I erased the message as soon as it was done, as if doing so could erase the pressure, the deadline, my debts, my lies, my bullshit, the whole world. I took a deep breath. I felt like calling Malik and coming clean. I took another long deep breath, and felt a touch of my sang-froid return. I hung up and crossed the street.
Chapter 15
I rang the bell and a jolly little man opened the back door. He must have been about five-two, with ink-black hair and olive skin that was a touch darker on his closely shaved cheeks. The way he was stacking the dining room dishes made clear that he was exceedingly organized.
In rudimentary English, the man told me that his name was Eaton. I introduced myself as well. He repeated my name several times, as if to commit it to memory, without managing to get it right. Over the next weeks I would see that Eaton had a particular way of messing up everyone’s name. Bébert was Cuckoo Guy; Bob was The Bob—he often placed definite articles before proper nouns—Jonathan was Chinatown, Bonnie Bobbie, Steven Estevan. He must have done it to get back for all the times his own name had been massacred, before he replaced it with a nickname. My own handle was Laloo. Every time we worked a shift together I’d ask him his real name, more than once. He’d always skirt the question with a mischievous smile or jokes whose gist I could grasp though their specifics eluded me. After a week he finally revealed his real name to me: Bramata Burudu.
That evening I asked how he’d chosen “Eaton,” and, as he dried dishes, he told me. In one of the first restaurants he’d worked at when he got to Quebec, they’d asked him to find a “less complicated” name. The day after this barbaric request he was walking through the McGill Metro station and, as he emerged onto Sainte-Catherine, had come across “this big tall building” inscribed with large letters reading “centre eaton.” Crowds of people were clamouring to get inside. He’d figured that this must be an extremely important place, clearly named after a great man, and decided to take that name as his own.
He’d finished his shift and put everything away. The stainless-steel dishpit was so clean you could almost see your reflection in it. I’d never seen the pit like that. It seemed twice as big.
In the basement I ran into Bébert. He seemed to be adjusting the temperature of the convection oven, with a bottle of Bawls in his hand. I could smell the guarana of his energy drink even over the detergents and grilled peppers and pungent basil pesto. Bébert gave me a big slap on the back and asked how I was doing.
“A-one.”
The prep kitchen was in the same condition as the dishpit. Eaton and Bob hadn’t forgotten a thing. The whole room had been scrubbed from floor to ceiling. In the break room Greg was getting changed while he chewed someone out on his cell phone. He had a way of yelling, like he was fighting not to lose his voice. In the unforgiving fluorescent light his premature wrinkles were more apparent, his hair a little greyer. Not the face of a guy coasting through life. Bébert burst into the room with his Bawls, tossed a bottle to Greg, and asked me and if I wanted one.
“Way better than coffee, man.”
Renaud came rolling out of the office on his chair, with papers in his hands. He’d been doing the schedule.
“Get ready,” he said to me. “Tonight’s gonna be intense. I hope you’re ready to hustle. We’ve got the forty-five. You might finish kind of late, they’re coming in at ten-thirty.”
He was chewing on his pencil like a stick of liquorice. He suggested I get through my prep list as quick as I could, because after eight they weren’t expecting anyone but the group, and they wouldn’t be having calzones or focaccias.
“Yo, Renaud, is Christian gone already?” Bébert asked, as he looked for something in his locker.
“What do you think?”
Renaud pushed off with his feet and rolled back into the office, all the way to the computer.
“Don’t listen to that goof,” Bébert told me, nodding toward Renaud. “Tonight’s just another shift. Groups of fifty don’t scare us.”
Bébert walked out of the break room, looking relaxed. Greg went right on channelling his rage through his phone, shirt unbuttoned, staring intently at something that wasn’t there in front of him. He stayed silent a few seconds, then cut off the person on the other end of the line:
“Now you’re talking about shit that don’t concern me, bro. No way. Absolutely not. You call him back right now, and . . . I don’t have fucking time for your bullshit, man. . . It’s ten or nothing. Tell him that. And don’t even fucking think about calling me back with another problem.”
While the other guy sputtered away he buttoned up his shirt and tucked it into his pants, in sweeping angry movements, then picked up the bottle of Bawls as he went up the stairs, shirttail flapping behind him.
“Yeah, or maybe you want to spend a relaxing weekend in hospital.”
He took bounding steps and seemed about to lose his voice. On his way up the stairs he dodged Bonnie who was dragging her ass into the break room. Though it was well past dark she had big sunglasses on. Purple tresses cascaded over her cheeks like long luminous claws. Bonnie looked like Molly Millions, the cyberpunk heroine of Neuromancer, or Kei after his duel against Tetsuo. She also looked like she’d spent the night in a bathtub, or maybe on a doormat. Sipping on a giant coffee, she opened her locker and threw her keys on a table, then peeled off her coat as if painfully removing a spider’s cocoon or cumbersome armour. She didn’t say hi to me. I didn’t say anything to her either.
“Morning, Bonnie,” Renaud said, still behind the computer. “Kind of late, huh?”
“Yeah, whatevs,” she said in a hoarse, barely audible voice.
I finished changing, put my stuff in Dave’s old locker, and went to join the team in the prep kitchen.
Despite all the cleanup Bob and Eaton had done before leaving, the room was now littered with produce crates, broken-down waxed boxes, empty containers of oily pesto and smeared cream cheese, baking sheets, buspans of pasta, mandolins with bits of carrot stuck to them, and dirty spatulas (which Bébert called “spazzulas”).
Jonathan was running back and forth between prep counter and cooler with loads of vegetables to chop. He’d shaved his patchy beard since I last saw him. I watched mountains of tomatoes, zucchini, and onions rise up on his counter and the next one over. It seemed inconceivable that he could get through all that before the rush. The prep list for the forty-five kept getting longer, and he kept voicing his feelings under his breath like a mantra, “what kind of idiots take a group that late, what kind of idiots take a group that late, what kind of idiots line up two services before a forty-five.” I washed twice the usual lettuces to make up for what Carl had left undone the day before.
Renaud came over to see how it was all progressing. He just stood there in the middle of the prep kitchen, rubbing his head under his chef’s hat, not sure who to ask to do what. Then he disappeared into the cooler, to do god knows what. I heard plastic lids opening and shutting, and the bottoms of sauce buckets being pushed back into place on the cement floor. Every once in a while he’d call Jonathan, who’d come help for a minute and then get back to his prep, with impatient, rushed movements. I focused on my lettuce, as if it might keep me safe from whatever lay ahead.
Bébert and Jason were running around upstairs. By now I could clearly picture everything happening above me from the sounds that reached me below—pans being slammed onto elements or dropped under the pizza oven, plates clanging down on the pass-through, the bell ringing—and I unconsciously took mental note of instructions yelled out in my direction. They were burning through the first round of reservations, which Séverine had grouped at the same time to maximize volume before the group arrived. She was also squeezing in walk-ins. You could distinctly hear Bébert swearing from the basement.
The chef hadn’t left clear instructions, and it showed. Bob had spent the whole day doing prep but hadn’t been given the right information, s
o he’d focused on certain parts of the menu while totally neglecting others. Christian had prepped for the group, oblivious to the fact that we’d have to make it through two full services first. It wasn’t even six when we ran out of marinated veg, the buspans of mushrooms were empty, and we were down to our last backups of chicken and shrimp. Jonathan was trying to fill holes, and I was giving him a hand in between batches of lettuce. I tore up the rest of my pleurotes, then helped him portion chicken strips that we had to get marinating asap. Handling a knife that big made me nervous, and the gelatinous texture of raw chicken grossed me out, but this was no time to be picky. After what seemed like an eternity in the staff room, Bonnie had joined us. Her whites brought out the green of her face, and she seemed even more lost than Renaud. Carl slipped by like a ghost, or more like the sulky slacker he was. Late as well. We ignored each other.
I tried not to get annoyed as the work piled up. I could hear the dishes clinking upstairs. But with one of the prep sinks full of thawing scallops, there was no way I could do my lettuces any faster.
Upstairs the first rush in full swing.
“I don’t give a fuck if it’s not your table. Take it out!” Bébert yelled. “I ain’t cooking that shit twice.”
“I don’t even know where it goes.” Sarah answered.
“Read the fucking ticket. And take out the table.”
“No, but I mean—”
“Hey! Take. It. Out!”
Sarah snapping, Bébert barking, servers’ voices rising above the crowd, Greg swearing, dishes slamming onto the pass, the muffled opening and shutting of the pizza oven: it all worked its way down to the basement like a series of tremors portending the thousand-and-one blasts to come.
Jonathan was running out of patience. The tension seemed to be eating him alive: he was swearing and irritated at everything and nothing. Bonnie always had a short fuse, but tonight Jonathan seemed even more irascible. It wasn’t like him at all. As for Bonnie, she was wordlessly finishing her mise, laboriously piling buspans and inserts of ingredients for focaccias and salads on clean baking sheets to carry upstairs in a single trip. But before she could finish she had to run off to the bathroom. As the contents of her stomach poured forth into the bowl, you could hear Renaud asking if she wanted a little shot of Apple-Jack.
I finished slicing the chicken. Jonathan calmly let me know that the strips were a bit thick, but they’d do. He explained how to mix up the marinade, but Bébert’s bellowing from upstairs was throwing off my concentration. He was yelling at Bonnie to get her shit up here, today. The tension just kept ratcheting up. Upstairs it sounded like a madman was pounding pots and pans while a jailhouse choir sang a song consisting in equal measure of elaborate curses and the names of dishes over a beat of steal cracking against tile. A poltergeist had taken over the service kitchen, and everything seemed to be flying and banging around every which way. I went to search the walk-in for marinade ingredients. I was sure that while I was downstairs Carl would keep lounging around in the dishpit with his goddamn cell to his ear.
I came out of the walk-in just as Jonathan cut himself peeling tomatoes. He let out a couple angry “goddamn motherfuckers,” then cleared some room in the sink to wash his cut.
“C’mon, fuck! Hot water, let’s go, fuck.”
Renaud dropped what he was doing on the other prep counter and went to find the first aid kit. Because he was afraid of blood Renaud asked me to find Jonathan and bandage his cut. Jonathan was holding his finger under a trickle of water dripping from the tap. He dried his hand and I wrapped his index finger in gauze, then put a latex finger cot on—it looked like the end of a surgeon’s glove—and went on with his work. He hadn’t noticed that I’d made the marinade with cinnamon instead of chili powder. I said nothing, since I didn’t want to see him really blow his top. This night was already such a clusterfuck I figured no one would notice anyway.
I left Jonathan and Renaud to fend for themselves and went upstairs for a load of dirty dishes. When I got to the dishpit, Surprise! No one was there. Twenty bucks said Carl was out in the alley again. At least the dishes hadn’t piled up too high. Three racks full of washed plates and saucers were sitting on the clean side of the machine. I went to put them away, but they felt greasy to the touch. I loaded another rack in the machine. Halfway through the cycle I realized the water in the dishwasher was cold. I emptied it and filled it again. Still ice cold. I ran another cycle through. Nothing seemed to work. The water wasn’t changing temperature. I went to look outside, to tell my teammate. He was all wrapped up in the smoking coat, cell phone to his ear, kicking back on the wrought iron staircase of the condo next door. I beckoned him over. He gestured toward his phone. I’d never met a worse slacker in my life. I went back in.
On my way back to the kitchen a new feeling was coming over me, something in the neighbourhood of panic. I had no idea what was happening. I imagined the hot water could be easily fixed by opening or shutting the right valve. But somewhere beneath this surface confidence an alarm bell was tolling faintly. After a rocky start to the night, the service kitchen was firing on all cylinders. Bonnie looked like a gnarly old eggplant, she was dancing like the devil in a cauldron of holy water. She still wasn’t acknowledging my presence. Jason was helping with her salads, but her movements were far less nimble and controlled than usual. You would have expected Bébert to be stressing, but the man was just calmly putting pans of ingredients onto his elements, singing to himself, with a headphone in his left hear. He kept a Walkman hidden under his chef’s coat. I had to call him twice before he turned to me and chanted a snippet of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments.”
“Bébert. Listen, Bébert,” I cut him off. “Is it normal for the water in the machine to go cold?”
He ripped out his earbud.
“What?”
I repeated my question.
He yelled at Jason to take over for him, pushed me out of the way and stormed down to the basement. I ran down the stairs after him.
Jonathan was still in the prep room, eyes red, working on the prep. He was sniffling. Before we had time to say anything about it he told us that it was the shallots.
I went to see what Bébert was doing. He was leaning over the hot water tank, playing with something covered in peeling paint, underneath the tank. Renaud came over, looking like a guy who’d been woken up at three in the morning over some bullshit. Bébert looked up at me. A big vein was pulsing on his sweaty forehead. His earbuds were dangling over his gut, spitting out Biggie. Fun time was over.
“Fuse is blown, man. Pilot won’t light. No hot water.”
“Fuck. I hope Séverine has the number of the repair guy.”
Renaud ran off to the office. Bébert turned around and sprinted back up the stairs. I decided to go get some dishes done. I ran every rack through twice, while Carl brought back dirty pans and took cleanish ones out to the cooks.
When Greg came looking for a rack of coffee cups, I tensed up. He was complaining about a customer. He sprung across the dishpit in a single bound, quick as lightning, saying that he was going to “throw it in your face, your fucking herbal tea, old bitch.” Carl tried asking him a question but Greg just answered with another question, something about whether Carl was going to shut his goddamn mouth one of these goddamn days or whether he’d have to do it for him. He turned toward me just before he got caught in the hallway. And yelled at me:
“Tell your little friend I better not run out of cutlery.”
I started working twice and fast, but after a couple racks I saw that it was futile: no matter how many times I ran them through the machine, the plates were still coming out greasy and covered in sauce.
“Stop, guys.”
Renaud had come back to bring us the rest of the dirty dishes and was watching us go, with a face I didn’t like much.
“The soap doesn’t work in cold water. Go heat up wate
r in the steam pot, then dump it in that big sink, and wash everything as it comes in.”
“You mean by hand?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Are you kidding?” Carl asked.
Renaud acted as if Carl hadn’t spoken.
“Get moving” he said in closing, “or you’re gonna get buried alive.”
It was already clear to me that we were going to get buried alive, one way or another. Hot water, cold water: what difference would it make in the end? It was almost seven. We still had an entire service to get through before the group showed up. At the rate we were going, washing everything by hand, the entire group of forty-five would be eating off dirty plates. There was no way we were going to make it. My stomach was tied in a painful knot, as if I’d swallowed a massive burning coal or a hornets’ nest. As soon as Renaud turned around I went down to the basement to turn on the steam pot and finish my salads.
Fifteen minutes later I was on my way back up. The heavy buckets of boiling water bashed against the stairs. Carl was back in his favourite position, watching the dishes pile up with his dead fish eyes, having a smoke and playing Tetris on his phone. When he saw me he got up and put his phone back in his pocket. He pretended to get to work around the rack of dirty dishes, with his smoke still in his mouth. I brought the baking pans that Renaud had pulled the osso bucco out of, and asked him to soak them right away in straight degreaser.
“That’ll be one thing done at least.”
“Whatever, man, you’re not my boss.”
He answered without looking me in the eye as he stacked dirty dishes, organizing the work according to his sophisticated system of camouflaged indolence. I took a deep breath and didn’t say a word.
The second service overlapped the first. I was making strategic incursions into the kitchen, where a new flurry of orders had caught the cooks off guard. Séverine was determined to fill every seat in the restaurant at any cost. Just watching her was exhausting: she was everywhere at once, smiling at new customers as they came in, moving around the room with a bottle, mixing candy-coloured cocktails behind the bar, storming into the kitchen to help take orders out. Nothing distracted her. Watching her make her way from one side of the restaurant to the other in rapid-fire staccato steps, without ever seeming to tire, it was easy to conceive of the restaurant as an outgrowth of her mind, a living map, an Edenic simulacrum she floated through while we remained confined to the red-hot lower rings of hell. Renaud had taken Bébert’s place on the hotside, and Bébert was more hindrance than help as he spurred him on to reach levels of speed Renaud couldn’t manage even on his best days. Bébert was throwing out plates faster than ever, barking periodically: “Ain’t no one gonna put me in the juice!” He was riding Jason hard, though the guy was doing his best to make up for Bonnie’s zombie torpor; she seemed poised to faint, or maybe bite someone. Even in this sorry state I couldn’t take my eyes off her. In her shoes, I would have collapsed at the start of the shift. I probably never would have even made it out of bed. Bébert was going through Renaud when he had something to ask her: she wasn’t talking to him either. Though they were less than three feet apart, each was managing to pretend the other didn’t exist.
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