Chapter 6: The Optimistic Transmigrator Doesn't Dwell
New Yorkers had a dating rule Andrew was pretty sure he'd read somewhere: never call first, and definitely not before the third date.
He filed that away for later, since at the moment he was crawling out of bed looking like something that had been wrung out and left to dry.
He could have had a genuinely good night with Phoebe. He was fairly certain about that. Instead, that street cart hot dog had taken the evening in a completely different direction, and Andrew had spent the better part of the night conducting what could only be described as an extended negotiation with the bathroom.
The Toilet Warrior. That was him now. A man humbled by 50 cents of questionable meat.
He'd only stopped when there was simply nothing left.
The reason he'd toughed it out instead of going to urgent care was that he now had exactly seventy dollars to his name and a court date on Monday. Seventy dollars had to stretch. A copay didn't fit in the budget.
Twenty of it was Gunther's loan. The other fifty was his pay from last night — the bar owner had confirmed the residency after his set, Gunther had quietly slipped him the cash, and Andrew had managed exactly two songs before the hot dog made further public performance impossible. Gunther, to his credit, had been understanding about it. Whether that was genuine sympathy or the simple fact that Andrew had spent most of the evening occupying a bathroom stall was anyone's guess.
He pulled up his skill panel and squinted at it.
[Guitar (Beginner): 8/100][Singing (Beginner): 3/100][English (Proficient): 89/100][Housework (Beginner): 1/100]
The guitar number was disappointing for a full afternoon of practice plus two live songs. Eight points. He'd burned his fingertips raw for eight points.
But the pattern was becoming clearer. The panel wasn't just counting time spent — it was measuring genuine engagement. The four songs he'd run through mechanically in the apartment, going through the motions without thinking, had generated almost nothing. Only "The Sound of Silence," the one he'd actually felt his way through, had moved the needle in any real way. Same principle as last night — one song with emotion behind it, one polished enough to register as real music. The rest was just noise as far as the panel was concerned.
The feedback was consistent: rote repetition didn't count. What counted was presence, intention, the actual experience of playing something like you meant it.
Which meant the fastest path to leveling wasn't grinding covers. It was writing something original. The panel seemed to operate on the same logic as everything else in his life right now — you couldn't shortcut it, you had to actually do the thing. Writing his own song, something built from scratch from his own experience, would generate far more experience than any amount of practicing someone else's.
The problem was that Andrew had approximately zero songwriting ability. No instinct for melody, no gift for lyrics. He could play. He was learning to perform. But composing was a different muscle entirely, and his was completely undeveloped.
He lay there staring at the ceiling for a while, letting that settle.
Take it slow, he told himself. Beginner-level skills still have uses. Figure out what you're actually good at and go from there.
He was, fundamentally, an optimist. It was one of the things that had carried over from his previous life intact, that particular stubbornness about not staying in a bad feeling longer than necessary. He acknowledged the problem, gave it its due, and then moved on.
He got up.
He stripped the bed, gathered every piece of clothing that had been living on the floor for the past month, and stuffed it all into the building's laundry room washing machine on his way back from the bathroom. Then he brushed his teeth, spat, and winced.
Blood in the sink.
He pressed his tongue against his gums. Tender, a little swollen. His lower back had been aching since he woke up. His body was giving him an itemized list of complaints.
Right. Add exercise to the list. And actual food.
He ran a quick inventory: court date Monday, two performances per week bringing in roughly a hundred dollars, seventy dollars current balance. Tight, but survivable if he was careful.
He went out and spent ten dollars on breakfast at the diner two blocks over — eggs, toast, orange juice, the full thing — because he wasn't going to recover from last night on an empty stomach. Then he came back, did the dishes that had been sitting in the sink since Evan died, wiped down the counters, swept the kitchen floor, and went through the apartment pulling empty beer bottles into a garbage bag.
[Housework (Beginner): 12/100]
By noon the place looked like an apartment someone actually lived in rather than an exhibit on the effects of neglect.
Andrew peeled off his damp shirt and stood in the kitchen in just his jeans, feeling genuinely accomplished about something for the first time in weeks.
He showered. Stood in front of the open refrigerator afterward, hand drifting automatically toward the shelf where Evan had always kept his beer — there were still four cans there, a warm six-pack minus two — and then redirecting deliberately to the orange juice on the bottom shelf.
Start simple. No drinking. Get the body working properly.
He unscrewed the cap, took two long pulls, and went to the living room.
Clicked on the TV.
Baywatch was on — the syndicated version that had been building an audience all year since NBC canceled it after its first season. The camera was doing what Baywatch cameras did, which was following the lifeguards at a very specific running pace along the beach. This season had apparently added some new faces — a blonde woman in a red swimsuit that Andrew was fairly sure hadn't been on the show before, doing the run with the kind of slow-motion commitment that suggested the cinematographer had genuine artistic opinions about it.
He watched for about four minutes.
Then he turned it off.
It wasn't that the show wasn't doing what it was designed to do. It was doing exactly that. It was just that something felt hollow about sitting here watching it — the vague, restless guilt of a man who knew he had things to do and was choosing not to do them.
When your life isn't actually comfortable yet, sitting still feels wrong.
He muted the TV instead of turning it off, let the images play without sound, and went to the kitchen.
"Okay," he said, opening the cabinets with the energy of a man starting a new project.
Evan's kitchen was, in a strange way, a window into his father's psychology. Most of the cookware had never been used — still in packaging, tags on the handles, stacked in the back of cabinets like furniture in a model home. Andrew had never once seen his father cook anything more complicated than reheating takeout. But Evan had apparently, at various points, purchased: a cast iron skillet, a pasta pot, a wok that had never seen a flame, a set of mixing bowls still nested in their box, and a garlic press still in its blister packaging.
Andrew had a theory about this. Evan had bought things the way he'd done everything else — impulsively, charmingly, in pursuit of something that had nothing to do with the object itself. A kitchenware store on Bleecker, a saleswoman with a nice smile. A woman he'd been trying to impress who mentioned she liked home-cooked meals. A late-night TV shopping channel and a bottle of bourbon and a credit card.
The result was Andrew now owned a fully stocked kitchen that had never produced a single meal.
He also, tucked behind the pasta pot, found a paper bag with a box of spaghetti, a can of crushed tomatoes, a jar of dried oregano, and a note in Evan's handwriting that said Italian night?? with two question marks and no date.
"Good enough," Andrew said.
He found a box of chicken stock in the back of the pantry, a can of diced tomatoes, some pasta, dried herbs, and what appeared to be an entirely untouched bottle of olive oil still in its gift-box wrapping. He lined everything up on the counter and stood looking at it for a moment.
He had cooked maybe a dozen times in his entire life on this Earth. His past-life self had been a decent home cook — nothing fancy, just the practical skill of someone who'd lived alone for years and gotten tired of spending money on takeout. That knowledge was in there somewhere, layered under twenty-one years of microwaved leftovers and Evan's diner tabs.
He filled the pasta pot with water, found the right burner, and started.
[Cooking (Beginner): 8/100]
By the time the sauce was simmering and the apartment smelled like something other than old beer bottles for the first time in a month, Andrew was standing at the stove stirring with a wooden spoon and feeling, for one quiet moment, almost okay.
Not good. Not fixed. But okay.
He could work with okay.
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