Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  “That would taste good on clouds,” Ferran said. “You’d taste the spices individually, eating it off a cloud. Try India on that. Let’s try it!”

  Albert pushed Oriol toward the refrigerator, Oriol produced a bowl of apple foam that he’d made for the foie soup and dolloped some into a bowl, Albert shook India onto the highest peaks of the lather, and Ferran spooned it up. Though there was nothing solid in that spoonful, his mouth moved as if he were chewing. His eyes began to light, but still he didn’t speak. His eyebrows followed the taste and texture up and down, and when it was over, he looked up. “That’s beautiful,” he said reverently. “That’s really beautiful.”

  Albert took a spoonful, and then Oriol. And each had the same reaction, the same facade of skepticism giving way to some new quizzical appreciation for the taste in his mouth, and then a grin. “Uncle, that’s good,” said Albert. Oriol just nodded his approval vigorously. Now Ferran handed me a spoon, and I tried, too. Each spice of India (the cocoa and lemongrass, the lime and curry) seemed to burn down individually, while the cool apple spread out beneath it, lifting it from the tongue. It felt like the Fourth of July in your mouth.

  Before I could say anything, though, we’d moved on. To a quail egg. And now we were crowded around a pot of boiling water. The quail egg, which was the size of a small Superball, had been Oriol’s obsession throughout the morning. I’d watched him crack egg after egg, strain them between brown-speckled shells until he was left with only the miniature yolks, and then boil them for five, ten, twenty, thirty, sixty seconds, removing the golden globe of yolk with a metal catcher, cooling it for a moment, and then tasting it—just to see what he got each time. After some consultation, it was agreed that the ten-second yolk was the best, sublime even, somewhere between raw and cooked but tasting like neither, the liquid inside warm and already swarming down the back of the throat by the time it touched the tongue. In fact, Ferran was afraid to do more to it. Oriol suggested covering the yolk in baked Parmesan, and he crumbled some over it. Ferran let a drop of olive oil fall on it, then spooned it up.

  And this time there was no doubt; his response was immediate. “It’s a natural ravioli!” he said, nodding, Yes, yes, yes. “We can serve it just like that.” He turned and walked away, turned back again. He could hardly contain himself. Again, everyone tried one. “That’s it,” he said, on the verge of levitation. “We can try other things with it, but that’s it!” He turned to me. “This is when I’m happiest. Finding the egg.”

  And here’s what it tasted like: It tasted like a first—the first time you dove into an ocean wave or made something good or touched her lips. The first time you jumped from fifty feet, that feeling in the air when you forgot the gorge was beneath you, air and sun rushing, and you kept falling, and you opened your eyes and you were in the bright, underwater lights of a kitchen in Barcelona before an elfin man with hair springing from his head, quail yolk in your belly, and you could think of only two words to say, but you said them at least two times before you stopped yourself.

  “Thank you,” you said, laughing. “Thank you.”

  10. [ON THE PLEASURES OF THE TABLE]

  On the last of our August days in Spain, Ferran said simply: Bring your wife and arrive by nine. Of course, I did as told. Being here had done our family good. We had swum. We were tan. Back home, phones were ringing, bills were piling, office workers were shooting each other dead, but the higher we climbed the mountain, the easier we could breathe again. It was the simplest thing.

  Ferran had reserved us a table on the patio, beneath a stone arch and a nearly full moon. Even before the meal began, we experienced the odd sensation of being alone for the first time in many months, without Baby. The calm was almost exotic.

  I had no doubt that somewhere back in the kitchen, Ferran knew everything that transpired at our table. While I at least had some vague sense of what might be coming, Sara was a neophyte. We barely got past “a childhood memory” (the dried quinoa) before she was smiling. By the time we spooned up our “cloud of smoke,” we were both simply untethered from any concerns but those of the table. Taste became our cynosure, night a thing to be eaten with stars and moon. Ferran Adrià revealed himself in every bite now.

  “It’s as if he’s climbed inside my mouth,” Sara said, laughing, taking a second nibble of trout-egg tempura, caviar grazing her lip and disappearing on her tongue.

  “Is that good or bad?” I asked.

  “It’s … disorienting, but fine by me because, really, it’s”—her face brightened—“so fantastic.”

  Next, in a rush, came corn ravioli with vanilla, wasabi lobster, sea urchin with flowers of Jamaica—each one of these dishes weaving the unexpected with the vague outline of something we recognized. At some point, I’ll be honest, I ceased to actually taste the food so much as feel it through Sara, who for the first time in months was no longer someone I passed at 3:00 A.M. but my wife, sitting across a table in a pink sundress, lit by a candle, hair falling to her shoulders, lifting against gravity. She closed her eyes, letting Ferran’s chocolate dust settle and liquefy in her mouth.

  And what did happiness taste like? Let me tell you. It tasted like seaweed and air. It tasted like watching your wife shorn of worry or care. It tasted like watching her face pass through every expression of surprise and mirth on the high road to euphoria, eating delicacies that she’d never eaten before, that exist nowhere else on earth.

  Afterward, having finished champagne, having discussed nothing but food, having sat there until the restaurant was nearly empty and the moon had reached its apex and begun its descent again, we went to find Ferran, but he was nowhere to be found. Somewhere down in the real world our baby boy was sleeping, and we were told Ferran had gone to bed, too, up in his furnitureless room. It was possible. Or maybe he was respectfully absent, so as not to be embarrassed by what would have been our inevitable gushing. Either way, his nonpresence here was strange. His kitchen was silent and empty, the counters gleaming. The Pacojet sat unplugged in the corner; the silver foam canisters stood neatly in a row.

  I imagined him in his room then, his head on a pillow or bent quietly over a book, his ever-moving mouth silent, his ever-darting eyes giving in to night, the sorcerer at rest. Of course he’d had no intention of checking with us after our meal. After all, what was he going to do with our happiness? It was ours. And so we kept it to ourselves as we traveled back down the mountain, passing the bent Johannesburg trees that made their own music in the wind, passing through the night into town, to our sleeping baby boy and each other, our world having ended and begun again.

  EATING JACK HOOKER’S COW

  GO WITH HIM. GO OUT INTO the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. Go out to the feed yards near Dodge City, Kansas, out into the stink of manure and the lowing slabs of cow, into the hot sun and rain and driving snow with Jack Hooker and know what it means to be a man.

  First, a man looks like someone who’s lived a while. Looks like Jack Hooker. Has a neck like Jack Hooker’s, the back of it all tanned and crosshatched. A man has hands like Jack Hooker’s, calloused but soft with pity on the rump of a steer he’s sizing up for the slaughterhouse. He walks like Jack Hooker, with that same authority, that same plain movie-cowboy grandeur, his shoulders rolling slightly, his arms moving with the smooth swivel of his hips, his body blading through air as he crosses the parking lot of a motel. As if he might be there in body but always somewhere else, too—out in the yards, lost in an ocean of cattle.

  See, a man like Jack Hooker looks on a heifer that stands twelve hundred pounds off the hoof and feels majesty. He shakes his hand on a deal that brings a new herd of a hundred head to his yard, and he feels grace. He sees God in a Black Angus that carries his meat in the flank. And he fights Satan himself when his cows go down with fescue, their tails, sometimes their feet, just falling off, littering the ground. What salvation is offered him here on earth, what afterlife, com
es by seeing a glimmer of himself in a son who rises up in the yards like his daddy did.

  And what everything comes down to for a real man like Jack Hooker is this one thing: America is a cow. It might sound funny if you’re not from Jack Hooker’s world, if you sit in those city offices trying to figure out how to take a piece of Jack Hooker, how to tax him and strip him bare, but America is a cow. And that’s how America got to be America and that’s what America is and that’s what America will always be.

  But now, here’s where it gets tricky. Used to be you had a yard full of cattle. You fed them up to a good weight and herded them onto pots, the trailers that take them to the slaughterhouse. Honest work by good people. But now in those slaughterhouses, you can’t find many people wanting to do the job. Jack Hooker did it once. Wasn’t pleasant, but he did it. But now it’s the Mexicans and those Asiatics. All these yellow and orange and black people stunning the cow and hooking it and flensing its hide. All these yellow and orange and black fingers inside every Angus and Hereford cutting them open, scooping out the viscera in slimy piles, all these yellow and orange and black hands sawing these cows in two, crushing up the bones, vacuum-packing their parts for the country to eat. That smell, that rancid, stomach-churning smell of melting cow, used to be a good thing, as good as the smell of money, but now it smells foul. Comes down on Dodge City like human flesh gone bad.

  And what eventually happens here is that these yellow and orange and black people get a good wage—maybe eight, ten dollars an hour—and save up. Wait ten years, bide their time. And in that time, Jack has become a different man. He’s out of cattle now, in semiretirement. Buys a motel with his wife, Beverley. But everything goes squirrelly in the late eighties, and Jack Hooker loses $100,000 in one of those bad S&L deals. Loses their house, too. Broke and homeless, they answer an ad in the paper: a Dodge City motel looking for managers. The Astro Motel. On the business card, it reads, THE SPACE AGE MOTEL. Has a little astronaut on a couch watching TV. Twenty-eight dollars for a single. The parking lot is full every night. Full of beef-jerky salesmen and crop adjusters and windmill collectors. The Hookers live in two rooms behind the front desk.

  And then come the Cambodians, or whatever the hell they are. They come around with cash saved from all those years in the slaughterhouse, and they buy the two motels on either side of Jack and Beverley Hooker. Suddenly, they’re surrounded by gooks. And Jack and Bev, they just manage the Astro Motel; but the gooks, they own the Thunderbird and Holiday motels. They gross more than $300,000 a year.

  So go with Jack Hooker now. At sunset. Out into the empty parking lot of the Astro Motel. Look to either side, at your neighbors. They’re holding your money in their yellow fingers. They own a Jeep Grand Cherokee and an Acura Legend and three other cars, and you have only your old Buick. Can you feel something building? Can you feel what a man like Jack Hooker feels? Maybe the difference between you and a real man like Jack Hooker is that he will tell you what he hates; he will honor his hate and unleash it and understand that his hate will come back on him, understand that he, too, is hated. For a real man like Jack Hooker realizes that he hates and is hated. And then, with the motel signs lit three in a row, tells you in so many words what he knows: Reckoning Day is coming. The gooks are eating his cow.

  So this is your new life, Jack Hooker’s life: Broken Coke machines and ice makers, broken Zenith TVs and GE air conditioners, broken Sylvania bulbs and Budweiser beer bottles smashed from the second-floor balcony last night by some wasted Mexicans, the jagged glass reflecting on the pool bottom. Just off the boat, says Jack Hooker in his gravelly drawl—you know how that goes. Then frowns. There’s no special time when things break around here, they break all the time. Even now, things are breaking, and Jack Hooker’s down on one knee, fixing them or picking them up.

  Forget the bullet holes in the lobby window—the Astro is a family place. American owned. With two golden rules: (1) People want a clean room, and (2) People want a good bed. That’s it. Built in 1965, when they set six metal beams thirty feet in the air, painted them blue, and hung a prefab, L-shaped motel from them. Today, there are still two scrunched-down stories and thirty-four rooms with alternating yellow and blue doors. An ode to another era, like some George Jetson space station, hovering just above the landlocked plain top of southwest Kansas.

  Oh—and it’s your life. You go to bed here; you wake up here. You eat here and make love here and may die here. Do you know what it’s like to have ten thousand cows passing in pots every day, rumbling up your spine, lowing in your dreams? After a while, it doesn’t matter how clean your room is, doesn’t matter how soft your bed is—it gets to you, gets to Jack Hooker sometimes, too. But you do your best with it, make a family of the people passing through. In the old days, they came because they wanted to visit Dodge, soak up the lore of Boot Hill and Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, came to see what was once known as the Wickedest Little City in the West. Whores, gunfighters, gamblers. Used to be a monument to everything that made this country great. Home to cowboys. American cowboys. So many once that you could hardly part them with a horse.

  But now things have changed. Cowboys are dead. What’s left is the rednecks and the bankers and the outsiders. The clientele at the Astro isn’t tourists so much anymore: They stay at the chain hotels—the Holiday Inn Express, the Super 8, the Best Western—all those big conglomerates. Now it’s the blue-collar people and traveling salesmen who keep the Astro alive. And Dodge City is losing its white majority—a quarter of the town is already Hispanic. And then you’ve got your Asiatics and blacks. Most all of them here for the slaughterhouse work, though they’re branching out, infiltrating everything. Especially the Asiatics. One day, they’ll have the country club, too, be up there playing eighteen like they were born to it. Scares you, scares Jack Hooker. There are gangs and killings and kids sniffing gold spray paint—what’s called spooking. There’s a rumor around town that some gangbangers are gonna kill a pregnant woman, as some rite of passage, and she’ll have blond hair. And there’s a law now against buying hogs and slaughtering them and hanging them from the trees in order to drain the blood. Do you know what it’s like to drive around the corner and see dead hogs hanging in the trees? Different people, these Mexicans and Asiatics—crawling all over your world, closing you in. And the Cambodians—you can’t help but wonder why they wander in front of your place all day long, eyeing you as they go.

  Thankfully, your guests are mostly like you, helping make an island against the others. Occasionally, some will stick around—for a construction job out at the new Walmart site or maybe doing time at the slaughterhouse, like the rare black man in 107, a night-shift manager. Bev Hooker calls him my black man in 107 in the same way she’ll say my construction crew in 117 and 119 or my British tourists in 120 or my Mexican gals when she refers to her cleaning staff, three women who speak very little English. To help them, Bev raises her voice and speaks slowly when asking for a cleaner toilet or a better-made bed.

  And it almost goes without saying that Jack and Bev are two parts of a whole. Jack sometimes calls her Momma. Never felt the need to go looking after other women. Never once, in all those years on the road, buying cattle. Nights in Abilene or Wichita or Denver or Dallas or Shreveport. Out for a steak. Talking cows. A strong, proud man with a James Dean walk. Turned more than a few heads in his day, you can count on it. But just so lucky to have her. Ain’t wanted another momma, he says. And Bev, she must have come straight up from a cornfield, born into this world with eyes like a clear twilight sky. That same blue. Some days, she might wear shell earrings and a shirt that looks like a big scallop. A prettier version of Shirley Booth. And her hair, swirled like cotton candy.

  Some nights at sunset, Jack and Bev’ll get out the lawn chairs, sit under the eaves of the front office, watching it all add up. People come and go. The woman in 106 is in the pool with her daughter, doesn’t have a bathing suit, so wears her dress, soaked up to her armpits. A group of men shuffle around their pi
ckup trucks in the parking lot. One brings a paper bag full of beer up to his room. Upstairs, there are a couple of windmill collectors: John and Johnny West, their real names, a father and son with their wives. On the road, looking for old farm windmills to buy and refurbish—and then do what with? Maybe keep around the yard. It’s a dying thing, says Johnny, looking over at his wizened, fading father, who’s nodding his head. We want to keep the old days alive.

  Occasionally, some folks aren’t so friendly. Like these two young troublemakers, two wire-rim liberals from Wisconsin who pull up in their VW van. When they ask Bev the price of a single, she tells them; then when they hem and haw, she brings the price down a bit—something she doesn’t normally do. And still they take off, peeling out of the parking lot. Off to the Cambodian jungle, says Jack Hooker.

  At night, Jack Hooker may sit behind the front desk, waiting for someone to need a room. He may sit and sit and sit. He may watch the cars picking up speed as they leave Dodge, off to somewhere better, maybe. Sensing they’re on the final edge of town, somewhere between in-between and nowhere, the drivers just press a little harder on the gas pedal. Kind of shoot by in streams of red taillights out into endless fields of wheat.

  It’s early in the morning now, out on the edge of Dodge City. There is a woman, Bout Sinhpraseut. Follow her. Follow Bout Sinhpraseut up into the graveyard, under the cottonwoods. She’s called Donna, but her real name is Bout Sinhpraseut. You can say it: boot sin-pra-sit. It’s her name. She’s not from Cambodia, as Bev and Jack think. She’s from Laos—an entirely different country. Forty-two years old with four children, she left her home after the U.S. bombed it to rubble, after a civil war broke out, left it in 1981, fled seven days through the jungle with her family, then made her way to America. Now she owns the Thunderbird and Holiday motels in Dodge City, Kansas, on either side of the Astro Motel, her signs lit nightly with NO VACANCY while the Astro is only half full. Follow her now. She is climbing a knoll in a graveyard with headstones that have come up like pearled tongues in the first sun. Everything is quiet here. Follow her to meet her God and know what it means to be an American.