CHAPTER 15

The Restaurant Manager

Goods of all possible types, stacked neatly under the bright lights of this warehouse turned into a store. There is food, and there is lumber, and there is soil in bags and fruit in bags, and there is clothing and footwear and ice. Quartermaster to the masses, a limitless supply of all that anyone should ever need.

In a bar, after work, he sees a man almost beaten to death.

It leaves him shaking. In his seat near the bar. Police and an ambulance come. They ask for descriptions of the men who did this.

“It was just one guy,” the bartender tells the police. “Some skinny kid. White. Never seen him here before.”

The restaurant manager sees his hands shaking. When he can, he gets another drink.

He stares up at one of the TVs still playing behind the bar. Baseball. Bright colors. The motion of statistical graphics, replays, a bunt, an out.

He turns away. Too much motion. Too much color.

The kid hit the man so many times. So fast. The man not able to stand. Get away. He just rocked back and forth with the motion, finally slumping over against the arm of the chair.

When one of the man’s friends stood up, trying to help, the kid beat him so badly that he was laid out, on the ground, within half a minute. Less.

The other people in the bar simply stared. No one stood to stop it. No one stood to help.

All anyone could do is stare.

Throughout it, the restaurant manager sat on his bar stool. Looking over his shoulder. Watching at an angle. Not realizing that he could turn his body fully around, he instead only turned his head, his hands still resting in front of him, on the bar.

Now, as he pictures it again, his stomach churns. All that blood. So much blood. The two men not just beaten unconscious but injured terribly.

“What happened?” a guy behind him asks.

The restaurant manager doesn’t turn.

“Fight,” the woman next to him says. “More like a beating.”

“Why?” the guy asks.

“Some big guy started throwing ice at someone. Some guy who was having a seizure. On the ground. Foaming at the mouth. Big guy sitting over there, where all that blood is, guess he thought it was funny. Threw some ice at the guy having the seizure. Black guy. On the floor.”

The man behind the restaurant manager says, “Damn. God damn.”

“Fucked with the wrong person’s friend,” the woman says.

“Damn,” the man says again. “God damn.”

The restaurant manager tries to tune them out. Looks up at another TV. Updates on the flooding along the Gulf. The city there decimated. The farmland washed over with water and debris. He’s seen the footage twenty times. Its effect now is not to horrify or to scare. Now it only numbs.

He looks down at his phone. Text messages. His fingers shake. He can’t quite get the messages to open.

The kid was so violent. So much blood. Covered in that man’s blood. It wasn’t like a movie or a TV show, a couple punches and the man goes down.

This man would not go down.

And the kid, he wouldn’t stop.

When he was a child, the restaurant manager had a neighbor, another child, maybe six or seven years old. He liked to torture cats. Stray cats, his own cats. He’d tie things to their tails. Shoot at them with his pellet gun. Once the restaurant manager watched from his window as the neighbor beat a cat to death with a simple, heavy branch.

This was the same.

So brutal. So empty. Devoid of a decency the restaurant manager has never articulated, but that he had otherwise always assumed all the people of the world want to share.

TVs lined up side by side, ever larger, flat black screens. Some are widely curved.

Refrigerators, one after another, blurring finally into the ovens, the dryers, the washers, the microwaves, and the air conditioning units, and the silent dishwashers costing hundreds and thousands. Silver and white and black, more cycles, more features than it seems possible to offer. Or that could ever be used.

Computers, by the hundreds, the size of briefcases or folded up so small they’ll slide into a purse. More power, more capacity than the computers that launched rockets and capsules and humans all the way to the moon.

Outside, in the morning, the wind blows even harder than usual. He can barely open the door of his house.

The news blames it on the remnants of the hurricane. Even a week later, its dissipating power spreads out across the country.

There are tricks to living with this wind. He parks his car parallel to it, with the driver’s door facing east, so that he can open and close the door without the wind smashing the door back on him, or wrenching the door against its hinges.

Driving, he feels the wind, it bounces the car around even on neighborhood streets. But he always knows now, without thinking about it, where the wind is relative to his position. Even turning onto busy streets, he has to account for the gust blowing against his side; it wants to push him into the wrong lane. He pulls harder on the steering wheel, leaning the car into the wind. Like sailing a ship along Eighth Avenue.

The restaurant crew is all on time. This is not a small thing. Crews like this, for these restaurants, the simple act of getting the employees here is part of his job as manager. Helping his employees navigate the mediocre bus system. Helping them arrange to get their children to first or second grade. Helping them find free clinics for sick family. Siblings, parents, or their children, the people who work here tend to be the ones in charge of everything.

Those who are from south of here, he doesn’t look too closely at the quality or accuracy of their IDs or documentation.

They work hard. They are here on time. They simply want to help their families and themselves.

He works with the crew as they get through the breakfast rush, talking the new people through their jobs, helping at the cash register when they need it, hauling trash out, working the grill, going out to the drive-thru line and greeting customers with small samples of the store’s new coffee drink. He hands the cups through open windows, very carefully; the wind wants to knock these drinks to the ground.

Only later does he have a minute to check his phone. Text messages from his brother.

His mother is sick. Hospital. He needs to go there. He needs to go there right away.

Rows of small, plush beds of many different sizes.

Aisles adorned with grooming supplies, the brushes and scissors and soaps and sprays, all hanging carefully from long hooks.

Food stacked in bags and boxes and cans, ever more expensive as the aisle moves right to left, food raised and processed and bagged with a care beyond comfortable description.

A few hours of driving north, and still the car is bouncing, shifting, pushed against by the wind.

The restaurant manager’s mother is very old. She’s lived longer than he or his brother ever thought was possible.

A good woman. Who did her best for them. He’s not close to her. She hasn’t ever allowed that to be possible. But she’s a good woman. Who deserves to see her sons right now.

He finds he is replaying the fight in the bar. The beating, really. It wasn’t a fight.

But his stomach doesn’t turn. His hands don’t shake. He simply replays it. Again. Not meaning to. It’s just what his mind has decided to do.

He’ll travel north a few hours more. To the city where he grew up. The vast suburb to the much older city from the documentary. As a kid, he was only told the stories. We live in the South End. Across the highway is the North End. Do not go there. Do not play there. Do not let your friends dare you to enter that place.

This was even before the area had been abandoned. A hundred thousand people still lived there then. Schools were still open. He once drove with his mother through the North End to the old church cemetery where her mother and father were buried. What they drove through was a worn-out, emptied place, storefronts dark and boarded up for street after street after street.

But once the last of the schools finally closed, once the last factory shut down and the police left and even the city mayor walked away from his job, then the city died.

Yet many of the streetlights still operated. The traffic lights blinking green, now yellow, soon red.

The documentary said some few thousand people still live there. In homes they’ve owned their entire lives. Or in homes they’ve simply taken over for themselves. Still others have gone there to salvage things of value. Copper tubing, aluminum gutters. They strip down homes and buildings, scavenging items of some value to buyers in the South End.

Why would someone live there?

Hours later, he still drives on the highway. The fight no longer plays in his mind. A memory worn down, details steadily blurred, edges smoothed away by constant repetition.

In a moment, he can see it, as he comes up over a slowly building rise in the otherwise flattened landscape. Ahead there are the clouds. A line of gray that lifts upward at a sloping, intermittent angle, three miles it goes, disappearing into the sky, having started so low to the ground that it’s as if the clouds spring forth from some unidentifiable source within the earth. In thirty minutes more, he’ll reach those clouds. Passing into a place that, starting some fifteen years ago, has been enveloped, that lives under an almost constant rain, that has not seen any sunlight since the manager was in his teens.

He’d been a boy, really. Just thirteen. Waking up one day to a storm that poured water all across their yard.

The rain did finally break. Days later. Just a mist continued to fall.

But the clouds, they still hung there, in the sky. And never left again.

Shoes priced in the thousands. Jackets priced for thousands more. Purses, watches, outerwear, all priced like collectible items of the future, treasures of cultural significance, not utilitarian objects of need.