Apparently, I Was Wearing Something

I accepted the order because of a feeling, which is generally a terrible way to run a delivery business.

The drive into downtown Phoenix was long. The tip was moderate. Under normal circumstances, I would have let the offer disappear and waited for something that made mathematical sense. But something about this one nudged me to take it.

Fine. Intuition could have a turn with the business.

It was the end of a long day of deliveries. By that point, I had used up most of whatever made me an interesting person to speak to. What remained could follow directions, identify apartment numbers, and say, “Have a good night.” Anything beyond that would require advance notice.

The delivery was going to The Stewart, an apartment building where my first challenge was figuring out how to enter it. I found myself in a basement parking area, already wondering how many stages there would be between my car and the person who wanted dinner.

A security guard was down there. I asked whether I could double-park long enough to drop off the order.

“Yeah, of course. Right there is cool. I’ll watch your car.”

An unexpectedly smooth beginning. Usually, parking for a downtown delivery involves making a temporary agreement with yourself about the meaning of a sign.

I headed toward the elevator.

Two attractive women were waiting there. While we waited, I noticed the sideways glances—the quick kind you can catch without either person committing to having looked. Then the elevator arrived, and all three of us attempted to occupy its entrance at once.

I stepped back and held out an arm.

“You first.”

They went in. I followed and took a spot at the back.

At the floor marked for the gym, another woman got on.

She was spectacular. Very much my type, wearing the kind of gym outfit that suggested the workout had gone well and she knew it. She pressed the button for her floor, took a position right by the doors, and stood facing the back of the elevator.

Facing me.

The doors were behind her.

There are conventions in elevators. You face the doors. You look at the numbers. You pretend the other people are furniture. She had entered, selected a destination, and arranged herself as though I would be giving a presentation on the way there.

Then I realized the other two women were angled toward me too.

I was at the back with somebody’s dinner, trying to find somewhere to put my eyes.

Looking straight ahead meant looking at her. Looking to either side meant looking at one of the other women. Looking down was available, but I couldn’t spend the entire ride inspecting a delivery as though it contained assembly instructions.

She kept glancing at her phone, then looking toward me. I would catch her looking, look away, and then look back to find out whether I had imagined it, which naturally meant catching her looking again.

An introduction might have simplified things.

I contributed silence.

There is probably a version of me who would have known what to do with that elevator. Asked someone’s name. Made a joke out loud. Participated in whatever seemed to be happening.

The version present was still running delivery software and had not been informed of the change in assignment.

We reached the gym woman’s floor—the one she had pressed the button for herself.

The doors opened behind her.

She stayed where she was, her attention still coming back toward me between looks at her phone.

I watched the open doorway. Then her. Then the doorway.

This seemed like information someone should act on.

The doors began to close.

Only then did she look up, check the floor, and realize she was about to travel past her own destination.

She made her exit.

I remained in place, having successfully said nothing during an entire situation.

The elevator continued. Eventually, I arrived at the floor where someone was expecting me to perform the much simpler task of handing over dinner.

As I stepped into the hallway, a woman emerged from an apartment with a cat on a leash.

Of course.

An orange cat, out for a walk through the building. I said hello and continued toward the delivery.

The customer’s name was Jayden. I had assumed Jayden would be a man, which turned out to be one more incorrect prediction I had made about this order.

A cute woman answered the door.

Then she asked me about Delta Infinite.

That got my attention more completely than anything in the elevator.

I had put my asteroid-mining work in my Uber Eats bio, an act of optimism comparable to putting a message in a bottle and dropping it onto a restaurant’s pickup shelf. As far as I knew, nobody read those things. People wanted to know where their food was. Understandably. I also wanted to know where their food was. It occupied a substantial portion of my working life.

But she had read it.

She wanted to know about the company. About asteroid mining. About how I was working toward that while doing deliveries.

Suddenly, I was having a conversation about the thing I actually wanted to build, standing in an apartment hallway with the person whose dinner I had brought.

At least this was a subject I knew how to talk about.

I gave her my website and told her she could find me on LinkedIn. She was blushing, saying she would look into it, telling me how impressed she was. I was flattered, but I was also touched. There’s something disarming about being recognized for the larger thing you’re trying to do while you’re in the middle of doing the thing that pays for gas.

We also had an audience.

The woman with the cat had followed me down the hallway and was peering around the corner.

The cat was peering around it too.

Jayden noticed them as well. Whatever uncertainty I’d had about interpreting the elevator, this was an observable event: two people having a conversation at a doorway while a woman and her cat conducted surveillance from a corner.

When I turned to leave, the woman immediately bent down, scooped up the cat, and attempted a retreat so abrupt she nearly fell over.

It is difficult to withdraw discreetly from an eavesdropping position while collecting an entire animal.

Unfortunately for both of us, the way back to the elevator went directly past her.

When I rounded the corner, she was standing in the hallway, doing her best impression of someone who had been standing in that hallway for entirely unrelated reasons.

We silently agreed to proceed with that version of events.

“Aw, what a cute cat you have,” I said. “Way to go on a walk together.”

I asked whether I could pet him.

“Ooooo, suuuure.”

I crouched and held out my hand. The cat approached, curious, and brought his nose toward my fingers.

We shocked each other.

Static electricity. An actual spark.

After an elevator full of ambiguous looks and a surprisingly warm conversation at the customer’s door, the only verifiable chemistry I had managed was with a cat.

He looked up at me, confused.

Fair. I had offered friendship and delivered voltage.

He sniffed again but declined the petting, walking away with the quiet authority cats bring to a failed interaction.

I tried to explain that I lived with a cat too, somehow choosing the word “housemate,” which did not improve the clarity of the conversation. The woman seemed to be having trouble finding words herself.

I wished her a good night and returned to the elevator.

Back in the parking garage, the security guard was still standing right by my car.

“How did it go?” he asked.

Then: “What did you think?”

Two perfectly ordinary questions, perhaps, if you had just toured an apartment.

I had delivered food.

Coming from the man who had waved me into the building and stayed behind with my car, they struck me as oddly specific. He seemed curious in a way I couldn’t quite place, as though I’d returned from something he had recommended.

What did I think of what, exactly?

The elevator? The customer? The small electrical incident with the hallway cat?

He had practically been standing beside my car the whole time. There was no reason to think he knew anything about what had happened upstairs.

Still, I had the peculiar feeling that everyone had received a briefing except me.

I got in the car.

That was my last delivery. I was done.

The evening, apparently, had one more stop.

Back at my apartment complex, the parking was nearly full, so I had to leave the car far from where I was staying. I was tired and burnt out, walking through the complex, ready to get inside and stop being perceived.

I hadn’t asked anyone for a number. I hadn’t turned the evening into anything. Mostly, I had carried food, missed conversational openings, and apologized to a cat with my body language.

Part of me already wished a different version of myself had accepted that order. Someone with enough energy left to be curious in the moment, instead of saving all his questions for the walk home.

But I was the one who’d been there. At the end of that day, at that point in my life, getting through the encounters was about as much as I had available.

Then a woman doing the nightly trash pickup looked up as I passed.

“Your cologne smells reaaaaally good.”

My brain had already clocked out. Whatever response might have suited the moment would have to be handled by the next shift.

“I’m not wearing anyyyyyy…”

The words trailed around the corner with me.

I still don’t know what she smelled.

But apparently, I’d been wearing it all night.