When I came back upstairs, a message on my phone. ‘big plans tonight? ;-P’

I sent the guy a picture, very square, very clear, nothing below the neck, like it had to pass approval by the passport scrutineers. I admired his profile, an anonymous white person in his early mid-twenties, a bit older than me. In a beer garden, at the gym, at a music festival; I swiped through the pictures, it was all the classics.

‘Yeah big plans,’ I said.

He wrote back straight away. ‘oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘where?’

I blinked at the phone. I didn’t want to say where, because it was here. But I guessed I was too drunk – on a glass of gunk on ice – to read a book or even pay attention to a movie, so I might as well go out and do things.

I did not trust the developers of these janky hook-up apps, which stole and leaked locations, words and pictures, so I sent him my mobile number, saying, ‘Sorry, the app crashed.’ But because free will is a problem that has yet to be vamoosed, he continued asking questions in the same leaky in-app chat screen, and on the screens of every government in the Five Eyes group.

His profile read, ‘If it’s on, it’s not on ;-P’, which sounded very modern, Zen and fun, kind of like saying there was no ‘there’ there.

‘Was thinking about Fitzroy,’ I typed, sighing to no one.

I walked away, but buzz, buzz. He said, ‘I’m going to fitzroy’.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. He had distance on; barely a kilometre. ‘So give me a lift.’

‘great’ he said.

I stared at the phone.

I stared out the window.

‘Great,’ I said.

I put on a short-sleeved shirt, and also put on jeans, because this was only ten at night on November 30 and by midnight it would probably be cool-to-cold again. I explained to the stranger I was not quite ready yet and went into the bathroom and paced it in my shoes, counting my notes and coins and managing my silhouette by tucking my earbuds into the rolled cuff of my jeans. I went onto the footpath and stared down oncoming cars, the joggers’ edge of Princes Park, its shadowy middle.

When the person picked me up, he was apparently post-gym, in a grey shirt with black blooms where it stuck against the skin.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to Fitzroy.’

‘You already told me that,’ he said.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said.

He drove down Park Street towards Nicholson, past gelati-eating couples and long rectangles of roadside space, blank with grass.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

‘No, it’s easy,’ he said.

He looked at me, smiled at me, and looked away again, being a calm and responsible driver.

We drove a while in silence, past a church, a pizza place, following the sloping road towards Alexandra Parade.