Flux

by Jinwoo Chong

“I take offense,” Lev said, “I didn’t learn it for you.” He had, in fact, learned it entirely for Blue. He had said so many times before. And American Sign Language, though complex, had barely taken him more than two weeks. Lev was older, beaten, falling apart, but not any duller, and it made Blue happy. At least he thought it did.

It wouldn’t have surprised Blue to know some legal clause afforded him the penthouse apartment gratis to serve out his house arrest. Lev had always commanded presence like that. It made sense that he’d demanded a penthouse and they had obliged, no matter what the cost had been.

A smile crossed Lev’s face. He smiled like this often; Blue was used to the comfort it generated in him. It was comfort he had never quite learned to distrust the way he should have.

He had heard enough about L’Aspirant for a lifetime. It was pitiful, the value people claimed in the words of those running for president.

They had called him L’Aspirant—in the French military, the word for an officer candidate—for the first time a month ago, when he announced his run, and the name had stuck.

So Io would be pardoned once L’Aspirant took office; who was this show of moral generosity even for? The young ones on the internet who’d obsessed over the movies made about her in the last year, acting as though they’d uncovered some secret tantalizing history twenty years obscured?

“Everybody dies,” Lev said. “I’m watching the dumbest old show about some cranky little cunt doctor who treats his patients like dirt. He says that all the time. ‘Everybody dies.’ ”

“Yet you keep coming.” / / Can’t I visit an old friend? /

“We are not friends,” Lev said. “You despise me. You always have.”

There were plenty of ways in which the show could have denigrated ethnic food, like it was always done on TV at the time. Her, lifting up a pot cover to reveal a pile of squirming bugs, duck tongues, monkey brains—played to death over sounds of plucked guzhengs and imperial cymbal crashes. But the camera, and your eyes, are respectful.

Somebody switched the television closest to us to the news, which was still running coverage of the blackout. A portion of the ConEd plant just by the river was still dark.

I remembered the first time I watched all of Raider through and realized there would be no more episodes. I think I actually cried.

It had been the moment I realized that I had seen all of you, every moment now uncovered. You were as available to me as my own thoughts, and it made me afraid, because first and foremost I loved the questions you posed. I loved knowing that I didn’t know, that there would be more, next episode, next episode. I wouldn’t be able to watch you quite the same way. I’d never wonder about you again. I’d never be surprised. There you were: Raider, for all you are, and there would be no more.

Hadrien hadn’t tweeted in two weeks, not since the Times article. Just twenty minutes ago, he had posted a screenshot of a white Word document with no caption.

As of tonight, I have filed paperwork to legally emancipate myself from Antonin Haubert’s estate. I am named in his living will as next of kin along with my step-siblings. These connections, with him and with them, will be severed.

I didn’t get a chance to say anymore, because she had shoved me back toward the wall with enough strength that I would’ve bowled over on my ass if I hadn’t grabbed her wrist on reflex. Which was a bad idea, the badness of which occurred to me when she ripped it free and, with her other hand, punched me clean in the face. I went down. I’d never been hit so hard.