Dante laughed loudly. “Perfect. The back wall it is.”
Jeremy walked around the room slowly, looking carefully at each. Kreschkov’s work was beautiful and menacing. The food she depicted was raised on a shining black background, suspended at the top of a void. Much of it was also clearly rotting. The cheese had turned. The shank of meat revealed maggots. The fruit was bruised. But each silky patch of mould, each broken pit, each rejected mouthful was rendered in achingly precise strokes. Jeremy examined the surfaces minutely and imagined that these images of decay had been painted with a brush of a single hair.
Nygoyen worked with multiple panels that assembled to make the whole. One work consisted of four square canvases arranged in a row. Another involved four canvases arranged in a larger square. If the overall image was arbitrarily segmented, Nygoyen at least painted healthy fruit and plump vines that ran from one canvas to another.
The Lukacs was vintage Lukacs, and you either did or did not like phallic National Socialist imagery. Dante had already walked the canvas to the back of the room, where it now leaned in its place between the kitchen doors.
Bishop made no attempt to conceal a debt to the Dutch Masters. The arrangements were familiar: fruit, vegetables, meat and cheese on tables, slaughtered game birds on chopping blocks, even the conical twist of newsprint, out of which spilled a bit of salt and pepper. Still, they all seemed intentionally wrong somehow. The light glanced into the frame from no definite source, throwing shadow in unexpected ways. Perspective was skewed, enlarging a dill pickle until it rivalled a watermelon on the other side of the table. (No amateurish zucchini either—the dill was next to a glass jar full of similar green oblongs, the milky liquid very clearly containing mustard seed and dillweed.)
Benny took charge of the operation and, for half an hour or so, Dante and Jeremy carted canvases up and down the riser, leaning them in various arrangements until they had the configuration just right.
They went into the kitchen afterwards and Jeremy poured iced tea. Dante sat very gingerly on one of the prep counters and waited until he had their attention. “We’re almost there,” he said, removing an apple from a basket on the counter. He took a bite.
“I’m excited,” Benny said.
Dante ignored her, sipped his tea and chewed his apple in silence. He was watching Jeremy, who felt the next part coming with a delicious side-car sense that he doubted he could ever be fired.
“Who is Charmin?” Dante asked, finally.
Benny circled away from them to avoid the conversation. She pretended instead to inspect the kitchen. She ambled behind the pick-up counter and ran a finger nonchalantly along the edge of the front eight-burner.
“Can I help you find something?” Jeremy said to her.
“Benny, up front,” Dante said without looking at her. Then to Jeremy: “Oh, fuck it.” Uncharacteristic language. He took a last bite from his apple and held it out at arm’s length and commenced staring at Jeremy. Benny, returning from behind the range top, encountered Dante’s arm with the already browning, half-eaten apple at about eye level. Unsure of its significance for a second, she finally registered the unspoken command when Dante waggled his wrist impatiently up and down.
Benny took the apple between two fingers. She carried it down the room towards the dish pit and dropped it in the garbage can.
“The beard comes off tomorrow,” Jeremy said to Dante, whose stare did not waver.
“The eighty-five-hundred-dollar shave,” Dante said.
Benny returned from the garbage, expression lost.
Dante shook his head. “Benny, show him.”
“Show him what Dante?”
“You like the uniform?” he asked Jeremy.
“I like the uniform fine,” Jeremy shrugged.
“Oh don’t,” Benny said.
“Do it,” Dante said. “Show the Chef.”
Benny turned to Jeremy, fiddling with her buttons, adjusting the front of the suit. “Albertini’s idea. He calls it aesthetic team-building.”
“It wasn’t Banks’s idea,” Dante said. “Banks only understood how to implement my idea. Now, Chef, I want you to imagine a set of perfect clones. Perfectly beautiful. They are dressed identically. Richly. An almost eerie combination of sex and money. Sensuous and yet efficient.”
Jeremy nodded. “Ah yes.”
“What did Albertini say?” Dante asked.
“Sexy robotic specimens,” Benny answered. Jeremy imagined the quip had been a joke coming from Banks, but nobody was smiling.
Dante finally turned to Benny, expression impatient. She began unbuttoning the front of the suit jacket, her cheeks red. He looked back to Jeremy. “Sexy robotic specimens. I like that. A dozen perfect meat puppets.”
Benny’s top was now open. She pulled the sides of the jacket away from her chest to reveal the tight top. Black sports underwear, no big deal really beyond the fact that waiters’ uniforms did not typically come with standard-issue underwear.
“Cover up,” Jeremy said to her. “Sorry.”
“Do not cover up,” Dante said. He was still sitting on the edge of the prep counter. He had not moved a muscle since this exercise in humiliation and authority had begun.
Benny began unbuttoning the pants.
“The back,” Dante said. “It’s your ass that interests me.”
She turned, dropped the back of her pants. Unisex briefs that came down the leg a few inches. Again tight.
Jeremy was resisting the urge to leave his own kitchen. “What?” he said to Dante.
Dante opened his eyes wider, staring at Jeremy. “The tab, Chef.”
He hadn’t even noticed. In fact, he had to lean in closer to make out the words embroidered Dolce & Gabbana-style on the waistband of Benny’s briefs. She stood, breathing a little raggedly, hand on the prep counter for balance. Dante stared off into the middle distance.
The chef leaned forward across the tiles of his magnificent kitchen.
He read: Gerriamo’s—Welcome to the Inferno.
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
He had a sense that it was time to get going. Ideas forming, a swell picking up on his mental seas. He had a sense of the forest around him and everything in it. But he also felt something that he hadn’t felt in years, maybe not since those very first days, first months.
Caruzo responded to it. He went to where the Babes in the Wood were. He found the trail. The secret offshoot. The crush of ferns, the leaning trees that did not touch the sacred ground. He went to the edge of the moss. Right there, he put his hands flat on the ground. Both hands, side by side, the thumb and index fingers touching. His heart beat faster, painfully. He sat in the salal. Sat and could not move, his legs sticking out in front of him, temporarily useless. He managed only to pull a hand to his chest. A hand stiffened with weather and age. His hand hurt. His legs hurt.
Everything hurt.
But Caruzo felt a degree of certainty that they were near. First time in a long, long time, this feeling. Them right close.
“Frankie,” he said to the fern. “Johnny,” to the moss.
They had both been face down. Red plaid jackets. Aviator helmets with toy goggles upturned. Bodies tattered inside their clothes.
It grew dark without Caruzo noticing the day disappear. There was light, then less. Then much less. Deep in the forest he did not see the sunset, did not feel the heat of its orange glow.
He made to move, but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
He pressed his back into bark of the fir tree behind him, pressed his shoulder blades around the trunk, holding it. And finally the smaller lights began to wink out between the trees, pierce the blackness all around. He let the lights penetrate to him, find him.
“Frankie,” he said. “Johnny.” They were close. They stood in the salal behind him, he thought. Silent as they often were.
Caruzo folded his legs under him, pulling his shins with his hands. It took all his effort and, when he was finished, he clamped his shoulder blades against
the tree and did not move again. They were very close now, one on either side. Frankie. Johnny.
There was a way to rise above yourself in this forest, it came to him. There was a way to have your sight carried high above your own head, up and up, through the trees. You closed your eyes and let the tiny hands hold you. Caruzo did this now and he felt them draw near. Still silent. And then the small hands clutched his sleeves and pulled him up, just as he had known they would, through the cedar trunks to the canopy. They held him there, very high.
He could see the Professor from here, curled inside his tent, asleep. He slept on a field of yellow pages, thousands and thousands of tiny words like wild flowers under him. He slept a peaceful sleep tonight. Utterly without dreams.
They carried Caruzo further. They spun him around like a beacon in a lighthouse and broadcast his sight over the entire park. Siwash, always. In the forest outside his bunker. At the edge of the cliff, holding the green glowing box in one hand and his blade in the other. He was weeping in anger. In fear.
Chladek sat in the bridge supports, rocking back and forth. Smoking and thinking, a square green bottle balancing on the I-beam next to him.
Caruzo floated. He turned, smiled to himself. There were other fires, other people. And to the east there was the city, a blaze of activity, Jeremy in it. He was setting the future just then. Deciding what came next. His face glowed white. Pale and certain.
And for a time these faces and lights and sounds filtered up to Caruzo, and the tiny hands held his arms, and the tiny forms pressed against his sides, holding him high in his impossible perch. He drank in the flow of these sensations like wine. He drank it in until it had been absorbed. He was filled. He was overflowing. He thought to rise again now, up past the trees, out of the forest and into the clear, black sky.
“Frankie,” Caruzo whispered. “Johnny.”
But their forms had vanished, their light touch fluttered away. Caruzo began to descend towards the earth. The wind picked up on his face; he fell gently. He slid between the highest branches of the trees, through the canopy, skating along the trunks and vines. Bursting through the salal, then the scrub. Plunging faster as the distance to the earth narrowed. Speeding and speeding, the air now pasting his hair to his head, howling in his ears. The ground inches, millimetres, microns away. The red strewn forest floor. The soil with its billion particles.
There were lights all around him. Lights in the forest. Lights in the earth. It all glowed, its shape and every one of its individual grains. A person might slide among these grains. Become a part of the composite. Slide into the leaf, the twig, the earth. Be made one, at last.
Caruzo put his head on the ground. His ear filled with dry leaves that made no sound. A root pressed his cheek without sensation.
The lights and the trees shimmered together. He shimmered himself. He grew warmer for a time. Each of his own grains warm and very, very light.
Jeremy talked to Fabrek for a long time on the phone before convincing him to come downtown. He was trying to sell Fabrek, something he hadn’t done before. Sketching plans and envisioning opportunity. “Hey, I’m flattered,” Fabrek said. “But I’m busy, there’s this new project.”
“The Gorilla Grill?” Jeremy said. It didn’t sound terribly promising.
“Guerrilla,” Fabrek said. “As in: Name a spot, any spot, we’ll do the rest. Six people to six hundred. Booze and extras included.”
“So, like, totally illegal,” Jeremy said.
“So, like, yeah,” Fabrek said. But the money was good and they got all kinds of strange gigs. Techno all-nighters. Jungle parties. Yuppie Polynesian lounge nights with whole spit-roasted pigs. The weekend before, Fabrek had been on Gambier Island at a field party for 350 vegan animists.
“How about getting busted?” Jeremy asked.
Fabrek made a dismissive noise into the phone. But he agreed to meet for a coffee.
Now Jeremy was looking out the window of the Rotterdammer Café, half a block down the street from the papered-over windows of Gerriamo’s. Stroking his chin, newly shaven as of that afternoon. It was just nightfall, and the cloud cover had split a seam at the horizon. There was now an orange glow from the west. And this light steadily intensified as darkness descended from the east, blooming upward, refracting, illuminating the clouds from beneath, doming out over the park and the city like the light of a great fire.
Jeremy got to his feet and leaned through the open window of the café. There was a new breeze too. Cold. Salty. It shocked his face and moved his hair.
Fabrek was reclining in the overstuffed couch near the front window. He had a dubious expression as he slowly turned the pages of the menu. A Benny design. Dante loved it. It was a thin cardboard book, the cover divided into four equal blocks of solid colour—olive, black, silver and blood—complementing the room without repeating any tones. It was bound with a white silk rope, tasselled. Inside were four plain, heavy paper pages, the outside edges microscopically gilded. Two pages of food. Two of wine. It was the most elegant menu Jeremy had ever seen.
Fabrek finished and closed the cover with exaggerated care, slid it onto the table in front of him. “I used to make falafels,” he announced.
“You had a grill.” Jeremy said, sitting opposite his friend.
“You made keftes, chicken kebabs, chicken breast sandwiches.…”
“Only thing I see on here that’s grilled …,” Fabrek said, picking up the menu and running a finger down the inside page. “Whazzit: beet-marinated goose breast?”
“So we grill a goose breast. You went to school somewhere.”
“No,” Fabrek said, mouth bending into a smirk. “I was taught by my baba. She had a Hibachi on the fire escape outside the window of her apartment. She made dinner there every summer night and I don’t think she ever put beet juice on a goose.”
Jeremy put his palms together, elbows on his knees.
“Where do you buy foie gras anyway?” Fabrek asked.
“This gig is real,” Jeremy said. “You could make some money. The opening is going to be special, but if you handle it right it could be a full-time thing. A reputation, a real career. I was thinking of it like a favour.”
“Thanks,” Fabrek said. “But there’s gotta be five dozen apprentices who would jump at this chance.”
“I also need special people,” Jeremy said. “People I know.”
“What’s that mean?”
“People I know,” Jeremy said. “People who might be prepared to try things a little differently. I don’t need fifteen years’ experience or anything, just come ready to train.”
Fabrek leaned into the window and looked up the street at the front of Gerriamo’s. The front awning had been replaced with a longer black one that stretched from the now double doors right out to curbside. On opening night, the tuxedoed valet parkers would stand here on a blood-red runner and make everybody feel like they were attending the Oscars.
Fabrek shook his head. “It’s not me,” he said. “I’m not inside a place like that. I’m cooking on a Hibachi on a fire escape somewhere. You understand?”
Jeremy leaned back in his chair, disappointed.
“But I came down tonight,” Fabrek said finally, “because I do know people. Better-suited people. There are these cooking-school kids. They’re off until the spring semester, so they’ll work.”
“What year school?” Jeremy asked.
“You just said they didn’t need to be trained.”
“How untrained?” Jeremy asked.
“Pretty raw,” said Fabrek. “But they roast a decent pig. I know this for a fact.”
They walked together around the corner into Hastings Street, Jeremy’s turn to be dubious. Half a block away he saw them right where Fabrek said they’d be hanging, at the window tables of Juize ’n’ Bluntz. Jeremy had probably walked past them a hundred times. Half a dozen kids in Prada Sport gear and L.A. Eyeworks sunglasses with coloured glass, light blue, khaki, orange, sea-foam green.
&
nbsp; Jeremy spotted Henk, whom Fabrek had earlier described. Skinny, with a poofy, natural-red afro. He had a black V-neck shell pulled over an orange T-shirt. He sported a thin gold chain with a tiny eggbeater charm. Timberlands.
“Whassup,” Henk said, passing off a joint to a colleague and flopping out a hand to shake, wrist cocked, fingers splayed downward. He spoke very slowly. The leader.
Fabrek shook.
Henk greeted Jeremy the same way, then back to Fabrek: “You workin’?”
“I’m working,” Fabrek said.
“You got something for us?” He was still talking to Fabrek, but looking curiously at Jeremy.
Jeremy wondered if Henk had picked him as a roast-pig guy or an all-night vegan jungle party kind of guy.
“It’s different,” Fabrek said. “This guy here’s a chef.” Yes, a real executive chef, he explained.
It got their attention. Jeremy was able to observe one of the anomalies of kitchen culture: how working-class kids with born attitude (but who seriously wanted to cook) would sit a bit straighter and even talk nice if they knew they were speaking to an executive chef.
Henk made a very small motion with his hand and his buddy stubbed out the joint. “Are you hiring?” he said. “Chef?”
Fabrek had to go. “Have fun,” he said, shaking with Henk and Jeremy again.
“Take care,” Jeremy said. “Keep in touch.”
“Oh, I’m around,” Fabrek answered. “You take care too.”
Jeremy had a coffee with the crew, then took them 0around the corner to Gerriamo’s. They fell in behind him in a ragged line across the sidewalk and out into the street. They looked like an album cover, all slope-shouldered, sole-scuffing ennui. Henk, Torkil, Angela, Conrad, Rolando and a thick-necked kid with a single black eyebrow visible under the rim of a battered straw hat, who introduced himself by his full name: Joey de Yonker. He was a part-time DJ.
“Joey, OK?” Jeremy said, unlocking the alley door.
The group fell silent behind him. Jeremy turned. “All right,” he said. “Joey de Yonker.”
They went inside. The kids fanned out around the room, looking, touching, the cool perfection of this kitchen with all its brand new top-end gear slowly sinking in.
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