How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

by N. K. Jemisin

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled, coolly professional. “Thank you sir. Anything else for you, madame?”

  “Some ice for my companion’s fat head,” Yvette said sweetly. I gave the waiter credit for not laughing.

  “I’ll return shortly with your wine,” he said. “Enjoy your evening at Maison Laveau.”

  The wine threw me first. I dismissed the fact that it came in an ancient-looking bottle whose label looked handwritten and whose cork had been sealed with what seemed to be dripped wax. Theatrics. But the wine itself was light, exquisite, and filled with a complexity of flavors that couldn’t possibly have come from some grocery aisle bottle. I didn’t know if that was the taste of a priceless wine or not, but it was more than worth whatever they charged for it.

  Then they brought the meal, and at that point I began to wonder if I was losing my mind.

  It was the meal. The same meal, down to the least spice as the hostess had promised, down to the distinctive Spanish Cadi butter that Angelina had always sworn by. Five dishes: crown roast of pork, broiled merlitons filled with a delicate crawfish-and-remoulade stuffing, honey-poached artichoke hearts, watermelon salad with tomatillo and tamarind, and a selection of petit fours for dessert. I tasted each dish, and flinched as every bite awakened a memory. The pork: lying in Angelina’s bed while she practiced techniques in the kitchen, filling the apartment with scents that awakened more than one kind of hunger in me. The petit fours: She’d always been so good with sweets. We’d once made love with a bowl of vanilla-anise sugar she’d made. I’d drizzled it between her breasts and been fascinated by the unique taste even as she giggled and wriggled to reach my sugared parts. We were high on sugar and youth and love and we’d believed nothing could ever separate us—

  I looked up at Yvette, who raised her eyebrows pointedly at me.

  “How can this be?” I asked.

  “No one knows,” she said. “They don’t tell, and I haven’t asked.”

  I stared at her. “What did you order? The first time?”

  Her smile never faltered, but her gaze grew distant and wistful. I wondered whether she, too, was remembering her first love.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “But I have no doubt that they got it right, because I was crying by dessert.”

  “I want to see the kitchen,” I said at the end of the meal.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s not permitted,” said the hostess.

  “Then I’d like to meet the chef.”

  “I’m afraid that can’t be done either. I’m very sorry.”

  “Leave it, Harold,” Yvette said. “Do you have to question everything?”

  Not everything. Just this. Just the fact that they had perfectly captured the taste of one of the sweetest nights of my life, and left my heart aching eight ways to Sunday. “There has to be some trick to this,” I said. “How could they know? How could they get it right? Did you tell them?”

  “Of course not. I know you and Angelina met while she was in school, but I didn’t know you were even there for her certification exam, and I certainly don’t know what you ate.”

  “You were friends with her. She must have told you.”

  “I was friends with both of you,” Yvette replied. “But more with you than her. Frankly I haven’t seen her since you two split, and before that, we certainly didn’t go gabbing with each other over all and sundry. I think she was always a little suspicious of me.” She gave me a wry smile.

  Yvette and I had been friends since Tulane, in one of those bizarre mélanges that never seemed to happen outside university walls—the Southern belle and the New York Jew, old money and new, nothing but our souls in common. We’d been close enough to alarm her parents and revolt mine, united by her jaded wit and my cynicism. (Our parents needn’t have worried; we knew better.) We talked to each other about everything. But it wasn’t Yvette who had broken up Angelina and me. That had been my fault.

  “How could they know?” I asked again, and she sighed and put a hand on mine.

  “Does it really matter, Harold? It’s a memory. Did you question it the first time it happened? Then don’t question it now.”

  “I want to come back here,” I said.

  The hostess gave me a bright smile and opened a heavy book bound in black leather. “We have an opening in July. Would you like a reservation?”

  “Yes, I’ll—” I started. It was August. “Next year?”

  She nodded, her lovely eyes dark with sympathy. “This is another reason we limit our clientele, sir. I’m very sorry.”

  In the end, I took the reservation. Yvette was pleased; she thought I wanted to bring someone else here, and she needled me to find out who. The truth was that I had no plans to bring anyone else. I just wanted to see the place again, get another chance at fathoming its secret. The hunger to know burned in me right alongside the warm satisfaction of the meal itself, and underneath all of that lay anger. It was irrational anger, I knew. Someone had looked into my heart and found a long-forgotten moment of love, plucked it forth and dusted it off and polished it up and shoved it back in, sharp and shiny and powerful as it had been on the day the memory was made. But I didn’t have Angelina anymore, and that turned the memory from one of sweetness into one of pain.

  So I had to know how they’d done it.

  That was why, when the server returned to inquire whether we needed anything, I smiled up at him and asked, “Where’s your restroom?”

  The bathroom was as quaint as the rest of the place—wood-paneled, containing a side-by-side toilet and bidet and an enormous porcelain sink in the style of Louis the XIV’s Versailles, though of course it had to be a replica as well. I was tempted to try the bidet just for kicks, but I had more important experiments to undertake, and so I slipped out of the bathroom as quietly as I could.

  Yvette suspected what I was up to. It hadn’t been difficult to read her face while the server gave me instructions to reach the men’s room. But she said nothing, merely sighing and shaking her head as I walked away. There was a part of me which worried whether our friendship would survive this night. Jaded or not, Yvette had a powerful sense of propriety, and I was testing its limits, I knew. But I had no choice. I had to know.

  The bathroom was at the end of a narrow, dimly lit corridor around a corner from the dining room. At the far end of the corridor was a spiral staircase leading down. That in itself was suspicious. Even in the 1800s, New Orleans had been New Orleans, where the dead could not be buried below ground and dowsers ran mad in white linen, and basements were as mythical as unicorns. I lurked in the corridor awhile, pretending to fumble for a cigarette as another waiter came up the steps with a heavy tray balanced on the fingertips of one hand. As soon as he’d gone ’round the corner to the dining room, I crept to the staircase and hurried down. I could hear the sounds of a busy kitchen below, clanking plates and sizzling food and orders being called back and forth in barely intelligible dialect. Were there four chefs? Five? My heart began to pound as I descended the stairs and the light brightened around me. They would see me the moment I reached the bottom of the stairwell. I would tell them I had gotten lost, looking for the bathroom, very sorry you understand—

  I reached the bottom step, and silence fell.

  The kitchen was empty.

  I blinked, unsure of my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I saw what I had before: a stainless-steel, perfectly modern industrial kitchen, so spick-and-span that its every surface gleamed. And it was completely empty. There were no chefs at work, though I knew I’d heard voices; there were no plates half-filled, no pans sizzling over leaping flames. There were no flames. If this kitchen had ever been used, there was no sign of it.

  I took a step forward, and the kitchen changed.

  Where there had been bright light and gleaming antiseptic surfaces, now basket-crowded shelves lined sooty stone walls. The only light in the place came from a few candles, and a briskly burning fire at the hearth—hearth?—nearby. Where there
had been a starkly empty chamber, now three men bustled frantically about a claustrophobic kitchen, one of them shouting orders in French—true French, not the New Orleans patois—at two others who hastened to obey. The pan that he moved back and forth over a black iron stove was aflame, its ingredients filling the air with the aroma of garlic and cilantro and perhaps brandy.

  “What?” It was the most intelligent question I could come up with. “Who?”

  The chefs ignored me; they were too busy. Where had the steel kitchen gone? What had just happened? I would have to brave the head chef’s wrath for answers. So I took another step forward, intending to touch the man on the shoulder. But as my foot touched the floor tiles, the kitchen changed again, and this time I stiffened in a shock so profound that if I’d been an Orthodox man, I would have said G-d had tapped me on the shoulder.

  Angelina.

  The stainless steel kitchen had returned, though it was not the same kitchen I had seen first. The configuration was different. The tiny part of me that paid attention to such irrelevancies recognized the place: the examination kitchen of the American National Culinary Institute.

  Angelina stood at a counter, tipping the bones of a crown roast with paper frills. All around her lay the signs of a massive culinary undertaking: emptied pots, a plate of stuffed mirlitons lacking only garnish, a genoise sheet cake drizzled with amaretto liqueur, a mixer holding a bowl of what looked like fondant icing. Angelina’s brow was furrowed with concentration, her movements brisk yet controlled, her face taut with that strange intensity that I knew so well. Back during our marriage, she had gotten that look with me sometimes. I’d been unnerved by it at first—was I the right man for her? did it bother her that I was losing my hair?—until I’d finally recalled seeing the same look on her face when she made her best dishes. It was a look she devoted to the most important parts of her life.

  So many questions flooded my mind as I watched her move about the kitchen. How had she gotten here? How long had she been working in this strange place? She’d become head chef at the Commander’s Palace restaurant two years before. Her work was already keeping her from me for more hours than I liked; the new job would’ve meant seeing her only on her days off, and maybe a few minutes in the evening before bed. I’d put my foot down. If you love me, you won’t take that job, I’d said. And she had said, You’ve never understood me.

  Angelina.

  “I want to understand you,” I whispered. Two years unraveled in my mind. I was there on that fateful night again, demanding that she choose between her calling and me, never realizing that even to ask was to tear her in two. That had been the end of the marriage, though it limped along another six months after that. “I didn’t understand, you were right, but I want to try again. Please, sweetheart? I just want to say I’m sor—”

  I stepped forward again and she vanished. The empty, antiseptic kitchen returned.

  “Sir.” It was the hostess. I turned to see her standing at the foot of the steps, her beautiful face a study in disappointment. “You should not be here.”

  “Angelina,” I said. It was a plea.

  Disappointment turned to pity, and the hostess sighed, coming forward to take my hands. “Just a moment in time, sir. If you tried to touch her, she would vanish. If you spoke, she did not hear. We can only recapture the past in the merest slivers—a taste, and nothing more. You could stay here and watch her make your meal over and over again, but what good would that do? Come.”

  She pulled me back toward the spiral staircase. I was terrified to lift my feet again, but nothing happened when I finally did. Somehow, the hostess held me in the present. I did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed by that.

  “What is this place?” I asked. My voice shook.

  “Just a restaurant,” she replied with a smile.

  “But—what I saw—”

  “Ah, that,” she said. “I must remind you of the agreement you signed, sir. You’ve done no harm by this—except perhaps to yourself—but please remember, every good restaurant has its secrets.”

  Some of my shock was fading; a flicker of the old skepticism returned. “Is that a threat?”

  She stopped at the top of the steps and looked at me in pure wonder. “Sir, the agreement is for your protection as much as ours. Or does it not occur to you how others will react, if you tell them what you just saw?”

  I stopped short and stared at her. There was genuine concern in her manner. And she was right, of course, because even in New Orleans no one really believed in voodoo or time-slips or whatever the hell simmered in the kitchen of the Maison Laveau. One of the oldest insane asylums in the country was just a little ways up the river, after all.

  “Now come,” she said, taking my hand again and patting it in that familiar, motherly Southern manner. “You’ve left your lady friend waiting all this time; that’s most unkind of you, sir. She’s been worried.”

  Worried? I doubted that. Furious was far more likely. Still, I followed the hostess back to the dining room, bracing myself. That was when I had yet another shock, for the relief that flowed into Yvette’s face made me realize that she had, indeed, been worried rather than angry. I sat down across from her again and could not meet her eyes for shame.

  “Shall I bring the check, madame?” the hostess asked.

  “Please,” Yvette said. When the hostess left, she sighed and shook her head at me. “You’re a fool, Harold.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. In hindsight, my earlier anger seemed like a fever dream; I couldn’t believe I’d been so inconsiderate. “Will this hurt your standing with the restaurant?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “Yours either. But that’s the least of the problem, Harold. Do you have any idea what could’ve happened to you?”

  Visions of the police escorting me out of the restaurant and right into involuntary commitment went through my mind. Visions of Yvette scorning me thereafter—which could still happen, I knew—followed. “I’m sorry,” I said again, knowing that it was wholly inadequate. “I just had to know.”

  She shook her head, rubbing her temple as if her head ached. “People can get lost in their memories, Harold,” she said. “You’re worse at it than anyone else I know. Angelina’s alive, right here in this city, and all you’ve ever had to do was call her. But what do you do? You go looking for the Angelina you lost years ago. I don’t know what to do with you.”

  The male server swept by and deposited the bill so smoothly that I hardly even noticed. Yvette picked it up, scribbled something on the slip, and handed me the envelope containing my NDA photocopy. “Let’s go.”

  I got up and held her coat for her, taking it as a small positive sign that she deigned to let me drape it over her shoulders. Still, she wasn’t going to let me forget this for quite some time, and I couldn’t really say I blamed her. She’d given me the most amazing birthday gift in the world, and I’d tried to take it apart to see how it worked.

  Still …

  “If you could have only seen it, Yvette,” I said as we walked to the door. I was conscious of the servers moving past us, and the hostess up ahead; I kept my voice low. “The kitchen … it’s the most amazing thing.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I want to keep my memories sweet.”

  “Until July, sir,” said the hostess as we left. “Au revoir.”

  Yvette eventually forgave me, although it took some doing. In the end I had to offer her something of value equal to my insult—an introduction in this case, to a wealthy and recently widowed gentleman client of mine. Last I heard, they were planning a vacation together in Monaco.

  It kept at me, though, the things she’d said, and the hostess’s pity. Was it really wrong of me to remember the past fondly? It wasn’t, of course it wasn’t—but the past was an easy meal, after all. I could taste it again anytime I wanted, in memory, and it would always be perfect and true. The here-and-now, though, had no recipe. It might be sour or bitter or raw. And yet.

 
In July, I canceled my reservation to the Maison Laveau. And in August, I gave Angelina a call.

  Stone Hunger

  Once there was a girl who lived in a beautiful place full of beautiful people who made beautiful things. Then the world broke.

  Now the girl is older, and colder, and hungrier. From the shelter of a dead tree, she watches as a city—a rich one, big, with high strong walls and well-guarded gates—winches its roof into place against the falling chill of night. The girl has never seen anything like this city’s roof. She’s watched the city for days, fascinated by its rib cage of metal tracks and the strips of sewn, oiled material they pull along it. They must put out most of their fires when they do this, or they would choke on smoke—but perhaps with the strips in place, the city retains warmth enough to make fires unnecessary.

  It will be nice to be warm again. The girl shifts her weight from one fur-wrapped thigh to the other, her only concession to anticipation.

  The tree in whose skeletal branches she crouches is above the city, on a high ridge, and it is one of the few still standing. The city has to burn something, after all, and the local ground does not have the flavor of coal-land, sticky veins of pent smoky bitterness lacing through cool bedrock. In the swaths of forest the city-dwellers have taken, even the stumps are gone; nothing wasted. The rest has been left relatively unmolested, though the girl has noted a suspicious absence of deadfall and kindling wood on the shadowed forest floor below. Perhaps they’ve left this stand of trees as a windbreak, or to keep the ridge stable. Whatever their reasons, the city-dwellers’ forethought works in her favor. They will not see her stalking them, waiting for an opportunity, until it is too late.

  And perhaps, if she is lucky—

  No. She has never been lucky. The girl closes her eyes again, tasting the land and the city. It is the most distinctive city she has ever encountered. Such a complexity of sweets and meats and bitters and … sour.

  Hmm.

  Perhaps.