“I did. Hope you don’t mind. Not super academic.”
“I mean”—I motioned to the very nice condo in the brand-new building—“it turned out okay for you.”
He glanced at the condo as if noticing it for the first time, the bastard. “I guess it did. Anyway, I remember you talking about your dissertation at one of those parties once.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I did that a lot at parties back then.”
“It’s fine,” Tom assured me. “I mean, it got me to read Snow Crash, right? You changed lives.”
I smiled at that.
“So why did you leave your doctoral program?” Tom asked me, the next time I delivered food to him, which was an Ethiopian mixed meat combo with injera.
“I had a quarter-life crisis,” I said. “Or a twenty-eight-year-old crisis, which is the same only slightly later.”
“Got it.”
“I saw all these people I knew of, people like you, no offense—”
Tom grinned through his mask; I saw it through the eye crinkles. “None taken.”
“—going off and having lives and careers and taking vacations and meeting hot people, and I was sitting in Hyde Park with the same sixteen people, in a crappy apartment, reading books and arguing with undergrads that no, actually, they did have to turn in their papers on time.”
“I thought you liked reading books.”
“I do, but if you’re only reading books because you have to, it becomes much less fun.”
“But when you got your doctorate, you could become a professor.”
I snorted at this. “You have a much more optimistic view of the academic landscape than I do. I was looking down the barrel of adjunct professorships for the rest of my life.”
“Is that bad?”
I pointed at his food. “I’d make even less than I do delivering your injera.”
“So you ditched it all to become a deliverator,” Tom said as I delivered his Korean fried chicken.
“No,” I said. “I actually got a job at füdmüd. A real one with benefits and stock options. Then I got fired by their dicknozzle CEO just as the pandemic ramped up.”
“That sucks.”
“You know what really sucks,” I said. “After he punted me into the street, he took the ideas I had for locking up restaurants and paying deliverators more. Well, some of the deliverators anyway. You only get paid more if you get more than four stars. So remember to give me five stars, please, I’m right on that edge. Every star counts, my dear deliverationee.”
“Deliverationee?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t ask.”
Tom smiled again; eye crinkles. “I take it you weren’t the one to come up with the ‘deliverator’ name.”
“Oh, hell, no.”
“So, you worked there, you can tell me this,” Tom said, when I delivered his Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, which honestly I was surprised was allowed within the borders of New York City at all, much less this close to Little Italy. “What’s with the umlauts?”
“You mean, why is it füdmüd, and not the more logical FoodMood?”
“Yes, that.”
“Because FoodMood was already taken by a food delivery app in Bangladesh, and they wouldn’t sell the name,” I said. “So if you’re ever in the Mymensingh area, be sure to use the app with the name that actually makes sense.”
“I’ve been to Bangladesh,” Tom said. “Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“For my job. It’s complicated.”
“Are you a spy?”
“No.”
“A mercenary? That would explain this very nice condo in a brand-new building.”
“I’m pretty sure mercenaries live in double-wides in the woods of North Carolina,” Tom said.
“Of course you would say that,” I said. “That’s what they tell mercenaries to say.”
“I work for an NGO, actually.”
“Definitely a mercenary.”
“I’m not a mercenary.”
“I’m going to remember you said that when I see you on CNN as part of a Bangladeshi coup.”
“This is the last time I’m going to get a delivery from you for a while, I’m afraid,” Tom said to me, when I delivered his shawarma platter to him. “My job is taking me back out into the field and I’ll be there for several months.”
“Actually this is last time you’ll ever get a delivery from me,” I said.