Chapter Seven
Inno chose to have his farewell party at the Rivebelle, renting out the whole bar for the occasion, which meant, of course, that everyone who worked there would be present. He was expecting a hundred people, a number he described as “intimate,” even though he had invited Apple, which indicated to me that he had been generous with his guest list. I didn’t ask how this extravagance factored into his effective altruism calculations. Maybe his parents were giving him one last send-off. Apple declined the invitation, accusing Inno of scabbing, even though no one was on strike. By the evening of the party I believed I had reconciled myself to his departure. I still wished he wasn’t leaving, but I decided to be inspired by his example and resolved to emulate in my own life the verve with which he was pursuing an unconven tional path. I was ready to tell him so when I found him at the party, swilling champagne, but before I could say anything, Inno said, “It’s over.”
“What’s over?”
“Peru, the Potato Park, and so on.”
“You’re staying?”
No, he was not staying; he was moving back to Nigeria, to work as a management consultant in McKinsey’s Lagos office. His parents, after the threats to cut him off if he went to Peru proved ineffectual, switched the stick for the carrot, pulling strings with their fellow elites to secure their son a very well remunerated job at the firm.
“They realized how to defeat me. They finally read the books I’ve been giving them, and they argued I could improve many more lives if I took the McKinsey offer and donated a portion of my salary to my causes, rather than toiling in the hinterlands of Peru, which indeed may have benefited me more than anyone else. I couldn’t argue with it because I would be arguing with myself. It is exponentially higher impact.”
“But what about living a small life?” I said. I was floundering. I felt like the false fish in the pan in the Japanese garden. One of my worst housemates had worked at McKinsey. He once told me, unprompted, that he was trying a new regimen which demanded that he abstain from ejaculation in order to retain his qi, like a Tang dynasty court official, to improve his productivity at work; he hadn’t spoken to his girlfriend in a week, he said, because he had come while having sex with her and blamed her for the slipup. It was unclear what she should have done to prevent this.
“Life will be big in Lagos,” Inno said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“Why are you even throwing this party?” I said.
He frowned. “I’m still leaving.”
“Did you tell anyone else yet?”
“Most of them know,” he said. “You are in fact the only one to whom I disclosed my Andean adventure.”
We were on the balcony of the bar. I leaned over the glass barrier, watching a woman in a black one-piece swimming laps in the hotel pool. She was thrashing around, trying to do the butterfly, which I thought must be one of the most ungraceful movements in the world, relative to its name. I didn’t feel like I had the right to be mad at Inno, but I felt obscurely betrayed. Even more obscurely, I felt guilty, as if I was the one letting the potato farmers down, even though I had no idea how they felt about the situation, and in all probability they didn’t care. The swimmer touched the edge of the pool and then kicked off again. She had switched to the backstroke, and for one sickening moment, I thought I recognized my mother, but it was just an Asian woman with a pixie cut. I turned back to Inno.
“Are you excited?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he told me how many children would be dewormed because of his contributions. I was sad about the Potato Park, but I agreed that deworming was good. We talked for a while longer. I told him about a recent meeting with Dr. Bae that had not gone well. Bae had asked me how my weekend had been and I’d mentioned the flyering, thinking it an innocuous remark. Immediately his demeanor had changed, the ink-splash brows furrowing, the handsome smile gone. He made allusive references to the failed graduate student unionization at the university, which had nothing to do with me, and to “grievances” at the museum, insinuating that people there, at some point in the recent past, had also tried to unionize, which I knew nothing about. What had begun as a friendly meeting ended with barbed pleasantries, and I’d left his office with a dull feeling in my chest. Inno said Bae probably thought I’d mentioned the flyering to spook him and that I was raising the specter of syndicalism, threatening his rule. I wanted to talk about it more, but other party guests began to peck at Inno for attention. I promised I would visit him in Lagos, and pretty soon, as always, he was swept up by the social needs of the numerous others, leaving me on the balcony to think.
Because I was staying clear of the bar, I had not yet had a drink. I had seen, or rather sensed, Hoang there upon my arrival. Now, discomposed by Inno’s revelations, I went to look for him, but found only Gus, who made me a lychee martini and told me Hoang was in the kitchen, looking for limes.
“Everyone wants daiquiris for some reason,” Gus said.
I asked him if he supported Apple’s reason for skipping the party, and he said he hadn’t even known she was invited.
“We’re kind of taking a break. She didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot,” I lied. I downed the rest of the martini. “Can I have another?”
“He’s paying, you should have as many as you want.”
“He’s going to work for McKinsey. You know, the consultants?”
“Your friends have some interesting careers.”
“Who else? Apple?”
Gus stabbed a fleshy lychee with a garnish pick using what I perceived to be unnecessary force.
“You don’t approve of her career?”
“You know what she does for work, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t. She told me she was a civil rights lawyer. Turns out she helps corporations circumvent antitrust law.”
“That’s why you broke up,” I said, trying to place my tone somewhere between a question and a statement.
“Not broke up. Taking a break.”
“Maybe she thought you would judge her if she told you the truth,” I said, raising my voice so he could hear me over the sound of the cocktail he was violently shaking.
“She was right. I do. But I judge her more for lying to me. It doesn’t feel good when somebody you love deceives you.”
“Wow,” I said. “Love.”
He handed me my drink. “I gotta go deal with those people. I’ll see you later.”
I wandered around until I found Femi and Louisa, who were in the middle of a discussion about whether K-pop stars should be exempted from military service. Louisa, obviously, believed they should. “Ballet dancers. Pianists. Athletes. How come they get out of it? It’s not fair to Jin. It’s not fair to the boys.”
“Success in sports does wonders for national morale,” said Femi.
“What about economic success? BTS contributes billions of dollars to Korea’s GDP. And the soft power they’ve generated for the government is priceless.”
“Patriotism is more important. Winning gold medals at the Olympics makes the average citizen much prouder of their country than knowing American teenage girls are teaching themselves Korean for a boy band.”
“I disagree,” Louisa said. She was speaking normally, but tears were streaming down her face and slicing into her foundation, like rivulets of water on beach sand. “It’s not fair to Jin,” she kept repeating. “It’s not fair to the boys.”
“Anyway, I’ll see you guys in a bit,” I said.
I stood next to a bowl of popcorn and ate mouthfuls at a time. For a while I played a game where I held a single kernel in my palm to see how long I could go without eating it, which never exceeded a few seconds. Later, I caught sight of Hoang, when I was back at the bar trying to commandeer more champagne from Gus to take back to Inno. He was at the far end, uncorking a bottle of wine with fluidity and poise. He smiled at me, and I smiled back.
Now that I had seen him in person, I knew that I would speak to him before the night was over, and everything felt resolved in a curious way. I was able to converse with people, to think of the work I had to do at the museum on Monday, and to swipe tiny food—blinis with shavings of carrot made to resemble smoked salmon, mini mushroom tarts, finger-sized vegan pistachio eclairs—from the waiters who circulated the room with trays. The anticipation of seeing Hoang powered me through these tasks like a battery.
I got into a conversation with Gleb, Inno’s chess instructor. I knew from Inno that Gleb had been a child chess champion, and I tried asking him about it, because prodigies interested me, but he refused to go into detail, claiming that he had forgotten that era of his life, and he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything that I couldn’t read in a newspaper article. I let it go, because I’d probably have said the same thing. Instead he told me stories about his childhood in Russia. When he wasn’t practicing or studying for chess, he said, he and his friends would go into the woods and play games. The games they played were: beating each other up, beating one specific kid up (sometimes the kid was Gleb), and, Gleb’s favorite, stuffing a tin can with acorns, lighting the acorns on fire, and then swinging the can around on a piece of string. In the summer the can helped to ward off mosquitos.
“The sparks jumped like fireflies in the dark forest,” he said. “That was so fun.”
I asked Gleb what his favorite food had been as a child, because I had no idea what Russians ate. He said it was porridge: milk, oatmeal, sugar, and salt, boiled and then stirred continuously at a very low heat to make sure it cooked all the way through without burning. It was his father’s recipe, and now he cooked it whenever he was feeling homesick.
“I know it sounds disgusting,” Gleb said sadly. I reassured him it didn’t, and said my favorite food when I was a child had also been porridge, but made of rice, and I also cooked it for myself when I felt homesick. Gleb smiled and, encouraged, told me his second favorite food from home was a dish I would know as “Russian salad,” and his wife cooked it very well. I said I wasn’t familiar with Russian salad, and he listed the ingredients for me, and this time I had to lie when I said it didn’t sound disgusting.
I asked Gleb what he thought of Inno’s career move.
“Innocent is a very intelligent man, but I do not subscribe to his philosophy of moral calculus,” Gleb said, meaning, I think, calculation.
“Exactly!” I was enthused. “Like the ban on tomatoes. What’s going on there?”
“The lodestones must be God and family,” said Gleb, meaning lodestars.
“And country?”
“No,” said Gleb. “Not country. In these days when people say country they mean government, and I do not support my country’s government. Do you?”
“I guess not,” I said. There was a pause.
“Hey, Gleb?”
“Yes.”
“Do you get along with your mother?”
“My mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Get along?”
“Like, do you like her? Do you talk? Does she like you?”
Gleb said, “She is my mother.” His tone said, the answer is so self-evident that it obviates the need for an explanation, for any statement other than the most circular of all: she is my mother. My mother is my mother. What more, his tone implied, could possibly be said?
After that, Gleb spent so long guiding me through the streets of his hometown on Google Maps, showing me the route he had walked to school, pointing out his favorite churches, and complaining about the outdated details, that my phone ran out of battery, at which point he said he had to go home to his wife and baby. The timing of it made me feel like he had only talked to me in order to access my phone and look at images of Novosibirsk.
Almost immediately after he left, someone else sat down in his place. It was Xinwei.
“Hey,” I said in Mandarin. “What are you doing here?”
“Your friend invited me.”
“Inno? Have you met?”
“Yes, at your birthday karaoke. I remember he brought his own sandwich to dinner, he said he was saving money. He must have saved a lot of money to afford this party.”
“Where’s Raymond?”
Xinwei took a big sip of her pina colada. I watched the white liquid move slowly upward through the green curly straw and into her mouth.
“We broke up.”
“What? Seriously? Why?”
“He doesn’t want to get married.”
“I thought you were married.”
“We just said we were. It’s easier.”
I asked her when it had happened. She said it had been a week. I told her I was sorry, and asked why she hadn’t mentioned it to me at home.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said. She drained her pina colada, moving the straw around the bottom of the glass like a vacuum cleaner nozzle. “I’m leaving now, I just wanted to say hello to you first.”
“Xinwei, wait,” I said.
“Don’t worry, nothing will change,” she said. “I will stay in the apartment.”
“No, but, are you okay?”
She shrugged and stood up. In English she said, “That’s life.”
I wandered back to Louisa and Femi, who were on the balcony now and who said we should go visit Inno in the summer. Femi said we could stay at his family’s “extra mansion,” and Louisa said she would go if our trip didn’t clash with the BTS Love Yourself World Tour dates. It felt like the party would never end, but eventually it did, with just a few stragglers sprawled on the couches, the bartenders refusing to serve anything but tap water, Gus warning that his shift ended at two a.m . and he was not going to stay a minute later for anyone. At one minute past the hour, I veered toward the bar, from which I had been keeping a respectful distance. Hoang was loosening his collar.
“Forest!”
“Hey.”
“You good?”
I nodded. After so long interacting with him in my head, it was interesting to have him in front of me. Underwhelming was the wrong word; humanizing sounded too grandiose. Most of all there was the sense that I’d never had anything to worry about.
“How was the party?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everyone was acting strange. How was it for you?”
“It was okay. We kept running out of limes, we had to start using clementines for the garnishes.”
“Are you tired?”
“I’m alright. Are you tired?”
“No, I’m not tired.”
“Are you hungry?”
“A little. Are you?”
“I haven’t eaten since like before my shift.” He cocked his head at me. “Do you want to get some food?”
We took the service elevator to the restaurant on the third floor. He led me through the darkness of the dining room, where upturned chairs rested on tables, and our feet were silent on the carpeted floor. He pushed open the heavy double doors to the kitchen, flicking lights on as he walked. “You can just sit here,” he said, drumming the steel countertop with his fingers. He filled a large and intricate pot with water and set it on the stove to heat.
“They have these great steamers, and Japanese knives.” He disappeared for a moment and returned with two large artichokes, one in each hand. “And these! From Italy.”
I watched as he sliced the stems and tops off the artichokes with a long delicate blade, and then picked away the errant leaves. When the water reached a boil, he placed the artichokes in the mesh net steamer of the pot and covered them. He asked me for the time and I went to check my phone, forgetting it was dead.
“It’s alright, we can guess,” he said. He extracted a lemon from his pocket and cut it into quarters. He set a white plate on the counter, and a bottle of olive oil.
While the artichokes steamed, I asked him about Mohd and the mice. He said that they hadn’t spoken about it since that initial confrontation, and he didn’t know if he was going to mention it again because he still hadn’t worked out an argument that satisfied him.
“I just don’t like the idea of telling somebody else what to do,” he said. “Plus, it’s not like I’m vegetarian or anything, so it would be pretty easy for him to call me a hypocrite, and he wouldn’t be wrong.”
“My friend Inno is the opposite. He doesn’t eat meat, but he would be perfectly happy killing mice. And he loves telling people what to do.”
“That’s the guy who threw the party?”
“Yeah, we’re close,” I said. I described Inno’s emissions-based reasoning about his diet—how he didn’t eat meat but didn’t have an ethical objection to killing animals, viewing cows and tomatoes as interchangeable units of sustenance with different nutrition-to-emission ratios. He also knew exactly how many dogs and chimps he was willing to kill to save one human life. His was a minority view among his effective altruist friends, who were vegan for ethical as well as environmental reasons, and one of whom once told me it was morally unjustifiable to ride a horse or keep a dog or cat. Hoang wasn’t familiar with effective altruism, but he said he thought it was interesting that one concept had enough philosophical bandwidth to include “stone cold” types like Inno as well as the anti-pet guy.
“Sorry, I don’t want you to think I’m ripping on your friend, calling him cold.”
“He can be frosty.”
Hoang laughed, and the laugh revealed the dimple in his cheek. I told him I was going to miss Inno because I could talk to him about things that other people didn’t want to discuss, or got tired of after a few minutes, whereas Inno was always happy to delve; at the same time, there was an unbridgeable gap. I still had not figured out if this was due to his popularity—I gestured to the ceiling to indicate the party that had just ended—or because of something more specific to him, like an aversion to intimacy rooted in his upbringing (that was Apple’s theory). Inno and I often discussed personal issues and dissected their causes and effects, but the tone during these discussions had to be jokey and unruffled and the mode of analysis objective. I couldn’t say he had ever confided in me.
“What?” I said. Hoang looked like he was thinking of some private joke.
“No, it’s just funny. I actually thought he might have been your boyfriend.”
“What? He’s gay!” I said. I was smiling too, hoping I came across as bemused in a relaxed and humorous way, even though hearing Hoang say the word “boyfriend” made my stomach flip.
“That time you came to the bar, I thought you were on a double date or something.”
He got up to check on the artichokes. I could see his shoulder blades through his shirt, and a deeper tan on his neck that stopped at his collar. He removed the lid, and steam gushed from the pot.
I had eaten artichokes before, but only the insides, soft and stripped of leaves. I had no idea how to approach the imposing flowers Hoang placed in front of me. He said he’d never eaten them either until he started working at the hotel and befriended Danny, one of the line cooks, who had cooked them for him once.
Hoang squeezed lemon over the artichokes and then hopped up on the counter beside me. We sat with the plate between us, tearing off the steaming petals one by one, dipping them in the olive oil, and then raking them through our teeth to get at the slivers of flesh. Oil and juice snaked down our hands and wrists, making liquid bangles on our forearms.
As we worked our way through this task, we talked. Hoang told me about his cousin who had recently become obsessed with old issues of magazines like Playboy and Penthouse that had published serious investigative pieces about CIA operations and crimes committed against civilians by American soldiers in the Vietnam War. His cousin, who lived next door to Hoang’s grandmother in North Philly, was going around vintage stores and scouring eBay for copies of these magazines, trying to get a collection going. The cousin was convinced it had been a deliberate tactic of the U.S. government to allow only those kinds of publications to write such stories, because it limited the audience, and because the pornography diluted the credibility of the reporting. “I don’t know if anything he’s saying checks out, but he’s fun to talk to,” Hoang said.
Circuitously, I learned sparse and shocking facts about his family. I made some offhand remark that the happiest I’d ever been was the first time I experienced a snow day, and he asked me if I did have an actual happiest day, one I remembered as such. I couldn’t think of anything, so I said I would stick with the snow day. He said his was the Super Bowl, earlier that year, when the Eagles won for the first time.
“It feels pretty good when you’ve been waiting for something your entire life and it actually happens,” he said.
I remembered the night. Apple and I had wandered around the city after the game ended, drinking and screaming with what felt like the entire population of Philadelphia streaming down carless streets, watching people joust with traffic cones and cops laugh as men tried to clamber greased utility poles. It was thrilling to think of Hoang somewhere in that crowd, not yet known to me.
“It was so great because it wasn’t just me that was happy, it was everybody I knew, and everybody else. You could look at somebody you never met and know they felt the same way as you, and know they were looking at you and seeing it too.”