The kitchen light stays off. The 43-year-old regional facilities coordinator has learned over four months of practice that overhead lighting is unkind to a semi-soft cheese, so he works by phone glow and the open refrigerator, texting cheese photos to a group chat at 3 a.m. with the grim focus of a man transmitting ransom instructions.
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He has been awake since 2:41. He did not set an alarm. Something inside him simply opened its eyes and said: they should see the Gruyère.
The board is slate, nineteen dollars, purchased in a state of clarity. The fig jam has been decanted from the jar into a small ramekin, because the jar reads cheap. There is a sprig of rosemary that the coordinator harvested from a neighbor’s raised bed at some point during the Biden administration and has kept alive in a jelly glass ever since. There is one piece of honeycomb, rationed since October. There is a single walnut, which he has now placed and re-placed eleven times, because the walnut is load-bearing and the coordinator knows it even if he could not explain why.
The recipients are six men from a rec-league softball team that dissolved in 2019. The chat is called GRILL SZN. The last message not authored by the coordinator was a photo of somebody’s dog in April, and he responded to it within ninety seconds with a photo of a Manchego.
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He takes forty-one pictures. He does not know that the word for what he is doing is styling. He mists the rosemary with a spray bottle he bought specifically for misting the rosemary. He drags a floor lamp across the linoleum with the slow, careful stealth of a man who understands exactly how insane this would look with the lights on.
For the caption he pastes his first attempt into a chatbot and asks it to make him sound chill. It gives him back a sentence with an em dash in it. He removes the em dash, because he is not a coward. He types “boys.” He sends it at 3:31 a.m.
Then he stands in his dark kitchen holding the phone at chest height like a hymnal.
Read receipts are off, which is the only mercy the platform has ever extended him. Nothing comes back. Nothing was ever going to come back, because it is 3:31 in the morning and the six men of GRILL SZN are asleep beside women who have already had the conversation about the phone on the nightstand.
The coordinator eats the cheese standing up over the sink, quickly, without pleasure, the way you’d dispose of evidence. The cheese was never food. The cheese was a press release.
This is not loneliness, exactly. The coordinator is married. His wife is asleep thirty feet away and has asked him, gently, twice, to stop doing this. He tried once to explain it to her and what came out of his mouth was “I just think people should know,” which is the closest thing to a mission statement anyone in this country has produced in a decade.
Everyone got issued an audience-shaped hole. Some people fill theirs with a podcast, or a supplement brand, or nine hundred followers who think they know something about macros. The coordinator got six men who used to play softball. There is no funnel. There is no revenue. Nobody has ever been converted. In a way, he is the last honest content creator in America: pure output, zero yield, three in the morning, dairy.
At 7:12 a.m., the team’s former shortstop replies with a single cheese emoji. The coordinator reads it eleven times on the toilet.
He washes the slate board by hand, dries it, and sets it in the rack facing outward so it will be ready. He sleeps ninety minutes. He goes to work. He is fine at work.
In the crisper drawer, behind the celery, a wheel of Taleggio sits patiently in its paper, waiting like news.