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New Short Fiction By Rachel Khong: "If A Tree Falls In A Forest"

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At the bar late last Thursday, a person wearing glasses with a built-in video camera filmed me and posted it to YouTube. By the time the video was forwarded to me — by my acquaintance Ronnie, who sent it to me with a “;-)” as the subject line — the video had 2,494 thumbs-up votes and 1,910 thumbs-down. Unfortunately, it was going a little bit viral.

I could see why it attracted viewers: The image was startling. I was an average-looking Asian woman with blunt, neat, healthy-looking hair and carefully applied makeup, save for the mascara that was starting to run. First I was doing tequila shots with the mariachi group, three men in sombreros still strapped to their instruments, and by the time they started playing again, only a moment later, I had peeled off my J.Crew blouse and was waving it over my head like a helicopter. One breast was popping slightly out of my bra, but not so far out that it was inappropriate for YouTube. I didn’t remember any of this, so it was interesting to see that portion of the night handed back to me like a gift.

I didn’t remember any of this, so it was interesting to see that portion of the night handed back to me like a gift.

“What a psycho,” one of the comments said. “*You’re* a psycho,” I responded. A not-great comeback, but I wrote it feverishly, angry. I looked at the comments he’d posted on other videos. He seemed like a career troll. Others commented on how attractive I was; I voted those comments up. There were comments bemoaning glasses with built-in video cameras. In support of those, I replied, “Down with tech!”

It wasn’t something I did often — go to bars alone. That this rare occurrence had been filmed was bad luck. Earlier that night, I’d texted my friends Davy and Rita but received no response, leading me to suspect they were together — and why shouldn’t they be? Davy had been Harry’s friend and Rita had been mine, and I was happy for them, though I hoped they weren’t hanging out with Harry and his new wife. In the Mission District, bodies were crammed into restaurants and bars and everyone seemed screamy and happy. Going to a bar alone was something a man would do, I figured. So I walked into a Latin American–themed dive on 22nd Street, sat at the corner of the bar, and ordered a margarita, a drink known to be particularly strong here.

While I was savoring that first margarita, a wiry man sat down next to me. He wasn’t an attractive man. His crusty-looking left eye was glued shut with eye goop. He sat quietly in the seat right beside me instead of leaving one seat as buffer, even though plenty of seats were available. I tried to talk myself out of my own discomfort; the discomfort was unwarranted — based on his external appearance only and nothing he had done. He drank from a glass filled to the brim with neat well whiskey, decidedly not hitting on me. I wondered if it looked to other people in the bar like we were together. I found myself wishing he wasn’t there, so somebody more attractive would notice me alone and buy me a drink. Then I felt embarrassed at how conventional that desire was. This was what I had wanted, I reminded myself — to have a drink at a bar like a man, unnoticed and unbothered. I felt ashamed that I’d only been considering myself — what was his story? How had he gotten here, and what did he need? Maybe I could buy him a drink. The margarita was beginning to do its work. I turned to him.

“How long have you been in San Francisco?” I asked, with a friendly smile.

The man said nothing. Instead he stood up, picked up his things — a plastic bag that bulged with a big brown coat — and he looked at me with hate roiling in his one open eye.

“Fuck you, bitch,” he muttered.

“Me?” I replied, incredulous. I looked around — no other bitches in the vicinity.

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing his coat and flannel scarf. “Fucking bitch.” He stormed out of the swinging doors.

I didn’t understand what had just happened or why, but I felt guilty about it.

“Want another?” asked the baby-faced bartender, unruffled, collecting my glass. He had the air of a guitarist in a band.

“Sure,” I said.

I blacked out after the fourth margarita. In the morning I found a bucket next to my bed and a little trail of hardened vomit on my pillow. Had I eaten corn? It appeared I had. My roommate left a note on the nightstand that said, “Hope you’re alive.”

Financially, I didn’t need a roommate, but the house was big and I figured this was a way to help with the city’s housing crisis. The rent I charged Mina was modest, and she worked as a waitress — she was hardly ever home. The arrangement worked well for both of us. I wondered what would have happened had I died. I didn’t have a will.

“Siri,” I said to my phone. “Remind me to write a will.”

“Okay,” Siri replied. “I’ll remind you to write a will.”

At my regular cafe, the barista seemed to be holding back a smile. Right away, I understood: He’d seen the video. He handed me my latte without looking at me, and went to work on another drink, even though there was no one behind me in line.

“Hey, I know you,” said a lean thirtysomething man, glancing up from his laptop.

“I come here every day,” I said.

“No, no. You’re—” and then he started make a helicopter motion above his head.

When the city starts feeling like too much — too many bodies, too many vehicles, too much pressure — I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to my cabin in the Redwoods, in a town called Guerneville, near the Russian River. I bought the house in 2009, right after the subprime mortgage crisis. It had been foreclosed on. So had my home in San Francisco. Even then, the house in the city was 10 times the amount I had paid for the cabin. It was an absurd figure, but nothing I couldn’t afford. I had been an early investor in a popular social networking site — I dated its founder during my freshman year, when he was at Harvard and I was at Boston College and we met at a bubble tea cafe — and that had worked out for me. So when I commented “Down with tech!” — which I did often and also sometimes scrawled in pen in dive-bar bathrooms — I did so in a conflicted way.

Occasionally I still see him around the city with his wife. We’re friendly. But his wife — let’s call her Pamela — doesn’t like me, I can tell. Seeing me reminds her that her husband — let’s call him Matt — had an Asian girlfriend before her. I wouldn’t like it, either. Seeing me, I think, reminds her that maybe how we look is just what he’s into — that we might belong to a type. That, if not her, he’d be with someone else like her.

There were many acceptable reasons to flee the city, in my view: running into my ex Harry; having an unsettling encounter; a YouTube video of me going viral. It was high time. I got into my car, a junky little Nissan hatchback that was at home up in West County and stood out against the Minis and Teslas in San Francisco, and opened the garage door by saying, “You little piece of shit.”

There were many acceptable reasons to flee the city, in my view: running into my ex Harry; having an unsettling encounter; a YouTube video of me going viral.

I’d let Mina set all the voice commands in my house. She’s a poet so I figured she would decide on some interesting turns of phrases. She went in a direction I didn’t foresee. We turned the living room lights on with “Go to hell.” If you didn’t know the codes you couldn’t turn on the heat or lights, which made us laugh.

The garage door opened on my command and I carefully backed my car down my steep and narrow driveway. There was a school nearby with kids always running around like chickens and it was my greatest fear to run over a pedestrian, especially a young one. My second greatest fear was to have to kill someone. Even in self-defense, it seemed terrible.

I turned on a podcast and settled in for the drive. Getting out of the city was always a congested ordeal, buses sighing and merging with abandon up and down Van Ness, but once I got across the Golden Gate Bridge I always felt relief. The podcast was about a serial killer who had found love in prison. The podcast’s host had the nasal, nerdy voice of all male podcast hosts. It was a voice that had become commonplace, and it was one I found puzzling — I wondered if years into the future, we would hear these male podcast–host voices and think they sounded as retro as Edward Morrow’s.

Once I exited River Road and the redwood trees came into view, I felt even better. The air here seemed easier to breathe even though I knew it wasn’t — in fact it was probably teeming with mold spores from ancient trees. I passed the vineyards and little inns whose rooms were booked by techies. It had been raining, so the Russian River looked like it was a boiling brown stew. When I pulled the car up to my little house, I felt myself filling with relief.

I extracted the key from its hiding spot beneath a large stone, then let myself in and inhaled. The house smelled woody but fine. The cabin is very rustic and not sealed well, so sometimes mice will find their way inside and not be able to find their way out. A few months ago I’d stepped into the cabin and smelled something afoul: Inside the kitchen trash can was what looked like fur. There were also what looked like strings, until I realized: tails. The wads were dead, decomposing mice. I put on rubber gloves and took the bin outside, and turned it over. Unfortunately the mice seemed to be stuck so I smacked the overturned bin to release their small bodies. They fell out, or seemed to, but when I looked inside their tiny feet were still stuck to the bottom of the trashcan. I turned on the hose, filled the trash can with water, and hoped for the best. It did not work. In the end I’d closed my eyes and had to scrape the feet out with a tree branch.

So now I always checked the trash can first. No mice. I put the groceries away in the fridge, sprawled out on the couch, and read the four New Yorker magazines from last month. Occasionally my mind drifted back to the YouTube video. I would catch myself, turn some music on, and attempt some home improvement, like caulking the baseboards. Harry had helped with the renovation, but now the house was falling again into disrepair. Periodically, for exercise, I erupted in jumping jacks.

I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink, sat naked by the woodstove, danced to some records, tried to drink just enough wine — but not too much — so that I wouldn’t feel scared at night, alone. I often wondered what would happen if somebody broke into my cabin with the intent of killing me. I decided I would probably die. I knew I was more scared to kill someone in self-defense than to just get stabbed or shot. Giving up seemed easier, I sometimes thought.

Giving up seemed easier, I sometimes thought.

Outside, it started to pour. As the rain came down, it hit the roof like a truckful of candy corn being unloaded. Through the window I could see thin branches snapping cleanly off tree trunks. I no longer felt relaxed. I drank more wine. A hulking redwood next to the cabin worried me particularly, and I suspected that one day during a storm, it would fall on the house with me in it.

In the morning, I called Kate, who cut my trees for me. When she arrived, she was wearing a bandana around her neck and sunglasses so reflective they showed my own face in them. I couldn’t look for long.

“Can’t you just cut this one down?” I asked. I gestured at the towering redwood a few feet from my house.

“That tree is almost a thousand years old,” she said, aghast.

“What if I pay you $2,000 to do it?” I asked. I knew she needed the money.

“Fine,” she said. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it.” She shook her head, pained.

“Are people always asking you if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“Yes,” she said, curtly.

“You wouldn’t want me to be crushed, would you?”

“You have home insurance and you’re hardly ever here,” she said.

Grudgingly, she climbed up the tree. She did this with a strap around the tree and her body, making her way up monkeylike; though I wondered how many monkeys had ever climbed redwoods, which only grew, as far as I knew, in California and Japan. With a chainsaw, Kate cut the tree down in pieces. The giant discs of tree trunk came down one at a time. Slice, slice, slice. Each disc was big enough to crush a toddler. It was sad, I had to agree. Still, I wanted her to keep going.

Back in San Francisco, the house felt as though it had changed, subtly. I wondered if Mina had had a party. In fact, I often wondered what she did while I was gone. I’d considered installing a surveillance camera to satisfy my curiosity but decided it was unethical — I imagined someone watching what I did alone at the cabin and shuddered at the thought.

There was no internet at the cabin and my inbox had filled up over the weekend. People were coming out of the woodwork to email or message me because of the YouTube video. I was surprised at who was sending the messages: Many of them were people I had met only once or never in real life. A college acquaintance named Tim Facebook-messaged me and asked if I wanted to meet up sometime. He lived not far from me, in Palo Alto. He wouldn’t mind coming up to the city — he sometimes came here for meetings. I’d always found him pleasant to talk to, and attractive, so I messaged him back. We decided to get drinks in the city.

“Not too many,” he added. “Haha.”

“Fuck you, Tim,” I muttered, but typed, “Haha.”

The bar in SoMa where we met was wholly unlike the bar where the video had been filmed. Here, the ceilings were high and the walls were white, without art, and the drinks cost triple what they had at the Latin-themed bar. Regrettably, the drinks also contained far less alcohol.

We discussed the 10 years that had passed since college. He was a lawyer; now he was “in tech, like everyone else” — doing tech law. He’d taken a year off after undergrad to travel; he landed in Nepal and hung out with goat farmers. This experience was “life-changing.” After that was law school in New Haven, then Denver with his girlfriend — it was where her family was from — then marriage. Had I seen their Vows column in the Times? he wanted to know. I had not.

A long silence passed between us. I sipped my too-expensive drink and waited for Tim to tell me more. This was 10 years we were catching up on, after all. But he appeared to have nothing further to say and looked at me expectantly.

I told him that these days I was doing a little bit of freelance consulting. My clients were people who wanted to open bakeries. I had, for a few years, run my own extremely trendy bakery, the kind that people lined up for, even though I couldn’t comprehend it personally. In fact, I found it absurd. Sometimes I wanted to shake those people, with their extraordinary patience, and say to them, “What the hell are you thinking? It’s just food.” Eventually I came to terms with it: If these strangers chose to stand in my bakery line and grow older here, right before my and one another’s eyes, waiting for cupcakes, so be it. I could not let that be my problem.

The bakery belonged to me and Harry, who was my husband at the time. Harry was the baker, but I’d had some good ideas too. One morning in bed, I came up with the idea for the thing that everybody would eventually come to photograph and put on social media: a cupcake that was swirled with green food coloring and had a soft-boiled egg baked inside. We called it the Dragon’s Eye. When you cut into the cupcake, and the two halves came apart, the yolk would flow out of the soft-boiled egg and ooze onto the plate. That was the money shot. Our bakery had big windows and a lot of natural light flowing in — no filter was ever necessary. When we split, Harry got the bakery. He’d gone on to do well for himself: He opened two other branches.

But that chapter of my life was over, I found myself saying to Tim. I cringed, then wondered if he’d noticed. I couldn’t believe I had said that out loud — “chapter of my life.” That would mean I believed that life had chapters, which could be wrapped up neatly, like a book. My discomfort was causing me to say things I didn’t mean. There was nothing to do now but ramble onward, I supposed. I told him about my cabin. He said it sounded cute. I asked if he had been up to that area, and he said, no, only Napa. We sipped our drinks.

“Another round?” Tim asked. Did he not know how boring this was?

“Why not,” I agreed.

Tim ordered us another round.

This was a terrible question to ask a woman, but I forgave him, because he was hot.

“Do you think you want kids?” Tim asked, out of nowhere. This was a terrible question to ask a woman, but I forgave him, because he was hot. I pretended he had asked, “Do you want me to put a baby in you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Someday.”

He used that as an opportunity to talk about the baby that he and his wife were having soon. They were planning to give birth at home. They weren’t hippies or anything like that — they were a far cry from that, he said and laughed — but it seemed to them the best option.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”

I couldn’t believe he was asking me this. What was the purpose of asking me, a totally uneducated person on the subject, this?

“I’d like being at home,” I responded, stupidly.

We continued to sip our drinks. He asked more inane questions that I fielded by pretending they were more interesting questions. “What do you like to do for fun?” became “What do you like to do for fun while naked?” and “Do you ever still talk to Harry?” — they’d known each other in college — became “Do you ever fantasize about breaking into Harry’s house in Sausalito and cutting a toe off his new wife, and getting away with it?” The answers were yoga and cleaning and yes, absolutely.

The drinks were now finished. I kept pouring ice into my mouth to suck any clinging alcohol off of it. He started to stand up, to reach for his coat. I was still sitting.

“Do you want to have an affair?” I blurted out.

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