Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Is your repairman from the company or an independent contractor?” I asked Cherise as we approached the center of the restaurant.

“Oh, these motors aren’t so complicated. I give them a knock myself when I need to.”

She flipped up a grate, revealing stairs like those that led down to New York City basements. “Well,” Iris said, “I’m useless at this kind of thing. Why don’t you go get a look, and I’ll see about our hotel room.”

“Hotel room?”

“Look outside. It’s getting late.”

A swatch of pink sky was visible in the doorway to the dining area, through which Iris disappeared before I could protest. Cherise offered a knowing smirk, but did me the kindness of letting it go quickly. At the bottom of the steps there was room to stand without crouching, and we simply walked back to the motor and stood next to it.

“The first thing to know is that all rotating restaurants are basically the same. Some different details, but it’s like in geometry with circles and equilateral triangles. What’s the word?”

“Similar.”

“Every restaurant is similar. Different size, same technology.”

She couldn’t stop it while anyone was dining, but she opened different compartments and explained in great technical detail how it worked and what could go wrong. I surmised that the old bearings at Apogee were binding and forcing too much torque from the motor. She agreed. They had a spare set of bearings, she said, that “my lady” could buy. How strange it was, Cherise in her elegant dress and her stylish makeup and me in my Sunday second-best, down there in that industrial compartment, a refined dining room only six feet above us. It felt like a scene from a movie.

“I’m not above poaching a resourceful employee,” she said as I followed her back into the dining area. “I can’t create an assistant manager position, obviously. But start as a waiter, show your stuff, you’ll move up quickly. You know the biz: lots of turnover—come on, you’ve got to prefer San Francisco to Fresno.” Her glance around indicated that I should do the same. The sun had set while we were underneath the restaurant, and the city had been illuminated. Straight in front of me, the towers and scalloped cables of the Bay Bridge looked strung with Christmas lights. Far to my left, the same was true of the Golden Gate. The Transamerica Pyramid and the other skyscrapers around us were all lit, no blighted buildings blocking the view. It was beautiful.

“I’ve got family in Fresno,” I said.

“Everyone has family in Fresno. Clackamas is my Fresno.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Leave it for now, call me when you want to take it.”

“Do you have a card?”

Of course she did.

Iris was at the bar with an old fashioned. I asked if she was feeling poetic yet. She said she was always feeling poetic. After she wrote a check for the rotator bearings and arranged with the concierge to have them delivered to her car, if they would fit, she asked the bartender for a refill and led me out of the place with her full glass in her hand.

We didn’t talk as she led me to our room, but I could see what she was saying with her body. She leaned her back against the glass of the elevator, resting her ass on the handrail. She sipped from her drink and watched me so directly I had to look away. In our hallway up on the twelfth floor, there was a swing in her hips that wasn’t usually there. She was trying to make me imagine, I thought, ripping that dress off her and throwing her on the bed. I was imagining it. I felt I was being forced to imagine it.

The room, I was surprised to find, had two twin beds. She walked ahead of me and sat on the far one, the open-curtained window glittering behind her. “I wanted you to have a choice,” she said. “Didn’t want to feel I was forcing your hand.” The confident stare she’d used in the elevator was wavering now. I walked forward until I stood between the two beds. In trying to think, I blocked myself from thinking.

She should have forced my hand, I thought. Give me a space to retreat into, and I will retreat. Offer me an empty bed and I’ll sit on it. That’s exactly what I did. For a moment she lost control of her face. When she regained it, she waited, clenching her lips, before she spoke. “I’m going to have a rinse off, then.” She headed toward the bathroom with no swagger in her hips now, no request to be unzipped. I stayed on the edge of the bed, thinking about how either choice would have led to a lifetime of regret. They would be different regrets. Choosing her bed would have been the more interesting regret, and the lesser regret in general. It would not have added mass to the accumulating regrets about my inability to act. It could have had its own special drawer. Iris would have been the mathematical choice, and the artful one as well. But it was no longer a choice. The moment had passed, and now it was a fact.

I thought I heard her crying in the shower. As I listened, I realized she was making love to herself. It was an even sadder sound, not trying to be silent, not trying to be heard—just a series of small moans as regular as an old brake pad squeaking against its drum. The shower ran for a while even after they stopped, accompanied by the modulations of regular washing. Good thing hot water wasn’t charged to the room. I lay down on the bed, facing the pretty window.

Iris came out wrapped in two towels, one around her body and one around her hair. She lay on the other bed, looking across at me. The small hotel towel showed me more of her legs than I’d seen before, creating the moment that made me realize appeal and availability formed an equation much too complex to be measured by a revelation of skin. The invitation was gone from her eyes.

“If she offers you a job, you should take it. You’re not married to Fresno.”

“I’m not sure what I want.”

“Could be that you never will.”

We fell asleep like that, facing each other across four feet of empty space. I know because she fell asleep first, still in her towels. I stayed up thinking of what Cherise had said about all revolving restaurants being geometrically similar. They were close enough to the same thing that the only important difference was what they looked out on. Our languishing restaurant had once sat atop the skyline of Waikiki with a line of patrons snaking out the door. Suppose you could pick up the whole thing, with Iris and me in it, and put it down on any tower in any city. Put us in a different place, would it be enough to give us different lives? That’s where I drifted off, and fittingly, because such hypotheticals are already halfway to being dreams.

Sleep let go of her first as well, because when I woke in the morning she was back in her same dress. The magic trick, repeated, had no effect. The second morning it seemed tawdry, and I felt tawdry for witnessing it. It didn’t help that her hair was a wreck from sleeping with it wrapped, a mess of weird curves that seemed the product of distorted gravity. But then, looking down at the clothes I had slept in, I was only one day behind her. All we had to put on were our shoes. We had no bags to pack. We didn’t even need to see the front desk. We just left our key in the room and rode the elevator down to the garage. In her car big enough for two, we headed south again.

BATTLE CREEK COLLEGE

The premature clang of the morning bell had the young men half awake even before Eli and his crew burst into the bunkroom shouting that a cow had been murdered. Someone had led Columbia out of the barn during the night and slit her throat next to the well. Outside, it was the transparent black of empty and frozen air, not even the peaks of the Sierras yet lit to the west or a line of purple on the flat eastern horizon. The thermometers had the temperature at twenty-one. If they worked quickly, Eli said, she wouldn’t have to go to waste. The young men were already out of their bunks. Letting an animal spoil was something nobody wanted, especially with Columbia, who of the fifty head they kept was the most noble-featured, the most loved.