“Will you take my order, Julia?”
“Why don’t you go away, Lionel? Please.” It was pitying and bitter and desperate at once. She wanted to spare us both. I had to know from what.
“I want to try some uni. Some-orphan ocean ice cream!-some urchin eggs. See what all the fuss is about.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Can it be done up as a sandwich of some kind? Like an uni-salad sandwich?”
“It’s not a sandwich spread.”
“Okay, well, then just bring me out a big bowl and a spoon. I’m really hungry, Julia.”
She wasn’t paying attention. The door had opened, pale sunlight flaring into the orange and pink cavern of the room. The hostess bowed, then led the Fujisaki Corporation to a long table in the middle of the room.
It all happened at once. There were six of them, a vision to break your heart. I was almost glad Minna was gone so he’d never have to face it, how perfectly the six middle-aged Japanese men of Fujisaki filled the image the Minna Men had always strained toward but had never reached and never would reach, in their impeccably fitted black suits and narrow ties and Wayfarer shades and upright postures, their keen, clicking shoes and shiny rings and bracelets and stoic, lipless smiles. They were all we could never be no matter how Minna pushed us: absolutely a team, a unit, their presence collective like a floating island of charisma and force. Like a floating island they nodded at the sushi chef and at Julia and even at me, then moved to their seats and folded their shades into their breast pockets and removed their beautifully creased felt hats and hooked them on the coatrack and I saw the shine of their bald heads in the orange light and I spotted the one who’d spoken of marshmallows and ghosts and bowel movements and picnics and vengeance and I knew, I knew it all, I understood everything at that moment except perhaps who Bailey was, and so of course I ticced loudly.
“I scream for ur-chin!”
Julia turned, startled. She’d been staring, like me, transfixed by Fujisaki’s splendor. If I was right she’d never seen them before, not even in their guises as monks.
“I’ll bring your order, sir,” she said, recovering gracefully. I didn’t bother to point out that I hadn’t exactly placed an order. Her panicked eyes said she couldn’t handle any banter right then. She collected the bamboo-covered menu, and I saw her hand trembling and had to restrain myself from reaching for it to comfort her and my syndrome both. She turned again and headed for the kitchen, and when she passed Fujisaki’s table, she managed a brave little bow of her own.
A few members of the corporation turned and glanced at me again, ever so lightly and indifferently. I smiled and waved to embarrass them out of giving me the once-over. They went back to their conversation in Japanese, the sound of which, trickling over the carpet and polished wood in my direction, was a choral murmur, a purr.
I sat still as I could and watched as Julia reemerged to take their drink order and pass out menus. One of the suits ignored her, leaned back in his seat, and transacted directly with the sushi chef, who grunted to show comprehension. Others unfolded the spiny menu and began to grunt as well, to jabber and laugh and stab their manicured fingers at the laminated photographs of fish inside. I recalled the monks in the Zendo, the pale, saggy flesh, the scanty tufts of underarm hair that now hid behind the million-dollar tailoring. The Zendo seemed a distant and unlikely place from where I sat now. Julia went back through the kitchen doors and came out carrying a large steaming bowl and a small trivet with daubs of bright color on it. With thesehe threaded past Fujisaki, to my table.
“Uni,” she said, nodding at the tiny block of wood. It held a thick smudge of green paste, a cluster of pink-hued shavings from a pickled beet or turnip, and a gobbet of glistening orange beads-the urchin eggs, I supposed. It wasn’t three bites of food altogether. The bowl she set down was a touch more promising. The broth was milky white, its surface rippled from underneath by a thick tangle of vegetables and chunks of chicken, and decorated on top by sprigs of some sort of exotic parsley.
“I also brought you something you might actually like,” she said quietly as she drew a small ceramic ladle and a pair of inlaid chopsticks out of a pouch in her robe and set them at my place. “It’s Thai chicken soup. Eat it and go, Lionel. Please.”
Tie-chicken-to-what? went my brain. Tinker to Evers to Chicken.
Julia returned to Fujisaki’s table with her order pad, to contend with the corporation’s contradictory barked commands, their staccato pidgin English. I sampled the uni, scraping it up in the ladle-chopsticks were not my game. The gelatinous orange beads ruptured in my mouth like capers, brackish and sharp but not impossible to like. I tried mixing the three bright colors on the wood, blobbing the tacky green paste and the shreds of pickled radish together with the eggs. The combination was something else entirely: An acrid claw of vapor sped up the back of my throat and filled my nasal cavity. Those elements were apparently not meant to be mixed. My ears popped, my eyes watered, and I made a sound like a cat with a hairball.
I’d garnered Fujisaki’s attention once again, and the sushi chef’s as well. I waved, face flushed bright red, and they nodded and waved back, bobbed their heads, returned to talking. I ladled up some of the soup, thinking at least to flush the poisons off the sensitive surface of my tongue. Another reverse: The broth was superb, a reply and rebuke to the toxic explosion that had preceded it. It transmitted warmth in the other direction, down into my gullet and through my chest and shoulders as it passed. Levels of flavor unfolded, onion, coconut, chicken, a piquancy I couldn’t place. I scooped up another ladleful, with a strip of chicken this time, and let the nourishing fire flow through me again. Until placed in this soup’s care I hadn’t realized how chilled I was, how starved for comfort. It felt as if the soup were literally embracing my heart.
The trouble came with the third spoonful. I’d dredged low, come up with a tangle of unidentifiable vegetables. I drank down more of the broth, then gnawed on the mouthful of pungent roughage that was left in my mouth-only some of it was rougher than I might have liked. There was some resilient, bladelike leaf that wasn’t losing the contest with my teeth, was instead beginning to triumph in an unexpected skirmish with my gums and the roof of my mouth. I chewed, waiting for it to disintegrate. It wouldn’t. Julia appeared just as I’d reached in with my pinkie to clear it from my mouth.
“I think part of the menu got into the soup,” I said as I ejected the bulrushes onto the table.
“That’s lemongrass,” said Julia. “You’re not supposed to eat it.”
“What’s it doing in the soup, then?”
“Flavor. It flavors the soup.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “What’s the name again?”
“Lemongrass,” she hissed. She dropped a slip of paper onto the table by my hand. “Here’s your check, Lionel.”
I reached for her hand where it covered the slip but she pulled it away, like some version of a children’s game, and all I got was the paper.
“Lasagna ass,” I said under my breath.
“What?”
“Laughing Gassrog.” This was more audible, but I hadn’t disturbed Fujisaki, not yet. I looked up at her helplessly.
“Good-bye, Lionel.” She hurried away from my table.