When Bunny gets back to the table, Albie gets up to help her off with his jacket. She twists slightly to free her left arm. Lydia says, “You must be chilled to the bone.”
“No,” Bunny says. “If anything, I’m a little warm. Is it warm in here?” Then she asks Albie what time it is, and he tells her, “It’s nine twenty-seven.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Julian says, “but we ordered dinner while you were out. I got you Banh Cuon Chay.”
“Mushroom ravioli,” Albie translates. “With lotus root.”
“That’s fine,” Bunny says, and it is fine. Provided that her meal did not at some point have a beating heart, she’s never been a fussy eater, and now, her ability to taste, to distinguish flavors, has dulled to the point where all food is tofu. As Bunny takes her seat, her attention fixes on a patch of the glass-tiled floor where one of the fish, a big one, calico, orange dappled with white and black, is floating, belly-up dead. It bobs the way a body, tossed into the Hudson, drifts between the pylons and gently laps at the pier, as if a murder victim were a rowboat. “He’s dead,” Bunny pointedly addresses Julian, as if he’d strangled the fish with his bare hands.
“Who’s dead?” Trudy asks.
“One of the fish.” Julian crumples his napkin, sets it beside his plate and goes off to have a word with the manager.
Doesn’t this knucklehead know that it is New Year’s Eve? Does he have any idea how busy they are? The manager could give a go-flying-fuck-yourself about some shit dead fish. He flashes an icy smile, assures Julian that he’ll take care of it and offers a round of drinks by way of apology. Then, in Korean, the manager tells the waiter to bring six flutes of champagne, the cheap shit, to those motherfucking jerkoff assholes at table twelve.
That’s how it happens when you know the chef. Julian sits tall in his chair. Prompt disposal of the dead fish and champagne on the house, and they all pretend not to notice that the champagne is plonk. But only Bunny notices that the fish has not been disposed of. Rather, it has drifted off and come to rest alongside a nearby table where two couples, wearing their red paper hats, are too busy cracking each other up with the party favors to notice a dead fish, a mere ripple in the water.
For people such as Bunny and her friends, people who believe themselves respectful of the cultural norms, except of course when it comes to cultural norms like female circumcision and then the whole Margaret Mead thing goes out the window, to forgo chopsticks in an Asian restaurant would be an admission of provincialism. Because Albie has been eating in Chinese restaurants since the time he could chew solid food, he handles his chopsticks with dexterous flourish, like a pair of batons tossed in the air at a parade, as if they’d twirl overhead as a tiger prawn falls into his open mouth. Julian, not quite as deft as Albie, is nonetheless as masterful as expected, and Trudy and Elliot know what they are doing. Albie pronounces his food to be spectacular, and asks if anyone would like a bite. Trudy says, “I would, except then I’d have to offer you a bite of mine, and I’m not sharing.” Elliot says, “Not half bad,” and Julian asks, “Have I ever steered you wrong?” That Lydia uses her chopsticks the way a chimp uses a twig for a tool, to bring termite-size bits of food to her mouth, is not indicative of an inability to eat with chopsticks. Rather, it’s that Lydia is a person who eats raisins one at a time. Trudy asks if they’ve seen the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Guggenheim. “Not yet,” Lydia says, “but we’re planning on it. I’ve heard that it is amazing,” and Elliot says he didn’t think it was amazing, he thought it was okay but overrated, and he wants to know if any of them have read the Bolaño. That’s how he refers to 2666, as “the Bolaño.”
Bunny is not doing well with her chopsticks. Her hands are shivering, and they twitch as she tries to catch her food. The noise level in the dining room has risen, and the pitch of the din is an indefinite treble, a noise that seems to absorb all sound. Bunny sees mouths moving but she can’t hear Lydia as she goes on about some friend of hers who is expecting triplets. She sees expressions of laughter and amusement, and Trudy’s exaggerated shudder when she says, “Dear God. One was plenty for me. Triplets? I’d kill myself,” which brings the conversation not to a grinding halt, but to the kind of full and immediate stop that follows a gunshot, and with that, as if she’s woken up to find herself in a car more than a hundred miles away from home, Bunny finds herself on New Year’s Eve at the Red Monkey at a table for six, to hear Trudy say, “Bunny, I’m sorry. It was just a figure of speech.”
“What was a figure of speech?” Bunny asks, but she really doesn’t care, which is why she doesn’t repeat the question when Julian mentions how some food critic he knows just got back from New Orleans, and reported that it’s still a disaster area. “Right,” Elliot says, “heck of a job, Brownie,” and, with the exception of Bunny and Elliot, they all laugh at the foolishness and insensitivity of George Bush, and Trudy says she’s counting the minutes until Inauguration Day. Albie reiterates his hope that Obama will give environmental concerns greater attention, and Julian has a thing or two to say about industrial farming, and hasn’t anyone noticed that strawberries are now the size of gourds. “And they don’t taste like strawberries. They taste like mush with a strawberry flavored additive.”
Despite her concentration, Bunny can’t keep her hands steady. The chopsticks blur as if her eyesight, too, is trembling. For the first time in weeks and weeks, she is truly hungry, and desperately she wants the food that is eluding her the way words will elude her and the way the flame went out, again and again, when she tried to light her cigarette.
Lydia asks, “Have any of you read Anathem?”
Elliot says he heard it was schlock, but he is curious to know Lydia’s opinion.
“I’m only a few hundred pages in,” she tells him, “but already it’s a transformative experience.” Transformative experiences are big this year. Lydia tells Albie that he must, must, must read it because it deals with philosophy and mathematics. And quantum physics, too.
“I don’t know,” Albie says. “I don’t have much of a grasp on quantum physics.”
Elliot says if you really want to have a transformative experience go to YouTube and check out “hamster on piano eating popcorn.”
Lydia swats him on the arm, and, hallelujah, Bunny succeeds in gripping a ravioli between her chopsticks. Trudy asks Julian what he thinks of cast-iron frying pans and is it true that you’re not supposed to wash them while, with absolute concentration and care, Bunny brings the ravioli from her plate to her mouth when a nearly imperceptible sensation crawls along the back of her neck. It’s nothing, nothing is there, but the extreme disturbance of this virtual nothingness makes its way down her back and through her arms to her hands, and the ravioli gets away like a frog making its escape, and Bunny tells herself: do not scream.
Do not scream, do not scream, do not throw the plate across the table, do not turn the table upside down. With every effort, she maintains her calm and sets the chopsticks down alongside her plate. Picking up the fork, she grips it the way a small child in a high chair grips a spoon to hack away at a bowl of Cheerios and milk. Poised and ready to spear a ravioli, she tightens her fist around the fork, as if, were she to loosen her grip, she would lose both the fork and any semblance of composure. She squeezes the fork the way you would squeeze a stress ball. Her knuckles turn white, and all she wants is for it to stop, for all of it to stop, she wants quiet, and as if she were about to pound her fist on the table, to demand it, to demand order to the chaos, to demand that everyone shut up, please just shut the fuck up, she raises her arm and in one swift move, with all her force behind it, she brings the fork down hard into the softest part of her upper thigh.
The prongs deeply embed in her flesh, the fork stands upright, as if with a flick of a finger, it would ping. Five droplets of blood weep through her dress, and then more blood comes, and it spreads like spilled wine, deep red on white velvet.
Oh, Bunny. What did you do?
What did you do?
What have you done?