The Rider

The rain was coming down hard on Fourth Avenue when Marcus got the ping. Seven deliveries in forty-five minutes, all in the same neighborhood, and a bonus if he finished them before midnight. He looked at the phone, looked at the rain, looked at the e-bike leaning against the fire hydrant, and made the only choice available to him.

He pedaled.

Marcus Chen had been riding deliveries in New York for eleven months. Before that, he had been doing something else. He could not remember what it was. The doctors called it dissociative amnesia, which was a fancy way of saying that his brain had decided to delete some files and had forgotten to keep the backup. Marcus called it being fired from a job he could not talk about to people who could not help him.

The deliveries were simple. Pick up. Drop off. Tip if the customer was feeling generous. Tonight's deliveries were the usual mix: sushi for a guy in a studio apartment who never came to the door, a box of Thai food for a woman who lived on the fourth floor of a walk-up that smelled like old paint, a package of medicines for an old man who left them on his doorstep and told Marcus to leave them there.

It was on the third delivery, climbing the stairs of a building on West Fourth Street, that Marcus saw it. A small black rectangle, no bigger than a postage stamp, stuck to the wall beside the door. He had seen things like it before—on buses, in subway stations, on the walls of bodegas. Small black things that nobody paid attention to because they were too small to be interesting and too ordinary to be remarkable.

He reached out and touched it. It was warm.

The woman who opened the door on the third floor looked at him touching the wall and frowned. "You shouldn't do that," she said.

"Do what?" Marcus asked, pulling his hand back.

"Touch them. They're not supposed to be touched."

"By who?"

She closed the door before he could see her face clearly, but he caught a glimpse of something behind her—something that looked like a desk, a computer, and a wall of small black rectangles, each one glowing with a tiny red light.

Marcus finished his deliveries. He rode home in the rain with the cold water running down the back of his jacket and the image of those red lights burning behind his eyes. He had seen those lights before. He was sure of it. He was sure of a lot of things that he could not prove and could not explain.

The next night, he went back to the building on West Fourth Street. He stood across the street and watched. People came and went. Some of them touched the black rectangles without thinking. Some of them avoided them, as if their bodies knew something their minds did not.

Marcus pulled out his phone. The delivery app showed seven new orders, all in the same neighborhood. He accepted them, knowing he would not finish them all before midnight. The bonus did not matter. He was no longer riding for the bonus.