Flux: A Novel

by Jinwoo Chong

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride; LGBT Gay; Science Fiction; Time Travel

Synopsis

"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.

Release date: March 21, 2023

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 272

Sample

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.