My teeth were the colour of parchment paper so it was unlikely I was American at all—that was one thing. Headaches were often involved and sometimes I wet myself. I guessed I was in my early twenties although sometimes I felt older and often I acted younger—my pockets were usually full of slobbered-over sweets.
I could speak, passable French as well as English, although more often than not I chose not to. People told me I mumbled anyway. I had begun to say I was Irish because that was the way I sounded—pronouncing oil as aisle. But I was very much not for chatting. For this and other reasons I knew I was difficult person to warm to and that you could not have counted on me for a dance at a party—I was dependably incapable in any social situation—or a reassuring word if you were feeling under the weather.
I was crying when I came to, for no other reason than I was peeling those onions. A stewy breeze had coated the skin on my face and anything further than a few feet away appeared smudged, as though the air around me was greasy. I was standing at a window which gave onto a murky alley and I was happy to be there although I didn’t know that I was happy.
I wasn’t, as perhaps I should have been, immediately looking for the local paper to see where I had ended up, because I was then—as I am now—incapable of asking the right kind of questions. If I was there tranquilly chopping onions then I supposed that’s where I was meant to be—just as, if you had dropped me into the cockpit of an A380 I would have coolly attempted to rumble it off down the runway.
I was wearing the chef’s clothing that seemed to be my uniform, but I was more startled by my candy-coloured plastic gloves. Had my skin been vacuum-packed? When I removed the gloves my hands were an unsettling cheese texture, the implication being that I had been wearing the gloves for some time. The dirt deep under my fingernails was astonishing. The state of the nails themselves—they seemed rusty—suggested I had been deprived of essential nutrients or had been using them to scrape cement. The nails were so soft that they made no sound when I drummed them on the aluminium work top.
There were reflective surfaces everywhere. It would have been straightforward to have a peep at myself and size this person up, whoever she was, but I was distracted by the figure moving in and out of focus. I felt the hovering someone looking at me.
This, I would learn, was Amadou. For the time being he was peeling potatoes in the sink beside me.
—Potato, I said.
Then I tittered. Well, you would.
When I spoke there were no vibrations in my ribs and no feeling in my throat. The sound was being generated from somewhere behind my ears. And my first word—I should have tried to say something more momentous than potato.
Amadou did not reply so I was not certain he had heard me. There was music playing from the kitchen’s food spattered radio, although it took me a while to realise that it was music. The singer sounded so mournful that I took it for a confession. He sounded frantic and insincere and, as far as I was concerned, he needed to be silenced. It still amazes me that I walked over and pulled the plug from the wall.
A few seconds of this new existence and already I was behaving out of character.
Amadou began to mimic my walk, the way I was prowling like a panther.
—Tu es animal, he said.
There was an incident. Poor man, but I lost it.
If anything Amadou seemed quite concerned that I didn’t get any more upset than I already was, that I didn’t—‘faire un honte’ were the words he used. But I didn’t care about disgrace. I was an animal and animals couldn’t be disgraced.
I went to the bathroom and saw my face in the mirror.
—Quite nice. That’ll do, I said.
And I went back to what I was supposed to be doing next, which was picking whatever meat I could from the fish necks and making stock from their bones. I was clearing up my fish-bones when someone leaned over my shoulder. Her fragrance was oniony, too, but sweeter. She spoke to me in English even though all the other voices I could hear in the kitchen were French.
—Looks like you’re feeling better, she said. You were much quicker towards the end. Let’s take a look at the rest of the vegetables. Or do you like pastry?
Ségo often worked ten hours day, in a space no bigger than a domestic kitchen, wearing a back brace under her whites. And she is still the only chef I have ever seen lie flat on the floor during a busy service. Her hair was as black as the enamel on our pans, and around her eyes there were little lines—tiny scores—from her worries about the world. She was in her twenties, too, I thought. I say too, but I knew as much about Ségo’s age as my own. She was French and Canadian—rather than French-Canadian—counting Ottowa as a former home after a plush, troubled childhood in Nice.
Her face sank whenever you mentioned her parents.
—To give them their due, she would say, they were very committed to despising one another. Stayed up late just to hate each other for longer. Then Mom got upset when I went to Dad’s funeral. Can you imagine? She was offended but she wanted to know what everyone was wearing. Black, I said. Drab, she said. Now she’s alone in fucking Raleigh. Muttering to herself all day.
And Ségo’s attitude to Paris was similarly cursory, particular and brutal. The only people who liked it didn’t know it properly. She always said the Paris air and the water left her skin feeling sandy and dried-out and old and tired. There wasn’t much wrong with her skin as far as I could tell. It was as smooth as a television screen and into it she spread moisturizer with a malevolent, sexualized intensity.
Ségo worked the dough quickly but carefully. She must have made choux pastry thousands of times but her eyes brightened once the flour incorporated itself and the mixture left the sides of the pan.
—And stop, she said. Don’t overwork it. You beat harder once you’ve added the eggs.
We waited for a little while before she added the eggs and found herself with a glossy hill of dough that met with her satisfaction. In went some cheese she called Gruyère, and some chives and black pepper, before Ségo piped walnut sized buns onto some parchment paper with a subtle flourish.
—Your turn, she said.
—What do you mean?
—Do what I did. It’s a rigmarole but you’ll get the hang of it.
And I did—chuckling as the little bronze skulls rose in the oven, startled by something so simple as the combination of flour and water and egg yolks.
—Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, she said.
—What?
—Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Keep saying it over and over. Practice makes perfect. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
I knew what I was doing, for the most part—I just didn’t know what everything was called. Until I heard everyone else I had my own names for things. I had the handwriting of a slow child but I would do my best to write down the names Ségo gave me—vejetubbels, vezjtobells, vgtbls—and the characteristics. Obberjean is purple and shiny. Inside Obberjean is bitter. Obberjean like salt.
Soon, I got to know all the vegitidibbles.
Passive-Aggressive
The facts of my life could have been described as a mystery but that is not how I viewed them. It was more a matter of distinguishing what I had forgotten from what I had never known. Maybe you are supposed to feel haunted without your memory but I felt as if there had been a reprieve.
I was passive-aggressive, people said. Mordant, too. Astringent.
Dictionary, please.
I cooked rice and drank the water. I masturbated in front of my window. I dropped a pea and spent an hour trying to find it. I said ‘fuck this’ so much that I was asked to stop. I was confused by the concept of peanut butter. I was entertained by staring at the lice in my mattress. I lent money to the gypsies outside Voltaire métro, twice. I believed people when they said ‘I’
ll get back to you’. I bragged about my shits. I thought that when someone said ‘it’s okay’ that everything was okay.
Everything you did in Paris involved a great pageant of paperwork but, in return for some of Ségo’s blanquette de veau, her good friend Hippolyte Pinoteau was happy to usher us into his chaotic rooms in Ménilmontant with very little recourse to admin.
Ségo took charge when Hippolyte asked me to attempt the new-patient registration form. All she wrote was ‘à l’attention de Ségolène Carena’.
Care of.
Without any paperwork, I was conditional. On a par with the feral cats of Belleville, although some of them had to have police records.
Hippolyte gave me the run of the uncomfortable chairs—shaped like bent spoons—before offering me some purple jelly beans from a jar.
—Tell me whatever you want to tell me, he said, massaging his fingers. I will ask lots of questions. You’ll become accustomed to that.
My mouth was packed full of sweets and Hippolyte made it plain that I could empty the jar if I wanted. He started off as excitedly as a dog following a familiar scent. Had I forgotten everything? How did I function? How far back could I remember? What would be my first memory? My last memory before I stopped remembering?
—Do you want to explore your past? There are ways of doing that. We can help you. I haven’t seen your papers, but I deal with people like you every day. Your memory could come back spontaneously, even suddenly, or it may never come back at all. You have no long-term memory, except little flashes. It’s retrograde amnesia. It’s a brain disorder, that is all. Or a hormone imbalance. If we can name it we are unafraid of it.
Hippolyte had set the proper tone, which I tried to imitate. I asked him what would happen if my memory was to return, whether I would be able to cope with the weight of information. Would there be a sign? Did your body inform you in advance? A headache, perhaps. Would the new me survive? Would the two personalities be compatible?
—Anything is possible, Hippolyte said.
He said I might regain 25 percent of her memory. Or 50 percent. Or none. Basically he had no idea.
The hospital was a worn-out building which seemed to be cut off from its surroundings—as separate from the rest of Paris as my apartment or Gravy itself. The door of the emergency room thumped me in the back and I had to pin myself to the wall to avoid the ambulance crew—two men between them controlling four trolleys bearing some injured construction workers who looked more confused than in pain.
One of the men on the trolleys was asking where he was. Were they there yet? When would this stop?
The only answer the nurse could give was, —Hôpital Saint-Louis. Onzième.
The various afflicted—all of whom seemed surprisingly relaxed for being in an emergency room—were spread out all over the seats. So many of them were staring at the ceiling that I assumed there was something to see up there—a screen or a scrolling news feed. Two men in neck-braces shared a piquant breakfast of cooked meat from a can. I didn’t want to think about what had happened to the man with the hole in the side of his head where one of his ears should have been.
Ségo was pleased that they could squeeze me in for the MRI. And I could only feel self-consciousness at the thought of my brain being photographed. After a wait we were led to a temporary settlement in the hospital grounds. I must have smelled like an old battery and the searingly clean portacabin would have pronounced my pungency. The smell might have been from my plastic work clogs, which were also my running clogs. Amadou had given me an orange windbreaker bearing the logo of one of the Parisian soccer teams and I wore that everywhere. My chef’s trousers were patched at the knees and I was wearing one of the two new T-shirts Ségo had bought me at the thrift store on Rue de Rivoli.
The radiographer looked quizzically at his screen.
—Pas de nom? he said.
—Portakabin, I replied.
Ségo interrupted with, —À l’attention de Ségolène Carena.
I was soon in the tube, lying as still as requested. But I didn’t
understand MRIs any more than I understood toasters or traffic lights. There had been a warning about claustrophobia—and to stay where I was if I felt claustrophobic—but I was more worried about disappointing the doctors. What if my brain was empty? What if it wasn’t as photogenic as the other brains?
I got paid a bit—minimum wage, I think—but my visits to Hippolyte and the hospital had been reminders that I was living the life of a successful stowaway. My apartment was another sign. After my incident with Amadou and the onions, I had settled into life at Gravy more or less uneventfully—but, after four nights of sleeping in the restaurant’s vegetable store and three incidents involving two different policemen and one official caution, Ségo had decided I needed my own place to live. She located the apartment—tucked away in a plain block on the stretch of Avenue Mathurin Moreau that buttressed Buttes Chaumont—and made the arrangements and she planned, too, to pay the rent. I was just happy not to be sleeping in the store room. On the lease where I had been supposed to sign my name, again she wrote ‘à l’attention de Ségolène Carena’.
Apart from Ségo’s friendship and dating Daniel—if that’s what we were doing—I didn’t have much going for me. The goings-on of the world were arbitrary but Ségo wasn’t. At that time in my life I assumed everyone was as kind as her. I took it for granted because the alternative was what?
#11,158 of 13,124
restaurants in Paris
Gravy was housed in a converted garage on a lane not far from Saint Ambroise métro. Looming tenements protected us from such invasions as sunlight and what could be glimpsed of the sky was more often than not indigo with impending rain. A concentrated ambience of mop-bucket and syringe—a picture-perfect resemblance to an alleyway awaiting a movie car chase, except no one other than bin lorries ever saw fit to drive down there. Most tourists stepped out of their cabs believing themselves to be hallucinating. Several times a day people stopped to see if we sold petrol.
If Gravy did not resemble a restaurant from the outside, it hardly looked the part inside either. The dining room, even in its finery, looked unfit for paying guests. Salty dust everywhere, certified twentieth century, this was no affectation. Nor were the curry-coloured walls and tutti-frutti—as in cracked—tiles from the hand of any artisan. Although there was a very handsome zinc bar in one corner—this had, according to Ségo, come from the highest bar in the Alps—it took up space that could have accommodated more diners. I liked to sit there anyway, to eat my daily meal—a waffle flooded with cheap chocolate paste.
It was my job to keep the kitchen clean and prepare it for the proper chefs who would appear a couple of hours after me. Ségo lived nearby but Amadou lived in a faraway land with no arrondissements.
Nearly Belgium, Daniel liked to say.
Amadou had six or possibly sixteen children and, like most parents I met, he came to work for a rest. Amadou dressed the way he did because he was into hip hop—but he reminded me of a child who was about to be put to bed.
—Night-night, I would say whenever I saw him.
Night-night Amadou.
By the time I got to work my hair was stuck to my forehead with sweat and my new T-shirt was soaking. I drenched my head under the cold tap, wondering if the T-shirt would do another day. It was from Ségo that I had inherited a regard for the chef’s clothing I wore all day, even to bed. No doubt that I resembled something out of a cartoon in those clogs and patched trousers, but there was no finer uniform so far as I knew. Everything else felt so drab, especially the kind of things I could afford.
I was pulling my T-shirt away from my armpits when Ségo arrived. She smiled when she saw it was the one with the Pink Floyd album cover. She had also bought me a shirt with a picture of woman in a bikini climbing a martini glass.
—W
ho is Pink Floyd? I said.
—It’s not a person, she said. Want to hear them?
Ségo put her little gizmo into the speaker to allow me to make up my own mind. I wanted to please her but the best I could come up with was the music sounded a bit spacey and the singer sounded out of breath.
We were there for so long that I began to inspect the morning’s deliveries. The herbs splashed me with dew as I picked them and I was pleased to see so many artichokes. These would take hours to prepare and I preferred time-consuming jobs.
—You hate it don’t you?
—Suppose.
—What’s wrong?
—Nothing, I said.
I had been hoping Ségo would let me deal with the fish this morning but she was already lining up the rigor-mortised bass at her station.
—We must get you back to the doctor, she said. If the headaches are getting worse then perhaps something serious is the matter.
Ségo made a lap of the kitchen, from her bench to mine, to look me in the eye as she said this.
—There mightn’t be another headache for weeks, I said.
Of course I was going to make no mention of the scene I had created outside Bertrand Rose. I hadn’t made sense of Eagleback and if I hadn’t made sense of him I couldn’t begin to describe him to anyone. Nor did it make sense to mention the flurry that was still occupying my forehead—the worst of it had passed for the time being.
I brought the matter to a close by volunteering to scale the fish. In seeking out the jobs the others abhorred I had made myself indispensable in this kitchen and I was pleased when Ségo curtsied and stepped out of my way. Getting down to it, I could only laugh when so many of the scraped scales ended up in my hair and in my mouth. After badly bruising several of the fish I worked through the still life as methodically as I could, taking great enjoyment in slicing open their bellies so the guts spilled into my hands.
One Star Awake Page 2