Relocation Package
Dongyuan and I live on the edge of the earth. We’ve been living here after Dongyuan‘s boss gave him a mediocre performance review and negligible salary bump. His boss encouraged him to make “higher impact, big picture” changes and work on the weekends. I told Dongyuan to either interview for a better position or move to the edge of the earth. He chose the latter. He was done with interviews, every company more incompetent than the previous.
Dongyuan is much happier here. He wakes up when he pleases and orders takeout from Hunan Mifen and Shan Xi Kitchen every day since only Chowbus delivers to our location. I don’t bother with cooking because the atmospheric pressure and temperature sensitivity make cooking and food handling difficult. I can’t open a box of tofu without it shriveling like an earthworm under the sun, or pop open a can of sparkling cider without it going flat within milliseconds. Some days, water boils with the tiniest addition of heat. Other days, water remains motionless no matter how long I monitor it on the stove.
Dongyuan spends most of his days indoors on his gaming PC, building an AI to make target shooting in CSGO easier. It uses computer vision to position the mouse at the target’s head—a huge step up from having to hack into the game’s memory. He has already trained the bot to the extent it’s more accurate than his aim, but he says there’s more to do. He calls it 外挂: because you’re hooking into the game with a cheat coded from the outside. I imagine him holding a fishing pole in the ocean, a fried piece of smelt stabbed onto the hook, waiting for a big catch. He spends more time on the mouse yaw and pitch calculation than he has ever spent on work.
I occupy myself outdoors. The edge of the earth possesses intriguing characteristics I’ve yet to grasp, including this warp hole I’ve not yet mustered the courage to enter. Its location changes every few days, and it takes me several days to find it again. When I think I’m resolved to enter, it disappears again.
“The illusion of a final destination,” Dongyuan jokes. He’s all jaded about dreams and destinations ever since he hit his promotion roadblock.
But I continue chasing the warp hole. I balance along the edge, taking careful steps, one foot hovering over space and then land, alternating steadily. One side of the earth is lined with abandoned stalls with steaming hot plates covered in batter, and to the side: a carton of eggs, a bowl of finely sliced potatoes, a bottle of black vinegar. I inhale the fragrant, fried dough scent, waiting for it to burn, though it never does. It’s nonincinerable dough. Further down, there are stalls each lit with a single lamp and pamphlets scattered on tables. I glance over and make out words like “personal salvation” and the “Way of Heaven.” No one operates any of the stalls, and yet the lights are lit, the plates cooking, the legs of each stand smooth and sturdy. I used to get lost in street stalls like these, following the scents rather than holding onto my mom’s hands. She thought it was funny and would let me wander around, grasping the hands of strangers who I thought looked like her, before finally bursting into tears in front of the grandpa selling fried taro cakes. He’d give me a small plate of taro cakes out of pity, which was when mom would swoop in and insist on paying. You’ve got to earn what you eat, she’d say. Mom lives on proper Earth. The flight here is too far and long for her back to handle.
I work the same job I’ve been doing for the last thirteen years: computer things I can perform remotely so long as I have power and decent wifi. I slack off most of the time, leaving my Slack status active and chiming in once or twice to show I’m alive, but otherwise spend my time tracking down where the warp hole has disappeared to. Dongyuan thinks my search is pointless. He thinks I’ll never muster up the courage to do anything once I find the warp hole again, but he thinks this of most things I do: no backbone, no results. He’s probably still hung up about my salary relocation adjustment since moving to the edge of the earth. We mainly live off my salary since Dongyuan gave up on corporate prison and wishy-washy managers, not that I can fault him. Still, he earned more than me when he worked. Got chewed out of the 9 to 5 life real fast.
Eventually, I find the warp hole again, a trippy reflection-distorting mass hovering right in front of a jian bing stall. I am not hesitant this time. I’m trying to adopt more of a live-in-the-moment, no-regrets mindset. Being here seems to do that to you, dangling you between smoky street stalls and oceans that fall upward—the land comes to a stop, but the water continues until it peels away from the planet and vanishes. Somehow, this place is supposed to house the brink of our existence.
Walking through the warp hole is underwhelming. I thought I’d be sucked into a vacuum, unable to escape like what happens in light novels. Instead, I discover I can easily walk back the way I came, and in fact do take a few steps backward, just to peek my head out and see if the food stalls are still there. They are.
I step out the other end of the hole, holding my breath. You know, in case it leads underwater or to some alternate oxygen-limited enclosure, I’d at least have a few more seconds of life to regret my decision.
My feet crush tufts of green and yellow grass. I know this area quite well. It’s where Dongyuan and I grew up: an isolated suburb next to a deli frequented by the local police and a convenience store that sells, most notably, blue skittles. The area looks greener, less developed than I remember. Skeleton frame constructions without roofs or drywall stand in the place where our childhood home should be. Further down where the rich people estates should be are instead empty hills and geese honking by a lake. We used to play behind the estates and would make it a game not to be caught by the owners. We eventually got caught anyway and the homeowners complained to our parents who forbade us from going out to play for a month. We ended up escaping at night through our bedroom windows and climbed down to the first floor by gripping ridges of planks lining the house’s exterior. We’d never really do anything during our nighttime escapades. We’d always get too scared in the dark since we only had one lamp post down the corner of the street, and stayed close to the house, counting stars, playing charades even though we could hardly see each other. We called them “Missions.”
There are no complete houses here though. And no Dongyuan. Just incomplete constructions and workers on break, smoking and shoveling belt-sized noodles into their mouths. I head toward them, curious if the warp hole transported my entire physical presence.
I wave to them. They don’t respond, but I’m probably still too far away. “Hi,” I say, and then repeat myself louder. The construction workers turn their heads toward me. They don’t have faces. Instead, they shovel belt noodles into dark, gray, featureless pits. When they hold their cigarettes to their heads, the smoke disappears into their bodies.
“When will the houses be done?” I ask.
One of them shrugs. “Whenever our demands are met.”
“We haven’t been working for a few weeks. We’ll work when they match our requested hourly wage,” another says.
“But then you won’t earn any money?” I wonder.
“Hah, what else have we been saving money for all this time? We've got enough to last at least a month. The contracting company will probably fold by then,” they reply.
“What if they don’t fold? What if they replace you with people willing to accept their wages?” I ask. I know better. “Everyone is replaceable,” I’d tell Dongyuan when he insisted only he could correctly fix a certain pipeline, concerned about the lack of common sense in the company.
“It won’t happen.” They seem convinced. I’m not sure where this confidence is coming from.
“You have some kind of dirt on them?” It’s the only viable method I can think of. That, or life threats.
“No no,” they deny. “They can’t refuse us or else we won’t be able to support our families.”
“Do contracting companies care about your families?”
“Of course!” They insist. “Any human who has a family would.”
I think they’re being terribly optimistic about humanity. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong since I've never been a construction worker. It takes years to construct identical housing structures in endless rows, where building policies are saturated with bureaucracy. In the city, apartment complex skyscrapers sprout from the ground like weeds.
We didn’t choose our home at the edge of the earth. There was only one option, one lone listing on Zillow with no agent to contact. We’d tried reaching out to the seller and had already spoken with Wells Fargo about getting prequalified, but we received no replies to our emails and calls. In the end, we moved in without a fuss, promising to pay the owners if they appeared in front of our door. Dongyuan was happy we didn’t need to sell any stock for a downpayment and risk a nasty tax return, but I’d rather pay up front than risk getting arrested for trespassing. For the first few weeks we lived in the house, I’d wake up in a cold sweat, imagining a fuming homeowner knocking at our door, threatening to throw us over the boundary unless we paid up twice the home’s market value—a fee all on me because Dongyuan switched companies like underwear, never staying at one place long enough to get past the first year cliff and reap stock vestments. There is nothing wrong with the house itself: a small, single-family structure with vaulted ceilings and redwood beams and original stenciling. The south-facing living room overlooks a set of canyons both rising from the ground and dangling from the sky like they’ve been reflected across the atmosphere to squash us from both ends. I tell Dongyuan I feel extra dwarf-like and claustrophobic, but he insists there’s nothing different about the gravitational forces. For what it’s worth, our house never seems to wear down: the marble grimeless, the cabinets without scratches, the wall trim forever dust free. Something about the edge of the earth must be time resistant. I’ve also noticed Dongyuan never tires and can game for weeks straight, only sleeping or eating or showering when I remind him he’s a human rather than robot.
In any case, the half-built houses here feel more reliable, maybe because I know people are building them. Not like our current home that seems to have sprung from the surrounding environment, coaxed into formation by dirt and air particles, constantly reforming its walls and refusing to age.
I sit on the curb near the construction workers who continue inhaling smoke down their empty, bottomless faces. One pulls out a deck of cards and begins to deal. They begin tossing combinations of cards in an anticlockwise circle, each combination cumulatively higher in value than the previous. I know this game. Mom, Dongyuan and I played zheng fen whenever hurricanes cut our power since we only had one hand-cranked lamp to navigate the dark.
“If your demands are met, when do you expect to be done?” I ask.
“The houses should be on the market in a year. We’re expecting high demand, fierce bidding. This is a good neighborhood and school district. Lots of smarties here,” one says.
“They’ll be going after each other’s throats!” another cackles. “For what? High taxes, classrooms with quality construction paper, and suicidal teens chained to textbooks.”
“That doesn’t seem like a great deal,” I reply even though that’s exactly why mom bought a home here—one of the smallest floor plans she could afford with its kitchen located close to the front door. She thought you should always be close to food.
“To each their own,” they shrug. “It’s not like we reap any benefit from prices being bid off the charts.” I have a hard time telling if they’re resentful or amused without proper faces to stare at.
I look at one of the maps depicting the layout of the neighborhood: a circle of single-family homes across from rows of townhouses, and further down the map, estates spaced so far apart you could build a tennis court and still have room to grow a garden. I point to a corner house, slightly smaller than the others so it’d fit between its neighbors. “This is where we lived,” I say. I gaze toward the house frames. The corner lot has yet to be cleared and built.
The construction worker sitting closest to me and who hasn’t touched a single cigarette glances over, fumes from his head suddenly flowing in a different direction—the only way I can tell whether he has oriented his body toward me or not. I make eye contact with the empty hole, peering into his head and body, unable to resist this urge to search deeper and find something beyond the black.
“Oh,” he says. “You’re from a different world line.” Another pause. “What brings you here?”
“Change of scene.” This is the best answer I can come up with given I’m not certain why I landed here myself. It is a change of scene, after all, even though I have no shortage of changing, autonomous, perhaps even sentient landscapes at home. Weather and terrain depend on when I decide to leave the house. Mornings tend to blizzard, before noon we get earthquake rumblings, and early afternoons tend to be calm enough I can venture out and see what landscape of ferns or kelp or sea urchins the edge of the earth decides to shake up from below. Mom would snatch up all the sea urchins and hack them open in an instant, dumping their juicy guts into bowls and slurping them down with rice, insisting she’s allowed to eat these things now that she’s in menopause. I tell her she’ll be able to visit soon once The Boring Company tunnels under the ocean and through inverted sky canyons so it can make a stop within walking distance to our home.
“Ah yes, it’s always a change of scene. You took the Portal over, yeah? From Destination 0,0?”
“I think so?” I reply and then think better of it. I’ve been trying to break my habit of pretending to know everything in order not to appear stupid. Dongyuan says asking more questions will build confidence, train me to speak up and fight for myself and negotiate my annual raise which has yet to exceed the inflation rate. I’m ok with this since we have more than enough to support our lifestyle, and we don’t need to pay a mortgage or electricity bill or water bill because the house self-sustains itself. That’s exactly my problem, according to Dongyuan: I’m too easily satisfied and let management trample over me. “What’s Destination 0,0?”
“Don’t you know? The origin destination. Where all things begin and end. That’s where we came from before leaving to unwind our lives out here.”
“Do you ever want to go back?”
The worker laughs at my question. “No way, we got it good here. We do one thing and another thing happens. What’s it called? Ripple effect? The origin destination eats change to maintain equilibrium. You can’t even ferment soybeans without them unmashing themselves into coherent beads of beans again.”
“I guess so.” I’m not sure how to reply. “Hey, can I reserve the corner lot? I’ll pay you half upfront if you want.”
“That might go against protocol,” he starts. But I wave my phone, the screen illuminating my E*trade account and net assets. “OK. But this is only between us, yeah? And the house will only be done after we get our rates raised.”
“That’s fine, I can wait.” I’ve waited for plenty of things. My patience is built of platinum.
“We’ll message you once the home is done. Signal should reach the origin destination in case you head back there to wait.”
I consider Dongyuan in the study room, attacking his keyboard and mouse, yelling into the microphone, running on an infinite energy reserve. He’s always telling me to do something big, different, daring. Asking for more money, interviewing elsewhere to obtain leverage for compensation matching—the things he did before hitting his mental roadblock and quitting wholesale. He should be fine now, though. I don’t even need to worry about setting the timer for an InstantPot full of congee to sustain him before starting my workday.
“I don’t want to go back,” I say.
“That’s cute. You think you’ve got a choice. When the Portal wants to send you back, it will send you back.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you’re stuck here for the time being. Although the Portal tends to eventually collect what it displaces.”
“Am I displaced?” I wonder.
The construction worker shrugs and resumes dealing cards. The others stretch and leave for another curb to sit. The sun has moved and we are no longer in the shade. I find it nice and warm even though everyone has left this corner. I could bask under the sun for hours, lying on the pavement which absorbs nearly as much heat as my hair, pressing my skin against asphalt like it’s the most comfortable thing I’ll ever encounter.
Lucy Zhang
Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Apple Valley Review, AAWW, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing, 2022) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review, 2022). Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.