Takata suppressed a grin as he poked his head through the curtain to look around the restaurant. The Miner and Herrera looked back at him, and when he saw that the rest of the bar was empty, he set to work closing the shutters and then he excitedly waved them into the kitchen. His guests exchanged looks, shrugged at each other, then ambled around the bar into the back, drinks still in hand.
“Ta da!” Takata said, whipping a white dish towel off a shriveled-looking fist-sized green and white ball in the palm of his hand. He beamed at it like he’d given birth to it.
Herrera tilted his head. “You dragged us back here to show us a cabbage?”
“Yes!” His elation dimmed. “Look, asshole, when’s the last time you saw a fresh cabbage? Never, that’s when.”
Herrera shrugged. “I’m not a cabbage guy.”
“You will be when I’m done with you. You, Mick, you’re quiet. No dry wit? No cutting remark?”
The Miner shrugged. “Just trying to remember the last time I saw a cabbage. I thought they were bigger.”
Takata huffed and set it down on the counter, then turned around and flipped the griddle on to the highest setting. “Cost me a bottle of real wine just to get Mr Shine to grow that dinky little thing. I was going to let it go longer, but I’m in the mood to celebrate. Anyway, you’re getting a free dinner out of it, so what do you want?”
“No complaints from me,” she said, smiling. “Little cabbage it is, and I’ll be glad to have it.”
Takata got out a sharp knife and held it in one hand as he examined the fist-sized vegetable in the other, turning it this way and that with a faint, almost blissful smile on his face. Then he lay it on the white plastic cutting board and plunged the knife in, pulling the base down to the board with a thunk and splitting the head neatly in half. A V-cut on the first half excised the core, which he set aside, then he repositioned the half and started slicing.
He was fast with the knife, and it must have been sharp as hell. The Miner watched with interest as he worked the blade up and down, almost rocking, feeding the half head into it and producing slivers of crisp green flesh that held the half-ball shape as they got pushed on down the board. Strands pushed themselves up in a traffic jam behind the blade, splintering, and then in thirty seconds he was done. He turned the whole board ninety degrees and crunched the knife through the splintered pile once, twice, then scooped it all up and dumped it in a bowl.
There was a ring at the back door, and Takata yelled a welcome without looking up. Dr Mills stood in the entryway, looking sheepish. “I hope I’m not late...” He held up a canister and said, “I don’t have any sake, but I thought a dry white wine might go well with it.”
“Sure!” Takata said.
“I don’t have that either, so I brought plonk,” Mills said with a mischievous smile, setting the canister on a worktable.
“Even better!”
Mills peered over the cook’s shoulder at the cutting board as he sidled by in the tight space, and took the stool next to Herrera. “Good to see you again,” he told him, and nodded politely to the Miner as well.
Takata was already halfway through the second half cabbage, producing an even slaw that he chopped roughly again and dumped in the bowl. Then he got to work finely dicing the core, and it went in, too. He turned to the little herb garden under a sun lamp on the far bulkhead, taking a pair of scissors to a trio of spindly foreshortened green onions and returning with two finger-lengths’ worth cradled in his palm. He sliced them and dumped them in with the cabbage.
“My grandfather used to make this for me when I was a kid,” he said as he chopped. “A little different back then. Easier to get stuff, and I was a spoiled brat who didn’t appreciate hand-made food.” He gave his audience a meaningful look, but they didn’t take the bait. He snorted. “I’ve been craving it for ages.”
“And telling me about it for at least that long,” Dr Mills said. “It’s become myth.”
“It is mythical in nature,” Takata said. From the fridge he got a jar of red strands – the Miner caught a whiff of ginger when he opened it – fished out a bundle with his fingers, and got to chopping them.
“How’s tricks?” Herrera asked Mills, who only shrugged.
“Slowed down. I ducked the excitement as long as I could, but, well, duty calls.”
Takata got a second bowl from under the counter, and sifted a good amount of flour into it. “It’s bulked out with jiminy,” he warned, but his guests shrugged. The Miner had probably eaten her weight in crickets and mealworms out of service rations alone, and who knew what was in emergency rations. Takata sprinkled in some salt and other powders from little dented canisters stuck to the side of his work table with magnets.
The bowl of seasoned flour was whisked, then Takata brought it over to a spigot marked “YEgg! Whyte & Yölk Mix” and opened it to glug in a good amount of mucous-like yellow and clear fluid. The Miner had once had a YEgg! brand yeast incubator, long ago, and she had considered it tolerable as long as she didn’t dwell on what she was really eating scrambled on toast, but the stupid thing was too finicky to keep operational and it stank to high heaven when bacteria infected the batch. She’d had to jettison the whole incubator, and sometimes still gagged when reminded of it too strongly.
Takata was already pouring water into the bowl, carefully measured from a battered metal cup. “This ought to be stock,” he apologized, “but I haven’t had dashi powder in months.”
“I’m heartbroken,” Herrera said.
“Good.”
Working a handful at a time, he massaged the shredded cabbage into the batter, stirring and frowning as it all went in the bowl, then running his hand around the edge to get every last shred. When it was all mixed in and glistening yellow and green, he turned to the griddle and let a few drops fall from his spoon to the surface where they sizzled and popped. He nodded once, satisfied.
“I know you don’t do pork,” he said to Mills. “The beef OK for you with the fake egg? I mean, it’s all fake, but the principle, right?”
Mills shrugged. “Sure, thanks for asking.”
“What about the rest of you? Fake pork belly all right? It’s not horrible, used to be a pig a million years ago probably. Some bastard pig nobody liked.”
“When’s the last time they tested those vats for staph or e-coli?” Herrera muttered.
“Never, that’s when. That a no on the pork?”
“Eh, I’ll live dangerously.”
“What’s dangerous is insulting my cooking. You?” He pointed a battered finger at the Miner.
“I’ll eat anything.”
“Good answer.” He stopped short and looked at her suspiciously. “I think.”
Three strips of pink-and-white striped something went on the grill, slap slap slap in a row, then after a moment a ruddier strip followed. They sizzled and the air filled with the heady scent of cooking meat. The Miner tried to remember the last time she’d watched a meal prepared, and couldn’t. It’d been ages since she gave up on the galley and just ate emergency rations. Small mounds of cabbage batter went on top of the shriveling and twisting strips of vat-grown meat, carefully shaped with a spoon and a pair of chopsticks, then gently flattened into cakes.
Takata flipped off the ventilation fan over the stove for a moment and breathed it in with a self-satisfied smile: wheat batter, frying cabbage, cooking meat. Using a pair of broad metal spatulas he went down the line, digging under each palm-sized disc from both sides and then with a little “hup!” under his breath he flipped them. The brown-and-black spotted tops of the pancakes steamed gently until he squirted a deep red sauce over top each in a lace pattern. The sauce dribbled over the sides and hissed and bubbled as the aroma of burning sugar and soy sauce overpowered the rest, and he turned the fan back on.
Onto the sauce went mayonnaise from another bottle in a cross-lace, then a fine green powder. The Miner’s stomach rumbled, and she realized that she’d gotten very hungry watching him cook. His three guests watched in silence, rapt.
Four blue square plates came out from under the workstation, and a pancake went onto each with another maneuver of the two metal spatulas and another little “hup!” The first went to Mills, then Herrera and the Miner. Takata switched off the grill top before plating his own, and turned his back on its steaming surface as he dragged over a stool. Each of them received a pair of chopsticks and a little spade-looking instrument still with the metal-printer’s ridges here and there along the handles, looked like someone had flattened a spoon and then snipped the front of the bowl off.
“Itadakimas!” he said cheerily, and dug in, cutting with the spade in neat downward motions and eating with the chopsticks. He sat back after the first bite, a look of bliss on his face. He pounded the table lightly with his fist. “Damn,” he said swallowing. “That is it exactly. Mmm! Spot fucking on.”
The Miner ate carefully. It was still steaming hot, and delicious. Salty, crunchy, sweet, spicy. The cabbage partly steamed and partly fried, the nutty cooked batter, the sweet sauce, and a sharp earthy note from the ginger and onion.
The reverent silence broke when Dr Mills remembered his wine. Takata fetched some cups and they split it four ways. They toasted each other wordlessly with their translucent plastic cups, and the Miner had a sip of grape-like engine cleaner with a hint of oak. She smiled and murmured a thank you to the doctor.
“I used to be able to get huge cabbages,” Takata said. “As big as your head.”
“Here we go again,” Herrera muttered into his dinner.
“Maybe not your head. A normal person’s head. Man. I could make this every day. I could put it on the menu.”
“You want Feeney back in charge so you can have cabbage.”
“Would that be so damn bad?” Takata slapped his chopsticks down with a loud click. “Would it really? Yeah I hated paying his protection money, but it was a hell of a lot better than all that bullshit.”
“He’s why we had all that bullshit. It was fool’s gold.”
The Miner ignored their argument to focus on the food. Good food, hot food. The argument made it better somehow, brought her back to mess halls a million years ago, family dinner tables long before that, all the little fights over stupid points of trivia or policy or pride. Her mind wandered back to the grinning idiots in her old photos, and to her surprise she found herself blinking back a tear.
“Don’t drag me into this,” Mills was saying. “I don’t like any of it.”
“You did the marriage,” Takata accused.
“Two young people asked me to marry them, and yes I did. I’d do it again, for any two people who asked.” He looked meaningfully at Takata and Herrera, and when they both harrumphed and refused to take the bait, he focused on the Miner. “I was surprised to see you there, by the way. I half believed that after I left, those two wouldn’t get out of there alive.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Good thing you only half believed it.”
“Best thing you could have done,” Herrera said sourly. “Those assholes would have killed each other off, let us start over. We’d have had some real peace. Now they’re just regrouping.”
“The peace of the grave,” Takata said.
“The peace of justice! You think just because they’re not out punching and shooting each other that there’s peace? Violence underpins everything they do. It’s there even if they’re not fighting, it’s just aimed at everyone like a squashed spring. Who’s gonna get fucked next?”
Takata waved his hand like he was swatting at a gnat. “That’s just crap. There’s tension in any system. People just plain don’t like each other. You’ll never remove all your ‘violent underpinnings’ and that’s the kind of shit you get when you try. Some jackass set off a nuclear weapon, for the love of God!” Mills met the Miner’s eye with a speculative look, but she let Takata’s speech wash over them. “People aren’t perfectible, Herrera. They’re assholes. They’re always gonna be assholes.”
Herrera scoffed, but Takata interrupted him, pointing a finger in his face. “But the trick is that they’re lazy assholes. You get people invested in peace, see the benefits for themselves, they like to stay that way. Then you work at it. You improve. That’s how you get justice, not by blowing everything up.”
“Every so-called peace like that is on somebody’s back. And that poor sonofabitch gets repeatedly fucked while the people who have it good tinker with making things ‘a little bit better every day’ or whatever bullshit slogan, and congratulate each other on how nice they’re making everything, how well-dressed and polite that Feeney chap is, and isn’t it nice he stopped shanking people in public.”
“That’s rich. You hear that, Doc?”
Mills looked surprised and started to say, “Don’t look at me,” but Takata talked over him.
“You’ve never been the poor sonofabitch, Herrera! You bitch and moan, but you drew a government salary this whole time.” Herrera’s face reddened. “You’d have ridden out months more fighting with no problem, but me, I’m at the end of my rope here. Those Anaconda assholes won’t care that I’m not making rent because they screwed every pooch that walked by, they just care that I’m not making rent.”
“I’d have helped...” Herrera muttered.
“I don’t want help, I want customers! Customers are predictable. I know what they want, and that’s a decent dinner with as many cheap drinks as they can pour down their gullets, and if I piss one or two off, they go away and another few show up, look just like them. I don’t have to worry, oh I offended that one guy and now I’ll starve.”
“You do if that one guy is John Feeney. Or Angelica del Rio. Or Tom McMasters.”
Takata made a scornful face. “I don’t care what those crooks think of me.”
“What? And you suddenly care what I think of you?”
The two arguers went suddenly quiet. Dr Mills pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. Then their faces both went dark and they started yelling over each other. The Miner leaned her elbows against the counter behind her, lost track of the conversation, and just enjoyed the bickering.