Selina @Parker Navarro Writes: The news is out ... excited to share my first piece of short fiction soon in @Th e Paris Review Daily! Ke ep an eye on this space. :) Unbelievable. Genuinely unbelievable that the same journal that gave us the Art of Fiction interview series had decided to debase themselves by publishing Parker Navarro. Had he bribed somebody? Had Bill Owens leveraged every ounce of cultural capital he’d earned in four decades as an agent to get a story through the door? Had— “Selina.” I looked up from my laptop. “What?” Hayden was giving me her flattest smile. “Are we interrupting?” “No.” I cleared my throat. Shut my laptop. “Of course not.” “Well, I was wondering,” she said from her armchair, “what we can do to ke ep this momentum building.” Down the table, Joyce exchanged a glance with Mike, our global news lead. Mike was a burly seventy-something man, serene and good-humored, who had worn the same pair of orthopedic slippers every day since I’d joined the team. He and Joyce were City’s two seniormost staff members, predating even Scott. Easy to guess why they were upset. For the past three weeks, Hayden had interrupted every meeting to review Navarro’s press, which podcast had featured him, which influencer had mentioned me, how we could push the feud into new corners of the internet as other corners moved on. I doubted this had been thrilling for two writers who’d been here since the magazine’s communications were conducted by fax machine. “Did you want to add something, Mike? Joyce?” Hayden asked.
“No, no!” said Joyce, fluttering her hands near her face. “Nothing to add,” said Mike with an easy roll of his cardiganed shoulders. “But, well...” Joyce swapped another look with him. “The conflict has been a little disruptive. That’s all.” This seemed to delight Hayden. “Disruption is what Nextward is all about! Being change agents. Injecting life into whatever industry needs shaking up. And readers are reacting to this! Page views are up, subscriptions are up—” “But this can’t go on forever, can it?” said Joyce. “Selina’s said what she needed to say. When are we going to go back to ... well, to business as usual? Writing great pieces that connect with people?” “Joyce, ke ep up. Business as usual hasn’t worked for y’all for fifteen years.” The lines in Joyce’s forehead de epened. She glanced down at her not epad, her reading glasses performing their familiar downward slip. I felt the urge to stand, yank the door open, and demand that Hayden get out. From the hard expressions around the table, I knew the rest of staff was having similar thoughts. Saying something cutting to Joyce was like aiming a kick at a rescue dog. Scott was considering Hayden, stone-faced. “What do you mean by ‘building momentum,’ Hayden?” “Well, Selina’s always been a bit of a controversial figure,” said Hayden, “but now that’s a real part of her brand, which is great.” “Is it?” I muttered. “We should ke ep her as exposed as we can, ke ep people coming back. Ooh—maybe we should do this with all the writers! Rebrand City as the place where the biggest, boldest personalities go.”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “I haven’t been talking about ‘rebranding’ in any of these interviews. I’ve been defending City’s mission. The importance of what we already do.” “And ... you think that’s what’s driving people to the site?” said Hayden. “A friendly reminder that City is still here, doing the same old thing it’s done for a century, publishing articles it takes half an hour and a dictionary to read?” “Yes! I think people want a place online that’ll—that’ll respect them. Their intelligence. Their attention span, which everything else on the internet is trying to degrade.” The sk eptical tilt to her mouth made my fists curl on my thighs. “Okay, what’s your theory, then?” “My theory is that they’re engaging because they think you’re an interesting person.” “But none of this is about me.” “Of course it is. Are you kidding? It’s a feud, Selina. It’s all about you.” For once, I found myself speechless. She was wrong. She had to be. Scott lifted his hands. “We’re getting away from the point here. Hayden, what you’re saying about a writer’s name brand isn’t so far removed from our existing coverage. We’ve always had our staff participate in readings and festivals and so on.” “Like what?” “Well, let’s take a look,” said Kellie, making a little lasso-twirling gesture with her pen. She swiped left on her laptop’s screen, scanning her calendar. “n+1 has a sold-out event tomorrow night—I’m interviewing one of the readers there. And the Wiseman Fest is in a couple of weeks...” “What is that?” said Hayden. “The Wiseman Foundation Literary Festival. They book out a convention center for panel programming, bookseller booths, signings—”
“Okay, yes,” said Hayden, rising and snapping her fingers. “I want to hear more about that. Kellie, send me the details, and Selina, ke ep your game face on.” I left the office in a state of dejection. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d loved the invisibility of the writing process, the feeling that, in this small way, I was allowed to st ep out of my skin and leave myself behind. I wanted to communicate with readers about art, about ideas, about something with real worth—not about myself. It was a relief to walk into the weight room at my gym and lose myself in my routine. For fifteen minutes I was a machine among machines. A two- second inhalation through the nose and a two-second release through the mouth. Flicker of muscle in my thigh, prickle of sweat down my cheek. Thoughtless. Then, during a recovery minute, came the intrusion, a fact I’d forgotten. Parker on some NPR show. Hayden had sent me the link that morning. Reclined on the bench, I crooked the weights over my head and pushed, trying to focus on the quiver in my tric eps. Useless. The peaceful emptiness had gone. What was the show called? Jacket Copy, something like that. What had Parker been spouting about me on nationally syndicated radio? Before I could stop myself, I sat up, sw ept my phone from the floor, and found the podcast release of the show. I climbed onto a treadmill, hit Play, and began to run. I forwarded through fifteen minutes of chitchat about Parker’s background before Steve Elgin’s mellow voice said, “So, considering some other literary feuds, I’m hoping this won’t end in a Proust-Lorrain scenario, with shots literally fired—”
Parker’s easy laugh echoed in my ear. “Yeah, let’s hope it doesn’t go that far.” Steve laughed too. “No! No. But I am curious how you view this battle between yourself and Selina Chan. Would you say the stakes are personal? Financial? More broadly cultural?” “Oh, interesting. I think it has to be all of the above, right? Critical anxiety is always financial anxiety. But with a really punishing review, like...” “Like Selina’s,” said Steve. “Yes. Like Selina’s.” “You can say her name. We don’t have her hidden in the supply closet.” They laughed. Hilarious. “Sorry,” said Parker. “It’s just...” “She’s an intimidating woman.” “Yeah. The way she looks at you, it’s like facing down a bull shark.” More laughter. I increased the speed of the treadmill. “Anyway, reviews like hers are different. Writing and reading and reviewing are—are supposed to be personal relationships, right? And they’re supposed to be, like, undergirded by this foundation of communication and connection.” “Right,” said Steve. “Right. So, getting told that you’ve failed to communicate and humiliated yourself trying, and then when thousands of people pile on ... to get that response feels like, not only have you failed in, you know, crafting the artistic object, it feels like you’re also s eparate from other people. Like other people can’t understand you, or maybe you’ll never understand them.” Navarro hesitated. I was thinking that this was a surprisingly cogent point when he went on, “And I feel like, with this feud, I’m now in the position to say I don’t think authors should be expected to—like—suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism totally voiceless, I guess.”
“Oh—my God—shut up,” I panted. The woman on the adjacent treadmill gave me a scandalized look. “So,” Steve said, “on the topic of your second book ... I have a copy of High and Dry here. The rumors are true, it’s six hundred pages, but I tore through it.” “Wow, Steve, that’s so gratifying after these past few weeks. Really appreciate it, man.” “I’m not just saying that. It has a whimsical air that I found exc eptionally charming.” Parker paused for a split second. “Oh. Whims—really? Interesting.” “Absolutely! These forays into the fantastical, the sentient alligator, the partially submerged bus ... the book takes on the feeling of a dark fairy tale. Like Dave is an elemental archetype.” “Oh! Um, yeah, I can see that! Yeah. I love hearing people’s different interpretations. Thanks again for reading it, thank you.” “You bet, and I want to dive de eper after the break ... Everybody, this is Parker Navarro, the author of the upcoming High and Dry, and—if you’re here after seeing his starring turn on video, rest assured—one of the nicest people I’ve met in a while. We’ll be back soon for more.” I hit Pause. As the treads slowed, as I broke out of my run and scrubbed the towel across my forehead, Navarro’s voice echoed in my ear. I love hearing people’s different interpretations. I scoffed. He loved getting fellated, was what he loved. Steve Elgin couldn’t have been further from the mark in terms of what Parker Navarro was trying to do with High and Dry. Whimsical? Fantastical? That book had been about as whimsical as a documentary about workplace injuries.
But instead of setting the record straight, Navarro ate up the praise. Why bother clarifying the point of his book when he could pat himself on the back for somebody liking him? I stalked into the gym showers and ran the water scalding. One of the nicest people I’ve met in a while, said Steve’s enthusiastic voice in my mind while I scrubbed myself pink. Niceness. The world was drowning in it. I closed my eyes and listened to the water’s drumbeat on my skull, massaging an aching muscle in my forearm. Maybe Parker Navarro was right. Maybe I did look at people the way a shark looked at its prey. Fine. I’d rather do that than gaze at every person I met with a desperation for them to like me. At my locker, I considered the earbuds sitting atop my wallet. I didn’t have to do this to myself. I didn’t have to listen to seventeen more minutes of Parker Navarro palling around with Podcast Steve. He was so good at this. Eager. Generous, even. He responded immediately, attentively to Steve’s every side note; he made socializing seem effortless, the way a figure skater cuts cleanly across the ice. He’d even been born with an appealing speaking voice, a low, warm tenor, like the hum of a guitar string. Here, I thought, was somebody who had never been disliked, somebody who could walk into a crowded room and expect everyone to turn toward him with a smile. And all it had cost him was his backbone. Yet here I was, hitting Play and plugging that smiling tenor back into my ears. Apparently the joke was on me. I returned to my apartment at a gray-black seven o’clock. Daylight saving time had ended, and with it the last of the year’s sun-washed evenings, but a flick of a switch and warm light painted over the darkness.
My home was five hundred square feet of pale neutrals. A jute rug ran beneath a pastel pink table, over which a wax paper globe light hovered like a moon. A taupe love seat faced a mounted television and a soundbar on a low, minimal stand. Amid the gentle bump of the radiator and the gurgle of the pipes, I wiped down the narrow counters and set acoustic guitar humming from my speaker. I watered the line of cacti on the windowsill and straightened the photos in the hallway. Jacob beside me in sky-blue robes at our graduation. Cassie planting a kiss on my cheek at her bachelorette party. My parents and my child self, clutching the ends of my sleeves in self-conscious middle school agony. Then I dressed in sweatpants, sat cross-legged before the apartment’s front windows, and began to run a hand sander over the baseboard. Nubs and blobs and drooling lines of old paint flattened out and disappeared. Delicate hillocks of white powder accumulated on the uneven floorboards. Eight years ago, I’d been lucky enough to land this rent-stabilized one- bedroom in a quickly gentrifying Bed-Stuy. My landlord had learned not to worry when I texted him bulleted lists of proposed improvements. Over the years, I’d wallpapered my bedroom, installed a backsplash in the kitchen, r eplaced every doorknob and drawer handle and light switch plate. This year’s project was to sand off decades of sloppy paint jobs from the windowsills, crown molding, and baseboards, then r eprime and r epaint with crisp new lines. I’d probably rent until I died, but I refused to live somewhere that would inflict itself upon me. A meditative half hour passed, the sander’s vibrations harmonizing with the guitar, before my phone buzzed on the floor beside me. I unlocked it to find that my cousins in Seattle had finally caught wind of the Parker Navarro situation.
Amanda Lu Selina! We just saw the video of you fighting with that author?!? Can’t believe it! Hope you’ve been holding up okay! Peter Lu Yeah, let us know if we can do anything, wow. Peter Lu For what it’s worth, I thought you won, haha. I wasn’t particularly close with Peter and Amanda, who were seven and nine years younger, respectively, but we’d always been friendly. Like my Auntie Sylvia, they were ambitious, energetic people. Amanda was a software developer at Google, while Peter was working toward his economics Ph D. I r eplied, Ha. Thank you, guys. It’s been an interesting few weeks, but nothing I can’t handle. They each reacted with a heart. I half smiled. Normally, we only texted at Christmas, birthdays, and Chinese New Year. I’d have liked to see them more often, but nothing ever brought us to each other’s respective coasts. I typed, haltingly, Peter, how’s your Ph D going? But before I could tap Send, another message arrived: Peter Lu By the way, should we mention any of this to our mom? His unspoken question was, of course, whether I wanted the news to circulate back to my parents. Auntie Sylvia was delightful but not discreet. Selina Chan Probably best not to worry her. Peter Lu Got it Amanda Lu Your secret’s safe with us! Only we three and the internet will ever know.
I hit the laugh react, but my smile had gone. I didn’t like the idea of the rest of my family caught in the sand trap that existed between my parents and me. I wished that what was between us could stay between us, sealed within the walls of my childhood home, but everyone could hear our silence as distinctly as sound. I glided my portable vacuum over the baseboard seam and watched white dust swirl up its translucent throat. I pictured my parents at this moment, ghostlike entities drifting through the clapboard house in our Minneapolis suburb. The kitchen table having worked gray circles into the linoleum floor. When I slid a damp cloth along the baseboard, dust peeled away from the paint above the molding. The lines between materials grew clean and crisp, each wooden ridge perfectly redefined. Satisfied, I picked up a fresh square of sandpaper. As I was attaching it to the sander, I got a text from Jacob: Oh boy. Oh boy what, I said. A pause. Jacob, I said. Oh boy, what? I switched windows into Bluesky and found thirty notifications. When I refreshed, thirty-five. 1 m ago @Selina Chan What a disgusting and invasive thing to be written about you 1 m ago @Selina Chan lawsuit when? wtf were they thinking letting him publish that 1 m ago @Selina Chan hopw u r taking time for sel f care sweetie I stared at this last post. Self-care? Historically, people on the internet had been more likely to recommend me self-immolation than self-care. A text dropped down from the top of my screen. Jacob had r eplied:
Enjoy. [LINK: “Who Will Know Me When I’m Gone?”—New Short Fiction by Parker Navarro—Th e Paris Review. com] Still cross-legged on the floor, I began to read. My mouth drifted open. Halfway through, I let out a disbelieving laugh, stood up so quickly that I nearly lost my balance, and grabbed my laptop from the table. Excerpt: “Who Will Know Me When I’m Gone?” by Parker Navarro In the concrete heart of the critic’s apartment building, three elevators rise to different heights. The first elevator rises as high as the twelfth floor and the business center. The second can take a person all the way up to the pool, assuming that person is worth the pool. The third elevator shaft spans the full height of the building, basement to fifty-third floor, where the critic lives. On the evening of February 3 she slides down the gullet of elevator three and counts time to herself. She lives thirteen seconds above the people who are worth the pool and twenty-nine above those who are worth the business center and forty above the man in the lobby who tells her, Stay warm, ma’am, as he opens the front door for her to pass, unpausing, through. The critic is on time for her seven o’clock reservation. She carries a black leather bag that holds at all times her uncased cellphone, two red lip stains, three fifty-dollar pens, the current novel, a notebook produced in Japan, a wallet produced in Germany, within the wallet two credit cards with a collective $53,000 limit, and gum. On the street she is never recognized but often admired. She knows that the exact symmetry of her features affords her certain opportunities at host stands and bars. Even the disaffected greeter at the front of the restaurant fumbles his words when she arrives.
At 7:02, the host at the stand, a fragile eighteen-year-old pursuing a degree in literature, says, I’m so sorry, we’re clearing your table now, it’ll be five minutes still. My reservation was for seven o’clock, the critic says. Yes, ma’am. I apologize. But the table over there, you can see, that’s the one. I see a table that isn’t ready for a seven o’clock reservation. Yes. Of course. I understand. Do you? Are you able to understand? Yes, ma’am, I understand. The critic considers the review she will write on each of the major platforms. A beautiful paragraph. An elegant cruelty. Maybe to maximize its reach she should translate it into each of the five languages she speaks. Later, as she teases pieces of the lobster away from its exoskeleton, she thinks with weary disgust that to ke ep a promise is not so very difficult. The lobster passes into her esophagus, and the current novel lies prostrate on the table beside her. When she was twenty-seven, she flew back to Denver and took up a post at her shrunken mother’s bedside. Not an easy promise to ke ep, but she was there. Her father excused himself regularly to we ep and otherwise spent his hours bowed over the bed or entangling himself into her mother’s hair or fingers. The critic asked, upright, Do you need the blinds drawn, Mom. She turns the page of the novel, then swirls her wine and examines its pale red legs running down the delicate glass. Her mother said no and reached for the critic, who enfolded her hand around her mother’s knuckles and moved her thumb neatly along the maze of the prominent veins. Her mother said, Would you tell me a story?
When the waiter arrives, the critic says, I’ve been waiting for this check half my life. I’m so sorry. This is a restaurant full of apologies, she says, handing him her credit card. Her mother’s eyes closed while the critic tried to think how to begin. Several minutes later the card comes back, and the critic r eplaces it in the German wallet, then closes the current novel, parsing her dislike. At the next table, some man, his face a blurred brushstroke of rosacea, has split his mouth open to display laughing teeth. The woman opposite plumps her hair with a self-conscious hand. The critic’s disgust and impatience intensify, and she carves a path in her black coat through the bobbing lights, the heads of the candles in their crystal jars bowing fearfully in her direction. Fifty- three years later she will die in a hospital bed in San Jose, the only person in the room. At home, the critic adds resistance to the weight machines and watches the flexion of her deltoids in the mirror. They twitch and gleam and relax, and she counts them into and out of their suffering. Afterward, she spends a quarter hour before the full-body mirror in her bedroom. She inches her fingers down the yielding contours of her waist and wonders why she is still so hungry ... The Paris Review: Letters to the Editor To the Editor: In response to your story, “Who Will Know Me When I’m Gone?” published yesterday in the Daily: Thank you for an evening’s unexpected entertainment. Imagine my surprise to find Parker Navarro writing a story with a real purpose, the kind of intent I’ve wished he would bring to the page since his first novel. That purpose may be hopelessly juvenile, and the piece does suggest total creative bankruptcy, but I’m not one to spit in a baby’s face as he takes his first tottering st eps.
Warmly,