"Nothing Personal" by Jeff Chon

"You wouldn’t believe the way he’s captured everyone’s attention. The police are calling him a terrorist, but people can’t seem to wrap their head around it. It doesn’t pass the smell test."

A couple years ago, I read Jeff Chon’s collection, This is the Afterlife, and absolutely loved it. My buddy Dave Housley had been raving about it (and also Jeff’s novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun), and I fell in love with the stories just has much as Dave thought I would. And the rec couldn’t have made more sense. I’ve published Dave a bunch of times over the last 20 years, and almost every time he sends me a story, he says something along the lines of, “maybe this is a dumb idea, I don’t know.” They almost always are “dumb ideas” (the characters from Reality Bites, hanging out in current times, as an alien invasion begins; a chapbook full of Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters set in a QAnon world of paranoia; a collection of stories inspired by television commercials produced by America's favorite brands), but they’re just as almost-always brilliant, too. Over and over and over again, Dave finds ways to inject humanity and pathos (and humor, and great sentences, and everything else I want from a short story) into ideas that could be too “clever” or one-note or just, well, dumb. It was a skill that seemed almost uniquely Housley’s… until I read Jeff’s This is the Afterlife.

In our interview coming on Tuesday, Jeff answers my question about how the story started by saying, “I find a lot of good writing has come from me after people laugh off an idea as bad… I think sometimes we write things to prove it's possible, even if we're only try to prove it to ourselves.”

I couldn’t have been more excited when I saw Jeff Chon’s name in the submission queue, and I couldn’t have been more surprised by the story, or fallen more in love with it. An immediate acceptance, and I’ve been looking forward to getting to share the story with readers ever since. Another story I am surprised by, and awed by, every time I reread, and I’m so excited to get to share it with you all.

—Aaron Burch

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art: Phil McAndrew

“Nothing Personal”

The Punisher stands on a rooftop and launches his bazooka into a building where the Roxxon Energy Corp. is holding a board meeting, killing everyone inside. I don’t remember which comic that was in, but it might have been the moment I began to understand what white-collar crime was. It’s actually a core memory of the Punisher—the other being the time he shot up some litterbugs in Central Park, and that one only stuck with me because of this book from elementary school where litterbugs were drawn as literal bugs wreaking havoc.

I wonder if anyone else has core memories of the Punisher.

No one else seems to remember the Punisher blowing up those Roxxon execs and shareholders. They tell me I must’ve imagined it, like a Mandela Effect-type thing, but it can’t be Mandela Effect if I’m the only one who remembers/misremembers. If anything, that they can’t remember either makes it Reverse Mandela Effect or maybe just gaslighting. I wonder if Reverse Mandela Effect is a thing. A group of people willfully forgetting something—mis-forgetting—has to be a form of mass delusion, doesn’t it?

I only bring all this up because yesterday morning, a man named Miguel Ortega snuck onto the rooftop of a construction site with an improvised rocket launcher—he built it in his garage—and launched it into the Hygieia building, corner office. The CEO died with sizzling shrapnel in his neck and face. Ortega then put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. People couldn’t believe anyone could build his own rocket launcher, especially someone like Miguel Ortega. This made no sense to me. He was a software engineer, for God’s sake—more Microchip, the Punisher’s tech guy, than an actual killer. Of course a guy like that could build a rocket launcher. He even looked like Microchip from the comic books: a pudgy guy with wire-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline.

Ortega’s friends called him Mikey. If you were still around, you’d see so many signs with the word MIKEY written on them, printed on them, graffitied, on the streets and on the news—one guy even burned it into the grass in front of Harvard Yard. You wouldn’t believe the way he’s captured everyone’s attention. The police are calling him a terrorist, but people can’t seem to wrap their head around it. It doesn’t pass the smell test. He just doesn’t seem like a terrorist. But what do I know? I’m just some guy who heard about what he did and immediately thought about all those Punisher comics he read as a kid.

Hygieia is a healthcare company, by the way. I know, it’s a weird name. Everyone jokes that it’s so people misspell it, which will invalidate documents brought against them in court. I don’t think that’s how it works, but it’s still a pretty good joke, corporations being evil and all. Anyway, they got into trouble a couple months ago when a whistleblower came forward and told the news how Hygieia was using a predictive algorithm to deny healthcare coverage. Turns out Mikey Ortega was the engineer who developed that software. Someone leaked his suicide note, where he talked about creating it to predict heart attacks—using demographic info, age, race, health history, family history, and all kinds of other data. This thing he’d created to help people was being used to keep people from receiving care and treatment.

Knowing he’d released evil into the world—his words, not mine—he said he couldn’t live with himself, and because he couldn’t live with himself, he was going to make sure those who could live with themselves weren’t going to be given the chance.

Again, his words, not mine.

Another thing: Mikey Ortega was found on the rooftop wearing a Bruce Gradkowski Buccaneers jersey. The orange one with the black collar. He was originally from Orlando and friends say he was the biggest Bucs fan alive. And now people around the country, people not from Orlando, are wearing that Gradkowski jersey. Can you believe it? People here, in this city of all places, are willingly wearing a Bucs jersey!

The Bucs claim they’re pulling the jersey from circulation. A guy at Starbucks said they should just retire it.

*

The CEO’s name was Ted O’Brien. He was 64 years old, had four kids—two adult, and two under the age of four. He was an avid sportsman, spending his vacations hunting big game and sport fish with his grandsons. The people at his church were on the news today, giving sober testimonials about his kindness and generosity. He sang in the church choir, bankrolled trips for teenagers to build houses in Central America every summer, that sort of thing. A woman at his church talked about how her daughter, who’s on the spectrum, had trouble selling Girl Scout cookies, so Ted bought $500 worth to make sure she surpassed her quota. That was a lovely story, the woman at the news desk said, and it honestly was. If I could’ve afforded that, I would’ve done it for you. What father wouldn’t? And he didn’t even do that for his own kid, but someone else’s. His only daughter’s 31 years old. She works at Exxon, which always makes me think of Roxxon. But I guess that’s the point, isn’t it—to create a fictionalized thing to represent something in real life to make some kind of message?

*

We had a copycat today.

A kid named Danesh Razavi broke into a loan processing company and blew himself up. It was after closing time, so thankfully no one was hurt. He was wearing a Gradkowski jersey, an away jersey. I only mention this because the security cam footage showed him in that jersey. Think about it, a kid with that name suicide-bombing a building. Think about the things they would’ve said about him if he wasn’t wearing that white Gradkowski jersey. How many members of that kid’s community would’ve had to come on the news to denounce his actions and say they weren’t anything like him?

They’ve been trying to ban those Gradkowskis. You hardly see Tampa ones anymore, but you still see his Raiders, Rams, and Steelers jerseys around. They’re actually kind of hard to come by now—eBay pulled them from their marketplaces—but people always find a way. Saw a lady in a Bengals one at Kroger.

Bruce Gradkowski gave a statement today. He looked really hurt, and I kind of felt bad for him. Imagine being a journeyman quarterback in the NFL, building a decent career—a damn good one, actually—for yourself as a player and then a coach, only to see a bunch of leftists and internet trolls wearing your jersey in an ironic way. That’s not even mentioning the people who aren’t wearing it ironically but because they really mean it in some way, that it’s not even about you or your contributions on the field, but because some angry person lashing out at the people who hurt him and everyone around him elicited gleeful bloodlust.

Gradkowski said he was sorry to the families of the victims, that he never thought his jersey would become a symbol for this kind of rage, that he knows people are in pain right now, that the country is really divided but violence doesn’t solve anything, that killing is wrong, that we can’t heal through revenge, that there are better ways for us to come together and change the world through kindness. Seemed like a decent enough guy. Hope he understands this isn’t a reflection on him.

I was talking to our neighbor, and he said he felt more for Gradkowski than he did the guy Mikey Ortega killed. Weirdly enough, so do I. How wrong is that? Seriously, how wrong? Like on a scale of 1-10, is it about a 6? Maybe a 7?

The news talked about how people have even begun sewing Punisher logos on the sleeves of their jerseys, the classic white skull from the 80s, not the tactical one worn by cops.

I know, I know. You hate when I talk about this stuff. Sorry. Talk soon, I hope.

art: Phil McAndrew

Can I be honest, Emily? It feels weird doing this, talking to you like this. I know I’m not talking to you, but to myself. Anyway, I don’t want you to think your dad’s lost his mind. It’s just the therapist says it’s supposed to help me cope, that I’ve been avoiding my feelings for so long. How weird is it that the reason finally I started this is because Mikey Ortega killed Dan O’Brien? Dan O’Brien? Honestly, I don’t even remember that guy’s name anymore. Maybe it was Tom. How come I’m not just looking it up and then deleting it? Why am I just writing Tom or Dan when I know it’s wrong, that it’s so easy to just look up and correct? If I was actually talking to you, instead of myself—that’s who I’m talking to here—myself—I’m just pretending to talk to you—throwing in stuff like “Can you believe it?” and “Let me tell you something” just so it feels even more unnatural than it already does. Anyway, if I was talking to you right now, if you were still with me, I’d be wasting your time.

I haven’t even mentioned comic books yet haha.

Rereading the stuff I wrote these past few days, it feels kind of cheap. Like it’s all a twist in a movie (She was dead all along! Gasp!) and not even a good one. But maybe these twists exist because they’re supposed to. Like maybe these things we call twists are just inevitable events and things go exactly the way they’re supposed to.

I just miss you is all. And I know I’m saying it like this because I can’t bring myself to say, “I miss her,” even though I do miss her. Miss you. I miss you. I feel terrible for the life I gave you, how you never even had a backyard because I couldn’t get my life together, and then you were gone. I have a decent job now. I’m able to give your brother and sister a better life. Maybe it isn’t what they should have, but it’s better than it was. I just wish I was able to give it to you too. I have a great job. I’m actually kind of proud of myself (again, I only write this because the therapist says I should take pride in things I’ve done instead of beating myself up all the time). Then I think about you. Not that it’s your fault. This is all my doing. You’re perfect.

Ironically, the company health insurance is Hygieia. It’s better than what we had, or at least I thought it was before I found out about the predictive algorithm thing. Sometimes I think about how they dragged their feet, that last insurance company we had through your mom’s work, and I wonder if you might’ve lived if they moved their asses instead of trying to cost-benefit the life of a fifteen-year-old girl. It makes me feel nothing for Tom O’Brien, or whatever his name was, even though he was a human being with a loving family like you were.

I told the therapist about these journal entries, how I only started doing it after Mikey Ortega fired his home-made rocket launcher in the Hygieia building. Believe it or not, the therapist said it was good I was finally doing it, that I just needed to get my feelings down. He said it would get easier. He did say he wanted me to focus more on you, though, make it more about my feelings about you—he only said this after I asked him what he thought about what Ortega had done. The truth is, these do feel like they are my feelings for you, if that makes sense. When you think about it, all my feelings are feelings for you, and Mom, and Dylan, and Jamie. All of my feelings belong to all of you. Or at least they should. And if they aren’t? Well, you already know my feelings for you.

Your mom’s doing great. Maybe not great, but pretty good. She finally got off Facebook, so all the crazy stuff she believed about vaccines and GMOs aren’t a problem anymore. She volunteers at a homeless shelter. She says there are so many children there, that it should make her sad, but she knows it isn’t about her feelings. All she wants is to help and make a difference. We’re all trying.

Dylan finally got his driver’s license! Works at Barnes & Noble. Every paycheck, he brings home a new book for Jamie. He’s determined to turn your sister into a reader like you were. Jamie’s teacher says she reads at a tenth-grade level. You’d be annoyed by all the questions she asks, but she’s just curious about the world like you were. The other day, she told Mom she wants to go to the Naval Academy. I have no idea where she’d get such an idea!

All we want to do is live our lives in the best way we can. It’s what you would’ve wanted. It's what you deserve. It's far more than people like O’Brien deserved. See, I think things like that and then immediately feel bad. That guy had a wife (two of them) and kids. He had friends. He actually seemed pretty well-liked. I remember early in the news coverage when a guy he used to golf with broke down on camera, talking about how generous he was with his money, that he always did more and gave more than he had to. And do you know what I thought? What does it mean for a rich person to be generous with money? O’Brien made about $13.7 million a year. What does it even mean to give more than you have to when you have that kind of money? That’s not supposed to matter. I know it’s not supposed to matter. We’re supposed to be grateful when people give, because no one really has to give at all. That’s what makes giving special, isn’t it?

But we’re also not supposed to take either, are we? O’Brien took Mikey Ortega’s idea, a great idea that came from a great place, and turned it into a way for him and his shareholders to take more money. Think about what that guy took (this time, I’m not talking to you specifically but to a hypothetical reader—mostly to myself as I type this, to be honest). Think about all those lives gone forever. Think about the joy he took from families, all the Thanksgiving dinners that will never happen, all the high school graduations that won’t be attended, births, vacations, weddings, family reunions—futures were taken from these people. All he really gave them was funeral costs, and I’m sure life insurance companies dragged their feet as much as they could on that end.

Maybe the people who always take needed to understand what it felt like to lose something.

I know thinking this way makes me just as bad as Ortega. I know it does.

Bad, he says like he believes it.

According to Google, Joyce Chang-Hagerman, the CEO of the insurance company that dragged their feet until it was too late for you, made $9.2 million last year. She was ranked ninth on the Top Female CEOs list. Was making people drag their feet how she made that list? What did she take from everyone to make the kind of money she did? Think about the humanity she took from those people your mom and I had to talk to on the phone every day. Most of them didn’t even seem to care, but maybe the calls were being screened to make sure no one seemed to care. Think about those people who screened those calls forcing the people we talked to into seeming not to care. What was taken from them so that this Joyce Chang-Hagerman can make $9.2 million?

I don’t know. You and I both know I’m just typing because I don’t know what to do with all these feelings.

I looked it up after I stopped writing because I felt bad. His name was actually Ted O’Brien. His friends called him Teddy. They don’t really talk about Ted O’Brien anymore. They only talk about Mikey Ortega, and Danesh Razavi, or Cecily Marks (they had a field day with her last name, I’ll tell you), or Colin Anderson—that they all wore Gradkowski jerseys, that so many angry people were wearing Gradkowski jerseys. Kids are being sent home from school because their Gradkowski jerseys have led to fights in the hallway. Nothing against Gradkowski, who really does seem like a nice guy, but how many jerseys of his are in circulation? Was there ever a real demand for that jersey? I know he was a starting quarterback in the NFL, but it just seems a little weird to me.

Anyway, the therapist (his name is Joel, by the way) says I should talk about things with you that don’t have anything to do with Mikey Ortega or what he calls “the Ted O’Brien murder,” so here’s a memory I have:

As you remember, your first movie was Guitaardvark. I’m not going to mention how horrible it was, because your mom and I have already told you how excruciating it was to sit through that movie no matter how much you loved it. Anyway, one of the voice actors was a stand-up comedian named Billy Han. He played one of the scientists. Hearing his voice made me think about a time I saw him perform live. This was before he got famous enough to play a scientist in Guitaarvark. Your mom and I were still in college at the time. There was a Vietnamese guy sitting in the front row who wasn’t laughing at the jokes, just smiling. This annoyed Billy, who singled him out and told him he reminded him of the one-legged guy from Platoon.

I’m going to stop here for a second to tell you something you might have learned about me, had Joyce Chang-Hagerman not made dragging feet a company mandate. I will laugh at an Asian joke if I think it’s funny. This, along with my anger-management issues, is the thing your mother likes the least about me. The problem is, they’re normally not very funny. It’s always the same hackneyed Ching-Chong crap. Racist jokes are usually pretty boring, which is why when there’s some kind of interesting spin on it, I’ll laugh—this is between you and me, okay? To give you an example, Richard Pryor had a joke where he went to a Chinese restaurant, and the waiter was a Chinese man who stuttered. When he mimicked that Chinese accent and the stutter, I fell off the couch laughing. It was unexpected, which is what I think made me laugh.

So in Platoon, a movie you were too young to ever see, there was a one-legged Vietnamese villager who had this serene smile plastered on his face while the American G.I.s abused his friends and neighbors. His smile unsettles the G.I.s, who begin shooting at the ground beneath him, making him hop up and down on one leg, shouting at him to dance, before he falls over and they beat him to death. Long story short, Billy looks down from the stage at the Vietnamese guy, and pretends to shoot a machine gun at him, shouting at him to laugh motherfucker laugh. The guy finally broke out laughing—what else could he do?—and Billy pointed at me and the Vietnamese guy, telling the rest of the audience that we were the only ones allowed to laugh.

Anyway, I thought about that during a Billy Han Guitaardvark scene and chuckled to myself, and you touched my hand, leaned over, and said, See? Isn’t this movie funny? I used to think about that a lot, the sweetness in your voice, the gentle way you let me know we were sharing something special, even though you had no idea I was laughing at maybe the most tasteless joke I’d ever seen live in person.

But I could never tell you about that.

And now I can.

Because you’re dead.

Sorry.

For the rest of the movie, I thought about how you’d grow up in a world that was okay with racist jokes, particularly against Asians, and wondered if I wanted to be a guy who laughed at these jokes. What if someone had gotten a zinger off on you—would I have found it funny? I wondered if that Vietnamese guy at the Billy Han show had any kids, how he might feel if Han had leveled that joke at his son. That memory stopped being funny after that. Your brother has already had some racist crap thrown his way, which honestly shocked me. I’d foolishly thought you guys were all past that stuff, which is admittedly ridiculous. Of course we’re not past his stuff—how can you be with us as parents? It’s a hard thing, knowing the world isn’t really that much better than it was when you were a kid.

Your mom saw a Cleveland Browns Gradkowski jersey—even took a selfie with the guy as proof—so we’ve officially caught them all. She said she got a lot of dirty looks from old ladies but the guy wearing the jersey seemed like a real sweet guy.

art: Phil McAndrew

Hey, long time no see.

So here’s something: they caught a vanful of guys in front of the governor’s mansion. They were wearing balaclavas and Aaron Rodgers jerseys. They posted a manifesto on Facebook about socialism run amok in the government, how the natural order was being upended in the name of DEI, how they were going to stem the tide. Sometimes, I think about how the world is going to hell and feel bad for your brother and sister. Even with this new job, I’m not going to leave them much of anything. Sometimes, I wonder if you’re better off not having me burden you with my failures the way I will Dylan and Jamie.

I feel horrible saying that, and I pray I’m wrong, that things will turn around, that your brother and sister will figure it out and thrive in ways I wasn’t able to. Typical, isn’t it? We mess up the world and then expect the next generation to figure it out, to fend for themselves. Ted O’Brien’s kids won’t have to figure it out for themselves. They’ll have nice trust funds to fall back on. That’s a mean thing to say, but I don’t feel like deleting it. Besides, Joel says these things are supposed to be unfiltered. Someone was talking about how those kids (the small ones anyway) will grow up knowing people cheered their father’s grisly execution. Your mom and I talked about how it’s probably going to radicalize them. That if there was ever a chance they were going to have any sympathy for people like us, those days were long gone.

Actually, your mom still has hope for them. I, on the other hand, think those kids are going to grow up knowing people like us celebrated the deaths of people like them—they’re going to talk about how we didn’t even have the decency to look upon their father’s death with the kind of ambivalence they had for ours, and that will be unforgivable in their eyes.

Those idiots had the modern, tactical Punisher skull patches on the sleeves of their Rodgers jerseys. I guess some people will never know the difference between retribution and retaliation.

*

Ted O’Brien’s widow Thea was interviewed on TV. She said something that didn’t sit well with me, which is why I’m in here talking to you instead of watching TV with Mom.

“How would you feel,” Thea asked, “if some sick person took away someone who was precious to you just because they were angry?”

She said this in response to the reporter asking how she responded to all the people who’d come forward to talk about being denied coverage by Hygieia. She said her husband was just doing his job, that nothing he did was personal. And I yelled at the TV, how people like her took you from us, and didn’t even feel anything about it. At least Ortega felt something when he did what he did. All those people who took you from us felt nothing. It wasn’t personal to them, just business. Dragging their feet while you wasted away was just the cost of doing business. You were just a figure on a spreadsheet they showed to people, who then patted them on their backs for saving the company money. You and others like you are nothing but fingernail clippings to these people. They sweep you off the table into their hands and then toss you in the trash. Then they wash their hands and go out to expense their dinners and drinks where they talk about how the stuff they do every day is good because it makes them loads of money. Not once do they think about the people they hurt. We barely exist to them. We’re what your brother calls NPCs—non-playable characters in a video game where you’re supposed to rack up as many points as you can, a video game they’re playing on the easiest difficulty level. People like Mikey Ortega, and Danesh Razavi, and Cecily Marks are just glitches in the system. They just hit reboot and just go back to racking up points. I know that none of this is very profound to you. I know this because it isn’t very profound to me. It all seems fairly obvious, to be honest. But that’s kind of the point too. We don’t speak out because it all seems too obvious. What’s the point in pointing out obvious things? People just brush them off and forget they ever heard them because they’d already stored these things away when they themselves said them days, months, or years ago.

This is why clichés exist: they exist so we can feel smart when we say this is why clichés exist.

I don’t even know what I’m saying right now. I just know I’m pissed off to the point of exploding.

Not sure if I can do this anymore, kid. This doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you. I think about you every day. You have to know that. The fact I’m apologizing to you, when all I’m doing is talking to myself should be proof of this. If you’re up there looking down on me, sorry to disappoint you yet again. I love you.

Hey, it’s been a while. Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Things have been pretty good. Everyone’s doing great. I’ll fill you in, I promise, but first I want to start with something that happened to me.

Heard “Tubthumping” at the mall today. Made me think about how you used to grip the side of the crib and bounce your knees up and down when that song came on. We used to play it for you when you woke up and man oh man did it make you happy. It always struck me as kind of wrong, my baby dancing to a song about drinking. But as I was sitting outside that Old Navy waiting for your mom and sister, I had a realization. It’s not a drinking song. Those people taking all those drinks aren’t drunks—well, they are, but they’re also more than that. They’re regular working people who get ground down and screwed by the system. What makes the song great is these people never quit. Think about it (again, not really saying this to you, but to an imaginary reader that doesn’t exist), it’s not like well-off people drink like that. It’s not exactly refined behavior to chase a whiskey with a vodka and then a lager.

It's not a drinking song at all. It’s a song about holding onto your dignity. I know this isn’t ground-breaking commentary. The band who sang that song were anarchists or something like that, so it isn’t like I’m coming from left field here.

Life goes on. Whatever bad thing happened yesterday, you brush it off and keep on keeping on because that’s all there is and it’s what we do.

As I sat there listening to that song, all I could do was think about you in your crib, smiling with your hair sticking up at every angle, grinning your four-toothed grin, bouncing up and down while this band of anarchists sang about getting back up whenever they got knocked down. And then I thought about how we used to watch you sleep in the hospital, how it was one of the times you weren’t in pain, that just by going to sleep, you were showing a kind of power and grace someone like me could never comprehend in their entire life.

You were so goddamn brave, so much braver than I was. So much braver than I’ll ever be.

I sat on that bench thinking about you, sat on that bench watching people pushing strollers, and staring at their phones, and holding hands, and arguing with their teenagers, and chatting up pretty girls, and eating giant pretzels, and listening to air pods, and taking lunch breaks, just walking past me, and just broke down.

I don’t know why it happened. Maybe I never will. All I know is that song did something to me and made me cry. I didn’t care about the people staring at me, ignored the people who asked me if I was okay, even the ones who patted me on the shoulder and told me they were sorry I was having a rough time, that they hoped things got better. I ignored everyone and just sat there, bawling like a baby.

STORY:
Jeff Chon is the author of Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun and This Is the Afterlife. His work is forthcoming in 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era.

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ART:
Phil McAndrew is an illustrator, a cartoonist, and a writer. His work has been published by The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Nib, Popula, and many other publications. He is the author and illustrator of CRYING IN FRONT OF YOUR DOG AND OTHER STORIES (Uncivilized Books, 2013). Phil has also illustrated a handful of books for kids like the CAVEBOY DAVE series of graphic novels written by Aaron Reynolds (Viking Books, 2016 and 2018), MONSTER SCIENCE by Helaine Becker (Kids Can Press, 2016), and YOUR MIND MAKES THOUGHTS LIKE YOUR BUTT MAKES FARTS by Todd Strauss-Schulson (Wisdom Publications, 2023). Phil lives in the Buffalo, NY area and teaches illustration at Syracuse University.

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Jeff about this story!

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