Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  They all laughed and returned to their meals. Kiwi sat down and took another few sips of wine, then slipped off her chair and announced the need to powder. Olli was the only one to notice that she didn’t go to the washrooms at all, but slipped out the front door of the restaurant and up the street. Off to buy heroin, he thought. Who knew? But he didn’t think about it further because he was being offered another glass of wine over one shoulder and, down the end of the table, Dante’s conversational radar had swept around to him.

  He was asking about the Tree of Knowledge project, predictably. They had earned a blip of press coverage three months before. Wired had picked up the story because Redmond was involved. Newsweek did a sidebar in a longer article about Internet publishing. Olli accepted the glass of wine and took a stab at a lay person’s description. They were archiving Internet development, taking multi-trillion-byte snapshots of the entire thing. The project allowed them to develop tools for the manipulation of huge amounts of data, which in turn … He couldn’t think of newer, better words and so out it came, his old vision: “Libraries of everything,” he said, and then to emphasize added, “disseminated freely.”

  It was a point that always got things going, people at the turn of the millennium having developed a fetishistic relationship with data, information. Dante was especially enthusiastic. “Just to bring life to such a tree,” he said.

  They talked along these lines for some time. The miracle of knowing. But Dante was also drilling relentlessly through the surface to underlying issues. He sensed something and Olli knew he sensed it, because just as his original idealism about collecting and disseminating libraries of everything had now been beaten into to a massive, megalomaniacal archiving project with no express reason whatsoever, so too had the shine come off Olli’s pronouncements on the topic.

  “And now you archive,” Dante said, “but do not disseminate.”

  True. Things hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d wanted on the Tree of Knowledge project. He admitted it when pressed. He let himself be coerced into acknowledging that his ideas had been redirected. And then, recognizing in Dante exactly the kind of force that moulds the idealism of others into service of personal metavision, Olli thought it was a good time to draw another junior into the conversation.

  “You know how these things happen, of course,” he said to Philip.

  Philip smiled without committing. “Not sure I do,” he said eventually. “This project turned out more or less as I imagined.”

  Well, so much for that. Olli hoped the subject would change soon.

  “Me too,” Benny said. “Despite what Jeremy wanted.”

  Margaret wrinkled her brow. Olli saw Dante frown a small frown. Benny forged ahead. “He wanted to make us into a French bistro. Not exactly bleeding edge.”

  “Perhaps not thet, ’zactly,” Albertini said, looking genuinely confused. “But the bistro is … timeless, yes-no?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Benny started up again, and now Dante’s frown deepened to frank discouragement, noticeable to all but those whose E was malfunctioning. “He wanted it to be all French. French food. French decor. French … I don’t know … bidet.”

  Philip put up a tent of fingers in front of his face, resting his chin on his thumbs. It covered a small smile.

  “Jeremy always talks about that place he worked in France, I know,” Olli said to Benny, kindly. He personally did not want to see the girl go up in flames merely because she was loaded. “But I know he’s really pleased with what you’ve made here.”

  “As if,” Benny snorted. “I almost had to break his arm.” She was looking across the table at Philip for support and was getting it with little, barely perceptible, encouraging nods. “You remember, he was talking about beef tongue in mustard sauce.”

  She said the words just as Kiwi Frederique slid back into her chair. Olli hadn’t seen her approach; he was just there all at once. An engaged, conversational aura about her.

  “Can you believe that?” Benny was saying, now turned to Kiwi. “Beef tongue. I mean, who eats beef tongue any more?”

  And when Kiwi realized the question was aimed at her, she didn’t take more than a half-beat to answer. “Oh, I’ll bet our chef does,” she said brightly.

  He had almost stepped on her. He certainly scared her. Kiwi screamed and scrambled to her feet.

  “What the …?” Jeremy said.

  “Chef—” Kiwi started.

  “What the hell are you doing in my kitchen?” He was standing there with his thyme in one fist. There was a tense exchange.

  Dante told her it would be OK.

  Dante didn’t run this kitchen.

  She really hadn’t been in the way.

  He didn’t care if she was in the way. And what the hell was she hiding for?

  She wasn’t hiding. She came in the alley door as Dante had suggested.

  “You are not seriously going to tell me that Dante told you to sneak in my alley door,” Jeremy shouted. He was going to lose it.

  Joey de Yonker poked his head back around the shelving just then. “Everything OK, Chef?”

  Jeremy was still glaring at Kiwi. “Give this thyme to Henk and tell him to get those three squab outta here.”

  “Yes, Chef!” Joey de Yonker said, snatching the herbs from Jeremy’s hand and disappearing.

  Kiwi stood her ground. “I heard that young cook say racoon …,” she began.

  Part of being on the hot line was being able to respond immediately to the unexpected. Jeremy heard what she said and didn’t need a second to compose himself. Kitchen plate code, he snapped. The kid was a jokester, wisecracked all the time. “I do not have time for this conversation,” he said, turning.

  “Later,” Kiwi said, following.

  By the time Jeremy got back to the point, they were backing up at the pick-up desk. “Order lamb, make that two lamb, order flatfish, order rabbit. Order prawns and another squab. Please.” He glared over at Kiwi, who had the nerve to follow him and stand off to the side, out of the way but in clear view. Only now was he beginning to wonder how long she’d been back there and what exactly she had heard.

  “How about a picture?” Kiwi called from the sidelines.

  “No pictures, no talking,” Jeremy barked.

  The rest of service was smooth, although one dinner did come back without any accompanying request for it to be heated or replaced. A racoon tenderloin. Jeremy sent a waiter out to talk to the table directly. When he came back he said, “Said it tasted just a bit funny to him. Quite sure it was fine.…”

  “Not everybody likes El Chaco Angus,” Jeremy called out, too loud. “Get him something else. Henk, are we out of anything?”

  “Prawns, squab and lamb.”

  “Rabbit,” Jeremy said. “Suggest the rabbit.”

  “Order bunny,” Joey de Yonker said, reaching for his slices of pancetta.

  The last orders were being prepared. “Almost there,” Henk said without looking up from a last duck breast he was beginning.

  “We killed,” Jeremy said. “OK, fire everything, you hear me? What do we have here—prawn, squab, duck, and I have the rabbit. These are last orders, last pick-up, people.”

  Jeremy finished the rabbit order, topped it with the sweet onion ragout and the lightly sautéed pancetta. He sprinkled the plate with a tablespoon of grated Romano, some chives, then slid it onto the pick-up counter.

  The waiter was back in what seemed like three minutes with an empty plate and a message from the table that had returned the racoon. “The best rabbit he’s ever eaten in his entire life,” he said, eyebrows raised.

  “Desserts are on the trolleys,” Torkil announced from the cold pick-up. “Sauces in serving boats. Gelato is in the reach-in. Servers have been told to wheel them around in fifteen. The bar cappuccino station will be handling coffee orders.”

  “Henk,” Jeremy said, turning to talk privately with his sous chef. They would break everything down, clean it all up. There would be nothing
left.

  “I understand, Chef,” Henk said.

  He gave Kiwi about five minutes, standing there against one of the prep counters, the dish pit wailing behind them.

  “What was in the won ton?” she tried. She was pretending to be interested in the background of each dish, for the article, of course. He was playing along and giving her bogus answers like: “Marrow.” And there was simply no way that was bone marrow in the won ton. Who did he think she was? She told him that he was a terrible liar—very sweetly—that she’d eaten marrow using a spoon made originally for Louis the Sixteenth, and why wouldn’t marrow be on the menu in any case?

  “Not everything was on the menu tonight exactly as served,” he allowed.

  “Fascinating,” Kiwi said.

  The chef sighed. “Listen, off the record?” he said.

  “Of course, darling,” Kiwi said. He was even cuter when he flushed. The tips of his nice cheekbones went all rosy. She powered down the Palm and put it on the prep counter between them.

  “My cooking is always part performance,” he told her.

  Is that so? How so?

  “Well, an actor doesn’t give it all to the audience, does he? There are parts you cannot know. Secrets that make the actor who he is. So the audience is ignorant, but the show is better for it.”

  Kiwi protested. If one agreed to go off the record, she argued, one really expected to learn something. It was only fair.

  And my, did she guilt a long speech out of him in response to that. He was all the way back to the Third-Wave Culinary Revolution now, going on about memory. In this brave new world of post-national cuisine, Chef Jeremy left his little reminders about what he thought had been lost. He had a whole list of nostalgic examples: regional tastes, local ingredients, passed-down recipes, family farms.

  “Even something of the family itself,” the chef said.

  And more: Embedded in this cuisine, Kiwi was to believe, were messages about knowing the earth’s bounty and your connection to it. Understanding where one stood, understanding loyalty and the sanctity of certain soil.

  Kiwi went to the bar before returning to her table. She had a Scotch and talked to a man there about his dinner. El Chaco Angus tenderloin, as it happened. He had never eaten anything quite like it, found it a bit gamey.

  “I should think you did,” Kiwi said to him. This admission from a man who claimed to have a taste for musk-ox kidneys.

  The young girl Benny was on a roll by the time Kiwi sat down. Dante was looking faintly displeased. Banks lost. The nice couple were embarrassed. Only this Riker fellow seemed to be having any fun, and Kiwi had already picked him as a bit dodgy. Unshaven at dinner. How charmingly eighties.

  But Benny certainly was on. Kiwi declined a refresh on the white wine and turned to listen to her ranting about the chef’s favourite dish, something she evidently found appalling: beef tongue with mustard sauce. She was looking for support on this point, and Kiwi found herself dragged into the discussion.

  “I mean, ick,” Benny interrupted her. “No offence to anyone French here, but.”

  “None taken,” Olli said. “Oh wait. I’m not French.”

  “And he had some other brilliant ideas too,” Benny went on, rolling her eyes in Philip’s direction again, receiving his subtle encouragement.

  “Remember though,” Olli tried again, “all his ideas legally belong to Dante.”

  “No, I mean, like … really off-the-wall stuff,” Benny said.

  “Like what?” Kiwi said. She turned to look directly at Benny.

  Margaret did not like where the conversation was going, quite suddenly. She didn’t know why. Call it instinct, but she turned to Dante, actually put a hand on his arm—something Olli did not observe her do often. “Perhaps,” she smiled broadly, “you could tell us about your future plans. Other restaurants? Other cities?”

  Dante smiled back with some relief and took the offer. He opened his mouth to begin.

  “I don’t know,” Benny blurted. “Like squirrel …”

  What? Olli thought.

  “I’m sorry?” Kiwi said.

  “You heard me,” Benny said, defiant, although now she also looked like she might start crying again. “Squirrel. I know for a fact that Jeremy eats squirrels.”

  She found one in his refrigerator, that’s how. And don’t try telling her that it got hit by a car and that he took it upstairs and put it in a wheelchair or something, and that it died and he put it in the fridge like his place was a squirrel morgue.

  Dante struck Olli as a guy who didn’t look really alarmed very often. Like he did now, say.

  “Oh, baby,” Kiwi said. She didn’t reach for the Palm. No need for notes, she’d remember this one. She put a hand on Benny’s arm. “Are you for real here? Yeah?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Benny said. “I saw it. It was grey.”

  “So brilliant,” Kiwi said.

  “I am just … a bit … lost,” Olli said.

  “Maybe all is not as it seems,” Kiwi explained. It wasn’t just a meal, it was a performance, she was saying now. A brilliant one too. Jeremy had fed them a range of things, a range of delicious, forbidden things. The chef was challenging the grid. Taste-jacking. He was apparently doing something called meta-hacking. For reasons that were not clear to Olli, Kiwi was suddenly using a lot of Wired “Jargon Watch” words.

  “I ate,” Margaret said, tired of it. “I’m full. I’m happy. But the meal was what the sheet said, all right?”

  “What did you eat?” Kiwi asked Philip, ignoring her.

  Silence.

  “El Chaco miniature Angus? Wonderful, but excuse me? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “If Jeremy says—” Olli started.

  “Then check the kitchen and be done with it,” Philip said back to Kiwi. He had been enjoying the fun up to a point, but when she went serious all of a sudden, he pulled right back.

  “Go ahead and try,” Kiwi answered. “But our performance artist this evening has scoured the place. There isn’t a trace of anything. Imagine that. Not a single bit of anything left over.”

  Everyone took the same nanosecond to consider this detail.

  “And it’s a tremendous thing, isn’t it?” Kiwi drove onward. “In drama, in art. He performed for us. He showed us some things and kept some things secret. Left us to discover the unexpected, strange connections. We should all be thrilled to have been part of it.”

  “What did you eat?” Olli asked her, regretting it instantly as Margaret kicked him sharply under the table.

  “That’s the whole point,” Kiwi said, eyes wide. “I have no idea.”

  Olli was certain she was serious, and that inspired a strange cascade of thoughts. But what was striking him as more unexpected was his sudden impulse to laugh out loud, really loud. What if it were true? On one level—and here Olli cracked a look at Dante, just a half-shade paler than usual, really thinking—on one level it would be fucking great. Wouldn’t it?

  Dante wouldn’t have agreed if he’d been asked. Because at that moment, he was rifling through a disorganized stack of thoughts, and he wouldn’t have described any of them as “great.” He flashed on the Professor, whereabouts again unknown. The mother, glowering at him from the coffin. That woman Jeremy had worked with, the sharp one, overtly hostile. And the young man himself—Dante had tried, Christ had he tried—always faintly resisting. They were like faces staring up at him from the plate, laughing. He had been caught out, fooled, made an example of. He was staring down at his empty plate and he couldn’t remember what he’d just eaten. Here these images had skipped across the surface of his consciousness, and all that remained were streaks of purple sauce, a few grains of mocking gold couscous. He felt very full, all at once. Sick full. And braying laughter was coming from a nearby table. The expanse of the room was opening around him, a sense of food in his belly was growing stronger, and everything Benny and this Kiwi person had been saying seemed, just then, very plausible.

  Olli watched Dan
te and only got the sense that if there were a menu handy he would have picked it up and reread what he had ordered. “You were saying …,” Olli said, growing serious. Taking a last shot at changing the subject.

  But now the room was in motion around them. People were getting up from their tables. Dante was greeted by someone and stood to speak with them, turning his back on Olli without a further word. Philip disappeared somewhere, to smoke a joint, thought Olli. To get some air. Albertini split to the washroom to regrease his hair, smooth the creases in his cape. Margaret changed seats and sat next to Benny, their exchange having migrated to a sisterly tone. He thought the substance of Margaret’s input would obviate anything he could say. Maybe you should go home, honey.…

  He leaned back in his chair. He let his eyes drift around the busy room. Everybody was having a good time. The woman with the gold riding crop was stroking it across some old fart’s bald spot. His friends were laughing big, male, locker-room belly laughs. Full and red-cheeked. There was a great quantity of Scotch going down and many, many cigars being waved around.

  Olli was offered a Scotch with this very thought, leaning back in his chair thinking about it and watching through the front window as Kiwi hailed a cab and disappeared into the night. Just thinking about that and a voice next to his ear said: “Scotch, sir?”

  “What do you have?” he asked by mistake.

  “Glenmorangie, Loch Dhu, Balvenie, Dalwhinnie, Glen-kinchie, Cragganmore, Oban, Talisker, Lagavulin, Macallan, Laphroaig, Connemara, Glenhaven and Sheep Dip.”

  They didn’t even have Glenfiddich. But he was thinking of Jeremy anyway. Not his taste, Scotch, was it? Ever. Even years ago, years and years. Decoder years when they used to go out together and get right polluted. When life had been a developed, consensual, rockabilly fantasy and that had been just fine.

  “You have Irish whiskey?”

  Of course they did. Black Bush, Jameson, Paddy’s, Power’s—

  He cut the waiter off. “Bushmills is fine.” He pressed a twenty into the man’s palm and looked back towards the closed kitchen door. “Bring the bottle,” Olli said.