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In the intake room, he says to the nurse, “I mean I work in a kitchen for chrissake. I eat all the goddamn time.”
“Sir—”
“What? What is it?”
“There’s no need to raise your voice at me.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” His hands shake briefly when he raises them. “As I said. Work in a kitchen.”
()
“Eat—what? Like a spoonful of stock?”
He does eat. He does. Not breakfast because who the fuck has time for that, but all day in the kitchen, and yes, when he gets home too.
“Fucking, beef off the floor?”
Two spoons of peanut butter, one of jelly. On bread, sometimes, but he doesn’t like the way it gets stuck to the roof of his mouth and he has to peel it off with his finger. But if there’s hard-boiled eggs in the fridge he’ll eat one of those. And he’ll have a Coke usually. Carbs, fat, protein, even dessert. All the macronutrients. Three course fucking meal.
If he eats too much he’ll throw it up anyway, but he doesn’t say that out loud because he knows it doesn’t sound good, knows from making the mistake of mentioning this once in passing to Sugar that his very simple fucking explanation somehow doesn’t fly: that it’s just stress. Every cook stresses. Everyone who’s worked in a kitchen in the history of this planet understands this.
“You haven’t been to family in a month.”
He closes his eyes to make Sydney less present. He can still hear her stare in the dark.
All he wants to hear is: It’s stress. Yes chef.
Everyone stresses, yes chef.
I eat.
Yes, chef.
()
They let him out of the hospital because of course they fucking do. He says over and over that he eats and he weighs in pretty normal. He looks normal. He’s not a skinny little white girl.
“We’ll do some bloodwork and call you with the results,” the doctor says dubiously, and Carmen says, “Knock yourself out.”
When he gets in the car, Richie says, “And?”
“And what?”
“Carmy.”
“I’m good.”
“Oh, you’re good? You—”
“The hospital said—”
“—fucking passed out onto the fucking floor but you’re good?”
“Where was I supposed to pass out, the ceiling? And I didn’t faint, I did not fucking faint. I was dizzy for one second and I tripped, and then everyone decided to waste time busting my balls about it instead of focusing on handling fucking service like fucking adults. Okay. The hospital said I was good. But by all means feel free to go in and give them shit if you know better, Doctor DeVry.”
Silence.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Well you’re certainly fucking awake now,” Richie grumbles, pulling them too fast out of the lot.
()
In the lobby of his apartment building, Richie lingers awkwardly until Carmen says, “Do I have your permission to go up? Cousin? Or do you wanna carry me up the stairs too?”
He gets into his apartment and goes straight to the cupboard and crams three fat spoonfuls of peanut butter and then loses it. His stomach is halfway up his throat and there’s cold oil in his gullet. He hunches over the sink deep-breathing. An animal is panting over his shoulder, fur is sweating on his neck, black handfuls up his nose. You are not going to vomit, Carmen, you fucking pussy-ass bitch. Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.
He swallows again and again and again and again.
There. It’s down. Fuck you.
Staring the bear in the eye, he opens the jelly and forces himself to swallow a spoonful of that too, and then goes to the toilet and throws up.
()
Once Chef said to him, “This is too good for you.”
He’d been working on the dish for weeks. Tasting, adjusting, tasting, adjusting, a painter with a feather hairbrush. Tasting with his eyes shut made things clearer. Heaven glowing in the dark. Sometimes he saw his tongue as a beautiful machine, this finely tuned instrument, taste buds blossoming like the arms of the sea anemone to the ocean, delicate, so sensitive that they’d die from a single extra PPM of pollution in the water, CO2, microplastics, whatever.
He blinked and thought he’d never open his eyes again. Chef’s praise stung him all over like electricity. Backstabbed and frontstabbed him.
“Say it.”
“This is too good for me.”
He would be so happy if he weren’t so tired.
When he opened his eyes the dish was gone.
()
“Did he just stab himself?”
Fak, frantic, lowering him to the floor.
“Hey, guys? Did anyone else—anyone else see that?”
His knife being taken out of his hand—no, he needs that, he can’t—
He fights for a second, until he sees it’s Sydney, and then he lets it go.
()
When you’re averaging four hours of sleep a night, pain is a pretty good way of staying awake.
So is cocaine, but when he got on that is when he started sleeping with Chef, so. Yeah. He really fucking doesn’t need a repeat of that.
Jesus christ, New York was such a mess. He was on top of the world and he was under the boot heel, he was eating all day and throwing up all night, he was on uppers and downers, he hadn’t had a weekend in two years, hadn’t had a relationship, ever. He was fucking Chef, or more like Chef was fucking him.
It took poor Syd ten months of work to sleep with him because he was so convinced it could only be awful, head chef and sous, boss and employee, up against the lockers, the old song and dance. That all he was capable of was echoing the old dynamics, sober or not, repeating what he was told to repeat, the parrot, squawking, Yes chef, yes chef.
“I thought you hated how I looked,” she says, and he touches the clasp of her bra and says, “I really like how you look.”
“A woman wouldn’t know it.”
“I just didn’t want you to think. I mean I didn’t want to—like, fucking, harass you, or anything.”
“You think you could harass me?”
“Anybody can get harassed,” he snaps. “I know you’re real fucking smart and tough and all that, okay. I’m not doubting you.”
“O-kay,” she says, widening her eyes at him.
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Trying to make light, she says, “You’re only harassing me in the way I like,” and then has to turn the light on because his shit has gone all wonky, he is feeling the fur and hearing the growl, jesus christ, the boy can’t even fuck right. As Chef was fond of saying.
Once he said to him, “It’s right enough for you,” and then spent the next two weeks slicing his fingers to ribbons on the mandoline.
“Carmy. Carm.”
“It’s nothing, uh. Yeah. Just a lot of old shit.”
“Old shit?” she says.
()
Carmen can tell he’s going to faint before it happens. His sense of smell always goes. The world suspended in gray.
When he was in New York he used to cut between his fingers. A tiny cut in the web between your index and middle finger can go for weeks, because you’re constantly agitating it, pushing the skin back and forth, pulping the blood out of yourself like juice from an orange. There’s not a way to rest that hurt. Pain even has a taste. Metallic, bitter, and tannic, high in the palate.
Stumbling on instinct away from the stove—can’t knock the stock off the burner—he aims the knife in his right hand at the fingers of his left, but misses, glancing the blade off the back of his hand, another fuckup, nothing but fuckups, he thinks, as Fak turns, yelping his name, dropping some piece of equipment that’s probably gonna cost them another grand to fix, a grand they don’t have, jesus christ Fak, why can’t anyone in this kitchen stay focused? Why can’t anyone just do their job?
()
“Dude, did you see how his fingers were, like, fucking locked around that knife?”
“I saw. Spooky—”
“Like, he was fully out, right. But—”
“—very spooky.”
“It was, like, richtus. ”
“The fuck’s richtus?”
“The death grip, dude. Like this,” Fak says, making a claw.
()
He tries to tell Sydney, right then and there, but he mangles the story so much—turns Chef from he to she, and from head to sous—and talks in circles, and euphemizes, and over and under exaggerates, and lies lies lies—that the steaming crock of bullshit he’s serving totally fails to congeal.
He’s also focused very hard on not crying throughout and it’s giving him a motherfucking headache.
At the end, Sydney says with the air of a confused pupil, “So y’all were… having sex?”
Carmen never liked that phrase. ‘Having’ sex. People ‘have’ whatever. A baby, a vacation, dinner. No, you eat dinner. You fuck.
“Yeah, we were having sex,” he says.
“But I thought you hated each other.”
He wants to hurl himself down the fire escape. He wants her out of his apartment. He wants to kick her the fuck out. He stares down at his hands so she doesn’t catch it in his eyes. His nailbeds are always dirty. Doesn’t matter how much scrubbing he does.
“We did hate each other,” he mumbles. He’s at his fucking limit.
()
His sister calls him while he’s still over the toilet. He lets it go to voicemail, wiping his nose on the grimy “guest” towel that’s never seen a guest. He gargles some baking soda before calling her back. Stomach acid can put holes in your tooth enamel; that’s another fun New York fact for you.
“What’s going on, Carmy?”
“Hey, uh, nothing. Not much.”
“Not much. Cool, cool. So why’s Richie calling me talking about how, quote, ‘your body’s shutting down’?”
“Jesus christ, you picked up from Richie?”
“Quit dodging like a bitch, Carm.”
“Quit bitching me out, Mom.”
It goes on like this for a few minutes.
“So you basically fainted onto a fire and then ran a knife into your hand.”
“I didn’t—no part of that statement is accurate. There was no fire.”
“In a kitchen?”
“I didn’t fall into any fire! There wasn’t any kni—I didn’t run a knife into anything. I did not faint.”
“That’s not what Richie—”
“Because Cousin didn’t listen to me, because nobody ever fucking listens to me. I mean, you, you phone me like a hundred times a day bitching me out about how I never call you, I never tell you how I’m doing—”
“Because you never tell me how you’re doing— ”
“—and then when I tell you you talk over me and tell me I’m a jackass that doesn’t know what’s going on with my own fucking life. Where’d talking about our feelings get Mom, huh? Where’d it get Mikey? Jesus christ! I’m not going to kill myself, is that what you want to hear? Your baby brother is not going to shoot himself through the head because he’s not that fucking selfish, he’s not going to t- to fucking take off like an asshole the second shit gets difficult and dump his bullshit all over everyone. Okay? I thought that was supposed to be the one single benefit of getting a fucking restaurant dumped on you by your fucking dead brother, that people are supposed to listen. ”
Silence.
“Hey. Uh.”
Stale vomit coating the inside of his mouth.
“...Hello?”
Sugar sighs. “That was the sound of me listening,” she says, and then hangs up.
()
That’s the worst thing: and for what?
For what, he missed the funeral?
For what, ten Christmases away from home?
For what the silence?
For best restaurant?
For four-centimeter plum squares? For screaming at someone for being off by a half-centimeter? For half a centimeter?
For getting fucked over a steel prep table two hours after closing?
For better knifework? For fucking awesome knifework to cut himself with?
For a nice coke habit it took him three years to break, just to complete his fucking cliche of an existence?
And there at the peak, hopped up on rage, he thinks, no, his piece of shit brother cut him off first, Mikey started this shit, fucking Mikey—
And then he realizes it was never his choice at all.
And that’s actually the worst thing, that’s the real worst thing, that’s the worst of all; it lops his fucking breath off, it cuts his throat in half.
()
“Yo, Carm.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he grunts.
“Same, I guess.”
The kitchen smells of fry oil. He feels his gorge rising.
“How’s those donuts coming along?”
“Gimme ten, and you can try some.”
The kitchen kind of jangles at the edges of his vision. In the absence of actual sound and chaos his mind pipes it in for him, so that the pots are boiling over and trays are falling onto the floor until he looks at them and then they’re not. Freaky. He touches a neat stack of trays. The clock ticks loudly on the wall. It occurs to Carmen that lately his mind is always piping it in, in a kitchen or no. He gets down on the floor to clean because things can always be cleaner. Kneeling makes him feel like a prey animal. He gets up and goes to the office to look at the financials. The financials are fucked. He leaves the office.
“Marcus?”
“Yo?”
“You wanna get in on this?”
Marcus looks at the fifth of brandy in his hand.
“Uh, no thanks, chef. Donuts are ready.”
“Alright, good. Good.”
He watches Marcus gingerly shift a single donut from the wire rack to a plate. Like he’s moving a fucking Faberge egg. When he cuts into the donut, the cream inside spills out like a sunrise, pale and golden.
He remembers that feeling, distantly. Creation. Like through a misted window.
When was the last time Carmen made something beautiful?
You’ve never made anything beautiful. All you do is destroy.
No, that’s bullshit. That’s Chef. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.
A chunk of donut breaks under his back molar. The crumb falls apart so sweetly. In another half an hour it’ll be sewage in the pipes.
“Good. The glaze feels a little tight. But the filling—very good.”
“Thank you, chef.”
He opens his eyes and catches Marcus staring at him.
“You, uh. You okay, man?”
Clearing his throat, Carmen nods at the folded blanket crammed under the counter. “You sleeping here?”
“I—”
“Don’t do that, don’t. Go home. Don’t work too hard, seriously. This stuff’ll kill you.” He pauses, then laughs waterily. “So to speak.”
()
When Sydney opens the door, he says too loudly, “Is your dad home?”
“No, he’s visiting my grandma. Like I told you. Are you drunk?”
Is Mom drunk?
“No,” he says.
Syd rolls her eyes at him. “Sure you are,” she says, holding the door open for him with her foot.
She’s been cooking—he knows it before he even gets through the doorway. Not takeout, not her dad. Sydney’s cooking smells like Sydney. The way someone cooks is the way their mind works. When you plate for someone, you’re handing them your soul.
You should be dead.
“I never cook anymore.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“My oven’s full of denim.”
“...What?”
He shrugs. “Like, jeans and shit.”
This is, obviously, excepting the times his body decides to zombie-walk him to the stove at 3am and try to turn him into a living brisket. He really shouldn’t have told Sugar about that. It definitely undercuts the whole “not trying to off myself” campaign slogan.
Carmen 2024—Still Better Than Mikey!
Sydney is going on and on describing what she’s been working on, and he kind of lets the words glance off him without absorbing them. He likes watching her talk, the way she loosens up when she’s properly geeking out. She gets all animated and cartoony and shit. It’s pretty cute.
“Carm, hey,” she says when he comes around the counter to grab her waist.
“Your dad’s not coming home, right?”
“Carmy, no. You’re so drunk.”
“But he’s not, though?”
“Stop it. Come try this for me.”
He does not fucking want to try it for her. Not because he doesn’t think it’ll be good—on the contrary, it’ll probably be amazing—but because wasting food sucks. And that’s what everything that goes into him is: waste. Garbage. Worse than, really, because at least if she composted it the worms would do something productive with it; turn shit to gold, which is really the opposite of his whole shtick, if you think about it.
Stop fucking wallowing, Berzatto, jesus. Baby of the year. He takes the fork from her and sticks it in his mouth and then has to spend the next five seconds wrangling his gut down so it doesn’t rise through his esophagus and strangle him.
God he wishes Syd wouldn’t look at him like that. I don’t deserve to be on a pedestal. I deserve to be under it.
He clears his throat, willing his eyes to stop watering. “Too sour.”
“Yeah. I might’ve went a little heavy on the lime.”
“Way too heavy.”
She pauses. He can see her spine going rigid in the way it does during a bad day on the line. Buck up, chef. Harder times are coming.
“‘Way too’ is a lot.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“You think a lot of things.”
“Noma’s great for learning how to think.”
She leans around him without touching him and jerks the plate towards her. The room is kind of panting around him. In the corners of his eyes plates are shattering in the dishwasher, spatulas are melting, spoons on fire. All the walls are falling down.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Don’t be mad at me just because you fucked up.”
Sydney wheels on him and for a glorious moment he thinks she’s going to stab him. He sees it from above, floating in midair, like they’re two actors on the world’s shittiest tiniest stage:
BERZATTO:
[Says some fucked up shit.]
SYDNEY:
[Enduring, teary-eyed. Hoping to reach his better nature?]
BERZATTO:
[Inexcusable language. Continual atrocious dogshit behavior.]
SYDNEY [Enraged, rising to his taunt? Fulfilling his innermost desire? Or just really, really over his bullshit?]:
[Runs him through with the kitchen knife. Blood coats the blade, dark, syrupy looking. Put that in a saucepan, high heat, boil. Might make a nice reduction.]
[A happy ending!]
CURTAIN
Sydney puts the knife down, saying, “Here comes the bear.”
It knocks him right out of it.
“What?”
They stare at one another. BERZATTO: [Going fully insane].
“What di, d-, did you just…?”
“The bear,” she repeats. “Attack mode. Like, raughh.” Making one of her little hands into a claw.
She’s plastic-wrapping her dish as she talks, swaddling it in Glad as tenderly as an infant:
“I’m a person, Carm. There’s a human being in front of you. And you can treat me like a human being, and act like a human being, or you can, you can go to the fucking zoo. Your choice.”
It takes him a little bit to notice that he’s crying. It’s kind of nice, actually. The most embarrassing thing about crying is starting it. Once you get going it isn’t so bad.
They’re on her couch and at some point his head is on her shoulder and then it’s in her lap. He is gibbering incoherently and hiccuping and just generally sort of spattering himself on her walls, spouting profound fragments such as “the glaze was fine” and “the alarm wouldn’t stop” and “I didn’t want to.” Then he lies there for a while with her sweater in his mouth, blind and deaf, feeling like the world has ended.
When he comes back the TV is on, and Sydney is eating chips quietly out of a bag.
“Awake, baby?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Heard, dude. Now would you quit wiping your face on my clothes?”
He leans on her to sit up. His entire left nasal passage is blocked and his head feels very shattery in a way that reminds him of this spun-sugar dish they did once at French Laundry.
Sydney has some kind of documentary on. Someone on screen is making a kimono. “I haven’t been eating,” he says, staring at the cloth being dyed bright scarlet. “I can’t keep anything down.”
“Hm. Is this recent?”
“I dunno. I guess. Since New York.”
“New York’s not recent.”
“I guess. Sometimes I feel like, uh. Like I don’t have anything left in me.” He blows his nose again. “I do eat, I make myself. But I just end up throwing it up. And it’s not like I—I mean I can’t fucking control that.”
“Don’t eat if you don’t want to eat.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But?” Sydney shrugs. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You’re in control, Carm.”
They sit there for a while. People on screen are weaving the cloth now. Embroidering, whatever, he doesn’t know the term. There’s a lot of shit outside of cooking that he doesn’t know. The needles dip tranquilly in and out of the cloth, like sea birds in water. Much less metal than a tattoo needle.
“What’re those,” he says to Sydney eventually.
She turns the bag towards him. “Takis.”
“What’s Takis?”
“Bro, are you kidding me? You’ve never had Takis?”
“So? So what? I bet there’s shit you’ve never had.”
He eats one out of her hand, nickering softly like a horse to make her laugh.
“Whoah. These are fucking wild.”
“I know, dude.”
“It tastes kinda like, uh. Like getting fucking clubbed over the head.”
“Exactly.”
“...Can I have another one?”
“Yeah. Get some chopsticks, though, don’t be getting that shit all over the couch. Dad’ll kill me.”
()
“Okay, chefs! Everyone over for walkthrough, please.
“Alright, first order of business: DOH. I need everyone on their toes on this, please, that C is killing us, let’s get it to A. No ciggies, no phones. Keep that shit clean.”
“Yes, chef.”
“Thank you. Next thing: Ye’s in town. Two nights. We’re gonna get a lot of late-night overflow from the stadium. That means double-prep all around. Front of house, get your aspirin ready. I know, I know. Don’t phone the cops unless you have to, but, y’know, phone them if you have to.”
“Yes, chef.”
“Thank you. New desserts menu”—catcalls, whistles—“yes, yeah— but, we’re pushing back the launch, again on account of Kanye. We’ll still stick to trialing it this week. Tina, you and me are gonna keep splitting chef Marcus’ prep, as discussed, yeah?”
“We’re cool, chef.”
“Thank you, chef. Last thing, walk-in. It was looking a little rough in there yesterday. Let’s keep that shit clean, no unlabelled shit, no mystery meat. If it smells off, bin it, time doesn’t run backwards.”
“Yes, chef.”
“Thank you, chefs. Let’s rock. Who’s got the playlist?”
“I believe I have the honor, Cousin.”
“God fucking help us.”
“Uh, you’re welcome.”
Carmen rolls his eyes, handing Richie the aux.
“Let it rip,” he says.
()
You know, now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t think Chef ever said that.
Thank you, chef.
Three fucking words.
Fucking asshole.
He catches hold of Sydney’s arm as she barrels around the corner. “Hey. Cover me for five?”
“Five minutes ?” she gasps, mimicking pearl-clutching.
“Yeah, sorry. I really gotta call my sister.”
“I’m kidding. Take your time.”
“Thanks.” Then he says it again, because he fucking can: “Thank you, chef.”
Carmen slips out into the alleyway. Outside the air snaps him in the face with cold, like his shower when his asshole neighbor uses up all the hot water. A kitchen has no seasons. Your ass is always over the fire. It’s kind of claustrophobic, but it’s also kind of nice. Let’s be real, at this point, it’s what he’s used to. For better or for worse—another one of Mikey’s favorite sayings.
He’s been thinking he should get out with Sydney, sometime. When they have some spare time. Hah-hah. One of these days.
One-handed, he lights up as he dials Sugar. Knowing her, she might let him sit on the dial tone for a nice long while. That’s alright. He kinda deserves it, but also, family doesn’t freeze one another out, in the end. Drags of his cigarette condense in the air. The marks of a human person, calling a human person. He’ll wait as long as he needs to.