PROLOGUE
Benjamin Blumenthal’s life isn’t empty. He tells himself so every morning.
Sure, he lives alone, with no one to keep him company but an ill-tempered cat; sure, most of his friends live out of town. Sure, his family’s back in Michigan and don’t exactly lower Ben’s stress levels when they call—sure, he lives in one of the world’s most vibrant cities, but he doesn’t get out much. Sure, he works a soulless job that doesn’t challenge him, that doesn’t even value him enough to make him an official part of the team. So what? As far as Ben can tell, an empty life is a matter of perspective, and he’s determined not to fall victim to self-pity or despair. He has his health. He has his apartment, his steady paycheck, his beloved if somewhat vicious cat, and great people in his life, however far away they might be. Maybe it’s not much, but it’s his, and it’s enough.
It has to be enough, because it’s everything he’s got.
My life isn’t empty, Ben thinks each morning as he gets ready for work; as he walks the six blocks to the subway; as he waits an interminable age for the subway to (hopefully) arrive. It runs through his mind on the bumpy ride to Formica Media’s midtown offices, as he rides the elevator twenty-seven floors upand settles in at his cubicle. He clings to it as he sits through endless, mind-numbing meetings with coworkers he hardly knows and doesn’t like, and through endless, mind-numbing projects on topics he’s never cared about. As he rides the subway home, makes a needlessly elaborate dinner and gets ready for bed—as he lives through day after unchanging day, each one slipping by the same as the last—he reminds himself over and over so he doesn’t forget it:My life’s not empty at all.
ONE
There are some jobs so boring that those unlucky enough to work them spend each moment thinking longingly of the end of their day, when they can cast aside their email inboxes and sensible blazers and ride off into the sunset. Ben’s job is so boring it makes those jobs look like lion taming.
Theideaof the job isn’t bad, which is to say that video editing itself isn’t bad. Ben almost enjoys video editing. It’s not like it’s his passion or anything, but he studied it in school, and he knows he’s good at it. It’s even satisfying sometimes, to cut things together in a way that watches smoothly, to make each piece of a narrative slide into the next one, seamless to the naked eye.
That’s not what Ben does for Formica, though. For Formica, Ben edits technical and instructional videos, and edits more technical and instructional videos, and sits through long strategy meetings about the technical and instructional videos he’s going to be editing, in which no one ever says anything interesting or useful. Occasionally, he gets pulled away from this thrilling nightmare to edit advertisements, which is an equally boring, but usually morally worse, nightmare. His coworkers, many of whom have been present and unpleasant during some of Ben’sless poised moments, have the emotional depth of a puddle between them, and roughly the same intelligence; his bosses, to the extent he can call them that, offer no guidance or encouragement, just deadlines to meet. Yet he puts up with it all, and in exchange enjoys the dubious pleasure of a permanent contractor role, a paycheck that would be higher if his role wasnota contract position, benefits that cost him more than those of his less capable coworkers, and a small cube on the twenty-seventh floor where his spirit goes to die every morning.
So he spends most afternoons with a laptop set up in a variety of positions in one of the restaurants on the ground floor of the building. Sometimes he’s perched on the edge of an armchair, absently running a hand through his dark hair; sometimes he’s resting his chin on his hand, comforted by the familiar, bristly texture of his carefully maintained, closely cropped beard; sometimes he’s hunched like a gargoyle over one of the mirror-finished, metallic tables, scowling balefully down at his own face, which would be pleasingly square if it weren’t for his sharply pointed chin. However he’s positioned, though, he’s always doing the same thing: looking for interesting people to talk to while he works. It’s that or lose his mind.
“Hey, kid,” Rick says one such Thursday afternoon, as Ben walks through the door of Brew, the coffee shop on the west side of the building. They’re in the last dregs of September, October only a day or two away and eager to bring its traditional weather, and it shows through the coffee shop’s large glass windows; something that looks to be a combination of rain and sleet is whipping into them. Ben shudders very slightly, his mind skipping forward unpleasantly to his journey home tonight, and then wants to keep shuddering when Rick uses a foot to push a chair out from his table and says, “Pop a squat.”
Ben looks at him balefully, hiking his computer bag up a little higher on his shoulder. Rick is…Rick. He’s a perfectly nice guy,Ben supposes, but that’s about all. The whole point of lurking in these terrible corporate restaurants during the afternoon is to befree, in case an actually fascinating person comes down from one of the many publishing outlets Formica counts under its vast corporate umbrella. They usually don’t, but now and then he has a conversation that makes working in this building worthwhile.
Rick, a thickly mustachioed, salt-and-pepper-haired white guy on the far side of middle age, once spent a whole conversation describing to Ben a fish he caught; he’d used the word “slippery” eighteen times. Scintillating, he is not. But the conversational pickings are slim today, just Rick and weird sexist Kenny from the sports website on twenty-three, and Ben has vowed never to talk tohimagain. Rick, at least, works forGastronome—and while Ben wouldn’t necessarily call it thebestcooking magazine on the market, it’s one of his personal favorites, and he’s been reading it since he was a child.
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’” Ben says, “and please never say ‘pop a squat’ ever again,” but he sits down in the offered chair anyway.
Rick laughs. Rick, Ben notes a little wearily, is often laughing at things Ben says that he doesn’t mean to be jokes. It’s part of what makes him such a frustrating conversationalist—Ben’s genuine attempts at humor fly right over his head, but Rick finds his actual personality hilarious.
“Look, kid,” Rick says, in flagrant violation of the request made only moments before, “I think I might have something for you.”
“Well, that’s ominous,” Ben says. “What kind of something? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
Again, Rick laughs. It really is very annoying. “A job, actually. Or—a project, I guess. You do video editing, right?”
“I…do,” Ben says, surprised and, weirdly, a little touched. He’s always assumed that his side of their conversations drifted out of Rick’s head like so much smoke the minute Ben walkedaway, but apparently, Rick’s been paying attention, at least occasionally. “Why?”
“Oh,” Rick says, and waves a hand. “Upstairs wants us to do more—what’d they say—‘accessible Gen Z content.’ Some nonsense about how the modern consumer doesn’t have the attention span to read a recipe or something. It all sounds pretty stupid to me, but.” He shrugs, affecting a commiserating expression. “You know how it is, when upstairs comes calling.”
The only person in Ben’s life who he even remotely thinks of as “upstairs” is Mrs. C, the octogenarian who lives in the apartment above his, and Ben doesn’t know how it is when she comes calling, because as far as he can tell she never steps past her front door. He does, pretty regularly, bring her some dinner when he’s made too much for himself, but he doubts that’s what Rick’s talking about.
“Sure I do,” Ben says. It’s just easier. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Well,” Rick says, and grits his teeth. “I’ve got this guy, one of my test cooks. He should’ve been perfect for it—real big personality, y’know? Teaches people in the kitchen all the time. Teaches classes, even! And one of the photographers who shoots for the magazine used to do video, so we figured, whatever, right? We’d shoot Pete making some dish and throw it online. Should’ve been no problem.”
“But…?” Ben prompts, when Rick pauses to build the suspense. This, too, is a common feature of conversations with Rick, and one Ben finds particularly irksome.
“My guy’s a disaster,” Rick admits. “The minute the camera turned on, he totally lost it. Rambling, spilling things, burning stuff. It took him two and a half hours to demonstrate making the chicken and kale salad we put out in our last issue?—”
“But that’s atwenty-minute recipe,” Ben says, aghast. “I made it myself last month! Even if you roast the chicken yourselfinstead of using a rotisserie—God, even if you goinsaneand decide to break down fresh artichokes—it shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half!”
Rick blinks a few times, then beams at him. “Wow, kid, I’m flattered. You never told me you were areader.”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” Ben says, irritably. “And I told you, don’t call me ‘kid.’ I’m like ten thousand years old inside.”
“That’s what they all say, at your age.”
“Dothey?” says Ben, who has yet to find another twenty-eight-year-old as ready as he is to be a crotchety old man. “Are you sure?”
