by Rick Wayne
He crossed his arms.
“Oliver.” She stiffened. “You know I can’t interrupt him when the doors are closed.”
“Who?” I repeated.
Right then the phone on the podium chirped. It wasn’t a ring. It was more like the chime of an intercom. Milan pressed her lips together resolutely as she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She said nothing. After a moment, she returned it to its cradle. She turned, resigned.
Ollie cursed. “Impatient for his lunch, is he?”
“Apparently you are to relay your message—”
“Like hell!”
Milan moved her eyes to the guests in the dining room as a warning not to curse. Ollie froze with his mouth half open. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, barely more than a whisper, so that no one in the boisterous dining room could hear.
“Tell him to go fuck himself.” And with that, Oliver Waxman, MD, turned for the door.
“Hold up.” I was getting frustrated. “Here and back, we just wasted an hour. The mayor’s people are on the TV right now. I thought you said this guy knew something about the mushrooms.”
Oliver spun around wearing a look that made me certain he was about to say he couldn’t care less. And then follow that with some choice adjectives. But he never got a chance. The phone chirped again. Milan lifted the receiver to her ear. Again, she said nothing. She replaced it, grabbed the tray, and walked toward the door with the soft words “Please follow me. Mr. Étranger will see you now.”
I looked to Ollie with a scowl. “Who?” I repeated as insistently as I could.
“Etude Étranger,” he sighed. We walked to the sidewalk and he leaned close. “He’s this French chef. He’s bat-shit crazy.”
“Mr. Étranger is from Brazil,” Milan corrected as she turned left and took us around the corner to an unmarked steel door. “He was only raised in France.” She opened it and pointed to the plain white stairs.
I hadn’t heard of him, but it turns out he’s kind of famous, mostly for his Cirque Gastronomique—this series of ridiculously expensive dinners he’d masterminded, each set in a different exotic locale: an oasis in the middle of the desert, a yurt on the Tibetan plateau, an ice mansion inside the Arctic Circle, that kind of thing. The ingredients were local, organic, non-Western, but the Cirque wasn’t bullshit bourgeois back-to-nature eco-cuisine. It was experimental, modernist gastronomy and it achieved a kind of mythic status in foodie circles, not least because Étranger had only held each meal once and he wasn’t doing them at all anymore.
The chef must have had the whole building to himself because there was only one door at the top of the stairs. It led to a loft apartment typical of the urban contemporary style: lots of neutral-colored metals, right angles, and glass. But it was still impressive for its floor-to-high-ceiling windows complete with a partial view of the Manhattan skyline. In any normal loft, that’s what would catch your eye. But not at Étranger’s. Fuck, no.
Eight-foot-tall tribal head.
Dark.
Mouth agape.
Staring at you through stitched-closed eyes.
You know those scraggly-haired shrunken heads you see on TV? Imagine its gargantuan evil twin. Eight feet. Right there facing the doorway. Frayed brown twine laced through the lids and pulled tight like an old shoe. The effect is almost physical. You see it and Bam! You’re on edge, half-expecting you’ll turn the corner to the living room and see spear-wielding, arrow-flinging natives hunched over bubbling pots, mixing curare.
Light poured in through the high windows and bounced off the white walls, illuminating the art even under an overcast sky. A long, stone-studded Polynesian battle club hung on the wall next to a six-foot-tall black-and-white photograph of a naked woman in chains resting intimately with a leather-clad pig with a cat-o’-nine-tails in its mouth. I turned away. There was a mummified hand in a glass case. Each finger wore a ring and each ring flaunted a different colored gem. There was a pair of facing burlap couches. In between, a giant stone block carved in bas-relief—Buddhist, maybe—served as a coffee table, despite its irregular surface.
No sooner had Milan directed us to sit on the couches and wait than my phone rang. I would have let it go to voicemail except for the fact that Ollie’s phone rang exactly one second after. He and I looked at each other as our phones played musical tag. Same phone. Same ring. Alternating.
Oliver reached into his pocket for his and stepped toward the high windows. I said “Excuse me” and stepped back into the short hall with the giant head.
Marlene.
I scowled and answered. “This is Dr. Alexander.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know who it is.”
“I can’t talk now.”
“Can you ever?” she asked.
“I’ll call,” I said.
“When?”
“Tonight. But I have to go now. Really. We have an interview.”
Nothing.
“Okay?” I asked.
Call ended. Without a word.
I pivoted my feet to head back into the living room—and stopped.
There he was. The man himself. At least, I assumed it was him. I have to say, he was definitely striking: fit but not particularly tall, mentally alert, eyes narrow and sharp. His great bald head was naked and shiny, as if naturally bare rather than freshly shaven. His skin was a ruddy mix of olive and ocher. His clothes were simple but fashionable—a fancy long-sleeve T-shirt, comfortable slacks, and loafers without socks. He was sort of squinting at me the way Dr. Sowell did at our first meeting. Like my very presence was some kind of magic trick he was struggling to see through. He held a wooden tray in his hands capped with a large glass dome. Inside was a single antler. It was covered in small, seething larvae: maggots, writhing and twisting. It was hypnotic and looked designed to be so, like those horrible modern art installations that are always getting MoMA into trouble with the outrage police.
But it wasn’t art. It was chefery. Deer shed their antlers every year. Certain species of biting flies actually lay their eggs on them so that the developing larvae can feed on the protein before pupation. I asked if it was an experiment. He didn’t answer. He walked to a wet bar at the back, across from those big windows, near a set of French doors, and set it down.
“Please take this to Raul when we are finished,” he said to Milan.
The man had one hell of an accent. Milan had said he was from Brazil, but he didn’t look Hispanic. He looked native. As in indigenous. And while his accent was partly French, it was partly something else—and not Portuguese, which is what they speak in Brazil.
Milan nodded.
They were going to run out of air, I cautioned him—the maggots, I meant.
“By which time they should be good and fat,” he said without turning. And then, after a pause, “They’re delicious stir-fried with saffron and truffle oil.”
He walked around the stone table and sat on the couch facing us, the one in front of those tall windows with the skyline view. Milan sat on the opposite end of the same couch. I thought she might be Étranger’s wife or girlfriend or something. She was certainly the right type for a somewhat-famous man—beautiful, of course, and noticeably younger, but not so young as to be scandalous. Around my age, maybe. But I got the sense real quick that that wasn’t the case. They didn’t respond to each other the way a romantic couple would. But they weren’t chilly with each other either, like Marlene and me. They were pleasant. Warm, but respectful of each other’s space. Like coworkers, I guess. Or siblings.
Ollie and the chef barely acknowledged one another. Milan asked us to sit, and we complied. I sat across from her and my mentor sat across from his adversary, whose covered lunch rested untouched and steaming on the irregular table, whose surface was a carved bodhisattva.
Silence.
I turned to my colleague, expecting him to speak. He was the reason we were there, after all. But Ollie just looked at the chef like he was having second thoughts.
My colleague bristled.
“A number of people have gotten sick,” I said.
“Not from anything I have served.” He didn’t say it to me. He hadn’t even looked at me since we sat down. He said it to my mentor. As if the accusation had previously been made.
Ollie stood. Out of the blue. Without a word. Like he was going to leave.
There was another long pause.
“No, sir,” I jumped in. “We think it has something to do with a rare kind of mushroom.”
That did it. The chef turned to me. He just looked. Then in that wonderful accent, “What kind of mushroom?”
“The kind you can’t buy at the grocery store,” Ollie said, taking his seat. “We thought, with your . . . connections, you might know—”
“I am not responsible for every dangerous food—”
“I didn’t say that,” Oliver jumped in.
“You barge into my restaurant. With policemen.”
“You had roaches in your kitchen.”
“They were imported!”
Now, I hadn’t heard of the man, but it turns out even I had seen pictures of the Safari Gastronomique. There was one in particular that went viral: wildebeest tartare ground with turmeric and tapioca, covered with a goat’s-blood foam sweetened with freshly tapped acacia sap and served with a side of wild beet, mixed legume, and alligator succotash, all in a woven bowl of edible leaves soaked in orange essence and shoyu and then dried. It was dark when the picture was taken and a fire (not in frame) lit the foreground, including the basket and the strong black hand that held it. At the back, you could see the silhouette of a few sparse trees along the horizon of the African plain, stark against the fading glow of the just-set sun. The rest of the picture disappeared into darkness. In fact, it was surrounded in darkness. You could almost hear lions rustling impatiently, preparing for their nightly hunt.
Étranger had allowed National Geographic to cover the safari, and it had been attended by at least one A-list Hollywood actor, a US senator (both names kept secret by the magazine), a suspected member of the Russian mafia, and the president of Eritrea, to name a few. But the best part was how, according to the reporter, the whole meal became unexpectedly ambulatory, moving through the African plains at dusk, because a young Etude had become dissatisfied with the ingredients he’d been provided and promptly set off to find wild replacements. There is even one report on the internet, unconfirmed by National Geographic, that this involved the shooting of a leopard.
The president of Eritrea later claimed it wasn’t a leopard at all but that there was “a large man-eating predator.”
I explained to our “consultant” that the big question was how these people could have eaten the mushrooms. That’s when I noticed his hands. They were tattooed. Both of them. On the palms. The symbols and lines ringed his knuckles before swirling over his lifelines and snaking up to his wrists where they disappeared under the sleeves of his shirt. I tried not to stare. I had never seen tattooed palms before. I haven’t since. I’ve been told the ink doesn’t take.
He scowled at Ollie. I think that’s when it occurred to him why we were there.
Ollie scowled back.
“No,” the chef answered the unspoken question. “I have never served it.”
Oliver raised his hands defensively. “Don’t act like it was a ridiculous question.”
“It’s a foul fungus,” Étranger explained. “Rare and distasteful. There is no reason for anyone to eat it.”
“So you’re familiar with it?” I asked.
“Of course!” he said, like I was an idiot. Then he turned to Milan and asked her to remind him to try a hallucinogenic mushroom risotto. It was hushed, as if he’d just had the idea right then and didn’t want either of us to steal it.
“You are familiar with ayahuasca?” he asked.
“The vision quest thing? Magic mushrooms in the jungle. Drums and chanting.”
“For each, there is an opposite. One mushroom opens the doors to a higher consciousness, to an encounter with a guiding spirit. The other, the reverse—to what you might call a waking nightmare. Terror. Anguish. And if enough is ingested, to death itself.”
“Evil ‘shrooms?” Ollie asked, incredulous.
The chef scowled. I wasn’t sure what to make of him—whether the eccentric genius bit was an act for the tabloids or he really was that clueless. But he was fun to watch. Not because he was particularly handsome or eloquent. It was his demeanor, I guess: careless and aloof. That and the accent—coarse, grainy, and resonant. Since it didn’t belong to any language in particular, the chef had the unusual honor of sounding foreign to absolutely everyone.
I looked to my colleague. This had been his play. I think Ollie was genuinely disappointed. I think he really expected he’d cracked the case. On my lead, of course.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you.” He only half meant it. He stood.
The rest of us did the same.
“If you think of anything else . . .” Oliver said it to Milan, not to the chef.
She smiled patiently, and he walked to the door.
I looked at Étranger. Our eyes met, and I felt then like he was holding back. Like he had something he wanted to say but couldn’t think of the right word in English.
I handed him my card. Milan reached up and took it from my fingers.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.
Oliver was waiting near the giant shrunken head.
Étranger looked to my colleague, then to me. His brow was knit, like he wasn’t sure what was happening. Or what it meant.
I walked after my mentor.
“Doctor,” the chef called.
Ollie and I both turned.
“Humans aren’t the only animals in the city that need to eat.”
And that was it.
I called the hospital that night. Finally. Mom was in genuinely rare form: Why had I been ignoring her? I never loved her. Not like Bug.
She didn’t say that last part. But we both knew it was on her mind. A dead boy is an angel. You can’t compete. I know. I tried. All through high school I tried. I tried to do everything right. To win Mom’s praise. Maybe even make her feel better. She just seemed so tired all the time. Especially after nights at the casino. She’d come back with a little bit of grocery money and show it to me and say “See?” Like everything was justified.
“I’m gonna quit now,” she’d say. “You’ll see.”
But I knew. By then I wasn’t a kid anymore.
The worst of it wasn’t that Bug died. The worst was that Mom and I never really talked about it. People can get over a trauma. If they deal. But we never did. Mom would never say it, but it was a lot easier for her to raise one son by herself than two. I hear working class folks say stuff like “I didn’t know we went without until I was older.” But if you’re poor, you know. When you’re a kid and you wake up hungry and there’s not a scrap of food in the house, you know. When your mom tries to hide the food stamps so the other folks in the checkout line don’t see, you know.
And then, all of a sudden, there was one less mouth. I’m sure the guilt of that, the unwanted feelings of relief, ate at Mom every day. She soldiered on as best she could. But I could tell something had broken inside her. Something permanent. She was already a casual user. So she turned to gambling. I think after so much trouble—one man in prison and another leaving and losing a son and getting hurt so bad she couldn’t work—she felt she had one big win coming. That she was owed it. That if she had faith and played long enough, God would see her through. Her number would hit. It had to.
At first it was pocket money. She’d save up what she could and spend a Saturday afternoon playing quarter slots at the Indian casino across the border in Alabama. It was a stretch just to cover the gas. After a while, she started carving out twenty dollars here and there from the grocery money. I’d come home from school and get scolded for buying the
wrong kind of cereal or getting the good bread. She’d tell me I was selfish and then snap her mouth shut, like she’d just stopped short of comparing me with Bug, who would never do such a thing. Like she’d been talking to his ghost.
Mom had been told she had dyslexia when she was a girl. I’m not sure who said it, but I know in her mind it became the reason why she could never do good in school or never work anything but manual labor, so it was always real important to her that I make something of myself. She was so relieved the day I got a basketball scholarship to a little college up in Ohio. By then it was clear she and I couldn’t live together anymore. Not if we wanted to stay mother and son.
I thought moving out would fix things, given enough time. But it didn’t, because we still never talked about Bug. No one even told me how he died. I just assumed. I assumed Curtis Wilson and his crew had caught up to him somehow. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized how stupid that was, that a group of nearly illiterate fifteen-year-olds weren’t going to steal a car and drive out to the boonies, away from everyone and everything they knew, for . . . what? They’d already won. They’d chased us away. They were kings. Besides, how would they even know where to find him?
So I called Mom from school. “You never told me what happened to my brother.”
I could hear her shaking her head through the phone.
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
The phone went down and Cliff, Mom’s new boyfriend from the casino, came on to yell at me for making her cry, and who did I think I was, Mr. Uppity College Degree, and he had a mind to drive up there and whoop my ass.
“You ain’t got no car, asshole.” I hung up.
When Cliff left a few years later, Mom hit bottom. She never came back. But she did find Jesus there. Wouldn’t stop lecturing everyone. The fact that she’d done most of what she wasn’t supposed to didn’t bother her. In fact, for her it was a kind of badge of authority. She could lecture because she knew from experience. There was a long time there I stopped talking to her. I only started again after my daughter was born. I wanted her to know her grandmother, if only to understand her father better. But it was tough.