In the event of an earthquake, I texted Tony, we’ll meet at the corner of Chinaman’s Vista, across from the café with the rainbow flag.
Jen had asked about our earthquake plan. We didn’t have one. We were new to the city, if it could be called that. Tony described it to friends back home as a huge village. But very densely populated, I added, and not very agrarian. We had come here escaping separate failures on the opposite coast. Already the escape was working. In this huge urban village, under the dry bright sky, we were beginning to regard our former ambitions as varieties of regional disease, belonging to different climates, different times.
“Firstly,” Jen said, “you need a predetermined meeting point. In case you’re not together and cell service is clogged. Which it’s likely to be. Because, you know, disasters.”
Jen was the kind of person who said things like firstly and because, disasters. She was a local local, born and raised and stayed. Tony had met Jen a few years ago at an electronic music festival back east and introduced us, thinking we’d get along. She had been traveling for work. Somehow we stayed in touch. We shared interests: she worked as a tech consultant but composed music as a hobby; I made electronic folk songs with acoustic sounds.
“The ideal meeting place,” Jen explained, “is outside, walkable from both your workplaces, and likely free of obstacles.”
“Obstacles?”
“Collapsed buildings, downed power lines, blah blah hazmat, you know.”
Chinaman’s Vista was the first meeting place that came to mind. It was a big grassy field far from the water, on high ground. Cypress trees lined its edges. In their shade, you could sit and watch the well-behaved dogs of well-behaved owners let loose to run around. We had walked past it a number of times on our way from this place or that—the grocery store, the pharmacy, the taquería—and commented on its charm with surprise, forgetting we’d come across it before. In the event of a significant earthquake, and the aftershocks that typically follow significant earthquakes, I imagined we would be safe there—from falling debris at least—as we searched through the faces of worried strangers for each other.
Other forces could separate or kill us: landslides, tsunamis, nuclear war. I was aware that we lived on the side of a sparsely vegetated hill, that we were four miles from the ocean, a mile from the bay. To my alarmed texts Tony responded that if North Korea was going to bomb us, this region would be a good target: reachable by missile, home to the richest and fastest-growing industry in the world. Probably they would go for one of the cities south of us, he typed, where the headquarters of the big tech companies were based.
nuclear blast wind can travel at > 300 m/s, Tony wrote. Tony knew things like this.
He clarified: meters per second
which gives us
I watched Tony’s avatar think.
approx 3 mins to find shelter after detonation
More likely we’d get some kind of warning x hours before the bomb struck. Jen had a car. She could pick us up, we’d drive north as fast as we could. Jen’s aunt who lived an hour over the bridge had a legit basement, concrete reinforced during the Cold War.
I thought about the active volcano one state away, which, if it erupted, could cover the city in ash. One very large state away, Tony reminded me. But the ash that remained in the air might be so thick it obscured the sun, plunging this usually temperate coast into winter. I thought about the rising ocean, the expanding downtown at sea-level, built on landfill. Tony worked in the expanding downtown. Was Tony a strong swimmer? I asked with two question marks. His response:
don’t worry ’lil chenchen
if i die i’ll die
I was listening to an audiobook, on 1.65x speed, about a techno-dystopic future Earth under threat of annihilation from alien attack. The question was whether humans would kill each other first or survive long enough to be shredded in the fast-approaching weaponized supermassive black hole. Another question was whether humans would abandon life on Earth and attempt to continue civilization on spacecraft. Of course there were not enough spacecraft for everyone.
When I started listening, it was at normal 1.0 speed. Each time I returned I switched the speed dial up by 0.05x. It was a gripping book, full of devices for sustaining mystery despite the obvious conclusion. I couldn’t wait for the world to end.
Tony and I were fundamentally different. What I mean is we sat in the world differently—he settling into the back cushions, noting with objective precision the grime or glamour of his surroundings, while I hovered, nervous, at the edge of my seat. Often, I felt—more often now—I couldn’t even make it to the edge. Instead I flitted from one space to another, calculating if I would fit, considering the cosmic feeling of unwelcome that emanated from wherever I chose to go.
On the surface Tony and I looked very much the same. We were more or less the same percentile in height and weight, and we both had thin, blank faces, their resting expressions betraying slight confusion and surprise. Our bodies were constructed narrowly of long brittle bones, and our skin, pale in previous gray winters, now tanned easily to the same dusty brown. We weren’t only both Chinese; our families came from the same rural-industrial province south of Shanghai, recently known for small-goods manufacturing. But in a long reversal of fortunes, his family, business people who had fled to Hong Kong and then South Carolina, were now lower-middle-class second-generation immigrants, while my parents, born from starving peasant stock, had stayed in China through its boom and immigrated much later to the States as members of the highly educated elite.
Tony’s family was huge. I guess mine was too, but I didn’t know any of them. In this hemisphere I had my parents, and that was it.
A couple years ago I did Thanksgiving with Tony’s family. It was my first time visiting the house where he’d grown up. It was also the first time I had left my parents to celebrate a holiday alone. I tried not to guess what they were eating—Chinese takeout or leftover Chinese takeout. Even when I was around, my parents spent most of their time sitting in separate rooms, working.
“Chenchen!” his mother had cried as she embraced me, “We’re so happy you could join us.”
My arms rose belatedly, swiping the sides of her shoulders as she pulled away.
She said my name like an American. The rest of the family did too—in fact every member of Tony’s family spoke with varied degrees of Southern drawl. It was very disorienting. In normal circumstances Tony’s English was incredibly bland, neutered of history like my own, but now I heard in it long-drawn diphthongs, wholesome curls of twang. Both his sisters had come. As had his three uncles and two aunts with their families, and two full sets of grandparents, his mom’s mom recently remarried after his grandpa’s death. I had never been in a room with so many Chinese people at once, but if I closed my eyes and just listened to the chatter, my brain populated the scene with white people wearing bandanas and jeans.
Which was accurate, except for the white people part.
The turkey had been deep fried in an enormous vat of oil. We had stuffing and cranberry sauce and ranch-flavored mashed potatoes (a Zhang family tradition), pecan and sweet potato and ginger pie. We drank beer cocktails (Bud Light and lemonade). No one regretted the lack of rice or soy sauce, or said with a disappointed sigh that we should have just ordered roast duck from Hunan Garden. It was loud. I shouted small talk and halfway introduced myself to various relatives, as bursts of yelling and laughter erupted throughout the room. Jokes were told—jokes! I had never heard people who looked like my parents making so many jokes—plates clinked, drinks sloshed, moving chairs and shoes scuffed the floor with a pleasing busy beat.
In the middle of all this I was struck suddenly by a wave of mourning, though I wasn’t sure for what. The sounds of a childhood I’d never had, the large family I’d never really know? Perhaps it was the drink—I think the beer-ade was spiked with vodka—but I felt somehow that I was losing Tony then, that by letting myself know him in this way I had opened a door through which he might one day slip away.
In the corner of the living room, the pitch of the conversation changed. Tony’s teenage cousin Harriet was yelling at her mother while Tony’s mom sat at her side loudly shaking her head. Slowly the other voices in the room quieted until the tacit attention of every person was focused on this exchange. Others began to participate, some angry—“Don’t you dare speak to your mother like this”—some conciliatory—“How about some pecan pie?”—some anxious—Harriet’s little sister tugging on her skirt. Harriet pushed her chair back angrily from the table. A vase fell over, dumping flowers and gray water into the stuffing. Harriet stormed from the room.
For a moment it was quiet. In my pocket my phone buzzed. By the time I took it out the air had turned loud and festive again. this happens every year, Tony had texted. I looked at him, he shrugged with resigned amusement. Around me I heard casual remarks of a similar nature: comments on Harriet’s personality and love life—apparently she had just broken up with a boyfriend—and nostalgic reminiscences of the year Tofu the dog had peed under the table in fright. It was like a switch had been flipped. In an instant the tension was diffused, injury and grievance transformed into commotion and fond collective memory.
I saw then how Tony’s upbringing had prepared him for reality in a way that mine had not. His big family was a tiny world. It reflected the real world with uncanny accuracy—its little charms and injustices, its pettinesses and usefulnesses—and so, real-worldly forces struck him with less intensity, without the paralyzing urgency of assault. He did not need to survive living like I did, he could simply live.
I woke up to Tony’s phone in my face.
r u OK? his mom had texted. Followed by:
R U OK????
pls respond my dear son
call ASAP love mom (followed by heart emojis and, inexplicably, an ice cream cone)
His father and siblings and aunts and cousins and childhood friends had flooded his phone with similar messages. He scrolled through the unending ribbon of notifications sprinkled with news alerts. I turned on my phone. It gave a weak buzz. Jen had texted us at 4:08 a.m:
did you guys feel the earthquake? i ran outside and left the door open and now i cant find prick
*pickle
Pickle was Jen’s cat.
A lamp had fallen over in the living room. We had gotten it at a garage sale and put it on a stool to simulate a tall floor lamp. Now it was splayed across the floor, shade bent, glass bulb dangling but miraculously still intact. When we lifted it we saw a dent in the floorboards. The crooked metal frame of the lamp could no longer support itself and so we laid it on its side like a reclining nude. There were other reclining forms too. Tony had put toy action figures amongst my plants and books; all but Wolverine had fallen on their faces or backs. He sent a photo of a downed Obi-Wan Kenobi to his best nerd friends back home.
He seemed strangely elated. That he would be able to say, Look, this happened to us too, and without any real cost.
Later, while Tony was at work, I pored over earthquake preparedness maps on the internet. Tony’s office was in a converted warehouse with large glass windows on the edge of the expanding downtown. On the map, this area was marked in red, which meant it was a liquefaction zone. I didn’t know what liquefaction meant but it didn’t sound good. Around lunchtime Tony sent me a YouTube video showing a tray of vibrating sand, on which a rubber ball bobbed in and out as if through waves in a sea. He’d forgotten about the earthquake already, his caption said: SO COOL. I messaged back: when the big one hits, you’re the rubber ball.
That afternoon, I couldn’t stop seeing his human body, tossed in and out through the rubble of skyscrapers. I reminded myself that Tony had a stable psyche. He was the kind of person you could trust not to lose his mind, not in a disruptive way, at least. But I didn’t know if he had a strong enough instinct for self-preservation. Clearly, he didn’t have a good memory for danger. And he wasn’t resourceful, at least not with physical things like food and shelter. His imagination was better for fantasy than for worst case scenarios.
I messaged:
if you feel shaking, move away from the windows. get under a sturdy desk and hold onto a leg. if there is no desk or table nearby crouch by an interior wall. whatever you do, cover your neck and head AT ALL TIMES
He sent me a sideways heart. I watched his avatar think and type for many moments.
I’m SERIOUS, I wrote.
Finally he wrote back:
umm what if my desk is by the window
…
should I get under the desk or go to an interior wall
I typed: get under your desk and push it to an interior wall while covering your head and neck. I imagined the rubber ball. I imagined the floor undulating, dissolving into sand. I typed: hold onto any solid thing you can.
I couldn’t focus on work. I had recorded myself singing a series of slow glissandos in E minor, which I was trying to distort over a cello droning C. It was supposed to be the spooky intro before the drop of an irregular beat. The song was about failure’s various forms, the wild floating quality of it. I wanted to show Tony I understood what he had gone through back east, at least in its primal movement and shape, that despite the insane specificity of his suffering he was not alone.
Now all I could hear were the vibrations of sand, the movements of people and buildings falling.
I went to the hardware store. I bought earthquake-proof cabinet latches and L-bars to bolt our furniture to the walls. According to a YouTube video called “Seeing with earthquake eyes,” it was best to keep the bed at least fifteen feet from a window or glass or mirror—anything that could shatter into sharp shards over your soft sleeping neck. Our bed was directly beneath the largest window in the apartment, which looked out into a dark shaft between buildings. The room was small; I drew many diagrams but could not find a way to rearrange the furniture. Fifteen feet from the window would put our bed in the unit next door. I bought no-shatter seals to tape over the windows. I assembled the necessary things for an emergency earthquake kit: bottled water, instant ramen, gummy vitamins. Flashlight, batteries, wrench, and a cheap backpack to hold everything. I copied our most important contacts from my phone and laminated two wallet-sized emergency contact cards in case cell service or electricity went down.
I bought a whistle for Tony. It blew at high C, a pitch of urgency and alarm. I knew he would never wear it. I’d make him tie the whistle to the leg of his desk. If the sand-and-ball video was accurate, and a big earthquake struck during business hours, there was a chance Tony would end up buried in a pile of rubble. I imagined him alive, curled under the frame of his desk. In this scenario, the desk would have absorbed most of the impact and created a small space for him to breathe and crouch. He would be thirsty, hungry, afraid. I imagined his dry lips around the whistle, and the dispirited emergency crews layers of rubble above him, leaping up, shouting, “Someone’s down there! Someone’s down there!”
Suddenly I remembered I had forgotten to text Jen back.
did u look in the dryer? or that box in the garage?
everything ok over here thanks just one broken lamp
It’d taken me five hours to text Jen yet now I was worried about her lack of instant response.
did u find pickel? let me know i can come over and helpyou look
maybe she’s stuck in a tree??
tony can print out some flyers at his office let me know!!!
I was halfway through enlarging a photo of Pickle I’d dug up from Google photos when my phone buzzed.
found pickle this morning in bed almost sat on her she was under the covers barely made a bump
She sent me a photo. Pickle was sitting on a pillow, fur fluffed, looking like a super grouch.
My office had no windows. It was partially underground, the garage-adjacent storage room that came with our apartment. We had discarded everything when we moved so we had nothing to store. The room had one outlet and was just big enough for my recording equipment and a piano. It was soundproof and the internet signal was weak. The recordings I made in there had a muffled amplified quality, like listening to a loud fight through a door.
The building where Tony and I rented was old, built in the late nineteenth century, a dozen years before the big earthquake of 1906. It had survived that one, but still by modern building codes it was what city regulators called a soft story property. According to records at City Hall, it had been seismically retrofitted by mandate five years ago. I saw evidence of these precautions in the garage: extra beams and girding along the foundations, the boilers and water tanks bolted to the walls. I couldn’t find my storage/work room on any of the blueprints. Tony thought I was hypocritical to keep working there, given my new preoccupation with safety. I liked the idea of making music in a place that didn’t technically exist, even if it wasn’t up to code.
Or maybe it was. I imagined, in fact, that the storage rooms had been secret bunkers—why else was there a power outlet. I felt at once safe and sober inside it, this womb of concrete, accompanied by the energies of another age of panic. Now I filled the remaining space with ten gallons of water—enough for two people for five days—boxes of Shin noodles and canned vegetable soup, saltine crackers, tins of spam, canned tuna for Tony (who no longer ate land animals), a small camping stove I found on sale. I moved our sleeping bags and our winter coats down.
My office, my bunker. More and more it seemed like a good place to sit out a disaster. If we ran out of bottled water, the most vital resource, there stood the bolted water heaters, just a few steps away.
“Holy shit,” Tony said when he came home from work. “Have you seen the news?”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t read the news anymore. The sight of the new president’s face made me physically ill. Instead I buried myself in old librettos and scores, spent whole days listening to the kind of music that made every feeling cell in my brain vibrate with forgetting: the Ring Cycle, Queen’s albums in chronological order, Glenn Gould huffing and purring through the Goldberg Variations.
Tony did the opposite. Once upon a time he had been a consumer of all those nonfiction tomes vying for the Pulitzer Prize, big books about social and historical issues. He used to send me articles that took multiple hours to read—I’d wondered when he ever did work. Now he only sent me tweets.
He waved his phone in my face.
Taking up the entire screen was a photograph of what appeared to be hell. Hell, as it appeared in medieval paintings and Hollywood films. Hills and trees burning so red they appeared liquid, the sky pulsing with black smoke. A highway cut through the center of this scene, and on the highway, impossibly, were cars, fleeing and entering the inferno at top speed.
“This is Loma,” Tony said.
“Loma?”
“It’s an hour from here? We were there last month?”
“We were?”
“That brewery with the chocolate? Jen drove?”
“Oh. Yeah. Wow.”
According to the photograph’s caption, the whole state was on fire. Tony’s voice was incredulous, alarmed.
“Have you gone outside today?”
I hadn’t.
We walked to Chinaman’s Vista, where there was a view of the city. Tony held my hand and I was grateful for it. The air was smoky; it smelled like everyone was having a barbecue. If I closed my eyes I could imagine I was in my grandmother’s village in Zhejiang, those hours before dinner when families started firing up their wood-burning stoves.
“People are wearing those masks,” Tony said. “Look—like we’re in fucking Beijing.”
Tony had never been to Beijing. I had. The smog wasn’t half as bad as this.
We sat on a bench in Chinaman’s Vista and looked at the sky. The sun was setting. Behind the gauze of smoke it was a brilliant salmon orange, its light so diffused you could stare straight at it without hurting your eyes. The sky was pink and purple, textured with plumes of color. It was the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. Around us the light cast upon the trees and grass and purple bougainvillea an otherworldly yellow glow, more nostalgic than any Instagram filter. I looked at Tony, whose face had relaxed in the strange beauty of the scene, and it was like stumbling upon a memory of him—his warm dry hand clasping mine, the two of us looking and seeing the same thing.
Tony’s failure had to do with the new president. He had been working on the opposing candidate’s campaign, building what was to be a revolutionary technology for civic engagement. They weren’t only supposed to win. They were the ones who were supposed to go down in history for changing the way politics used the internet.
My failure had to do with Tony. I had failed to save him, after.
Tony had quit his lucrative job to work seven days a week for fifteen months and a quarter of the pay. The week leading up to the election, he had slept ten hours total, five of them at headquarters, face-down on his desk. He didn’t sleep for a month after, though not for lack of time. If there was ever a time for Tony to go insane, that would have been it.
Instead he shut down. His engines cooled, his fans stopped whirring, his lights blinked off. He completed the motions of living but his gestures were vacant, his eyes hollow. It was like all the emotions insisting and contradicting inside him had short-circuited some processing mechanism. In happier times, Tony had joked about his desire to become an android. “Aren’t we already androids?” I asked, indicating the eponymous smartphone attached to his hand. Tony shook his head in exasperation. “Cyborgs,” he said. “You’re thinking of cyborgs.” He explained that cyborgs were living organisms with robotic enhancements. Whereas androids were robots made to be indistinguishable from the alive. Tony had always believed computers superior to humans—they didn’t need to feel.
In this time I learned many things about Tony and myself, two people I thought I already knew very well. At our weakest, I realized, humans have no recourse against our basest desires. For some this might have meant gorging in sex and drink, or worse—inflicting violence upon others or themselves. For Tony it meant becoming a machine.
Because of the wildfire smoke, we were warned to go outside as little as possible. This turned out to be a boon for my productivity. I shut myself in my bunker and worked.
I woke to orange-hued cityscapes. In the mornings I drank tea and listened to my audiobook. Earth was being shredded, infinitely, as it entered the supermassive black hole, while what remained of humanity sped away on a light-speed ship. “It’s strangely beautiful,” one character said as she looked back at the scene from space. “No, it’s terrible,” another said. The first replied: “Maybe beauty is terrible.” I thought the author didn’t really understand beauty or humans, but he did understand terror and time, and maybe that was enough. I imagined how music might sound on other planets, where the sky wasn’t blue and grass wasn’t green and water didn’t reflect when it was clear. I descended to my bunker and worked for the rest of the day. I stopped going upstairs for lunch, not wanting to interrupt my flow. I ate dry packets of ramen, crumbling noodle squares and picking out the pieces like potato chips. When I forgot to bring down a thermos of tea I drank the bottled water.
Fires were closing in on the city from all directions; fire would eat these provisions up. The city was surrounded on three sides by water—that still left one entry by land. It was dry and getting hotter by the day. I thought the city should keep a ship with emergency provisions anchored in the bay. I thought that if a real disaster struck, I could find it in myself to loot the grocery store a few blocks away.
In the evenings, Tony took me upstairs and asked about my work day. In the past he had wanted to hear bits of what I was working on; now he nodded and said, “That sounds nice.” I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to share this new project with him—with anyone—until it was done. We sat on the couch and he showed me pictures of the devastation laying waste to the land. I saw sooty silhouettes of firefighters and drones panning gridwork streets of ash. I saw a woman in a charred doorway, an apparition of color in the black and gray remains of her home.
Once Jen came over to make margaritas. She put on one of Tony’s Spotify playlists. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really need to unwind.” She knew I didn’t like listening to music while other noises were happening. My brain processed the various sounds into separate channels, pulling my consciousness into multiple tracks and dividing my present self. For Jen, overstimulation was a path to relaxation. She crushed ice and talked about the hurricanes ravaging the other coast, the floods and landslides in Asia and South America, the islands in the Pacific already swallowed by the rising sea.
Jen’s speech, though impassioned, had an automatic quality to it, an unloading with a mechanical beat. I sipped my margarita and tried to converge her rant with the deep house throbbing from the Sonos: it sounded like a robot throwing up. Tony came home from work and took my margarita. Together they moved from climate change to the other human horrors I’d neglected from the news—ethnic cleansings, mass shootings, trucks mowing down pedestrians. They listed the newest obscenities of the new president, their voices growing louder and faster as they volleyed headlines and tweets. In the far corner of the couch, I hugged my knees. More and more it seemed to me that the world Jen and Tony lived in was one hysterical work of poorly written fiction—a bad doomsday novel—and that what was really real was the world of my music. More and more I could only trust those daytime hours when my presence coincided completely with every sound I made and heard.
I was making a new album. I was making it for me but also for Tony, to show him it was still possible, in these times, to maintain a sense of self.
My last album had come out a year earlier. I had been on tour in Europe promoting it when the election came and went. At the time I had justified the scheduling: Tony would want to celebrate with his team anyways, I would just get in the way. Perhaps I had been grateful for an excuse. On the campaign, Tony had been lit with a blind passion I’d never been able to summon for tangible things. I’d understood it—how else could you will yourself to work that much?—I’d even lauded it, I’d wanted his candidate to win too. Still, the pettiest part of me couldn’t help resenting his work like a mistress resents a wife. I imagined the election night victory party as the climax of a fever dream, after which Tony would step out, cleansed, and be returned to me.
Of course nothing turned out how I’d imagined.
My own show had to go on.
I remember calling Tony over Google Voice backstage between shows, at coffee shops, in the bathroom of the hotel room I shared with Amy the percussionist—wherever I had wifi. I remember doing mental math whenever I looked at a clock—what time was it in America, was Tony awake? The answer, I learned, was yes. Tony was always awake. Often he was drunk. He picked up the phone but did not have much to say. I pressed my ear against the screen and listened to him breathe.
I remember Amy turning her phone to me: “Isn’t this your boyfriend?” We were on a train from Brussels to Amsterdam. I saw Tony’s weeping face, beside another weeping face I knew: Jen’s. I zoomed out. Jen’s arms were wrapped around Tony’s waist; Tony’s arm hugged her shoulder. The photograph was in a listicle published by a major American daily showing the losing candidate’s supporters on election night, watching the results come in. I remembered that Jen had flown in to join Tony at the victory arena, in order to be “a witness to history.” The photo-list showed the diversity of the supporters: women in head-scarves, disabled people, gay couples. Tony and Jen killed two birds in one stone: Asian America, and an ostensibly mixed-race couple. Jen was half-Chinese but she looked exotic-white—Italian, or Greek.
That night I’d called Tony. “How are you?” I’d asked as usual, and then: “I was thinking maybe I should just come back. Should I come back? I hate this tour.” There was a long silence. Finally Tony said, “Why?” In his voice a mutter of cosmic emptiness.
I have one memory of sobbing under bright white lights, some terrible noise cracking into speakers turned too high. This might have been a dream.
For a long time after, I was estranged from music. What feelings normally mediated themselves in soundscapes, a well I could plumb for composition, hit me with their full blunt force.
Now I was trying to re-enter music by making it in a new way, the way I imagined a sculptor makes a sculpture, to work with sound as if it were a physical material. Music was undoubtedly my medium: I had perfect pitch, a nice singing voice, and I liked the monasticism and repetition of practice. According to my grandmother, I had sung the melodies of nursery songs a whole year before I learned to speak. But I had the temperament of a conceptual artist, not a musician. Specifically, I was not a performer. I hated every aspect of performing: the lights, the stage, the singular attention. Most of all I could not square with the irreproducibility of performance—you had one chance, and then the work disappeared—which, to be successful, required a kind of faith. The greatest performers practiced and practiced, controlling themselves with utmost discipline, and when they stepped onto the stage, gave themselves over to time.
This was also why I couldn’t just compose. I wanted to control every aspect of a piece, from its conception to realization: I did not like giving up the interpretation of my notes and rests to a conductor and other musicians.
I wanted to resolve this contradiction by making music in a way that folded performance theoretically into composition. Every sound and silence in this album would be a performance. I would compose a work and perform it for myself, just once. From this material I would build my songs. If the recording didn’t turn out, I abandoned the mistakes or used them. I didn’t think about who the music was for. Certainly not for a group of people to enjoy with dance, as my previous album had been—I, too, had been preparing for celebration. My new listener sat in an ambient room, alone, shed of distractions, and simply let the sounds come in.
In the morning, Tony showed me a video of three husky puppies doing something adorable. “Look,” he said, pointing up and out the window. From the skywell we could see a sliver of blue.
We got up and confirmed that the smoke had lifted. Tony reported from Twitter that the nearest fire had indeed been tamed. “Huzzah!” I said. I walked outside to wait with him for his Uberpool to work. The sun was shining, the air was fresh, the colors of this relentlessly cheerful coast restored. I kissed him on the cheek goodbye.
I watched his car drive away and couldn’t bear the thought of going back inside. My legs itched. I wanted—theoretically—to run. I put in earbuds and turned on my audiobook. I walked around the neighborhood, looking happily at the bright houses and healthy people and energetic pooping dogs.
In the audiobook, things had also taken a happy turn. The lady protagonist, who had escaped Earth on a light-speed ship, found herself reunited in a distant galaxy with the man who’d proved his unfailing love by secretly gifting her an actual star. This reunion despite the fact that eight hundred years had passed (hibernation now allowed humans to jump centuries of time) and that when they had last seen each other, the man’s brain was being extracted from his body in order to be launched into outer space (it was later intercepted by aliens who reconstructed his body from the genetic material). She had discovered his love in that final moment, when it was too late to stop the surgery—aside from then the two had barely spoken. Now he was finally to be rewarded for his devotion and patience. I thought the author had an exciting imagination when it came to technology but a shitty imagination for love. Somehow I found the endurance of this love story more unbelievable than the leaps in space and time.
That afternoon I tried to work but didn’t get very much done. dinner out? I texted Tony. For the first time in a long time I wanted to feel like I lived in a city. I wanted to shower and put on mascara and pants that had a zipper.
Tony had a work event. I texted Jen. sry have a date! she wrote back, followed by a winking emoji that somehow seemed to say: ooh-la-la.
I decided to go out to dinner alone. I listened to my audiobook over a plate of fancy pizza, shoveling down the hot dough as I turned up the speed on my book. By the time I finished the panna cotta, the universe was imploding, every living and non-living thing barreling towards the end of its existence. I looked at my empty plate as the closing credits came on to a string cadenza in D-minor. I took out my earbuds and looked around the restaurant, at the redwood bar where I was sitting, the wait-staff in black aprons, the patrons in wool sneakers and thin down vests, the Sputnik lamps hanging above us all. Would I miss any of this? Yes, I thought, and then, just as fervently—I don’t know.
Outside, the sky was fading to pale navy, a tint of yellow on the horizon where the sun had set. A cloudless, unspectacular dusk. I walked to dissipate the unknowing feeling and found myself at Chinaman’s Vista, which was louder than I had ever heard it, everyone taking advantage of the newly particulate-free outdoors. I weaved through the clumps of people, looking at and through them, separate and invisible, like a visitor at a museum. That was when I saw, under a cypress tree, a woman who looked exactly like Jen, wearing Jen’s gold loafers and pink bomber jacket. Jen was with a man. She was kissing the man. The man looked exactly like Tony.
I was breathing quickly. Staring. I wanted to run away but my feet were as glued as my eyes. Tony kissed Jen differently than he kissed me. He grabbed her lower back with two hands and seemed to lift her up slightly, while curling his neck to her upwardly lifted face. Because Jen was shorter than him. This made sense. I, on the other hand, was just about Tony’s height.
I blinked and shook my head. Jen wasn’t shorter than Tony. She was taller than us both. Jen and Tony stopped kissing and started to walk towards me, and I saw that it wasn’t Tony, it was some other Asian guy who only kind of looked like Tony, but really not at all. Horrified, I turned and walked with intentionality to a plaque ahead on the path. I stared intently at the words and thought how the guy wasn’t Tony and the girl probably wasn’t even Jen, how messed up that I saw a white-ish girl with an East Asian guy and immediately thought Jen and Tony.
“Chenchen!”
It was Jen. I looked up with relief and dread. Jen stood on the other side of the plaque with her date, waving energetically.
“This is Kevin,” she said. She turned to Kevin. “Chenchen’s the friend I was telling you about, the composer-musician-artiste. She just moved to the city.”
“Hey,” I said. I looked at the plaque. “Did you know,” I said, “Chinaman’s Vista used to be a mining camp? For, uh, Chinese miners. They lived in these barrack-like houses. Then they were killed in some riots and maybe buried here, because, you know, this place has good fengshui.” I paused. I’d made up the part about fengshui. The words on the plaque said mass graves. “This was back in the—1800s.”
“Oh, like the Gold Rush?” Kevin said. His voice was deep, hovering around a low F. Tony spoke in the vicinity of B-flat. I looked up at him. He was much taller than Tony.
“Yeah,” I said.
I stood there for a long time after they left, reading and re-reading the historical landmark plaque, wishing I could forget what it said. Chinaman’s Vista, I thought, was a misleading name. The view was of cascading expensive houses, pruned and prim. The historic Chinese population, preferring squalor and cheap rents, had long relocated to the other side of town. Besides me and probably Kevin and half of Jen, there weren’t many living Chinese people here.
What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?
The temperature skyrocketed. Tony and I kicked off our blankets in sleep. We opened the windows and the air outside was hot too. Heat radiated from the highway below in waves. The cars trailed plumes of scorching dust.
Tony texted me halfway through the day to say it was literally the hottest it had ever been. I clicked the link he sent and saw a heat map of the city. It was 105 degrees in our neighborhood, 101 at Tony’s work. We didn’t have an air conditioner. We didn’t, after all my disaster prep, even have a fan. Tony’s work didn’t have AC either. Nobody in the city did, I realized when I left the house, searching for a cool café. Every business had its doors wide open. Puny ceiling fans spun as fast as they could but only pushed around hot air. It was usually so fucking temperate here, the weather so predictably perfect. I walked past melting incredulous faces: women in leather boots, tech bros carrying Patagonia sweaters with dismay.
My phone buzzed. Jen had sent a photo of what looked like an empty grocery store shelf. It buzzed again.
the fan aisle at Target!!
just saw a lady attacking another lady for the last $200 tower fan
#endofdays?
That weekend, I took Tony to the mall. Tony had been sleeping poorly, exasperated by my body heat. He was sweaty and irritable and I felt somehow responsible. I felt, I think, guilty. Since the incident at Chinaman’s Vista I’d been extra nice to Tony.
The AC in the mall wasn’t cold enough. A lot of people had had the same idea. “Still better than being outside,” I said hopefully as we stepped onto the crowded escalator. Tony grunted his assent. We walked around Bloomingdale’s. I pointed at the mannequins wearing wool peacoats and knitted vests and laughed. Summer in the city was supposed to be cold, because of the ocean fog. Tony said, “Ha-ha.”
We got ice cream. We got iced tea. We got texts from PG&E saying that power was out on our block due to the grid overheating, would be fixed by 8 p.m. We weren’t planning to be back until after sunset anyways, I said. I looked over Tony’s shoulder at his phone. He was scrolling through Instagram, wistfully it seemed, through photographs of Jen and other girls in bikinis—they had gone to the beach. “But you don’t like the beach,” I said. Tony shrugged. “I don’t like the mall either.” I asked if he wanted to go to the beach. He said no.
We ate salads for dinner and charged our phones. This, at last, seemed to make Tony happy. “In case the power is still out later,” he said. We sat in the food court and charged our phones until the mall closed.
The apartment was a cacophony of red blinking eyes. The appliances had all restarted when the power came back on. Now they beeped and hummed and buzzed, imploring us to reset their times. Outside the wide-open windows, cars honked and revved their engines. So many sounds not meant to be simultaneous pressed simultaneously onto me. In an instant the cheerfulness I’d mustered for our wretched day deflated. I found myself breathing fast and loud, tears welling against my will. Tony sat me down and put his noise-canceling headphones over my ears. “I can still hear everything!” I shouted. I could hear, I wanted to say, the staticky G-sharp hiss of the headset’s noise-canceling mechanism. Tony was suddenly contrite. He handed me a glass of ice water and shushed me tenderly. He walked around the apartment, resetting all our machines.
We took a cold shower. Tony looked as exhausted as I felt. We kept the lights off and went directly to bed. Traffic on the highway had slowed to a rhythmic whoosh. I wanted to hug Tony but it was too hot. I took his hand and released it. Our palms were sweaty and gross.
I was just falling asleep when I heard a faint beep.
I nudged Tony. “What was that?” He rolled away from me. I turned over and closed my eyes.
It beeped again, then after some moments again.
It was a high C, a note of shrill finality. I counted the beats between: about 20 at 60 bpm. I counted to twenty, hoping to lull myself to sleep. But the anticipation of the coming beep was too much. My heart rate rose, I counted faster, unable to maintain a consistent rhythm, so now it was 22 beats, then 25, then 27.
Finally I sat up, said loudly: “Tony, Tony, do you hear the beeping?”
“Huh?” He rubbed his eyes. It beeped again, louder, as if to back me up. Tony got up and poked at the alarm clock, which he hadn’t reset because it ran on batteries. He pulled the batteries out and threw them to the floor. He lay down, I thanked him, and then—beep.
I sat on the bed, clamping my pillow over my ears, and watched Tony lumber about the dark bedroom, drunk with exhaustion, finding every hidden gadget and extracting its batteries, taking down even the smoke detector. Each time it seemed he had finally identified the source there sounded another beep. It was a short sound, it insisted then disappeared: even my impeccable hearing could not locate from where exactly it came. It sounded as if from all around us, from the air. Tony fell on the bed defeated. He said, “Can we just try to sleep?” We clamped our eyes shut, forced ourselves to breathe deeply, but the air was agitated and awake. My mind drifted and ebbed, imitating the movements of sleep while bringing nothing like rest. I couldn’t help thinking that the source of the sound was neither human nor human-made. I couldn’t help imagining the aliens in my audiobook preparing to annihilate our world. “Doomsday clock,” I said, half-aloud. I was thinking or dreaming of setting up my equipment to record the beeps. I was thinking or dreaming of unrolling the sleeping bags in my bunker, where it’d be silent and I could sleep. “Counting down.”
“I’m sorry,” Tony said.
“It’s okay,” I said, but it wasn’t, not really, and Tony knew it. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. Between the cosmic beeps his lips smacked open as if to speak, as if searching for the right words to fix me. Finally he said, “I kissed Jen,” and I said, “I know.”
Then, “What?”
Then, “When?”
My eyes were wide open.
“Last November.”
High C sounded, followed by ten silent beats.
“You were in Germany.”
Another high C. Twenty beats. Another high C.
“I’m sorry,” Tony said again. “Say something, please?” He tightened his hand. I tried to squeeze back to say I’d heard, I was awake. I failed. I listened to the pulses of silence, the inevitable mechanical beeps.
“Tell me what you’re thinking?”
I was thinking we would need a new disaster meet-up spot. I was wondering if there was any place in this city, this world, where we’d be safe.
Meng Jin’s first novel, Little Gods, will be published by Custom House in January 2020.
