Théodora Armstrong - Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

An extra lane opens on the bridge and the traffic breaks up. The Civic goes shooting through the causeway, evergreens on either side blurring into a long green tunnel. Charlie moves into the middle lane down the Lions Gate Bridge, taking in the West Vancouver mountains and the mansions creeping up the slopes. At the base of all that luxury, a short drive down the hill from the Trans-Canada Highway, across the train tracks and past the main thoroughfare on a quiet street overlooking the ocean and the bridge, is Charlie Beaulieu’s restaurant. During the summer months swarms of sunburned bathers from the beach spill over onto its patio, but once the deck umbrellas are stacked in the corner and the chairs are tilted against the tables to prevent pooled rainwater from rotting the wood, the stream of diners quickly dries up and the only customers left are the regular patrons: the elderly, ruled by habit or limited mobility, and the wealthy, too nervous to cross the bridge and leave their little hamlet of multi-million-dollar homes.

Today he will sit down with Susan to negotiate a salary increase, because Charlie feels he deserves more. He knows food and he loves food and he’s a big man because of it — not morbidly obese or anything, but a bit of a fatso. When Charlie came to the restaurant three years ago, the menu was all over the place — eggrolls alongside pierogi, an Indonesian stir-fry next to a pasta bolognese. The previous chef had been fired after he went across the street for a midnight dip in the ocean with some of the underage staff members and then left his wet underpants to dry in the back hall. Charlie’s fairly sure he’s looking pretty good by comparison. A few days ago he organized an early-morning tasting for the staff. He stood in the middle of the dining room and recited the menu changes as though he were reciting a love poem, everyone squinting at him from under baseball caps and hoodies. The room smelled strongly of a night club — booze and body odour and smoke — until he brought out his food and then the room filled with the aromas of bouillabaisse, salmon terrine, quiche lorraine, and filet mignon. He recited the ingredients and preparation of each dish to the frantic clatter of cutlery. It was like watching a pack of hungover hyenas — save Rose, who ate nothing, and Susan, who sat in the middle of all the chaos eating like she was completing a business transaction, neat mouthfuls chewed precisely. After each robotic machination she would make a note next to the item on the menu. What could she have been writing? Bouillabaisse: sublime. Risotto: transcendent. Duck confit: orgasmic. How could one describe such pleasure with words?

He’s been composing different speeches all week, fine-tuning his approach, but the birthday card has unhinged something inside his brain, caused a short-circuit that has eaten a smouldering hole through his grey matter, and now everything is tumbling out of its compartments, collecting in a big messy pile inside his head. The idea of sorting through the disarray is making Charlie feel unbelievably tired, and he is tired most days; tired of ungratefulness and gluten allergies and Atkins regimes. Charlie’s fatigue is profound and feels like old deep-fryer oil pumping through his arteries. When he pulled out of his underground parking spot this afternoon and drove by the liquor store at Davie and Thurlow, he felt the pull of a super-magnet, the same super-magnet that pulls the escaped IV-wheeling alcoholics from the hospital down the street to the liquor store’s front door in search of cheap whiskey. Some days he feels no different than those parched men hobbling along the sidewalk, clutching the back of their hospital gowns to keep their bare asses from hanging out.

The Civic zips down the alley, thumping over the speed bumps, and pulls into the small parking lot behind Charlie’s restaurant. Back here there is no hiding the truth. Seagulls dive-bomb the garbage bins and scatter the remnants of last night’s dinner service all over the lot. The paint is peeling and a faded sign from days gone by advertises Cheap Gyoza Tuesdays. A broken grease trap leaks a rank odour akin to death. There’s always a cluster of angry and bedraggled waitstaff smoking on his back steps. It isn’t a sight that promotes the appetite. Any tiny morsel of hope Charlie may have mustered while driving to his restaurant is always shattered when he pulls into his parking spot. They irritate him, the squawking seagulls and the squawking waitstaff. Ack, ack — scavengers, all of them.

Of course, technically Marinacove is not Charlie’s restaurant. It’s owned by a group of has-been sports stars with shares in three different establishments in the Lower Mainland. Mostly they remain anonymous, but once a year the Logan Group calls a meeting to discuss something pointless like bringing pierogi back onto the menu. He dreads those meetings — those square-shouldered thick-necks coming in to tell him how to run the restaurant. If he were in charge of the place it would never have become this cesspool of miscreants and deadbeats wallowing in their own puddles of worthlessness.

Charlie lugs his tired body up the back steps of the restaurant, the loitering of unkempt staff parting for him as choruses of hey, Chef bubble around him. He grumbles as he elbows his way through — his usual shtick — and they all grin good-naturedly (save Rose) like he’s some sort of cartoon character put on this Earth for their entertainment. He’s already picked out a staff member to yell at tonight: the teenage dishwasher sitting at the bottom of the steps, looking pale and waterlogged, as though he’s just been pulled from the ocean.

Charlie pulls his toque down over his ears. A gust of wind blows in off the water, the cold biting at his earlobes. He’s more exposed to the elements with his bald head, more vulnerable to illness.

“Chef, guess what I found in my pocket this morning?” Martin, the bartender, says, rooting around in his brown leather jacket. You can never tell Martin is drunk until, at 3 a.m., you find yourself standing next to him at the twenty-four-hour Chinese buffet while he builds a teetering pile of ribs on his plate. “Bones.” He pulls out a couple to prove his point. “Dry ribs. Were we at Fortune House last night?”

“I was here last night,” Charlie grumbles. There’s something about the way Martin looks today — something in the plum-coloured circles under his eyes — that’s making the pain in Charlie’s chest worse. Charlie and Martin have spent many an evening together when neither could find any good reason to go home. The night always ends with Charlie standing at the entrance to some downtown alley, yelling at a drunk-deafened Martin wandering off to something more sinister.

Their baker, Tara, hasn’t lifted her head off her knees yet. He gives her a nudge with his boot, but she doesn’t move. Rose stands next to Martin, smoking and chewing gum at the same time. “Like menthol,” she explained to him once. Charlie nudges her for a cigarette even though he has a nearly full pack in his back pocket. “No,” she says, scowling at him. She reminds him of a cigarette — skinny, dirty, stinky, but still appealing in a way he could never explain. She’s added to the sleeves on her arms, swirls of stars mingling with twisting koi tails. He glares at her tight-lipped, dagger-eyed face and vaguely recalls a remark he made to her last night, something off the cuff, something about intelligence and a sack of bricks. “Don’t say no to me,” he says. She yanks out a cigarette and throws it at him. She’s the only one who refuses to call him Chef; she calls him Charlie, that is if she’s speaking to him at all. She’s above it: above taking requests, above scraping people’s leftovers into the garbage, and Charlie has a strong hunch she also feels she’s above him. He puts the cigarette to his lips without looking anyone in the eye. James, one of his kitchen runts, whips out his lighter. Asskisser , Charlie thinks as he leans the tip of the cigarette into the offered flame, catching the fire before a gust of wind blows it out. “Looking a little tired, Chef,” James says.