The Reunion

We had arranged to meet at the North Indian Diner in Newtown, our ancient haunt, to speak of times past, and be Men, because my rich friend Silver had read a Medium post about how men needed to reconnect after the pandemic.

I hadn’t seen him since 2021, and of course he still looked magnificent, standing there all grey-bearded on King St looking in confusion from his Pixel Fold to the front of the building that was clearly no longer the North Indian Diner. It was now a fusion Korean/Mexican gin bar named GorgeTakei’s (sic).

“Jeyuk Bokkeum and Tacos? Oh My!” said a hand-lettered sign in the window. Silver somehow spotted me.

“I’m not sure what happened to the North Indian Diner,” he said by way of greeting and apology. He held up the Pixel Fold. “You can’t get these in Australia, so I think Google Maps is a bit out of date or something?” He opened and closed the phone a few times, because that’s how he’d always dealt with tech being weird.

A cloud of unease approached from the south-east. It was the Guerrilla Gamer, the fact of his surviving the pandemic no less remarkable than the fact he still went by “The Guerrilla Gamer” despite being a man of 48 who held a senior team leader’s role in the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust. The pandemic had made strangers of us all. No wait, that’s not it: the pandemic had made us all stranger.

“You,” he said, looking at my feet. “What are you wearing?”

I was saved the need to explain myself by the arrival of one-time Nintendo magazine editor L—, whose anonymity I’ve been instructed to continue to maintain, because since mid-2020 he’d become a famously controversial streamer, as the Guy-Fawkes-masked ideologue who heads up a major ANTIFA-aligned civil disobedience group, you know the one. Before that he was on Twitch. Anyway, L— looked as he has always looked: ready to fight in the street at a moment’s notice.

Cmos fell out of an Uber into the gutter in front of us and then stood up. He was shorter than we remembered, and he saw us looking. “Well hello,” he said. “You see now the downside of the vaccine? You make a guy go to a sports and leisure centre, give a guy one, two, three jabs, then he falls down the escalators and breaks both his femurs so badly that when the casts come off he’s two inches shorter than he used to be!”

We all exchanged pleasantries with the wary distrust of men who hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years. I was ready to sprint. Meatloaf - one-time ex-editor of an ex-official PlayStation magazine - turned up at some point and pretended to have always been there, which had always been his thing.

Eventually we struggled inside and had to immediately stop and wait in a tiny dark vestibule. Silver was still flexing his Pixel Fold. “Okay, uh, uh, uh,” he rallied, “so apparently this place has an awesome gin garden, which is like a beer garden but for gin.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said a waitsthing, suddenly glitching out of what looked like a bricked-up doorway, “we don’t seat people in the garden anymore, since they built the new apartments.”

We stared at the waitsthing blankly.

“Because the apartment building blocks out the sun,” the waitsthing explained.

The Guerrilla Gamer leaned forward. “Then we will drink in the shade.”

There was another pause.

“Okay, whatever, I’ll just go get the key.” The waitsthing wandered off shaking its head, piercings jangling. We stood in the corridor and waited. After a moment the waitsthing came back, unlocked the door, and went into the garden with a handful of cutlery to make a big deal of putting it out on the solitary table. Then the waitsthing stalked back past us without a word, leaving the door open. One of the forks fell off the table and just spun around and around on the floor.

“Dude, is this another one of your tortuous metaphors, about loading screens or something?” said Meatloaf. “I can’t say I’ve missed them.”

“WHERE are your GODDAMN BOOTS?!” screamed L—, who apparently couldn’t take it anymore.

Rather than answer, I looked around at the weird linocuts of George Takei in a sombrero that covered the walls. “This place is madness,” I said. “I mean it’s almost blasphemy.”

“Nah,” said Silver dismissively, “this is Newtown.”

L— grabbed me by the lapels and stared me down through a forehead known and feared by hard men on three continents. “Why. Aren’t. You. Wearing. The Boots?” he demanded.

“Okay, fine!” I squealed, shaking him off. “They died in a fire, okay? Is that what you wanted me to say? They burned up, they’re gone, I wear Allbirds now because of the low carbon footprint! It’s not so bad! At least it’s better than what happened to my crazy ex-third flatmate!”

There was dead silence.

“Wh… why?” stammered Cmos. “What happened to Vic? Aw dude, don’t say it. What happened to Victor Ninox, man? Don’t say…”

And that was the moment Vic finally arrived. With his kids.

The end.