In the MFA program at the University of Washington in Seattle, candidates are, for one quarter, relieved of their teaching duties. For me, this so-called “fellowship quarter” was allocated to the winter of my second year, by which point I had already written my thesis—a slim, flaccid novel about the sexual failings of a nonbinary mathematician—but had also come to terms with the fact the project wasn’t worth trying to firm up through additional drafts. My only real task for January through March was providing vague yet positive comments on the work of my classmates in the “advanced” fiction workshop, something I did the night before each week by tinkering with boilerplate feedback I had given in previous workshops—the same approach I took to grading freshman composition.
At the time, the “Big Dark” was bearing down on the city. My solace was spending two days a week at Stevens Pass, a ski resort two hours east of Seattle. That was, until the head gaskets on my Subaru Outback gave out and I couldn’t afford to fix them. I had spent all my savings on my ski pass and, due to the stipulations of my international student visa, I wasn’t allowed to seek work that could supplement my stipend and fund the repairs.
In my resulting stasis, I came up with the idea of writing an essay about the tech sector’s stranglehold on Seattle. This was something that had endlessly disturbed me since I moved from Melbourne, a city relatively unmolested by the hands of Big Tech. Even our creative writing program hadn’t been able to escape its grubby reach—that year, we were one of seventy-four recipients of funding from Amazon’s Literary Partnership program.
As I walked around that winter—carless, aimless, and implicated—I thought a self-referential essay on Amazon might be a way of interrogating my guilt, ideally allaying it. But once I began, I was reminded why I didn’t write essays: they required rigor and honesty, neither of which were my strong suit. What came easiest to me were stories of interpersonal crises told in plainspoken first-person by protagonists who almost always resembled me. So by week four of my fellowship, I shifted my plan to write a piece of “autofiction” in which an Australian named Simon dates an Amazon employee. The idea was ballasted by the fact that, despite my seasonal depression, I was disastrously horny. “Research” for the piece would open my dating pool to individuals I was otherwise foreclosed from by my tenuously constructed moral scrupulosity. I was also aware that many of the people I had met in the carparks at Stevens Pass were tech workers. Maybe, as part of my research, I’d be able to hitch a ride.
We met at a Levantine restaurant called Mamnoon on a Monday night. This was Gertrude’s suggestion, and I was naive enough to agree without looking at the menu in advance. It wasn’t expensive by Seattle standards, but it was by student standards. My dismay was quelled though by how attracted I was to Gertrude. She was prettier than in her profile and I was pleased she wasn’t wearing the PNW uniform of head-to-toe Patagucci. Under a leather trench coat, she wore a green one-shoulder top that made her curly red hair radiate, and her jeans were Perks & Mini—a beloved brand from Melbourne.
Finding an Amazon worker had proven more difficult than I expected. Most didn’t list their employer on their profiles, so I had to sift through dozens that simply said “tech” next to the briefcase icon. Microsoft, Microsoft, Google, a start-up. Slowly though, the Bezos girls, gays and theys emerged from his Seattle Spheres on 7th Avenue and entered my phone. Gertrude was the most promising—she explicitly mentioned skiing on her Hinge profile and her position at Amazon was “project manager,” a title that felt fitting for my story due to its diffuse ubiquity and subsequent meaninglessness.
The only problem was that Gertrude identified as a “lesbian,” and while I was “nonbinary,” I was under no illusion that someone who defined their sexuality this way would be interested in me. They may be in theory, I thought, but couldn’t possibly be in practice given my corporeality was indistinguishable from that of a cis man. Unless, I reconsidered, the title of “lesbian” was the theoretical assertion of Gertrude’s identity while the practical reality of her desire was covertly more capacious. This latter possibility turned out to be true.
Nevertheless, after we ordered orange wine, Gertrude said as if surprised with herself, You’re the first person with a penis I’ve been on a date with in six years.
I sat back in my ghost chair. That’s a strange thing to say, I said.
I didn’t mean, she said. I’m sorry. I’m just nervous, is all.
I, too, was nervous, but not as much as I usually was on dates. This was potentially due to the fact that I kept reminding myself it wasn’t a date, only research.
Over our drinks, we talked about typical things. It was just before our food arrived that I returned to Gertrude’s faux pas.
You haven’t been with a person with a penis in six years, I said. This is new for me too. You’re my first tech worker.
It was obvious from the way her nostrils recoiled that she disliked being reduced to her job as much as I did my biological sex.
Well, she said. Here I am.
Would you say you’re representative?
God I hope not, she said. Are you representative of writers? Or people with penises, for that matter?
I also hoped not, but I knew I fit some of the stereotypes. I might be, I said.
Our food arrived, and it was the best thing I’d eaten in months: a plate of eggplant, corn, tomatoes and pine nuts, with a side of labneh and sourdough pita. I asked the waiter what the sauce was, and Gertrude answered.
Sumac and black molasses, she said.
Molasses, I repeated.
The meal gave me newfound respect for research and all it could constitute until this respect was extinguished by the bill. An ex once told me that in his friend group they split bills proportionally based on income, which I thought was both ingenious and a humble brag likely not founded in truth. But I started doing the math based on the average Amazon project manager salary—$139,000 a year—and my stipend of $28,000. I was having trouble carrying over the one when I noticed that Gertrude was looking at me strangely. She had placed her card on the bill and was waiting for me to do the same. I complied and received the consolation prize of a brief night-concluding kiss at the bus stop. Gertrude took an Uber.
The following Saturday, Gertrude picked me up from my apartment to go to Stevens Pass.
I was excited but also trepidatious about Gertrude’s competence as a skier. My father had, for a time, been a professional ski coach, and as a result I was an “expert” at the sport—it was, in fact, the one thing I was truly confident in. If Gertrude was an “intermediate” or even “advanced” skier, the day would be difficult for both of us—she would feel she was slowing me down, and I would feel I was pressuring her to hurry up.
Fortunately, this didn’t come to pass. We warmed up on a busy blue run called Skyline, and Gertrude’s turns had the sharp precision of an ex-slalom skier. On the chairlift, I asked if she had been a racer and she said yes, in high school, and again for a year in college.
I can tell, I said. You have the naturalness people get from skiing since they were toddlers.
Gertrude shook her head. No, she said. I didn’t start until I was ten.
She explained that she had been adopted at nine. The parents she had described to me at Mamnoon—a psychotherapist and an economist—were her adoptive parents. On the chairlift, she alluded to traumatic early years and a complex period in which she was a ward of the state.
I attempted to be an active participant in this intimacy by sharing that my mother had died when I was a teenager and that I had spent a number of complex years moving between the houses of my grandmother and a number of family friends while my father continued to travel the world skiing. This was all true, but the way I said it made it seem like I was drawing an equivalence between my experience and hers, or even worse, attempting to one-up it.
Sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to make it about me.
For the rest of the day, I tried to integrate Gertrude’s adoption into the conception I had of her, as well as into the arc of the short story I was writing in my head. Until that point, I had misgivings about the fact she had highly educated and financially privileged parents and yet had taken work at Amazon rather than applying her skills elsewhere. I thought that a white-collar position in a conglomerate was only excusable if the job afforded an individual and their family upward mobility. For the first time, I wondered what a job in such a large company might have to offer beyond pay—things like psychic safety and stability for someone whose life had begun in turbulence. I thought this as the two of us were darting between trees in a steep gully called Solitude. As the pines parted into open crud, it became clear to me I was no longer thinking about Gertrude, but again, of myself.
I was unsure if anyone anywhere in the history of humanity had ever expressed sympathy for a skier, so I omitted this aspect from my written account of my relationship with Gertrude. I worked on the story as the two of us continued seeing each other with a fluctuating frequency that had a mean of once per week. We had also begun having sex, which was satisfactory after a challenging start due to my poor performance in comparison to Gertrude’s six years of partners who had the home team advantage. But Gertrude was patient with me. She was also “polyamorous,” and I was glad to share the responsibility of meeting her sexual needs with a cast of strangers, though I did sometimes wish we could have shared notes.
Once I had drafted my “autofiction,” I submitted it to workshop. The responses I received were vaguely positive. Multiple people remarked that the story dealt in important themes but lacked what was variously described as heart, warmth, and humanity. This I expected. What I didn’t was the post-workshop response from Rachael, the only person in class close enough to me to know that I really was dating a woman named Gertrude who shared a striking number of traits with the woman I had portrayed poorly in my story.
Does she know you wrote this and shared it with others? Rachael asked.
Does Ally read all your stories? I retorted. Ally was a unionist Rachael had started seeing.
No, Rachael said. But she is also not in any of them.
I told Rachael this wasn’t true, that the people in close proximity to us permeate all our work.
You’re being evasive.
No, I said. Gertrude doesn’t know about the story.
Rachael asked if I really cared about her or if I was using her for my art. It was a good question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. I realized that the narrative beats of our relationship had surprised me and were continuing to do so. As a person with control issues, this was concerning. As a storyteller, I was pleased.
I told Gertrude about the story over a game of Scrabble on a Sunday.
We had intended to go skiing, but torrential rain had frozen Stevens Pass to an ice pack. This was two weeks after Rachael’s interrogation, and their questions had lingered in me. I took my unsettling guilt as an indication that I was invested in Gertrude, but she still worked for Amazon, and I was unsure whether our relationship contributed more to my quality of life than the internal sense of moral righteousness I would have to forego if I pursued a long-term relationship with a tech worker.
I decided telling Gertrude would be the perfect test. If I revealed my initial gambit and she not only understood the impulse and had a sense of humor about it but also gave me her consent to be an ongoing participant in the writing of the story, then perhaps she was the right partner for me. If, on the other hand, she was repelled by the whole charade, then that would reveal an important incompatibility in the ways we respectively approached our brief sublunary existence.
Gertrude was winning Scrabble by a substantial margin. I thought her buoyant momentum might make her more open to my story, but when I pitched it she didn’t seem convinced. She just kept shaking her head. Soon her voice was shaking too.
Why would you do this? she said.
Do what? I asked.
All of it, she said. Stringing me along, treating me like a guinea pig.
I repeated my reasons, but she said these weren’t reasons, only excuses. I asked her to explain the difference.
Can I just read the story? she said.
I logged into my Google Drive on her laptop. While she read, I looked around her Queen Anne apartment. It was triple the size of mine and had panoramic views. In the draft Gertrude was reading, her character was reluctant to reveal how much she paid in rent. In reality, this was not what happened. She told me right away and the rent wasn’t much more than my own.
This was one of many discrepancies Gertrude drew attention to in the story. She also took umbrage with the fact I hadn’t changed her name but soon after said it didn’t matter.
It’s not like this is going to get published anyway.
That’s very cruel, I said.
Aren’t you happy about that? Isn’t this what you wanted to show, that I’m a monster?
I said what the story wants and what I want are totally different things.
Well, she said, I hope at least one of you wants to be less of an idiot.
These words came out spitefully, but after she said them her body crumpled and she stood up from the couch and disappeared into the adjacent room.
I sat alone in the spacious silence for a while. I stared at the words on the Scrabble board. Gertrude’s cat swatted at my shin. I located my wallet and my keys.
I was putting my shoes on when Gertrude came back out. She stood between me and the door. Her eyes were blotched red. They matched her hair.
You know, she said. You could have just asked me why I work there. It’s a valid question. You didn’t have to go to these ridiculous lengths.
I took this information in. It made me wonder what shape our story would have taken if I had just asked her on the first date, if there would have been a story at all, or if it would have been one much longer than this.
Well, I said. Why do you?
But Gertrude didn’t answer me. Instead, she smiled, shook her head and turned away. The window I had been granted into her life was now closed. All I could do was follow her line of sight through an actual window, a beautiful bay one that looked out over the Puget Sound all the way to the peninsula. Nothing but a small sailboat stood between us and Mt. Olympus. The peak of it was right there. And yet.
Four months later, I graduated from the MFA program with a flawless academic record and no publications to my name. As a reward, the Department of Homeland Security granted me an Optional Practical Training visa that required me to find a job related to my degree within ninety days or else I would be deported. That summer, I applied to dozens of tenure-track teaching positions, non-tenure-track teaching positions, assistantships in publishing houses, jobs in nonprofits, small corporations, large corporations, and finally, desperately, the tech sector.
It was late in August when LinkedIn notified me there was an opening in Amazon’s Kindle division for an “author experience manager.” Despite everything that had transpired with Gertrude, it was remarkably easy to rationalize applying. I told myself the role would enable me to conduct further research for my story, attacking the beast from inside its belly, all the while receiving a healthy paycheck and an air-conditioned office in which to write.
I also convinced myself I was shoo-in. Do you love authors and fiction? the job ad began. Do you like challenging the status-quo? I didn’t understand most of the words that followed these opening provocations, but I was sure my experience as an actual, albeit amateur, author would override my lack of experience in, say, acting as a front-line interface between KDP and high value content.
My only real concern was Gertrude, whom I hadn’t seen since she broke up with me. I didn’t know how she would react if she saw me in the Amazon office, or on an org-wide Zoom call, or at a company ski day—if Amazon did, in fact, have those. She would think I was a hypocrite, I was sure of that at least, and it was possible she would alert upper management to my duplicitous nature. Such delusional worries persisted as I waited to hear back from the hiring committee, and on one lonely night, while unable to sleep, I admitted to myself my fears had little to do with Amazon at all but were instead inverted manifestations of the sort of simple emotional truth my classmates claimed my autofiction elided: I missed Gertrude, and my life was smaller without her.
Do I even need to say I didn’t get an interview for the job? My period of permissible unemployment ran out, my visa was revoked, and I was forced to fly back to the antipodean city of my birth whose consumer market had, in my absence, held relatively strong against Amazon’s attempts at penetration. It was a relief at first to no longer be reminded of my rejections on every street corner by rotund trucks that bore the company’s condescending smile. But with time I began to pine for them. All I otherwise had left of Seattle and Gertrude were my depictions of them in my writing—versions that, no matter how vividly rendered, could never replace the real thing.
***
Rumpus original artwork by Carl Dimitri
