Flux

Description

“Flux happily offers a moving appraisal of lives buffeted by personal and systemic traumas; a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of self-serving corporate culture; and no shortage of “wait, what the heck just happened?” thrills.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn’t predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride.” — Ling Ma, author of Severance

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel—and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes . . .
 
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
 
So begins Jinwoo Chong’s dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic ’80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
 
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.A Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List
A BookRiot Most Underrated Sci-Fi on Goodreads
A BiblioLifestyle Best Literary Fiction of 2023
A Best of Korea Best Books by Korean Americans 2023
A CrimeReads Best Speculative Crime Fiction of 2023
A Shondaland Best Debuts of 2023
A HuffPost Best Book of 2023
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
A CrimeReads Best of 2023 Notable Selection
A Literary Hub Best Book Covers of 2023
A Hudson News Best Books of The Year
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2023
A Nylon Most Anticipated Book of 2023
A Goodreads Most Anticipated Fantasy and Science Fiction Book of 2023
A Men’s Health Most Anticipated Fantasy and Science Fiction Book of 2023
A Cosmopolitian Best LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 so far

“It’s a pleasure to encounter a work like Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel, Flux, that offers a healthy dose of brain-bending pleasure without making it the whole point…Flux happily offers a moving appraisal of lives buffeted by personal and systemic traumas; a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of self-serving corporate culture; and no shortage of “wait, what the heck just happened?” thrills.” — The New York Times Book Review

“This exhilarating and unique debut novel by Jinwoo Chong is surprisingly funny and haunting at the same time… Juggling multiple points of view and timelines is an ambitious endeavor but one Chong accomplishes with artistry and undeniable talent.” – HuffPost

“It’s rare for an author’s debut novel to gather a lot of buzz, but that only shows how intriguing Flux is….Jinwoo Chong has crafted a lavish mystery that’s hanging-off-the-edge-of-your-seat good.” — Cosmopolitan.com

“Ambitious…The narrative pleasures of Flux lie less in the big reveals than in watching Chong knit together genre tropes from sci-fi movies, speculative fiction and thrillers to tell a story about how what we remember can imprison us — and why freedom may lie within… The book is an imaginative exploration of how cultural memory and grief interact.” — The Washington Post

“Stunning … a profoundly moving story about grief, and about surviving in the hyper-capitalistic world of today …Chong knows how to boldly blend the boundaries of genres … an immensely rewarding read.” — The International Examiner

“Mind-bending… Chong writes with such subtlety and skill that readers won’t realize the true nature of the speculative mystery at play until they’re already waist-deep in these interlocking narratives. The result is a gorgeous speculative gem for fans of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War.” — Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Not yet 30, Chong bursts forth, Athena-like, with an impossible-to-simply-label masterpiece that melds various genres—from Bildungsroman to speculative fiction, coming-of-age drama to epic tragedy, crime documentary to noirish thriller—into an intricate literary mosaic…Chong stuns readers with a multipronged, multilayered, multivoiced, magnificent enigma.” — Booklist, STARRED review

“Chong’s debut novel falls right on the emotional bubble between the cult film Donnie Darko and Charles Yu’s noodle-bender Interior Chinatown…A paranoid and inventive cautionary tale about buying into someone else’s glitchy utopia.” — Kirkus, STARRED review

“Jinwoo Chong’s engrossing debut braids three narratives — a boy in mourning, a whistleblower, and a laid-off media employee—to unspool a mystery examining pop culture and time.” — Vanity Fair

“Flux takes the classic time-travel story and the detective story and mashes them up to create something wholly original, something that lives in between genres in the same way that its queer, biracial Asian American protagonist navigates the world. This novel earns its place as a work of speculative fiction, queer fiction, and contemporary Asian American fiction.” — Strange Horizons

“Jinwoo Chong has crafted a lavish mystery that’s hanging-off-the-edge-of-your-seat good.” — Cosmopolitan

“A… genre-bending brain teaser.” — USA Today

“As Chong’s characters intersect through time and space, both style and substance pour out of the seams of this striking debut novel.” –Esquire

“Flux is aptly titled, and Chong’s ability to tell a nuanced, intricate, and page-turning story shine in this immersive novel.” — Shondaland

“Flux is brisk, stylish, and sexy, a high-stakes noir thriller that makes room for big philosophical ideas…” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Part speculative fiction, part neo-noir, with some time travel thrown in for good measure, Flux is a wildly imaginative and mind-bending read.” — Buzzfeed

“Chong is an uncannily accessible writer … compelling and utterly new.” –Bloomberg Businessweek

“Jinwoo Chong’s experimental debut brings to mind Charles Yu’s similarly genre-bending novel Interior Chinatown: Both express a deep affection for Hollywood nostalgia, cut through with the bittersweet reckoning with their imperfect heroes who nonetheless made for unprecedented representation.” –Literary Hub

“Flux is a dizzying, dazzling debut… It’s the kind of story where even the twists that seem inevitable and telegraphed end up surprising you in remarkably powerful ways…That’s largely due to two of Chong’s clear strengths as a writer: an ability to marry poetic abstraction with simple, accessible prose; and the insight to anchor everything emotionally in the characters.” –Boing Boing

“Flux is… a daringly constructed thriller, a mystery that propels you through it with burning questions, magnetic characters, and gasp-worthy twists…a book for our time.” –The Rumpus

“Exhilarating and entirely unique…Chong’s mindbender of a novel is full of grief, trauma, relationships, humor and identity — all while being Asian in America.” –HuffPost

“A time-traveling noir and ambitious climate novel, Flux takes a close look at what happens when twenty-first-century egomaniacs bring their grifts to bear on the climate crisis. The result is a story that is equal parts wry and tender.” — The Millions

“A brilliant and enjoyable sci-fi tech thriller… “Flux” is haunting. I cannot begin to describe the plot without spoiling the joy of discovery. It’s about climate justice scammers, sure, and about the promise of a technology exceeding its abilities. But at its heart is a guy, trying to define himself even as he realizes that there’s no box to describe everything he’s experienced and everything he feels.” –The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“The novel’s themes ring out clearly. It’s a story about grief, trauma, and the powerful influence of pop culture, especially during childhood. And in telling that story, with a great deal of heart and passion, Flux adds to a growing canon of terrific speculative novels… that explore the tension between Western and Asian culture from a second-generation perspective.” –Locus Magazine

“Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel Flux is that perfect alchemy of disorienting and delightful. It’s also a masterclass on aspects of fiction ranging from point of view to structure to building and maintaining an enormous cast of characters to making room for joy.” –Full Stop

“A bona fide good time… This speculative neo-noir novel by Mr Jinwoo Chong is a seriously accomplished debut. Flux, which is named after epoch-shifting tech, skewers the tumult mega corporations wreak on ordinary people, sensitively captures the life-altering effects of gargantuan loss and spikes gross stereotypes that still shadow Asian-American souls.” –MR PORTER

“An unexpected sci-fi novel that integrates time travel and tech dystopia into the complex emotional landscape of its three narrators as they explore grief, trauma, and Asian-American identity.” –Interview Magazine

“A…brilliant time-travel puzzle box.” –Polygon

“If you like stories featuring neo-noir style, corporate corruption, and anything else that wouldn’t be out of place in a slightly more humorous version of the Blade Runner universe, then check this one out!” –CrimeReads

“Riveting and distinctive…” –The Southern California News Group

“Pick this one up for a wholly unique speculative novel that looks at how our saddest moments shape us.” –Book Riot

“This witty, heartfelt look at celebrity scandals, the indelible imprints pop culture leaves on individuals, and the transformative power of grief packs plenty of thought-provoking twists into a sci-fi thriller with depth. Some elements feel ripped from the headlines, grounding speculative aspects in a familiar reality.” –Shelf Awareness

“The prose here is brilliant and honest, and the plot cleverly crafted. You can try to guess what might happen in Flux, but it’s better to let it bloom beautifully before you.” –TOR.com

“Flux transcends both genre and theme.” –-The Advocate Magazine

“Flux takes the classic time-travel story and the detective story and mashes them up to create something wholly original, something that lives in between genres in the same way that its queer, biracial Asian American protagonist navigates the world. This novel earns its place as a work of speculative fiction, queer fiction, and contemporary Asian American fiction.” –Strange Horizons

“Flux stands out as a novel with ideas, dramatic scenes, and shifts in genre.” —Counterpunch

“A debut novel that is pleasantly surprising at every turn…” –The Harvard Crimson

“Jinwoo Chong’s brilliant debut novel is a cornucopia of stories, genres, and moods…The book is another picture of contemporary anomie, but it is rich, complex, and highly enjoyable… At the age of 27, author Jinwoo Chong is already a major literary talent.” –The New York Journal of Books

“At its center, Flux truly is a powerful exploration of family dynamics, grief  and loss (both from a child and parent perspective), and identity.” –The Nerd Daily

“Flux is the kind of twisty, time-bending novel that slips out of your hands and leaves you guessing at every corner, and its ambition makes it surprising to be just a debut.” –OurCulture Magazine

“You’re left dazzled without getting dizzy. Go on the rollicking ride this book offers.” –StyleCaster

“This novel is an introspective look at the significance of representative fiction in the lives of people yearning for but also fearful of assimilation.” –Criminal Element



“Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn’t predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride.” — Ling Ma, author of Severance

“Flux is a powerful debut – deft and fluid, sharp and dreamy. Employing the vehicle of a breakneck sci-fi thriller, Jinwoo Chong explores interstitial spaces of ethnicity, sexuality, trauma, pop cultural memory and, finally, time itself, with wit, tenderness and alacrity. The result is provocative and deeply moving. – Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive

“A smart and stylish addition to the tech thriller genre with interesting things to say about family, society and, indeed, reality itself.” —  Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure

“Alluringly seductive and highly imaginative, reading Flux was like puzzling out a mystery always two steps ahead of me that I didn’t want to end. Chong has written an intricately layered and boldly cinematic debut that interrogates how the past collides with the present, and how our choices are bound up in not just who we wished we were, but who we dare to be. At once mind-bending yet grounded in timeless questions about forgiveness and hope, Flux is a kaleidoscope of a novel.” —Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation

“A compelling, deft, and mesmerizing book taking Korean American literature in a riveting and bold direction.” — Joseph Han, author of Nuclear Family

“Jinwoo Chong manages to combine a time-bending mystery, genre-bending adventure, and mind-bending literary novel into one stylish and propulsive thriller. You’ll tear through it. —Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout
 
“Flux is the book of my dreams—expertly mashing genres and deftly playing with both time and perspective to tell a deeply human, personal story. It’s almost hard to believe this is a debut, and it instantly elevates Jinwoo Chong to must-read status. —Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse

“Provocative and propulsive, Flux is a delicious genre bender about the evolution of identity—the moments that bifurcate our lives and the ways in which we lose ourselves to trauma and time. A poignant, expertly constructed puzzle with an intellectual bite. I’ll be thinking about this book for a very long time.” – Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House Jinwoo Chong received an MFA from Columbia University. His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Salamander. Flux is his first novel. He lives in New York.FLUX
Jinwoo Chong
Hardcover 978-1-68589-034-6
eBook 978-1-68589-035-3

“Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn’t predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride.” —Ling Ma, author of Severance

Flux happily offers a moving appraisal of lives buffeted by personal and systemic traumas; a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of self-serving corporate culture; and no shortage of ‘wait, what the heck just happened?’ thrills.” — The New York Times Book Review

INTRODUCTION

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel—and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes . . .

Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

1. How does Raider play into the story of Flux? Do you think it would have been as influential to the story if it were a different genre of television? Do Raider’s mysteries mirror Bo’s in any way?

2. Io tells “The Parable of the Friend in the Night” (174), citing persistence as a virtue. How can persistence help someone? How can it hurt someone, like it did Io?

3. Early on, Brandon mentions that Raider was one of the first instances of Asian representation on TV, noting, “Don’t forget the fact that Raider was one of the only shows putting Asians on TV. By season two you were almost exclusively among us, the shopkeepers and immigrants. We said more than unsubtitled Cantonese, we played more than kung fu masters or dragon assassins” (5). How does being Asian define Bo’s actions throughout the story? Do you think Bo saw himself in Moto?

4. Brandon refers to Kaz as having “no job, dirtbag friends, points and parole, but he was, in fact, free. He was, in fact, good,” (256). How does this compare to Brandon’s life and his view of himself?

5. What similarities can you find between Io Emsworth/Flux and tech companies today? Io is described as “Flux’s founder, billionaire for the span of thirteen months before investors bailed, now tried and living out a sentence of life in prison for the deaths of three employees approximately twenty years ago” (35-37). Could you see this happening to any of the tech moguls of today? What companies today thrive under false advertising? 

6. Regarding Hadrien, Antonin Haubert’s son, Min remarks, “As if anybody needed reasons why nepotism is poisonous. Just waves and waves of generational wealth propping these people up until they don’t even understand what they’re doing is wrong” (97). What commentary is Chong making here about nepotism babies/children? Do you have examples of nepotism children today that have made successful careers even if their parents have poor public opinion?

7. After starting at Flux, Brandon says, “‘This doesn’t make any sense … What did you hire me for, Lev?’” And Lev replies, “‘If I give you what you want, does it matter?’” (136). After finishing the book, how do you interpret this interaction? Would you work for a company without knowing their true intentions if it meant access to anything you could ever want? Where is the moral and ethical line?

8. Why do you suppose Bo kept visiting Lev––monthly for ten years––despite the fact that Lev was really the one behind Flux’s lies and manipulation? Io was the figurehead, but Lev was the brains. What do you think compelled Bo not to throw Lev under the bus with Io?

9. Brandon struggles with his love for his favorite TV show after the lead actor’s violence against his ex-wife and coworkers is exposed, saying, “[The] idea that we should just dissociate from something that big, like a show, with so many moving parts and other actors and writers and producers who are probably really proud of what they did there and what it means to so many people, doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not fair to everybody else” (106). What are instances in your own life where you have struggled to justify a piece of media because of something the actor/artist did, or vice versa? Are there ways to separate the art from the artist, the character from the actor?

10. Jem is a key factor in Brandon breaking the time loop. The alarm, “Try the one percent,” is the eventual trigger. How does Chong’s use of time travel differ from other media representations of it? Did the three timelines and points of view help you understand the loop, or make it harder? Why do you think Brandon used Jem as the trigger point for his younger self?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jinwoo Chong’s short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Salamander. Flux is his first novel. He lives in New York.

MORE TO DISCOVER

Find more resources for your book club at www.mhpbooks.com.Your line was always: “give me a reason.” Always. And forget the fact that it was and continues to be the cheesiest TV-pilot-gravel-voiced-detective-mystery catchphrase ever written. It was your thing, you were the guy who wanted everybody in the world to give you a reason, the reason, any reason, and for the most part, for most of the episodes through 1985 and 1986, people did. When you said it, the world was right. Your writers were genius. They kept us—kept me—coming back because, above all, we loved you too much to see you fail. That’s why the show worked. After the rocky pilot and early yarns, you found your footing with the Little China episode (season 1, episode 14, “Fractures of the Heart”), after which you were unstoppable. They loved your chiseled face, your dark aura and hard eyes. You were handsome, cunning, young—one of the youngest detectives on the force, you fulfilled the legacy of your dead mother and father, killed in a home invasion when you were a child (retconned as such season 2, episode 4, “Anytime, Anyplace,” from a house fire mentioned in the pilot). You got what you wanted, you nailed them, every time, you were a step ahead, a bar above. I loved you. For real, man, I loved you. I hate what’s become of you, what they say about you, that you’re derivative, that you’re toxic, because none of it is your fault. Because every day after school I was the kid busting out the tapes and watching the scratchy reruns from the ’80s until I was yelled at. I still have all the episodes, digitized and saved on a flash drive that I play on my laptop to fall asleep. My mother never liked the show, saying always it was too violent. She didn’t like the guns and didn’t understand that was just the way of your world like I did. You want a reason, Thomas Raider, a reason, the reason it all happened, and I’ll give it to you. This pisses you off; you want answers now, I’m sure, and to that I’ll say this: do yourself a favor, play a little pretend with me. It should be easy for you. You’re not even real.

The dumbest part about the way they’ve been tearing you down lately is that they’re all forgetting the fact that Raider defined an entire genre of television. Three years after Hill Street Blues, two after Cagney & Lacey, this was a show that played in the dark. You know why you only did two seasons? Your critics weren’t ready for you, they couldn’t take the blood and the bodies, too detailed, too ghastly for the 4:3 aspect ratio. Conservative pearl clutchers chided your drinking and sexing, the fact that you never smiled, not once, for forty-six episodes. Middle-aged nerds of today would’ve gone nuts for you, they would’ve dressed as you for Comic-Con and defended your abject womanizing to their wives and girlfriends. You dealt a rawness that couldn’t be glossed, the hard edges of those alleyways, your filthy clothes, that fucking jacket. You know, I’d kill for that leather jacket. You were a king when you wore it. Don’t forget the fact that Raider was one of the only shows putting Asians on TV. By season two you were almost exclusively among us, the shopkeepers and immigrants. We said more than unsubtitled Cantonese, we played more than kung fu masters or dragon assassins. They even gave you a son, that six-year-old street urchin, Moto (season 2, episode 6, “Mercy for the Damned”), who you rescued from a drug ring. I used to think I looked like that little kid. I’d imagine I was him and you were my real father come to take me away. It’s my favorite episode. It’s the promo they show every time some history special mentions Raider. You, trenchcoated, half shadowed, holding that little Asian boy in your arms, staring into the dark rain falling all around you and straight into my soul.

And still, as it happened, two seasons was plenty enough for Antonin Haubert, the actor who played you. By the end, he had movie offers, endorsement deals. He didn’t fight the network when there was cancel talk. He had a face that could play rough like he had on Raider but a mutability underneath that couldn’t be taught. He could play the wholesome friend, sadistic politician, principled lord, gay wizard villain. Typecast proof. Antonin Haubert was dark and sexy and on his way to further greatness, and—history will show—the wall of film, television, music, theater, and exemplary Presidential Citizens awards hanging somewhere in his cliffside palace near Malibu are nothing to scoff at. Forty years later, you’d be hard-pressed to hear Antonin Haubert even mention the show anymore. The guy was so entwined with American pop culture despite not even being American that one could barely think of movies without picturing his godly, symmetrical face. Still, time will always bend forward. He was seventy-one this year. He got the ovations at award shows but belonged to the cadre of legends now, taken both more and less seriously by modern folk. He’d pop in for brief, pivotal guest spots on prestige television shows and promote his memoirs and his charities without doing much of anything, these days.

We all moved on. This month’s cover of Metropol was a profile of Antonin’s son, Hadrien, an arthouse twink with huge eyes, at only twenty-two years old already one of the biggest stars of our age for playing a baby-faced serial killer in a terrible movie called Gorgeous Demons last year. He won thirty awards for it and trended every time he tweeted. I saw the mockup of the Metropol cover last week in the office, hanging on the window wall near the art department. He looked a lot like you, Raider, the lips were the same, and so was the scraggly hair. He was wearing a jewel-embroidered Gucci corset that hugged his skeleton ribs and a shag blanket hanging off his shoulders. The editing had been done so as to accentuate the circles under his eyes and gold leaf in swirls on his cheeks. In slick white font around his head were the words MAD ABOUT THE BOY. It was the gayest thing I’d ever seen. It sort of worked. Sort of.

 I was picturing the innocent slope of those lips when I woke, moved my head, turning to my right, found Gil still asleep and breathing his feathery breaths into my armpit. I wasn’t much used to such close contact with him, at least without our dicks involved. I reminded myself that I did in fact like the way Gil made me laugh, also the way he paid for dinner. I didn’t believe it was a power thing. In the pit of my heart I knew Gil just thought paying for dinner was a sweet thing to do, which it was, and I liked him so much better because I knew he thought like this when I never could. I moved my arm down, slowly, and his eyelids fluttered. For half a second he noticed me in front of him, then roused himself awake, shimmying up around my shoulder to rest his head next to mine.

“Too early. Go back to sleep,” he mumbled.

You’d think he was sweet, too. I didn’t know this for sure, of course. There were no queers on Raider, not that I remember. You were a gruff straight boy prone to violence and a single word doing the work of ten, so maybe you would have looked at us curled together in my bed and felt rage or fear—whatever it is that moves people like the founder of Chik-fil-A or the Alabama State Senate to argue extermination. But I hoped you wouldn’t.

As though he’d been waiting for it, Gil propped himself on an elbow, squinting at me. He didn’t look six years older than I was. We’d have had more problems if he did. There were minute but definitive differences between us: he’d always had big eyes, which he used often to convey meaning without fully realizing their devastating effects on people around him. Jewish, but on his dad’s side. He picked and chose when to indulge his bacon-and-egg sandwiches, and he wasn’t circumcised, either. His arms and legs were hairier, but I was in better shape.

“What?”

“You’re not sleeping,” Gil said, observing me.

I shrugged. The light was bright and violent through the window above us, all white because of the snow falling outside. First snow of the year and it had almost invited martial law as the lights went out, one by one. Nevertheless, if it stayed on the ground another two days, we’d have the first white Christmas in who knows how many years. The thought made me happy. I reached over his shoulder and found my phone. Almost nine. He watched me get out of bed and pick my clothes up from where we’d pooled them on the floor.

“You want any breakfast?” he asked me. I didn’t answer him until I was dressed.

“I’ll be late if we have breakfast.”

Gil sat up, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his fists. “ . . . About that,” he began to say.
I wasn’t listening. I glanced outside, judging the depth of the slush on the street, and dug a pair of Gil’s boots from the closet across the room. We were supposed to be off for the holidays by now. It didn’t matter much to me; I would go in and scroll my desktop Twitter feed, order lunch around eleven, same as I always did. The holiday party I’d gotten blasted at had been the past weekend. I still had my gym membership in the fancy place next to the office lobby. Should I bring shorts? Sneakers? Gil appeared in the bedroom doorway, where I had pushed our leftovers from last night out of the room.

“Just be late,” he pleaded, simply, raking his back in a cat stretch with his fingertips.
I made a noise through my nostrils. He was being needy, and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t stick around any longer to find out. I opened the door and shut it behind me. Took the garbage out without looking back, into the hallway, then the snow.
 

You wouldn’t exactly understand why. It’s not something I’m proud of. I knew what Gil wanted from me. He seemed to ask it every time our eyes met these days. Questions like these weren’t supposed to matter so much at my age, and it didn’t make me feel good to imagine that they did for him. Did Gil want to marry me? Adopt kids? Coach little league?

When I liked Gil too much I thought about your jacket, the kind of no-shit, absolute icy guy I’d be if I could wear something like that every day. There was an awesome replica of your jacket that I saw somebody selling out of a personal shop a couple months ago. I wanted seriously to cash my last paycheck to buy it. There was a cut in the left sleeve from the pilot, where you rip it open on a chain-link fence going after some coke runner through an industrial park in the opening scene. We never learn the perp’s name, and the important part is that he gets away while you lose your footing and fall two stories onto a pile of woodchips. You look down at your jacket, feeling with your fingers the rip in the pleather. For a second the camera enters your perspective, staring up at the unfinished beams, at the white sky. It’s only your second week on the detective bureau, nobody blames you. You wear that same jacket with the tear in the sleeve for forty-five more episodes. I’ve read that the costume department made over a hundred of them. I wondered briefly, zooming into the pictures of the replica, whether this was one of them. There would be production numbers somewhere, no tags if it were custom. I didn’t buy it, before you ask. Gil would have said something mean about it; he didn’t like my obsessions—any of them, especially mine for you.

After two stops, I exited the subway on the southwest side of the memorial park, on the other side of which towered the glass building that housed a realty firm, several computer systems fulfillment companies, a super-luxe mall in the lobby, and the high-gloss headquarters of the hundred-year-old newspaper company that owned Metropol, Pointe, HollywoodNow, and a raggedy collection of other dying magazine brands marching slowly into the ether. It was both good and bad to be a marketing guy at one of these companies. Perks like free subscriptions, the pristine Apple Store office that cost a billion dollars and change, run-ins with Clooney promoting an HBO miniseries in the twenty-fifth-floor video wing. All that for a job that amounted to very, very little. You know those little pieces of cardstock that fall out of the magazine when you’re flipping through them at the airport? Let’s think—’84, so Rolling Stone? Newsweek? You’re flipping through one of those at the bodega next to the precinct. You have an hour off before you’re due in court for arraignment, and that little slip of paper falls out from behind a page flashing ALERT! ALERT! RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW AT 85% OFF! That was me. Except I didn’t even write the copy, we sourced that out to copywriters. We used an ancient system of keys and codes to split Metropol’s 3.4 million print subscribers into a hundred innocuous segments. Rich, poor, urban, rural, men, women, white, nonwhite. Something you might not know: it was massively effective to raise the low net-income segments up to twenty dollars more an issue each renewal period. Sure, you’ll lose a few new next round of expirations, but an infinitesimally small margin of people—even those who might be doing their progeny a favor by saving that eighty-nine dollars a year—ever notice the money leaving their accounts each month and end up going through the gargantuan trouble of doing something about it. We made sure of that by keeping our customer service on a website that hasn’t changed since 1998. Year over year it was about an extra ten million for the conglomerate.

I slapped my badge onto the turnstiles and pushed my way through to the elevators. Beyond the lobby I saw the shiny stainless opening of the gym I was planning on skipping out around three to get to. The elevator doors were about to close on me alone when they hiccupped, then groaned back open for a young woman who sat two rows of desks down from me to step inside. We gave each other small smiles as the car lurched upward.US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.1100 × 5.7000 × 8.5000 in
Imprint	Melville House
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09781685890346
ISBN-10	1685890342
Author	Jinwoo Chong
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC011000, FIC028080
Subjects	lgbt novels, lgbt books, detective fiction, fiction books, books fiction, time travel, realistic fiction books, gay fiction, gay books, lgbt fiction, sci fi, sci fi books, sci fi book, sci-fi books, science fiction novels, books science fiction, FIC028080, time travel books, time travel fiction, asian, LGBTQ, trauma, fiction, grief, lgbt, science fiction, novels, FIC011000, gay, Literature, science fiction and fantasy, non binary, speculative fiction, biracial, sci-fi, literary fiction, intergenerational, science fiction books