Page 4 of Bad Words

“It’s up.”

I reluctantly lifted my eyes from my book. “What?”

Kellie Cade, City Magazine’s other senior editor, had angled herself into my office in the usual way, her chin hooked around the doorjamb. “Your High and Dry review,” she said. “It just went up.”

“Ah.”

Kellie snapped her fingers. “Hey. Don’t do the face. It’s a good piece.”

“A piece that should never have been assigned to me.”

“Probably. People online are having fun with it, though. Maybe it’ll keep the click overlords off our backs for a week.” She tossed a glance down the hall. “Speaking of which: Hayden’s here for the meeting.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. Firing the rest of us, maybe?”

“Thank you for that inspiring theory.”

Kellie cracked a smile that compressed her eyes into sly green dashes. “I try. See you in there.” Her hair whipped out of sight.

Alone, I exhaled and let Lauren Groff flip shut in my lap. Kellie had always been much more attuned to the thoughts and feelings of people online than I was; the closest thing I had to social media was a Venmo account. And contrary to what the internet surely thought about me, I didn’t relish the idea of people cheering on a negative review, especially for a book I’d never wanted to read.

I swept the advance copy of High and Dry from my desk. One look at its dusky, rain-shot cover, and my frustration began to simmer again.

I would never pat a writer on the back for what they might someday accomplish. That was a job for the supportive English teacher, for generous friends and relatives. But if I’d been forced at gunpoint to talk about that dubious concept, potential, I would have had to admit that Parker Navarro had it. The man could write a single-punch knockout of a sentence. The kind of description that makes a reader look up with new eyes at the room around them, freshly aware of texture, color, and sensation.

He also seemed perversely uninterested in making any meaning out of his balletic turns of phrase. He was Pavarotti singing on a nonsense word. Van Gogh run through a paper shredder.

The dizzying height of his potential—and the corresponding depth of the loss that these god-awful books represented.

I stood and tossed High and Dry onto the desk face down, exposing Navarro’s brooding headshot. Charcoal-gray sweater pushed to his elbows. Soft-looking hair that rose above his forehead. For an instant I imagined his shadowed eyes following me, a glint of accusation in that glossy black and white.

Ridiculous. I swept my laptop beneath my arm and strode out of my office, down the hall. To my left, the misty silhouettes of fact-checkers paced behind frosted glass doors. On the right, framed City Magazine covers lined the wood-paneled walls. Warhol-inflected sixties duplication. A screaming neon mouth from 1987. By the time I rounded the corner, I’d pushed Parker Navarro out of my mind.

I believed in criticism too much to waste time on guilt. When critics wrote honestly, the public could use us to cut through the chatter and find the books that would illuminate their worlds. But if we shrank back from our feelings, apologized and demurred, we were of no use to anybody.

I had one life. I wanted to spend it surrounded by excellence, by fine wine and dark chocolate and great reads. I wanted everybody else to have that, too. How many books could a person read in a lifetime? A thousand, five thousand, ten? A world without criticism looked like the thirty-million-title Amazon catalog.

Without criticism, I’d have died unaware of Asylum Piece, Anna Kavan’s strange, clinical story collection shot through with isolation and incomprehension, which Marcy D’Artagnan had raved about in City Magazine—a book that had saved my life at sixteen.

In a world without discernment, in the attempt to give everything a chance, you could die without tasting chocolate. I was not sorry.

I entered the library at 10:59 to Hayden singing out, “There she is. Our killer queen!”

I moved my mouth into something that could technically be called a smile and looked to the armchair in the corner. Seated there was a tall, sharp-chinned woman in her midforties wearing beige cashmere and scrolling through an iPhone the size of her face. Her name was Hayden Fairbanks. Back in April, when City had been bought by a venture fund named Nextward Capital Associates, she had become our handler.

We’d never seen her in the library, though. Her presence felt intrusive. Bookshelves ran corner to corner in this inner sanctum of the City offices, displaying the hundreds of authors—Ellison, Faulkner, Sontag—who had published work in our pages.

“The reactions are so good,” Hayden went on, to her phone screen. “I can’t believe you didn’t want to write this. Didn’t I say you were the perfect fit?”

Of course she had. I was used to the euphemisms. The perfect fit. The viewpoint we need. The truth was, as City’s only Asian American staff writer, I was all but required to write our opinion on everything from the continental diaspora.

No matter that Parker Navarro was third-generation Filipino American, the Californian son of Californian parents, while my parents had moved from northern China to Minnesota in the 1980s. Our backgrounds had never come within one and a half thousand miles of each other. But no one really seemed to care about this.

“Thank you, Hayden.” I sat stiffly at the round table, a pitted oak slab fifteen feet in diameter whose feet, four heavy claws, had notched deep footholds in a century-old Persian rug. When I’d started here, twenty-six of us had sat around this table during editorial meetings. Now we were down to fourteen.

“Deep breaths,” Kellie murmured, spinning her pen over the back of her hand.