In “Gatekeeping,” your story in this week’s issue, a man works at an airport, pushing people in wheelchairs to their gates. He’s also seeing a flight attendant, but can’t quite commit to a relationship. In the airport, a liminal kind of place, he’s sort of drifting through his life. Why did you give the narrator this occupation—what narrative possibilities did it open up for you?

A recurring theme in my work is journeying: characters going to, or coming from, some other place. The ways in which physical and liminal distances shift an individual’s sense of self work their way in, too. But, here, it felt interesting to center a protagonist at the site of other characters’ journeys while his own plays out in comparatively stationary circumstances. This framing also posed a challenge: How could an individual’s narrative trajectory advance alongside the story’s allegedly supporting characters, despite his apparent disdain for literal and figurative motion? And emotion? Looking for ways to highlight the degree to which an individual’s trajectory is constantly determined, in ways both immediately discernible and less visible, by those around him, felt fascinating.

One solution was positioning the protagonist to interact with myriad individuals and groups very different from himself in an elliptical fashion. In that sense, his stationary predicament becomes a narrative asset. Despite his immediate situation, he encounters more, and varied, communities than he otherwise might—all of whom, in the midst of their own respective narrative arcs, further his own by proximity. Character-wise, similar dynamics exist in my next novel, “Minor Notes,” and also in a handful of other projects I’m working on. Luckily, as a form, the short story continues to serve as fertile ground for narrative experimentation.

As ever, music helped a ton. In early drafts, I cycled between hoo’s “hoàng hôn,” Jia*’s “Nightlight,” and Masakatsu Takagi’s “Marginalia.” Then, while editing, I mostly kept CHO CO PA CO CHO CO QUIN QUIN’s “Quarantine Mood” on repeat.

The story is told through a series of vignettes with various passengers. What drew you to this mosaic-like structure, and how did you go about insuring that these episodes would maintain narrative momentum?

I was curious about the extent to which repetition in narrative underlines growth. The route I opted for here was attempting to construct a single narrative composed of much smaller ones—each with their own arc, stakes, and conclusions—in the hope that the information gleaned from those moments would contribute to the construction of a simultaneously developing whole. The protagonist deals with his daily misadventures—some innocuous, others less so—while navigating more foundational challenges of intimacy, mental health, dependence, and risk. But the former threads are instrumental to the reader’s understanding of the latter ones. Those later motifs, I hope, create a landing space for emotional release.

This compositional simultaneity felt close to a simulacrum of life as we navigate it on a regular basis. But I tinkered with this story for about six months. Significant changes in our world took place in that interim. Those, too, impacted the dynamics of the many folks, from all over the globe, whom the protagonist comes into contact with, and had to be addressed in subsequent drafts. But reference points are always helpful, right? A few works that were particularly useful in codifying the form included the television series “Ore wa Shinji Matta ze!,” Rachel Khong’s collection “My Dear You,” and the animated series “Chiikawa.”

JT, the flight attendant, dangles a powerful invitation to the narrator, asking him to visit him in Taiwan. At the same time, the narrator’s brother seems to depend on his presence. How did you want the reader to think about this tension?

The tensions between an individual’s perceived capacity for change, the belief in that capacity (or lack thereof) from the people around them, and an infrastructure that either expands or negates those possibilities fascinated me here. JT offers consistency and stability, of a sort, for someone who craves those things. But life happens, as it often does, and he has to leave. As a result, the narrator’s constants are now in flux, but not necessarily unattainable: their new forms would require him to make an active decision to change his own life. Or not.

His brother offers another sort of constant—a weight both tethering the narrator to the world and, perhaps, prohibiting him from expanding. In initial drafts, the brother’s presence served more as a “dependent” structurally, and a hindrance to the protagonist’s personal growth. But this was, ultimately, significantly less interesting than a more symbiotic relationship, complicated by their inability to communicate their desires to each other. The narrator needs his brother, more than he would like to admit. His brother is very aware of that, but hasn’t codified the language to broach it.

So the onus shifts from party to party: At what point do they question each other’s value in their lives, and the extent to which their current circumstances prevent them from expanding in fruitful ways? How much comfort is an individual open to sacrificing for the promise of growth?

The narrator observes intimate, sometimes heartbreaking details of strangers’ lives—hidden relationships, old grudges, secret sugar babies. What does this constant proximity to other people’s most private moments do to him, and how did you want that to set up his final decision?

A component of narrative I continue reaching toward is the tension between what’s known by an individual—physically, intimately, intellectually—and what is hoped for. The question of whether it’s possible to push toward softness and understanding, when all available evidence in this world alludes to their impossibility, and finiteness, in comparison with cruelty and hardness, continually appears in my work. Partly, maybe, because that line of inquiry is expansive—every day, our societies morph in new and horrifying ways. Partly, maybe, because various solutions appear in tandem—every day, despite it all, people still find a way to choose softness.

While editing, I watched Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden.” That film is a blessing. But one thing it expanded for me is the structural question of how, in the midst of systemic and interpersonal cruelty, one can still reach for possibility. The potential reward of community can outweigh the risk of failure. And to what extent that reaching, even if only very occasionally fruitful, justifies the work of creating conditions for gentleness. The reaching and flailing toward possibility is the narrative. While I was drafting, it was important to me that every character in this story had space for complication, while still making the choice to strive for motion. They choose to actively reconfigure their language and actions to live among one another as best they know how.

As someone continually at odds with whether this is possible in real life, I think narrative remains one means of codifying softness’s value. And it contorts the predicament: breaching impossibilities yields what’s possible. Kindness is impossible until it’s a habit—then it’s just daily life. Personally, the solution is very often: go outside and be with your communities, fuck around at a gay bar and think about how lucky I am to be able to do that in this moment of genocide and fascism and artificial intelligence drinking all of the water. But watching and reading and hearing people grapple with these questions, and win, however temporarily, before returning to the conversation however many times our finitude allows us, bringing along our newfound experiences—this is one of the things that keeps me going. For now, I’ll continue to work. The hope is to continue contributing to that ongoing conversation in capacities that have value. ♦