The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  Storing meat in a cool basement is strictly short-term. If it’s down there for more than four hours it starts to attract raised eyebrows from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and if you run a restaurant called Carnage which uses “meat reenvisioned” as its high concept, you’d better be reliably getting DHMH to give you sheets of paper with a giant letter A on them or you’re pretty much fucked. So the next part of her job is to take whatever heap of meat is on hand and reduce it down to manageable pieces, ideally pieces that demonstrate some level of finesse, pieces the chefs won’t bring back to you and wave in your face while calling you a talentless abortionist.

  She fishes her battered, seven-year-old iPod out of her apron pocket and slams it into the SoundDock that she keeps on the highest shelf in the prep area (Guychardson, who’s about five foot four, can’t meddle with it up there unless he gets a stool). She punches play on the work playlist, which kicks off with Swans. “Raping a Slave.” As the kitchen fills with thudding, dirgelike percussion, she pulls her knife kit out from under her station and approaches the prep table, where Guychardson has arranged four sides of pork.

  Together, they butcher.

  She saws her side into thirds, grunts as she works the saw through the aitchbone. Takes the middle section and separates it: chops, ribs. Saws the chops from the backbone, then switches from saw to trimmer as the music switches from no-wave pummel to annihilatory black metal shredding. This mix is eight hours of the kind of music that keeps you from thinking about yourself too hard, which is why she likes it. Guychardson whistles a jaunty melody over the top of it, possibly to annoy her; when she looks up he is pretending to play a set of ribs like a xylophone. He looks like something out of a macabre old-time cartoon. She smirks, in spite of herself, and goes back to finishing the chops; she slaps them down on a twelve-inch platter and racks it in the end-loading cart. She removes some belly fat and plops it into a steel bucket: Angel will turn it into something tasty later.

  She gets the loin out and drops it on another platter, racks it, moves to working on separating the bacon from the ribs. She spares a glance at Guychardson’s work at the other end of the prep table, notes that he’s begun on the rear third of his side, cutting out the hams. That’s her least favorite task to perform on any pig; it takes time, and breaks up the flow of the work. She envies Guychardson his pace. He’s faster than she is. At that part anyway.

  They only work together two days a week, Friday and Saturday, prepping for the really busy nights. The rest of the week Guychardson’s at a Caribbean joint somewhere in Brooklyn and Ollie’s on her own here. But even though they spend only two days a week together, they’ve developed a rivalry. They race. They track who’s ahead, who’s made more animals disappear into the walk-in, who’s produced more finished cuts. It’s friendly, sort of. Or, more accurately, it has the surface appearance of being friendly. In reality there’s an edge to it. Guychardson wins almost every night. She thinks he must be cheating.

  The competition has left its mark on her. At the end of one shift last winter, she was going too fast, trying to catch up, and she took off the edge of her left pointer finger, leaving a quarter-inch sliver of flesh on the surface of the prep table. She clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth and closed her eyes, and when she felt the blood begin to well out she clenched her right hand around the wound as if she could unmake her mistake through the application of pressure alone. When the chefs figured out what happened they poured her three shots of whiskey and made her stick the finger into a chafing dish full of kosher salt. She remembers the scream she let out. She doesn’t remember what happened to the tiny filet of finger-meat; it amuses her to think that it might have ended up accidentally swept into a sausage bucket and served to some unsuspecting customer.

  Before that, about a year ago now, just after she’d first started working with Guychardson, she’d asked him how he was able to bone out the hams so effectively. He gave her a grin she immediately thought of as shit-eating and said, “I’m a man, baby.” She has tried to make herself believe that he’d said I’m the man, but he hadn’t: she knew it then and she knows it now.

  I’m a man. His stupid answer comes to mind at least once each time they work together, percolating up unbidden through the layers of scorching drone that her SoundDock fills the kitchen with, through the work, which is supposed to ground her, keep her mind from wandering. And each time they work together—every Friday and Saturday—she reaffirms that his answer is bullshit. Being a man has nothing to do with it. He’s tiny. She’s bigger than he is, she’s stronger than he is, and she’s pretty sure there’s no other kind of inherent male advantage that could be helping him in this particular arena. And frankly, his technique isn’t any better than hers either, at least as far as she can tell.

  She takes a quick glance across the table, watches him separate a tough joint. She narrows her eyes, inspecting him.

  Maybe it’s his knife. He uses this weird knife in his kit for almost every task. The weird thing about it is that it has no spine; both sides are sharpened to an edge, like a fucking dagger or something. It’s got no bolster to speak of and the handle looks like he cut it out of a piece of oak with a saw; the whole thing looks like he might have made it in shop class when he was a kid. It makes no sense. She can’t see how anyone could get good action off that thing. But it’s clear that he cares for it. He doesn’t leave it at his station at the end of the day; he takes it with him, in a special lacquered box that only holds the one knife. So maybe there’s something about it.

  Maybe his knife is magic.

  She’s spent a lot of her life around enough people who used magic to cheat the world. She’s done it herself, though that was a long time ago, and she tries not to think about it too much, these days. And on an average shift, she stays busy—so it’s pretty easy to keep from thinking too much about anything.

  They work. They wheel filled racks into the walk-in. They drop the hocks and hams and bacon into the big brining buckets. They replenish the prep table with more meat from the basement. Angel and Jon show up. Jon, a curly-haired pirate-looking Caucasian, sticks his head in for only a second, beams a smile at them, then heads back to the front kitchen, where he will spend an hour or so planning the day’s specials out on a whiteboard. Angel, a slender guy, half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, sits in the rear kitchen with them for a couple of minutes, watching them appreciatively. Watching her. Even without turning away from the task in front of her, she can feel something in that look. An invitation. Hers to respond to or to ignore. This note in the look is something new. It started about a month ago, which, she notes, somewhat uneasily, lines up almost exactly with the date Angel’s wife moved out.

  Don’t shit where you eat, she tells herself this afternoon, as she tells herself every afternoon, when she feels the invitation in Angel’s look. But on some other level she already knows that it’s going to happen, that she will accept the invitation eventually, whether she wants to or not. It’s just a matter of time. But she makes herself not think of that. Instead, she imagines smoking a cigarette. She imagines it in great detail.

  Ollie’s playlist moves into its final songs, long pieces of Louisiana sludge rock. The basement is finally empty now, the walk-ins nearly full. She’s lost the competition again. Neither she nor Guychardson remark upon it, but she knows that he’s noticed, and she knows that he’s noticed that she’s noticed. A couple of the cooks and the lead servers have shown up, congregating around Jon’s whiteboard. Laughter and easy talk. Somebody’s turning leftover bison into the family meal.

  And at the end of that final hour she jams her iPod back in her pocket and joins everybody in the main kitchen and listens to Jon and Angel talk the staff through the plan for the night. Half-listens, really: her work for the day, at this point, is done. Sometimes, if they’re shorthanded, she’ll work an additional shift, but they don’t need her tonight, so she wolfs down an enormous bowl of shepherd’s pie and cleans up her knife kit
and dunks her apron in the laundry bin. She receives a few claps on the back from the friendlier cooks and heads out through the service entrance. She has the cigarette she fantasized about earlier, her second of the day. She’s trying to quit. Guychardson follows her out, lacquered box under his arm, and with one wave back over his shoulder at her he disappears, into the waning light.

  And then she stands there, alone, her hair and fingers stinking of iron and offal and brine and smoke, her head ringing with the memories of the roaring noise which soundtracked her day’s work. Now, on the evening air, she hears the murmur of a line out front, just beginning to form. People have come to dine on the food that she’s handled and prepped. There’s satisfaction in hearing that murmur, satisfaction in being exhausted from long hours of labor. This is as happy, these days, as she ever gets.

  She rides the 6 back to the Bronx, walks the quartermile from the station to her apartment. When she gets inside she flips on the light and finds a little tableau that Victor has laid out for her: a Glencairn whiskey glass, a spoon, an unopened bottle of single malt Scotch, and a note. TREAT FOR YOU IN THE REFRIGERATOR, says the note. PAIR W/ THE SCOTCH FOR BEST RESULTS. XOXO

  Well, OK. She opens the fridge and finds a table-setting card marked with an O, propped against a coffee mug filled with chocolate mousse.

  She sits down, fills the glass halfway with Scotch, and takes a bite of the mousse. Holds it in her mouth, disassembling it, the way she knows Victor would want her to do. She detects honey, vanilla, but also the faintest note of something dank, like a rotting leaf; echoed by the bogginess of the Scotch that she uses to swish it away. It is a wholly Victor concoction: delicious, but delicious in a way that has a little bit of difficulty in it, something the faintest bit unlikable for the mouth to puzzle over.

  She texts him as she’s mulling through the second mouthful. He’ll be at work, but somehow he manages to always be checking his phone, even in the middle of churning out God only knows how many desserts for a Friday night rush.

  TREAT DELICIOUS, she texts. WHAT’S IN IT?

  By the time he texts her back she’s forgone the spoon and has begun scraping out the recesses of the mug with her finger.

  INFUSION OF CAVENDISH TOBACCO, reads his response. It is so characteristically Victor that she has to roll her eyes. It’s a little gimmicky; it excites on a kind of shallow level, designed as much for its attention-getting qualities as for anything having to do with the way the end result will actually taste. It’s something that Victor would describe as sticky, something likely to get passed around on the food Tumblrs or whatever other Internet things he keeps up with. It’s the side of the industry that she hates—just do good work, she thinks, and you will never need to worry about all that shit—and his engagement with it would make her insane if he didn’t have the talent to make things that actually tasted good in addition to being, whatever, clickable.

  His obsession with attracting and retaining attention: she chalks it up to his one brush with celebrity some years back. He’d created a confection that ended up as the now dessert for a season: the Black Cupcake, made from squid ink and a near-perfect dark ganache. The thing landed him a gushing interview segment on the Food Network, made his career at the tender age of twenty-one. Everything he’s done since then has seemed designed, at least in part, to try to reclaim some of that glory, working hard to dispel the notion that he’s the one-hit wonder of the dessert world even though the only person in all of New York who holds that notion is probably himself.

  EXCELLENT WORK AS ALWAYS, she texts back, and she means it. She waits a minute to see if he’ll say thanks or anything, but she doesn’t really expect him to, and he doesn’t. She pours herself another glass of Scotch and downs it a little too quickly, and then staggers into her bedroom without brushing her teeth and presses her face into the pillow.

  At around three a.m. she’s awoken by the sound of fucking: Victor’s brought some boy home, as he’s known to do. She groans with irritation and slaps the wall blearily, once, twice, and then she spins back down into sleep, not quite waiting to register whether the noise has ceased.

  She dreams. Faces rise in her mind: the faces of people she doesn’t want to see, churned up by the fitfulness of her sleep. People from her life before. They float up like leaves, dislodged from somewhere down below. They break the surface of the calm black water and they turn there in a wide slow gyre, disturbing the stillness, all night long.

  2

  DEMONSTRATION

  Logan International, Boston, Massachusetts. Maja gets off the airplane, submits her form and her passport for inspection, answers the familiar questions, and, everything in order, she is once again stamped into the United States of America. She checks her watch, which she set to local time during the night, when she was over the ocean, sleepless. Her appointment with the prospective client is in three hours. She is right on schedule. Jet-lagged, of course, but she’s come to prefer doing these initial consults that way. Get off the plane, get to the client: that’s been her rule in recent years. A flight leaves her higher functions blunted and her nerves raw: put another way, it leaves her sensitized, sensitized in the exact way that makes it easier for her to do the work that the clients will be expecting.

  She drags her suitcase and garment bag into the airport bathroom, inspects her reflection in the mirror, checks her gums for bleeding. She runs a hand over her ruff of short black hair, aiming to give it some mussy volume, hoping to better show off the few thin lodes of gray. She’s forty years old this year, but flight draws out her premature markers of age, sharpens the network of lines in her face, enhances the sense that she’s lived a life spent focusing with powerful intention.

  You look good, says the Archive.

  Well, she thinks back, we all end up with the features we deserve.

  You sure about that? asks the Archive.

  This she ignores. She washes her hands for a long time in the steel sink, aware, as always, of the ways in which airports facilitate the passage of bacteria, but she doesn’t splash any water on her face: she doesn’t want to lose the dark circles under her eyes; she wants as little color as possible to return to her lips. Jet lag legitimately helps her work but it also enhances the theater of what she does, it also makes her look more dramatic, scores another point with the clients. Clients—the kind of clients who want what she has to offer, anyway—like to see her this way. A little ragged at the edges. A little haunted-looking. It makes her look exactly like the person they’re hoping will come in through the door.

  So cynical, says the Archive.

  You were always supposed to be the cynical one, she replies.

  That was a long time ago.

  Mellowing out in your old age, are you then?

  She rearranges the strap of her purse, grabs the handle of her suitcase, and heads briskly back out into the flow of people moving through the airport. She stands in a designated zone outside and catches a shuttle to a rental car place, negotiates the pickup of the compact car she’s reserved for the day. She declines the GPS that the rental agent tries to upsell her on; she curtly waves off the cheaply printed regional map that he tears off for her from a pad of same. “I know the area,” she says, in her accented English.

  The car’s been sitting in August light all morning, and as she opens the door she can feel heat push out in a wave. She lowers herself into the sun-baked driver’s seat, closes the door behind her, and smiles, allowing herself to enjoy the sensation of sudden sweat prickling in her armpits, beneath her dark blazer and her linen dress shirt. Outside of saunas she’s only experienced this kind of heat three or four times in her life, and all of them have been here, in America. It’s good to be back.

  Somebody died the last time we were in America, says the Archive. Am I remembering that right?

  They both know the answer to that, so she doesn’t reply. Instead she starts the car and turns the air conditioner on as high as it will go, lets the crisp cooling streams blast against the e
xposed bone of her sternum with the force of a massage. She’s almost embarrassed by the luxuriousness of it. She makes a series of precise, incremental adjustments to the mirrors and then heads out onto the road.

  She lied before. Back at the counter, when she said she knows the area. Not strictly true. She’s been to the States several times before but not to this sector, not to New England. Nor has she studied the area closely on any map. She could not tell you the name or number of the highway that she pulls onto to head south. She only knows that south, along this road, is the way to the client. Once she’s exchanged more than a few e-mails with someone, she knows the way.

  Before long, she’s outside the city limits. Here, both sides of the highway are lined with trees and occasional lakes. The sky is blue, dotted with thick storybook clouds and a single distant helicopter. Summertime. The nearest vehicle on the road is a Jeep, loaded up with mountain bikes and a kayak made from florescent plastic, like an enormous toy. The spare tire is hidden by a cover which bears the legend LIFE IS GOOD. Maja has to marvel at this touching declaration of optimism, so unlike anything she’d see in Norway.

  She pulls up alongside the Jeep, spares a quick look at the driver and passenger. Tanned girls, with plastic sunglasses and matching blond ponytails. They appear to be singing along exuberantly with something on the radio. Maja gives her head an almost imperceptible shake, expressing some admixture of bafflement and appreciation. She doesn’t think poorly of the girls, she just can’t imagine being them. She wonders what kind of person she would have become if she’d grown up here. Would she have soaked up solar energy and synthesized it into a greater enthusiasm for life, into the surplus of pep so evident in these two beside her?

  She knows one thing. She wouldn’t do what she does. She wouldn’t have the skill that she has. The whole reason she has it, the only reason she discovered and honed it, is because she grew up in Hammerfest, where she suffered through two months of darkness each winter. As a child, she never trusted that the sun would return. It would be gone for so long that she would begin to believe that it had been obliterated, snuffed out utterly by some cosmic malevolence. The thought would deliver her into terrors from which no assurance could release her; she would sit in her closet and shudder for hours. Eventually she learned that the fear could be dispelled if she could sense where the sun was, if she could locate it in space somewhere. It didn’t matter whether it was a few degrees beneath the horizon or on the far side of the planet; as long as she knew where it was she would feel better, breathe easier. And so it was the first thing she taught herself to find.