Edge Case

A Novel

YZ Chin

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063030701
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A Recommended Read from: Entertainment Weekly * Buzzfeed * Good Morning America * USA Today * Harper's Bazaar * Fortune * A.V. Club * The Millions * Lit Hub * International Examiner * Publishers Weekly

When her husband suddenly disappears, a young woman must uncover where he went—and who she might be without him—in this striking debut of immigration, identity, and marriage.

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. Did he give up on their increasingly hopeless quest to secure their green cards and decide to return to Malaysia? Was it the death of his father that sent him into a tailspin? Or has his strange, sudden change in personality finally made Marlin and Edwina strangers to each other?

As Edwina searches the city for traces of her husband, she simultaneously sifts through memories of their relationship, hoping to discover the moment when something went wrong. All the while, a coworker is making increasingly uncomfortable advances toward her. And she can't hide the truth about Marlin's disappearance from her overbearing, eccentric mother for much longer. Soon Edwina will have to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to stay in her marriage and in America.

Poignant and darkly funny, Edge Case is a searing meditation on intimacy, estrangement, and the fractured nature of identity. In this moving debut, YZ Chin explores the imperfect yet enduring relationships we hold to country and family.

"Chin's specificity and wonderfully drawn minor characters add depth and richness…. Not only a subtly provocative depiction of the tech industry, and this country, as tilting ever more off-kilter; but also a realistic portrayal of a woman in crisis."—Lauren Oyler, The New York Times Book Review

After

Day Three (Friday)

I woke up convinced Marlin was back. There was no reason to think so, no sound from another part of the apartment. I simply sat up on the couch and blinked, waiting for him to sit down next to me. My delusion went beyond just believing he had physically returned. I had somehow been sure, for a moment, that he was his old self again, logical and unflappable. I checked my phone, heart pounding impatiently, but there was nothing there from him either.

Where had these false feelings come from? I stared at the ceiling. Maybe he’d been such a grounding force of pragmatism for me that I didn’t know how to be rational on my own.

We had a conversation about intelligence once. Marlin, to my amused annoyance, was being falsely modest. He waved off my insistence that he was extremely intelligent and said he was merely smart enough to realize he wasn’t that smart.

“Isn’t that like saying ‘I’m a good person because I don’t claim to be a good person?’” I asked.

Marlin frowned very seriously and kept saying no, no, there’s a difference. I wish I could remember what his arguments were. In my memory, I gave myself the last word.

ON THE SUBWAY, I LEANED AS FAR AWAY AS I COULD FROM A BRIEFCASE poking into my butt. I scrolled through my smartphone with one hand. Lucas had canceled our meeting today. As the train lurched around a corner, I brought up Josh’s latest novel installment and picked a section at random.

Radmonsius leans into her face. “You don’t mind if I call you Kathleen, do you, doctor?”

Kathleen lets out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Yes, she is a scientist, but she is also a sensitive, romantic woman! She has been waiting for this moment for so long, and now it has finally arrived.

“You can call me anything you want,” she murmurs as she stands on her tiptoes to press her lips against his. In the background, the ghost of Lt. Col. Coiler pumps his fist.

I figured I’d read enough to tell Josh what he wanted to hear. Hero slays alien, hero gets girl. I could probably extrapolate from that.

The stink of a fart blossomed in the train car. I looked around and unintentionally met the eye of a woman in a pencil skirt. She pinched her nose and grinned, so I did too, before glancing awkwardly into someone else’s armpit. It felt unnatural to smile.

Once, Marlin and I were stuck on a stalled 7 train. We were on elevated tracks suspended high over Long Island City, on our way back from visiting Flushing for good food. Through the train’s dirty panes we could see the sun setting, a purplish pink that seemed innocent but also somehow gravely wrong, like a birthday party full of zombie children.

A middle-aged man at the other end of the car stood up and declared he could no longer hold it in; he was very sorry but he simply had to relieve himself. A commotion started, strangers uniting in aggressively expressed admonishments for the man to sit back down and “chill.”

The man sulkily plopped back onto his hard, shiny seat. A minute later he sprang up and made again for a corner of the car, wagging his hands and head to show he was not listening, no, really, he was going to do it. Two youngsters in sports jerseys stood up and puffed their chests out imposingly, and for a moment I thought the man would simply pee on them, but instead he turned around and marched quickly toward our end of the car. Groans of alarm immediately took up our side of the train, and the passengers across from us tried to dissuade the man, now red in the face, except his body could no longer be stopped. It would do what it had to do. As people started moving away from him, the man unzipped his pants. In his hurry he yanked on his trousers too hard and they fell to the ground, exposing his bare ass. The hems of his pant legs darkened with the backsplash of pee.

Marlin grabbed my face and overlaid his on top, blocking the man from my view. He could be old-fashioned sometimes when it came to nudity, prudish almost, even though he was very liberal-minded about everything else. I thought this was because he’d grown up in a country that regularly censored nudity and sex scenes from movies, if not outright banning them. Then again, I’d been brought up in the same country and was not bothered by naked body parts unless they happened to be my own. It was interesting how the same forces of influence and pressure could produce something so dissimilar in different people. I thought about all this, and a tenderness for Marlin suddenly washed over me. I found him special, charming in the ways he diverged despite our many overlapping experiences. I nuzzled his neck and whispered into his ear: “It smells bad in here.”

Then we were kissing, our lips furiously working. I felt his tongue spread like jam and our teeth bumped, while four feet away a man beset by his fellow New Yorkers let it all go.

I FLICKED MY COMPUTER TO LIFE IN THE OFFICE AND TYPED UP A PARAGRAPH of gushing “feedback” for Josh. I figured that by sending this to him digitally, I’d preempt another lunch invite. I’d also be saved from having to keep a straight face.

I hit send when I saw Josh walk toward his desk, messenger bag bouncing. I decided I’d give him until lunch before I asked after his ex at Cachi I/O.

“Exciting night?” Josh asked, eyes serious and trained on his screen, smirk mismatching.

“Me?” I looked up. The typing to my left stopped. Maybe he meant Ben, the quiet one who kept his head down and worked with a grimace of concentration.

“Aww, it’s okay, I don’t judge,” Josh said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Ben let out a squeaky, obviously fake cough. “Your hair, ah, is a little messy.” His voice was even quieter than usual.

Had I forgotten to brush my hair? Were there nugget crumbs tangled in there? I pushed back from my desk, my ergonomic chair rolling into Ben’s with a muffled crash. I was at the women’s bathroom door as Josh’s voice rang around the open-floor office: “Hey, Phil! What were you up to last night?”

I ran the tap so I wouldn’t have to hear anything else. In the mirror, I did indeed look frightful. My hair was tousled on one side but flattened on the other, where I had fallen asleep on the couch learning about ants. I found just a single flake of desiccated nugget, a blessing I counted out loud in the empty bathroom: “One.”

I combed wet fingers through my hair, my back to the oversize mirror. I could feel a scowl distorting my face. There had to be something I could do to Josh. Some way to hit back. But I still needed to get into Marlin’s office. My nape burned as I mentally recited the obsequious praise I’d just sent Josh for his inane novel.

Pursuing a half thought, I took out my phone, navigating to Stack Overflow, the hub for programming-related dumb questions. “List of common edge cases,” I typed in the query box. Edge cases are rare situations or use cases that engineers might miss when they write code, resulting in ugly bugs. It was simultaneously the engineers’ responsibility to anticipate these edge cases and the bread and butter of my job as testing analyst to catch them. I scrolled through Stack Overflow posts, making note of potential gotchas to try on Josh’s code. Some of them must trigger flaws in his work. I imagined filing virtual reams of bug reports, writing up taunting descriptions, and assigning them to Josh. I’d present it as a problem to Lucas, and maybe, just maybe, Josh would get a stern talking-to. It’d take him down a few pegs. After he connected me to Cachi I/O, of course.

JOSH DID COME THROUGH WITH A NAME AND A PHONE NUMBER, AFTER a lunch break from which he returned humming. I read his email and glanced at his serene expression from the corner of my eye, wondering if he felt bad about his innuendo-laced comments this morning. Since then I’d bought an I ♥ NY cap from a street vendor, hoping it would make me look less ragged.

I took a break from my hunt for Josh’s coding errors to contact the Cachi I/O connection. He had provided only a first name, Meg. Outside our office building, two competing halal carts stood at opposite ends of the city block, spreading a smell of charred meat that nauseated me in my nugget hangover. I tried my best to stand equidistant between the carts, fingers hesitating over my phone’s dial button. It was probably better to text, so Meg wouldn’t detect my “foreign” accent. Who knew what she’d be like? She had some kind of relationship with Josh, after all. Then again, was it wise to leave evidence of my probing in writing?

I hit call before I could waffle further. I didn’t think people still answered unknown numbers, but Meg picked up after a few rings. I introduced myself in my best movie-American twang, deepening my voice and thinking Scarlett Johansson, Scarlett Johansson.

“Oh, it’s you,” Meg said with a light laugh. “Josh told me you might call.”

Next to me, someone lit up a cigarette. I moved away from it, past the P.C. Richard & Son somehow still in business in the age of Amazon.

“Thank you for taking the time.”

“It’s about the WIT meetup, right?”

“Wit?”

“Women in Tech?”

“Yes, I’m a woman in tech,” I said woodenly, unsure how to steer the conversation to Marlin.

“Do you want the email to RSVP?”

“Actually, I was wondering if you know a coworker named Marlin.” There was no good way to do it, I decided.

“Marlin? Yeah, why?”

“Is he—there?”

A white van with AMBULNZ emblazoned across its side approached, blaring its obnoxious horn. I watched passersby frown as they tried to puzzle out the ambulance that couldn’t spell.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” I said.

“I said I just checked, and I don’t see him. He’s been coming in pretty late these days. Something about commuting all the way from Queens. Are you a friend? You’re not, like, a stalker, right?”

“No, please don’t worry.” Queens? Eamon lived in College Point, but he hadn’t seen Marlin. How many hotels were there in Queens? Probably fewer than Manhattan, so maybe a search was actually feasible?

“Then what is this about?”

“He was the one who told me about the WIT meetup,” I said, pronouncing “WIT” carefully. This part was almost true. I’d seen the flyer for it, after all, tucked among the papers on his desk.

“That’s nice of him.”

“You said you had the email for RSVPs?”

She spelled out the address and I memorized it, pretending all the while that I was writing it down. I thanked her. Just before she hung up, I added quickly: “Please don’t tell Josh about this.”

She waited for me to say more.

“I don’t want to give the wrong impression,” I said.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going between you two. Just know that Josh can come across, eh, a bit of a dick? But once you get to know him, he’s not that bad.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you again.”

I bought some prosciutto from a deli before returning to work. Back at my desk, feeling somewhat grateful, I decided to stop scrutinizing Josh’s code and work on the AInstein master test plan instead. The plan was a long document laying out every common scenario that a user could possibly encounter with the AInstein robot, with corresponding test cases to make sure AInstein behaved as expected in said scenarios. I checked my calendar. I was supposed to present a completed plan to engineers next week. Once they signed off, I would then actually write the tests and run them against both production and upcoming code. If I did my job right, my tests would catch errors and flag them for fixing before our September launch.

It was nearing the end of July, and I was behind on finishing the plan. The problem was the engineers kept veering off their specs, surprising me with modified implementation methods and new expected behaviors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• After: Day One (Wednesday)
• Before: February 2014
• After: Day One (Wednesday)
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: 2016—?
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: January 2018
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: October 2017
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: March 2018
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: January 2018
• After: Day Two (Thursday)
• Before: May 2018
• After: Day Three (Friday)
• After: Day Three (Friday)
• Before: January 2018
• After: Day Four (Saturday)
• After: Day Four (Saturday)
• After: Day Five (Sunday)
• After: Day Five (Sunday)
• After: Day Six (Monday)
• After: Day Six (Monday)
• After: Day Seven (Tuesday)
• Before: June 2018
• After: Day Seven (Tuesday)
• After: Day Eight (Wednesday)
• After: Day Nine (Thursday)
• After: Day Nine (Thursday)
• After: Day Nine (Thursday)
• After: Day Ten (Friday)
• After: Day Eleven (Saturday)
• After: Day Twelve (Sunday)
• After: Day Thirteen (Monday)
• After: Day Fourteen (Tuesday)
• After: Day Fifteen (Wednesday)
• After: Day Fifteen (Wednesday)
• After: Day Sixteen (Thursday)
• After: Day Eighteen (Saturday)
• After
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by YZ Chin
• Copyright
• About the Publisher