I was very stoned and very hungry, and so, after nearly two hours had passed since putting in my order, I called to check on my pizza.
The line rang for longer than normal, and then a man picked up and said, “Dominos,” just like always, except this time his voice seemed to falter on the second syllable. He hesitated before saying the next thing, which was, “Give us a second, here.” It sounded like someone was crying in the background, but then the hold music chirped on, and this detail left my mind almost immediately. To distract myself from the hunger, I put my phone on speaker and massaged myself to the mental image of a sex scene from a PG-13 horror movie. I remember that the sequence in question featured the two leads embracing in a hot tub, their bodies obscured by a layer of bubbles festering at the surface, and I remember moaning involuntarily over the hold music as dark clouds shifted past the moon out my living room window.
I was very hard by the time the hold music cut off, and the guy on the other end of the line was different from the first guy. He asked me my name and then said, “Shit man. Andy—the uh, your delivery driver—he got in a bad wreck on his way out to your apartment. He didn’t make it.”
“Oh,” I said, withdrawing my hand. “God.”
The employee told me I should call the support number about a refund. “Do you understand?” he asked, sounding somehow accusatory, and he hung up before I could apologize.
I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I was very hungry and very sad.
As soon as the idea struck me, I could not resist logging onto Facebook and typing ANDY into the search bar. This brought up an absolute shit ton of Andys, and so I specified DENVER for his location and DOMINOS for his work, and then there he was, poor Andy Loomis. Andy had been twenty-five years old, and he seemed to have been graced with a very full life: a girlfriend named Jessica, a dog named Felix, a bunch of jokes from The Office listed under his interests. We weren’t so different. I scrolled through Andy’s entire life, practically, all the way back to when he was in high school and posting poorly lit pictures of himself in basements. In one old photo, he and a friend were wearing fedoras and standing back-to-back against each other, holding up finger guns like they were secret agents or something. In another, he was smiling uncomfortably outside Union Station with his parents beaming on either side of him. In a third, he was flipping off the camera in a dive bar as Jessica kissed his cheek.
And I felt awful, scrolling through these. Just awful.
It seemed important that I honor Andy’s memory, and so I resolved not to masturbate at all that night, a statistical anomaly. I even considered making a donation in his name, but then I didn’t know what kinds of issues he cared about, and so instead I tried sketching his profile picture into a notebook. This didn’t turn out the way I hoped—he looked too angry and too severe, too old—but at least it was something, and so, after writing Andrew Michael Loomis, 1999 – 2024 underneath the caricature, I ripped out the page and stuck it to my refrigerator using a Domino’s delivery magnet that had come free with a previous order. I didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, but I knew that I would need my strength for work the next morning, so I walked to the corner store and bought myself a frozen pizza. Back home, I slid the pie into the oven, took a hit off my bong, and stood there, dazed and alone, waiting for it to finish.
“For Andy,” I muttered, his portrait staring back at me as heat filled the kitchen.
■
I abstained from ordering delivery for the next few weeks. This seemed like the respectful thing to do, and so for nearly an entire month I burned pasta and cooked watery scrambled eggs and biked myself to the nearest McDonald’s, or the nearest Taco Bell, or the nearest Qdoba, thinking of Andy at every incline and at every bump in the road.
If only I had been a little less stoned, I kept thinking. If only I’d been less hungry.
I followed Jessica’s digital footprint religiously during this time, tracking as she posted fragments of her grief across social media. I kept thinking of her as Andy’s widow even though I knew that wasn’t correct, and I wished that there was a word for what she was now, for what I had turned her into. Practically every single day, Jessica would post another photo from the endless library of selfies that they had taken together, each captioned with a devastating outburst of emotional vulnerability. She seemed to really love Andy in a way that I have maybe never been loved by anybody. Some nights the guilt was so bad that I’d consider messaging her to confess my involvement in her boyfriend’s death, but I worried that this wouldn’t bring her much relief, or that she’d respond in a way that would make things worse for both of us. Instead, I just kept refreshing her Twitter every couple of hours, waiting for her to say something, like, “To whoever ordered Dominos that night: I just hope you’re happy with yourself…I hope you’re full.”
She didn’t seem to be thinking about me at all, though, and I strained for reassurance. You can’t blame yourself for somebody dying at the job they’re paid to do, I told myself, especially if you’re not the one paying them.
That’s just the cost of doing business. That’s just the cost of living.
I was adapting to this line of thinking when Jessica posted to her Instagram story that she was planning on attending a bereavement support group later that night on the corner of Logan and Iliff. She shared the address and the meeting time and everything, explaining, in a tiny black text box overlaid atop a photo of their Jack Russell Terrier, that she was hoping someone would join her in grieving Andy. She said that she didn’t want to go alone and that she wasn’t sure if this was a weird request or not. She said that she was sorry for asking, that she wished she could just bring the dog. I found this unbearably moving, and I resisted the temptation to heart-react to her story, particularly given that I was viewing it from a burner account that I’d disguised to look like a run-of-the-mill porn bot.
There was nothing watchmypussycum_6969 could say to make her feel better.
There was probably nothing anyone could say.
The support group was held in the basement of a Catholic church. It had been a taxing workday of emails and Zoom check-ins, but I still tried to put on a good face, hoping that my bad attitude wouldn’t be too obvious to the other attendees. I descended the rickety stairs and took a seat a couple of fold-out chairs away from Jessica, who was sitting there by herself with her hands folded over her lap. I did my best not to gawk at her, immediately relieved that she seemed to be taking care of herself. She looked clean, well-rested, and reasonably dressed, wearing a loose-fitting boygenius shirt and a pair of cut-offs. I didn’t mean to objectify her or anything, but I could see why Andy had been attracted to her.
A few more people trickled in, and the meeting began later than it was supposed to. The group facilitator said a few words, and then one by one around the circle of chairs, each of the bereaved took turns sharing out about their grief, their loss, their plotless days of mourning. It seemed to me that they were all complaining about the same sorts of problems, and so I tuned out for a while, finally locking back in once it was Jessica’s turn to address the group.
“It’s been a month without my boyfriend,” she started. “He died at work. In a car accident.” She continued for a few minutes, and I tried not to look disappointed that much of what she had to say matched the exact phrasing of expressions of grief that she’d already shared on Twitter. “I feel hollowed out,” Jessica told us. “I feel like I lost my whole life.” Once she finished, I joined the others in snapping for her even though I’d heard all of it before.
The facilitator directed the group’s attention to me a few minutes later, which I suppose shouldn’t have caught me off guard. After briefly feigning that my loss was too painful to put into words, I cleared my throat and told the group that a dear friend had recently passed. “It was a car accident for him, too,” I said, nodding toward Jessica. “I feel terrible because he was bringing me something that I needed when he got into the wreck. Medication, I mean. Insulin. He’d still be alive if I had just gotten it myself.”
I let myself trail off, and it took everyone an extra couple of seconds to snap for me, probably because they could sense that there was more that I wanted from them. It’s not your fault, I expected the facilitator to say. You can’t blame yourself. Your friend would want you to live. We all do. No one said anything particularly hopeful for the entire meeting, though, and Jessica made a beeline for the exit as soon as it was over. I was sure to grab a cookie and an extra can of Pepsi on my way out—“Low blood sugar,” I explained, unprompted, to the facilitator—and I was feeling pretty bummed that I had wasted my whole evening, but then I stepped outside and found Jessica standing there underneath a streetlight in the middle of the parking lot, rummaging through her purse for a lighter.
“Hey,” I said, seizing upon her obligatory nod. “I uh—I’m sorry about your boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she echoed back as the last of the bereaved pulled out of the lot. “And I get what you were saying about the guilt.” She lit her cigarette. “It’s been driving me nuts.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
“Andy—my boyfriend—he wasn’t even scheduled to work the night he died. We had plans to see a show, but then I overdrafted on the tickets and started a dumb fight about money. I think he picked up the shift to punish me.” Jessica took a drag and shook her head. “I guess in a way we’re both responsible,” she said. “I guess we’re both going to have to live with it.”
This was it, I realized, hesitating. It was now or never, and I felt suddenly compelled to confess everything to Jessica, to lessen her burden and reassure her that the blame lay entirely at my feet. I was just about to say it—it’s not your fault, really, I can explain—but I couldn’t bring myself to form the words. Something about them didn’t feel right. Surely Andy’s death could not be entirely blamed on my pizza order. Surely there had been a thousand other factors that led him behind the wheel that night.
Maybe if Andy had been a little nicer to Jessica, I thought, he might still be alive.
Maybe if he’d tried getting a better job in the first place.
“Andy would want you to remember the good times,” I heard myself tell her.
Jessica wasn’t having any of it, though. “Andy had no idea what he wanted,” she said. “He didn’t when he was alive, and he certainly doesn’t now.”
I laughed just a little, respectfully, and then she laughed, and for a second, I thought that the two of us might evolve into friends or even into something more. We kept talking, though, and after a while, she started to seem agitated by my efforts to prolong the conversation. “Are you parked all the way out here, or something?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder. The lot was empty except for her baby blue Pontiac Vibe. It looked pretty beat up. The hood was badly dented, and a faded bumper sticker affixed to her fender read, KEEP HONKING! I’m listening to SKA and YOU’RE in the band now!!!
“I don’t have a car,” I answered. “I walked here.”
I thought Jessica might offer to give me a ride home, but instead she just shrugged, dropped the butt of her cigarette, and toed it into the concrete. “Probably safer that way,” she said.
■
My appetite grew with every step of the four-mile walk back to my apartment, and I was practically salivating when I put in my DoorDash order for Chipotle: a chicken burrito, a side of chips and guac, a Coke Zero. It was nothing too extravagant, but for too long I had been living in fear and shame, and it was time to put all this behind me. I left a 15% tip for my driver and wrote “Be safe out there!” into the instructions box. My phone buzzed with a text confirming that my food would arrive in the next twenty to thirty minutes, and then I put on a superhero movie and cracked open a beer, trying hard not to think about it, trying hard not to worry.
I couldn’t help noticing, though, when thirty minutes had trickled by without an update.
Then forty-five minutes.
An hour.
An hour and a half.
I felt sick as I dialed Chipotle to inquire about the delay. They told me to call DoorDash, and then DoorDash put me on hold, and then eventually I gave up and opened the TRACK MY ORDER link that they had sent alongside the confirmation email. I breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing that the ESTIMATED DELIVERY TIME was just five minutes out, a blinking dot on the map indicating that my driver was at the intersection of Speer and Broadway. Ten minutes later, though, and the driver’s location hadn’t changed. Every time I refreshed the page, the estimated delivery time kept getting pushed back a little more, perennially five minutes out into the future, taunting me.
I hoped it was just a glitch. I really did.
Sure enough, though, when I biked the eight blocks to my driver’s cross streets, the road was blocked off at the traffic stop, red and blue lights disco-balling in the dark as a pair of grim-looking EMTs loaded a covered gurney into the back of an ambulance. My whole body shaking, I put my hand on the guardrail at the side of the road to gape at a smashed Corolla at the bottom of the hill. The driver must have blown right through the barrier, and then the car must have flipped several times on the way down.
More of the tableau clicked into focus as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. A branch had pierced through the Corolla’s windshield, and the hood had folded in on itself like an accordion. Through the strobe of emergency lights, I could just barely make out a bright red DoorDash mirror-hanger, dangling just inches away from where the driver’s head must have been at the time of impact.
My driver, I realized.
■
I grieved Sarah just as I had grieved Andy, although my feelings of guilt faded a little faster this time. She hadn’t been very active on social media toward the end, but she used to post all the time when she was a teenager, and, scrolling down nearly a decade, it seemed that she had once fancied herself as something of an edgelord. Among the deluge of Deadpool and Rick and Morty memes clogging up her timeline were occasional bursts of text that had aged so poorly that they were nearly breathtaking: It’s not like she was some angel. I sketched Sarah a crude in-memoriam portrait and stuck it carelessly on the fridge right next to Andy’s.
A few weeks later I grieved Makayla, T-boned by a pickup truck on her way to me from a Panda Express. And then Steven, ejected from his vehicle right outside the Jimmy John’s parking lot. And then Esther. And G. Niles. Dinah. I found all of these drivers on Twitter or on Instagram or on Facebook, some even through archival, long-dormant Myspace pages. Invariably, each of them had at one point or another posted something that, like Andy’s vindictive cruelty or Sarah’s callous shitposting, seemed to relieve me of my guilt. I found a wide spectrum of wrongs here: a just-asking-questions dog whistle, a self-aggrandizing humble-brag, a public fight with a significant other in the comment section of an Instagram photo where they came off looking like an asshole. The drivers who had posted like this in the weeks before their deaths disgusted me, while the drivers who had neglected to wipe their timelines from years or even decades prior made me pity them. Shouldn’t they have known, as I had, that potential employers would one day scrutinize these sorry displays of ignorance and ego? Shouldn’t they have thought to delete all of this? It became clear that this was how they ended up working a job like that in the first place, and, after the tenth fatality, the portraits on my refrigerator began to blur together, their faces indistinguishable from one another.
All of them were Andy, to me, and Andy was all of them.
Not every delivery was a death sentence. In fact, after running the numbers, I realized that my drivers’ odds were far better than I might have expected, with just one in four turning up dead on the side of the road. I wondered if this was normal—all these dead drivers, all these spoiled meals. One night I got drunk and found that, on average, 918 delivery drivers die on the job per year. A little under 1% of this year’s fatalities had occurred under my directive, and, in my more sober moments, the thought crossed my mind that all of these deaths might not be cosmic retribution for my drivers’ transgressions, but rather for my own, for some moral failing that I had until now failed to consider.
The possible triggers were endless: the time back in high school when I put in a massive Papa John’s order to a random address in the middle of nowhere; the time I ordered Chinese food during a blizzard and failed to tip; the countless times I left drivers waiting at my front door as I was shitting, or masturbating, or looking at my phone. Indiscretions continued to percolate. There was my general refusal to patronize local establishments. The free meals I would collect from claiming that my driver had delivered the wrong order. My sloth. My lust. My hunger. It seemed feasible that the cumulative stain of these transgressions had marked me, somehow, that it had provoked all this.
One night, though, I was experimenting with forgoing my usual weed regimen when a horrible thought occurred to me: that Andy’s death had been a fluke, but that the rest were a direct, karmic result of my inability to confess to Jessica in the church parking lot. I worried that all of this could have been stopped if I’d just told her the truth, that all of these lives could have been saved, no matter how flawed they may have been. I considered that it might not be too late to fix things, and then I spent the next thirty minutes drafting a DM explaining all of this to Jessica, and then apologizing to her, and then begging for her to forgive me. It felt good to write all of this out, but, after finishing, I stared at the words blinking back at me, and they seemed too awful to be real.
I couldn’t send this to Jessica. I couldn’t tell this to anyone.
I deleted my draft, took a massive rip off my bong, and masturbated into my fist. I can’t remember what it was that I ordered that night, but, waiting around for a Jimmy John’s sandwich or a Three Finger Combo or a Crunchwrap Supreme, I reassured myself, over and over again, that some people are just born unlucky. That I should count my blessings. That this is how the world works.
Some people deliver, and some people receive.
■
Years passed. I got a promotion, moved into a larger apartment, and started cooking for myself a little more, my HelloFresh orders arriving often enough that their occasional absence rarely unsettled me. I was feeling healthier. I was feeling better about myself.
Jessica hardly posted about Andy at all anymore, except for on his birthday, and on the anniversary of his death, and on the occasional holiday. It looked like she had a new boyfriend. He didn’t grace her Instagram much, and, although his existence stirred a spark of jealousy, it settled my guilt to learn from his LinkedIn profile that he had a white-collar job not so different from mine, something in sales that he could do safely, that he could do from home. I hoped that he and Jessica never fought, that they never worried about money, that they never wanted for anything that couldn’t be summoned with the click of a button.
Things seemed to be getting serious between them. After a while, I made it a point to stop checking up on her at all.
Denver is not so big of a city, though, and perhaps it was inevitable that one night, fishing my grocery order out from the wreckage of a Wal-Mart delivery driver’s decimated Subaru, I looked up to see someone who looked an awful lot like Jessica staring down at me from the driver’s seat of a Pontiac Vibe. She was waiting at a stop light, looking more confused than appalled, and although I couldn’t be sure that it was her, I’d scrolled through enough of her photos that I could recognize the stern slant of her face just about anywhere, even cast in silhouette as it was now. She was smoking a cigarette. She seemed to be alone. I shoved the last of the plastic grocery bags into my cooler just as my cell phone buzzed with a notification that my Lyft driver had arrived to pick me up.
Sure enough, an Audi eased against the side of the road, headlights beaming toward the Pontiac. I didn’t want to get in my Lyft, though; I wanted to talk to Jessica. I knew there was no way she would remember me, but I suddenly felt that I needed to be sure that it was her. It seemed akin to fate, running into her like this, and I thought it might be a kind of deliverance. Here was one last chance to confess in person and to put an end to all of this carnage, one last chance to see what might happen between us.
I hobbled to my feet. I waved to this person that I hoped was Jessica.
The woman cocked her head at me. I thought that maybe I could see a flicker of recognition, but then the light turned green, and she put her cigarette to her lips, and then she turned away and accelerated into the dark.
DO NOT HONK AT ME, read a new bumper sticker on the back of her car, the text shrinking by the second. My life is WORTHLESS. I will KILL us both.
It was Jessica, all right.
Sweating incessantly, I shuffled out of the wreckage, dragging the overstuffed cooler beyond me. I raised my hand in acknowledgment as I rushed toward the Lyft, sirens yelping in the distance.
“What the fuck, man,” said my driver, Liam, as I threw open his back door. “Were you in that crash?”
I shoved my cooler into the middle seat and scrambled inside. “Never mind my drop-off location,” I gasped, buckling myself in with one hand and pointing to the Pontiac Vibe disappearing ahead of us with the other. “I need you to follow that car.” I knew how crazy I must have sounded, but I just needed a few minutes with her. I just needed to explain myself. “Please,” I added. “I’ll tip you like crazy.”
“This had better not be anything fucked,” he said, and I promised it was on the level.
Liam merged back onto the road.
He jammed on the gas.
And then, just as we passed over the crosswalk at the edge of the intersection, a delivery truck blew through the red light and collided, head-on, with the driver’s side of my Lyft.
■
A few months have passed, now, since the accident, and I’m not ashamed to say that I haven’t been cooking as much through my recovery. The doctors say that I should be able to take my cast off in a couple of weeks, and, well, let’s just say that I consider myself lucky.
Sooner or later, everyone encounters death up close, I figure.
Sooner or later, everyone gets their hands dirty.
These days, I try not to think too much about Andy and Jessica. I took the accident as a sign that I should move on, and now they only seem to cross my mind late at night, when I’m so violently high that I can hardly even masturbate, when I’m not watching anything on television, when my AC is off and I’m alone with my thoughts and with the portraits glaring at me from the refrigerator, my apartment so quiet that, from down the road, I can just barely hear the crash of metal colliding with metal, with pavement, with street signs. On these nights, I close the window shut to silence a string of delivery drivers gasping for life out in the dark; I step around shattered glass on the sidewalk; I avert my eyes from the charred wreckage of a six-car pileup on my way to the corner store, pretending not to notice that everything I’ve ever wanted is strewn across the concrete, already turning bad in the dry mountain air.
