This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Trisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Han Ong, read his story, Futures, from the March 30th, 2020 issue of the magazine.

Ong, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize, is the author of more

than a dozen plays and two novels, Fixer Chow and The Disinherited.

Now here's Han Ong.

Futures.

Did you check his phone? I told you I'm not going to do that. But it's so easy.

They are not talking about Martine. Toby pronounces it Martin, because that's how Martine himself pronounced it, being from Chile.

It was only last year that Martine stayed with him,

and Toby's father was crazy about the young tennis player.

Since then, disillusionment has spoiled his father's gaze, and every tennis player after Martine can only be a reminder of him

and an object of suspicion.

I don't think I could live through that again, Toby's father says, and switch us back to the

subject of the new guy. How difficult could it be? Just ask to borrow his phone. Say you want to

play a game. Say I don't allow you to on your own phone,

then take a look at his messages for anything iffy. Head things off at the pass.

He'll know I went through his messages. Tell him you touched it by accident. Do I have to feed you

everything? Toby has only his father and his father has only Toby, plus their palatial estate in La Jolla.

Many months out of the year, Toby is left alone with a groundskeeper and a companion.

All right, a nanny, while his father is in Macau, tending to his casinos and his other businesses.

But this is the part of the year that they always spend together, roughly from the beginning of March to late April.

...