by Alex Laidlaw
On a Monday afternoon, Teresa fired Ricky unexpectedly. This came after a weekend during which one of our baristas hosted a party in his apartment, inviting everybody from the café. I hadn’t gone, but Ricky filled me in on the details. Sunday morning he had come into work hungover and late, saying he’d drunk a whole three-litre jug of someone’s homemade wine the night before. He’d spent the entire night, he explained, sitting on the floor and playing a guitar, singing song after song.
And I guess I didn’t notice I was drinking, he said. I didn’t even get up all night, so I never had that moment when you try to stand and realize how really fucking drunk you are.
At some point in the night, Teresa arrived at the party, and after trying unsuccessfully to find her place amongst the crowd, wound up next to Ricky on the floor. She’d tried to get him into conversation, divulging the fact that she too was a lyricist, and had herself written a handful of songs. Getting nothing out of Ricky in response, she switched tactics and asked instead about the café. It being Saturday, she hadn’t been in the kitchen for a couple of days. She told Ricky she worried about the café when she wasn’t around to keep an eye on the place.
Whatever followed from there, Ricky couldn’t remember. He told me he vaguely recalled having to defend me against something Teresa had said, and he thought that maybe things had got a bit heated. But, he assured me, it was nothing. He wasn’t worried about it. For now, his only concern was how to get through this day without kicking the bucket.
I don’t know how much help I’m going to be, he said while leaning into a counter, his elbows on the cutting board, his aching brain cradled into the futile comfort of his hands.
When he got fired, I was waiting for him on the patio. Ricky came out the side door, and without breaking his stride, announced he had been canned. I followed him across the street and into the park. He found a bench by the fountain, and we both sat down. Ricky lit a cigarette and described how Teresa had invited him into her office, and with evident restraint, informed him he wouldn’t be working at the café anymore.
But didn’t she give you any reason? I asked.
Not really, but I guess we must have had it out the other night. Apparently I said some things I shouldn’t have said. Ricky blew a cloud of smoke into the air. Turning suddenly serious, he said, I don’t drink very often anymore, but every time I do it seems like something bad comes out of it.
But you really don’t remember what you said to her? I mean, nothing? None of it comes back to you?
Ricky said he must have been honest, that he must have spoken what we were thinking, all of us, all the time.
And that’s what drives me crazy, he said. I don’t regret what’s happened, but it kills me to see so many people pissed off, and nobody says anything. It’s dishonest. It’s the worst kind of dishonesty, he said, when a person will not say what’s on their mind.
I nodded, though I couldn’t agree. In principle, sure, it sounded great, but what if you just didn’t have the luxury? What Ricky doesn’t realize, I thought, is that for some there is a forced calculation that goes into this.
Walking home later on, I felt sorry about what had happened. I felt sorry for Ricky, but I was envious too. Now that he’d been fired, I wanted to quit the café, but of course, I couldn’t do that. After all, I had a family to support. But with Ricky gone, I wondered what the place would be like. I knew he wasn’t the only one to have been recently fired from the café, but in a way this was different, this felt like an ending of sorts.
A couple days later, Teresa called me into her office to talk. Her office was in the basement, in a room that had been previously used for storage. Now it was cleared of all previous junk, and what remained was a handful of chairs and a fold-out table where Teresa worked. There were no windows, and the room reeked of cigarettes. It was dim and stale and gloomy.
She asked me to take a seat. On the table there was a computer with the monitor turned halfway toward me. On the screen, I could see my coworkers in real time, unwittingly captured on camera as they walked back and forth upstairs, behind the bar, fixing drinks and taking payments. In the background, I could even see into the empty kitchen where I should have otherwise been standing.
The first thing I want to tell you, Teresa began, is that you have nothing to worry about. I know there’s been a lot of… there’s been a lot of change recently, but I want you to know that you can rest assured. You’re a hard worker, and I think you can be trusted. That’s why I wanted to talk with you, that’s why I asked you to sit with me here, because I think that we can work together, don’t you?
At that moment, Teresa glanced toward the monitor where my co-worker Michel could be seen standing with his back to the register while a customer made awkward attempts to gain his attention.
I just need you to tell me that you’re on board, Teresa said.
Of course I’m on board, I told her.
Great. That’s terrific. In that case, I want to tell you about the chef I’m bringing in to replace Ricky on the weekend shift.
My heart sank.
This guy is a professional. I’ve known him for years, Teresa said. He’s a great guy, the pick of the litter, and the very first person I thought to call. And it just so happens he’s available! How lucky is that? I mean, this is someone who knows this business inside out and upside down. Someone who’s going to be able to whip the rest of us into shape.
Teresa was wearing a big, dumb grin on her face. Meanwhile, with every word she spoke, I sunk deeper into despondency. I struggled not to react. The pick of her litter? Like a special recruit? Someone to come and whip us into shape? My god.
She went on: This is not someone who’s going to come into work hungover. He doesn’t even smoke.
Here she made a gesture of holding an invisible joint to her puckered lips.
I’m telling you David, she said, you’ll be impressed.
Next, Teresa spoke of what she wanted from me. It was going to be my job to be like a sponge, she said. She repeated this same unsavoury metaphor several more times. I was to try and learn from him as much as I could. I was to stick with him and to soak up the wealth of his knowledge, just like a sponge.
When Teresa asked if she had made herself clear, I told her things were perfectly clear. When she asked if I was capable and willing to do what was needed, I told her I was.
I’ll do it. I’ll be like a sponge, I said.
I figured it didn’t matter anymore what I did or didn’t say. In the space of some weeks, my position within the café had been summarily altered. Still more, I felt as if my position in life had been taken away. For months I’d been thinking of myself as a cook, but the truth is I wasn’t a cook. I’d never been one before and was not one now. I had become something else instead. And if in the interim between then and now it had seemed a real possibility, if for these months I had entertained the idea that I could be a cook, that I might be a cook, well, best to consider it a failed experiment, an illusion circumstantially perpetuated for a season or two wherein I had briefly forgotten myself. To put it simply, I would never let this happen again. From now on, this job would be like every other job I’d had before: nothing but a means to earn a wage, nothing but a gross inconvenience dropped into an otherwise fine and decent existence.
I was a writer then, same as now, perennially occupied with other things. Back then I had so many stories in my head, same as I do now. I used to worry they would never be written because to do them properly, I knew, required something that I couldn’t afford. I needed time, yes, but also more than that. I needed the kind of time that exists all around and throughout common time—that time which lifts individual moments and explodes them into infinity.
I was always tired and distracted then, and it was hard not to get discouraged. To be holding these stories was like holding a bouquet of wild and wonderful flowers no one could see. My whole sense
of self-worth and confidence was wrapped in these dreams I couldn’t make real.
At that time, there was one in particular, one among all those stories that I wanted to write. That was my war story, and I thought about it constantly. Even during that meeting with Teresa, sitting in her office as I handed myself away, even then I was thinking about it. I was feeling the weight and the hope of it with me.
The idea for that story came after I’d cut off the tip of my finger at work a few weeks before Ricky got fired. It happened around noon one day while I was working alone and the café was bustling. We were running out of food in the display case so I was making sandwiches to order while also trying to make a soup and replenish our stock of salads. At one point, I was roughly chopping a pile of mushrooms when I let my free hand get too close. As soon as the blade came down I felt a rush of pain like an electric shock from my hand, up my arm and into my the shoulder.
I dropped the knife. I knew right away that the cut was deep, so I went to the sink. I ran the tap and allowed the water to wash away the blood, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. It was still so busy in the café that I needed to get back to work. Of course, those mushrooms would need to be thrown away. The cutting board and knife, I thought, will need to be washed. As for what to do with my finger, I decided for the time being just to wrap it in some paper towel.
Later on, when things had quieted down, I went back to the sink to try and deal with my finger. By now it had been encased in a wad of brown paper towel for an hour or so, and when I tried to unwrap it, I found that the paper towel was stuck. I tried pulling against the resistance I met, but then I was hit with such a sudden force of pain that I had to stop. I had to take a breath. I tried wetting the paper towel, hoping to unglue it, but I couldn’t bring myself to try unwrapping it again. My stomach buckled at the prospect. Feeling unable now to inspect or even clean my wound, I decided to wrap the whole thing up in a layer of gauze. Finger, paper towel, blood and water, all wrapped in gauze and tied together with some surgical tape.
I should have dealt with it after work, but my wife and I had plans to visit with some of her relatives that night. Cousin of an auntie’s husband, I think, and that cousin’s own husband, their kids and grandkids. They all lived out at Sainte-Anne de Bellevue, so we would need to take a train just to get there, and by the time I was home from work we were already late. I was hardly able to get showered and dressed before we had to run out for the metro. And late that evening, coming home, after having been plied all night with food and wine, we fell straight into bed. So it wasn’t until I was back the next morning at the café that I got to look at my wound.
I set myself up in the basement over a utility sink. All around me were rows of basic shelves we used to store our non-perishables. There was a bare light hanging overhead which made this all seem like an improvised surgery. By the sink I had a pair of scissors, a bowl of salt and some fresh bandages.
First I cut into the gauze and peeled away the outer layers of yesterday’s paper towel. I found that everything was still a bit wet, a little bit sodden, and not only that, but I found that it had started to stink. And that was what did it, it was that smell. Although I had never encountered it, I knew right away what it was, as if by some animal instinct, I knew that this was the smell my blood left out overnight, that a part of my body had started to turn. For a moment I stood in a kind of awe, just considering the strangeness of the fact.
It must be something common in the human experience to have encountered this smell and yet it is an aspect of our existence which we have managed somehow to keep hidden away. Gangrenous limbs are said to stink, I thought, and what about the so many wounded in war? I began to imagine how a cut like this, one that was fairly minor, insignificant really, if suffered in the trenches, say of the First World War, could have been the death of someone. Just this, I thought, hardly more than a scratch. And then, there are likely places still in the world where a simple scratch could lead one to death, just for lack of access to things like clean running water, a sink, fresh bandages and a bowlful of salt.
Back upstairs, I was roasting a squash. By the time I’d finished in the basement, it was ready to come out of the oven. Later, when the squash had cooled, I set to work pulling the meat out of its skins. It was a butternut squash, and while I worked, the smell of that squash rose into the air and surrounded me. My plan was to make a soup.
Once again, I was struck by that smell. I mean, it wasn’t the very same smell, but it was close enough. There was a definite similarity in it. So once again, I stood in a moment of something like reverie and tried to make sense of my thoughts. The fact that a roasted butternut squash could remind me of the smell of my own rotten blood seemed at least curious enough that I ought to write it down. I didn’t know why I was writing it down, but that sort of thing, you don’t just throw it away. Maybe I could use it somewhere, someday, I thought.
I called it a reminder of war. I imagined that for a person who had become say traumatically familiar with the smell of a rotten wound, how someday in their future they might be returned to their memories, triggered maybe at a family gathering when old aunt so-and-so brings out the pumpkin pie. Of course, I had never been to war and I didn’t know anybody who had, but over the next few days this notion grew in my thoughts. I collected other so-called reminders of war. The retort of an egg cracked into a pan, the flash of sputtering grease, even the taste of something eaten off a slightly rusted, cast-iron dish. Of course, I had no reason to write about war. Only, I liked the idea of writing something entirely fictitious for once, something utterly different from all the loosely autobiographical stuff I had written before. Maybe it came from feeling stuck in the café, looking for a kind of escape.
I dug into my war story, which started coming together, if in an uneven way. From a collection of observations to an amassing of aesthetic details. The city in the 1920s. All red brick, iron, rolling river, fog and smoke. Some half-cocked veteran working as a cook. Greasyspoon, eggs and bacon, cup of coffee costs a nickel, all that. As I said before, I thought about it constantly, to the point of distraction. I kept writing things down. At work, every fifteen minutes or so, whenever I was struck with another idea, I stopped what I was doing and wrote it down.
Teresa had given us notebooks, one to every cook at the café. She said that if we were going to be working here, we should always be on the lookout for new ideas. We should be trying new foods and taking notes, finding recipes and writing them down. We should be vigilant, she said, and inspired. And if one truly wanted to be a cook, I suppose that is what they’d want to do. But I was filling my notebook up with ideas of an entirely different kind.
The new guy’s name was Rob. He started work the following Saturday. At seven o’clock I saw him standing at a distance on the sidewalk. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and was wearing a bomber jacket and a baseball hat. At first he looked shady to me, actually. There seemed to be a shadow set around his eyes. I thought he looked like a disaster, but by then I was so tired of everything, it made no difference what I thought. I could barely even stand to introduce myself, I had so little left to give. Nevertheless, it was my job this morning to show him the ropes. Teresa told me I wouldn’t need to train him. Professional that he was, she’d said, he would know just what to do. He’ll jump right in, she’d assured me.
From the moment I opened the doors, as we stepped into the café, Rob launched an inquiry into every aspect of our work. He was as meticulous as he was scattered, asking about our inventory system, for instance, wanting to know what day we ordered our stocks and who was in charge of the task, and who, upon delivery of the goods, was responsible for signing waybills and receipts and where, finally, was the paperwork kept? With his very next breath, he was on about our baked goods wondering how many muffins we sold in a day and did we make the batter for these ourselves or did we use a prepackaged mixture? And if we did make the batter ourselves, how much sugar
did we use? How much salt?
All of this caught me off guard and left me feeling badgered. First by questions, then by corrections. According to Rob, everything we did could be done in another way. And though not necessarily a better way, certainly a different way. Rob couldn’t dice an onion without first asking what method we used. When I told him that we didn’t have a method, that he could cut an onion any way he wanted to, he took it to mean that we hadn’t given the matter any true consideration. He explained that there were many different ways to cut an onion, that a choice had to be made, and if you were looking for, striving for consistency, then the outcome of that choice ought then to be followed assiduously, by every member of our team.
It was only eight o’clock, but I felt like I was burning out. I went to make myself a cup of coffee. As a gesture, I offered to get one for Rob. Rob said he’d like a macchiato, and I had to admit I didn’t know what that was. He explained that a macchiato was a shot of espresso with some frothy milk.
But only very little milk, he said. And the milk should be only lightly steamed.
I nodded, thinking it sounded pretty standard. When I handed him his coffee though, Rob took a small sip and shook his head.
Tell me how you made this, he said.
Without waiting for any answer, he went on to describe, in detail, the process of pouring a proper shot of espresso.
The trick was to let the first few drops fall. These were so full of bitterness, Rob explained, that they irritate not only your sense of taste, but also the process of the body’s digestion.
A little later, Rob asked if he could step out for a cigarette. I practically insisted he should, thinking that I might finally have a moment of peace. He went out the side door onto the patio, but not half a minute later the door opened again and he was coming back in. He hung up his coat, washed his hands, and appeared to be ready to get back to work.
It was cold out there? I asked.