“Jayzuz,” Rolando said, peering down the gleaming length of the bridge, a long hand to the point of his chin.
Torkil was inspecting the front of the RapidAir, nodding. He looked to be taking mental notes, which Jeremy imagined were instantly memorized.
Angela and Conrad were looking at the Metro shelving full of Bourgeat copper. They were breathing through their mouths, necks craned back. Conrad had to be told to remove his sunglasses indoors. He wore beach slippers and boasted finely chiselled facial architecture. Angela had soft, spoiled but intelligent features framed in blond.
“Whoa,” came a voice from the end of the room. Joey de Yonker was grooving on the dish pit.
Jeremy let them poke around for awhile before calling them together again in a way that brought Quartey to mind. A chefly command issued from the middle of a large kitchen. “All right everyone,” Jeremy called. “Listen up.”
They had fun that first night. They discussed the possibilities. They considered the future.
Jeremy took them up front, and the kids walked gingerly around, looking up at the high walls and the arched ceiling like travellers at the Basilica of St. Peter. Torkil went behind the bar and ran his hands along the wood. Angela, Conrad and Rolando were inspecting a panel of Nygoyen’s. Joey, who Jeremy had just decided had to be called something other than Joey de Yonker but hadn’t thought of what yet, stood adrift in front of the Lukacs.
Henk stood back by Jeremy, arms crossed, nodding. “Nice space,” he said. “Very nice.”
Back in the kitchen, Jeremy walked them through stations. They talked about school. They’d done Basic Skills. They knew measurements and knife work. Product ID. Sanitation and Meat Fab. They’d done vegetables, stocks and some sauces. They knew that you didn’t sear meat to keep in the juices.
“Whut? Naaah,” Angela said when Jeremy suggested it to test them. “It’s for colour and for flavour. For caramelization.”
The group was nodding, looking at him.
“OK,” Jeremy said. “So you knew that.”
They talked about the Guerrilla Grill. Mention of it produced sly smiles and sideways glances. Jeremy sensed how delicious the secret was to them.
He learned that Fabrek had alt.celebrity status in the crowd that knew, which at their school was essentially this crowd. Henk had met Fabrek first, at a Dead concert (this event predated the Fabrek’s Falafels by a few years). He’d been making portobello mushroom-cap burgers on a Weber kettle set up in the back of his Toyota pickup truck. There was a huge line up, over the heads of which Henk saw this crazed, bald Iranian dancing around in the back of his vehicle, bootleg tapes blaring in the background. And then the burger itself … heaven. The mushroom cap was juicy and hot, rich and complexly flavoured. When the crowd thinned, he went back to the truck and struck up a conversation. Fabrek told him how to make the marinade. (He still remembered: olive oil, balsamic vinegar, minced shallots, parsley, garlic, cumin, mustard powder and cayenne.) The underground economy flourished outside Dead gigs, naturally, but Henk was still impressed.
He told Jeremy how it helped him make up his mind about cooking as a career. “I was going that way,” he said. “I just didn’t know there could be such individualism involved, such an element of performance. I thought kitchens had to be, you know, straight ahead. Fabrek was a show.”
The rest of the group agreed. They talked more about performance, saying something individual with your cooking. When the Guerrilla Grill came along they all jumped at the chance. Fabrek had been openly skeptical when Henk showed up with his list of six names. They were kids, Fabrek said. They hadn’t graduated Basic Skills I.
“This from a guy who never went to school,” Conrad said.
“Anyway,” Henk said, looking over at Conrad. “He did start feeding us a little work.”
They drove the van. They carried gear into the bush. Eventually Fabrek let them set up the fire pit and tend the pig.
“Showtime,” Joey de Yonker said.
They talked about their futures, what they all wanted to do. No surprise to Jeremy by this point that every one of them wanted to start their own place one day. Their own show. In some cases, possibly unrealistic.
Joey de Yonker had a named picked out: The Garage. He thought he wanted to involve a lot of kinetic sculpture. “Metals,” he said. “Blow torches.”
Torkil was the group baker. He was already selling small-scale to friends and family. He shrugged. Humble. “Chai-thyme rye,” Henk said, next to Jeremy. “Stuff rocks.”
Angela’s idea was Grazer, a high-concept tapas Web bar. Satay, tofu spears, samosas and slivers of super-fusion designer pizza. Caviar and quail’s egg was mentioned. The Web part centred on the stand-up tables with shelves for tapas dishes and pop-up, active-matrix, flat screens. Waterproof touch-pad keyboards. The browser favourites file would have links to sites all over the Net, providing background on ingredients. And their own website, naturally.
“Browse the tapas, graze the Web,” Angela said. Conrad and Rolando were looking at her very seriously, admiringly.
“Henk?” Jeremy asked.
Henk was thinking about high-end panini street carts. Brie-onion, tomato-chevre. Squashed flat in a two-sided griddle and eaten out of a waxed-paper sleeve while you strolled. A once-humble idea from the Rue Mouftarde, although what Henk was imagining for Canada was more like a panini revolution. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax. Big Time. “Nothing wrong with getting smokin’ good food off a street cart,” he said, very slowly.
Jeremy told them as much as he could about how the following weeks would unfold. He could pay them for the three-week training period. He could pay them for opening night, which was going to be a very large, very splashy affair. “We’ll be running the kitchen a little hot that night,” Jeremy told them. “That’s why I’m bringing you all in. But for some of you it could turn into a full-time thing.”
They had a glass of Tempranillo to end the evening. They swilled the pleasant wine and talked more freely. Jeremy listened and appraised, already slotting them into stations based on skill and personality.
“We’ll bring in a dish pit operator, of course,” Jeremy said.
Joey de Yonker looked vaguely disappointed.
At about eleven, when they were gone, he cleaned up and took a last look around. The glasses had run through the dish pit already and were standing in the dryer. The wine bottle was in the recycling rack. The coolers hummed and the floors shone. The knife rack was a phalanx of sharp points, hanging and ready. In the centre, the ageless Fugami. He thought of how he could have used the Sabatier now. The Fugami was here; it was this kitchen. The Sabatier might have balanced feelings in him, events he saw upcoming, the same way it would have balanced in his hand.
He pushed his mind to other things. He locked the back door behind him and stepped outside. It was black in the alley, the cloud cover having recapped the sky. It was colder than before. He blew in his hands and turned uptown, ready to walk home and sleep if he could. Pace otherwise. Stare out the window over the blackness of the park and think.
He was almost at the alley mouth when he saw the form against the back wall of the building and stopped. The person pushed off the wall, tiredly. He had been waiting a long time.
“Son?” the Professor said, voice just a little fragile. He had been sleeping. Not dreaming. Whenever he fell asleep over his work he did not dream, having spent himself. Drained dry.
“It can’t have been that late,” Jeremy said. They were walking down Haro Street, their pace quick as they passed sleeping walk-up apartment buildings and the oak trees leaned in. They were approaching the park, Jeremy’s heart racing, his throat tight.
“I fall asleep early these days,” the Professor said.
“Was he sick, did you know he was sick?” Jeremy asked.
The Professor didn’t think the question was meant to be accusatory, and so he didn’t respond directly and wasn’t offended. He returned to telling his story.
Asleep, no dreams. The sunset woke him. Something he had never experienced. There had been a brilliant glow, through his eyelids. It pulled him from sleep.
He crawled from the edge of the tent to look out over the water. The sun had just emerged from under the cap of cloud, making a vein of molten orange at the horizon. Washing over everything around him. It bathed the trees, turned the needles and leaves and fronds of grass into a spectrum of apple green and incandescent violet. An amazing, filtered, vibrant last light.
“I thought of my own endings,” the Professor said. “I thought of things being finished.”
Jeremy strode along in silence beside him. He burned with a much different intensity now, the Professor noted.
“I went to find him, to talk with him,” the Professor went on. “It was suddenly clear to me that the time had come for things to be written, to be finished.” He crashed on up through the bush, past Prospect Point, across the causeway to the top of Reservoir Trail. Only by then had the light fallen so low that a uniform blue descended between the trees. The light grew particulate, grainy. You could feel it move across your skin.
In the cane of salmonberry bushes he called Caruzo’s name, their comfortable mutual arrangement. He called from the bush a short distance away. No response, do not push on. Go around or come back later.
He waited a long time there. He had never broken the rule before.
“Caruzo,” he called again. “Answer me.”
Nothing.
His camp was empty, but the Professor felt that he was not far away. He followed the trail he had been shown. Down the hillside to the secret offshoot, the side path. It split out from behind a spray of fern, disappeared into the salal. A short distance along came the mossy clearing. The trees parted, made a place. A place of silence, rest. A place to lay down. Caruzo’s holy place.
He was just off the path, short of the clearing itself. His cheek rested on the soil. His eyes closed. He looked asleep, but the Professor felt a weight drop through him. He caught his breath, knelt.
Caruzo was cold.
The Professor grew silent now. They were at the lagoon, still walking very quickly. They were in the forest, climbing Cathedral Trail.
“I always expected a day like this one,” the Professor said. He felt very still as they walked. No comparison to the black whirlpool that followed Hélène’s death. There was a certain grey tranquility to his emotional seas.
His son vibrated with energy. They were charging up the hill towards the point now, Jeremy maintaining a long, aggressive stride.
“And Siwash was there?” Jeremy asked.
“Later,” the Professor answered.
He sat in the salal nearby after finding Caruzo’s body. From this spot, the Professor noted, you could not see a single piece of sky. No blue, no stars. The children had been all the light that this place offered. The Professor leaned and touched the moss. He picked up leaves and let them slide through his fingers, brushed the nearby salal. The ancestors of these leaves had covered the bodies in this indentation. Silent and invisible among the trees. To find them you would have had to search very gently, sifting with your hands for a very long time. Searching with tenderness and intent.
He meditated on this quest for a time, as much as half an hour, he thought. It was the green light he noticed first. A small green glow hovering in the trees. It didn’t cover any area at all, didn’t illuminate. Just made a tiny patch of green where seconds before there had been none.
“Who is it?” The Professor had been startled.
“I,” said Siwash from the darkness.
He’d been there a while, the Professor guessed. And in that instant, he wondered if Siwash had played a role in Caruzo’s death—the battling evangelists came to mind—although there had been no signs of violence.
Siwash came forward through the leaves. He crouched a few feet away in the salal, regarding the Professor. Then Caruzo’s body. He knew, he said, his voice smooth. “I knew the hour and minute,” Siwash said. “I knew the second it happened.”
He edged a little closer along the path. The leaves rustled under him. He had sheathed his strange green light in a leather holster and withdrawn a knife. Nine, ten inches long. A gleaming blade.
The Professor paid attention to this knife.
“I became unsettled,” Siwash said. The knife was extending directly in front of him, silver blade up, black handle buried in his right fist. He was running his thumb along the blade, aggressively. The Professor found himself wincing in anticipation of the cut. The spurt of blood.
“Unsettled how?” the Professor answered.
“I felt that a new wind had risen,” Siwash intoned. “And it marked a great disturbance. It marked the great imminence of shaking.” And again his deep voice resonated among the trees, shivering the leaves and pine needles. “Of distortion.”
The Professor nodded politely, confused. A little frightened. The blade had become uncomfortably active. Twitching in Siwash’s hand. Blade up. Blade down. Slashing lightly at the nearby leaves.
“I have not seen it,” the Professor said. “This distortion.”
“You wouldn’t,” Siwash said, looking down at Caruzo, cheeks hard. “You need a certain perspective. And you brought it here first. This distortion of views. You brought him in first, and now he comes alone. I see him in the forest with others. I have seen him here, on this spot.”
The Professor took a minute to respond. “He’s my son.”
“The others, the ones on the seawall and in the paths,” Siwash said very slowly, rendering judgment. “They come, they go, but they are never truly here. He is not either here … or there.”
The wind was sighing among the trees. The Professor had the sense that the clouds had thickened. That they were heavy with imminent rain.
“You have reached your number,” the Professor said.
Siwash thought the idea over, the knife rotating in his fist, blade turning as if he were twisting it in a wound.
“And did he tell you?” Jeremy asked. They had made their way up into the forest and were now, very quietly, heading towards the spot off Reservoir Trail.
Siwash hadn’t said yes or no. The Professor thought he had been taken by surprise that the number was mentioned at all. He turned and disappeared into the dark.
They arrived at Reservoir Trail. Jeremy looked around them both into the same darkness. “He will be back in his place,” the Professor reassured. “He doesn’t wander as a rule.”
Jeremy turned away sharply when he first saw Caruzo’s body. He lay with his cheek smeared into the earth. His eyes closed. They both knelt. Jeremy made a move to touch the body, to look at the face and the hands.
“There isn’t a mark on him that I can find,” the Professor said. “And I had my reasons to look.”
“We’ll bury him here,” Jeremy said.
They found Caruzo’s camp a quarter mile away in the salal. They found their way through the maintenance yard first, through his front door. From there the Professor took them through the salmonberry cane, left along a worn but hidden path, between a number of tightly spaced fir trees. It was almost invisible, even standing on top of it. Caruzo had left little physical mark on this place despite his long tenure: a black plastic sheet strung low, a pile of rotting clothes, a faded blanket. A quilt, Jeremy thought, touching it. You could pick out a pattern in the soiled squares, a pattern that was once visible in boldly contrasting colours. There was some peanut butter here. Epoxy. A latrine shovel. No books, no other bags.
They buried Caruzo in the holy clearing. They dug a pit in the moss, sweaty work. They piled earth and leaves over Caruzo and his possessions. A layer of moss was last. He made a green mound in the middle of that place.
They sat on their haunches in the dark afterwards. A few respectful minutes passed. Jeremy was already thinking about what came next.
Siwash Rock wasn’t far from the Professor’s camp. Jeremy made his way across the park to the familiar cliffs
ide encampment, then another few hundred yards around the hillside overlooking the harbour.
The Professor had strongly objected. What was the point? What could he say? After all that had happened, his father said, their work here was nearly done. Writing could be completed from home, or from Jeremy’s apartment, which was closer. So they would leave now, the Professor said, the two of them, finally. They had learned much.
Jeremy looked at his father, impressed by these words. He then impressed his father in return by producing the Fugami from his waistband. He folded back the layers of tea towel he had wrapped around it, and the knife lay darkly across his palms. Even after Jeremy had explained the trade he had in mind, the Professor was unconvinced.
“He is not always stable. Must you have your knife back?”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. And more emphatically: “I also don’t like the idea of him having it.”
After a few minutes of searching the cliff’s edge, Jeremy found the path down to the old pillbox. He stood on the sloping grade. Assuming he was already being watched, Jeremy pulled his hands away from his sides, palms out.
He took one slow step at a time, descending the slope halfway without hearing a thing beyond the sigh and scrape of one tree against another in a rising wind. At the bottom of the slope Jeremy could make out the black metal door into the old pillbox. He thought it was ajar.
The sound came from directly behind him. A twig cracked, Jeremy spun around, scattering gravel.
Siwash was immensely strong. Jeremy was on his back, a crushing weight pressed down on his chest. Small rocks ground into his shoulder blades and the towel-wrapped Fugami dug into the small of his back inside his waistband.
“Just be still,” Siwash said, persuasive and calm. Deep tones moderated by musical intonation. “Let me have another look at you.”
And in this position Jeremy first saw Siwash: bald, serious, skin smooth and seamless as plastic, without wrinkle or pore. Expressionless round grey eyes. Ears impossibly folded, like a boxer’s, but cut and ribboned, the earlobe of the left split into two distinct pendants.
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