For weeks, Brian looked out to see “Evan Hansen” on practically every MTA bus careening down the avenue below the living room windows. When he first heard about this play, he could see as plain as day the handwritten name that kept appearing on the end papers of his grade-school textbooks. You weren’t supposed to write your name in these books, but “Evan Hansen” and his clotting blue ballpoint had gone on a tear across third, fourth, and fifth grades. The coincidence of continually winding up with an “Evan Hansen” book annoyed Brian. It felt as if something—the universe maybe—was pummeling his own identity into nonexistence. Consequently, the first time he saw the familiar giant letters sail past on a city bus, he felt the same way. “Evan Hansen” had got there first and put the flag up. There was no room for Brian Paszkowski.

He frequently looked out the windows because the place was small and his girlfriend was usually doing something in the bathroom when they were supposed to be standing spiffed up on the subway platform. As his mind idled, he’d find himself studying the guy often waiting below in the bus shelter no one ever used because it was one stop from the end of the line. The guy always wore a pristine white T-shirt that looked expensive for a T-shirt plus a small gold chain. He never looked up from his phone, and the MTA drivers knew not to slow down for him. He was the most optimized dealer Brian had ever observed. He had an uncanny ability to never be seen in the act. Brian would look down to answer a text and the guy would be gone.

For some reason, both “Evan Hansen” and the optimized dealer were on Brian’s mind when he saw the face on a digital billboard in Times Square: “There’s no place like home.” He was stopped in his tracks at the double recognition—knowing this face in the first place but also realizing that this face had at some point disappeared entirely from the news cycle.

Now the words under the face were “Whose do you want?” He wondered why he hadn’t ever pondered the whereabouts of both this face and that of its fraternal twin. They should’ve been everywhere you looked right about now. But they had disappeared—disappeared without any buzz about their having disappeared. He wondered briefly if it was conspiracy, their disappearance. But here they were again, one of them at least. Here was one of them hugely and provocatively asking “Whose do you want?”

When Brian was a student at the New School and pretended he believed he wanted to be a working journalist, he had interviewed the twins as an assignment. His classmates called it a coup that he’d got them to consent to a sit-down. At the Coffee Shop in Union Square, Gareth and Gisella Gibson kept comparing themselves to the Wachowski siblings. It was 2010 and the Gibsons had a platform they could not disclose. They kept using the phrase “launch-ready,” but Brian had no idea what their platform would offer the world.

During the interview, he realized he was committing a mortal sin of journalism by being preoccupied at how the twins’ upbringing had been so unlike his own. They were from an upper-middle-class family in northern California; he was from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. They had nice clothes and good skin. Gisella had beautiful hair. Gareth recounted being attacked by a robotic trash collector in Tuscany and considered this their platform’s “origin story.”

“They finished each other’s sentences” was a cliché (you didn’t do that as a journalist), but that’s what they did. When Brian had listened to the conversation that night, he found scant material to write about. Beyond their obsession with The Matrix, the twins were laser-focused on generating hype and venture capital.

But the interview made Brian realize something critical: his own intellectual limitations. The twins made him aware of the fact that there was nothing he could do to make his brain work like theirs did. He could never give it free rein to imagine without parameters. He chalked it up to the limitation of not having grown up with the financial comfort that took down the invisible fence. There was always the anxiety of a bill in the mail, of someone having to slide a check inside a windowed envelope.

He wouldn’t call it devastating this realization; he prided himself on being savvy enough to know this about himself. Why did he quit journalism before even trying? It was mostly the money. Everything was the money. He came out of college twice as much in debt as he anticipated, and there was no support from his family. It was the money, yes, but it was also because, as a profession, journalism had become the butt of all jokes. His classmates mocked print journalism wannabes like they were passing through a steampunk phase. You demoralized yourself by “trying” and “following your dreams.”

Standing before the giant face of Gareth Gibson, Brian Googled the twins. The lead news wasn’t Gareth’s launch of a new platform but the estrangement from his sister. This was already ancient history—six years ago. Gisella was said to have “untwinned herself”; she coined the hashtag “detwinification.” Gareth’s new product was called Homefront, but again, just like in 2010, it was some kind of state secret what this product did.

In the midst of this unexpected reverie, Brian’s phone pinged with another text from his girlfriend. She wanted him to bring her a caramel macchiato, but what she really wanted was an engagement ring. She was exactly right for the kind of life he currently led. He had a bullshit job that paid OK and sounded good on paper. They first got together five years ago and then broke up and got back together several times. Going down the checklist, everything looked good: they had made pickles one weekend two years ago; she bought him a used banjo that he would never play.

After Times Square, Brian had to add Gareth Gibson’s giant face to his current thoughts on rotation. He believed in very little, but the coincidence of signs he considered important even if he’d never profited from any directional wisdom. It wasn’t long before he became preoccupied with the estrangement of the Gibson twins. He suspected it was because they “broke up” right around the time he was floundering in finding an alternate career to the journalism he never started. He had succumbed to generational ennui and the quest of self-optimization and bagged the idea of an Act 1—the years you pursued a romantic ambition, making a lot of great friends but ultimately failing at the money part before going to law school or taking up someone’s father’s offer of a financial-sector starter job. These great friends of Act 1 were the idea you held onto in middle age even though you probably had little in common from the start.

Brian decided he had to track down Gareth Gibson and request another interview. He did so under the guise that he now worked freelance and wanted to write a bookend profile to the one he did in 2010. He neglected to note that that profile had never been published and only received a B.

It was shockingly easy to get an interview with the face of Homefront. Gareth was still based in California but had an office in New York. When Brian entered the Park Place address into his phone, he was surprised to see WeWork on the map. How do you pay for a Times Square billboard if it’s just yourself in some WeWork space?

Gareth still oozed the same Silicon Valley confidence from before, but without his sister, the artistic vibe was gone. Almost immediately, Brian felt lonely talking to him one-on-one; it was as if Gareth only vibrated on a single frequency. It seemed even lonelier because Gareth was doing a “phone detox” following a Buddhist retreat. He took a vow to turn his phone off and put it out of sight during face-to-face conversations. “Put yours away too,” he ordered like a boys’ school headmaster.

Brian smiled. “But I have to record this.”

He rolled his eyes. “Do what you have to.”

After Brian fed him several lies to seem legitimate, Gareth replied, “That was one great piece!” Brian was relieved to realize that Gareth hadn’t bothered to Google him, to see if there was any quality to his nonexistent work. “So what is Homefront?” he asked first thing.

The furtive smile from years before made a reappearance. “There are no known issues.”

Brian nodded for no reason he could think of. “And that’s as good as it gets?”

Gareth inhaled deeply to exaggerate the sigh that came next. “You know what I want to talk about? I want to talk about being stalked by an algorithm. I’m Holmes and the algorithm is Moriarty.”

Brian tried to look engrossed as his subject elaborated on Game Theory using the example of Sherlock Holmes’s escaping from his nemesis in “The Final Problem.” Unlike a good journalist, Brian found it difficult to feign interest in this performance. He felt preoccupied by the question of when to ask about Gisella, wondering for the first time if she was the reason for everything. When Brian realized Gareth had finally stopped talking, he asked, “So is Homefront the same platform you guys were going to launch eight years ago?”

Gareth laced his fingers on his lap like someone’s grandfather. “We gave up on platforms.”

His tone was so intentionally superior that Brian had to fight breaking into laughter. He decided on a nudge: “But not in defeat. . . ”

Gareth grinned. “Hey, we saw it coming, the abuses—where Facebook was headed. Cambridge Analytica and all that.”

Brian tried out nodding like those cutaway shots on Dateline. It struck him how his mind was doing something akin to what it did in diagramming a sentence in third grade. Here, for instance, he would write in the margin “getting hold of the narrative” and then add a checkmark.

He searched for a way to gently address the Gibsons’ failure to launch. “I remember the story where you’re attacked by the robotic trash collector. You called it your origin story.” He paused. “Your sister called it your Buster Keaton story.”

Gareth’s expression instantly turned to stone. “You probably know that Gisella’s gone all Jaron Lanier. She feels betrayed.”

“Betrayed by you?”

He looked away to the spot he had obviously settled on for looking away to. Brian could tell he was in withdrawal over his phone. “By the whole culture.”

Brian nodded.

“She’s living in some town north of Sacramento.” He smiled in the sad way of latent self-awareness. “She’s started a shelter for wildfire dogs.”

Brian couldn’t stop his face from lighting up. “That’s a good thing.”

Gareth smirked. He was only six years older but already cultivated the disposition of having seen too many things. He had seemed so easygoing before, but now Brian could see the bitterness of a Peter Thiel—any steward of a tricked-out fortune that had ballooned on public attention. Except that Gareth Gibson did not have Peter Thiel’s fortune. Here was a guy mocking Brian for being a simpleton, but this guy had consented to an interview with a simpleton not once but twice. Brian realized he was being mocked at the same moment that he was drastically discounting the IPO of the mocker.

Clearly, Brian realized, Gareth was having trouble functioning without his sister. Back then, he seemed physically composed of assumptions rather than oxygen and carbon. Now, however, Brian recalled that it was more often Gisella who completed the sentences, providing depth and context.

Already the conversation had reached a dead end, with Brian struggling for content. “Whatever happened to your Matrix thing?”

Gareth stiffened his spine. “Thing?”

“You talked a lot about the movie’s meanings, but now it’s like only the far right talk about the Red Pill people.”

Gareth again looked away to his preferred spot. Brian could tell he was affronted but also embarrassed to have gone on about the movie back then. It seemed like he was only now realizing how the most innocuous personal history could be weaponized against you. “So what’s your brilliant theory about cutting through to the real?” he asked.

“Mine?”

“Yeah, Brian. Share your brilliance.”

What Brian always pictured in regard to “cutting through” was grabbing his grandmother’s can opener from the dark ages of her kitchen drawer—this can opener that he loved getting out of the drawer and using on a can of Alphabet Soup. In the dark ages you cut right through the tin with this thing that didn’t even need to be recharged. He used to dream of taking this can opener to cut through the world in circles, like a cordless boring machine.

“I don’t know,” he replied like a chump. “Be like the Road Runner in cartoons—draw the exit tunnel onto the wall of stone.”

Gareth’s mocking smile now seemed oddly familiar. “That’s pretty deep, Brian Paszkowski.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to insult Brian with his own name.

“Life is a scrim,” Gareth went on. “It always has been and always will be. Plato and the cave. You need to remove the shades.”

Brian didn’t want him going off on another tangent. “Can’t you even tell me who? What audience is Homefront for?”

“Talk to Gisella,” he said coldly, looking away in boredom. “I’ll text you her number. She’s got me blocked. It’ll be fun to see if you get through.”

As Brian headed back to work, he wondered if Homefront would fizzle out just like the twins’ phantom platform. Were they all hype and nothing more? That’s not what he thought eight years ago. Back then, they were measurements to show him precisely what he was not. Even if Homefront fizzled out, he realized, his own preoccupation wouldn’t. One morning as he stared down through the bus shelter Plexiglas at the white back of the optimized dealer, he had to acknowledge a driving desire to sit down and write a story—only he didn’t know what it was about.

After a couple days of hedging, he went ahead and texted Gisella Gibson. An afternoon went by before she replied, quite courteously. He asked if he could call, and she texted “I don’t really like to talk on the phone. I don’t do fake facetime.”

He texted back: “Do you ever come to New York?”

“Not really,” she replied. “But I’d be happy to talk if you’re ever out here.”

A week later he booked a flight to Sacramento to meet Gisella at her shelter. The only way he could get away with this rash decision was that his girlfriend had taken off two weeks to go to what she still called “home” to be with her sister who just had a baby. He told people at work he was going to a funeral.

The drive to the town took fifty-five minutes. The shelter was a small afterthought of a structure with four cars parked in a dirt lot to the side. He entered this world of dog sounds apprehensively, expecting to go through door upon door, but he came face to face with Gisella and her perfect posture first thing.

She told him to call her “G.G.” “But don’t say it with the Frenchiness of Gigi. It’s a hardy soft G—twice.”

He nodded, noticing that her hair was no longer shiny and straight. “Your hair is different.” He couldn’t believe he said that.

She laughed, pulling at a curly strand. “My hair is real.”

He felt himself blush.

“So what’s new with you?” she asked.

This was kind of her, he thought, since she obviously remembered nothing of him. “Not a lot really,” he said. “Lately I’ve been selling drugs from a bus shelter under the name Evan Hansen.”

She laughed. “Like the play?”

“Just kidding,” he said, shrugging. “But I have to tell you that I’m not really a working journalist. I just wanted to follow up on an old story.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated. “That’s a good question.”

She looked concerned. “So you talked to Gareth.”

“Yeah. And talking to him made me want to talk to you.”

“Again, why?”

It suddenly dawned on him that he might appear to be a psychopath or a stalker. He thought it better not to acknowledge this possibility. “I guess I wanted to know what it’s like when your life goes into Act 2 after a legitimate Act 1.”

This made her smile. “Legitimate?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying. I told you I bailed on being a word guy.”

She appeared to be thinking things through. “F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life. And yet his buddy Hemingway had four wives. That’s four acts right there, right?”

Brian nodded at Hemingway’s four acts. “How did the separation happen? Did you have a fight?”

“Gareth is a terrible bully. I will always love him, but our relationship got toxic.”

He proceeded hesitantly. “The detwinification . . . that seems extreme.”

She looked at him intently. “Let’s talk about dogs, OK?”

He nodded again. “OK.”

There was something slightly possessed about her demeanor, but she was a force that drew him along. She told him that a partner was doing cats in Palermo. Next up was farm animals. “We will rescue everything domestic on four legs and maybe even nondomestic. As long as settled areas are burning.”

She gave him a tour of her shelter, pointing out the dogs and their problems and introducing him to the shelter’s manager, Amir, and two college girls who worked there part time. “It’s funny that we call them ‘fire dogs,’ ” she observed. “In the Chinese zodiac, this is the year of the Fire Dog.”

He laughed. “Really? We had ‘fire dogs’ growing up. Nick’s Texas Hots.”

“But did you have a dog?”

“Of course we had a dog. Everyone had a dog.”

She obviously had her pitch down pat. “The first order of action is reuniting the dogs with their owners,” she explained. “And sometimes it’s reuniting them with relatives of their owners because the owners have died. So it’s very sad in many ways.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize she was trying to get him to adopt one of her dogs. He tried to deflect the railroading by volunteering “My girlfriend doesn’t like dogs.”

She seemed amused at this. “Dog conversion therapy is the one kind of conversion therapy I’m cool with.”

He kept still as she drew his attention to another caged pit bull. “If it wasn’t for the Shih Tzus and the Chihuahuas, it would be all pitties.” When she let this one out, it looked up at both of them as if it had absolutely no expectations—not of humans or of the atmosphere, not that the floors wouldn’t crumble or the ceilings wouldn’t collapse.

“He’s not a fire dog,” she said. “His owner’s in jail.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know.”

He stared at the indifferent animal. “Don’t you think his owner misses him, will want him back?”

She shook her head. “He had six dogs. He asked his brother to shoot them, but his brother couldn’t do it. We found homes for the other five. Big Boy is the last.”

“Big Boy?”

“Yeah, but you spell it B-O-I.” She laughed. “Whoever adopts him doesn’t have to keep that name.”

Brian studied the animal. How could he not be a sad-looking dog? His forehead was so wide you could rest a cappuccino cup and saucer on it.

“As you can see, he’s lethargic,” she pointed out, “but he’s healthy. No separation anxiety, not on any meds.”

Brian continued looking down at the dog. “I think I used those words on OK Cupid.”

“You’re funny, Brian Paszkowski.”

He refused to look up.

“You have the soul for a dog like this. No one seems to get that although he came from a less-than-ideal environment, he doesn’t have baggage.”

He was sensing less and less of an outlet. “No known issues.”

She caught her breath like he just said the secret word. “Exactly! You totally get it, Brian!”

He laughed out of frustration and apprehension.

“Let’s make a deal,” she said. “I’ll tell you what Homefront does if you adopt Big Boi.”

It was so scattered, this conversation, but he heard himself agree. He came all the way out here; it had to have been for something.

“OK,” she said, splaying the fingers of both hands as if this would somehow ground her. “When I kept asking you ‘why’ you were interested in Homefront and us, it was for a reason. I thought you might have remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

“During that interview, you said something about your house growing up. Was it Pittsburgh?”

“Mechanicsburg.”

“You said the house was so ugly in the front you hated going home.”

He laughed. “I can’t believe you remembered that.”

“But you said something funny. You said that you wished you could project a hologram onto it so it looked like someone else’s house.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I used to think that.”

“Well,” she said as if her point was already taken. “Gareth has basically stolen your idea. Homefront projects a hologram of the house you want to live in.”

He was stunned, mainly because it was such a bad, undoable idea.

She looked penitent. “If you still have the recorded interview you can sue his ass off.”

He didn’t know what to say. “That was, like, at least one lifetime ago.”

“I think you scared him by showing up. That’s probably why he sent you to me.”

He had the sickly feeling of not having control over something he himself had started.

“It’s a logistically dumb idea,” she said before looking down. “I’m the one who gave it to him, although not on purpose.” She paused. “I was making fun of you, Brian. We were making fun of you. We did that to a lot to people.”

He didn’t know what to say. “Don’t expect me to thank you for being honest.”

She made a whimpering sound to suggest frustration. “Oh, I know you’re not going to take Big Boi. You know that I’m humoring you in order to use you. It’s good and it’s healthy that you get that.”

He was flustered by her use of “get.” You totally get it, Brian. Is this why he came out here—for the get? to totally get something?

“The platform fell apart,” she confessed. “So much money was lost on us, on me. You can’t even say ‘lost.’ That money got vaporized. Remember in grade school when you learned about a body of water as being either a heat source or a heat sink? I was a heat sink.”

“I remember heat sink,” he said truthfully. It was uncanny how he, too, had thought that about people. “All that money must mean you’re very valuable.”

She laughed. “Bless you, Brian Paszkowski.”

He felt himself blush, but it may have been from the shame of being humored.

“Gareth didn’t have any big ideas,” she went on. “He asked me, ‘What do people really want out of life?’ And I said, ‘Other people’s houses.’ And then I remembered your comment because I did think it was poignant. He would never have remembered it. I mentioned it as a joke. And the first thing I know he’s running with it.”

He’d lost any thread of logic. After some silence, he reached to pet Big Boi’s prairie forehead. “It’s pathetic, isn’t it? I mean, not what he did but that this would be a marketable product.”

“People live that way.”

He laughed in a sickly way. “Maybe he can sell a version with Tupac on the porch.”

She shook her head. “God, that would be sad.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “I mean, anyone could shoot him in a drive-by but he’d never fall down.”

She shut her eyes tightly. “He thinks everyone’s out to get him.”

He nodded. “He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes.”

This made her laugh. “He’s lost his Watson.”

“He told me you went ‘all Jaron Lanier.’ ”

She laughed again. “There’s always already a word for it, isn’t there?”

“I had to look him up, being the dipshit I am.”

“It’s all pretense, always moving on to the next thing because the fires weren’t put out behind you. Give poor mothers in Oakland a laptop with tutorials. Give obese kids in Oxnard a Fitbit. Done and done.”

“My mom used to say that for every jar of ointment, there were a million potential flies.”

“Your mom was right.” She paused. “A solution is not a marketable thing but a process that shines light on further problems but also new solutions. It’s a willingness to chronically engage without promise of reward.”

He ended up driving away from G.G.’s shelter with a verbal commitment to a dog. Was this chronically engaging? he wondered. Because there was no promise of reward. It took another day and a half to get the dog booked on the same flight as himself.

“You’re a hard sell,” she said when she presented him his forty-pound prize in a scruffy carrier.

“And you’re a hardy soft G,” he replied. “Twice.”

“You’re funny, Brian Paszkowski.”

“I wish that was true.”

On the plane he felt like he was coming out of anesthesia after surgery. Only now could he realize that, back during that Coffee Shop interview, there was indeed a story about the Gibsons—a big one staring any real journalist in the face—but he couldn’t see a story because he couldn’t see the world objectively. He remembered that one of the hallway bulletin boards from elementary school had a “Climb every mountain” theme with brown construction paper peaks and white construction paper clouds. As a kid, he looked at this aspirational display and thought “Why bother?” He disqualified himself from the start, but he now realized he was wrong in thinking that self-awareness made him objective.

He claimed his dog at LaGuardia and took an Uber to an Unleashed on Third Avenue to load up on things a privileged dog would have. He felt a tinge of shame at the checkout, for the hoard brought to mind those TV movies from the eighties where the poor orphaned Black kid gets a new life in a John Hughes-style suburban home of white people wearing many layers of brand-new clothes. Soon the poor kid’s wearing the same layers of brand-new clothes—problem solved. By the time Brian got Big Boi and the commodities of his new lifestyle back to his and Alex’s small apartment and turned on the overhead, the John Hughes image quickly dissolved.

Alex would be enraged that he did this to her. How could this have happened? Rather than dwell on the expanding dilemma, he took Big Boi for a walk. The slow-moving animal periodically turned to look up at him, as if waiting to hear something either soothingly familiar or provocatively foreign. “I want a happy ending,” G.G. had said when saddling him with a six-year-old rescue. It was an awkward moment. He knew he’d been played, though the dog had lucked out. “Big Boi,” he said when he and the animal were alone, “this is definitely an Act 2 for you.”

After the park, Brian sat on the bus shelter bench rather than go inside his building. Big Boi dropped his haunches on the sidewalk and leaned onto Brian’s calves like a sea lion on a jetty. It occurred to him that this dog who’d been rescued from a shelter was now in another kind of shelter. They were both in this shelter, in fact. “I know I lied,” he told the dog. “You must have issues, everyone has issues, layers and layers down in their unknowable depths.”

Just then a careening bus suddenly braked itself upon noticing the pair in the shelter. Brian waved away the driver he could see through the opened door. The bus belched twice before dragging itself away with the familiar “Evan Hansen” in its wake. Then Brian saw the guy in the white T-shirt approaching, not looking up from his phone. When the guy finally noticed Brian and Big Boi, he seemed startled and hesitated before moving on. Here at street level Brian realized that the guy wasn’t very tall. He also apprehended a glaring paradox. The guy never wore a jacket even when it was cold, which must mean people needed to see that white shirt. Ironically, this was the last guy you’d expect to see waving white in surrender.

His pinging phone meant more staccato updates on Alex’s flight. He made himself silent and motionless to discern the rhythm of Big Boi’s panting. He found it nice just sitting there without a plan. “You know that I’m humoring you in order to use you,” he told the dog after a bit. When Big Boi looked up at him there was another ping, a solo. “bb ok?” It was from G.G. “Sitting with me in bus shelter,” he texted back. A few seconds later he added, “Thinking about rest of lives together. But in 2 different brains.”

“Call me,” she texted back.

“U don’t like phone.”

“Anything for bb,” she texted, “u2.”

Although he didn’t have an origin story that involved being attacked by a robotic trash collector, Brian had somehow turned the tables. He had deposed the dealer on his bench. He had waved away “Evan Hansen.” He was calling the woman who had blocked Gareth Gibson on her phone. As he pressed the green circle, he thought of Gareth’s Big Brother face asking “Whose do you want?” That was a tough one, but something made him almost confident that, in a little while, the solution would be found. §