The List

After three years teaching himself to code and working for less than minimum wage at a grueling apprenticeship, Nate has at last landed a real job paying real programmer money in a real city. The position, at a startup that sells proprietary security software to other businesses, is fully remote, so he doesn’t technically need to move. Nevertheless, Nate­—desperate to leave his mom’s basement in a hometown full of losers who stuck around after high school—jumps at the chance to relocate to Chicago. He establishes himself in a one-bedroom in Lakeview and sets up his work desktop with views of the train and the congregation of religious Jews who walk to synagogue on the weekends. On the cusp of his new life, the thing Nate really wants, the thing he fears he won’t find, is a friend.

It’s not immediately obvious, though, how one makes friends in a new city. Instead, Nate spends his evenings on Hinge. He isn’t very picky, swiping right indiscriminately and seeing who bites. In conversations, he offers a few lines of reasonably witty banter before asking the particular girl to get a drink. He has a very low conversion rate, but he does this with such frequency and consistency that he ends up going out several nights each week.

On the first few dates, Nate is awkward and doesn’t know what to talk about. He has an idea that his clothes aren’t very good without understanding necessarily how they could be better. The girls are all friendly, but they end the night with a hug and don’t return his texts except to say that they didn’t feel a spark.

At his new job, he almost exclusively interacts with his boss. In his mid-fifties, the man frequently brags about his past business successes, which are innumerable, and references famous and influential people Nate has never heard of. He gives Nate some sample code to familiarize himself with. For a few days, Nate does nothing but pour over lines of C++. He comes to the conclusion that whoever built the software had no idea what they were doing. Upon realizing this, Nate is at first giddy. He had been worried his programming chops would prove inadequate. Now, he feels like a savant. Nate is sure that he will be rewarded handsomely when he streamlines huge swathes of the company’s core product.

When Nate lived with his mom, she was adamant that he carry his own weight. Because he had neither rudimentary cooking skills nor money, this meant that mostly he ate pasta and canned red sauce or simple rice and beans. Nate arrived in Chicago with a comfortable moving stipend in his pocket from his work, and when his first paycheck hits, there is more money in his checking than there has ever been in his entire life. Nate is initiated into the world of DoorDash, where all conceivable cuisine is available to him at the press of a button. He promises himself to only do this occasionally, but it isn’t long before he is waking up each day to a bacon, egg, and cheese from Colectivo delivered right at his doorstep.

When he first approaches his boss with his insights into improving the code in the company’s proprietary software, he’s met with ire bordering on outright hostility. Nate has fundamentally misunderstood his role. He isn’t there to rewrite the code but rather to create materials to help clients troubleshoot when things inevitably go wrong. His first task, which his boss estimates will take a few months, is to familiarize himself with the product. This means mastering the unusual way the software is written. Nate has his first few calls with his coworkers, their Zoom backgrounds blurred, faces run through a gruesome filter.

Nate gets better at Hinge dates. He finds some guides online—YouTube videos and Reddit threads—on what to wear and how to act. He practices a coy half-smile in the mirror, and he learns to nurse pauses in the conversation with flirtatious eye contact. He even manages to sleep with a handful of girls, although he always tries to avoid bringing them to his own apartment—largely unfurnished—and the act of sex is a bit hit or miss. The girls don’t seem to hate it but neither are they rapturously enthusiastic. Nate, for his part, has to imagine his most cherished porn clips to finish. His new personal best is four dates before he or the girl cuts off contact. The sheer number of girls with the last name “Hinge” in their contact info concerns him, and he makes a list on his notes app to keep track of them. Over time, this develops into something like a ranking system.

A few months in, Nate starts to worry about his social life. He typically has a date or two on the weekends, but that hardly qualifies. He notices groups of friends entering dive bars together, hears the laughter echoing from third floor parties, orange dots of cigarettes flashing like fireflies on the ubiquitous wooden back porches. Every night, he watches friends and lovers ascend the Brown Line to be carted across the city. It’s getting colder outside, and he lets many Sundays pass without leaving the apartment, only opening the door to retrieve his DoorDash. He considers joining a pottery class or a sports league, but Nate has never had an aptitude for art or athletics, and he’s afraid of embarrassing himself.

Nate considers his talents. He’s good at coding, but that’s a nonstarter for the basis of a social life. The one other skill he has—something he thinks he has a real knack for—is languages. He excelled in Hebrew school growing up, and he even took a few courses in college to achieve a roughly conversational level. Nate is not particularly religious, and the thought of making friends at synagogue depresses him. But he discovers a class that meets, of all places, at the Islamic center, which makes learning Hebrew feel cosmopolitan and not excessively Jewy.

The first class meets on a Tuesday night, and Nate is so nervous that he gets there thirty minutes early. He kills time doing laps around the block. When he enters the classroom at 6:55, Nate finds three people already there. He’s relieved that they are about his age, and none of them is wearing a yarmulke. They greet him warmly—David and Naomi and Sage—in English. He notices right away that Naomi is very pretty, a lot prettier than the girls he’s been going on dates with. As more people file in, he feels like he’s made the right choice.

In the class, his Hebrew is rustier than he expected, and the instructor—an effete older Jew named Saul that the rest of the class clearly adores—kindly spares him from too much scrutiny. Afterwards, David informs Nate that they are all going to get a beer. Nate’s stomach does a quick somersault.

They go to The Globe on Irving Park, exactly the kind of divey place that Nate can’t bring a date to but that he’s been wanting to try. With a few beers in them, the group grows jocular and very funny. Nate is not a natural comedian, so he tries to laugh at the right moments and do nothing overtly awkward. Even though twiggy Sage takes it upon themself to fetch Malört shots from the bar, it’s clear that David is the leader of their little group. He has glossy black curls that are matched by the patch showing at his chest, in which nestles a little Star of David. He’s broad-shouldered, if a bit on the stocky side, and when he pats Nate chummily on the back, Nate guesses that he’s rather well-muscled. David’s eyes are a striking shade of green, and he seems to look at everybody at once while he holds court. Naomi ribs him for talking too much, but in fact David is deferential. He even includes Nate in the conversation, giving him a chance to shine and laughing unnecessarily at his stabs at humor. Nate feels a pang of disappointment when he notices David at one point fondle Naomi’s leg, but he forgives his new friend when David smiles warmly and says he’s glad Nate joined their class. Later, as Nate is leaving, he catches David’s eye and winks. He’s not sure why he does it—it’s a trick he picked up from a YouTube video and has only ever done it to girls, yet he flicks his eyelid without giving it a second thought. Not missing a beat, David winks back. At home, Nate lies for a long time on his bed, feeling like he has accomplished precisely what he set out to do.

As winter hardens around Chicago, Nate’s job feels increasingly burdensome. On team calls, he’s often scolded or disciplined in front of his coworkers who not once stand up for him. Nate has come to the conclusion that his boss is a moron, lofted through life with almost unbelievable serendipity on the work of his subordinates. Nate had hoped to build a portfolio of work through this job that would help him on future applications, but he’s stuck deciphering imbecilic code written by his idiot boss, whose logic is beyond question. Nate finds that he despises the cold weather, with its relentless wind that slices up the Chicago grid. The sole bright spot in the week is his Hebrew class, their routine hangout at The Globe, and the little parties that David sometimes throws in his Logan Square apartment.

Nate’s natural language aptitude quickly polishes the rust off his spoken Hebrew. It’s not long before he’s one of the best speakers in the group. This compensates for his erstwhile awkwardness. At The Globe, Nate finds it unexpectedly easy to talk with Sage, a fellow programmer, and even pretty Naomi is more than happy to give him an insider’s perspective on Chicago. Nevertheless, it’s David that he aims to sit next to at the bar. David works for a boutique creative agency in the Loop doing graphic design, and he has little understanding of software development. He listens rapt as Nate explains the absurdities of his job. “Like something out of the Talmud,” David says one night, and this stirs something in Nate. Returning to work the next day, hungover as he always is on Wednesdays, Nate has the unusual feeling that he has been picked, some secret hand twisting him until the stem came loose. 

One morning, Nate realizes that he’s gotten rather chubby. He deletes DoorDash from his phone and signs up for a delivery service of healthy boxed meals. He texts David telling him that he’s interested in joining his gym, and David immediately texts back a referral code.

Nate goes to the gym on a Monday after work at the time David suggests. No Planet Fitness, this place is all barbells, with a loud little man strolling about that everyone calls “Coach.” Nate shows up in basketball shorts and a hoodie; David comes out of the locker room in a spandex singlet. He’s a lot more muscular than Nate had realized. David tells him he’s busy with his own workout but that Coach can show him the ropes. Nate doesn’t do a very good job at learning the ropes from Coach, falling on his ass when he tries to clean and jerk. Nate doesn’t come back to this gym but signs up for ClassPass instead.

Nate starts to wonder if he’s gone through the best crop of girls in the city. The ones who accept his date offers are increasingly plump. It’s not the individual body type that bothers him as much as the trend. One girl gets extremely drunk with him at a barcade and practically drags him back to her apartment. Nate can’t finish at all while the girl seems to get off again and again.

There is a week where Nate has three dates on three consecutive days. He takes the girls to the same bar, and he brings each of them back to his apartment. Three times, he fails to get hard. On the third time, the girl suggests they watch porn together, and for an agonizing ten minutes they watch a gangbang while glancing, every so often, at Nate’s flaccid penis.

The morning after the third girl, Nate gets a Hims subscription. He texts the girl from the barcade. They go out that night. By the weekend, she’s his girlfriend.

Nate feels a little uncomfortable bringing his girlfriend, whose name is Maggie, to meet his Hebrew friends. He tells himself it’s because she’s a goy, and while there is no official rule, their class is of course all Jews. He knows deep down it’s because she’s overweight, and the thought of her standing next to svelte Naomi makes him sweat a little.

Through this period, Nate and David begin hanging out, just the two of them. David will get drunk any night of the week, Nate learns, and when the girls aren’t around, sometimes there’s a little baggie of cocaine in the bathroom too. Nate does a key bump for the first time in his life and takes to it immediately. At the bar, David talks freely about Naomi, who he isn’t dating exactly. She is insatiable for sex, insisting that David stay up all night fucking her senseless. This is what the coke is for. He tells Nate that she wants him to stop sleeping with other girls, but he feels like that is an unfair ask while David is in the prime of his youth. David lets on that there was a pregnancy scare after he broke a condom. “Condoms are always breaking on me,” he says. Later, when they are doing coke in the stall, David unzips his fly to pee and insists that Nate do the same. “Oh, wow,” David says. “You’re uncut.” Nate feels a sinking in his stomach. It’s different for working-class Jews, he explains, if your parents aren’t super religious. “Uncut and Jewish. You’re a unicorn,” David jokes, leisurely shaking the last few drops of urine out of his own dick, which is quite meaty and, yes, Nate is sure to note, circumcised.

The next weekend, Nate brings Maggie to hang out with his Hebrew friends. They love her, find her charming and witty and tell Nate many times they are happy he found someone. He watches Maggie giggling with Naomi. It’s like seeing her for the first time. That night, they have their best sex yet.

As a matter of fact, Maggie has many attributes to recommend her. She has a distinct sense of style, a large aquarium of koi fish, a beautiful jade wall hanging from a trip to CDMX. She loves her job—advertising—and is charismatic in a group setting. Nate tends to shrink when he’s by her side, although she will sometimes touch his back as she cracks a joke. She’s been studying Japanese in preparation for a trip to Tokyo, but she is quick to pick up some Hebrew too. The group welcomes Maggie, welcomes her wry stories of a Roman Catholic upbringing, her apparent interest in Judaism, her effusive joie de vivre. They can’t compliment Nate enough on having found her. Maggie tells Nate she’s never had a boyfriend before but also blows him like an old pro. When he tells her he doesn’t like eating pussy, she doesn’t seem to mind.

Come March, David announces a Saint Patrick’s Day party. He’s hosting, and he expects everyone to get absolutely trashed. During the party, David and Naomi have a big fight, and David grabs Nate to do some blow on the balcony while Maggie cools Naomi down in the bedroom. David tells Nate that Naomi had seen some text messages she wasn’t supposed to see. That stuff that David had told Nate at the bar—well, let’s just say that Naomi and he didn’t see completely eye-to-eye about their arrangement. David puts his head in his hands. “She made me say how many I’ve been sleeping with.” “And?” Nate says. “I said ‘two,’” David says. He catches Nate’s eye, and they both burst out laughing. On a whim, Nate opens the notes app on his phone and shows David his numbered list. “What’s this,” David asks. “It’s the girls I’ve slept with since I moved here,” Nate says. “You rank them?” David says. But the two have not been paying attention to the open doorway, where Maggie and Naomi stand. Maggie is decisive, reaching over their shoulders, snatching the phone, and scrolling down to her name.

Nate sleeps alone that night. He wakes up with the worst hangover of his life and a slew of unread texts. None of them are from David. Nate texts him, “Crazy night.” He texts him, “Did you sort it out with Naomi?” David never texts him back.

The Hebrew class ends in May, but the group stops getting Tuesday night drinks at The Globe before then. David doesn’t return to class after the party. Nate spends his evenings reviewing Instagram posts showing Naomi and Maggie and the rest hanging out. Eventually, someone realizes he probably should have already been blocked.

Summer arrives in Chicago like a miracle. Nate resolves to try again. He joins a kickball league. He joins pottery. He attends a variety of fitness classes on ClassPass, but it is here and only here that he is embarrassed. He stops going to these altogether, although he must pay out for the year. Nate kicks a triple. Nate makes a blue mug. Nate goes for drinks two times with his kickball team, both times at a bar in Old Town where the music is so loud that he can barely make conversation. He resolves to be celibate, to delete Hinge, to stop watching porn. On this count, he is two for three.

He has, at least, settled into a rhythm at work. He knows to hold his tongue in team meetings, to pace his tasks so he doesn’t finish too quickly, to never do anything that he isn’t explicitly asked to do. He parks himself in front of his desktop and becomes completely blank, watching out his window as the religious Jews pass, dressed mysteriously in dark colors. People bike lazily toward the lake, beach towels and novels and Tupperware filled with sliced melon overflowing from giant tote bags.

Lake Michigan in the summer is, naturally, the most painful. One weekend day, he rents a Lime scooter and ditches it near the harbor. As he walks along the concrete steps, Nate is hounded by the huge beautiful biomass of the city. Miles of glistening flesh smile at him in the sunshine: girls bronzing on beach towels, men in futuristic sunglasses with violent abs sprinting along the trail, everyone leaping into the water, splashing each other, pitching their laughter over a Bad Bunny song.

July passes without Nate marking the days. When he redownloads Hinge, he sees that his old pictures are all quite a bit fitter than his current appearance. He sticks to porn, then, the calm blue light of it guiding him into the dripping cave of nighttime, only the mechanical torment of cicadas to keep him company. He gets a second desktop to scroll NSFW GIFs during meetings in which he can leave his microphone muted. On one screen, his boss talks and talks. On another, an endlessly changeable girl gets nailed by a series of giant perfect penises.

Around August, Nate says to hell with it all and joins his neighborhood synagogue. They are not so immediately welcoming, and they have some questions. He struggles to explain his reasons for joining. A beaky cantor suggests a class before he becomes a full member. Reluctantly, Nate signs up for remedial Judaism, which meets for four hours on Saturdays.

There are only five of them in the class, and the rest are women between five and fifteen years older than him, all in the process of converting for their fiancés. Even worse, they already know each other, and, since they’ve been taking the class for a few weeks, more knowledgeable about Judaism. It turns out, there is a lot to know. The rabbi at least has the tact to hold him after class and wait for the women to leave before he asks Nate about his penis.

Toward the end of August, Nate is laid off. He is completely blindsided. It turns out their company is being purchased by a larger cybersecurity firm, and, by the end of the year, none of his coworkers will be there either (his boss, on the other hand, will make enough from the deal to retire early).

While venting his misfortune after a Judaism class, one of the other women suggests he meet with her fiancé, who also works in tech and whose company is rapidly expanding. They sit down at a Starbucks on Wells, Moshe’s bald spot well-covered with a kippah. Irony of ironies, it turns out his company is the very one that acquired Nate’s. They laugh when Nate says he already received job training. The following Monday, Nate has his adult circumcision.

In mid-September, Nate is finally able to join the synagogue, and he starts going both weekend days. The other men are not very friendly, but some of the other women are exceedingly so. Moshe, his one ally, lets him know that a particularly zaftig girl named Sabrina is single. Nate goes on three dates with her—coffee, walk in Lincoln park, coffee again—but does not sleep with her.

Nate interviews at Moshe’s company. They have an office in the Loop with a view of the river. Not too far, Nate notes, from where David works. Everyone seems to be under forty. Nate sits through three interviews, two of them with Israelis who Zoom in from across the world. They ask him about his reconversion, and they laugh when he takes a gamble and mentions the bris. They tell him he’d fit right in. He leaves at the end of the day with a feeling of unbelievable good fortune. As he checks his phone on the train though, he finds an email from Moshe apologizing and saying they’ve decided to eliminate his old position, though they might have something for him in the future.

In October, something incredible happens. Nate wakes up one morning to stunning videos of men in masks flying through the desert, of bulldozers toppling fences, of screaming women pushed into cars and onto the backs of motorcycles to be carted somewhere unimaginable. He’s been out of a job for over a month now, and the money that had seemed so inexhaustible a few months ago is quickly growing exhausted. His mom has begrudgingly offered him his old room back. He spoons Cheerios into his mouth as he devours news articles. On a whim, he texts David, “Hope you are well,” but gets no response. Nate knows, through diligent research, that David and Naomi are back together. He does get a barrage of texts from the women from his remedial Judaism class, full of hearts and blue flags and six-pointed stars. In the evening, he wanders over to the synagogue, where a vigil is in place. A stranger puts his hands on Nate’s shoulders. When they sing, Nate finds he knows all the words.

For weeks, Nate spends his mornings refreshing news feeds and looking out his window at the L tracks. Meanwhile, he sends out his résumé to companies, twenty at a time. A void has opened between the news from across the globe and normal Chicago existence, all the people going to and fro on the L. He goes to synagogue increasingly often, but he has become invisible. The people he passes in the hallways are invariably locked in tense conversation, and all the flyers for singles mixers and youth programming have gone out of date.

An old classmate announces on Facebook that he is taking a hiatus from his job to join the reserve forces. He posts a black and white photo of himself in fatigues, and it receives almost five hundred likes. Nate DMs him and receives a link to a recruitment page. Nate reads through it several times but ultimately exes out.

Nate texts all his old friends one at a time, asking if they are doing OK. He gets one response from Naomi, and it comes in a group chat that includes David and, to Nate’s horror, Maggie. Naomi calls him a misogynistic pig. She says how dare he use this moment to try to get back in their good graces. Before he can respond, he is blocked on text too.

After Nate decides to join Mahal, he is briefly the most important person in temple. Dozens of other Jews offer the contact of relatives in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa. His mom, of course, is horrified. When rabbi mentions him by name in his sermon, Nate rises to his feet, and he almost blacks out from the head rush. He has never felt so many eyes on him.

To his surprise, Nate does not go where the fighting is but ends up, three months later, behind a desk near Qalandia, organizing units of military police and manning the phones, where he fields calls from both Palestinians and West Bank settlers alike. It’s tremendously boring, and Nate suspects the calls he logs in a spreadsheet are not read by any of his superiors.

During his time in basic training, Nate loses much of the weight he had gained in Chicago, and for the first time in his life he’s achieved some standard of physical fitness. The Israelis have offered him nearly universal hospitality, equally impressed by his decision to volunteer and his better-than-decent Hebrew—very rare for a Jew who was until recently secular. One person who was not so impressed was his coworker, Mateusz, who only gaped at Nate when he learned all this their first day. “Why on earth would you come here?” he asked. Mateusz is lanky, something feline about the languid motion of his hands and ironic gray eyes. He is as pale as Nate, and he often laments how Israeli girls ignore any Jew without desert in his skin. To volunteer for a conscript army is, to Mateusz, the sign of an absolute sucker. Nevertheless, the two get along well enough. They pass long boring hours in the windowless room where their superiors have stuck them.

Nate tells Mateusz his skin tone has nothing to do with his sexual luck. Nate has already been laid several times since moving to Israel, each time with a real Israeli girl, who melt at the story of his reconversion, his sacrifice, the tender circumcision scar. They do not fault that he stopped short of Aliyah—Mahal was enough. Nate and Mateusz pass the hours sharing sexual experiences, each of them happy to exaggerate for the other’s sake. After some time, Nate shows Mateusz his list and is pleased to learn that Mateusz has a similar, if not as prolific, note on his phone.

From time to time, real soldiers—the ones who drive military jeeps and protect outpost settlements—drop in to chat with Mateusz and, eventually, Nate as well. The captain of one unit is Mateusz’s friend from university and often finds excuses to stop by. Mateusz calls him “Captain Cohen” ironically, but Nate calls him Captain Cohen earnestly. He has buzzed black hair that is the same length and consistency as his beard, giving him a permanent masked look, as well as a boisterous laugh. One day, he asks the two if they wanted to see some real action. Mateusz yawns and says sure, as if all options in life are equally dull. Nate, though, feels a thrill lighting up his surgical scar.

They leave around 11 p.m. There are six of them piled into the Jeep, and the driver takes the hills with enthusiasm. The men have M4s slung on their torso, though Nate has only ever fired his in training. They drive through the dark out to the village of az-Za’ayyem. The whole way, Nate has the impression of moving through a kind of membrane, something that can sense the edges of his body as he passes through. The other soldiers tell jokes until they stop outside of a cinderblock structure, clotheslines running along the side. One of the soldiers says that this house was on a list of known terror nests. Captain Cohen holds up his rifle, aiming the scope through the darkness. They all sit tensely for a minute before he lowers the gun. He removes a little baggie from a pocket and takes a hard bump of something off the Jeep key. It passes around the car, and everyone follows suit. Nate and Mateusz are told to wait in the car.

When the raid is complete, two prisoners taken and loaded in the back of the Jeep with zip ties on their wrists, Nate and Mateusz are allowed to venture into the house. Nate walks through lamplit rooms, his hand on his gun, but the home is empty. Captain Cohen leads the two of them upstairs, down a narrow hall, and to a closed door. “There’s something in here you need to see,” Captain Cohen says gravely. He opens the door, revealing one of the other soldiers lounging on the bed with one leg slung over the other, a pair of lacy pink underwear stretched over his fatigues and a matching bra on top. Captain Cohen laughs so loudly that Nate jumps. “We found her!” he says. “We found the terrorist.”

As they pull apart the room, knocking over a bureau, rifling through a small jewelry cabinet, the soldier in the women’s underwear makes an interested noise. “Look at this.” He holds out to Captain Cohen grainy polaroids of a young Arab girl, her hair uncovered. Captain Cohen leafs through them, grunting approvingly. He sets the photos on the bed and, without looking at the others, reaches into his pants and starts working himself. After a minute, he unzips and pulls his underwear down to produce a rather large cock, thick in the middle but tapering at the end. Nate, still with his hand on his gun, isn’t sure what to do, glancing at Mateusz, who just shrugs and drops his own pants, sidling up next to his old university friend. Nate isn’t long to follow, gentle with his own dick, which can still be a little sore at times. When the last soldier, the one in lingerie, drags his own penis out from the lacy garment, ripping the fabric as he does so, Nate is pleased to see that he fits in, the embarrassing foreskin months since dispatched. He has a sense of the four cocks working like pistons through their outstretched hands, like a single machine that requires all of them to pump for the mechanism to turn over. None of them speak. The only issue is that Nate’s mohel had cut a little too close, which isn’t a problem unless he gets really, maximally hard. When he does, there is a painful tightness down his shaft, and after a few minutes, little abrasions open under the newly naked head. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to suffer this condition for very long; all four men come rather quickly, with Mateusz practically drenching the photos, before they all zip up and return to the Jeep, where the other two soldiers, tasked with babysitting the prisoners, ask what took them so long.

When his tour is up, Nate reenlists, this time with the proper connections to gain a real deployment in Gaza. He begins in Gaza City but drifts southward, ending up near the Sinai, where he spots a few Arabs running from some low-lying hills toward an Israeli tank. Without pausing to consider it, Nate opens fire, dropping both men. He receives a special commendation for this in which his unit commander calls him courageous. He calls him a paragon of Jewish virtue, the reason their race has been chosen and will never know defeat. Nate, for his part, feels dazed, as if he’d been punched in the head. He marvels at the non-choice, the pure instinct, with which he snuffed out two lives. He wonders if what his unit commander says is true.

He stays in Tel-Aviv for a while after his second discharge, where he has his pick of three AI companies that hound his résumé. Somewhere along the way, Nate has acquired a certain swagger, a gravitas. He allows himself to be bid on. Ultimately, he picks the company with a U.S. office. As a Hebrew-speaking American fresh off two tours in the IDF, every possible door is open.

While the three years it took for Nate to master programming were some of the most difficult, things are different with AI. He once had to spend long evenings puzzling over complexity values. With this new technology, there is a tendency toward simplification. Coding now takes on an effortless feel, understanding not a dense thing to slice into but an aroma you sometimes catch. The Israelis love everything AI, and he understands why right away. LLMs are a reward for suffering, a luxury necessary in the same way that suffering in the first place is necessary. Nate connects this vaguely with the idea of his renovated penis, which continues to be painful under intense arousal. His doctor in Tel-Aviv comments that the covenant which Abraham made was first and foremost painful: to be chosen meant sacrifice.

Nevertheless, the women in his life rarely stimulate him to such agonizing extremes. His list grows quite a bit, and similar lists spawn given to different metrics: one for hotness, another for oral dexterity, and so on.

After a year, his boss suggests he return to their Chicago office. This seems appropriate to Nate, though sun-kissed Tel-Aviv has treated him quite a bit nicer than the frozen plains. For the first time in his life, he’s achieved a permanent bronzed state. He’s eager to strut back into town, draped in a military swagger incomprehensible to an American cosmopolitan.

When he’s returned to the United States, Nate runs into David so quickly that he later thinks David planned it. It’s not really that surprising, though: an off night back at The Globe. David beelines to Nate and wraps him in a hug that’s more enthusiasm than apology. “Naomi would kill me if she knew I was seeing you,” he said. “The Israel stuff has just about wrecked the old crew.” There’s a feral edge to David’s look that puts Nate on guard. “And where do you stand on it?” Nate asks. David puts on a somber, nunnish countenance, shaking his head. “Terrible people, terrible things on both sides. I just want peace.” He catches Nate’s eye and winks. “Naomi wishes she were an anti-Zionist but doesn’t believe it in her heart. Sage won’t speak to her after she told them what the Arabs would do to them if they lived there. But you,” he grabs Nate’s thigh. “You didn’t have any debates. You just fucking went there.”

They catch an Uber to the VIG, where they flirt with every waitress indiscriminately. David pats one discreetly on the ass. Nate asks for a beautiful dark-skinned girl’s number and receives it. He finds he’s sexually acceptable to a completely different set of women upon serving in the military. They take trips to the bathroom to re-up on coke every hour or so, until on one final trip to the single occupancy stall, David removes his mostly hard cock, and Nate kneels to take it in his mouth.

Back at the bar, they are both suddenly bashful. Nate is returned to an earlier version of himself, worried that he has nothing at all to say, that he has disappointed David, will continue to disappoint him, even as he can taste the remnants of his load lodged in his sinuses. David sips his drink and refuses to look Nate’s way. He is the one person who ever turned the warm lamp of friendship toward Nate. Now, something has been severed. Nate’s groin howls. It is such a specific pain, and so private it doesn’t seem likely that anyone else has ever felt it before. 

David has one or two drinks left in him, a few more bawdy comments, no more coke, no acknowledgement of what happened in the bathroom. He calls an Uber home, and Nate suspects it’s the last time he will see him. At last, Nate sits alone at the bar. His bank account has long since replenished from its former lows. He has nothing better to do than to stay there and keep ordering double whiskeys. He fingers his watch (expensive), and after a little while, he chuckles to himself. He thinks about David and Naomi, and he laughs out loud. The pain in his dick has subsided. He thinks about years ago, when he first came to Chicago, and he thinks about David, finishes his drink and smacks his lips. Nate feels lighter, like the actor closing a run of difficult shows—an ancient tragedy that makes little sense to the urbane modern viewer—who leaves the theater and walks into clean sunshine. And when one of those waitresses gets off before closing time, she sidles right up next to Nate, links her pinky around his, and breathes, “You know, you’re on my list.”