Niall discovered urban efficiency two weeks ago via a podcast he describes as "kind of niche" but has mentioned to me eleven times. The podcast is called something like Walkable Futures or The Grid Reimagined — I've stopped asking him to repeat it because each time he does, he gets a faraway look and starts talking about Copenhagen.
So when he texted me about a date on Saturday, I was already a little on alert. He said it would be "low-key, just vibes, maybe Apple Fest." I said great. He said "also I want to show you something about pedestrian flow." I said what. He said "you'll see, it's actually really cool." Reader, it was not cool. Or rather — it was, but only in the way that Niall is cool, which is to say completely unaware of how much he's asking of a person.
We met on Lincoln Avenue at eleven, right as the Apple Fest crowd was starting to thicken. The cider smelled incredible. The sun was doing that specific October thing where it's warm enough to make you optimistic but the shadows still carry a warning. I had a good jacket. I was ready.
Niall was holding his phone in two hands like a surgeon. He had, I noticed, a route pulled up that was not the obvious route to the cider booth. He had a different route.
"Okay so," he said, "the thing about festivals is everyone defaults to the same corridor, which creates this totally unnecessary bottleneck, but if you offset your entry point by half a block you get basically the same access with like forty percent less friction."
I looked at the cider booth. It was directly in front of us.
"Niall," I said. "It's right there."
"I know, but watch." He gestured at the crowd with the focused energy of a man who has recently learned the word throughput. "See how they're all funneling in from the main entrance? We don't have to do that."
The detour added four minutes and took us past a parking garage. He was genuinely delighted the whole time. He narrated, a little. He used the phrase "desire line" in a sentence, correctly, which I found infuriating because I had to look it up later and it is actually a real term that he used correctly.
When we emerged on the other side of the booth — which, I will grant him, was slightly less crowded — he looked at me the way people look at you after they've performed a minor miracle they've been planning since Thursday.
"See?" he said.
"We walked past a parking garage," I said.
"But efficiently," he said.
He bought me the cider. He got the apple fritter. He was so happy about the apple fritter that he held it up and said "this is peak allocation of a Saturday morning," and I laughed, actually laughed, even though I had promised myself I wouldn't reward the bit.
At some point he started telling me about Open House Chicago — apparently you can tour buildings that are usually closed, whole neighborhoods, infrastructure sites — and his voice went genuinely soft in a way it only does when he cares about something for real. He said he wanted to take me to a water reclamation facility because the architecture is "quietly incredible" and I told him that was the most Niall sentence ever spoken and he said "I'll take that."
We stayed on Lincoln for two more hours. He was warm the whole time. He held my hand in a way that suggested he had not, in fact, optimized for that part.
On the way back to the train, he steered us slightly off the main path — "better sightlines," he said — and I let him, because the route did happen to go past a very good bakery, and I don't know if that was an accident or if he is, slowly, becoming someone who plans things for both of us at once.
I haven't told him that yet. He'd probably make a chart.