Kaiju Preservation Society(4)

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.”

“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?”