The French Revolution (14 page)

System chatter overwhelmed her, nervous flashes and respiratory schisms and digestive crunches, a scathing case of heartburn, her internal temperature fluctuating like the Dow Jones industrials. “Where do I sign up?” Esmerelda stammered, her lunch leaping up her throat.

“Meet me at sunrise at the summit of Mt. Tamalpais. You may bring one bag. Tell no one.”

“Tell no one what?”

“Precisely.” With an understanding eyebrow hitch, Bruce swung onto his bicycle and glided down the hill, a sleek, colorless missile diving straight into the city center.

Esmerelda took off after him, speeding down hump after hump until the view was erased by houses and trees, cars pulling up hills, the usual jangly crowd, none of which she noticed through her mescaline trance. She bottomed out in Cole Valley and caught the bus home, poured her favorite aprons and underwear into her great wool bag, slipped a toothbrush in her pocket, and knocked on her mother’s bedroom door.

“Ma, I need a ride.”

“Esmerelda? Why are you not at work?”

“Can you drive me to Marin? Early?”

“What for?”

“Camping trip.”

“Since when have you ever gone camping?”

Busted. “Thought I’d try it. You know, get back with nature, clean out the head.”

“Then you can start out with a hike from here.”

A minute later Esmerelda slammed the front door so hard that four paintings fell to the floor, a hinge popped loose, and a tiny but menacing crack appeared in a stucco wall.

Up to something, Fanny Van Twinkle thought as she dug out her tool kit from the utility closet. She knew that behind her daughter’s hard legs and outwardly sunny disposition was the girl who’d grown up in her home, the pushy, bossy kid who ignored rules and curfews, who ordered her mother around as if she were a paid servant, who never did dishes (despised getting her hands wet, actually), and only took over the cooking when her father’s disappearance into the sea locked Fanny in her bedroom for an entire year. Even in those days Esmerelda got by with the minimum at work, never cross-pollinated with other top chefs, gave up on new recipes if they failed the first time, took several coffee breaks each day even though caffeine gave
her hives, and liked to spend her days off dozing on the sofa. Everything was way too easy.

But at least she seemed happy, Fanny realized, and celebrated her small parenting victory with a triple-snifter of the finest New Jersey gin she could find in the cupboard.

The taxi dropped Esmerelda at the Mt. Tam visitor center as a soft purple glow swept the horizon. She slung her bag over her shoulder and bumbled up the spiraling narrow path, clanging against boulders and stumps, stubbing both big toes and bruising a shin. When she limped out at the summit a cool ocean blue shimmered off the eastern mountains, the rippled landscapes emerging with vicious clarity. Wind slashed through her apron—she had come dressed to work—and her bones ached with the beauty of it.

After a few minutes gaping at the new day, her zeroed sensors detected a shift. There was no sound other than rustling wind, no visible motion besides the rising sun, no new smell in the vicinity. Instead she felt a minute change in barometric pressure, a slight drop in humidity, spotted some twigs a few inches out of place, the clues pulled into conclusion by an innate sense of phase completion—take the papaya pie out of the oven, enough blowtorch on the buttercup crème brûlée—fully developed among only the best of chefs.

“Bruce?” she queried.

“Shh!” She followed the noise to a massive stalagmite, jutting from the earth like a dinosaur incisor. On top Bruce sat Indian-style dressed in simple white pajamas, his eyes heavy-lidded in concentration. “Silence,” he hissed.

“Nice morning for a séance,” she joked. He noiselessly bared a set of lupine teeth, nostrils darting in precise angles. She wondered if this was Tai Chi or yoga, possibly a pagan ritual, then settled on a cult, as it also explained his permanent hermitizing, the secrecy, the devotion to perfection, the unreal ultraclean getups, everything about the guy pretty freaky. She was about to vamoose when the sun exploded into the sky, a miraculous
supernova haloed with fire, the intensity and scale combining for a grand, triumphant vision that reminded Esmerelda of Apocalypse and Revelation, the end of the beginning—not a bad way to start.

“Wow,” she said when Bruce climbed down, “color me inspired.”

“Stop right there,” he replied. “The first thing you must learn is how to keep your enormous fucking mouth shut.” A pilot light flared, nuclei fused. Bruce held out his open hand, intimating violence, but already Esmerelda was launched and roaring, leveling her shoulder into his chest and slamming him into a boulder.

“My way of saying I ain’t going,” she shouted, raining saliva into his eyes. “Go find another protégé to pick on. Just know I’ll be right behind you with a megaphone and baseball bat.”

With an abundantly insincere smile Bruce wound himself upright, brushed dirt off his pajama tops, and limped back to his precipice. Suspecting a counterattack, Esmerelda made use of the interlude to compile an arsenal of rocks, dozens of light stones fingered for long- and mid-range attacks and a pile of big boys in reserve to finish the job. She loaded the ammunition into her apron pockets, then scooped up a discarded Snapple bottle and a handful of gravel and moved carefully toward the path back down.

She heard the rasp of scissors. A box flexing open. A meaty swish, a sponge adjusting to altitude. Distant internal noises: liquids resettling, gases finding equilibrium, sinuses breaking impasse. A smell like Sunday morning and fresh apples and a day at the beach. Professional curiosity got the better of her, and she double-timed it back to the peak.

He was flat on his stomach, facing her, a crimson-frosted pyramid on a gold plate by his head. Cult for sure, Esmerelda decided, and reached into her apron for a heavy-stone head cruncher. “My deepest, deepest apologies,” Bruce mewed. “I have been out of the company of people for many years. It is a
skill I must rebuild. How can I cook without appreciating the harmony of humans?”

“The real question is, how’d a rad chef like you turn into a total dickweed?” She lobbed a pebble across his bow and cleared her throat menacingly.

He lifted his face and stared at her, his gaze even steel, cheeks constructed from sheet metal. “This is my latest cake,” he announced, his voice a clarion bell. “It is blessed with the peace of the rising sun; now, it is for you.”

Pricks and bubbles ran across Esmerelda’s back. She shuffled toward the slice, sidestepping matador-like, the Snapple bottle raised to defend against sneak attacks. When she reached the plate, she slowly descended into a catcher’s stance and examined his offering. A marvelous mixture of scents blitzed her cells—fresh fruit mixed with the first day of vacation—shifting atomic structures and mushing her heart into a wispy, delighted haze.

“I am infinitely sorry,” he remarked, his voice peppy and devoid of remorse.

“Better be.” She scooped a hunk of icing with her pinky and held it under her nose. Majestic. “See you on the other side.”

She entered an airport whirring with song. Passengers with formless faces danced across a capacious sun-streaked terminal, scatting and swinging to big band tunes. Ivory golf carts zoomed in synchronized routes, carrying cages filled with melodious songbirds and doubling as launchpads for cartwheels and somersaults and advanced tap-dancing combinations. Along the ceiling maroon fluid pumped through plastic tubes, sparkling with injections of glitter. Esmerelda pranced through the action, whirling and singing along in perfect pitch, conducting chugging flap heels and sugar brushes and rapid-fire quadruple spin moves alongside blazer-clad customer service agents, until she eventually found a diamond-shaped glass elevator with her name stenciled across the front. She pressed a large red button and the doors opened immediately. Inside, her pastry instructor from
the culinary academy sat on a stool with a hand on a lever, portly and yellow skinned, his chin twitching as if poorly animated.

“God, you again,” she said. “Haven’t you had enough?”

“Don’t blame me,” he said, “I just drive.” He threw the lever and the doors screamed shut, iron bars slammed over the windows, the elevator catapulted upwards. Sensations of heaviness and weightlessness battled in her torso; her head soared like a kite, her spine drilled into the earth’s mantle. The elevator accelerated, smashing her into the floor and breaking her teeth and shaving off her apron, her body turning to oatmeal, then liquefying, a widening puddle across the elevator floor, licking her professor’s shoes. A minute later he pulled back the lever, the elevator froze, and Esmerelda was pulled from her flatland into the glorious sun.

“How is it?” Bruce asked.

“Trippy,” she drooled, “like a dream.”

“A nightmare?”

“Not really a good dream or a bad dream. A weird dream.”

“Not acceptable.” His neck twitched three times. “I’ll reduce the argon ratio.”

“Know what it was like? Like your dreams after late-night Indian food. You sure you didn’t put any curry in there?”

“What?” A metal splinter rose in the center of Bruce’s forehead.

“Kidding, kiddo.” She raised the gold plate and pawed another hunk. “Take the stick out of your ass and we might get on OK. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish my breakfast.” The rest of the slice went down easy as wine, and within seconds she was overcome by jazz orchestras and soft-shoe acts circling on baggage carousels.

She awoke on a cot in a dark room, her lips caulked with sugar. “Ma?” she whined, wiping the scab from her mouth. She waited as no one rolled out of bed grousing about the electric company, no one dug out flashlights and old camping torches from the garage, no one clomped into her room suggesting it was time Esmerelda learned her own sweet way to the emergency
locker or else she would be ten miles up shit creek in the event of a major shaker. Kind of nice, actually.

“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.