I

            When Jux arrived at the restaurant in late morning, he found that the closing crew had once again forgotten to leave the back gate unlocked, which meant he was going to have to hop it. He grumbled and walked back across the bright, empty parking lot, got into his red pickup, and pulled up. He left it idling, took a last sip of his iced coffee, and got into the bed before scrambling up onto the roof and peering through the space between the gate and the slatted shelter to behold the dock in its idyllic, pastoral glory. A cairn of empty delivery crates sat silently before a copse of dormant space heaters lined by slabs of busted tabletops. The four large, perforated rubber floor mats that were used during service hours to provide necessary traction amid the inevitable slop and spillage of a kitchen were hung from their hooks along the wall to the left, where they had been placed the night before for spraying-down. They glimmered like freshly-skinned deer pelts, disgustingly dark red and perpetually greasy in the light slanting through the slats. For a moment, he almost envisioned the gnarly feet of a slumbering mountain man sticking out from behind the dumpster. But maybe that was just one of the downtown hoboes. He’d have to be careful.

            He recognized that he was stalling, so he steeled himself and then maneuvered himself over the gate. When he dropped down onto the other side, he felt a tug on his black pants before landing hard on the muck-stained cement next to the rancid dumpster. He stood and checked the crotch of the pants and found that some uneven spot on the gate had snagged and torn a three-inch rift.

            “Perfect,” he said.

           Near the back door, a warped chair lay on its side with three of its four legs sticking out and the other sitting on the ground under it. A piece of paper taped to one of the legs had the word “broken” scrawled in black sharpie upon it in adolescent, blocky letters.

            “Almo,” Jux said with a sigh and a thoughtful shake of the head.

            He punched the appropriate code into the bulky padlock attached to a heavy fixture laden with old buckets of paint and sealant, but for some reason it didn’t open so he punched the code in again and it opened right up. Inside the padlock’s rectangular heart was the key to the restaurant’s back door, which he quickly used to let himself inside.

            The back room, which contained a slim tower of lockers, an extra stainless steel prep table, the mop bucket and floor basin, water heater and purification system, and countless shelves of chaotically-stored empty containers and serving plates, was unsurprisingly dark, but what was surprising was that the door to the kitchen was shut. Over the course of his approximately nine months at the restaurant, he had never seen that door used. It was always just propped open against the wall. Jux sighed and tried the door, finding it locked. He tried the key, and it didn’t seem to fit at first, but with a bit of coaxing it went into the handle and turned to unlock passage into the kitchen. He slid his hand into the space between the wall by the door and the ice machine and located the light switches and flipped them and the kitchen was not only illuminated but immediately filled with the somewhat soothing whir of the hood fan above the ranges.

            With one exception, everything looked as it usually did on Saturday mornings when the restaurant was closed and Jux spent the first couple late-morning hours alone preparing whatever was listed on the whiteboard near the corner out to the bar. The long stainless-steel prep table along the wall next to the ice machine was cleared and clean and the small fryer was unplugged and covered. The central workstation was also cleared and clean. The ranges had been properly scrubbed and the surfaces of the two coolers along the left wall next to them were spotless. The dish station at the far end of the room was cleared as well, and the pressure nozzle hanging over the three deep sinks dangled like the head of a melancholy swan. The only thing about the kitchen that wasn’t normal was the mess of ceramic shards on the floor between the island and the prep table. It looked as though an entire stack of ramekins had managed, in the dark quiet of the night, to slip off the top shelf of the island, where all of the plates and bowls were stored for quick access during service. This wasn’t the first time that some bowl or ramekin had slipped off the island on its own, but Jux couldn’t remember ever seeing such a big stack having fallen. He shook his head and carefully stepped over the mess and left the kitchen, calling “corner” out of habit as he turned into the empty bar and dining area.

            The front of the house was quaint and spacious and charged by the sunlight coming in from the street. While he crossed to the front door, the light rail swooped in from the south, its speed diminishing as it approached the stop only a block away. The easel near the host/ess station promoted in large, flowery letters the Mother’s Day Brunch menu they had planned for the next day.

            He had struggled with the tall glass front doors before, just like every other employee at the restaurant, so when he approached them that morning with the urgency of someone trying to get back out to an idling vehicle and warming iced beverage he summoned up some kind of determination, as if drawing from the staid black floor and the angular bars of table and chair legs the power that he would need not only to press the door in the right way just as the latch was tried but also to do it right on the first or, failing that, second try. The doors weren’t working with him, though, no matter how he manipulated the body weight he pressed against them timed with the attempts to switch the bolts. All that the repeated attempts seemed to produce was a little groan from the bolt housing that sounded like the suppression of a snigger. Only when he was resigning with frustration and trying one more time half-assedly did the bolts disengage and the front doors free themselves to open, creaking like a whine after a hardy fit of laughter.

            He walked quickly around the building to his pickup and hopped in and reparked it and collected his cold coffee, now somewhat diluted by the ice melted from sunlight through the windshield. By the time he got back into the front of the house, the time on the bar computer said 11:10 and he realized that he’d forgotten to clock in.

            “Stole another ten minutes of my life from me,” he muttered to the restaurant as he punched in his pin. The receipt proof of his clock-in that was supposed to print didn’t. The screen said that the printer was out of paper, and a small animated diagram of the printer demonstrated how to put the paper in, so he chuckled and went back into the kitchen, crossing the mess of ceramic shards and collecting a roll of the printer paper from the box in the back room and then recrossing the kitchen to the bar computer where he opened up the printer and found a nearly full roll inside. He set the extra roll down on the counter and checked the printer and, finding nothing wrong with the feed, shut the lid. Seconds later it printed out the clock-in receipt.

            “You know,” he said to the empty restaurant, “it really does seem like you’re just fucking with me sometimes.”

            The HVAC suddenly kicked in with a deep, distant thump followed by the soft whirring of conditioned air flowing out of the circular ceiling vents. Jux stared at the vents for a moment but soon collected the printout, slipped it into the right ass-pocket of his pants, and went into the kitchen to clean up the broken ramekins.

II

            As he was sweeping the chunks into a long-handled black dustpan, he noticed that the prep station wasn’t quite as clean as it had seemed only a few minutes earlier. Specifically, there were spots of hardened flour paste scattered across the steel surface like a smattering of snow near a placid pond of spilled oil near the fryer. He checked the clock: 11:14. With at least the sense that not too much of his time had been wasted and that there was plenty left during which he could get done what needed to be done, he emptied the dustbin into the trash and saw that the dish station was, also, not as cleared as he had initially found it. There was one of the big square plates they used for cheese and charcuterie along with a couple of small ramekins and one of the eight-inch chef’s knives sitting there on the stainless-steel counter next to the sink. The plate was pasty in places from the cheese that had been sitting on it, but the ramekins appeared to be clean. The knife looked clean, too, except for a rectangular shaft of subtle white across the blade where it had cut through a block of cheese. Jux figured that the back of the house had cleaned up and left before the last of the customers, and that the sommelier, Kieran, had had to toil at a cheese plate for the remaining patrons in the absence of a kitchen crew. And, of course, Kieran didn’t clean anything. It happened all the time and was only to be expected. Rather than cleaning it up immediately, Jux decided to set into the prep.

            The first thing to do was set up some music. He plugged his MP3 player into the audio jack dangling between the wires of the rack above the fryer and set it to play Aphex Twin and then as the avant-garde electronic music began—the kind of thing not even his old friend Abuse, an Aphex Twin adept, would have tolerated for very long during a service shift—Jux consulted the prep list on the white board to get a sense of what and how much he was expected to prepare.

            He expected to find the usual list of items along with whatever else Chef Junior had tasked him with in preparation for the Mother’s Day brunch the next day, but Jux’s eyes widened considerably when he saw the list on the white board. He would have eyed it on his way to the bar to clock in, but the morning’s fiascoes had attracted his attention down a different path. So it was that he looked at the white board for the first time at, and he checked the clock on the wall next to the overhead rack above the dish station, still, somehow, 11:14. At least time isn’t passing quickly, Jux thought as he stared at the prep list.

            “PReP:” it read, in all capitals except, for some reason, the “e,” though that letter was as tall at the characters around it. Fig Tarts, Hancho Empadadas, Lazana, Bree, Nokee, Pasta, Eggshard, Ganash, Pizza Dogh, Crustinnis 3, Poched Pears, Creám Brulae, Proshucto, Saranno—

            “Goddamn it,” Jux said, smiling and shaking his head at the list. “I still can’t understand why these motherfuckers don’t at least look at the labels on the other containers to figure out how to spell this shit.”

            —MAC x2, Lemon [drawing of a square], Citris Vin, Blu Cheze, Pizza, Scrimp Ceviche, Deforest Chicken, Beef, Butternut, S+P.

            Jux ran his eyes up and down the list. “Yeah,” he muttered, nodding. “Deforest Chicken. Gotcha. Okay. ‘Dammit, Jim, I’m a prep cook, not an interpreter.’” After a chuckle at his own joke, he looked at the clock: still, fortunately, perhaps magically, 11:14. On brunchless weekend days, whoever was in charge of the front of the house and the bar usually came in sometime after noon and the chef and the night crew around one, so he still had some distractionless alone time. Jux, invigorated by the music, started preparing things.

            Within minutes, the kitchen was active. Water steamed in large pots on the range and an assortment of fruits, vegetables, and herbs were scattered across the island’s cutting boards—pungent handfuls of rosemary and thyme chopped finely and gathered into neat piles alongside mutilated garlic and mounds of uniformly-diced yellow and red peppers. Jux worked at the list for a while when someone came into the kitchen from the bar.           

           “Smells good back here,” said the voice of what appeared to be a man of middling height.

            “What?” asked Jux through a shaft of steam, his eyes squinted, one hand gripping a ladle and the other a whisk. “Is that you, Teatree?”

            “I’ll leave you to it,” said the man who was probably Teatree.

            “What?” Jux added, getting no response. He grimaced and looked back at the potatoes, which were certainly ready now, so he put towels on his hands to pick up the large pot and take it over to the cold side sink where he’d set the strainer. The kitchen was filled with vapors, and he saw that the clock said 11:48 and he shook his head, thinking about how early Teatree was and how much he’d completed in such a short time. The rest of the kitchen crew wasn’t likely going to start showing up until near to one, so he doubled into the list.

            After what seemed like only enough time to set up the electric mixer and rice the potatoes for the gnocchi, the back door swung open and Chef Junior was there with his service uniform draped over one arm and a crate of ingredients cradled in the other. Jux stared at him and then looked up at the clock, thinking, No, no, it’s too early. I haven’t got the chance to do enough. Indeed, the clock read 11:51, and the chef was early.

            “What the fuck is this music?” Junior asked, grinning skeptically up at the stereo.

            “Aphex Twin,” Jux said.

            “Sounds like robot farts,” Junior said, pumping his head like a piston mechanism.

            “You’re in early,” Jux observed as he added eggs and flour to the potatoes presently being massaged by the spinning wand of the mixer.

            Junior set the crate on the prep table near Jux. “Let’s just say ‘Mother’s Day Brunch,’” he said, raising his eyebrows wisely and going out to the bar.

            Jux nodded, recalling harrowing tales of holidays past as told by those who had been there. This would be his first. There was something about not enough watermelons cut in time and a lot of undercooked eggs with broken yolks. Also, a few years back, twin great-grandmothers had apparently been involved in a fight over who was going to pay the bill and ended up temporarily blinding a rookie server with the remnants of a habanero peach bellini. Abuse himself had related the story of the year that Tati decided he wanted the crème brûlée caramelized at table and the result had been a teenaged boy in a Motörhead t-shirt stumbling screaming into the kitchen with his long, greasy hair ablaze. No more tableside brûlée, was the logical policy pivot. Jux shivered like he’d just felt a ghost. He peered into the crate that Junior had just set down. Inside were four large tins of extra virgin olive oil and what looked to be about two-dozen cheap metal ladles. He looked toward the base of the island, where several similar full tins of oil sat unopened, and then across toward the dishwasher station, where an assortment of metal ladles hung shinily from the wire rack.

            “Huh,” Jux said, putting his attention back to the gnocchi.

            “Where’s the front of the house?” asked Junior as he reentered the kitchen.

            Jux motioned toward the bar with a tick of the head. “Over there,” he said. “We’re in the back now, and the front is out there.”

            “Right,” Junior said. “I mean where is the staff. Doesn’t Teatree usually come in early on Saturdays?”

            Jux nodded. “I think he was in.”

            “You think?” asked Junior.

            “It was loud and full of steam back here,” Jux explained. “Someone popped in, but I was too busy to engage in a formal greeting. I’m guessing it was Teatree. Hey, what’s with all the extra oil? Are we really going to need six drums just for Mother’s Day?”

            “Jesus, Jux,” Junior said, looking at the dish station. “How many knives did you need to use this morning?”

            “Just the one on the cold side,” Jux said. “That was there from last night. I’m guessing Kieran made up a cheese plate after you guys left.”

            “Guessing a lot this morning, are we?” asked Junior. “Do you really expect me to believe that even Kieran would need five chef’s knives to make a cheese plate?”

            “Five?” Jux asked, leaning over to take a look at the counter by the sink. Indeed, where he had apparently thought he’d seen only one knife there were more than one.

            “He probably used a different one for each cheese he was hacking away at,” Junior said. “The magnificent bastard.”

           “What the fuck is going on?” Jux muttered. “There was only one there earlier.”

            Junior shook his head. “Maybe Teatree dropped the others off when he popped in,” he hypothesized. “Then again, now that I’m visualizing it, I can totally see Kieran using a different knife for each thing he had to cut just so that he didn’t have to clean anything.”

            “Ahh, Kieran,” Jux said. Then he looked up at the ceiling and hollered, “Teatree!”

            “What are you doing?” asked Junior.

            Jux looked at him with obvious confusion.

            “There’s nobody out there,” Junior said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. He must have left for some reason. I’ll ask him about it when he gets back.” He went to the back door.

            “Where are you going?” asked Jux.

            “Distributor,” said Junior, “to pick up some stuff I forgot to add to the order yesterday.”

            A few seconds later, Jux was once again alone in the kitchen. The gnocchi dough was ready for forking and blanching, so he went into the back room to collect a hotplate from one of the cluttered shelves. The restaurant had two hotplates, and one didn’t work well. The one that worked, typically, wasn’t immediately accessible, so he moved a couple of plastic-wrapped bundles of extra plates to another shelf and put four boxes of food service gloves with the stacks of others on the opposite side of the room. When he picked up the hot plate, however, a bag of stainless steel scrubbers that he’d failed to notice fell to the ground behind the big yellow mop bucket. He rolled his eyes and took the hot plate in to the kitchen and set it up on the prep station and went back to collect the scrubbers. When he got back there and rolled the bucket out of the way, he found one of the eight-inch chef’s knives there on the ground next to the fallen bag.

            “Put the knife back?” Jux muttered, collecting the blade along with the bag. “Never.” He tossed the bag at the space on the shelf from which it had originally fallen and it landed unevenly against a warped old hotel pan and fell back down onto the ground. After a quick grumble, Jux picked it up and placed it carefully on the shelf, looked at it for a moment to make sure that it wasn’t about to fall again, and then went back into the kitchen with the discovered knife, which he brought directly to the dish station. Neither he nor Junior had been right, it seemed, about how many knives Kieran might have used the night before in putting together this hypothetical cheese plate. There were two of the large knives there on the counter and Jux added the third that he’d found on the floor in the back room. He consciously counted them, even saying the numbers out loud, and then went across the kitchen to where the clean knives were stuck to a magnetic mount under the rack with his iPod over the fryer and next to the ice machine. He counted the clean knives and found there to be five total.

            “Five plus three makes eight,” said Jux out loud, “which means we’re still missing two.” He sighed. Sometimes the line cooks brought their own knives, but usually everyone used the ones the owner rented from a knife-sharpening service. Four of the ten knives were black-handled chef’s knives with wide, slightly-curved eight-inch blades that line and prep cooks used for most of their work. Two of them were serrated bread knives, also black handled. One was a gray-handled cleaver, the shaft of metal a rectangular block with a single circular hole in one of its corners. Another was a straight sixteen-inch blade with grimy white handles at either end, usually used for cutting large blocks of cheese but also, occasionally, a cake. Were this chunk of sharpened metal attached to an appropriate apparatus and angled the right way, it might serve as a guillotine, an observation inevitably made at the restaurant’s farcical annual celebration of Bastille Day, often by the owner himself, and as if he hadn’t already pointed that out every year for ten years. Yet another knife was white-handled as well, but it was for boning and its long tapered blade thinned almost to the point of a rapier. The last was a short, black-handled paring knife that nobody ever seemed to use. This one wasn’t on the rack, and neither was the cheese knife.

            Jux went out to the bar, which was empty. The front of the house was not only vacant but somehow gloomy despite the tall windows everywhere around and the bright glancing light upon the rails of the train track between the asphalt roads outside. He looked over at the front door and saw that it was not only unlocked but hanging slightly open, perhaps a result of the air conditioning doing its best to get outside into the waxing heat of a May day. After a quick shrug, he rooted around in the bar near the glass cheese display cooler and, sure enough, there was the cheese knife sitting sharp side up between boxes of service gloves and plastic wrap. He picked it up along with the crusty white plastic cutting board that Kieran had neglected to retire to the kitchen at close and added them to the items waiting for him or the dishwasher to clean.

            Jux checked. There were now four knives on the counter at the dish station: three chefs and a cheese. He looked around the room suspiciously, imagining himself sticking a gloved hand into a large container of cooked macaroni only to be lacerated by the tool that had inexplicably found its way inside.

            But Aphex Twin was still playing and there was still time alone before afternoon and the arrival of the rest of the crew, so Jux made the gnocchi, rolling the dough into long, narrow logs and pluck-folding with fork tines meaty little chunks that plopped into the salty boiling water. When some of the bite-sized morsels floated to the top, he scooped them out with a long-handled steel skimmer and added them with the others in a deep stainless third. It looked like a steaming bucket of glistening maggots.

            Later, after scrubbing firming floury dough from the surface of the prep counter with a wad of steel wool, Jux realized that he’d only done one of the major time-consuming things on the list and determined to at least get some of the other smaller items out of the way before anyone else arrived. He generally liked these Saturday prep shifts because he had the place to himself and could play his music and make food as almost a kind of meditation. He chose to do the crostinis next.

            The freezer contained a box and a half of the par-baked baguettes that the restaurant used for bread service as well as kitchen needs such as the slicing, seasoning, and toasting that went into making the crostinis for use on cheese and charcuterie plates as well as additions to the paté and ceviche happy hour specials. He slid several of the long tubes of partially-cooked and frozen bread out onto a pile on his arms. They were hard and cold.

            Back in the kitchen, he put them in the inoperational salamander above the old ranges to defrost in the ambient heat and set to making the bleu cheese dressing in the meantime. A bucket of sour cream, a few heaps of mayonnaise, half a bag of blue cheese crumbles, generous red wine vinegar, a subtle pocket of extra virgin olive oil, a handful of sea salt, and extra coarse-ground pepper were all mixed together into a wide stainless-steel bowl at which he worked a large whisk for a minute or so before everything was creamy and delightful. When he’d got the dressing into a rectangular plastic container and the rest into a tall plastic squeeze bottle and fitted it with the one cap that had a large enough aperture to pass hunks of blue cheese like easy kidney stones, he wiped everything down and prepared the labels with description of contents, date, and his initials. He slapped the labels on and opened the cooler nearest the dish station and found a place for them, noting that there was already at least half a container of the same dressing already there.

            Then he started to make the crostinis. The operation was simple, in theory: cut the baguettes at a moderate bias, arrange the quarter-inch thick slices flat on a large sheet pan, spread a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil over them, sprinkle salt and pepper, and toast at 400 degrees until done. That last part was always the trickiest, no matter the volume of activity produced in the kitchen. Not enough time meant undercooked toast that got stale quickly, and too much time meant burnt trash.

            After cutting up the first one and a half baguettes, giving the slices the treatment, and shoving the sheet pan into the hot oven, he went back to the white board to see what else he could get started in the meantime. Somehow the list looked different to him now, a feeling that he inhaled and shook his head at, considering how much he’d done and how much was left to do. Still, he thought he’d seen crostinis as a main issue, remembering even an “2” or something along those lines, but now, scanning the long list, he had difficulty locating it. But there it was, with an “3” no less, meaning, he figured, three batches, and it somehow bothered him and encouraged him at the same time. Some of the other items on the list would take too much time to start between batches of crostinis, so he decided to clean up the dish station in the meantime and start on another project after setting out the second batch of toast.

            The dishpit in the corner had the industry-standard three-sink setup, as required by law: the basin at the left was to contain a precise amount of sanitizer (supposedly to be measured by some kind of strips, but Jux had never seen them used in the restaurant), the middle basin was the rinsing one, and the basin to the right the sudsy one, where the mess started its cleanse. At present they were all empty, not just of liquid but of objects. Jux, who had started off his time at the restaurant that past year as a dishwasher, got to filling the sinks with hot water and appropriate chemical solutions. When the hot stream of water was ceased and the basins ready, he submerged the plates and pans and mixing bowls he’d used or found there along with the ricer and the mixer’s fittings. He left the three knives out, watching them sometimes to make sure they didn’t move while he scrubbed everything else, because there is nothing more treacherous than an unexpected knife in a dishwasher’s basin.

            Things were settling drippingly and he started on the knives. Cleaning knives is relatively easy, as long as one isn’t concerned at the same time with anything else. There is, with most service knives, a sharp side and a dull, and handling them in hot, soapy water is far from difficult as long as one isn’t stupid enough to plunge them all in at one time and then have to work it out blindly from there. The contents of a soapy, murky dishwasher’s sink are too dark to assess with eyes only—someone’s got to get their hands in there and hope for the best. But Jux had learned the hard way, kind of, several months before. In his second week working as a dishwasher, he’d gone back to his cloudy right-basin mess and found his fingers butting against the handle of a long chef’s knife. He was sure to raise it up and explain how different the night would have been had a different edge met his skin in the dark water.

            So Jux counted the knives as he passed them through the three-basin crucible. When the four were all clean, he took them to the magnetic mount by the ice machine and put them there with the other knives and even took a few moments to space them all out so that they were symmetrical, with those of lesser length fanning out to either side from the long cheese guillotine in the center. Then he went back to the basins and noticed that there was a ramekin sitting on the counter near the door to the bar. The dish station queue was now otherwise empty. This ramekin was riddled with the thick, hard gnarls of something cheesy that had been baked black into it, and Jux sighed with disgust and picked it up and dropped it into the soapy sink and walked off to wash his hands, pausing to investigate a whiff of burning.

           Moments later, he scraped the blackened crostinis into the trash bin near the cold side of the island and started cutting up another batch of parbaked baguettes. When the thin, biased slices were arranged on the parchment-lined sheet pan and slathered with EVOO and sprinkled with S&P, he shoved them into the oven and left the kitchen and went through the bar to the freezer and got a couple more baguettes out to defrost. After returning to the kitchen and sliding them into the dormant salamander, he sniffed and frantically jerked open the door of the oven, in which the latest batch of crostini were hardly warming. He stared into the radiating heat of the dark oven for a few moments, sighing heavily, before finally shutting it up and turning to gaze across the kitchen toward the whiteboard upon which the prep list was scrawled.

           Then there was a loud knocking from the back door through the storage room. Jux frowned and looked up at the clock. It was early afternoon already.

           “Is there a delivery today?” Jux thought out loud as he moved around the island and looked through the storage room at the back door, which was propped open to the warming sunlight pouring down through the beams of the dock shelter. “Hello?” he called out. As he passed the stainless steel sectional counter against the left wall, which was cluttered with various stacks of dusty containers surrounding the central bulk of the plastic-wrapped slicer, he saw a small square service plate nestled between the blade housing and the sealed cinderblock wall. He gently picked it up, scanned the surroundings, and then stepped to the door and leaned outside for a look at the empty dock patio. The tall gate to the parking lot was slightly ajar. Jux quickly turned to the wall where his bag hung by a strap on a coathook and felt at its secured zippers. He then looked strangely down at the small plate in his hand and sniffed and then rushed back into the kitchen and tore open the oven door, letting out a quick billow of burning. He swept up a couple of service towels and pulled out the sheet pan of charred crostinis.

           “Puta madre,” Jux muttered as he maneuvered the pan over the trash bin and carefully tugged at a corner of parchment paper until the whole blackened mess sluiced down to settle on the cooling ashes of the previous failed batch. For a few seconds, he breathed deeply and listened to the irregular soothing beats coming from the speakers. Then, suddenly, he walked to the fryer and reached up to manipulate the dial of the MP3 player until, at long last, he set the rotation to play-all Fela. He listened as the first track itched into its rhythm, and then, moving in an attempt at sync, he exited through to the bar and then to the frontside freezer to collect, this time, four long loaves of frozen parbake, which he promptly exchanged at the cool salamander in the kitchen for the two baguettes that were already beginning to thaw.

           The bread knife was just where he’d left it on the cold-side board, so that was good, but the baguettes were not completely defrosted, rendering the slicing impossible. He felt at the loaves and then left them be to have another look at the prep list.

           As he positioned himself before the whiteboard, however, he found it increasingly difficult to look upon it, and, in no time at all, a thick curtain of dread hung heavy on his shoulders, as if some impending catastrophe was right behind him. Thus, instead of studying the prep list again, he swung about and beheld the humming, empty kitchen in all of its perilous, glorious splendor. Fela was just beginning to occupy the soundspace generated by Africa 70 with notes from his sax.

           Jux opened the tall cold-side cooler and shifted some of the containers until removing a long stainless third in which chopped shrimps were cold-cooking in citric acid, packed in tight, plastic-wrapped layers. The label on the pan’s outer shell of plastic wrap simply read “SCRIMP.”

           “Indeed,” Jux said, nudging the cooler’s door shut with an elbow and setting the pan on the hot-side board near the sheet pan from the crostinis. He began unpeeling the clingy plastic and then lifted the corner of the top layer to view the translucency of the chopped shrimp soaking in lime juice. After a subtle nod, he took up the corner of the next layer and froze at the sight of the small missing knife tucked between the lower layers of the curing. Though its black handle blended well in the darkness, a fortunate angle of light from the ceiling fixture glanced upon the short fat shaft of the blade. Jux took up the knife and repositioned the layers of cured shrimp and walked over to the dishpit and gripped a quick blast of cold water down at his hand holding the knife, which he promptly deposited on the empty counter. A few drips from the hung spray nozzle plunked into the soapy water of the first sink. After wiping his hands on his apron, he walked back over past the line and examined the label on the outer wrapping of the third pan. There was yesterday’s date, in addition to the questionable description, but no name or initials pursuant to best practices for food storage, so he lifted up the pan and crossed to the prep list near the hall corner. When his face aligned with the board, he beheld an incomprehensible mess of characters both familiar and strange and, among them, central to his perception and alone and uniquely readable, was “Scrimp Ceviche” in the same blocky script.

           Jux stared at the words for some time and then, again weighing the third pan in his grip, walked over to the line and set it down and then went back to the dishpit and gathered a wide steel mixing bowl from the upper rack. As he did so, he glanced down at the small, rinsed knife for a moment before taking the bowl out through the bar and server station to the front produce cooler behind the defunct retail counter. He slid the glass door open and transferred a few luscious tri-color bell and dark green jalapeño peppers into the mixing bowl along with a shrinkwrapped long English cucumber and a slick purple onion. To top it off, he fingered into a clear plastic bag and worked out a few sprigs of moist, pungent cilantro.

           When he got back to the kitchen, he immediately thought he caught the scent of burning, so he hurriedly set the mixing bowl on the cold-side line next to the baguettes and long cutting knife with a serrated edge and pulled at the handle of the oven until it opened and he looked at nothing for a few seconds and then shut the oven up. He turned and palmed the firm, clammy baguettes and then walked to the washing station to sanitize his hands before collecting one of the eight-inch chef’s knives from the strip.

           In order to get an even dice with peppers, Jux had learned to first core out the base of the stem at the top and remove the seedy bulbs inside before splitting the flesh apart and stripping off the spongy white glands. Then it was just a matter of working the pieces flat and squaring and slicing so that the strips were as wide as you wanted a side of your dice to be. Thus he worked, propelled forward in his precise, repetitive rolls of the blade into the board through pepper by the relentless thrust of Fela Kuti and Africa 70. He did the green peppers first, then the red ones, the orange ones, and, finally, the yellow ones. When the pepper bones were swept with the dull side of the blade into the bin at the end of the cold line, they left behind a jagged network of their colored juices in the scores of the plastic cutting board. The peppers were done. Jux wiped each side of the knife with a striped yellow service towel damp with sanitizer and set it down and checked the baguettes, which were just sufficiently defrosted for the slicing, so he picked up the black-handled serrated bread knife and began rending the long shafts of bread into thin, biased slices that he gathered in groups to deposit onto the sheet pan, freshly lined with parchment. Soon he peeled the last slice from the cold, tough loaf and placed it on the tray with the others and the end of the baguette with the other three ends in a neat little triangle next to the edge of a plastic-wrapped third pan of mixed greens. It looked for a brief moment as if the tiny, tight face of a praying mantis peered up through the plastic wrap, but a quick lean to investigate yielded the observation that everything in there more or less looked like it could be part of a praying mantis, so he directed his attention to arranging the raw crostinis on the sheet pan and then lavishing them with extra-extra-extra virgin olive oil, Spanish, denominación de origen and everything, maybe, he didn’t go check, maybe that was fantasy, living in Spain, and seasoning them, flicking the last bits of kosher salt and coarse ground black pepper on his fingers down at the tray to coincide with a saxophone drop from the speakers. Jux slid the prepared crostinis into the oven and then looked up at the clock high up on the wall over the dish station, but he didn’t want to see that, and he didn’t want to look again at the prep list, either, so he instead took up the small paring knife and carefully cleaned it, first soaking its blade in the warm soapy water of the first sink and scrubbing it well with a good-and-scratchy green pad before rinsing it off in the middle basin and then dipping it for a final show in the sani sink before setting it to rest, and dry, on the clean rack.

           Jux shuffled back to the oven and peered through its foggy, corroded window at a mound of imperception inside. He tugged the oven door open and flared his nostrils as he drew in a deep breath of warm stale air with only the most subtle hint of EVOO blossoming from within. He shut the oven door, double-checked the levels of the knobs on the console, and then pressed the tips of his fingers into his eyes and looked over at the onion, cucumber, cilantro.

           “Tomatoes,” Jux exclaimed. He scanned the empty kitchen. “Tomatoes,” he said again, looking around at the empty kitchen. “I forgot the tomatoes, the most important part.” He thrust a finger into the air to punctuate the proclamation. “But, first,” he announced throatily, “I will dice this onion. That should take me no more than the two minutes or so these crustinis need, so we will finally have that first batch done and we will be one step closer to the ceviche.”

           Nobody responded, so he shrugged and went about carving the outer layer of the purple onion off into the trash with the fat blade of the chef’s knife. In Jux’s early days at the restaurant, Chef Jessup had tasked him with dicing an onion for the first time and, when Jux indicated that he didn’t really know how to go about doing it, Jessup had told Duke to teach. So Duke had proceeded to explain a method that involved keeping one end of the onion together while lateral slices are made along with a perpendicular network of slices and then you have to keep the end together, naturally, and when the bulbs pop out, well, that’s nobody’s fault but your own. So Jux listened, and he not only immediately implemented the method but also continued practicing it over the months when the occasional need to precisely dice an onion presented itself. In time, however, he’d come to find that the easiest way to dice an onion is to get the outer layers off, split it in half along its core, shear off the ends, slice at the appropriate width, and then turn the sliced mound a quarter, keeping it tight, and cut down radially into the core. So this is what he did, cut the onion his way, and the cutting was quick and it was only with the slightest tearing up that he looked away to scoop the dice up into his hands and into the bowl with the pepper cubes.

           He then suddenly stood upright, breaking with the afrobeat. “Macaroni,” he said aloud. “I know, I know, it’s ‘medium elbow,’ but you know what I mean. And the spaghetti is ‘capellini.’ I get it. I know.”

           The kitchen did not respond.

           “And medium elbow needs a salty bath,” Jux said, bouncing his eyebrows and looking over at a stock pot settled upended on the lower rack of the dish station. “But, first,” he announced, “I say to you that the crostinis must be attended to.” He turned at the silence and opened the oven to reveal the fragrant warmth of shimmering golden thin toasts. He gripped the sheet pan with a towel to remove it from the oven and, after a quick, gentle nudge of the leg against the door to shut it, brought the pan over to the prep table and set it under the knife rack next to the covered tabletop deep-fryer. For some time, he stared blissfully down at these crostinis until, finally, he looked around the kitchen with a victorious smile, settling his gaze, in the end, at the clock on the wall over the dishpit.

           There was still time to “make it nice,” as Chef Junior often said, so Jux put together the colorful shrimp ceviche and made the gooey mac and cheese and poached the pears in spiced red wine and, before he knew it, Junior had returned to herald the arrival of a wave of evening crew members.

III

            Soon enough, the kitchen’s small space was occupied by others. The service staff, gearing up for the night, came back occasionally to fill buckets of ice or ask for cucumbers to slice for the water glasses. Chef Junior had a black and white paisley bandana around his head and he spent the first fifteen minutes talking about the awesomeness of the remote-controlled car he’d purchased with winnings from his trip to Vegas a few nights before. In the meantime, Abuse put on some hardcore anti-gospel and went about assessing the wrap-jobs on the hot side with an air of unsurprisingly increased disappointment.

            Then Junior clasped his hands together and smiled approvingly at the various items that Jux had prepared. “So,” he said, “looks like you’ve been busy.”

            “I did what I could with that prep list,” Jux said.

            “Yeah,” said Chef Junior. “About that.”

            “What?” asked Jux.

            Junior motioned over at the prep list. There were only three things written on it: “Goat Balls, Poached Pears, Gnocchi.”

           Jux gazed at the board and then looked around the kitchen. Then he looked at the chef. “Are you serious?”

            “It’s right there, bro,” said Chef Junior. You got two out of three, so it’s all good, but why make all this other stuff when we don’t need it?”

            Jux gripped his scalp with the tips of his fingers finding passage between and through the hair. He stared at the white board for a bit and then at the floor. “This is unreal,” he said. Then he cast a glance back into the kitchen and smiled. “Someone’s fucking with me.”

            “Bro,” chuckled Junior, “nobody’s fucking with you.”

            Jux pointed at Abuse. “Is this you?”

            Abuse pointed the end of a pair of tongs at himself. “Me?” he asked, eyes wide.

            “Eh,” Jux said. He looked at the dishwasher, who was wiping the inside of a pot with his fingers. “Do you know who changed the prep list on me, Arturo?”

            Arturo shrugged. “Fuck you, man,” he said. “You know nobody changed the prep list.”

            “Did you label the curing shrimp last night?” Jux pressed.

            “The what?” Arturo asked.

            “The shrimp for the ceviche,” Jux articulated. “It was in a third pan in the cooler. Didn’t you help wrap up last night?”

            “Why the fuck are we talking about that?” Arturo asked.

            “Because whoever labeled the pan also wrote the prep list I was working off,” Jux explained. “Same handwriting, same scrimp.”

            “What the fuck is ‘scrimp?’” Arturo asked.

            Jux sighed. “There was a knife in the container, too.”

            “You probably just got confused,” Junior called. “Leave poor Arturo alone.”

            “I got more money than you, motherfucker,” Arturo said.

            “That is very likely,” Junior admitted. “I don’t own jack shit. My wife’s the one with the real job.”

            There was a silence. Then Jux threw out a hand in the general direction of the whiteboard. “I don’t care what you say,” he said. “That was a different list earlier, and I’m not just talking about the goat balls. There were like twenty things on there this morning.”

            Arturo and Junior exchanged looks while Jux stared at the whiteboard.

            Suddenly, a sonorous thump shook the prep station wall, rattling the crates of potatoes and dislodging the knife rack. They watched in terror as the knives lost their magnetic binds to the strip as the force of its swing pulled against their initial momentum and flung them all down and across at the prep station. The bread and boning knives skittered across the stainless steel countertop and then toppled onto the floor while the chef’s knives plunged to a stop halfway up their blades into the vat of steaming cheesy noodles. One of the chunky white plastic handles of the two-handled cheese saw crashed into the edge of the steel half-pan lidding the fryer, dislodging it just enough so that the force of the blade against the curve of its edge popped it up sideways to allow the blade handle to splash down into the cool vat for just a moment before the pan fell settling bottom-side down against the shaft of the long blade and causing the handle of the cheese knife by weight of the blade and the crux of the fulcrum on the side of the fryer to push back up against the upside-down top of the rim of the pan and then launch a splatter of oil along with the cover across the prepared crostinis, many of which were disturbed from the papered tray and cast to the floor.

            There was silence, and there were fretful and confused glances.

            “Crazy-ass pressure in these ducts,” Arturo said. “Probably building up in the basement.”

            “Was that the bathroom?” Chef Junior cried. “Did someone just take a shit?”

            “I said the basement,” Arturo corrected. “Kitchen, whatever, all blocked off. It’s probably still connected to the aitch vee ay see.”

            “We still haven’t one hundred percent confirmed that there is an abandoned kitchen in the basement,” Junior said. “But there’s a bathroom on the other side of that wall. Almo used to shit in there and we’d hear it boom every time. It wasn’t ever like this, though.” He looked over at Jux. “Was it?”

            “The crostinis are all fucked, man,” Jux whined. “I could have done more of the list.”

            “There are only three things on that list,” Chef Junior reminded him, “and you took care of two of them. Don’t worry. We can probably get the goat balls done tonight when it’s slow.”

            Jux gripped his forehead, still staring down at the mess. “I just don’t understand,” he said. Then his eyes opened wide and he rushed over to the cold-side trash bin and began rooting around among the discarded crostinis and used service gloves and sloppy remnants of vegetable chop.

            Arturo frowned in disgust, still wiping the slimy insides of a pan with his bare hand.

            “What are you doing?” Junior asked Jux.

            Jux looked up angrily. “Looking for the label,” he said, immediately resuming the dig.

            “What label?” Junior asked.

            Jux paused, exhaled intensely, and then looked again at the chef. “Scrimp,” he articulated like a confused language instructor. He thrust his hands back down into the trash and immediately winced and pulled them out to find that one of his fingers had been pricked by something and a small bead of blood was swelling among the slop on his skin.

            “Now look what you’ve gone and done,” Junior chided.

            Jux scowled at him and walked to the rinsing station to clean his hands. Instead of applying a bandage, he ran his uninjured hand across the motion sensor to no avail and then tore the front from the dispenser and yanked out a half-yard of towel, which he wrapped tightly around his finger before storming out to the dock.

            He was followed closely by Junior and Abuse, who had to practically skid to a stop when Jux suddenly froze.

            “Where is it?” Jux asked intensely. “Where’s the broken fucking chair?”

            Abuse slipped out a cigarette. “Probably someone sitting on it out front as we speak,” he said, bouncing eyebrows.

            “What broken chair?” Junior asked, scanning the dock.

            Jux pointed at the filthy cement. “The one that was right here,” he said. “The one that’s been here since before Almo quit, because he put a ‘broken’ sign on it even though it was so obviously fucked it couldn’t even stand up. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

            “I know what you’re talking about,” Abuse said, puffing, “but that chair got tossed a couple weeks ago.”

            Jux eyed him suspiciously. Finally, he said, “Fuck you.”

            “Fuck-a-me?” Abuse gaped with a voice that was kind of half Mario, half Oscar the Grouch. “Fuck-a-me? Fuck-a-you!”

            “Seriously, though,” Jux continued. “How long have we known each other? Experiences shared? Trials overcome? Forks in the road taken up from the road and repurposed as implements of poking? And now you’re telling me that that broken fucking chair wasn’t there this morning even though I know it was because I fucking saw it here?”

            Abuse shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, man,” he said. “I remember that busted shit, and the note Almo wrote, but it’s been gone for weeks.”

            Fuming, Jux whipped out a cigarette of his own.

            “What’s this all about, exactly?” Junior pressed.

            Jux flicked his lighter and took a long, satisfying pull, exhaling, responding: “I think the handwriting was the same.”

            “Almo’s ‘broken’ sign?” Junior asked. “Same as what, the label on the shrimp?”

            “‘Scrimp,’” Jux corrected. “But yes. The whole fucking prep list I was working off of. I mean, I don’t know, because it’s not like I can even compare them because now they’re mysteriously all gone. Poof.”

            Abuse clicked his tongue. “Don’t say that,” he advised.

            “What?” Jux asked. “Poof?” He looked around worriedly.

            Abuse winced.

            “Hold on,” Junior said. “Are you trying to tell us that you think Almo is like some kind of disgruntled ex-employee who’s been sabotaging your prep shift?”

            “I don’t know what I’m saying,” Jux said pathetically, “except that I have no idea what’s going on.”

            Abuse nodded slowly. “That’s how it is around here.”

            “Why don’t we stop talking about the list and focus on getting the knives and everything cleaned up?” Junior suggested. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re done for today, Jux. You did far more than you needed to, whether it was what I put up there last night or not.” He beckoned Jux back into the kitchen with a gentle hand gesture.

            Instead of cleaning anything up, however, Jux just stared at a bread knife resting where one of the grimy base-poles of the island pressed against the flooring.

            “I mean it,” Junior continued with a slight cock of the head. He flared his nostrils a few times and then rolled his eyes around. “Isn’t this like one of those situations where that guy in New Vegas has to choose a dialogue response? Like you want to pick the good one?”

            Jux slowly turned to him. “I don’t want to talk about Fallout right now.”

            Chef Junior held up his hands. “I thought you’d be impressed.”

            “Oh, I am impressed,” Jux told him, “but I know you’re just trying to make me feel better. I also just don’t want to talk about it right now.”

            “Maybe you should clock out and move on with your day,” Junior suggested. “Grade some papers or something.”

            Jux continued stare blankly at the mess of knives all over his prep.

            Then Kieran poked his head around the corner from the bar. “What was all that?” he asked, gripping the doorframe like a frog.

            “There he is,” Junior said. “Your ghost knocked the knife rack off the wall and ruined a bunch of Jux’s prep work.”

            Kieran scrunched his nose at Jux. “That’s terrible.”

            “Yeah,” Junior continued. “His work is done for the day.”

            Jux just continued to stare miserably at the mess, especially at the cast and tainted crostinis.

            After a moment, Kieran ticked his head at Jux. “Hey,” he said. “You want a drink? There are a few sips of a dry Italian red at the end of a bottle over here.”

            Jux looked at the sommelier for a moment and then at the chef and then back at the sommelier. “Fine,” he said, tossing up his hands and sighing. “I mean, thank you.”

            Moments later, Jux had clocked out and was sitting at the bar across from Kieran, who emptied the dregs of a bottle of Sangiovese into a wide, elegant wine glass, aerating the liquid with an upward pull as he poured.

            “The grapes are grown on a sunny, rocky hillside in Toscana,” Kieran explained as the rich purplish wine settled and he placed the glass before Jux. “Lots of morning sun. It’s luscious.”

            Jux nodded graciously and took up the bulbous glass and sipped with a wince.

            Kieran screwed his eyes. “You don’t like it?”

            Jux swallowed and shook his head and worked the base of the glass in circles on the counter with his fingers. “No, it’s good,” he said. “I just…” He breathed deeply and stared over at the short corner hall to the kitchen. “I just don’t get it,” he finally managed.

            Kieran tossed the empty bottle into the tall can by the register setup and picked up a black linen from a stack on the counter and opened the small bar washer and began unloading clean, wide Burgundy glasses. “The kitchen is working against you,” the sommelier intoned. “Can’t keep things from burning or breaking. Can’t keep from injuring yourself. Did I ever tell you about that cook who didn’t have no-slips and ended up deep-frying his scalp?”

            “You did,” Jux said. “I believe it was essentially the first thing you told me on the first day I worked here.” He hung his head so that it hovered over the glass of Sangiovese. “But, yes, it’s like you’re saying,” he continued. He breathed the hearty, warm air of the wine. “Random shit flying across the kitchen. Knives where you don’t expect them. Violent mystery noises from the bathroom on the other side of the wall. Hidden, dilapidated subterranean chambers. And today, I started on everything on the list and got a lot of it done—or nearly done—and now the list looks different, because apparently that board writes itself. I mean, what the fuck?”

            Kieran shrugged as he polished wine glasses with the linen.

            “Everything was fucked today from the moment I got here,” Jux continued. “I had to jump over the goddamn back gate and I tore my only pair of work pants in the process, and then there was a bunch of broken shit on the floor in the kitchen, and then the front door, you know, sucks, and then, seriously, I worked all fucking morning, man—”

            “Something was broken back there again?” Kieran said, setting a wine glass down on the extended napkin with the others and looking at Jux.

            “Yeah,” Jux said. He waved a dismissive hand. “When I came in, a bunch of ramekins were busted up on the floor. Fucking shards all over the place, and I’m trying to get back out to my car and forget to clock in in the meantime.”

            “You know this place is actually haunted, right?” asked Kieran. His gaze was serious and a little confused. “It’s not a joke.”

            “Meh,” said Jux, waving another dismissive hand. “You’ve been selling me on that for months.”

            “Seriously,” Kieran said, leaning in. “Before they built this place with the restaurant-type space at the ground level and the condos up top, it was a sign-printing shop and, before that, a trophy shop. Before that, it was some other business, but the foundations are even older, the beams, too.” He looked around mysteriously. “This is an old space, and full of ghosts. A bunch of kids and Indians died here.”

            Jux stared for a moment and then gripped his glass and held it up at the sommelier. “Thanks for the info, Kieran,” he said. He gulped down the wine. “Oh,” he added, “also, Indians are from India, so, you know, I think you mean, uh, Native Americans.”

            Kieran cocked his eyebrows as if Jux had just said something in an alien language, but Jux just smiled, set the globe glass on the bar counter and left.

            As he headed out through the back dock, he passed Chef Junior hard at work thin-slicing a greasy pad of Jamón Serrano at the spinning circular blade. “Be good tonight, now,” Junior said. “You’re on hot side with me for the brunch tomorrow, so you need to be sharp. No staying up all night playing New Vegas.” He passed the meat against the blade again and added the translucent pinkish brown strip to a small pile on a nearby plate.

            “Oh, come on,” Jux whined. “I was just about to start a Caesar’s Legion playthrough.”

            “Five ay em,” Junior insisted.

            Jux rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

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