Excerpt
Our Beautiful Boys
One Except for the Native Caves—tucked high in the hills above town—the city of Chilesworth presents nothing extraordinary. During the day, the three large craggily black holes set against a lion-yellow hillside were something: a historical artifact, a geological occurrence, a living thing, an astonishing view. By dusk, they were mostly abandoned, the dirt path leading to them framed by cactus, sage, and the occasional beer can left by generations of teens looking for a secret place. And at night, the caves had a register and intensity of darkness that made it hard to tell up from down, side from side, boy from boy. Late one night, that darkness would pull all four boys into the largest cave, their arms and legs soon flailing and tangled, the click-click of their bones against bone, their grunts and cries echoing off the smooth walls.
Two Now, looking down, the scene below the caves could be West Texas (1972) or eastern Michigan (1988). But it was a bright Southern California (2019) fall afternoon, one of those where when you looked up, the blue stretched in every direction, and a bird, no matter how low or well winged, looked like nothing more than a jittery black dot. Roughly fifty teenage boys, in full pads, were draped around one another, waiting for practice to start. And right before it did, a new kid walked onto the field, mostly on his heels.
“Bin Laden is
playing now?” one of them asked the thick boy next to him.
“I thought we dumped his dead ass in the ocean,” the other responded.
They both burst into mocking laughter.
*
* * “Did you read it?” Gita Shastri asked her husband, Gautam, later that evening. She’d watched him walk into the kitchen, glance briefly at the yellow Post-it note with his name on it and an arrow pointing to a permission slip she’d left on the counter, and head straight to the refrigerator. This first stop for a beer had been a recent thing.
“Isn’t he a little old for field trips?” Gautam asked, cooling his hand on a bottle.
“You didn’t read it?”
“You saw me not read it.”
The two looked at each other, neither wanting to proceed down this particular path. Gita had trouble recalling her once young husband’s handsome face, now covered in week-old gray stubble because he’d run out of razors; Gautam just looked away.
“Apparently, Vikram was walking down the main hallway yesterday when the football coach noticed him. He asked if he had any interest in the game and whether he wanted to come to practice after school to take a look.”
Gita was conveying the story and staring at the discoloration on their oak cupboards, now lightened and worn by sun and overuse. They’d bought the house new nearly two decades before, a small development in a neighborhood of old, seventies-era stucco tract homes. As the older houses were bought, sold, and remodeled with each turn of boom and bust, their house, once the shiny new thing, now looked frayed and outdated. The old, drafty windows let in too much dust, a patch of shingles on the roof needed to be replaced, and the lawn out front, while still green, had large holes from the gophers living below. In most everything she did, Gita operated with order, cleanliness, and just the right amount of sheen, and while the rest of the house was warm and inviting, the kitchen in particular had become the object of her sustained frustration. No matter how much she scrubbed, it never got the right kind of clean. And with every hole she plugged, another would appear with a fleet of ants coming in, mocking her about the one grain of sugar she had failed to clear from the counter. The remodel she wanted—an added island with a stainless steel six-burner stovetop, walnut cupboards, thick wood floors—would cost them roughly seventy-five thousand dollars, maybe more if she got the exact green Rajasthani marble counters she’d discovered on their last trip to India. Gautam had insisted that they couldn’t afford it, that the cupboards were perfectly functional, and that maybe he could slap a coat of paint on them. She’d been annoyed by his use of
slap as a verb. She wished he was actually handy around the house.
“He checked it out yesterday,” Gita continued, turning away from the cupboards and now looking at the stained grout on the counter. “He went to practice today and loved it and now wants to play.” She paused and then added, laying out her argument, “He also thinks having a second sport would be good for his apps.”
Vikram was upstairs in his room; their daughter, Priya, was in her first year of college and barely called.
“He thinks or you think?”
As the words were coming out of his mouth, Gautam leaned slightly forward, as if doing so might let him suck them back in.
“Let’s leave aside for a moment how little you’ve done to help him think through any of it.”
“Isn’t the loss of one kid over all this college admission madness enough?” Gautam asked.
Gita looked straight at her husband. When her mother had died, her father, in a rare show of raw emotion, had said that after fifty years, he could no longer distinguish between his own thinking on things and his wife’s. She took all our memories with her, he’d said, his eyes filling with thick tears. For the past few years, Gita had instead felt herself inch further and further away from her husband, greedily hoarding her own thoughts and memories.
“Sorry,” Gautam said immediately.
“I think we both did that. But we can certainly argue over who was
more responsible. And I would win that argument.”
Gautam looked away, took a deep breath, and had a sip of his beer. After the first couple of sips from a bottle, the rest was just disappointing.
That morning, Gautam had arrived at work at his open-floor-plan office—the kind of space with a kitchen stocked with cereal and protein bars and quinoa bowls to be delivered at lunch, a Ping-Pong table that all the programmers called
table tennis, and clear sight lines between the CEO’s desk and the intern’s. He wished they still had cubicles so that he could disappear into one for the day. For years, he’d made a very good, consistent income as a programmer. But at some point, he’d realized that programming was the dentistry of the tech world: solid and steady, but without the glamour or the paycheck of being a doctor. He’d watched the sales guys, who knew nothing about the architecture of the software they were selling, making absurd year-end bonuses based on the zeros and ones Gautam had carefully constructed. And so, a few years back, he’d decided to switch to sales.
Gautam had been the twenty-fourth employee hired by a startup called VirtualUN. “Never Be Misunderstood Again” was the tagline on their marketing material. There were other video-conferencing companies on the market, but theirs was the only one that had real-time translations in more than a hundred languages. If a German speaker and a Mandarin speaker got on a call, the German speaker heard only German from the Mandarin speaker, and vice versa. When Ryan the CEO and Bryan the head of sales—RyanBryan in Gautam’s mind—had originally interviewed Gautam for the job, he had told them that he would come on as a programmer to help them refine the accents attached to each of the languages. It would give him the time to learn the guts of the technology. But then soon after, he wanted to move into sales. I’m the perfect translator for this product, he’d said in his pitch to them. I can move between tech and sales, between Hindi and English, between Asia and America.
The mood at work that morning had been liminal. They were past the collective exuberance from having received an infusion of big boy, Series A funding. Now, if they wanted to get to Series B, they needed to make something of it; they needed to sell their product far and wide. Gautam found himself in a similar in-between space. He was older than most other people in the company. He knew and understood the programmers—young Asian American kids fresh out of college and older H-1Bs from India and China—but now he was spending his time with the salesmen, mostly fit white guys who seemed to have an endless supply of crisp button-downs that never wrinkled. No matter how intimately he knew the product he was selling, no matter his deep love and precise knowledge of the history of Pac-12 basketball, the buyers simply didn’t buy from him. He knew why, but to admit it openly meant that he would need to return to the sanctity of coding and algorithms. He was not ready for safety yet. But he was getting there.
