The Pasta Purity Filter

Cold Open

BOILWATCH ALERT

HUMIDITY: 86%

RISK LEVEL: EMOTIONALLY UNSAFE

RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT FORM NEW EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

The bungee cord had one notch left in it, and Ricky Rigatoni was hauling it over a stranger’s breakfast on the north sidewalk outside Nonna’s Pasta Shop when the alert landed on the phone in his back pocket, at six minutes past nine on a Tuesday. He read it with the cord still in his other hand. Then he put the phone away and hooked the cord. Somewhere up the walk-up next door, a window came down harder than it needed to.

The breakfast was two iced coffees and a box of lemon biscotti for an apartment in SoHo that had typed, under special instructions, leave at door, no talking. Ricky patted the bag. “You’re going to be fine,” he told it.

He was twenty-one, a courier on three apps at once, and the insulated bag on his rack wore all three of their logos, stitched on top of one another in the order they had hired him. It was eighty-six percent out and his ridges had started beading before he finished his own coffee. They were beading now. SauceRun gave him eleven minutes to reach SoHo and called it a challenge.

He turned to swing his leg over the bike, and Frankie Fettuccini was standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his phone out, grinning like a man about to ruin someone’s day and bill them for it.

Frankie was twenty-three, a ribbon of fettuccine as long and pale as a receipt, in a black suit jacket cut for somebody broader, and even standing still some part of him was on its way somewhere else. He had planted himself between Ricky and the street, which left Ricky the bike, the brick and the kindness board to back into.

“What are you doing?” Ricky said.

“Check this out.”

He held up the phone. On the screen was an app Ricky had never seen: a white circle the size of a face, and under it, in friendly rounded letters, SCAN YOUR TRUE SHAPE.

“It scans your face and tells you your TRUE SHAPE,” Frankie said. “Like, your authentic pasta identity. According to the algorithm.”

“That sounds fake.”

“Everything’s fake. But THIS fake is fun.”

“I’ve got an order,” Ricky said.

“It takes four seconds. You’ve got eleven minutes. That’s a hundred and sixty-five of you.”

He turned the phone around and pointed it at Ricky’s face. A ring of light ran around the white circle, and inside it a slow spiral began to turn, the kind of swirl somebody drew when they wanted a machine to look busy.

“Look at it think,” Frankie said. “It’s a shit-sieve with a progress bar.”

“Who even made it?”

“Fuck knows. It’s on two hundred phones on this street already.”

“Two hundred?” Ricky said.

“Give or take. Stop bouncing. It can’t read a guy who’s bouncing.”

Ricky had not known he was bouncing. He stopped. The swirl went around twice more, slowed, settled, and the screen printed its verdict like a price on a shelf.

YOUR TRUE SHAPE:
GENERIC TUBE
Common. Unremarkable. Easily replaced.

His ridges beaded from the top row down, each row waiting politely for the one above it to finish.

“…Generic?” Ricky said.

“Ooh,” Frankie said. “That’s rough.”

“I’m not GENERIC.”

“The algorithm has spoken, bro.”

Ricky took the phone out of his hand. “Let me— there must be a mistake—”

He knew that small print. HotBag sent him a shorter version most weeks, two words, whenever he stopped on somebody’s stairs to carry their groceries up the last flight: Order reassigned. He held the phone at arm’s length. His own face looked back at him from inside the white circle, damp and hopeful and in need of a ruling, and he arranged it into the face of a rigatoni with a history. He had a history. He had a grandmother who had run the same shop for fifty years, a jersey he washed by hand, and nine hundred deliveries since New Year’s, near enough, with a smile through every door, and he put all of it into his face and held it there while the swirl made up its mind.

YOUR TRUE SHAPE:
GENERIC TUBE

The second time it did not bother with the small print.

Ricky took that in. “Cool. Love that for us.”

The phone was warm in his hand. Behind him the board, which said Say something nice, said nothing.

Ricky turned the screen toward Frankie, as evidence. “That’s not— I’m a RIGATONI. I have RIDGES. I have CHARACTER—”

Frankie took the phone back. “Look, it’s just a filter. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He was already walking, phone up. “Oh, look at this fucking guy,” he said, and turned it on the Trattoria’s delivery man, who had come out of the side door with a crate of tomatoes on his shoulder and stopped dead in the light of the swirl. The swirl turned. The delivery man read the screen, set the crate down on the cobbles, and took out his own phone to photograph it.

On the rack, the iced coffees had begun, very quietly, to stop being iced. SauceRun said nine minutes. Ricky stood under the kindness board with the bike against his hip and his ridges running, still looking at the place in the air where the screen had been.

“…Generic,” he said.

Chapter One — The Patch at Eye Height

Lao Lao LoMein stood at the window of her shop with a cup of tea in her hand and graded the morning through the one clear patch in the glass, which the steam had left at exactly her eye height because it knew better. She was seventy-nine and dressed as if the shop might be audited before lunch: a white work shirt pressed and buttoned to the collar, a black half-apron, reading glasses hung from a chain, a single jade bangle, and her strands bundled tight and paling at the tips.

The morning was a bad batch. Eighty-six percent, the phones had said, which meant ninety, and the clouds over the water towers had been worked too long and gone gray and elastic. The street was a single lane of wet cobbles with a white line down the middle that nobody on the block admitted to painting. The paint was on the bars of the grate too. Somebody had been thorough. On the walk-up’s roof stood the water tower, a colander whatever the building’s management said, which dripped on the top fire escape every morning at eight.

Her own building was the older storefront on the street. The shop across the lane had been there fifty years, which was young. It had a board bolted to its brick that said Say something nice, and nobody had. At the alley mouth, under the one streetlamp, Louie Lasagna kept his traffic cones and his opinions. On her own sidewalk, in front of the launderette, the colander dome over the station stairs breathed out the platform’s air, the one thing on the street older than her shop.

Across the lane, behind her own glass, that woman was filling the case with the morning’s pasta, and once a minute she looked up at nothing in particular, which happened to be here. Lao Lao gave her a B for it: too much looking up. She had been marking that woman every morning for sixty years and been marked back, and neither of them had ever once been caught at it. Lao Lao was only reading the street, which had that woman in it the way a ledger had a debt in it.

At twenty past nine the Trattoria’s delivery man came out of his side door for the third time since breakfast. She had always graded him bruised but honest: a good tomato in a bad box. This morning he carried the crate without noticing it. In his free hand he held his phone, screen outward, and he was showing it to the pharmacist on her way in, and to the mailman, and, when the mailman had gone, to the hydrant. He did not have to tell her what it said. A man did not show the street a bad grade.

“Lao Lao.” Lilly LoMein, twenty-two, was at the counter with her strands skewered up out of the way on a pencil and her phone lying face down on a job listing, which was how she read job listings. It had just buzzed. Lilly turned it over and made the small sound she made at deliveries of the wrong size. “Somebody scanned somebody. Now it’s on my phone.”

“What is?”

“A thing that tells you what you are,” Lilly said.

“Delete it.”

Lilly deleted it. She set the phone down, face down. It buzzed. She turned it over.

“It came back,” she said. “Like a cousin.”

“Hē chá.”

Lilly poured herself a cup, because it had been an order, and did not drink it, because it had not been a request. Lao Lao returned to the glass.

At twenty to ten the Fettuccini one, the ribbon who belonged to no shop and was on every stoop, sat down on the walk-up’s steps and began holding his phone up to the building. He did the 3B couple on their way out, both together, so that they read their screens shoulder to shoulder and started arguing before the door had shut. He did the elderly mostaccioli from the top floor, who stopped on the bottom step to be photographed by what they plainly believed was a newspaper. He did a window. A head came out of it and was done too. At five to ten he crossed to her side of the street without once looking at her shop, did the launderette’s doorway, did two people in it, and walked on toward Broth Street with his phone still up.

By ten the whole north sidewalk was holding phones up to faces like people checking fruit.

Lao Lao drank her tea and kept count. The delivery man at nine; the stoop at twenty to ten; the launderette at five to; and after that, everybody, from everybody, faster than she could write it on the inside of her head. Every one of them read the screen once and then looked up at the person beside them. She noted where it had started. A grocer kept the invoice.

Mena Orecchiette came in at half past ten, small and cupped and listening even as she came through the door, and sat at the table nearest the window, the table for people who had come to sell something. Mena was seventy-one and lived in the walk-up’s lowest apartment, with a window over the stoop that she had not closed in thirty years. Lao Lao put a plate of six dumplings in the middle of the table and kept the chopsticks.

“The Fettuccini one has a telephone,” Mena said. “It tells you what you really are.”

Lao Lao moved one dumpling to Mena’s side of the plate.

“It started with the delivery man,” Mena said. “Gil from 3B says it told him he’s high value. The delivery man, not Gil.”

“I saw the delivery man.” Lao Lao cut the second dumpling in half with one chopstick and moved one half across. “Half. I had that one already.”

Mena ate the half without resentment. Half a dumpling was still a dumpling. “It goes by itself. You scan one person and it sends itself to three more phones. Fina says it’s like a chain letter. Aldo says it’s like a cold. Fina says that’s what she said.”

One dumpling.

“Your granddaughter has it,” Mena said.

“My granddaughter deleted it twice.”

“Then it’s had her twice.” Mena looked at the plate. Lao Lao looked at the window. One dumpling.

“That woman across the street has it,” Mena said. “Since nine. Her grandson’s friend showed her the screen on the sidewalk, and she took it off him and put it on her own phone with him standing right there.”

This was the best thing anyone had said in the shop all week. Lao Lao did not smile, which cost her something, and moved two dumplings across, which left one on her side of the plate and established, for both of them, that a fact about that woman was worth double.

“And you?” Lao Lao said. “What does the telephone think of you?”

Mena wiped her fingers, took out her phone and held it up so the screen faced the shop. She had saved it. People were saving them already, the way people kept a doctor’s letter.

YOUR TRUE SHAPE:
STORE BRAND
Reliable. Forgettable. Bottom shelf.

“Bottom shelf,” Lao Lao read aloud.

“That’s what it says.”

“Do you believe it?” Lao Lao asked.

Mena put the phone away and held out her hand, palm up, over the last dumpling on Lao Lao’s side of the plate.

“I’m not saying anything,” she said, and left her hand where it was.

“Interesting.” Lao Lao gave her the dumpling.

When Mena had gone, still listening as she left, Lao Lao went back to the glass and stood in her patch and finished her tea, which had gone cold, which she preferred to admitting it. Beside the window stood a stool she had never sat on. It was there so that customers could see her not sitting on it. Across the lane the walk-up had gone quiet; everyone in it had been graded and gone upstairs to think about it. She had known what she was for seventy-nine years and had never needed a second opinion. She was not about to start taking one from a telephone that had been in the neighborhood since nine.

On the counter Lilly’s phone buzzed again. Lilly did not turn it over this time.

At ten to twelve, across the street, that woman opened her door to call in the lunch line, with a phone in her hand, and pointed it at the first face like a ticket punch.