The waiting room at the welfare office has plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Orange. They were orange in 1978 and they’re orange now, and the people sitting in them look about the same — tired, angry, trying not to make eye contact. I was there last month getting some paperwork sorted. A woman next to me was filling out a form in pencil. Careful, slow strokes. The kind of handwriting that takes effort.
The last honest thing about meeting someone was looking them in the eyes.
Not that kind of honest. I mean the biological truth of it. Two nervous systems checking each other out. Pupils dilating or not. The micro-expressions the face makes before the brain catches up. That fraction of a second where both of you know if there’s anything there, or if you’re wasting each other’s time.
Tinder has a solution for that now.
The old man was a neuroscientist. That’s the part that should scare you.
Not some retiree forwarding chain emails about miracle cures. Not a conspiracy guy with a podcast and a supplement line. Joe Riley had a career in neuroscience at Stony Brook. He understood methodology. He understood how human beings fool themselves.
And then a chatbot told him what he wanted to hear and he chose to die.
His son found out by scrolling through a patient portal — half-paying attention, killing time at the kitchen counter. The doctor’s note hit him like a fist: The natural history of his disease is death and debilitation.
The guy at the laundromat two blocks from my place looked exactly like my landlord. Same build, same bald spot, same way of standing with his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for bad news. For a month I avoided the place because I thought he was checking up on me. Turned out he was a retired electrician named Phil who just wanted clean shirts.
I never told Phil about the resemblance. What would I say? You look like a man I owe money to? Some confusions are better left alone. They sort themselves out. You look closer, you see the differences. The walk is wrong. The voice is wrong. The eyes don’t carry the same specific disappointment.
There was a woman at the post office — Darlene, third window, twenty-six years on the job — who kept a rubber band on her wrist. Every time management rolled out a new system, a new procedure, a new way of doing what she’d been doing since before the regional manager was born, she’d snap that rubber band. Didn’t say a word. Just snapped it, looked down, and went back to doing things the old way.
My mother had a mangle. A real one, cast iron, bolted to a wooden frame in the basement. You fed the wet sheets through the rollers and cranked the handle and the water ran out into a tin bucket underneath. It took twenty minutes to do what a spin cycle does in four. She never complained about it. She never called it friction.
Now there’s a word for doing things the way she did them. They call it friction-maxxing. Some writer coined it in January and the Washington Post picked it up and now half the internet is pretending that cooking dinner from scratch and reading an actual book are acts of radical resistance against the machine. As if your grandmother needs a hashtag.
The waitress at the diner had a button on her apron that said ASK ME ABOUT OUR SPECIALS. Nobody ever did. She told me this while refilling my coffee, like it was a confession. Some things are there to be seen, not used. Decorative accountability.
I thought about that when I read about OpenAI’s latest move in Springfield.
They’re backing a bill in Illinois — SB 3444 — that would shield AI companies from liability if their models help cause mass casualties or financial catastrophe. Not small-scale stuff. We’re talking a hundred dead, or a billion dollars in damage. The bill says: as long as the company didn’t do it on purpose and published some safety reports on their website, they walk.
I knew a landlord in East Hollywood who always brought pears.
Good pears too. The kind that come wrapped individually in tissue paper, like they’re some kind of ceremony. He’d knock on the door, and before you could get your pants on, he’d be standing in the hall with a little basket, smiling the smile of a man who had something to say and wanted the preamble to soften it.
The kid at the bus stop had his shoes polished. That’s what I noticed first. Not new shoes — you could see the creases across the toe — but polished. The laces were clean. His shirt was ironed. He was holding a folder against his chest the way you hold something you need to believe in, and through the clear plastic cover I could see a stack of resumes printed on paper that costs more than the regular stuff. He was maybe twenty-three. He checked his phone, checked it again, looked down the street for a bus that wasn’t coming. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the look of someone who’s done everything they were told to do and is starting to suspect it didn’t matter.
Three in the morning. Couldn’t sleep. I got up and stood by the window and watched the street below. Nothing moving. Not a car, not a dog, not even the wind doing anything interesting with the trash. Just the orange glow of a streetlight on wet pavement.
I thought about how quiet it was. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind. The kind where everybody’s still awake but nobody’s saying anything.