Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

She launched into her updates as soon as I picked up the phone, so I was able to act like her call had woken me up. “You need me to come fix it tonight?”

“For these old hats? I’ve been dosing out so much free sherry they think we’re still spinning.”

“I’ll check it out in the morning.”

It wasn’t too much to worry about, she said: the Bulldogs were playing, and it had been quiet for a Saturday. The customers didn’t mind, or didn’t let on. Most of the people there were boosters, like her, and in a place with as few boosters as Fresno that meant they were all her friends. None were there for the novelty of a changing view. The motive common among them was pity, either for her or for themselves. I’d gone in for payroll paperwork that afternoon and knew the slender blue dress she was wearing. I could picture her, pulling out a chair from a two-top in the unoccupied side of the dining room, using one hand to hold her phone to her ear and the other to pick up a thin vase and smell the mums. This time of night, especially with something the matter, she’d have a port glass or a champagne flute, but she would be sipping slowly. She drank enough to make her regrets feel poetic, and no more.

“Is that your bed you’re sleeping in, Nick? Dee called in sick tonight.”

Dee was one of the waitstaff. I was tempted to tell Iris I kept my dick out of the restaurant, but that had a charge I didn’t want to add to the conversation. I mumbled instead that it was my bed, and Dee had probably called in because of her boyfriend’s gig at Tokyo Garden. I visualized receiving dental anesthesia, trying to get more sleep in my voice, though I knew it would do nothing to rush her off the phone. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk to her. I wasn’t sure if she was flirting, wasn’t sure if I wanted her to be. “Not sure” was something of a mantra for me at the time, a blank check I refused to fill in.

“Frank there?” I asked, hoping the invocation of her husband would sober the chat.

“Football game. The sedative effects of warm Coors.”

I let a silence hang, considering a fake snore.

“It’s a clear night,” she said. “I’m not sure why. If you lean against the windows and look up, you can see the constellations.”

“Good thing this happened after dark. Send smoke out the top of the building before sunset and you’ll have pictures all over the web.”

“The gators.” This is what she called the Fresno residents who loved to disparage the city. It sounded more mature than haters.

“The gators,” I said.

“Sounds like you’re waking up,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to come in tonight?”

Our conversation would be much the same if I were there. Though probably bawdier, more direct. Restaurant talk. This was the hour of coffee and port, mousse and Black Forest cake. The latestayers talked from table to table. The men watched Iris’s hips as she strolled her territory. She was in her forties, and looked her age, but no less good for it. This late, she let the seams of the restaurant show: Lupe playing Lola Beltrán loud enough to be heard in the dining room while she scrubbed down the kitchen; young bussers without their aprons, their top buttons undone; plates, still steaming from the dishwasher, clanking as they were piled at the salad station. Iris conveyed the sense that this was the hour she was most herself, a self that was both elusive and present. Her plaintiveness made her sexy. I wanted to think that she did this out of instinct—that she didn’t know why, but that I, with a male intuition, discerned the unconscious allure: a chance to satisfy the unsatisfied—but I was fairly certain she knew exactly what she was doing. What was it, then, that tamed our conversation? The presence of witnesses, maybe, but more the understanding that the promises she made when she was too nakedly herself would fade away as quickly as the impressions made on your skin by a pillow. In person, the context was clear. On the phone we were just one voice against another, wide open.

“Night, Iris,” I said, knowing she would appreciate the spirit of an abrupt goodbye.

“Sweet dreams,” she said, squeezing the words in just before I ended the call.

I preferred to come in early despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I rarely had reason to. The sunrises from Apogee actually had something to them. I arrived Sunday morning in time to see a red ball squeezing up between the snowcaps of the Sierra Nevadas. Rain a few days ago had turned the sky blue again, brilliant blue above the soup of colors spilling out over the tops of the mountains. The restaurant was beautifully quiet. The repetitive sound of a wire brush scouring mussels in the kitchen was its own kind of silence. Our chef, Lupe, and her husband Phil liked to shop and prep early and take the midday off. We couldn’t support a lunch service on the weekends. Iris had tried to establish a Sunday brunch, but all the brunch people lived ten miles north in the sprawl. The sprawl, the sprawl—Iris hated the sprawl. Sprawl is what happens, she said, when you have a city no one wants to be a part of.

Just standing there, facing east, I somehow made enough noise to be heard from the kitchen. “What you looking at, Nick?” I heard Phil shout.

“The sprawl,” I said.

“The sprawl, the sprawl,” Lupe said. “All full of the gators.”

In the kitchen, Phil was hulling strawberries while Lupe took the beards off the mussels. They offered me eggs. I said I’d had cereal. “You insult the chef,” Lupe said. It was a sort of routine, comforting as a rerun.

“Iris safe to drive last night?”

“Frank picked her up,” Lupe said.

“Even though he was less safe,” Phil added.

The access hatch for the machine room was in the middle of the kitchen. I had to move pots out of the way and crawl through some open shelving to get to it. As assistant manager, I had become the de facto mechanic as well. There are only a few real mechanics in the country who do this kind of work, and their travel costs, let alone the specialty fees, run to the ridiculous. Technologically, a rotating restaurant isn’t much more than a huge lazy Susan with a motor to turn it. Tending the machinery usually just meant changing the oil and tightening some bolts that tended to vibrate loose. Occasionally it meant scouring the web for diagrams and message boards that contained the information I needed. Twice I’d tried calling the Top of Waikiki, who’d sold us the restaurant structure and its associated machinery, only to be brusquely reminded that they were the busiest restaurant on Oahu and the auction had not included consultations.

Climbing down the ladder offered some of the pleasures of descending into a submarine, even if it was only a half story down to a crawl space. The skunky, rubbery smell lingering down there actually enhanced those pleasures. After scooting on my back to the motor, I did the few things I knew: changed the oil, though what was in there wasn’t too dark; cleaned the rotator belt; removed and cleaned the contact plate. Meanwhile, the sound of non-rubber soles started clacking from the surface above me. The vibrations shivered through the metal framing of the crawl space. When I’d finished my maintenance, I flipped the local start lever. The motor farted some black musk in my face.

“Hasn’t had anything?” I heard Iris saying as I returned to the bottom of the ladder. She was talking with her mouth full. “If you make it, he’s not going to turn it down.”

After washing my face, I sat down across from her and her plate of steak and eggs. I could hear and smell my steak searing in a pan. I hadn’t been sure I wanted breakfast, but now I knew I did. Iris was holding the steak in her hand to eat it, as if it were a crust of bread, but she managed to do so without looking like a barbarian. She used a corner of it to pop an egg yolk.