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Frankly, it blows his mind that Dinesh Chugtai even let the name Bertram Gilfoyle cross an event planner’s lips. But it’s right there, stamped on the envelope, in the boilerplate invitation for a charity gala. San Francisco Intercontinental. February the 12th, 2024.
Dinesh fucking Chugtai is offering to fly him out to a stupid gala for some kind of disease, like MS or cystic fibrosis or something, the same charity Gilfoyle’s company sends a check every year. Dinesh Chugtai the genius billionaire with a cult following and highly publicized divorce, the same one who used to be his best friend. Gilfoyle can’t believe he’s even willing to be seen among mere mortals.
He wants to call up Arthur, who’s almost certainly burning the midnight oil, to see if the rest of the guys got them too, but the foreseeable conversation about what it was like to work with such a disruptor of the 21st century tech scene gives him a headache.
He finishes his dinner (which is cereal, toast, and beer) and takes the dishes to the sink. When he gets back to his room, the dogs are both sprawled out on the bed, blinking up at him lazily.
“Hey,” he says, patting Mala’s chest. “You want to go for a run?”
She whines a little and licks his hand. He looks at Sid, but he’s asleep. “Suit yourself.”
When he gets out of the apartment, he turns the music up as loud as it goes and breaks into a jog. It’s snowing, and a little windy, but it keeps him awake, makes his senses a little sharper. Running helps him push all the extraneous stuff to the back of his head, lets him focus on something real and tangible and right in front of him.
But this time it takes much more force of will not to think about the invitation on the table. Or toy with the idea that the invitation was some kind of accident, or that Dinesh had no idea his name was even on the list. It has to be the second. There’s no way he gives a shit about who shows up to his stupid galas.
When he gets back, he digs through the envelope and finds an RSVP card at the bottom. Don’t engage with him, he tells himself, sticking all the papers back in. Don’t even give him the satisfaction.
He lets the dogs sleep on the other side of the bed that night, feeling them breathe against his back and the side of his leg. The next morning he accepts the invitation and mails it off. Some habits he just can’t kick.
The day he flies out from Pearson to go to the gala, he starts drinking at eleven in the morning. It’s not that he thinks he needs to be liquored up to do this, it’s just that people keep offering him alcohol, and he’s never in any place to refuse it. Mimosas as soon as he steps on the plane. Wine with the shitty airplane meal. More wine and a fruit basket in the hotel room. He wanders into the ballroom at six o’clock already feeling pleasantly buzzed, and then someone ushers him to the open bar.
This isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to go stag to. He sees old-school industry assholes whose names he can’t remember with their third and fourth wives, and handfuls of twenty-something kids still looking fresh-faced and awkward. It reminds him of the time they snuck into some fundraiser, passing as caterers, and got in a couple minutes of networking in before making a break for it. Except this time he actually has a seat at the table.
Everyone else he’s seated with just so happens to be Canadian, which makes him a little more confident he was invited as filler. People keep talking in hushed tones about when Chugtai (the awful mononym he successfully forced) will be here, whether he’s here to tease new software under the guise of charity or not. Gilfoyle realizes then that there’s a lot he missed.
In a panic, he looks his name up on WIkipedia. American software developer, venture capitalist, philanthropist. His net worth was estimated about 3.8 billion USD in January 2024. Naturally. His thumb hovers tentatively over the “personal life” tab, but then the lights start to flicker, and he slips his phone back into his pocket.
A band starts playing from the far corner of the room. He can’t place the name of the song, but it’s familiar still. People stand up in clusters from the center of the room, until everyone’s on their feet, applauding loudly. Finally, he spots Dinesh in the crowd, waving his hands and smiling in false modesty.
He looks well, if you ignore the fact he's wearing red Jordans with a well-cut Italian suit. He looks like a rap producer, or maybe a rich basketball player. Gilfoyle tries to remember both of those insults, just in case they happen to be funny later on.
He watches him shake hands in the audience, taking his time on the way up to the stage, dragging the walk-on music much longer than the band anticipated. He’s much more polished, embodying the same kind of sleazy confidence he always wanted to pull off but couldn’t. The closest he ever saw him get before was after half a bottle of tequila. Gilfoyle thinks he’s going to be sick.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. Can I just say how beautiful everyone looks tonight?”
Gilfoyle's drinking a bottle of complimentary Fiji water when someone’s entourage clears the path to the bar. He sees this kind of strategy all the time — three or four tall guys is enough to either obscure a celebrity or at least discourage people from approaching. Maybe it’s Belson or Bream or Bezos or whoever else Dinesh has collected over the years, if his history of sleeping (figuratively) with the enemy still holds up.
It’s none of those people, of course. He should have. It’s just Dinesh, chatting away on a cellphone in the middle of his own gala. Gilfoyle tries to slip away, but he eyes him down in an instant, and shouts:
“Mother fucking Gilfoyle.”
His voice cuts through all the music and chatter. The urge to snatch the drink out of the bartender’s hands and drink the scotch neat is almost irresistible.
Instead he turns around and smiles stiffly. “Hey, man.”
Then they hug, the modified bro-hug rich old guys are supposed to use after seeing an old friends, presumably right before asking how the hell they are. (Now he knows how it feels to be some billionaire’s old partner coming out of the woodwork, and it’s as pathetic as he expected.)
“Man. What’s it been, six, seven years?” Dinesh smiles a broad smile, waving off the people around him. “How the hell are you?"
“Good,” he says, then glances to the other guys, all trying to get the bartender’s attention. “So who are they, your posse?”
“Yeah, you know. They’re here to keep me away from journalists, paparazzi, crazed ex-employees, that kind of thing. You know how it is.”
“Not really,” he says, without even a touch of humor, just to watch him squirm.
“So, uh, they told me you’re CTO at Zircon Solutions now? Toronto? That’s pretty legit.”
“Yeah,” he says. A fresh drink appears by his arm, so he takes it and finishes at least half with one swig. “You know. Turns out you can have a decent life without a billion dollars. Or your own business. Or mansion.”
“Classic Gilfoyle,” he laughs. “Always taking everything I say as a goddamn threat.”
That shuts him down pretty quick. He’d almost be proud if he didn’t feel like such a goddamn idiot. Dinesh clasps his arm with his hand, squeezing it with the same stupid shit eating grin as always.
“Listen, I better get out of here. I’m flying out to Reykjavik tomorrow and that time change always fucks me up. Good to see you, man. Really good to see you.”
“What a prick,” he says to the bartender, who looks at him in tacit sympathy. He takes his last drink back upstairs, and spends the rest of the night sitting by the window, half-listening to the TV, until he falls asleep in his suit on top of the covers.
He wakes up the next morning to a notification that his flight’s been delayed by six hours. Not long after, he gets pictures from the dogsitter of Sid in at least two feet of snow. He’s too hungover to find a way home himself, so he stumbles down to the concierge, who’s just as helpless as him. Eleven at night is the best they can do.
After a (free) brunch on the top floor, he finds Chugtai outside the elevator, taking selfies with some kids on their way out. He shakes hands with a bunch of twenty-something brogrammers and even signs someone’s goddamn laptop. Gilfoyle wonders if he sees himself in any of them. If there are any kids he’s taken under his wing (or worse, incubated.)
The elevator door closes before he can make a break for it, and then he’s stuck right in his line of sight, a black sheep in a snowstorm. He sees him right away and smiles.
“Hey, man.” Never have those two words felt so menacing or given him the urge to pry open the door and throw himself down the elevator shaft before.
“Hey,” Gilfoyle says, then because he can’t think of anything else: “so what’s up?”
“Nothing.” He checks his predictably expensive-looking watch, then asks him something, but somehow Gilfoyle can’t actually piece the words together into a coherent sentence. The elevator dings and they go inside together, and his head clears again, at least somewhat.
“Sorry?” he asks, snapping out of it.
“I said, when are you flying back?”
“Um — my flight got delayed, so not until four.”
“Really? That fuckin’ sucks, man.” Dinesh pats him on the shoulder, then leans against the wall, staring up at the mirror on the ceiling. "You know — Toronto’s basically on the way to Reykjavik. I could just ask the pilot to make a stop for you. How’s that sound?”
“There’s a snowstorm,” he says, which is thankfully true. "I don’t think they’ll let any plane land.”
“Of course they’ll let us land. It’s a much smaller plane.”
“How does that change anything?”
“C’mon. This plane’s the same size as Air Force One. You think they let POTUS circle around because of some snow?”
It’s not like he’s in any place to say no. It’s just a matter of pride. Dinesh is looking right at him — he’s gotten a little more polished, a little better at selling it. He wonders if he had to learn or if he had it all along.
“Yeah,” he mumbles, “that’d be nice of you.”
“Great. We’re leaving at noon, so — I don’t know, we can meet you in the lobby. Or is your number still the same? I can just text you when we’re leaving.”
“I changed it.” At least that’s true.
The elevator dings — thirty-sixth floor, a good twenty above him, naturally. Dinesh gives him a little wave, and then disappears, the doors closing behind him.
It is 12:41 on New Year’s eight years ago, at the end of the fourth and final quarter of Pied Piper, and Richard is on his first (and last) drunken rant.
“You two don’t even pretend to care,” he slurs, and the whole thing would’ve been funny if he didn’t sound completely deranged. “You don’t give a shit about this company anymore. Why would you? As long as there’s a paycheck you don’t—“
“Come on,” Dinesh sighs. “Of course we care about the money. Isn’t that why we’re all here?”
“I thought maybe — maybe we weren’t all in it just for the money. Maybe we really wanted to make the world a — you know, a better place.”
“That’s bullshit, Richard.”
“You make me sick,” he says, as Jared starts to help him up. Suddenly Dinesh suddenly grabs ahold of Gilfoyle’s knee — this is a breach of their public contact rule, because their whole thing is still an airtight secret, a ticking time bomb about to explode — and he realizes too late he’s about to vomit.
“It’s not as extravagant as I thought it’d be."
“Were you expecting a water bed?”
It’s 2024 and he's sitting in a leather seat with eight different settings on a remote control, watching Dinesh show him all the features of the plane. There’s a flight attendant, but she excused herself to the other section, behind a sliding partition.
“This isn’t my first time on a private jet, for what it’s worth,” he says (out of nowhere, just that old defensiveness he never let go of.)
“Of course not.” Dinesh goes to the wet bar and pulls a bottle of champagne out of a bucket of ice. “But God, man. Once you go private, you never go back. Fuck commercial. Fuck those fucking TSA pricks.”
“Too bad I forgot to be a billionaire.”
Dinesh hands him a champagne flute. “Should we toast?”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. It’s been forever since we saw each other.”
“To the private aviation industry?"
“I was going to say to us, but yeah, sure.”
They clink glasses.
They’re two hours into a five hour flight. Gilfoyle does an excellent job pretending he doesn’t know about almost every detail of his private life — at least what the press has led him to believe — and listens to him tell stories about meeting Zuckerberg and how the first million he ever spent at once was on a house, for his parents, because that’s all they ever really wanted.
“Everybody came back looking for a handout, you know,” he says. “Except you. Why’s that?”
Gilfoyle shrugs. “Scorched earth.”
“But you didn’t even think about it?”
“No,” he says. “There wasn’t any point after I moved away.”
“Huh.” Dinesh stares down into the bottom of his glass. “How’s Tara?”
“I don’t know.” It’s almost funny that that’s the only bit of small talk he can come up with. “Haven’t seen her in a while.”
“Oh.” He seems genuinely surprised. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody at home?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” If he’s trying to give him a meaningful look, it’s lost on him. “Being single again is fucking impossible. Francine and I were — well, I don’t wanna say inseparable, but we were together a lot, you know?”
“Yeah,” he says, finishing his drink and reaching for a bottle of water. (You need to pace yourself, he thinks, uselessly.) “It can be hard.”
He opens a panel on one of the screens at his elbow and music starts to play, the same he heard last night.
“What song is this again?” he asks.
“‘Never Can Say Goodbye.’ The band last night was good, right? That setlist was all mine, though.”
He starts talking about swapping bass guitarists and the uphill battle with the Jackson estate to find the licensed arrangement, until he cuts in:
“You planned all this. You invited me here on purpose.” He’s surprised at how calm he sounds. “Right?”
“What, do you think I can control the weather?”
“Stop.”
“Honestly, man, what are you talking about?”
“Stop acting like I'm an idiot," he says. "I remember this song. You played it for me."
They are in the early hours of 2017, and it’s raining, softly.
“Sorry I threw up on your shirt,” Dinesh says, his voice heavy and vacant. They’re lying close next to each other in his room, staring up at the popcorn ceiling and ugly yellow walls.
“It’s fine. You just said what everyone else was thinking.”
He laughs, and then hands him one side of a cheap pair of earbuds. “Listen to this song.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I can never get you to listen to my music.”
He rests his head on his shoulder and listens. It’s pretty good.
Later, half-asleep, he tells him he loves him. Dinesh doesn’t hear him — he’s already out cold. He chalks it up to fate.
It is the end of 2017, and months after leaving him, Dinesh Chugtai becomes a billionaire overnight.
It is 2018 and Gilfoyle can’t afford to live in Palo Alto anymore.
It is 2019 and he is on the phone with his mother during her chemotherapy, as a favor he didn’t know he owed her.
“You were impossible as a child and you’re impossible now,” she says, her voice rough like sandpaper and floaty on Oxycontin. “You refuse to be happy. Like your father. It’s a shame unhappy people live such long lives.”
It is 2020 and a computer model says there will be more coders in five years then there are office clerks, more engineers than doctors, more apps than there are people to download them. Silicon Valley is set to implode from the inside out.
It is 2021 and is lying in bed after his mother’s wake, stewing over a comeback he came up with two years too late.
“So what if I did? I needed to see you.”
“Needed?”
“Wanted to see you. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
They’ve switched seats — Gilfoyle moved to the window and Dinesh is pacing around across from him, from the bar to the galley to the window. He opens the shade a little, sees it’s too bright, and shuts it again.
“You’re the only one left, man,” he says, and it sounds like a bad joke. “You’re the last person that knew me before all this. Before everything — before I stopped being —“
“Before you stopped being normal.”
“Yeah,” he says, squinting at the label of a bottle of twelve-year scotch. “I know how that sounds. But people treat you different. They act like you know something that they don’t.”
“You know I’m not going to feel bad for you and your multi-billion dollar company, right?”
Dinesh laughs, even though he wasn’t supposed to. Gilfoyle’s surprised there’s anything left to joke about between the two of them.
“Forget it.” Dinesh sits next to him and offers a glass of scotch, and again, he’s in no place to refuse. “There’s gotta be a movie on here you can deal with.”
They find a Star Wars release they both missed and settle in.
It takes forty-five minutes for someone’s elbow to brush someone else's, another fifteen for Gilfoyle to stop paying attention to the movie, another ten for Dinesh to look at him and say: “Man, nothing’s changed since, like, 2015, has it?”
He looks up from polishing his glasses with his shirt. “I can think of a few differences.”
“I mean between us, dumbass.”
Gilfoyle reaches for his drink and finishes it. “People don’t change.”
“See? That’s exactly what you would’ve said then, too.”
Twenty more minutes and Dinesh’s head is on his shoulder. Forty more minutes and the movie is over and they’re arguing about something idiotic, laughing, and when they kiss again he can’t even tell who took the lead.
“God I missed you,” Dinesh sighs, and he says nothing, tries not to let him continue that train of thought. It scares him how easy it is to slip back through the cracks. Every bit of anger he buried and all the ammunition he had stored against him seems to melt away in an instant. But he knows better. It passes, but it never passes away.
“Run away with me,” Dinesh says, well before either of them have gotten their bearings. “We can go anywhere you want.”
“What?”
“Anywhere.” He stands up and starts pacing again, misbuttoning his shirt. “I have a townhouse in Barcelona. Have you ever been? There’s this place off La Rambla with the best fucking food you’ve ever had. We could eat there tonight. And — and I could get football club tickets, or there’s this farmer’s market we could get lost in for hours —“
“Dinesh, relax,” he says, sitting up. “The world isn’t going to stop for your boner. I have two dogs to pick up from my neighbor. And I have work on Monday.”
“Go get the dogs,” he says, frantically. “Pack another bag. I’ll sit out here on the tarmac. We can just take a long weekend.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” he says, sliding back in next to him. He becomes acutely aware of his hand on his knee, the familiarity with which he touches him. “You and me with a whole place to ourselves. When’s the last time that happened?”
“Maybe Las Vegas.”
“In the Bellagio. With the folding bed we didn’t use.” Clearly Dinesh remembers it better than he does. He slides his hand further up his thigh and says, right up against his ear: “I missed this. I missed being with you. Don’t you want that again?”
He’s drunker than him, his breath smelling of champagne and Glenfiddich and whatever else he’d plied himself with. It would be so easy to say yes.
“Just come back with me. Stay at my place.” He’s surprised at his own self-control. “I don’t want an adventure.”
“I get it,” Dinesh says. “No adventures yet.”
It’s late by the time they get to Toronto, so he asks Eliza to look after the dogs for just one more night. Dinesh insists on paying for two slices of cheap pizza four blocks away from his apartment. He looks ridiculous swiping his AmEx at the ancient card reader, wearing his expensive suit and Ferragamo shoes surrounded by kids in hoodies and Timberland boots.
Some people recognize him and they stop for pictures. What can I say? I’m big in Canada, he jokes, again and again.
Gilfoyle’s apartment is as bare-bones as he kept it when they lived together. He makes him a pot of coffee and listens to him flip through TV channels in the other room. It feels normal when they find a cooking show and watch it on his couch. It even feels normal to have him in his bed again.
He watches him brush his teeth in the bathroom and flip through his record collection with a certain degree of detachment, thinking less about the moment itself and more about what it would be like to see it again, every day. He looks for the mannerisms that used to drive him up the wall, the innocuous things that made him so angry at the time, but they’re not there. Nothing’s there, in fact.
Gilfoyle wakes up in the middle of the night and finds his way to the kitchen for a glass of water. Usually when he does this he’s practically sleepwalking, but a sort of clarity washes over him. Instead of reaching for a melatonin, he goes to the living room and unzips the satchel on the floor.
It’s a nicer one than Dinesh had before, but it’s well-worn, not unlike the battered-up Tumi next to it. There’s nothing glamorous inside, just the same laptop he’s had for eight years and a few leather-bound folders. The same wallet, too, except it’s fatter and there are half a dozen credit cards inside (the black AmEx feels heavier than he thought it would.) He considers pocketing some of the cash inside, but knows he doesn’t need it — he’s not a billionaire, sure, but he’s comfortable.
There are no pictures or folded-up notes, no evidence of lovers or family or a personal life at all. The person in the almost-expired ID photo is unfamiliar and squirrelly, squinting a smile at the camera.
The thrill of looking through his things wears off fast, so he wanders back into the bedroom, completely forgetting about the glass of water. He comes in and finds Dinesh digging through his nightstand.
“Looking for something?”
“Am I sleeping on your side?” He turns to him, and Gilfoyle see’s he’s wide awake, too. “What’s in the other drawer?”
The question blindsides him nonetheless. “What?”
“Do you — do I not wanna see what’s in the other drawer, or something, is that it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to ask you —“ he furrows his brow, pulls at his own hair, and Gilfoyle is helpless to watch him sound out the question in his head and get it out as quick as he can. “Were you lying earlier? Do you have, I don’t know, a wife or something? Or a — can you get gay married in Canada still? Civil partner? Boyfriend?”
“What? No.” He sits down on the bed. “Do I look like I live with someone? Jesus, man, there’s only one toothbrush.”
“I don’t know,” Dinesh says, and the look on his face is more embarrassed than accusatory, like any evidence he had left already slipped out from under him. “This is a big place. And she could’ve taken her stuff with her.”
“There’s no she,” he says, laying down on his side. "I live alone with two pit bull mutts. I'm pretty predictable.”
Dinesh laughs, but his mind’s clearly elsewhere. “I always pictured something different.”
“Like what?”
“Living with somebody who really cares about you.”
Gilfoyle turns to glance at him, but he catches him in a look at just the right time, and it’s enough to get him to fold.
“Not yet,” he says, “but I’m open to it.”
Dinesh stays for two weeks and makes an office out of Gilfoyle's kitchen table. Somehow, they manage to effortlessly put on the old act again — it’s a little rusty at first, maybe, but the banter and the working together and the moments in private come back to him readily.
More than once he sees him in the middle of a frustrated Skype call or searching himself on CodeRag. It gets harder to pretend this is normal behavior for two forty-something tech moguls, one a lot more successful than the other crashing at the poorer one’s apartment and filling his liquor cabinet up with expensive scotch.
Something Dinesh doesn’t know is that there’s only been three people he’s shared a bed with, at least any longer than a night or two. He lived in the basement at Melanie Henderson’s house in Alberta, rent-free. Subleased the place in Boston with Tara. Then him, but this is different. Everyone else he felt disillusioned towards, in comparison. He always put faith above other people, saw it as the only reliable saving grace. But when he looks at him all of it feels useless. This is a stronger kind of drug.
He wakes up one afternoon to the sound of Dinesh hanging up the phone. This is the third time today. The facade is showing signs of wear.
“You need to go back. You owe it to your company.”
“I know.”
“And you can’t use me as an escape.”
“You should be living with me,” Dinesh tells him, point-blank.
“And doing what? Being your trophy boyfriend? What about my job?”
“I’ll buy the company. Move everyone out to Palo Alto. Just give me a number — what does Arthur want?”
“You think everybody at our company can afford to live in Palo Alto?”
“Then they can live in fucking Oakland like everybody else. Or, even — fuck those guys! Fuck Zircon. I can get you any job you want. Everybody in this town owes me a favor.” Dinesh reaches for his phone like he’s about to pull up his contact list. “Just name somebody—“
“Stop,” he blurts, laughing out of exasperation. “That’s not it. That’s not enough. That’s not why I loved you.”
He goes quiet.
“Don’t act surprised, asshole,” Gilfoyle snaps, his only defense left. “I’ve told you before.”
“No shit,” Dinesh grins. Then in the silence of the bedroom he touches two fingers to his chest. “Everyone — everything else has been a distraction. It’s always been you.”
The words alone make his stomach lurch, like he’s gotten a taste of something bitter. It’s no coincidence. The only reason why he feels so sick is because he knows it’s true. Some people you can’t cut out of your life no matter how much you want to. Some people you keep coming back to no matter how often you quit.
“What do you say?”