The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Power’s out!” Dank air weighted her lungs. She sat up, felt woozy, flexed her toes, lay back down.

  Next time she came to, a green light bathed her small chamber, emanating from a narrow hallway. She swung out of bed and discovered that she was wearing a set of white pajamas similar to Bruce’s; her shoes and socks were missing; her hair was wrenched back in a bun. Her great wool bag rested on a bench on the far side of the room, and she rifled through it until she found a pair of flip-flops and her cake knife.

  She crept down the hall toward the light, fixing an overhand grip on the cake knife for maximum-power downward stabs. A green lamp was posted beside a door, which she yanked open with her free hand and charged through into a sheer white electrified den. A series of huge red-lettered signs screamed to shower and suit up, complete with directions to changing facilities, but those were obvious red herrings; her chef sense was tingling, and she knew her creep captor was dead ahead through the big steel door marked DO NOT ENTER, though it didn’t budge until she’d gone through a few hundred numerical combinations on the keypad, fast typing having always been one of her strengths.

  She leaned into a gray bunker lined with a row of hoop-ring cabinets, a wall of refrigerators to the left, an enormous iron range heating eight pans of odorless goop to the right, the cumulative soul of a dentist’s office. In the middle, a moon suit turned away from a long banquet table covered in blinking green computer screens and shuffled her way.

  “Nice place you got here,” Esmerelda quipped, easily dodging the moon suit’s lethargic advance and skipping out to the perimeter. “What do they call this? Industrial chic? Bet it impresses the Eastern Bloc girls.”

  The moon suit jammed a glove to its neck. “You are in serious danger,” Bruce’s voice crackled. “Please, return to the clean room.”

  Esmerelda pulled open a drawer, lifted out a steel brick. “Whatcha got in here, building supplies?”

  “Tellurium,” the glove buzzed. “Radioactive.”

  “Eww!” Esmerelda threw the brick back in and wiped her hands on her apron. “What‘s in the other cubbies?”

  “Most of the items on the periodic table. Plus essences. Scents. New strains from the lab arrive every day.”

  The muscles in her face released in a quick and surly sag. “Whatever happened to fruits and veggies, wheat flour, plenty of good butter, and a hearty helping of creativity?”

  The moon suit stopped a few feet away, the gold face mask contorting her tall face and voluptuous apron-draped chest into a convex funhouse hologram. “Dairy’s produced daily at the barn complex. We grow local fruits and vegetables at the farm and the greenhouse, with nonnative greens arriving on daily shipments at the landing strip. I haven’t used wheat flour for years.”

  Liquid gushed into her mouth, building ravenous hunger. “Weird,” she mumbled.

  “I’ve been working on devising more sophisticated flour blends, improving the flavor complexity and mouthfeel. A creamy pistachio flour for summertime wedding cakes, for example; a coconut-and-gum-tree flour that will revolutionize hot cross buns. Recently I’ve been tinkering with a blend of acacia, kudzu, and field grass that makes for an unbeatable loaf of country bread. But if you prefer wheat flour, that’s easy—we’ll have it here tonight.”

  “Who’s we?” Esmerelda asked, heavens streaming into her skull.

  “Yakob, the caretaker, planter, milker, feeder, dishwasher, choremaster, all-around handyman. Won’t see him much, but he’s around.”

  She posted a hand on a table and felt sparks fly inside her head, the imagination engine room firing up to speed. “Can I see the dairy barn?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow. First you need a laser bath, some injections. Then a welcome salad. Here, start with water,” he ordered, pulling a retractable tube from the ceiling. “You’ll need more sleep too—zazen starts at 4:30 AM.”

  At his command she stripped, let the white flashes kill her coating of skin cells, and accepted a procession of colorful vials into her forearm. She ate his plain salad as instructed: each forkful a quarter leaf of lettuce with three shreds of cucumber, chewing fifty times and circulating the vegetable mess counterclockwise in her mouth, fifty milliliters of lemon water after every five cycles. By the end of it she felt fresh as a doe on a morning trot through the woods, nibbling dewdropped greens with the freedom of open land throbbing in her neck, though partially that was due to all the munching she had to do—which also explained why Bruce’s jaw was built like a boxer’s fist and probably just as dangerous.

  “Enough of the salad bar,” she pronounced, “let’s get our bake on. Where do you keep the Cuisinart?”

  “Patience,” Bruce murmured, moving his fingers against her temples in a reassuring progression.

  “Not really my strong suit—” Esmerelda admitted, whereupon Bruce’s hands found their mark and she keeled over the table in a deep and dreamless slumber.

  A soaring symphony roused her on her cot. She followed the music to a small chapel covered in miniature paintings, elephant men with eight heads bashing swords and blowing flames, hordes of winged monkeys attacking island goblins, giants hurling mountains into seas. Following Bruce’s lead she kneeled over a pillow and balanced on her haunches and attempted to throw memory to the clouds, forgetting where she was and what couldn’t be, relying on the low oval “Om” word to carry her to a clearing in the wilderness, the purr of controlled agony, a trail of bread crumbs leading home.

  When the droning was over, she stood and tied an apron tight round her torso. She felt cleansed, hands ripe and ready to make and bake, an even hunger stretched through her stomach. They funneled down another tunnel toward what was certainly the kitchen, the same green glow in the distance, her chef senses picking up massive stores of ingredients, the microscopic crumbs and fibers that eluded Yakob’s intensive nightly scrubdown and bleach. “Glad to be getting down to business,” she chirped. “Zen stuff’s nice, but it ain’t paying the bills. Now how’s about you show me the tricks to your cake baking and I’ll put you in touch with the best cowman this side of Cheyenne.”

  “This morning you will wash the measuring cups,” Bruce announced. “When you’re done, read the first five chapters of this.” He handed her a textbook the size of a suitcase. “I’ll collect you for lunch.”

  Esmerelda let the book slam to the floor, its thunderous thomp somewhat deadened by the humid cave stones but still a significant disruption to the tranquil morning of whispers and natural calm. “First thing’s first. You ain’t Kemo Sabe and I ain’t Tonto. Get Yakoff Smirnoff to do the dishes, because I’m too good at what I do to put up with the wax-on wax-off circle jerk. As for your homework assignment, I did my time in the education system already, and now I’m done.” She kicked the book against the wall, the spine slap accentuating her point: “Your move, Kasparov. Either suit me up and put me in the game or get me the hell home.”

  Nothing moved on Bruce’s steely face, his lips flat ingots, eyes sturdy bolts, nose a metallic shark fin. A minute of robotic silence geared by, the green light steady as a sun. Then his parts mobilized, joints compressed and flexed, his face lit with the first snatch of warmth she’d seen in her stay. “Come along,” he said brightly, “let’s make some music.”

  “Dairy barn first,” she insisted.

  “Don’t push it,” he retorted, and instead helped her into her own moon suit and spent the next eight hours leading her around the kitchen on his quest to manufacture a frosting that tasted of berry fields without a powdery aftertaste. For dinner Bruce smoked a half lamb and Esmerelda boiled up a wild-raisin-and-boar risotto, and they chattered on about chemical formulations and ideal boysenberry planting conditions into the wee hours. In the morning Esmerelda skipped the meditation routine to fry up a pan of honey bacon and eggs, which they ate quietly over copies of Cook’s Illustrated. After a tour of the dairy barn—identical in most ways to Jamison’s, the biggest difference being the music, exclusively classical s
trings rather than the mix of honky-tonk harmonica and sports radio Camden preferred—they returned to the kitchen with a bucket of silky butter, which they used to bake a guava flan pie paired with spearmint ice cream and topped with chorizo brisket. “Holy hacksaw, we got ourselves a hit,” Esmerelda declared three bites in. “What do you say we go to Vegas, put our names in lights?”

  “Not so fast,” Bruce said, jotting down a list of unwelcome supplementary flavors he noticed after chasing his sampling with cheap red wine. “Doesn’t work with young merlots.”

  “Who eats guava flan pie with wine?”

  “The French.”

  “Obviously,” she said, and plunged into a round of merry guffaws until she saw he really meant it.

  “Additionally, if you let the pie settle in an environment warmer than seventy-nine degrees, the guava tastes off, almost rotten. The chorizo’s smokiness feels congested and slightly unnatural, like car camping as opposed to a backcountry hike. For people drinking gin cocktails, the pie will sometimes have a bitter aftertaste.”

  “Yeah, well, they’ll live. And love.” She licked her fork clean, felt the warmth in her chest settle and spread. “C’mon, Brucey boy—this pie’s the bomb. It slices, it dices, it’ll do your laundry and mow the lawn. Hell, you could sell it for brunch since it’s got fruit and sausage, perfect for him and her. Let’s put it out and get rich.”

  Bruce completed his notes and took another swig of merlot, his eyes misting and contorting. Sweat beaded to his forehead like lunar modules; he moved his head plaintively, a slow bobblehead roll. “It’s not perfect,” he informed her.

  “It’s pretty darn close,” she responded. “What are you, chicken?”

  Bruce splashed down another hit of wine and explained in a low voice that as a young pastry chef known as Herman Sprutz he’d worked at Vida Vida, an ultra-hip experimental restaurant in an unmarked warehouse lost in the thick of the Dogpatch, where he put together several of the most decadent dessert offerings ever known to mankind, one of which had been dressed with a synthetic compound not far off from heroin that had indirectly resulted in the deaths of multiple dinner guests—primarily Japanese tourists, but a few Americans, and, toward the end, one local, a reliable and simpleminded mail carrier celebrating his sixtieth birthday with a rare night out. Court proceedings had absolved Herman of all liability, but the mail carrier’s family and dinner companions had raised a stink in the local media, with all the families on his daily route piling on, so that the name Herman Sprutz, while beloved by serious gourmands across the globe, had been effectively turned to mush in Northern California and most of the world as well. No eatery would let him in the door, investors shunned his new restaurant pitches—he couldn’t even get a job sacking groceries—so he’d gone the name-changing-and-plastic-surgery route, emphasizing squares and hard corners, projecting strength through his face. After a lengthy recovery on a remote Thai island he’d launched his comeback running a low-budget churro stand in the Mission called Zoog’s Chocolate Fugue, a clever bit of assonance backed up by a sensational chocolate dipping sauce that attracted a huge number of intoxicated San Franciscans after bars closed and generated more than enough buzz to open the mind-shattering North Beach cake shop he’d always dreamed of. From whence came the fame, the money, the freedom to seek perfection in his own personal underground lair.

  “I often invoke the metaphor of music,” he concluded. “A conductor strives to intertwine the talents of excellent individual musicians to produce impeccable orchestral experiences, a universe of sound. With all the variables cross-tabulated and accounted for, can we create a masterful experience every time? Can perfection be sustained? Will the concerto linger in the blood for the rest of the listener’s life?”

  “Probably not,” Esmerelda drawled, helping herself to another plate of pie. “People got too much to remember.”

  “No. Superior experiences always are so. Think back to your most electrifying life events.” Esmerelda dug back in the mud, came up with high school graduation and gossip magazines, a lot of time on the couch, hours of television and dozing and solitaire and snacks. “These are immortal sources of joy. The brasserie in Paris. The café in Rome. The funnel cake at the county fair. The stuff of memories and deathbed reminiscing. These are the moments that make life worth living. This is the food I must make.”

  Esmerelda gave the thought a couple of nods, then polished off her slice and picked her teeth clean with a fingernail. “Spend your life chasing perfect and you’ll probably never get it. So I say you get pretty close and drink up. Like this pie”—she knifed off a little sliver, last piece, that was it, to prove her point only—“damn good so long as you don’t drown it in shit French wine.”

  Bruce untucked his napkin, rose, and poured the remainder of his wine over the pie plate. “Good night,” he said leadenly, and left, leaving Esmerelda to fully explore the chemical interactions between merlot, guava, flan, and chorizo. She forced down the rest of the prototype in the noble name of research.

  The next day they worked on a barley wine pudding that literally simmered on the tongue, evaporating into a spray that coated teeth and needed a slice or two of olive-cherry bread to level out, ideal for rustic retreats and destination restaurants and even gourmet camping trips. Bruce found it overpowering when consumed with a half bottle of fino sherry, but Esmerelda managed to push down all of her portion as well as Bruce’s leftovers, then finished the other half of the Sandeman bottle for the sake of completeness. Next night was a cottage cheese- stuffed pork roast slathered with hickory and lime—a couple flecks too dry for Bruce, impeccable according to Esmerelda; all it needed was a six-pack of Hefeweizen to flush out the juices. On it went, a vat of crawfish jambalaya, squid truffle paste, cherry-apple-pork-chop marmalade, gooseneck onion goulash brewed with platinum flakes, emu casserole slow-cooked with periwinkle nutmeg and served with gingerbread pretzels, candy-cane venison stew, armadillo caper soup. Each dish loaded with otherworldly flavor sensations, titillating textures and exquisite composition, an overarching sense of painting on a bigger canvas, the sweep of history—and that was before they got to the desserts. Cookies, brownies, puff pastries, pies, ice cream, sherbets, puddings, all exquisite and headline-worthy, but the cakes dwarfed everything else, towering leviathans, slice after slice liquefying in Esmerelda’s mouth, alighting the dim portions of her brain and helping her see across continents, into the future, through the webbing of souls. Though Esmerelda was firmly agnostic, and knew the cakes were born of trial and error, centuries of scientific research, and a generous dose of luck, she couldn’t eat a slice of Bruce’s cake without feeling the warm breath of God upon her.

  Days and weeks melted by, hours bunched up and collided, a string of unfocused photographs drying on the line, sorcery in the kitchen, hours of eating and notation, Bruce ticking off shortcomings, then back to her room and the green glowing bulb. Sleeping more and more, breath coming harder, no life in her legs. Bigger pants, shirts, and aprons waiting under her pillow. Jerry-rigged bricks and two-by-fours buttressing her cot; a second bed added alongside to accommodate her growing girth. Internal cycles slowing down. Bathroom breaks an inhumane ordeal. Mild narcolepsy setting in, first sudden naps in the kitchen, then clocking out at meals, later falling asleep willynilly, night and day meaningless conceptual exercises, a life of black and white and the green glowing bulb. She developed the unfortunate habit of passing out face-first into her fourth or fifth dessert of the evening, a potentially life-snuffing series of collapses that tested Bruce’s footwork, bench press capacity, and emergency medical training as he diligently cleared out her air passages and hurled her back into life.

  One morning, following a top-dollar dinner of catfish quiche and pear-shiitake upside-down cake, Esmerelda was hauling herself off her cot combo when she caught a new aroma in the air: grease and perspiration with a bitter, lonely bite. “Who’s there?” she murmured, settling onto her back with a manic grin, unable to disguise how glad sh
e was to justify a break with the threat of home invasion.

  “Yakob, miss.” A small man glided out of a corner, his face covered in fur, a felt cap pulled low over his eyes.

  “You! Glad to make the acquaintance. Doing a bang-up job keeping us running and all. Even baked you a cake a few weeks back, left it out with a note.”

  “My day off, miss.”

  “You can take my word that it was a good one. Braised vanilla asparagus cake, I believe. I’ll make you another tonight.”

  “Probably shouldn’t, miss.” He grabbed his hat and stuffed it into his pocket, revealing a field of wire hair sprigs lining a smooth bald crown.

  “Why not?”

  He rubbed his head with his knuckles. “You should go, miss.”

  She floundered through her new waterlogged laugh, deeper and more authoritative thanks to enhanced vocal insulation. “Go where? Got about the best gig you can think of. The stuff we’re making here? I love it. The best. Strike that”—she launched a baggy arm in the air—“the best of the best. We’re a crack team, the kitchen Green Berets. Once we go public, the world won’t know what hit it.”

  Yakob moved toward the exit, the comforting silence of solitude. “Better go,” he mumbled, “this place is killing you.”

  “All we’re killing is bad taste,” Esmerelda shouted back, but Yakob was already gone.

  She prowled through the day feeling nasty, grumbling expletives every minute or so, dropping pans and scalding her stir fry, the evening’s marzipan malt-ball cake so badly undercooked even she had to admit it was a loser, though she did eat the whole thing just to be sure. Back on her cot early, she listened to her heart throb, felt her flesh squirm, tracked her shuddering lungs, her skin dead to the world, from every angle fulfilling the role of immovable object, a jackknifed tractor trailer paralyzing freeway traffic.

  She was ready when Yakob arrived in the dead of night, her wool bag packed and slung over her shoulder, her fat feet packed into sensible walking shoes, a long pizza-oven poker serving as a hiking staff. But even appropriately appointed she needed a solid hour to putter down the couple-hundred-yards-long tunnel to the road, still plenty of time before Bruce finished his early-morning Buddhist chanting but putting Yakob well behind on his nightly schedule, a concern manifested in watch-checking every three minutes, the regular refolding of his cap in his pocket, the grind of his knuckles into his bald spot. Eventually she made it outside and, rejuvenated by the clean air and natural lighting, posted herself on the shoulder with her thumb out after a mere ten minutes. A cattle trucker pulled over a half hour later, thinking one of his stock might’ve somehow gotten into a clothesline, and graciously loaded her into the back, where she nested on hay and dozed amid tail swats for the drive back to the city.