Fiction: Unpaired

As if on cue, my phone decided I was hungry. It pushed a map of the surrounding neighborhood to the front of the screen. Places I didn’t recognize, or at least hadn’t eaten in for a couple of years, were highlighted with slowly pulsating pale blue dots. Two Chipotles, a gyro truck, some taco place I had a vague memory of, a soup and sandwich joint that actually looked new, and of course a Whole Foods Go. All of them were Amazon affiliates. I sat in the front of the truck and thought about how I was going to have to learn the city all over again, build myself up a new mental map of places I could easily go, lunches I could afford to eat. Or maybe I didn’t need to bother. Maybe I could just let my phone and the data brokers take care of it all.

A week earlier, my phone would have recommended the diner across the road, the one I was staring numbly at through the windshield. It would have known I was heading for it as soon as I turned onto this block, and then probably tried to distract me with coupon codes for some other, competing Uber-affiliated place. Now, it knew better. It knew going in there would be futile and painful and awkward. And, most important, it knew that going in there would be expensive. I didn’t belong in there anymore. My phone was coming to terms with my changing life a lot easier than I was. 

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EMILY LUONG | UNSPLASH

It throbbed again, pushed something else to its screen. A text from Nakisha: where r u? everyone’s here! I started to compose a reply but stopped myself. It was pointless—I had nothing to say. Plus, if I did, it’d be weird to text it, when I could just cross the road and walk into the diner and say it to her face. She was in there right now, with a bunch of other Uber drivers. We used to try to come here at least once a month, just to catch up and hang, chat shit and bitch about how fucked everything was. If I was honest, it was always a little tough for me—being around people felt like a struggle at the best of times—but this was more about not being able to face any more goodbyes.

I stared at the diner some more, guessing who would be inside. I tried to hold their faces in my mind, but one by one they all slipped away from me, lost in the anonymous crowd. It was always there, a shuffling horde of familiar faces dissolved into vague, generic sketches. Friends, family, acquaintances, forever on the edge of my peripheral vision. Faces lost to me, swept away by the waves of sickness, death, change, and hard economics that had emptied out the city I once knew. Faces it was a whole lot easier to just let fade away than to try and find again, or to mourn.

Nakisha’s face didn’t fade, though, as hard as I tried to push it away, as much as I wanted it to be absorbed into the crowd. Let me make this clear now, though, to avoid any misunderstanding: there was never any hint of romance there. No unrequited this, no flirtatious that. There was no obsession, not from me. Just fear and awkwardness, and above all selfish guilt at not being able to accept genuine kindness and friendship, because I knew that one day they would also be ripped away. I hadn’t told anybody in there that I’d switched, not even Nakisha, and I was feeling pretty shitty about it. I’d met her when I’d started driving deliveries for Uber, just after Mayor Yang got elected. He’d swept in with a 1.7% lead over the other guy, which is what Americans call a landslide now, on a promise to solve New York City like a math problem. He’d promised everyone they’d get some money from the city every month to help us rebuild our lives and then, after the pandemic, from his Universal Basic Income experiment. But you can’t solve a math problem if you don’t know the numbers, and Yang didn’t get to see them until he was in City Hall, and then it was suddenly very clear that they didn’t quite add up. So he had to turn to the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, the rest of them—to help him keep his promise. 

Source: MIT Technology Review

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