, nobody.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “But here’s a deal,” I continued. “If I listen to you, you have to listen to me after. I’m gonna tell you a sad story and you’re gonna listen, attentively, to every second of it.”

  Michael looked suspicious, but maybe his curiosity got the better of him. Or maybe he just really, really wanted to tell me about his startup.

  “Also,” I added, “you’re gonna expense all our drinks.”

  Two more arrived, neither of us having asked Charlotte for them.

  Michael’s startup had a backstory. He used to be in love, you see. The woman’s name was Kristen (of course), and he remembers the day they moved in together. At the time, they were both too poor to afford movers, so they rented a truck and did it all themselves. It was an exhausting day, one that involved a lot of tired bickering from all the stress of manual labor. By the end of the move, the fighting had gotten so bad that Michael and Kristen weren’t even talking, and suddenly the entire cohabiting thing didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

  They showered off and planned to order takeout. But to Kristen, the thought of them eating shitty Chinese food in silence was just too much. Instead, she suggested they go out. Like, really go out. Dress up, find the nicest restaurant they could get into without a reservation. Michael thought this idea was crazy. They were worn out. The last thing he wanted to do was to celebrate a day of arguing. But he went along. They dug through their boxes to find their best outfits—Kristen found a dress she’d worn only once; Michael, his one and only ill-fitting suit—and they left the unpacked, barely furnished apartment.

  At dinner, they spent too much money and began fighting again, of course. An expensive meal wasn’t going to alleviate any of the pressure that had been building throughout the day. It would also not bode well for their relationship, which would slowly deteriorate over six months until Kristen moved out and the two would never speak to each other again. But on the way to that dinner, everything felt different. The promise of treating themselves to a nice meal after a long day of moving signaled that they had made the right decision, that living together was the next step in a long and fulfilling friendship, the road to marriage, a home, maybe even kids. All that potential felt so present on the thirty-minute subway ride headed to the restaurant.

  The subway car was mostly teenagers and tourists. The teens were loud and joyous and keeping to themselves, as if no one else in the world existed. There was a group of three women in their mid-forties, likely tourists, considering their fanny packs, speaking a vaguely Scandinavian language (Swedish? Danish maybe?). One of them, armed with a large camera with an intimidating lens, approached Michael and Kristen and asked if she could take their picture. She said they looked so perfect together. Flattered, they obliged.

  When she was done, she turned the camera around to show Michael the photo. He could only see a thumbnail-size rendering. Kristen looked beautiful, of course, in her black-and-white dress; her features looked vibrant, gorgeous. Michael’s suit, which rested so baggily on his thin frame, looked trim and tailored from the angle of the photo.

  Michael asked the woman to send him the photo. He found an old receipt in his pocket, fished around for a pen (one of the other women had one), and jotted his email address down. She nodded, promising to send the picture when she got to a computer.

  The photo never arrived, though. Maybe Michael had written his email down illegibly, or maybe he’d written it incorrectly. Or perhaps the woman just forgot and never sent it. But Michael thought back to that pictu
re often. And he got a little weird about it, he admitted. In the months that followed, he scoured the internet in search of the photo. His relationship with Kristen didn’t last, but if only he could hold on to how it felt when he thought it might.

  There was no promise—really, not even a strong likelihood—that the picture existed anywhere Michael could access it. The photographer would’ve had to upload it to a photo sharing site, and a public one. In all likelihood, it was probably sitting on the SD card in her camera. Or maybe she’d deleted it, wiped its existence from the face of the Earth.

  And yet, Michael kept looking for it. He spent tens of hours looking through photo sites. There were rough ways to search and filter by metadata, since digital photographs stored certain kinds of information when they were taken. He knew the day it was taken, and, if it was a newer model of camera, it would even identify the city. Michael tried to recall the make of the device, though it was hard to summon that detail. But even filtering as thoroughly as he could, Michael found himself with a pool of millions of images—impossible for a single person to get through.

  This is what inspired his company. They did facial recognition, he explained. With machine learning, his technology would be able to identify people, and scan thousands of images per second in search of them.

  “It would be like having a million of me looking for this picture at once,” he said.

  “Does it work?” I asked. “Could you take a picture of my face and then use it to find every photo of me on the internet?”

  “Yes and no,” he admitted. “The foundation is there. It just requires more time to develop. But if I can actually secure some funding, yes, one day you’ll be able to locate every photo of yourself on the internet.”

  “At first I was skeptical, but that actually sounds like a smart idea.”

  “Thank you,” he said, acknowledging that he’d won my approval.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Panopticon.”

  I scoffed. “Isn’t that, like, a kind of prison where the inmates are observed from every angle?”

  “Nobody knows that. Panopticon is a word that sounds cool.”

  It did sound cool, if you didn’t think too hard about it, which probably meant no one was thinking very hard at all.

  “So you’re here, in New York, looking for money because investors in San Francisco don’t like that story?”

  “I don’t tell it to many people anymore.”

  “Is it even true?”

  “It is true. But it’s not exactly the kind of context people who finance companies are interested in.”

  “Investors aren’t so sentimental, huh?”

  “They are, actually. Surprisingly so.” Michael took a moment to figure out how to explain it to me. “Investors don’t want to think of the girlfriend they lost. They want to think about the better girlfriend they can have next.”

  I tried (and failed) to hold in a groan.

  This is when Michael got sad. Sometimes, he found himself restless at night, unable to sleep. So he would just go to his computer and scroll through public photo sharing sites, looking for that perfect image.

  “Why don’t you just use Panopticon? Didn’t you create it for this express purpose?”

  “I have. Of course I have. I mean, I’ve tested Panopticon more than anyone else, so if the technology can identify anyone’s face accurately, it’s mine. It’s scanned through millions—maybe billions—of photos by this point,” he said. “But now it’s just a ritual. It’s familiar and calming. I can’t explain it.”

  Panopticon was a prison after all.

  * * *

  —

  “YOUR TURN.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was part of the deal. You would listen to my story, and I had to listen to yours.”

  I’d forgotten our bargain already. I signaled to Charlotte for two more drinks.

  “Oh, I actually think I’m okay for now,” Michael said.

  I glared at him and he capitulated.

  “Okay, another.”

  So I told him my sad story, the whole damn thing. How I’d had a friend online—my closest friend for a year—and how she’d died, and how I met her other friend in real life and we had staved off our collective grief by sleeping together. I told Michael about the massive archive of Margo’s recordings we’d uncovered and been committed to transcribing, with Lucas’s lofty and naive hope of a book.

  I kept waiting for him to bow out, but he didn’t. He was actually a really good listener.

  “It’s such a shame,” he said, when I’d finished. “You and Lucas sound like you two had a good thing going.”

  “We were fucking to get over the loss of our friend.” It seemed like he didn’t know how to respond, though he must’ve realized by this point that if he wanted to take me home, he could.

  “Can I say something?”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s just been me talking for the past hour.”

  “If you knew that it was unlikely Margo’s stories weren’t publishable, why didn’t you make that clear to Luke?”

  “Lucas,” I corrected, as if it mattered. “He was so hopeful and so confident that this was what we were supposed to do. It gave our relationship a purpose,” I said. “And I had been stuck on my own novel for so long—in a real rut. It felt good to be writing again, even if the words weren’t mine. I guess that sounds selfish?”

  I continued, not ready for a response. “I was never dishonest with him. I said I’d show my agent Margo’s stories, and I did. She said, ‘Absolutely not, no one would publish these,’ which is exactly what I expected her to say.”

  I finished the last few sips of my drink. Finally, a moment of silence while Michael finished his drink and asked for the check.

  “So, are you gonna invite me over or what? Clearly I could use a rebound fuck.”

  “Ah, I wish I could, but I probably shouldn’t,” Michael said. Then sheepishly: “The girlfriend, you know how it is.” As if he had mentioned her once in our hours-long conversation.

  “You know, I’ll be completely honest with you: I don’t know how it is. Why don’t you tell me, Michael. How is it?”

  I’m not sure why I was suddenly so forceful, but it worked. Two minutes later we were in a cab to his hotel.

  MINING_COLONY: Okay, I’ve attached an outline of my new book. You’re the only person who has seen this. So please be kind. But also honest. But also kind.

  AFRONAUT3000: Don’t worry, if it’s terrible, I’ll have you run off Fantastic Planet.

  MINING_COLONY: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I appreciate you taking a look. I know it’s a lot to ask of a stranger.

  AFRONAUT3000: Not at all. We’re not strangers anymore!

  Week 3

  I STILL THOUGHT ABOUT Lucas often. We did spend nearly every night together for four months. I must have liked him even if I never took him that seriously. He was endearing, honest. I admired that. He liked to go down on me. I liked that too.

  Jackie told me she wasn’t sure what I saw in him, which was rich coming from Jackie, who had just gotten engaged to Jeremy, that horse’s ass. But he’d made a big production out of it—a ring in a glass of champagne at a Michelin three-star restaurant—and even if it lacked any sort of imagination, the photos on Facebook were good (Jeremy had hired a professional photographer), and I hit LIKE and wrote “Congratulations!!!”

  Apparently the engagement had come out of a tough time. Jackie had learned that Jeremy was cheating on her, though she wouldn’t reveal how she discovered that. Instead of breaking up like normal people, Jackie explained that the “ordeal” had strengthened their relationship. That was even the word she used. Ordeal.

  Jackie met me at the Crystal Palm, and she was immediately unimpressed. She only drank white wine, but she liked fancy
cocktail bars. (She’d always ask for the wine list, then ask for the house chardonnay regardless.) We hadn’t hung out in a while—not since she’d gotten engaged, nor since Lucas and I split—and it was just like old times: Jackie’s life moving forward, mine seemingly stalled in place. After college, while I’d struggled, Jackie found herself immediately in a PR job. It demanded long hours for a grabby asshole boss, but the money was decent and her career progressed to the next benchmark. I wondered if, on some level, that was why she’d agreed to marry Jeremy: to check the right box. But I could be wrong. Maybe he had a great dick.

  We ordered drinks (a rum and coke, a glass of the house chardonnay) and Jackie was scrolling through the engagement photos on her phone. I’d already seen them, but I indulged her. Your friend only gets engaged three or four times, tops. There were rough wedding plans (next summer) but the location was to be determined (probably New York, but maybe Paris?). For a moment I was terrified that Jackie would ask me to be a bridesmaid, or worse. Then she told me she’d already lined them up, and I felt disappointed that I hadn’t been asked.

  “Anyway, enough about me,” Jackie said, while simultaneously signaling the bartender for another glass. “How are you?”

  “Good. I’m good.” The redundancy was not exactly convincing.

  “You got that yellow fever.”

  “Yellow fever?” I was shocked that she’d said it.

  “You know those guys who only date tiny Asian women? Because they’re so tiny and quiet and thin? That’s yellow fever.”

  I must’ve made a face.

  “Relax, Jill, I’m just kidding. You don’t have yellow fever, obviously,” she said. “Yellow fever is not a thing for women.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like, some women are into Asian guys. But no women are only into Asian guys,” she said. “Except you. You’re the closest woman I know, especially if the next guy you date is Asian. Two is a coincidence. Three is a trend.”