The baby woke us up around one, and my wife got out of bed with him because it was her turn. I think she nursed him, but I quickly fell asleep. The next thing I knew she was shaking my foot with a free hand, and I couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. I looked at the clock and saw that more than an hour had passed, which meant she’d been up with him all this time, going room to room through the apartment, rocking him and singing to him, trying to keep him from crying, trying to get him to sleep. I got up and pulled on a shirt, found my jeans in a pile on the floor and put them on. At some point in the last two weeks I had learned that the only way to get the baby to sleep at a time like this, in the middle of the night, when every other recourse had failed, was to take him for a walk around the neighbourhood.
I stood at the top of the stairs, and with Henry in my arms, and without bending down, tried to shimmy a foot into my canvas shoe. My kitchen shoes were also by the door, and they were more comfortable and easier too to slip on, but being as they were coated underfoot with a layer of grease, they presented something of a hazard, something to be avoided while descending our stairs in the dark with a one-month old babe in my arms. As I stood there refusing to take a chance in those shoes, I gave myself a mental congratulations. After all, this was proof I was maturing. I was learning. I was being responsible.
We were still new to Montreal, having moved here in the winter while my wife had been pregnant. She hadn’t known that she was pregnant at the time. If she’d have known, we never would have moved, she never would have come. She hated Montreal and I respected her for that because she, I thought, was a rare kind of animal.
Everyone I’d ever met had been enamoured with the place, as I was too. The red brick, the iron stairs, particularly those in our neighbourhood, with balconies overhanging the street, and even trees locked into their little plots on the sidewalk—every little piece of it had me enthralled.
Out at two or three in the morning, it was calm and quiet. Being summer, it was warm. So warm that my son could be dressed in pajamas and I could walk with him simply cradled in my arms as if the city was ours, belonged to us, as if the world was our living room.
Up Saint-Philippe to Notre-Dame, past the tattoo parlours and the mattress stores, the marchés aux puces with their doors caged for the night. As usual, we walked past the Café Riviera and stopped and stood for a while. Through the big front windows we studied the pattern of shadows and light on the floor. I tried to explain to Henry that this was where I worked, that here was the place I spent my days. This is where your Dad goes when he isn’t at home, I said to his incomprehension. This is where I am when I’m gone away (and here I shifted him to release one arm, and with my free hand made a gesture like a bird flying away).
We crossed the street and went into the park, which was where he would always fall asleep, his eyes growing heavy, looking up into the trees. Tonight was as usual. Henry drifted off as we rounded the fountain. I knew that now I could go home if I wanted. I could put him down and put myself to bed, but I decided instead to keep going, to walk at least until I reached the canal. After all, I was already up, and despite the hour, it felt good to be out. It felt like nothing really mattered, as if in all of life there was nothing more important than this, nothing of greater significance. Just to be walking in the night with my son in my arms.
The next morning I’d need to be up by six, and I’d be tired but okay with it. It was summer now anyway, so every morning was bright and it felt almost good to be up and about. Walking to work, I would take the back streets. Down Sainte-Marguerite and once again through the park. I would believe I could feel the whole city also coming to life, waking out of its slumber. I’d be almost inspired to be a part of this massive, daily movement of people, getting out of bed and into the world. Meanwhile, I was a cook in a small café, so I had my own role to play. While they were getting ready to walk out the door, I’d be brushing their morning pastry. Then, while they were at their offices, eyes deep in screens, I’d be putting together their lunch. Fine feelings, I had then, but of course those wouldn’t last. Because doesn’t every summer have to come to an end? This one was no different. It began with a chill. The mornings were fresh, then brisk, then cold. Leaves began to turn in the park and pretty soon it was dark as I was getting out of bed. And though it was still bright walking down along Sainte-Marguerite on my way to the café, it was bright with a sun that didn’t offer any warmth.
One morning while approaching the café, I spied one of our baristas on the patio. She was sitting with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her and smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed while a dappled light played against her face. Her name was Emily and she had a reputation for being kind of brainy. I think it was only because she had recently graduated with an honours degree in literature, and given the state of the economy or whatnot, she had wound up so far only working here. As I approached her, I shook the keys to the café from my pocket. When Emily opened her eyes, I spoke.
It looked as if you were lost in thought, I said. Sorry to interrupt.
Emily said something that was evidently a quote. That time of year thou mayest in me behold, she said, when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…
That word “yellow” made me think of the particular light of these mornings, and I figured that what Emily had said was meant to refer in some way to this season, and to the particular way in which it went creeping into the mind, taking its effect.
It’s Shakespeare, Emily said.
No. I mean, of course it is, I said.
There was an awkward moment, and whatever I’d been thinking, I couldn’t recover it now. Being unable to explain that a misunderstanding had just occurred, I capitulated.
That was lovely, I said.
I asked Emily what she was doing here since it had just occurred to me that as this morning’s barista, she didn’t need to be in for another half hour. Emily waved her hand in the air and the smoke of her cigarette did a little dance.
I was awake, she said, so I thought I might as well come in.
I nodded, and stepping past her, opened the side door into the kitchen. At that time it didn’t seem at all strange that someone would want to come in early for their shift. The café still had a kind of warmth and a quality of easy-goingness. Of course, all of that too would change, and only a few weeks later, Emily’s eagerness, or say her willingness to get to work, would seem almost unthinkable.
When I’d started working at the café, the situation had been that the owners were in charge of our daily operations. Vincent and Valerie were in their mid-thirties and were remarkably well established, both for their age and for the type of people they were. It was Vincent’s family, I supposed, that owned the building which housed the café. Above us was his brother’s apartment, and still above that was another apartment, this one belonging to Vincent, Valerie and to their toddler-aged son, Napoli.
It had been Valerie’s project to open the café. She’d been a chef for more than a dozen years working in various restaurants and some hotels. When I first arrived, she was running the kitchen, but then in the following months, eased herself out of the position, wanting instead to focus on becoming a yoga instructor. Truth is, I was glad when she left. Valerie could be sweet at times, even kind, warm and generous, but there were days during which she slipped into inscrutable moods, when she would enter the café in a hoodie with sunglasses over her eyes, when she would make herself a coffee and a light snack, then stand in the kitchen and manage to slip a few barbs into whoever was working, saying that what they were doing was wrong, all wrong, and that they would need to do it over again. What a shame, what a waste, what a stupid mistake, she would say, and then leave as quickly as she’d come.
When Val started training in yoga, she made a rule for herself not to enter the kitchen. She didn’t even want to know what was happening there. Her removal from the job had to be total, she’d said. So from that point on, Vincent took over, although he had no background in this kind of work. Essentially, he left those of us working in the café to our own devices, only coming into the kitchen occasionally, always late in the morning, and looking as if he had just woken up. Invariably, Napoli would be riding on his hip, the boy dressed in a T-shirt with no bottoms, no diaper, his bare bum pressed into the meat of Vincent’s arm. On such occasions, Vincent’s great contribution to our work was usually to describe a late-night sandwich he had eaten recently at a place on Rue Saint-Laurent. At one of those charcuterie places, he would explain. It had roast chicken, tomato sauce and I think maybe some swiss? And it was simple, but like real fucking food, you know? Like the kind of thing that makes you want to start a family, that makes you want to build a house.
Then Vincent would wonder if we could add something like that to our menu. Of course, everyone knew to ignore such requests since it had happened time and again that when one of us did put in the effort, say to visit Saint-Laurent to eat a sandwich and then attempt to create a facsimile, by the time we’d been able to put it together, Vincent would have already moved on, forgotten entirely that the suggestion for this sandwich had been his, and would dismiss our work with something like: It isn’t Italian enough.
As a result, those of us working in the café learned to manage ourselves. We were in charge of the menu, and of ordering stock. We were responsible for seeing that nothing got wasted, and that there were sufficient quantities to meet the shifting demands of the day. It was up to us cooks to keep the kitchen running smoothly, and the same was true of the baristas in the front of the house. If there were any conflicts, it was our job to solve them, or at least to behave in a reasonable way. To work things out amongst ourselves.
All of this was hard, and of course some of us did better than others, but everything that happened each day resulted directly from the work we put in. Every success belonged to us. And in this arrangement, we each felt a great deal of freedom, too. We were allowed to organize our time and invent our own methods for getting things done. We were free to create and to improvise. We were free to be lost in our work. For me, it was a feeling I hadn’t ever had at a job in the past, and I didn’t know it was possible.
But all of that changed in October, when Vincent and Valerie hired a manager. Not only did they hire a manager, they hired the worst possible person to come and take charge of the situation. Teresa was in her forties, and like Valerie, she had worked for a decade at a slew of different places around the city. Before that, she’d been living in Toronto. She admitted she still felt out of place here. She didn’t know her way around the city at all, and she didn’t speak a word of French. That on its own should have been a strike against her, seeing that more than half the members of our staff were francophones.
Practically overnight, Teresa turned the prevailing scene at the café from something light to something heavy, from easy to anxious, something now tinged with paranoia. One of her first decrees was that from now on, everyone in the kitchen would need to wear a uniform. From now on, we would need to wear a white coat, black pants and a tidy black cap on our heads. But it wasn’t just the uniform that irked, after all the coat and pants and even those caps had always been available to us on a rack in the basement if we’d wanted them, but it was the principle of now being told what to wear, the inflexibility of Teresa’s demand, and the pettiness with which it was enforced that made the difference. We were given to understand that from now on, Vincent and Valerie wanted nothing more to do with the business of running the café, and so they vested their authority in Teresa. And forget it if you wanted to complain. They would turn a blind ear, a cold shoulder, and would tell you that whatever your problem was, take it up with the boss.
Teresa’s position was by default defensive. Her expression was invariably stiff, her eyes calculating and scrutinizing. In every conversation, she came forward bearing arms. It was as if she were always prepared to do battle, and she wanted you to see it. She wanted you to recognize this about her because it was a challenge and a threat and a warning on her part.
For a group like us who had grown accustomed to our liberties, it was unnerving to have someone peering over your shoulder while you worked, to have someone correcting your work, and mostly for reasons that seemed arbitrary, to have a person with little else to do than exercise authority and a lot of people couldn’t take it. Some of us were fired for trying to stand up to her. Others simply quit, either because they couldn’t stand to work with her, or because they were able to read the writing on the wall and see that what the café had been, it would no longer be. It was as if the job you thought you had was suddenly taken away and replaced with something else altogether. For those of us who did remain, it was hard to see so many coworkers fall, bizarre to witness an influx of new employees, and disappointing—but also gratifying—to then see those new hires quickly turn against Teresa too. It was dizzying to see all of this happen so fast, but then what could you do other than to come into work every day?
Ricky was another cook, and something of a friend. He’d been working at the café for only a couple of months when Teresa fired him. He and I had been working the weekend shift. Teresa never worked the weekend shift, so Ricky and I enjoyed an oasis without her. Every weekend, the café was as it had been before Teresa. People were relaxed, cheerful and talkative. Ricky went around cracking jokes and singing songs. He was a musician, actually. He wasn’t a cook at all, although he worked as one. Music was really what he cared about.
Between Ricky and I, more than anything else, there was a difference of circumstance. Because here we were: me with my early nights and platitudes, doing things in life like trying not to drink as much alcohol anymore, while Ricky was this guy who had two smoking pistols tattooed on his forearm, their barrels crossed and the name Marita written in smoke as an homage to his grandfather. At home, he had trays of psilocybin mushrooms growing in a bedroom closet. Every week he showed me pictures of the progress they had made, scrolling dotingly through entire albums on his phone. So we were in different places, but we were comfortable. We fell into a kind of rhythm, working together.
At the end of each day, I would let Ricky talk me into sharing a smoke on the patio. Although I wasn’t really a smoker, never keeping a pack of my own, I would watch with anticipation as Ricky pulled his from a pocket in his coat and took out two cigarettes. I would reach for one and let it rest in my lips until he tendered a flame.
On a Monday afternoon, Teresa fired Ricky unexpectedly. This came after a weekend during which one of our baristas hosted a party in his apartment, inviting everybody from the café. I hadn’t gone, but Ricky filled me in on the details. Sunday morning he had come into work hungover and late, saying he’d drunk a whole three-litre jug of someone’s homemade wine the night before. He’d spent the entire night, he explained, sitting on the floor and playing a guitar, singing song after song.
And I guess I didn’t notice I was drinking, he said. I didn’t even get up all night, so I never had that moment when you try to stand and realize how really fucking drunk you are.
At some point in the night, Teresa arrived at the party, and after trying unsuccessfully to find her place amongst the crowd, wound up next to Ricky on the floor. She’d tried to get him into conversation, divulging the fact that she too was a lyricist, and had herself written a handful of songs. Getting nothing out of Ricky in response, she switched tactics and asked instead about the café. It being Saturday, she hadn’t been in the kitchen for a couple of days. She told Ricky she worried about the café when she wasn’t around to keep an eye on the place.
Whatever followed from there, Ricky couldn’t remember. He told me he vaguely recalled having to defend me against something Teresa had said, and he thought that maybe things had got a bit heated. But, he assured me, it was nothing. He wasn’t worried about it. For now, his only concern was how to get through this day without kicking the bucket.
I don’t know how much help I’m going to be, he said while leaning into a counter, his elbows on the cutting board, his aching brain cradled into the futile comfort of his hands.
When he got fired, I was waiting for him on the patio. Ricky came out the side door, and without breaking his stride, announced he had been canned. I followed him across the street and into the park. He found a bench by the fountain, and we both sat down. Ricky lit a cigarette and described how Teresa had invited him into her office, and with evident restraint, informed him he wouldn’t be working at the café anymore.
But didn’t she give you any reason? I asked.
Not really, but I guess we must have had it out the other night. Apparently I said some things I shouldn’t have said. Ricky blew a cloud of smoke into the air. Turning suddenly serious, he said, I don’t drink very often anymore, but every time I do it seems like something bad comes out of it.
But you really don’t remember what you said to her? I mean, nothing? None of it comes back to you?
Ricky said he must have been honest, that he must have spoken what we were thinking, all of us, all the time.
And that’s what drives me crazy, he said. I don’t regret what’s happened, but it kills me to see so many people pissed off, and nobody says anything. It’s dishonest. It’s the worst kind of dishonesty, he said, when a person will not say what’s on their mind.
I nodded, though I couldn’t agree. In principle, sure, it sounded great, but what if you just didn’t have the luxury? What Ricky doesn’t realize, I thought, is that for some there is a forced calculation that goes into this.
Walking home later on, I felt sorry about what had happened. I felt sorry for Ricky, but I was envious too. Now that he’d been fired, I wanted to quit the café, but of course, I couldn’t do that. After all, I had a family to support. But with Ricky gone, I wondered what the place would be like. I knew he wasn’t the only one to have been recently fired from the café, but in a way this was different, this felt like an ending of sorts.
A couple days later, Teresa called me into her office to talk. Her office was in the basement, in a room that had been previously used for storage. Now it was cleared of all previous junk, and what remained was a handful of chairs and a fold-out table where Teresa worked. There were no windows, and the room reeked of cigarettes. It was dim and stale and gloomy.
She asked me to take a seat. On the table there was a computer with the monitor turned halfway toward me. On the screen, I could see my coworkers in real time, unwittingly captured on camera as they walked back and forth upstairs, behind the bar, fixing drinks and taking payments. In the background, I could even see into the empty kitchen where I should have otherwise been standing.
The first thing I want to tell you, Teresa began, is that you have nothing to worry about. I know there’s been a lot of… there’s been a lot of change recently, but I want you to know that you can rest assured. You’re a hard worker, and I think you can be trusted. That’s why I wanted to talk with you, that’s why I asked you to sit with me here, because I think that we can work together, don’t you?
At that moment, Teresa glanced toward the monitor where my co-worker Michel could be seen standing with his back to the register while a customer made awkward attempts to gain his attention.
I just need you to tell me that you’re on board, Teresa said.
Of course I’m on board, I told her.
Great. That’s terrific. In that case, I want to tell you about the chef I’m bringing in to replace Ricky on the weekend shift.
My heart sank.
This guy is a professional. I’ve known him for years, Teresa said. He’s a great guy, the pick of the litter, and the very first person I thought to call. And it just so happens he’s available! How lucky is that? I mean, this is someone who knows this business inside out and upside down. Someone who’s going to be able to whip the rest of us into shape.
Teresa was wearing a big, dumb grin on her face. Meanwhile, with every word she spoke, I sunk deeper into despondency. I struggled not to react. The pick of her litter? Like a special recruit? Someone to come and whip us into shape? My god.
She went on: This is not someone who’s going to come into work hungover. He doesn’t even smoke.
Here she made a gesture of holding an invisible joint to her puckered lips.
I’m telling you David, she said, you’ll be impressed.
Next, Teresa spoke of what she wanted from me. It was going to be my job to be like a sponge, she said. She repeated this same unsavoury metaphor several more times. I was to try and learn from him as much as I could. I was to stick with him and to soak up the wealth of his knowledge, just like a sponge.
When Teresa asked if she had made herself clear, I told her things were perfectly clear. When she asked if I was capable and willing to do what was needed, I told her I was.
I’ll do it. I’ll be like a sponge, I said.
I figured it didn’t matter anymore what I did or didn’t say. In the space of some weeks, my position within the café had been summarily altered. Still more, I felt as if my position in life had been taken away. For months I’d been thinking of myself as a cook, but the truth is I wasn’t a cook. I’d never been one before and was not one now. I had become something else instead. And if in the interim between then and now it had seemed a real possibility, if for these months I had entertained the idea that I could be a cook, that I might be a cook, well, best to consider it a failed experiment, an illusion circumstantially perpetuated for a season or two wherein I had briefly forgotten myself. To put it simply, I would never let this happen again. From now on, this job would be like every other job I’d had before: nothing but a means to earn a wage, nothing but a gross inconvenience dropped into an otherwise fine and decent existence.
I was a writer then, same as now, perennially occupied with other things. Back then I had so many stories in my head, same as I do now. I used to worry they would never be written because to do them properly, I knew, required something that I couldn’t afford. I needed time, yes, but also more than that. I needed the kind of time that exists all around and throughout common time—that time which lifts individual moments and explodes them into infinity.
I was always tired and distracted then, and it was hard not to get discouraged. To be holding these stories was like holding a bouquet of wild and wonderful flowers no one could see. My whole sense of self-worth and confidence was wrapped in these dreams I couldn’t make real.
At that time, there was one in particular, one among all those stories that I wanted to write. That was my war story, and I thought about it constantly. Even during that meeting with Teresa, sitting in her office as I handed myself away, even then I was thinking about it. I was feeling the weight and the hope of it with me.
The idea for that story came after I’d cut off the tip of my finger at work a few weeks before Ricky got fired. It happened around noon one day while I was working alone and the café was bustling. We were running out of food in the display case so I was making sandwiches to order while also trying to make a soup and replenish our stock of salads. At one point, I was roughly chopping a pile of mushrooms when I let my free hand get too close. As soon as the blade came down I felt a rush of pain like an electric shock from my hand, up my arm and into my the shoulder.
I dropped the knife. I knew right away that the cut was deep, so I went to the sink. I ran the tap and allowed the water to wash away the blood, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. It was still so busy in the café that I needed to get back to work. Of course, those mushrooms would need to be thrown away. The cutting board and knife, I thought, will need to be washed. As for what to do with my finger, I decided for the time being just to wrap it in some paper towel.
Later on, when things had quieted down, I went back to the sink to try and deal with my finger. By now it had been encased in a wad of brown paper towel for an hour or so, and when I tried to unwrap it, I found that the paper towel was stuck. I tried pulling against the resistance I met, but then I was hit with such a sudden force of pain that I had to stop. I had to take a breath. I tried wetting the paper towel, hoping to unglue it, but I couldn’t bring myself to try unwrapping it again. My stomach buckled at the prospect. Feeling unable now to inspect or even clean my wound, I decided to wrap the whole thing up in a layer of gauze. Finger, paper towel, blood and water, all wrapped in gauze and tied together with some surgical tape.
I should have dealt with it after work, but my wife and I had plans to visit with some of her relatives that night. Cousin of an auntie’s husband, I think, and that cousin’s own husband, their kids and grandkids. They all lived out at Sainte-Anne de Bellevue, so we would need to take a train just to get there, and by the time I was home from work we were already late. I was hardly able to get showered and dressed before we had to run out for the metro. And late that evening, coming home, after having been plied all night with food and wine, we fell straight into bed. So it wasn’t until I was back the next morning at the café that I got to look at my wound.
I set myself up in the basement over a utility sink. All around me were rows of basic shelves we used to store our non-perishables. There was a bare light hanging overhead which made this all seem like an improvised surgery. By the sink I had a pair of scissors, a bowl of salt and some fresh bandages.
First I cut into the gauze and peeled away the outer layers of yesterday’s paper towel. I found that everything was still a bit wet, a little bit sodden, and not only that, but I found that it had started to stink. And that was what did it, it was that smell. Although I had never encountered it, I knew right away what it was, as if by some animal instinct, I knew that this was the smell my blood left out overnight, that a part of my body had started to turn. For a moment I stood in a kind of awe, just considering the strangeness of the fact.
It must be something common in the human experience to have encountered this smell and yet it is an aspect of our existence which we have managed somehow to keep hidden away. Gangrenous limbs are said to stink, I thought, and what about the so many wounded in war? I began to imagine how a cut like this, one that was fairly minor, insignificant really, if suffered in the trenches, say of the First World War, could have been the death of someone. Just this, I thought, hardly more than a scratch. And then, there are likely places still in the world where a simple scratch could lead one to death, just for lack of access to things like clean running water, a sink, fresh bandages and a bowlful of salt.
Back upstairs, I was roasting a squash. By the time I’d finished in the basement, it was ready to come out of the oven. Later, when the squash had cooled, I set to work pulling the meat out of its skins. It was a butternut squash, and while I worked, the smell of that squash rose into the air and surrounded me. My plan was to make a soup.
Once again, I was struck by that smell. I mean, it wasn’t the very same smell, but it was close enough. There was a definite similarity in it. So once again, I stood in a moment of something like reverie and tried to make sense of my thoughts. The fact that a roasted butternut squash could remind me of the smell of my own rotten blood seemed at least curious enough that I ought to write it down. I didn’t know why I was writing it down, but that sort of thing, you don’t just throw it away. Maybe I could use it somewhere, someday, I thought.
I called it a reminder of war. I imagined that for a person who had become say traumatically familiar with the smell of a rotten wound, how someday in their future they might be returned to their memories, triggered maybe at a family gathering when old aunt so-and-so brings out the pumpkin pie. Of course, I had never been to war and I didn’t know anybody who had, but over the next few days this notion grew in my thoughts. I collected other so-called reminders of war. The retort of an egg cracked into a pan, the flash of sputtering grease, even the taste of something eaten off a slightly rusted, cast-iron dish. Of course, I had no reason to write about war. Only, I liked the idea of writing something entirely fictitious for once, something utterly different from all the loosely autobiographical stuff I had written before. Maybe it came from feeling stuck in the café, looking for a kind of escape.
I dug into my war story, which started coming together, if in an uneven way. From a collection of observations to an amassing of aesthetic details. The city in the 1920s. All red brick, iron, rolling river, fog and smoke. Some half-cocked veteran working as a cook. Greasyspoon, eggs and bacon, cup of coffee costs a nickel, all that. As I said before, I thought about it constantly, to the point of distraction. I kept writing things down. At work, every fifteen minutes or so, whenever I was struck with another idea, I stopped what I was doing and wrote it down.
Teresa had given us notebooks, one to every cook at the café. She said that if we were going to be working here, we should always be on the lookout for new ideas. We should be trying new foods and taking notes, finding recipes and writing them down. We should be vigilant, she said, and inspired. And if one truly wanted to be a cook, I suppose that is what they’d want to do. But I was filling my notebook up with ideas of an entirely different kind.
The new guy’s name was Rob. He started work the following Saturday. At seven o’clock I saw him standing at a distance on the sidewalk. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and was wearing a bomber jacket and a baseball hat. At first he looked shady to me, actually. There seemed to be a shadow set around his eyes. I thought he looked like a disaster, but by then I was so tired of everything, it made no difference what I thought. I could barely even stand to introduce myself, I had so little left to give. Nevertheless, it was my job this morning to show him the ropes. Teresa told me I wouldn’t need to train him. Professional that he was, she’d said, he would know just what to do. He’ll jump right in, she’d assured me.
From the moment I opened the doors, as we stepped into the café, Rob launched an inquiry into every aspect of our work. He was as meticulous as he was scattered, asking about our inventory system, for instance, wanting to know what day we ordered our stocks and who was in charge of the task, and who, upon delivery of the goods, was responsible for signing waybills and receipts and where, finally, was the paperwork kept? With his very next breath, he was on about our baked goods wondering how many muffins we sold in a day and did we make the batter for these ourselves or did we use a prepackaged mixture? And if we did make the batter ourselves, how much sugar did we use? How much salt?
All of this caught me off guard and left me feeling badgered. First by questions, then by corrections. According to Rob, everything we did could be done in another way. And though not necessarily a better way, certainly a different way. Rob couldn’t dice an onion without first asking what method we used. When I told him that we didn’t have a method, that he could cut an onion any way he wanted to, he took it to mean that we hadn’t given the matter any true consideration. He explained that there were many different ways to cut an onion, that a choice had to be made, and if you were looking for, striving for consistency, then the outcome of that choice ought then to be followed assiduously, by every member of our team.
It was only eight o’clock, but I felt like I was burning out. I went to make myself a cup of coffee. As a gesture, I offered to get one for Rob. Rob said he’d like a macchiato, and I had to admit I didn’t know what that was. He explained that a macchiato was a shot of espresso with some frothy milk.
But only very little milk, he said. And the milk should be only lightly steamed.
I nodded, thinking it sounded pretty standard. When I handed him his coffee though, Rob took a small sip and shook his head.
Tell me how you made this, he said.
Without waiting for any answer, he went on to describe, in detail, the process of pouring a proper shot of espresso.
The trick was to let the first few drops fall. These were so full of bitterness, Rob explained, that they irritate not only your sense of taste, but also the process of the body’s digestion.
A little later, Rob asked if he could step out for a cigarette. I practically insisted he should, thinking that I might finally have a moment of peace. He went out the side door onto the patio, but not half a minute later the door opened again and he was coming back in. He hung up his coat, washed his hands, and appeared to be ready to get back to work.
It was cold out there? I asked.
A little, he said, but not too bad.
I looked at the door. I looked at his coat hanging up on the wall, and then back at him. You can’t possibly have just smoked a whole cigarette, I said.
Rob smiled. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette that had evidentially been lit, partially smoked and butted out.
I only ever take a couple of drags. When I’m at work, he said, it saves time and it keeps me on my toes.
Jesus, I said. That isn’t natural. I mean, don’t worry about it, please. Smoke a whole cigarette. It’s still early, I assured him. We’ve got plenty of time.
Rob shook his head. I’ve been in this business for fifteen years, he said, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that there is never enough time to smoke a whole cigarette. Not now, he said, not ever.
The next morning Rob and I got into an argument after he accused me of being late. His position was that I should have been at the café at least ten minutes prior to the start of our shift. My position was one of disbelief. I couldn’t believe that we were having this conversation, especially since it was only his second day on the job. Besides, as I pointed out to him, there were still a few minutes left before my shift. Rob wasn’t convinced. He told me it was unprofessional, disrespectful.
I’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes, he complained, freezing my ass off in the cold, waiting for you.
Why would you show up fifteen minutes early and expect me to be here? I asked.
Once we were in the kitchen, we settled into separate tasks. The morning progressed, and then just before eight o’clock, Françoise arrived. After wishing us each a good morning, she asked if either one of us would care for a coffee. Rob said that he’d like a macchiato.
Avec plaisir, Françoise responded.
When he took a sip of his coffee though, Rob confided to me that it wasn’t very good.
I’m going to have to have a talk with her, he said. I’ll have to teach her how to pour a proper shot.
By nine we had settled into cooking for lunch. There were now two baristas working the bar, and Elizabeth was in, washing dishes in the back.
Liz was Ricky’s girlfriend. She was tall, quite thin, and had willowy limbs. She was an Albertan originally, which was where she and Ricky had met, and where they’d started living together before reaching a decision to come to Montreal. Understandably, Liz was annoyed when Ricky lost his job. She told me that Ricky was stubborn, and describing the night of the party, she said she had tried to get Ricky to leave, and that she herself had gone home at a reasonable hour having drunk only a reasonable amount.
But you can’t tell Ricky anything, she said. Not once he’s in a certain mood.
At one point in the morning, while Rob was on an errand to the storage room, Liz took me aside and told me that Vincent and Val had been in the café last night, and that they had found a pile of empty beer bottles stashed in the walk-in fridge. They suspected that Rob had been stealing beers and drinking them while on the job.
From that point on, I started watching more carefully, and I did notice how often Rob would find an excuse to go into the walk-in fridge. I went in there myself a few times, and while nosing around I found an open bottle hidden in a case of purple onions. I noted the level of beer in the bottle and came back to check on it periodically. I guessed that by lunch Rob had drunk maybe three or four beers, and still he found new reasons to excuse himself into the fridge.
Well, I thought, so what if he’s been drinking on the job? So what if he’s a thief, a bum and a drunk? If anything, I was glad. Here was someone who had been hand-picked, who had been recommended to us as a model chef, as someone for us to emulate. Teresa had practically sold this guy as a prince, and so surely this would reflect badly on her. Maybe Vincent and Val would have a moment of doubt, a moment to reconsider the vote of total confidence that they had given her.
As Rob continued to drink, he became less of a nuisance to me. He started loosening up. He wasn’t so focused on the work anymore. He even started telling jokes, and though they were awful—unbelievably abysmal puns for instance that felt forced and fell flat—it was an improvement. What was more, he started taking longer breaks. Once he stepped outside to smoke and was gone for over twenty minutes. There was a moment, then, wherein I was standing at my cutting board and the light of the afternoon splayed across the counter from a window above, and just for that moment, everything seemed calm, peaceful, set above the fray.
When the door finally pushed open and Rob came in, I said, You seem to be enjoying those more.
He laughed. I enjoy them, that’s the problem, he said. I enjoy them too much for my own good. I’m always trying to cut back. It used to be that I was smoking five packs every day. I was working two jobs, fourteen-hour shifts, and for what? He turned suddenly serious and held up his pack of Du Mauriers. Just to pay for these godawful things.
That night I had plans to go with Ricky and Liz to see a show on Avenue Papineau. It was to be the first time outside of work that I’d be with them as friends. The band was one of Ricky’s favourites. Several weeks before, when he’d heard they’d be playing a show, he immediately purchased three tickets without even asking me if I wanted to go. I hadn’t been out very much since my son had been born, so that, combined with the fact that I’d never been out with Ricky and Liz, had me feeling both excited and nervous.
Our plan was to get to the venue by bike. Ricky and Liz came by the apartment early in the evening to pick me up. When they got there my wife had just run out to the depanneur, so we weren’t able to leave right away. Ricky and Liz came to the top of our stairs and stood in the doorway. I stood in the hallway, holding my son. Since none of us seemed to know what to say, we stood there in silence for a full minute or two. Finally Liz remarked how after all this time, she’d never seen me with my baby. Ricky nodded.
You look good with a kid, said Liz.
I could tell they had already started drinking. Something in the way they stood on the fringe of our apartment, not sure of what to do with themselves. It was like they were afraid of a misstep, of stumbling or upsetting something if they came in. Soon though, my wife was home, and shortly after that we set off on our bikes. The venue was in a neighbourhood that none of us knew, but being pragmatic, Liz had studied a map of the area before leaving home and planned out a route for us to take.
She and Ricky were like opposites. He was all about passion and wanting to be lost. He wanted to be surrounded by music and didn’t care much about anything else. Liz, for her part, had started taking classes at a college in her spare time. She was studying commerce and accounting. Four months before, when she had started working at the café, she’d been hired to wash dishes because she couldn’t speak any French. Now she was still washing dishes, but she was also involved somehow in the general accounting of the business, managing our payroll among other things.
Liz had told me once that she was passionate about accounting. She loved numbers and their verifiability. Ricky sometimes made fun of her, referring to her as either his accountant or his personal manager. If she was his manager though, she didn’t seem to hold too much sway over him. On our way to the show, Ricky sped off, keeping himself about half a block ahead of us all the way there. At first Liz and I tried to keep up, but soon found we couldn’t manage his pace. We kept an eye on him though, watched him duck and weave, ride in and out of traffic, moving all over the road, senselessly, inattentively, even occasionally moving up onto the sidewalk.
Jesus, Liz muttered. She tried calling to him, but Ricky was too far ahead. He’s like this every time he gets excited, she told me. And I don’t want to be the one reining him in, but I swear someday he’s going to get himself killed.
After parking our bikes, we stopped at a depanneur to pick up several tall cans of beer and took these to a park around the corner to sit, drink and smoke. We smoked a joint as well, and then lingered, telling stories in the cold. Ricky talked at length about the band we were going to see.
What they were known for, he said, was the depth of their sound. The production on each of their records was highly technical, experimental. They created, like a lacework of sound. Only no, he said, lace wasn’t the right word. Lace was too delicate. It was more like a landscape, he said, with parts of it melded, blended together, as if it had been done with paints.
Liz was listening too, but it was clear that Ricky was talking to me. I began to wonder about this dynamic that had grown between us. It seemed like Ricky was always trying to teach me something. Whether it was him bringing new music into the café when we’d been working together, or addressing these explanatory monologues to me, it felt like he was always trying to expand my horizons. How he’d harp on about some album or artist made me wonder: Did he think I had no taste, no preferences of my own? I felt as if he was constantly trying to fill me up with what he figured would be valuable to me. Maybe I was being overly sensitive, but these days it was as if every new person in my life wanted to shape me into something. What was I doing to give off this impression that I was but an empty receptacle, waiting to be filled?
After drinking in the park, we crossed over to the venue, an old, baroque theatre that had at some point been renovated to accommodate a standing crowd. There were two bars serving drinks in the room, and as soon as we arrived, Ricky went off to order us a round. The show hadn’t even started yet, and already I was feeling drunk. I reluctantly accepted a beer from Ricky, but then decided I was going to have to stop drinking. I went to the bar and ordered myself a soda water. I tried to buy a round of beer for Liz and Ricky, but for some reason Ricky didn’t want to accept. In something resembling a vaudeville routine, he went back again to the bar for a beer, maybe thinking this would pressure me to drink the one I’d gotten for him, but I didn’t give in. In the end, Ricky wound up drinking both of them.
We got stoned again after the opening act, and then Ricky disappeared for a while. I stood with Liz by the front of the stage while she danced to the intermission music. She looked happy and was glassy-eyed. She seemed to be off in a world of her own. At one point, she leaned in to tell me that it had been a year tonight since the last time she had taken cocaine.
You and Ricky? I didn’t know you were into that.
Usually we aren’t, but when we are… she said, trailing off.
She told me a confused story about one of their first nights in Montreal, something about an overweight man, their connection, and a narrow set of stairs into a loft. After that she laughed and went back to dancing alone.
I watched as she moved across the floor, coming close then going farther away. Somehow I’m missing something, I thought. I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know who I’m with and I don’t know where we are or what we’re doing here.
Ricky reappeared carrying two plastic cups, evidently from the bar. As he approached, I saw that they were filled with an amber-coloured liquid.
It’s Scotch. That’s a fifteen-dollar shot, he said pushing one of the cups into my hands.
But I don’t want this, I said.
Don’t waste it, he chided.
It’s too much money. Aren’t you unemployed?
Ricky rolled his eyes. Take it up with my accountant, he said.
The next thing I knew, the lights went down and the band took the stage. Ricky turned with wide-eyed attention, and I followed his lead.
All in all, the band played for an hour and a half without breaking. There weren’t even any breaks between their songs, but they did use all kinds of effects, layering and looping things, so that it was like one song never ended, but instead went on progressing, changing and coming apart. New songs would take shape out of the old ones, as if formed of the same material. The result was an accumulation of sound, it was sound as material, sound as mass. The effect was hypnotizing. You could get lost in a sound like that.
And part of me wanted to get lost. Part of me wanted to submit to the music, to submit to this night and get carried away. But still I didn’t drink any of the Scotch, though I held onto the cup until the liquor warmed. I even lifted it up to my lips several times, but I only breathed it in. After a while I got tired of holding it, so when I thought that Ricky wasn’t looking, I put it on a nearby table and left it there. Not twenty minutes later though, Ricky was handing me another cup.
This one, he said, was twenty-five dollars.
You’re wasting your money, I told him. You know I’m not drinking this.
Liz came over when she saw what was happening. She didn’t say anything, but she shook her head. I gave her a questioning look and she shrugged.
Ricky turned his attention back to the band. He was obviously bent on getting drunk. I had to admit I had been there myself, and though I hated to make him do it alone, I had my own life to think about. I put that second cup down on the same table as I had the first one. Another twenty minutes later, Ricky was back with another two drinks.
These are doubles, sixty dollars each, he said. That’s the most expensive shit they’ve got, so drink it up and enjoy it.
By now, he was bleary, and whether or not I was drinking with him couldn’t make any difference. Liz yelled something in his ear, but over the music I couldn’t make out what it was. He didn’t respond. He just stood there wearing a sideways grin, keeping his eyes on the stage. Liz shrugged and went back to dancing, but I went on watching him. Ricky looked almost victorious, proud in some way as he lifted his cup. The music at this point was thick and loud. Ricky was transfixed. He stood there, eyes on the stage, gulping his Scotch as the music played on.
After the show, our plan was to smoke some more pot for the bike ride home. Ricky stepped out of the theatre, and I was right behind him. He stepped over the curb, but I told him to wait.
Where’s Liz? I asked.
Ricky turned around. She’s standing right behind you, he said.
As he turned to cross the road, a van sped by and it clipped him with its side-view mirror. It happened fast and was surreal as Ricky was thrown sideways, hitting a parked car. He was bounced against the van again before he finally hit the ground. Liz and I ran to him immediately. He was unconscious and laid out on his back. There was blood on the road, but it was hard to see where it had come from. There wasn’t much of it, only a sort of patina spilled over the asphalt.
A crowd gathered out in front of the theatre, and a young man came forward who displayed such a level of confidence that he inspired our trust. He quickly took charge of the situation, instructing his girlfriend to dial 911. He pulled some other fellow out of the crowd and had him kneel next to Ricky with instructions to support his neck, and not to let him move his head, his neck, his arms or legs.
As we waited for the ambulance, Ricky regained consciousness but then it faded again. This happened a handful of times and whenever he came to, Ricky would try to sit up, so that fellow from the crowd had to continually pin him down. I helped as well by keeping my hands on his chest. Every time Ricky tried to sit, we had to push to keep him laid out on the ground. Liz tried to discover where the blood was coming from. I kept glancing at her, expecting maybe hysterics, expecting at least for her to be in dismay, but I found her to be strangely calm. It was as if she were trying to figure out the source of the blood not so much for the sake of Ricky’s well-being, but to satisfy her own curiosity. Of course, I knew she must be worried, but she kept telling me that this was just like the skiing accident Ricky had suffered while they had been back in Alberta. She said she’d seen him come out of worse than this.
When the paramedics arrived, they strapped Ricky to a board and loaded him into an ambulance. Apparently he had smacked his head against the road and they needed to take him to the hospital. There was only room for one in the ambulance, so Liz hopped in. I told her I would follow on my bike. After asking where they would be taking him, I left the scene and crossed the road to where we had parked our bikes. Leaving Ricky and Liz’s bikes on the rack, I headed west toward Mount Royal. The paramedic had said the hospital would be on the mountain, so that’s where I went. Eventually the ambulance caught up with me, and in an eerily quiet blaze of lights it fired past, blending into the city’s distance.
When I got to the hospital I couldn’t find the entrance to Emergency. I couldn’t see any ambulances or any activity. Through the front doors, there was no one at the main reception desk. There was no one milling, fretting or sleeping in chairs. In fact, everything was quiet, the lights were low, and the building seemed almost abandoned. I followed a wide corridor, past the shuttered gift shop and a closed café, and then turned onto a smaller hallway, all the while looking for a person or an obvious sign of life. The deeper I went, the more empty the building seemed to be. Passing through secondary hallways now, all dimly lit and full of unmarked doors, I thought I could forget what I was looking for and still feel compelled to keep going, but it was only an errant thought. The truth is, I was still deeply embroiled in the practical matter of finding my friend.
While wandering, I met an old man who was doing more or less the same as me. He was wearing a heavy coat and looked to be about seventy years old. Speaking in French, he explained that he was looking for his nephew who had been admitted here. The old man didn’t know where the nephew was, and like me, had been wandering the hospital. Together we found a bank of elevators and decided to move onto the second floor. The old man waited inside the lift and held the doors as I had a look around. Finding nothing on the second floor, we moved up to the third, the fourth, the fifth. On every new floor it was the same routine. The old man stayed back and held the doors as I walked for some distance into the darkness. Back in the elevator, we would carry out a debriefing about whatever I had found, which was invariably nothing. As the doors shut we would see ourselves reflected in the sheet-metal panelling. At one point, the old man started laughing, so then I started laughing too. Then he started crying, but I kept on laughing doggedly, persistently. Eventually the old man gave in and we were both laughing again, riding from the fifth to the sixth, and so on.
Somewhere in the midst of all this we found a nurse, or maybe he was some sort of night clerk. At any rate, this hulking figure wearing hospital scrubs had access to a nearby computer and was able to tell me that Richard Pistales was in an altogether different hospital. Apparently there was a second hospital on the mountain, one I hadn’t known about. Ricky, said the nurse or clerk, was at Montreal General, farther down the road.
How much farther? I asked.
The nurse clerk guessed it was a mile or so.
By the time I got to him, Ricky had been admitted into Primary Care. He’d been given a bed in a large room full of patients, each with their own similar bed on wheels so that they could be shuffled around easily. There were nurses swarming in and between everyone, both omnipresent and inconspicuous.
Liz was sitting next to Ricky’s bed. She was handling a scrap of wool from the sweater he’d been wearing, which the paramedics had cut off of him. Liz was quietly turning the scrap of wool back and forth in her hands.
It’s such a shame, she was saying. This was the nicest piece of clothing you owned.
Ricky, now awake and with his neck in a brace, was strapped to the bed with a stack of monitors over his shoulder. There were wires running between his body and the monitors, and an iv needled into his arm. Ricky didn’t know what was happening and every now and then he would ask us, so Liz and I would need to explain that he was in the hospital. We would need to explain to him why he was here, and every time we repeated the fact that he’d been hit by a van, he became frightened. Then his fright would transform into incredulity. It was as if he thought we were making it up. The trouble was that he had taken a serious blow to the back of his head, and besides that, he was drunk, so he was also disoriented. He couldn’t remember the accident, nor could he retain the information that Liz and I tried and tried to impart.
Let’s get out of here, said Ricky to Liz. I feel like shit, but really I’m fine, he pleaded with her. Come on Lizzy, let’s go. Take me home, he practically begged.
Liz maintained her composure. Babe, she said, we have to wait until the doctor can X-ray your brain.
She pointed out to me that Ricky was angry, which had to be taken as a positive sign. His anger, she said, shows that he’s himself.
Ricky complained he was thirsty, so we signalled a nurse who brought him some water in a small paper cup. When Ricky tried to drink, he felt sick. It looked like he was going to vomit, so Liz held up a garbage can, but because of his brace and the straps holding him down, Ricky couldn’t turn to the side and he wound up spewing all over the front of himself. At the same time, some of those monitors over his shoulder went into alarm. Suddenly there were nurses rushing in, and because there wasn’t enough room around the bed, I was pushed aside, which was fine by me. Seeing Ricky like that made my own stomach turn. My face felt hot and my neck was flushed.
I found a sink in the middle of the room where I wet a paper towel and applied it to the back of my neck. Hospitals sometimes had this effect on me. I felt light-headed, as if I might lose consciousness. Where I was standing, I was surrounded by people in beds, all with wires, tubes and needles disappearing into them, hidden under their gowns. There was something unnatural about it, something so abstract. The body was at the very centre of everything that happened in this place—the body injured, suffering and broken down—and yet in the process of it being mended, the body was completely debased. It was this disconnect between process and intent that had me feeling so faint.
I thought about my war story. I tried to imagine a scene like this, a hospital in the field, set someplace five miles back from the front. The floors would be covered in stretchers, row on row, with men gruesomely injured, horribly wounded, disfigured, crying out in pain.
Across from me was a woman in bed. Nothing more than a fat, middle-aged woman lying under a sheet. One of her legs exposed, there was the shape of a purple bruise. She looked exhausted, but as if she couldn’t sleep. Her arm was thrown up to cover her eyes, so I could even see the stubble of her armpit.
I looked at this woman and thought of my story. But how could any story measure up to the simple, honest fact of her—this woman, whose existence should mean nothing to me. How could any invented narrative ever stand up against the humble reality of this stranger-woman’s stubbly armpit?
I spent another half hour at the hospital. For a while I ended up in a hallway just outside the main room that Ricky was in. There were still more patients here in their wheeled beds, but it was quieter. The lights were low, and the people were mostly asleep. I spent some time studying an informational chart on the wall about head injuries. It mentioned symptoms attending to long term effects, spoke of problems, possible complications and warning signs that one should look out for. By now it was well after two o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t sure there was much I could do hanging around the hospital. Ricky had been given a sedative, so he was sleeping. Liz was sitting by the side of his bed. When I told her I’d decided to leave, she offered to walk me out, but first she reached into the pocket of Ricky’s jeans, slung over the back of the chair, and extracted his pack of cigarettes.
Together we walked to the edge of a parking lot where I had locked my bike. We sat on a concrete divider and smoked. There wasn’t much for us to say. Everything seemed obvious and trite. In lieu of anything else, Liz and I ended up talking about the café. It was a boring, tedious conversation, but I think it did both of us some good just to sit and talk and share a smoke.
I was off work for the next two days. My son had started waking up early, sometimes as early as five o’clock. I got out of bed with him, and because it was hard to stay awake sitting around the apartment, I bundled us up against the cold, and wearing him in an infant carrier, took us out for a walk. Recently he and I had discovered that besides the all-night diners on Rue Notre-Dame, besides the neighbourhood strip club which seemed never to close, the only place open early nearby was the Atwater Market building. The shops and the market stalls themselves wouldn’t open up for another hour or so, but the building itself was a place to keep warm, so on those early mornings we walked to the market, crossing the barren fields and the railroad tracks. We waited and watched as the shops opened up. First the butchers and the bakeries, and then finally the small café at the end of the row where I could get a coffee before walking us home.
During those days I had no news of Ricky. I thought about visiting the hospital, but then decided against it. Aside from an illogical suspicion that I might not be able to find the building again, I just figured that it wasn’t my place. I was neither family, nor a close friend. In fact, I realized I didn’t even have a phone number for Ricky or Liz, because until now, I’d never needed one. I couldn’t even be sure if Ricky was still in the hospital. And if he was, I didn’t know if he would want to be seen.
By Wednesday I was back at work. First thing in the morning, Teresa called me into her office and asked why I hadn’t come to her to tell her about Rob.
Here we had someone stealing from us and drinking on the job, Teresa said. It was your responsibility to keep me informed about something like that, she explained. How am I supposed to do my job if you can’t be trusted to do yours? she asked.
A slew of defensive statements, of objections and qualifications, got caught and mixed up on the way to my mouth. In the end, I just loudly exhaled. After all, what was the point of trying to fight back? She had already won.
Why did you tell me he didn’t drink? was all I could finally manage to ask.
I never said that, Teresa snapped. What I said was that he didn’t even smoke.
Later, while we were working in the kitchen together, Teresa decided to tell me about the last time she hired Rob for a catering job. It was sometime last year, and she’d given him a simple list of dishes he was supposed to have prepared. She’d even trusted him enough to send her clients to pick up the food. So this husband and wife whose daughter was about to be married showed up at his apartment, she said. And this was first thing in the morning, but they found him drunk. He opened his door to them in his underwear and none of the food had been made.
Even as she told me this story, Teresa was laughing. Well, I guess he does have a real problem with alcohol, she said. Go figure. It’s just such a shame—he’s such an excellent cook.
Before the end of that day, Liz came in to do an hour’s worth of office work. She’d come from the hospital, she told me, and would be heading back that way immediately. Ricky still hadn’t recovered much. She said his brain had been hemorrhaging, and that it had been swollen for days against the back of his skull.
Walking home from work, I thought about the words hemorrhaging, swollen, brain and skull. I tried to connect these words with the thought of my friend lying there in his hospital bed, but every time I came close, I mean every time I thought I could almost understand what those words meant, I began to feel sick. I could see Ricky as he had been at the time of the accident. His body thrown like an object, dashed defencelessly onto the road. The look on his face as he moved in and out of his consciousness. His confusion, his obvious pain.
I thought then that I would never do well in a war. I was too squeamish, too sensitive, too easily overwhelmed.
That weekend, I had to work with Rob again. By now everyone knew about his drinking, but we had no one to replace him with just yet. Teresa had instructed me to pretend as if I didn’t know anything. She said Rob was going to come into work, and if he continued to drink, so be it. On Monday we would make a tally of however many beers had gone missing, and while firing Rob, Teresa would present him with a bill for whatever amount he owed.
On Saturday, Rob looked dishevelled. He came in fifteen minutes late and apologized, but I told him not to worry. He quietly set himself up with a task, and the morning progressed with us working separately, but side by side. At one point I overheard him talking with some of the baristas. He was standing by the espresso machine trying to explain to them how to pour a shot. I overheard the words bitterness and irritant, and I could see him trying to make a demonstration, but nobody was listening.
Throughout the morning he kept finding reasons to get into the walk-in fridge, and I found reasons to get in there after him. For me, it was just a curiosity, as I had no intention of reporting anything back to Teresa. By noon, I figured he had had six beers, and his mood had lightened considerably.
After the lunch rush, Liz came in to pick up a cheque. She stopped in the kitchen and told me that Ricky was doing much better now. He was still dizzy, had a headache and was suffering memory lapses, but all of that was beginning to fade. The doctors thought that in time, it was possible for him to make a full recovery. It seemed for now as if he was out of the woods.
I was relieved and felt a weight had been lifted. Liz went out the side door and as she did, the afternoon sun momentarily blazed into the kitchen, lighting up the counters, the food, the floors, the knives and the whites we were wearing. Rob had been standing next to me, so he heard everything that Liz had said, but he didn’t know Ricky and he didn’t know anything about the accident. Although he didn’t ask, I felt compelled to tell him what had happened. I told him about the accident and its aftermath, I told him about the show, about the band, about the music. I told him about the hospital, and about having gone to the wrong hospital at first. I even told him about the old man who’d been looking for his nephew.
After I finished, I imagined there would be an awkward pause. After all, I couldn’t really explain what had compelled me to tell the story at such a great length to Rob, but I didn’t have time to wonder about it because without missing a beat, Rob launched into a story of his own. And for so many reasons it was clear that he was making this story up as he went along, or if maybe there was some kernel of truth within it, he was smothering that truth in embellishment.
Rob told me that the year before last, he had also been hit by a car. Only at the time, he’d been riding a bicycle. The car, he said, had immediately fled the scene, and Rob had had to get himself to the hospital alone. Nobody stopped to help, he said, although he was very clearly distressed: wounded, bleeding and dragging his heap of a bicycle along. At the hospital, he said, they had sent him home. They told him there weren’t enough beds. They said all he needed was some rest, and so he went home and fell asleep on the couch.
When I woke up, I couldn’t remember a thing. I didn’t know what had happened, only that I was hurt so bad I couldn’t get off my couch. I couldn’t even get up, he said, to get myself a drink of water from the kitchen sink.
Rob said he spent three days wallowing and wasting away on his couch, and that he probably would have died if his boss at the time hadn’t realized that something was wrong.
See, because I hadn’t been in to work, and I hadn’t even been able to make a phone call, because I couldn’t even move to get to the phone and couldn’t even remember that I had a job, well, my boss figured that something must be terribly wrong because I was otherwise so totally reliable, so he called the police. The cops showed and broke open the door, then seeing so much blood and debris, the officers pulled out their guns. And that’s how they found me, said Rob. With their guns drawn, standing over his couch, asking him how this all had happened. And the thing was, I couldn’t remember, he said. But anyway, those cops saved my life.
When Rob finished talking, I didn’t know what to say. He went back to work, bending over his cutting board. I shook my head as if to clear it of a fog that had accumulated.
In another few minutes Rob would put down his knife. He would walk to the door and head outside to smoke. In another few days he would be fired. And then, coming in some time after that to collect what would be left of his pay, he would corner me and recount in a harsh, conspiratorial tone how he had been mistreated, how he had been abused, how Teresa had taken advantage of him.
A few months later I would lose my own job, but by then it wouldn’t matter. It would be winter, there’d be snow on the ground. And later still, other seasons. Time would pass. Teresa would eventually run the café into the ground. There would be no more Riviera. No more heavy, early mornings. No more keys in pockets, nor light coming in at the window.
This fog, I thought, will lift and everything attending it will be dispersed.