Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  Fingers of gas rise off the black wine.

  “Anyway, this car’s abandoned. Nobody knew what happened. Pike was never seen in Europe again. He vanished. But years later a buddy of his, from Formula One racing, was invited to a castle behind Cap-d’Ail. A stock of experimental wines was there with handwritten labels. And he recognized Pike’s hand. When he tasted the wine he knew things had changed. He went on to trace Pike to this hidden acreage. Found him bearded, living in the vines, driving an old truck. One of Europe’s great rakes, uh. Fucking mystery to everyone—unless you know what it is he discovered that day behind Monte Carlo. Today he’s just there in his vines, trying to put the secret into grapes. Production’s tiny but he meets regulations, he can be openly traded, unlike Toque. Almost like he’s trying to camouflage it.”

  I finally snatch the balloon.

  “Didier’ll tell you Pike had a revelation. Went searching for unicorn soil to settle his tab with Bacchus. Took him years, but he found it. Word got out to a few. Rumor says that virgins go to fornicate in the vines, that it’s a pilgrimage for twisted convent girls and aristocrats. I met a man at the Kempinski who said a Comtesse d’Auxonne conceived a child under Marius vines. Said since then the sound of crickets can make her cum. I wouldn’t trust him, though, he was downing Léoville-Barton like beer. Still, uh. More than one sommelier’s saving up for a tumble under the grapes. Didi’s even advised them to do it under the Shiraz. Says the Shiraz thrives on passion but the Grenache prefers regret.”

  “So after a bad night under the Shiraz you could just roll over.”

  “Listen, Putain.” Smuts draws himself up. “These pressings are from a geological fluke dated to the first human ancestor. They’re a correction of nature. They grow on prehistoric minerals, passion, and virgin’s cum. So drink the thing and shut up.”

  With my first sip of Marius a landscape rolls out, of black chocolate trees and tobacco skies, of cherry pastures where herb stalks tick in a breeze. After a deeper draught the panorama moves uphill. My sense of body weight and proportion subtly changes, muscles and organs recline on quiet alert. I look up to see Smuts grinning.

  “Shut your eyes,” he says. “You at the hill yet?”

  There’s a rising curve of warmth, a subtle lifting in all the body which coincides with the moving taste. The hill. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

  “Good. See how long you can stay—take a smaller sip, then another one quickly. Feel the breeze? Feel the heat unfolding?”

  It’s there, a landscape where I’m alone, a living map that I’m propelled across.

  “Might take a bottle or two, but Didier swears it can carry you back through its own vines to a porch where it’s always summer’s night. Where the correction to the first human ancestor lives. The trick is to stay there and be corrected.”

  Whoosh. Bottled nimbus. I blink, and look around, also entranced by the idea of this man discovering how to live. Because, although it’s late for me, I’ve come to realize that the notion is at the heart of my failure in life. Seeking ever-higher nimbus was how I defined “the good” in my ethic, and I stand by it, as in fact does my culture, simply seeking more and bigger and better of everything. But both the culture and I are on our way to die—whereas it seems this man found a mechanism to step back. Indeed, to step back at his peak.

  I turn to Smuts: “And so this secret, this punch line you mention—is it about reaching for dreams, or just being happy with what you’ve got? Because it sounds like the man was having a great life before he walked away.”

  “Who knows, Putain, you have to ask him. Even Didier won’t say. Anyway, don’t get too fucked up with the idea, it’ll drive you crazy. Enjoy the wine, look around, and ask yourself—do things get much better than this? Uh?”

  “They don’t get much better.”

  Smuts looks on proudly. “Tell me that’s not an armament for the modern day. Yoshida’s only good feature—he’s got taste. He built the room for Toque, but then had to test every bottle in case it didn’t fly. A pricing headfuck—he couldn’t charge the full bottle, and you often don’t get travel till the third or fourth glass. If there was more than one White Room party in a night he’d end up wasted. Marius solved that, though he doesn’t bring it out much anymore. Japanese don’t have the booze gene. Last month some Yakuza cunt hurled all over the walls. Had to repaint the whole room.”

  “It’s a temple,” I say. “A temple of nimbus.”

  “This is nothing, you should see one of Didier’s events—not that you ever could. Nobody’s even allowed to talk about them. But they put this shit in the dark. Fountains of Marius is what I’ve heard. Fountains of it. That’s why I have to behave myself—with some fugu experience Didi might pull me into his European operation. Nowhere to climb after that. Didier ‘Le Basque’ Laxalt is the godfather of high-octane catering.”

  “I wondered what got you into fish.”

  “The deep end of fish. Ever eat torafugu?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Poison blowfish. Very sweet. The trick is to slice it leaving just enough poison to buzz your lips. A little kiss from death. Fine art, though—if your lips go numb you’re fucked. No antidote. Takes years to get a license.”

  “Is that all you serve?”

  “With a twist: fugu’s farmed now, without poison—but ours are wild tiger-blowfish, caught off a line in the Sea of Japan. Massively toxic. Illegal, ex-quota, sourced quietly through the Basque—hence we have to switch fish in the tank tomorrow, put in regular ones for the inspectors. Yoshida’s been having a baby over it.”

  “Not a love child of yours, by the sound of it.”

  “Midget prick, he’s just a businessman, it’s all about the money. If he could make more selling supermarket fugu he’d do that—but people pay a premium for the really edgy stuff. He’s raking it in. Opening his second place next month, a bigger one, where all the walls are saltwater tanks, like dining under the ocean.”

  I reflect for a moment, hovering on a ridge of Marius. I’ve fetched up in a salon of limbo. A place where patrons come to touch the shadow of death. My mind boggles. Death by gourmet pufferfish, what a rococo flourish by the Enthusiasms, beyond anything I could’ve dreamt up. I’m dining with fellow limbonauts. Whoosh. Of course, for me it’s also a chess game, to navigate all these factors without hurting Smuts. But the Enthusiasms have shown themselves to be end-players, take note. With Marius in my veins I feel I can trust them with the night’s arrangements. For now I’ll settle back and unfurl my senses.

  I become aware of Smuts watching me. “Hm,” I muse, “so if you poison a customer do you have to kill yourself?”

  “Once upon a time, uh. Fuck that, though, nothing to do with me—Tomohiro, the tall one, is the chef. He’s the only one tonight with a license.”

  “But do they monitor how much you order? Can you just eat too much?”

  “You’ll see how it is. Most of the dishes aren’t toxic, and the poison sashimi’s so thin you could watch porn through it. Minimal danger. The scary deal is the offal. The liver, and especially the ovaries. But offal’s not on the menu, it’s totally banned. In Japan it’s even illegal to sell whole fish. And we can’t even trash the offal, hobos have died on the streets. I don’t think you can even incinerate it. One ovary can kill thirty people, uh. But they still love to mess with it. Macho deal, kind of Russian roulette. Nibbling the organs is as far as you can go. There’s a few deaths around the country every year.”

  “So how do you get rid of the offal?”

  “Fuck knows. Gets collected. Probably buried under the seabed or something, dropped on fucking North Korea. We have a special icebox for it, you’d think it was nuclear waste. I’ve only seen it a couple of times. Anyway, come get a table.” Smuts unfolds from his chair. “And Scarlet Putain—hope you’re not on any medication.”

  “
Hm—why?”

  “Because I’ll order for you.”

  8

  A hostess in a kimono tends me with the hesitant grace of a stork, crossing paths with her shadow as she moves under the light. Patrons arrive, and the salon’s canvas comes alive as their creases, colors, and smokes smudge and stir it. Pufferfish watch from the tank along the wall, sometimes traveling to the kitchen in a pagoda box, heads and tails poking out, gasping and flapping. This is the scene, and every so often Smuts beams over the counter where he’s in motion with the surgery of rare food.

  Over a sashimi of sweet torafugu I monitor the kitchen for clues about poison. Quite a few minutes pass this way, till finally I catch myself picturing chefs tossing offal over their shoulders and losing ovaries like marbles on the floor. I have to laugh. Planning a death at a banquet shows bad grace, and mistrust in the Enthusiasms. Opportunism is called for. I leave it for later nimbal moments, which will surely come. What’s important now is to make the most of limbo. As it’s heightened my senses to such an extreme, I simply bask in the goings-on, smoking, drinking, feeling this voluptuous salon around me like a silken coat. What a salon of thrills, a training-limbo with its lethal hors d’oeuvres. What a civilized culture to think of it.

  At one point Smuts brings me a sliver of fish on the end of his finger, a sort of amuse-morte, and motions me to take it with chopsticks. He watches like a cat as I eat it, and swells with pride when I react. What a dainty expression of hunter-gathering. Among other subtleties is a moment out of the blue when a fish breaks surface in the tank. As it splashes down, all the diners refer to each other across the room, nodding, smiling, and gasping. They use the opportunity to inspect each other, as diners do, and to create rapport. I join them and am bonded, even opening my mouth and pointing at the tank, which is too much, I admit. But in such a tranquil place the jumping fish is a highlight, and highlights are the pixels of a life. We’re all witnesses together of the jumping fish, nobody else in the world is. The same pixel is added to each of our lives, and we’d feel more comfortable now to be survivors together of a plane crash, or stranded in a raft at sea. Who would be the leader? Who the panicker? The sly one? The martyr? Such are the outermost ripples when a fish jumps. This is humanity, in its little ways, and I feel a fleeting nostalgia. Note how in our wildest nightmares it’s not necessary to see a friend at a window, nor a doctor, nor a rich man—but just another person. Looking at it, it’s not such flawed behavior, this constant reaching out. Perhaps it compensates for the flaw of our being here at all. Perhaps it’s even a sense that together we should be able to man this drifting boat of life.

  Such musings are a delightful pastime until I start to muse on the act of musing itself. Then I realize food and time are making Marius fade from my system, and that the sake is in too small a pot for a steep nimbal climb.

  I pull some miniatures from my coat and find the restroom.

  Smuts walks in while I’m there: “Tomohiro says the boss isn’t coming in. Halle-fucking-lujah. And just so you know, I’ve told them you’re a big-deal international food writer. Try and look professional. I’ll put you on my tab.”

  “Cheers.” I pull out two miniatures of white rum and separate them between my fingers, pointing one at Smuts. He likes rum.

  “Fuck off.” He turns away. “Just think about it—I have to work next to a man who slices sashimi so fast it hits the plate wriggling.”

  I shrug, and stand looking at the bottles, I suppose in a bovine sort of way. They become glossy under the light. Smuts rubs a hand over his face. He stifles a yawn. And finally his shoulders slump, resolve being like an inner coat hanger, and he swipes the bottle up. We toast with our left hand, as always—because it’s connected to the heart.

  “Where are those lines?” He eventually pats my pocket.

  Whoosh.

  I needn’t say much about the sanctity of a restroom cubicle where drugs are shared.* While Smuts cuts lines on the cistern, herding and chopping with the speed of a chef, a graphic chart comes to my mind of our friendship: I see two spheres of very different colors, our individual lives beside each other—and in the slim vagina of their overlap a third color appears, which is where we meet.

  I snort my lines from the bottom up, while Smuts takes his straight down. We have another shot of liquor each, and a nibble of MDMA. Finally Smuts straightens, sucking a lungful of air: “Pu-tain!” Then he bustles out and I’m left alone licking dust from my bank card—a refreshing bitter chaser, after which I waft back to the table like a cloud.

  More rice wine has arrived, and now has the effect of a foot bath after treading a winter lawn. I’d like here to draft a recipe for the nimbus all this raises; but like some of the best things, it comes from intuitive and unpredictable sources. I’ll lay out certain recipes, of course, in a quieter moment, over wine. But for now, if you follow me, there’s only one master recipe for a limbo:

  Have some more.

  The evening takes on a rhythm, proceeding in verses of fish and sake with a chorus of drugs in between. These are triggered by Smuts with a nod to the restroom. As a note of research, hot sake seems to act as a balm between sharp and soft substances, blending them in the way a painter joins sea and sky. Sake and MDMA make a fine sky for spirits and cocaine in this way, a masterpiece of nimbus, like a Dutch port scene, busy yet bathed in tranquil light. As I think about it, all things in life are this way, a question of fusion, just like a fragrance; even our experiences seem to have three notes of flavor: a high note, which is the immediate slap of an event; a middle note, which is the average effect while it’s under way; and a base note, which stains you after the experience passes, and contains its memory and truth.*

  After a number of these choruses and musings, some of which I write down for you, the house starts to empty of diners. In inverse proportion to my soaring nimbus, the fish in the tank slow down and swim low, maybe grateful to survive with their toxins. Smuts’s colleagues wipe sweat from their faces, while Smuts moves up and down the kitchen on trivial missions.

  My attention drifts back to poisons.

  Clearly I’ll have to smuggle some back to the hotel, because in these elegant surroundings it becomes clear what a brutal trick it would be on Smuts, no matter how bright our nimbus. Really savage, and my intoxication deflates somewhat with shame. It highlights a problem of limbo: that the untethered mind can lose its civilization. It becomes self-absorbed and incorrect. Curious, then—some things do matter. Limbo needs a constitution. In fact it’s a riddle, because if deciding to die means that everything ceases to matter—then dying ceases to matter.

  Whoosh—some things do matter.

  The last of the sake flies down my throat, and I bite off some MDMA right at the table, to see if I can avoid the fallout from this question: which things matter? Thankfully I have suicide to fall back on. Yes, and the hotel is the obvious answer. Poison to hotel. Dump passport and wallet. Anonymous dead. Found on the street, or on the beach. In the Sea of Japan as a denizen, or like seaweed washed to the shore. Even my shark-fin hairdo points to the sea. And as seafood’s the cause of death, who’s to say I didn’t meet the fish in the Sea of Japan? It cuts Smuts’s employers out of the equation and unless it was front-page news, even Smuts wouldn’t find out for ages.

  Ah, Smuts. This idea is just sprouting branches when, some distance across the room, the last table of gentlemen grows loud. Hisses and grunts arise from their table, sounds you’d expect with sword thrusts. Looking over, I see that one man wears tartan trousers, and two have ponytails as shiny as plastic. The eldest sits alone at the head of the table, and seems to be the agitator. All are drunk. Rising smoke absorbs the tank’s glow, making the salon a setting for an epic with beasts and fire.

  I’m transfixed—but Smuts’s colleagues avoid looking at that table. I watch staff prepare to leave and see that when a noise erupts that might make them look, the
y turn to each other instead. Tomohiro, the licensed chef—a taller, gentler-looking man—dons an overcoat and comes to bid those last patrons good night.

  The oldest gentleman responds with a commanding slap on the table. A shiny grey suit hangs off him, and his mouth seems poised to express shock. Not as a gesture; his mouth is that way by nature. Man born on the edge of shock.

  Bang: he slaps again. The chef stands with bowed head.

  Finally the old limbonaut spits out some words, whatever you’d say at a stabbing. Groans erupt from his henchmen, but the elder dismisses them with a wave, a hysterical flap of his hand, like an infant. He’s the table’s boss. Infant boss on the edge of shock. He stares at the chef. Tomohiro addresses the floor. In reply the gentleman hisses, reeling back as if gripped by a lethal rage. He smacks the table again.

  Chopsticks jump.

  In the middle of this drama, looking more like Kabuki theater, there comes a moment when Tartan Man glances sideways at me and smiles. The tension of my voyeurism suddenly breaks. We’re bonded now, in a club, and I settle back with a cigarette to watch things unfold. It seems the limbonaut is asking for something which Tomohiro is ashamed to refuse. And although my nimbus makes me just want to hug them all and confess, with some effort I manage to chill with the introspective quiet of the lone diner, groping the scene invisibly.

  Smuts soon sidles up. “Bizarre.” He sets another dish before me. “Yoshida usually deals with them personally. He’s like a virgin bride when they come around. Now they’re giving Tomo a hard time.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Fuck knows. ‘Why do those fish look like us?’ probably. ‘How did you get our families into the tank?’ ” Smuts stifles a laugh.