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Not faces.

Torsos.

A tiled mosaic of them, each one with a little number in the corner that I initially took for a rating and then realized, with a slow, chilling horror, was a distance.

Fifty feet.

Two hundred feet.

Nine hundred feet.

These weren’t men across the city I might drive to meet for coffee on Saturday. These were men near me, right then. The number said exactly how near, which meant the whole thing worked less like a dating service and more like sonar.

I sat back and sipped some of the beer I’d been nursing. Then I downed half of it, because the nursing plan had clearly been drawn up for a very different evening.

A message arrived.

My heart, God help it, actually lifted.

Someone had seen my carefully crafted bio and my hard-won eleventh photograph and reached out. I opened it, ready to be charming, ready to ask what he did for a living and whether he liked sunset strolls.

The message was from a gentleman whose name had me spitting my beer.

Fck4Eva: Sup?

That was the whole message. I read it several times, in case there was more to it, some subtlety I was missing. There was not. There was only “Sup,” glowing up at me from a man three hundred feet away whose photo was of his own shoulder.

I wrote back, because I’m a person of manners.

Me: Not much. Just got home from work. How’s your night going?

It took me a minute and a half and one autocorrect incident in which “night” nearly went out as “ninja.”

The three dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared.

Fck4Eva: U host? PNP?

I considered this.

Host?

It was a hospitality word. I latched onto it gratefully, because hospitality was a language I spoke. He was asking, I decided, whether I liked to entertain, whether I was the kind of man who had people over. I didn’t know what his little acronym stood for but assumed it involved charcuterie and wine. I typed, sincerely,

Me: I do, though not as much as I’d like since we opened the bar. I make a good short rib, and my back patio’s nice this time of year.

He blocked me.

I did not, at the time, know what blocking was. I only knew the conversation vanished, the shoulder-man erased from my screen like he’d never existed. I sat there feeling like I’d said the wrong thing at a party in a language I didn’t speak.

It went like that for a while.

I’ll spare the full transcript, but I want it recorded that over the following hour I offered to buy three separate men a coffee, asked one about his dog after he mentioned, in passing, that the dog was on the bed with him, and told a fourth that he seemed nice but I wasn’t looking for anything at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, which apparently was the only thing anyone on the entire application was looking for.

My thumbs betrayed me the whole time.

I told one man I found him “intruguing.”

I congratulated another on his “acomplishments.”