Every office has one. Every family group chat has one. He is the man who reads your message, and then, with the serenity of a monk, does not reply. He has not been heard from since Tuesday. He is at lunch. You can see the lunch.

The narrator is here to tell you that the man who refuses to return texts is the last honest person in American public life, and that the rest of us — the instant repliers, the “sounds good!” people, the women who type for six minutes and send a paragraph — are the phonies.

Consider the man’s record. He does not reply to the email that says “just checking in.” He does not reply to the invitation to the networking breakfast. He does not reply to the man who writes “quick question,” which is the most dishonest phrase in the English language, because there is no such thing as a quick question, and the man on the bench knows this in his marrow. He looks at the phone. He puts the phone face-down. He eats his sandwich. This is not rudeness. This is a man who has read the contract and declined to sign it.

The critics call it ghosting. The narrator calls it a veto. In a country where everyone has a microphone, the man on the bench has the only real power left: the power to not speak. He is the Senate of one. His filibuster is a sandwich.

Some say the man is anxious. They say he drafts the reply, deletes it, drafts it again, and falls asleep. The narrator has heard this theory and finds it insulting to the man. The man is not anxious. The man is decisive. He read your message about the group gift for the coworker’s baby, and he decided, in four seconds, that he is not buying a gift, and he communicated that decision with the only tool that cannot be argued with: silence. A reply invites a reply. Silence ends the negotiation. The man has never once been asked to split a gift.

Others say the man is in love with you and is overthinking the text. The narrator says: look at the lunch. A man overthinking a text does not eat a full sandwich with a side. A man overthinking a text stares at a wall. The man on the bench has a pickle. The pickle is the answer.

The narrator’s own position is that we have built a civilization that demands a reply to everything, and that the man on the bench is the only citizen left who understands the First Amendment includes the right to shut up. He is not your friend. He is not your enemy. He is a man with a sandwich, and the sandwich, as has been well-documented, does not check its phone.

The narrator has, on three occasions, been the man on the bench. He has never once regretted it. He has, on 400 occasions, been the man who replied instantly, and he has one story about a networking breakfast he cannot tell you.

The man will reply eventually. He will reply in December, to a message from March, with the word “congrats,” and he will be right, because by December the thing you were asking about will be over, and his congrats will be for a victory that no longer needs one.

He is not late. He is on the only schedule that has never been wrong.