by
Carrie Sun
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My ice cream was melting fast. “If you’re going to inherit everything soon, why don’t you go ahead and do the thing you want to do?”
“Because I’ll feel guilty inheriting something I didn’t work for. I think if we, you know, you and me, if we have a future, if I work a few more years at the company, then we will never have to worry about money ever again.”
“So, if I’m hearing you, you’re working at your family’s company to lessen the guilt you feel for inheriting your parents’ wealth?”
He paused, then said, “Basically. Yeah.”
“You used to talk about starting this or that or— You had dreams. What happened to them?”
“It’s not just money, though. It’s a lot of money.”
“Yes and no—”
“Uh . . .”
“Yes, it’s a lot of money. But it’s also just money. I am confident that you and I, if we remain together, with or without your inherited wealth, could make a living. The only thing in short supply is time.”
“But to live the lifestyle we want—”
“Don’t factor me into this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want that lifestyle, I really don’t. In fact, I hate it.”
“You don’t care about having hundreds of millions of dollars for our future?”
“It’s your inheritance, not ours, and certainly not mine. Also, the New York apartment is owned by your family’s trust, not even you.”
“But if you’re married to me, then it is ours.”
“That’s the thing—only if I’m married to you. I want to have things, own things, have equity in things that are not contingent on you. I don’t want to live in your house.”
“I’m offering you the chance to never have to worry about money again in your life.”
“And I would rather live in a half-a-million-dollar house that I own than a ten-million-dollar one in which I’m squatting.”
“So, let me get this straight: You don’t want to live in our, uh, extremely luxurious Manhattan apartment many people would die to live in?”
great convo love this for her
He fell silent. So did I. I heard the crunch of fallen leaves and the happiest barks of unleashed dogs in a nearby dog run. Slowly, quietly, Josh asked, “You would give up hundreds of millions of dollars for the freedom to do your own thing?”
I looked across the street at a neighborhood deli and thought of my parents. The first thing I remember telling myself I wanted to be when I grew up was “the opposite of my mom.” I had been so intent on defining myself as the antipode of her that I failed to see how that mindset shortened the umbilical cord I had tried to cut loose. She yelled; I would be calm. She judged; I would be tolerant. She saw danger; I would know no fear. She changed her mind randomly; I would be so consistent and logical and rational—and thus, unchanging, because how do you reason and decide your way into insight, revelation, becoming a whole new person?—that I would drive myself into paradoxical corners from which I saw no escape.
Looking back at Josh, I knew if I wanted the freedom to do my own thing, I would have to give him up—and give up Boone, and, in a sense, my parents. I would have to give up all the gifts they continued to offer me because a gift weighed down by the imposition of gratitude becomes an expectation; over time, it becomes debt. “I have wasted my life,” I said. “But it’s okay. I will begin again. My parents did it in their thirties and if they can do it, so can I.”
nice
Not a day went by at Carbon when I wouldn’t have a fleeting thought about how I had achieved a childhood dream of mine. Mom’s and Dad’s tongues were sharper than knives, and often I felt like their honing steel, but their hearts were—and have always been—softer than tofu: they put everything into giving me a shot at the American dream, the one and only way I saw and felt their love. Even when I did not have the time or appetite to eat lunch, which was most days, and even during the period in which I was bingeing, I needed the psychic comfort of having the dumplings there at my desk, just in case. My orders expanded to include shumai and hargow and jiaozi but no wontons. Hated wontons. I kept ordering and ordering and wasted a lot of food. I had gone from free to reduced to regular to overindulgent lunch. I would think of my mom, whose father’s rule at mealtime was never to leave a grain of rice uneaten on the plate; and of my dad, who would stay out past midnight delivering Domino’s pizzas during icy, snowy Midwest winters, in hopes of more quarters in tips; and of myself, again, my thoughts returning as guilt and self-loathing, so nauseating were the emotions they would only make me want to binge more.
girl u dont need to do this
But I did not grow in the ways that he or I had expected. I don’t believe I grew at all. I changed—radically. I transformed. I did not swing from one side of a pendulum to the other; I removed the pivot. This could not have been a total surprise. As every Carbon document would remind you in the footnotes: past returns are not indicative of future results.
heh
This is good; this is easy. He wants to talk. He has the untroubled grin and bright blurred gaze of someone who likes working in tech, who genuinely believes in the mission and, of course, the money. She used to live a diminished version of that life, performing remote data entry for a company that would eat photos of your apartment and spit out your scientifically optimized aesthetics, your exquisite objets, your precious self. Her task had been to re-tag products sent in from their secret corporate partners, since the A.I. tagger was only right 68 percent of the time. Nope, this one is actually a wingback; this is a papasan; this is a chaise lounge. It was good, it was easy. She would wake early. She would dress and eat an orange. She would pad through the beating grey light to her computer and click for ten hours. A finger on the cursor, a set of eyes, a brain. Disembodied parts strung together by flesh and electricity, her mind leaping blindly from one corrected metadata tag to the next while her body sank into the chair and rotted.
It’s the worst thing that ever happened to him. It’s the worst thing that could ever happen to him, besides possibly being hit by a bus, which is unlikely but not impossible, and therefore not magical. His wife left him for an ex, an old flame. As though it had suddenly flamed up in her—I am not with the right man, I am not where I am supposed to be, I am not in my right life no matter how comfortable— and her flame sparked the flame of her old flame, and they burned together. In the old days they would have been considered the worst sort of sinners.
She tells him about the old furniture-tagging startup, and her current work, which is whatever she can find. More mechanical Turking but less well-paid: dog-walking apps, homework assistance, personal shopping, middleman food delivery. Last week she was robbed in Queens for a burger. She was just standing outside a duplex at midnight, waiting for the person who’d ordered the burger, but she’d been there ten minutes already and was about to leave when a rat-tailed man whipped around the side of the building and hissed at her to stand still. He had a gun. He held her up at gunpoint for a burger, which wasn’t even her burger. The burger place she was delivering from was just okay. It wasn’t even that good of a burger.
He laughs, but uncomfortably. She’d hoped he would feel strong in the story—oh if I had been there I would have, etc. etc., grabbed the gun, badassedly. I would have protected you. And he seems to feel that a bit, but he’s also bothered; it’s too close to reality, to a real thing that happens to people. People not like himself. The wrong approach, she realizes belatedly. Most men she’s dated seem to want a woman around for contrast, and self-definition. So they can be the shaggy golden man-half, the eloquent speaker, the mighty hunter. Or else they just want to assuage their nostalgic adolescent loneliness. But this man, with a child, doesn’t need to be a child anymore and he doesn’t need something else fragile to protect. He’s eager to settle down with someone, of course, but he needs a wife. His profile should have been a job listing. Must be able to fold laundry, give great head, and pick up the kid after school. Room and board included. Must love me and my stock options enough to never leave.
Outside TAROT he suddenly grabs her shoulders and shoves his mouth at hers. It’s meant to be fierce, romantic. It’s not. Wet and bumpy and unpleasant: a toad’s kiss. She’s turned by it into something small and mean.
“We’ll do this again,” he says, decisively.
“I don’t know if I can,” she says.
He lets go of her shoulders. He’s absolutely stunned. It’s impossible, which means it must be magic. Only some kind of curse could make a lonely, lovely, desperate girl reject him. Only a curse could explain why women keep walking away from him—him! With his stock options! He stalks away, furious.
The first job I was assigned to was hell on earth. I don’t think I’ll ever be “ready” to talk about it. Partly because I can’t communicate in words how haunting the smell was. Partly because I just kind of shut down and the memory of the experience is… crackly, like a bad VHS. In self-defense, my olfactory nerve committed suicide to deaden the blow of the stench. The rest of my body and brain followed suit, leaving just enough juice to keep the engine running. Every day, just enough. The other guys on the line and I got through each shift, went home, and forgot about it. That was it. We couldn’t bear to ask if our work “meant” anything to us. We didn’t want it to. We were just there, just doing a job that needed doing, laboring quietly in the rancid gut of modernity.
Here’s all I’ll say about it: our job was to stand amidst the steam and froth in full Hazmat gear, like humdrum astronauts, sorting and cleaning the soiled laundry of L.A. and Orange County hospitals. The conveyor belt in front of us never stopped, not once. It rumbled monotonously, shepherding endless piles of sheets and towels and smocks and blankets, all stained, dripping with the insides of our fellow human beings. Blood, shit… tears, dying words… piss, bile… the effluence of broken bodies, the residual pudding new life leaves behind—it all ended up here. I once found a syringe in one of the piles.
Besides the smell, there’s only one thing that stands out. One image, I can still make out through the thick steam that’s taken over that part of my memory. A Black man, fifty-something. He’d worked there for years. I never actually saw his face, just his eyes—we all wore masks. The smell, he said, didn’t bother him none. There was a superhuman tenderness and care in the labor he did to sift through an entire civilization’s worth of human-stained laundry, without being bothered by any of it. To make it all clean again. He was Atlas, holding the world up.
<3