Stanley Park (22 page)

“Seriously,” Jeremy said. “I believe him.”

“He’s a kid,” Olli said, stopping with a plate in each hand.

“He’s a strangely wise kid.”

Olli frowned at his friend. He got weird on you sometimes without warning.

Benny cut the silence perfectly by getting up to help with the dishes. In the process of scraping quail carcasses into the garbage, she generated an exchange with Olli about which would taste better: seagulls or pigeons. Jeremy stopped listening.

“Why do you believe him?” Margaret said to Jeremy, leaning across the corner of the table and talking under the foghorn of Olli’s laughter coming from the kitchen.

Jeremy wasn’t sure. But as he considered his answer, he also got a strong, familiar feeling. The slightly cold feeling of Trout bearing down directly on him, and in a rolling instant he was wondering if Trout was at the loft rail directly above his head. Jeremy had to fight the urge to look upwards.

“I guess I don’t really know,” Jeremy said.

Margaret didn’t pursue this; she didn’t know either. She wasn’t even sure it mattered, although it made her curious.
But now Olli and Benny were back, setting liqueurs on the table: grappa, Drambuie, white port, Essencia, Bushmills for Jeremy. Olli was leading the conversation into work by talking about his trip to Washington State. Benny was handling herself with utter confidence, asking questions about the project that Olli described as “Building Libraries of Everything.”

Jeremy had lost the thread. He poured a glass of grappa for Margaret and a Bushmills for himself. He settled back in his chair.

“Massive-scale data architectures,” Olli was saying. “We have these tape robots, multi-terabytes each. A little compression software and you can take a snapshot of virtually every page of information the world has ever known. From the Book of Kells to the entire Hooters website. Whatever you can think of.”

Jeremy reflected on what seemed like a monomaniacal task. The difference between Jeremy and Olli, it might be said, was scale, that and the fact that Olli had an uncanny sense for making money in the natural orbit he established around such obsessions.

“The thing is the money,” Olli continued. “And that’s always where partners come in.”

“Enter Redmond. Enter Bill,” said Jeremy.

“That’s right,” Olli said, launching himself again through the spectacular constellations of the project. Now he was explaining what it meant to work with this galactic volume of data. Terabyte-sized data clusters. His personal underlying objective: the contents of every library, every museum, every church vault from today back through the mist of recorded history,
disseminated freely
. “Because we can,” Olli said.

“Kewl,” Benny said, her eyes glistening.

“It gets me hot,” Olli said. He poured Benny another Essencia and Jeremy saw it again, a hiccup in the physical releasing of the bottle. There was moment where he poised behind the words,
Just one
.

“Olli wants to know everything,” Margaret said. “All knowledge, all places, all the time. Isn’t that right, darling?”

Olli defended himself. If it could be done, it should be done, he argued. Feasibility was the imperative. “If it weren’t for that drive, we’d be sucking our thumbs in the shade of the Tree of Knowledge, blissed-out in fig leaves.”

Margaret rolled her eyes. Benny looked curious.

“It’s our project name,” Olli explained. “Tree of Knowledge. Remind me later and I’ll give you a sweatshirt.”

“That’s Adam and Eve and the apple, isn’t it?” Benny said, wrinkling her forehead.

“A strange myth,” Olli said. “The sin should be
not
knowing what is knowable.”

Margaret was shaking her head. “The point is, there are some things you can’t know. This is part of the architecture of knowledge Olli doesn’t like so much.” As in seismology, she went on, the use of animal behaviour to predict quakes. It worked on occasion. Haichen, 1975. A 7.3 quake predicted with unprecedented accuracy by watching the sudden migration of monkeys. They evacuated an entire region twenty-four hours before the quake. “A year later in Tanshan,” Margaret finished, “no warning of any kind. A 7.6. Two hundred and fifty thousand people dead. No peculiar animal behaviour.”

Benny didn’t get it.

“It was unknowable,” Margaret said. “Even the animals didn’t know.”

Olli looked across his corner of the table at Benny. “You may not believe it, but we’ve had this discussion before.”

“Trout’s Kawasaki episode is an example of the same kind. It is unknowable whether there will be a recurrence. We attach a probability to it, but beyond that we don’t know.”

“Long live the Human Genome Project,” Olli said.

“Which actually scares me more than it encourages me,” Margaret said, interrupting Olli. “Something about the Tower of Babel. Sorry. Can’t help it.”

“My favourite Papist,” Olli said, smiling.

“Hey, guilty.”

Olli was silent for a couple of seconds. Jeremy took Benny’s gaze and smiled at her. She returned the warmth with her eyes, the glass of golden Essencia hovering in the air below her lips. He felt a bootless foot slide across his shoe and settle between his legs, her heel on his chair. Jeremy could see from the corners of his eyes that Margaret was looking at Olli and that Olli was mesmerized briefly—one of those fleeting involuntary meditations—his eyes locked on the glistening heaving liquid in the bottles in front of him.

“I figure that the fear of knowing is like the fear of God,” Olli said finally. “And who fears God any more?”

“Godfathers,” Jeremy said. “It’s our job.”

“Besides you.” Olli said. “I just think accepting something as unknowable is a cop-out. It was a comforting thought behind which hid the prejudice and intellectual narcissism of a couple thousand years. I can appreciate that there was a certain security to be derived. It provided people with something like roots. But I prefer to celebrate the absence.”

“We don’t root any longer,” Jeremy said. “We hover.”

“Not bad. Who needed roots in the first place? Somebody told us we needed them and we believed.”

“You root, you lose,” Jeremy said.

“It’s true,” Olli said. “When the future is a promise that we can be anything we want to be, those with roots lose out. The lesson of the Tree of Knowledge is that Adam and Eve should have dug it up, tore it out of the ground and made a raft out of it.”

“Blasphemy,” Jeremy said. “But then, I’m a bit nostalgic about roots. At The Paw, after all, we’re all about reminding people what it was like to be rooted in one place. To eat things from our own soil, know what that soil could produce.”

There were times when Olli wanted to tell his friend to just cook and be quiet. That must be the beauty of cooking,
he frequently thought: There wasn’t much ideology behind it. “How’s it going down there, anyway?” he asked.

Jeremy and Benny exchanged another glance. Then a smile. Benny couldn’t hold it, and started laughing.

Olli and Margaret smiled politely.

Jeremy straightened his face. “Not altogether smoothly,” he said, answering Olli. “Although not without promise.”

“Maybe you need new ideas,” Olli said, shaking his head a little. But an idea did swim through just as he was speaking. With the restaurant established now, with the money he was making on the Tree of Knowledge. “Like a new look,” he finished.

Jeremy was curious; Margaret, dubious.

“I agree,” Benny said.

“Money would obviously be an issue,” Olli started, and for a moment it crossed his mind to suggest lunch later that week.

Jeremy caught the whiff of something. “Money
is
an issue. And there is a potential investor.”

“Oh,” Olli said. He should have known. “Do we get to know who?”

“No,” Jeremy answered. “But food-wise, he’s big. Redmond big.”

Margaret wasn’t saying anything. The news surprised her, and she couldn’t decipher the quality of Jeremy’s response to it. The whole idea of a large investor was antithetical. Not to Olli certainly, not in that world. But for Jeremy in the world he was exploring.

“And?” Olli said, exasperated. Even Benny was looking at him curiously, with real focused interest, waiting for this response.

“I’m on the fence, truthfully,” Jeremy said at last.

“Take it,” Olli said simply. He had a wash of warm feelings for his old friend that he wouldn’t want to express in any way other than with these words. Take The Money. Free yourself of the hassles I have watched you deal with, year after year.

“That’s it?” Margaret said. “You don’t know anything about this guy, and you tell him to take it.”

“It sounds really exciting,” Benny said.

Olli started to say something to Margaret, who had turned to answer Benny. Jeremy stared around the table at each of them in turn. It had never occurred to him that they would have strong feelings on how he should manage his culinary and financial future. And now everybody was talking at once. Margaret was saying that big is not necessarily beautiful. Talking about personal visions and integrity, and wasn’t it important to have independence? Olli chiming in with asides about reality and practicality and economies of scale. He heard Benny say something about the growth of a vision. About how a new look, new people, new money … how these things would facilitate evolution.
At the Inferno Pender, for example.…
She continued to surprise him with her sense of the possible, her belief in the future.

The conversation rolled on. He wasn’t even included.

Jeremy sipped his Bushmills and leaned back from the table. He let his eyes drift along the length of Margaret and Olli’s loft, the sound of their voices discussing the issues surrounding his situation filling his ears. He took in the proud size of the place, the brightly lit cityscape. He let his eyes follow the vestigial crane tracks still hung on the roof. He followed these back to the loft railing. And as he traced his eyes along this structure, his unfocused gaze snagged on a small irregularity at the smooth, stainless steel rail.

It was Trout. He was staring down from above, eyes locked on Jeremy.

It made Jeremy start. It brought him forward in the chair, like he had been pushed from behind. He returned his glass to the table with a cough.

“You OK?” Margaret said, reaching over to pat his back. Benny and Olli stopped talking and were also looking at him.

“Fine,” Jeremy said.

They resumed talking. Jeremy cracked another glance upward. Of course, his godson was gone.

When they were ready to leave, Olli made them wait while he ran into the kitchen, opened and shut cabinet doors. He found what he was looking for and returned to the hall.

It was a white mug with green embossing. A silhouette of a tree, with a single pear-shaped fruit and a coiled serpent at the base. Underneath the drawing, the words:
Tree of Knowledge ’97. Yum Good
.

“If there’s fruit to be eaten …,” Olli said to Jeremy, shaking his head.

“Eat it,” Jeremy finished.

Olli nodded, wide eyed, as if to say, What else?

Margaret and Benny had a sisterly hug. Then Benny drove him back across town into the West End.

They were parked on Haro Street in front of his building. She’d been up only once, and Jeremy thought it would be an excellent opportunity for a second visit, but she couldn’t. Early morning tomorrow at the Inferno Pender.

“You have an early morning too,” she reminded him.

“I’m gassing the morning service,” he said. “Opening at eleven. Focusing on dinner.”

She took this news in. “I’m glad,” she said finally.

“You have to move one way or the other,” he added, smiling just a little.

She nodded. They looked at each other for a few seconds.

“You think I need a new look,” he said, returning to the matter raised at dinner.

“Lose the cowboy boots,” she said.

“Hey, these are new.”

Benny became serious again. “Sure. There’s more you could do with the place. Lots more.”

“I feel like something is coming,” he said eventually. “Something is about to happen.”

“Good or bad?” Benny asked him. She was looking at him calmly, her chin resting on her arms, which were crossed on the steering wheel.

He wanted to tell her about Trout, about the Professor. Trout at the top of the box, at the rail, fixed on him and waiting. The Professor in his tent, in his corner of a strange land. Also waiting. Waiting for his next move, anticipating his next action. About how these thoughts filled him with a sense of the future.

But in the end he only said, “I don’t know. Good, I hope, or good ultimately.”

She smiled as if she had arrived at this conclusion already and enjoyed him catching up to her.

Wednesday was the turning point. A nadir for Jeremy, even in the most confident frame of mind. As a chef, he was inverted within each working day relative to the norm, starting slow and ending very loud and very late. But his whole week was also upside down. Mondays they were closed; a hungover Jeremy typically slept in. Tuesdays were low-key, foodie nights, when they were lucky enough to get them. By Wednesday the weekend was already looming—walk-in nights, money nights. The future seemed to hinge on Wednesday, and so Jeremy didn’t coast down to the weekend from Wednesday like the rest of the world. He struggled up.