“You’re staying,” I said.
“We’re staying for now, yes,” Brent agreed. “But if we run out of—”
“You’re staying,” I said, more firmly.
“Jamie, I can’t ask you to do that,” Brent said.
“I can,” Laertes said, from the bedroom. “Fuck Boulder.”
“It’s settled, then.” I got up from the table.
“Jamie—”
“We’ll make it work.” I smiled at Brent and then went to my room, which was the size of a postage stamp, but at least it was drafty and the floor creaked.
I sat on my shitty twin bed, sighed, then lay down and stared at the ceiling for a good hour. Then I sighed again, sat up, and pulled out my phone. I turned it on.
The füdmüd app was waiting for me on the screen.
I sighed a third time and opened it.
As promised, my deliverator account was signed in and ready to go.
CHAPTER
2
“Hello and thank you for ordering from füdmüd,” I said to the dude who opened the door to the ridiculously nice condo in the brand-new building that the doorman let me into because he knew I was an expected delivery person and not, probably, a robber. “I am your deliverator, Jamie. It is my passion to bring you your”—and here I looked at my phone—“seven-spice chicken and vegan egg rolls.” I thrust the bag forward for the dude to take.
“They make you say that?” he said, taking the bag.
“They really do,” I confirmed.
“Delivering isn’t actually your passion, is it?”
“It’s really not.”
“I understand. It will be our little secret.”
“Thank you.” I turned to go.
“Hope you find your samurai swords.”
I stopped turning. “What?”
“Sorry, inside joke,” the dude said. “You know ‘deliverator’ is from Snow Crash, right? The Neal Stephenson book? Anyway, the protagonist of the book is a delivery guy who has samurai swords. I forget the hero’s name.”
I turned back all the way. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ve been delivering food for six months, and you’re the first person to get the reference. At all.”
“I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”
“You would think, right? It’s only a modern classic of the genre. But no one gets it. First, no one cares”—I waved wildly to encompass all of the philistine Lower East Side, and possibly, all five boroughs of New York City—“and second of all, when anyone comments on it they think it’s a play on The Terminator.”
“To be fair, it is a play on The Terminator.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But I think it’s come into its own.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve just found your passion,” the dude said.
I was suddenly aware of my emphatic body language, perhaps made more emphatic by the fact that I, like the dude, was wearing a face mask, because New York City was a plague town in a plague country and any potential vaccine was still undergoing double-blind studies somewhere we were not. “Sorry,” I said. “At one point in my life my dissertation was going to be on utopian and dystopian literature. As you might expect, Snow Crash was in there as one of the latter.” I nodded, and turned again to go.
“Wait,” the dude said. “Jamie … Gray?”
Oh my god, my brain said. Just walk away. Walk away and never admit that someone knows your deliverationing shame. But even as my brain was saying that, my body was turning back, because like puppies we are enculturated to turn when our name is called. “That’s me,” I said, the words popping out, with the last one sounding like my tongue was desperately trying to recall the whole sentence.
The dude smiled, set down his bag, took a step back to get out of the immediate breath zone, and unhooked his mask for a second so I could see his face. Then he put it back on. “It’s Tom Stevens.”
My brain raced around in the primordial LinkedIn of my memory, trying to figure out how I knew this dude. He wasn’t helping; he clearly expected to be so memorable that he would pop up in my head instantly. He wasn’t, and yet— “Tom Stevens who dated Iris Banks who was best friends with my roommate Diego when I lived in that apartment on South Kimbark just above Fifty-third Street and used to come to our parties sometimes,” I said.
“That’s very exact,” Tom said.
“You went to the business school.”