Parker Teeth clenched, I paced from my kitchen to my front window and back, into and out of the cloud of steam rising from the stockpot on the stove, trying to think of some way to express how much I hated her, but in a way that would sound vengeful and righteous and not just vaguely pathetic. I stopped in front of the TV, my vision clear with rage, as though I’d just put in eyedrops. I typed, Out of curiosity, are YOU capable of feeling any emotion besides sneering self-satisf A red number 1 popped up over my messages tab at the bottom of the screen. I forcibly unclenched my jaw, deleted my response, and tapped into my inbox. An author named Jenny House had sent me a message: Hi Parker! My name’s Jenny. You probably don’t know me, but I have a few books out from Penguin. Selina Chan wrote a soulless pan of my last book, too. I’m glad somebody’s standing up to that vulture and her pretentious cult of readers who seem to hate all books! I settled at our dining table, the fist in my gut loosening for the first time in hours. Hi Jenny. I do know you, haha—I loved your first book! Thanks for the message. Really means a lot. No way? she said. That’s sweet. Nobody read that book! Her debut had been a crime novel called Hurricane Cassandra, and I’d liked nearly everything about it, from its hard, muscular sentences to its unexpectedly pulpy climax. It deserved more attention, I wrote. When I recommend it to people, I tell them it’s their new favorite hidden gem. :)
Stop! Jenny said, followed by a few bashful emojis. I’ve already preordered High and Dry. Can’t wait to read it. Review by the Devil Herself notwithstanding. I sent a laughing emoji back, then looked up as Arthur’s keys rattled in the lock. A moment later he’d barged inside, face alert. “Hey. Are you—” “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” He relaxed as he bumped the door shut. “Okay. Just, I was watching you two get into it.” “Yeah, five minutes ago I was ready to punch something.” “You don’t still want to punch something?” “A little. But this author just messaged me. We’re bonding over being Selina Chan victims.” I tapped back to my profile and reread my r eplies to Chan with a twinge of unease. I’d never talked to anybody this way in my life. I sounded like such an asshole. “Should I delete this stuff I said to her?” Arthur tossed his jacket onto the hook with an indignant flourish. “What, to Selina Chan? Fuck no. She deserves the heat.” “Right ... Yeah, you’re right. I just”—I let my phone clatter onto the table and rubbed my hands over my face—“it feels so weird to, you know, say shit like this.” “Enjoy it. I bet every person she panned would kill to be in your shoes.” I doubted that. Three years ago, I might have been a punchline, but I’d never been hated the way that some people in my mentions seemed to hate me now. You sexist pig, I hope your mother sees the video ... You are what’s poisoning our culture ... If only someone had paid you $1.2 million to never write again. Arthur jogged down the hall, I returned to the kitchen to check the stockpot, and my phone chirped again. Jenny House had sent another message:
If you want some commiseration, I know a bunch of authors who are a hundred percent behind you. We could hop in a group chat. Really? I r eplied. I’d love that. Honestly, I don’t know a lot of other authors. Omg! Here, two minutes A new group chat appeared in my DMs. I opened it to see the first notification: Jenny House renamed this group to Chan Pan Support Group. Jenny House Hey beauties! Meet Parker Navarro, the man of the hour Aiden Linville you mean my hero? defender of the innocent? avenging knight to selina chan’s accursed wyrm? Carla Lew Parker!! I’m Carla. It is SUCH a pleasure. Parker Navarro Wow, it’s great to meet you all! JJ Purnell I’m imagining you’re overwhelmed? Please know that however much hate you’re getting, there’s an even larger contingent of people silently cheering you along. Aiden Linville true. about time this happened. according to selina chan, my second book was “unchallenging” but “blessedly slender” Jenny House Put that in your dating profile, Aiden Giving the stock a stir, I wondered whether to riff or commiserate, but before I could choose, Bill called. I set down the ladle and picked up. “Bill, hey. What’s going on?” “Parker! I’m getting bombarded with interview requests, that’s what. GQ wants to meet, and The Atlantic asked if you could get on the phone beginning of next week. Good with you?”
“Whoa.” I hesitated. “Yes. Sure.” “What is it?” “Sorry. Just—do they want to talk about High and Dry, too? Not just Selina Chan?” “They didn’t say. Krys Badowski’s doing the GQ piece, and they assigned Ellery Robbins at The Atlantic. Good writers. I trust them to get a big-picture view.” “Okay.” I turned down the burner. “I just don’t want this fight to be my entire personality, you know?” I could hear Mahler in the background again, the string section twining through Bill’s office. Then he said, “I’ll level with you, Parker. I have faith in your work to stand the test of time, but the interest this is driving in the new book, that’s not something to ignore. I talked to Lauren. Your team at Coronation is happy right now, very happy.” “Right,” I said. “Right, of course. I’ll do whatever you send me.” “Good. Incoming.” As he hung up, I inhaled the steam from the stockpot and felt my mouth water. For the first time in three years, my publisher had reason not to rue the day they’d learned my name. It was probably too much to hope that if I argued my case strongly enough, These Extraordinary Times would undergo a reappraisal, but High and Dry’s fate wasn’t set in stone. Maybe I wouldn’t need to sell my apartment, flee New York, or get another job, or two, or three. Maybe I just had to hold the line. I spent the days after the video glued to my phone. Time flowed in a lumpy, unsteady way, like mud-clumped water being pumped through a thin hose. I’d look up from my screen and find that the quality of the light had changed and suddenly I needed to feed myself. I’d look down again and feel myself sliding headlong into the evening, obsessively refreshing my notifications, or cracking jokes with the Chan Pan Support Group, or tending to my siblings’ group
text. The video had shocked my family. My parents responded in identical ways: They each called me up to worry for half an hour about the professional r epercussions, then accused each other of embroiling me in this mess. “It would be just like Moy,” my mom scoffed, “to suggest you bull into this with no forethought.” “So, let me guess,” my dad grumbled. “Analyn said you should make that woman’s review into a conversation.” “No,” I said, exhausted, to both. “I did this on my own.” To which they reacted with insulting confusion, as though I had never done anything of my own volition in my thirty-two years upon the earth. My brothers and sisters shared their own opinions in our group text: Elena Parker wtf. I thought you weren’t allowed to talk to critics?? Christi He isn’t allowed. He was just drunk. How many drinks did you have, anyway, P? Parker two Justin Hahahhahahahaa Justin Lightweightttttttt Kevin Barely recognized you in the video bro. Yelling like that. Who knew you had it in you lol. Elena Kevin don’t lol at this! It’s not funny, Parker’s getting harassed online by like thousands of people! Kevin Im not laughing at that Jesus Kevin Where is the laughing at harassment in what I wrote Kevin Show me the bad lols Lena
Elena You are so annoying and like, a bad brother Kevin Wtf why am I the bad brother when JUSTIN is the one who was harassing Parker IN this chat!!!!!!!!! Kevin He’s literally complicit while Im innocnet Kevin innocent Christi Parker, this is why I stick to soda water or seltzer when the office goes out to drinks. You never know what might happen. Parker Yeah, that’s fair. Elena Kevin you’re NOT funny and you’re NOT taking this seriously enough. This is like a national news story??? Parker Don’t worry about me, Elena. I appreciate your concern, but the situation looks worse than it is. Kevin See Lena? Looks worse than it is. Im allowed to lol as much as I want Parker Y ep, feel free to lol Justin lol @ you getting drunk off 2 weak ass cocktails I loved my siblings, but they were an exercise in being overwhelmed. In fact, even the things I felt most grateful for that week—the landslide of exposure for High and Dry, the hundreds of supportive messages— overwhelmed me. Sometimes, after two straight hours of refreshing, scrolling, r eplying, liking, and emailing—Thank you so much! That’s really kind. Appreciate you! Thanks. Totally agree!—I’d lie face down on my bed, close my eyes, and envision the thin dirt trails in San Bruno Mountain Park, where I’d started taking walks near the end of middle school, after my parents had split up for good. I’d imagine the antique armchair in the back corner of Poppy Street Books, six blocks from my
mother’s house in Daly City. These places were silent in my mind, oases. I could barely remember what that quiet felt like. As the days passed, op-eds cropped up in publications and newsletters, each with a rude title like “Parker Navarro’s Big Miscalculation” or “The Obsolescence of the Wounded Critic,” and I discovered that the only thing more annoying than Selina Chan was other journalists trying to outcriticize Selina Chan. A week turned into two, and the interviews began to blur together. I was running out of ways to r ephrase my loathing. Chan—unsurprisingly, for someone who’d built a career on r ephrasing her loathing—had no such problem. She seemed to think I was some harbinger of the publishing apocalypse, that if she said even one syllable of a mea culpa, the very offices of City Magazine, and also possibly the rest of civilization, would crash down around her silver-studded ears. I’d developed this compulsion to check her social media the moment I woke up, groping my phone into my bed in the half-light, thumbing in her handle semi-conscious, until finally I was barraged by whatever self-important bullshit she had to say that day. Two weeks after the video, I woke up to this gem in Lit Hub: SC: Some of these op-eds have come dangerously close to suggesting that criticism has been r eplaced by social media, and that the only articles to punch through therefore have to be disproportionately negative. The implication is that my review of High and Dry was negative for negativity’s sake, even for publicity’s sake. Frankly, this is unfair. City remains devoted to writing what we’ve always written: thoughtful long-form journalism executed to a rigorous standard. Even Parker Navarro has never tried to rebut any point I made in my review, though that might just be because he lacks the conviction. The line wormed its way under my skin. After reading the interview, I lay in bed with the curtains drawn for three hours, like a frail Victorian dying of consumption, and reread her review dozens of
times, trying to come up with rebuttals. But the worst thing about Chan’s review was that while she’d detested the book, she’d understood exactly what I’d wanted to achieve with it. I had wanted to skewer the absurd circularity of modern life. I had wanted to nod to Kafka and Lucy Ellmann and Virginia Woolf. This had happened with These Extraordinary Times, too: She’d written about my strategies and influences with a crystalline accuracy that had made me feel like she’d X-rayed me, then used that X-ray to puncture my lungs. That evening, I felt proud of ke eping to the plans I’d made. Instead of inventing an excuse to cancel, I dragged myself out of bed and showered and took my medication. I dressed in real clothes instead of d epression sweatpants. I took the subway into Manhattan and joined my friends at a tiki bar on the Lower East Side, where you could pay twelve dollars for the privilege of drinking a Corona. Five of us had made it out tonight, but the overall friend group was twice this size, consisting of everybody from our corner of the Bay Area who’d wound up in New York. Slouched in a booth surrounded by tropical foliage, we kicked off the night chatting about Tyler’s residency—he’d gone into neurosurgery and now discussed catastrophic brain injuries with a weird, blithe indifference. We joked around about Julian’s millionth new startup idea, which aimed, somehow, to disrupt the airport luggage cart industry (“Would you describe it as Uber for airport luggage carts?” asked Maricel). As for Maricel and Xiangyu, they were both consultants and therefore never talked about their jobs, exc ept to say that they were trying to get new jobs. I was happy to be three drinks de ep by the time the subject turned to me. “Hell of a couple of weeks for our famous author,” hollered
Julian, ruffling my hair. “Are we allowed to ask about it?” asked Tyler, sounding more concerned than he had about last Tuesday’s subarachnoid hemorrhage. “Sure,” I said. Xiangyu and Maricel exchanged a look. “Okay,” said Xiangyu as they both leaned over the table. “Be honest. Was it staged?” I choked on my drink. “Was it—what? No!” “Told you,” said Julian, looking satisfied. “Why did you think it was staged?” I said, staring between Xiangyu and Maricel. “Uh,” said Maricel, “because we’ve known you for eighteen years and never seen you lose your shit like that?” “Must have felt good,” said Xiangyu, grinning. “It ... Yeah.” I hesitated. Part of me wanted to admit how I’d spent this afternoon, to paint the range of the experience, but I didn’t want to complain. Xiangyu and Maricel regularly described their jobs as exercises in soul death. Julian, alone of the people at this table, was still struggling to pay rent. Tyler worked twenty-eight-hour shifts and saved people’s lives. My problems were all fictional. I told myself, Relax. The last thing I needed was to be seen differently by a group of friends I’d had since childhood, and we were having a nice time here, their smiling faces smudged violet by the tinted lightbulbs. Easy. “It’ll blow over soon,” I said. “Anyway, I made some author friends from this, which is cool. I’m going to meet them later. One of them is throwing a, like, a house party in Boerum Hill.” A storm of teasing about my attendance at this prestigious literary salon followed, and Julian gave me a fond elbow to the bic ep. “I’ll tell
you what, I would not be this silver lining about all this shit happening.” “Well, it’s Parker,” Maricel said with a laugh, and they agreed that it was Parker, glass-half-full Parker, and I smiled and k ept drinking my gin and tonic, and soon they’d moved on to the topics of the subway and that new show they were all watching. As we parted ways outside the bar, Maricel and Julian and I broke out a little Tagalog to make our goodbyes. I would’ve liked us to practice together more often, but Julian was self-conscious about his pronunciation, especially around Maricel, who’d lived in Quezon City until age ten and was still near-fluent. “No, you sound great, Julian,” Maricel was saying, and I was agreeing, “Tama siya,” when from a heaving group of passing bodies, a voice slopped out, singsong: “Speak English.” “Fuck off,” Maricel said reflexively, and like every one of these encounters I’d ever had, it was over with a surprising abruptness, the faceless guy and his friends already turning the corner, Julian and Xiangyu making annoyed sounds, Tyler cracking a joke about how clearly Julian’s Tagalog sounded good enough for dickface over there. Loud sighs and “anyway”s. We laughed, hugged, broke apart. I wandered toward the train and heard the man’s voice echo twice, three times. I thought of the woman who’d once snapped her fingers at me outside a concert hall and said, with a mysterious urgency, “You Korean? You Chinese? No, you Korean?” Remembered the guy leaving a college party who, on his way out, had grabbed the back of my T-shirt and crowed, “Maaade in Vietnam!” Why was I always so curious about these people, where they came from, where they were going? Curiosity seemed like the wrong emotion to have. Occasionally these encounters walked out of my fingers when I was
writing, but usually upside-down, backward, like I was those people, looking in at myself, finally able to control how other people saw me, or at least able to explore the implications in a way that would mean something. From this side the interactions felt so meaningless. Weaving through a college-aged throng outside a dollar-slice joint, I felt remote and lightheaded. I’d drunk too much again, which didn’t help whatever this disconnected feeling was. When I checked my phone, I was grateful to find new messages to latch on to. I opened my mother’s text thread first. Mom 8:58 PM Hi sweetheart How r u? Parker 9:16 PM Hi Mom—everything’s great over here Mom 9:17 PM Everything settling down with the critic? Parker 9:19 PM Y ep, nothing to stress about. How about you, how are you? Mom 9:19 PM Doing OK Parker 9:20 PM Just okay? I descended into the warm stink of the subway, hip-checked my way through the turnstile, head beginning to ache, and then: Mom 9:25 PM Took the car to the mechanic, it’s having suspension problems The train roared down the track toward me. Car opened. I st epped in, crumpled down, rubbed my forehead with the flat of my palm.
Parker 9:25 PM Oh, man. That must be so frustrating—I know you just had it in the shop. Does this help? I don’t want you to worry. Parker Navarro sent $500 with Apple Pay Mom 9:26 PM Oh Pijay. You’re too generous to your mom I don’t know what I did to deserve you Parker 9:27 PM Haha, I can think of an entire childhood’s worth of things you did. Love you, Mom. Mom 9:27 PM I’m sorry to be such an inconvenience Parker 9:28 PM You’re not an inconvenience at all. This is what kids want to be able to do for their parents. Living the dream, haha Mom 9:29 PM Can we call tomorrow?? Love you so much Parker 9:30 PM Of course, any time. Talk soon. As the subway rattled eastward toward Brooklyn, I swiped through photos of my family. My mother in florals with Christi and Elena at a seaside restaurant on her birthday. My father laughing at his retirement party, two thumbs up over a steaming pot of sinigang. My dad, a former X-ray technician, hadn’t retired until last year at age seventy-two, and my mom was still working the front desk at the same hotel that had hired her after my dad had moved out. For how hard and how long my parents had worked, they should have had more to show for it, but they’d had five of us to raise in the Bay Area, where the cost of living had gone from high to sadistic, and their bitter divorce hadn’t exactly contributed to our financial stability.
My mom, at least, I could trust to be somewhat open about her problems. The car was a recurring issue. With my dad, I had to ferret around for information through Christi and Justin—the oldest of us—to figure out if he could foot the copays for his blood pressure medication, his ankle therapy, the appointments for his deteriorating vision. I switched texts to my thread with my father. Dad 8:22 PM So f. y. i. your mom is trying to guilt-trip about the holidays Dad 8:23 PM I told everyone in Manila you would all be here on the 28 th like last year. Somehow this is an enormous problem for her Parker 9:32 PM Thanks for letting me know, Dad. I’ll talk to her, we’ll figure it out. The train shot underwater. Sympathy and affection pressed in on me as though someone were palpating thick pillows against the front and back of my skull. In some ways my feelings toward my parents verged on pity; I couldn’t help it. The divorce had shocked my grandparents and set off waves of discontentment among our extended family in the Philippines, who were all varying degrees of Catholic. Both of my parents had cousins who thought divorce should never be legalized in the Philippines, cousins who hadn’t spoken to them in two decades now. The conductor blared something indistinguishable as we pulled into the station. I navigated around some jacketed teenagers on the platform, checking the address in the Chan Pan Support Group thread.
Ten minutes later, I was jogging up to the third floor of a limestone building on a quiet one-way street. Laughter and conversation swelled as I pushed through the cracked door. There they were, tucked in by a standing chessboard: Jenny, willowy and auburn-haired, dressed in a long velvet wrap, beside Aiden and Carla, clinking a pair of blue-tinted goblets. Jenny seemed to be the youngest—maybe a few years older than me—while Carla and Aiden appeared to be in their forties. Carla’s eyes strayed onto mine, and her face split in an open-mouthed smile. “Parker,” Jenny and Aiden exclaimed together as I navigated toward them. “I’m so glad you made it,” Jenny said before giving me a voiced kiss on my cheek: Mwah! “I wish J. J. were here, we’d have everybody!” “Yeah, I wish! Thank you so much for inviting me,” I said, trying not to ogle the apartment, its extravagant width, the working fir eplace and wall of professionally framed prints, whose treated glass didn’t reflect the chandelier. As Jenny poured me a glass of red wine, I imagined spilling its contents onto the coffee table, an avant-garde and porous-looking concrete blob. “Jenny, your place is incredible.” “Thank you, you’re too sweet!” She craned her neck, sliding a jeweled charm up and down a silver chain at her collarbones. “Christopher’s around here somewhere. My husband. You’ll have to meet him.” “Is he also a writer?” “God, no.” Jenny laughed. “He’s in tech. Thus...” She waved around at the apartment. “Oh, cool! Right. Um—are these people all writers?” “Mostly, yeah. That group in the kitchen is all Penguin people. Shane, at the table, they’re a poet. A lot of people from my class at Iowa wound up in the city.” Jenny frowned. “Wait, what year did you go to Iowa? Did you go to Iowa? Am I making that up?”
“You are,” I said. “I never got an MFA.” “Me neither,” said Carla, lifting her wineglass. Her red lips had an impish slant. “I only got into programs without funding, lucky me ... Aiden, you went to NYU, didn’t you?” “Y ep. Eighty grand when I went. It’s over a hundred now.” Aiden let out a throaty laugh, flattening his skinny tie against his button-down. “Thank God this city is so affordable, to make up for it.” We laughed. “Parker,” Carla said, “how have things been with Pannibal Lecter?” I hesitated, then pulled out my phone to show them the Lit Hub interview. “Impressively insufferable,” said Aiden, “even for her.” Carla let out a sort of snarl. “Tell me why she always sounds like she’s channeling your most out-of-touch modern lit professor who won’t take anything after Nabokov seriously?” “Well, that’s her whole thing, Carla,” said Jenny. “If she weren’t pretending to be New York’s reigning intellectual monarch, her little empire would collapse.” I laughed, suddenly glad I hadn’t gone into the industry details with my friends from home. “Yeah. To be honest, I got sort of worried that everything she’s saying about my new book is true.” “Nope.” Carla leveled a manicured finger at my nose. “Stop right there. After she reviewed me, I started gaslighting myself into thinking I was a bad writer because—why? Because she didn’t like a book that clearly wasn’t even for her? She doesn’t know anything about you, Parker.” We spent the better part of an hour getting progressively drunker and more outraged. I couldn’t believe how satisfying it felt, the verbal equivalent of shattering a glass against a brick wall. By the
time I spilled myself into an Uber, my temples were palpitating. The driver dropped me outside my building. My street was silent and deserted, but the night felt agitated, loud somehow, the noise of the house party and the tiki bar still ringing in my ears. Speak English. I could feel the subway plunging onward far below, making the ground vibrate. My phone buzzed as I let myself into the foyer. Jenny House 11:37 PM P, you’re a gem. Remember, don’t think about it too hard! She’s just a bad person. It doesn’t have to be interesting or complicated. I twisted the key in my apartment door. My friends were right: Selina Chan didn’t know me. I was ascribing too much insight to somebody who had written a few thousand cursory words in response to 1,500 pages of my work. Parker Navarro 11:42 PM Thanks, guys. You’re the best. Parker Navarro 11:43 PM I don’t know why I let Selina Chan, of all people, get in my head Parker Navarro 11:43 PM I guess I’ve just got to remind myself: I might have bad reviews, but at least I don’t have to wake up in the morning knowing my broken personality will alienate everyone in my life Aiden Linville laughed at Parker Navarro’s message Jenny House laughed at Parker Navarro’s message J. J. Purnell laughed at Parker Navarro’s message The messages k ept arriving as I sat down at the table, but I lost track. I opened my laptop, and there was the interview again, still glaring out at me from my most recent tab. That might just be because he lacks the conviction.
I’ll show you conviction, I thought, tossing my phone into the sofa. Looseness spread through my body, the kind I hadn’t felt all night, and a thrilling clarity pierced the rubbery surface of my drunkenness. At last I was alone. Alone, I could say something. I could speak to her. With a gray haze eating into the edges of my vision, I opened a blank document and began to write. I awoke the next morning to find that I’d dragged my laptop into bed with me. When I moved, the screen lit up, showing me what I’d done last night. I reread, my eyebrows slowly drawing together. Then I called Bill.