I

            At one point, the sink faucet on the cold side of the line started leaking so badly that Jux and Duke decided to try and calculate how much water was being wasted over the course of a year.

            “This will prove it to him,” Jux said, pumping a long strip of carbon paper out of the ticket printer and then tearing it off.

            “He’s not going to call the plumber,” Chef Junior said as he plunked roasted veal bones into a pot with agitated mirepoix. “He just had to drop eleven hundred bucks to get the oven fixed.”

            “He calls that fixed?” asked Duke. He shook his head.

            “I’m just saying,” Chef Junior said, “you’re going to have to be pretty persuasive if you expect him to call the plumber again after the corn silk fiasco.”

            The afternoon was a perfect time to do some calculations, since they only had one reservation on the books for the evening and all of the stations were set and the only necessary prep—the veal stock at which Junior was working—was underway. Duke had Eminem’s latest album playing on the stereo but it was presently difficult to hear because they’d just dropped a basket of fries for Teatree’s pre-dinner feeding.

            “Okay,” Jux said, tapping a cheap pen against his chin like, he was thinking, an engineer in the midst of a tricky equation. “First we need to measure how much is leaking out every minute.”

            Duke held out a clear-plastic quart measure, which he had at the ready.

            “Okay,” Jux said, looking up at the clock on the wall above the dish station. “Thirty-three seconds. Wait for it,” he warned as the second hand ticked its way to the start of the minute.

            “You know you can keep track of a minute starting at any second, right?” Duke asked.

            “It’s not as good,” Jux said, holding up a finger. Somehow, this held the back of the house in suspense. “There,” he finally said, pointing a finger down at the leaking faucet.

           Duke held out the measuring cup. The water dribbled steadily into it as they waited and watched the clock.

            “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pay so much attention to what they were doing in this kitchen,” Chef Junior observed.

            Jux held up a hand. “Don’t distract us.”

            “What about all of it coming out from here?” Duke asked, indicating the water seeping from around the base of the faucet.

            Jux frowned. After a moment, he shrugged. “Whatever,” he said with a shrug, eyes back on the clock. “We’ll just say ‘at least’ this much water lost every year. That’s probably better, anyway.”

            Duke pulled the measure from the faucet as soon as the hand touched the minute mark, and Jux seemed to choke a bit instead of calling the time. They looked at the measure.

            “That’s almost two cups,” Jux said with a nod.

            “Four hundred and fifty milliliters,” Duke corrected, “more or less.”

            “It’ll have to do,” said Jux. He had already written both 2 and 450 on the scrap of ticket paper and was now staring down at the numbers as if they were the secret key to the lock of some unknown vault. Duke began staring down at the scrap as well and, a moment later, Chef Junior tucked his service towel over the oven’s handle and approached to join his stare with theirs.

            “Now we just have to multiply,” Jux said.

            “Don’t multiply those two,” Duke warned, indicating the numbers Jux had written down.

            “Why not?” Jux asked. “Oh, I know.”

            “The question is,” began Duke, “do we pursue metric or English?”

            “You’re talking to an English professor,” Chef Junior warned.

            “Well,” Jux said, “on this matter, I must insist on metric. All that imperialism is just too fucked up for me.”

            Duke nodded in agreement. Chef Junior went back to the stock pot.

            For some time, Duke and Jux engaged in calculations. Each of them tapped at the screens of their phones and every time they came to a product, their numbers were different. More than a little angry tapping at screens ensued.

            “This is horseshit,” Jux finally said. “We need to do it on paper.”

            They settled the scrap of carbon ticket on the prep table and hunkered down for some real math.

            “Oh shit,” Duke said, squinting down. “Four-hundred fifty? I was thinking four-twenty the whole time.”

            “Typical,” said Abuse, who was just arriving and fussing with his backpack in the storage room.

            “That explains some of the discrepancies,” Jux said. “Ok, 450 milliliters. That’s where it all begins.”

            They started by multiplying 60 times 60, which was, of course, 3600. Why? Because there were sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour. Then, Jux wondered how many seconds were in a year, so they multiplied 3600 by 365, yielding 1,314,000.

            “Goddamn, that’s a lot of seconds,” Jux said. Duke and Abuse agreed.

            “That’s not right, though,” Duke warned.

            “I know,” Jux said.

            “Jux took calculus class in high school,” Abuse said.

            “And I got college credit for it, thank you very much,” he added. “Duke’s right, though. We haven’t factored in the water yet.”

            “No, it’s wrong because you multiplied the number of seconds in an hour by 365,” Duke corrected. “That’s not a year. I think we have to multiply that by 24, since there’s 24 hours in a day.”

            “Oh shit,” Jux said, scratching his head. “He’s right.”

            Duke nodded and cranked up the Eminem now that Teatree’s frites were getting cold on a plate on the island.

            “Ok, start over,” Jux said, scratching out the previous computation.

            60 seconds per minute times sixty minutes was 3600 seconds—

            “Why are you doing it in seconds?” asked Duke. “We measured the leak per minute.”

            “The second is the most common of denominators,” Abuse offered.

            Jux bounced his eyebrows. “That,” he said, “pretty much.”

            Duke shook his head. “That’s not right,” he said. “Give me that pen.”

            60 minutes per hour times 24 hours a day was 1440 minutes a day. 1440 minutes (a day) times 365 days in a year was 525,600 minutes in a year.

            “Good wholesome Christ,” Abuse exclaimed. “That’s all the minutes there are in a year?”

            Duke nodded.

            Abuse looked over to where his phone was plugged into the stereo. “That’s not enough minutes,” he said fearfully. “We need more.”

            “More?” asked Jux.

            Abuse nodded. “More.”

            “I don’t think anyone can help you with that,” Duke said.

            “Not even Carl Fucking Sagan,” Jux added.

            “Who’s that?” Duke asked.

            “Billions and billions of stars,” Abuse said with Saganesque gravity.

            “Oh, that guy,” Duke said, nodding. “Didn’t he write Contact?”

            “Matthew McConaughey sure didn’t,” Abuse said.

            “Right,” Jux said. He tapped the scratch paper. “Now we do the final calculation.”

            525,600 minutes a year times 450 milliliters (at least) per minute equaled 236,520,000 milliliters of leaked water per year.

            “Dayum,” Duke said, shaking his head.

            “I’m writing that down,” Jux said. He hit the printer feed button and tore off another section of carbon paper. After spreading the clean paper on the stainless steel of the window counter, he added, “New sheet.” He wrote out the massive number.

            “I’m not sure I can visualize what that much water looks like,” Chef Junior suggested as he dumped a cup of red wine into the stock pot.

            “Good point,” Jux said. “Maybe we compare to, like, how much water there is in the ocean.”

            “On it,” Duke said, tapping at his phone.

            “Or we could calculate gallons, too,” Jux added, “since we are all more familiar with gallons.”

            “I thought you were all metric progressive,” Chef Junior said.

            “Metric-sexual,” Jux said.

            “I don’t think so,” Chef Junior said.

            “Shit,” Duke said. “It’s fucking scientific notation.”

            “That’s not scientific notation,” Jux said.

            “Looks scientific to me,” Duke said. “It’s all in cubic kilometers, though. We’d have to do more calculations.”

            “You know,” Jux said, “we’re thinking about this the wrong way. Tati is our audience here. Let’s do the calculation that makes the most sense to him. There are 750 milliliters in a bottle of wine, right?”

            “Brilliant,” Chef Ryan said, grinning.

            236,520,000 milliliters divided by 750 milliliters yielded 315,360.

            “Equivalent to bottles of wine,” Jux proclaimed.

            “That’s a number he’ll understand,” Chef Junior admitted.

            “It hasn’t been leaking like this for a year, though,” Abuse noted.

            “Good point,” Jux said, frowning down at the calculations.

            “Easy,” Duke said. “It started, what, three weeks ago?”

            “It’s been leaking for months,” Abuse said, “just wasn’t as bad as this until recently.”

            “Getting progressively worse all the time,” Duke said.

            Jux’s eyes widened. “I think this might be a job for calculus,” he said. “Will wonders never cease.”

            “I thought you were an English professor,” Chef Junior said.

            “Oh, I am,” Jux said. “I’m not suggesting that I can do calculus to figure it out, I just think I know that calculus would do the trick. But, then, I think we’d need to know the rate of change or something.”

            “Let’s see how much it’s been since Saturday,” Duke suggested. “It’s been pretty much this bad for at least that long, right?”

            1440 minutes per day times six days times 450 milliliters per minute was 3,888,000 milliliters, which meant the equivalent of 5,184 750-milliliter bottles of wine.

            Chef Junior dropped his tongs. They ricocheted off the pocket rubber traction mat and toppled under the stove. He stared down at the floor, defeated.

            “That a lot of bottles of wine,” Abuse noted.

            “Can that even be right?” Jux asked, looking down at the sheet and comparing it with the figures entered into the calculator on his phone.

            “I got the same,” Duke said.

            “Can I get a good goddamn,” Jux muttered, staring in horror at the leaking faucet.

            Chef Junior looked up from where he was crouched to retrieve the tongs from the hot, dark space beneath the oven. “Are you saying that faucet has leaked over five-thousand wine bottles of water since Saturday?”

            “Looks like it,” Duke said. He slipped his phone in the sleeve pocket of his chef’s coat and crossed toward the back storage room.

            Chef Junior sighed and leaned back down, curving his bulky torso around to jab his chubby fingers into the darkness under the oven. “What do we have here?” he suddenly asked.

            Duke stopped at the doorway and turned back to look along with Jux and Abuse as Chef Junior rose with the tongs in one hand and two crusty 8-inch chef’s knives gripped together by their black plastic standard handles in the other. These he raised into the air and called out, “Almo!”

            Teatree peeked in from the bar. “He’s already long gone,” he said. Then he noticed his food cooling on the island window. “Hey, why didn’t you page me?”

            “I did,” Chef Ryan said. “Eat your dinner.”

            Teatree sniffed disappointedly at his plate.

            “Why are you yelling for poor old Almo?” Duke asked the chef.

            “He probably stashed these under there so that he wouldn’t have to clean them,” Chef Junior said with a sigh as he brought the grimy knives over to the dishpit.

            “I got it,” Jux said, slipping his phone back into his pocket along with the calculation sheets.

            “No,” Chef Junior said. “You write up your little argument there and I’ll clean Almo’s knives. Then I’ll see if we can’t get the owner of this fine establishment to have the faucet fixed.”

            “Tati’s not coming in tonight, is he?” Abuse asked worriedly.

            Chef Junior shook his head. “I’m going to call him,” he said. “I’m not going to let five thousand wine bottles of water drip down the drain overnight if I can help it. Besides, it’s not five o’clock yet, so he’s probably only a couple of glasses of wine in, and that will make him possible to deal with.”

            “More receptive,” Teatree concurred. “It’s after 4 or 5 that he gets obnoxious and stubborn, I mean more than usual.”

            Jux nodded. “I’ll crank up the pathos, then.”

            “Doesn’t need to be an essay, Professor,” Chef Ryan noted. “I just need a few talking points.”

            “What’s this about five thousand wine bottles?” Teatree suddenly asked, munching through a palmful of frites.

            “That’s how much that faucet is leaking,” Abuse said.

            “Over the course of six days,” Jux added.

            Teatree’s eyes widened and he came around the side of the island to see. “Holy shit,” he said, pulling out a smartphone.

            “We already did the calculations,” Jux informed.

            Teatree was pointing the phone at the faucet. “This is totally going on Reddit.”

II

            First thing next morning, Jux arrived to start his prep shift. He let himself in using the lockbox key out back as usual, but, after flicking on the kitchen lights on his way to clock in at the bar, he discovered the scuffy trouser-legged lower half of some bulky man sticking out from underneath the kitchen island. There were grunts and metallic wrenching sounds, as well as a kind of songlike humming. Jux froze, staring for a moment and controlling his breath.

            Then the man’s hum evolved into actual sung words. “Don’t stop,” he sang softly, “believing. Just got to hold on to that feeling.”

            Jux rolled his eyes and tiptoed out of the kitchen and into the bar. The dining room was empty, as far as he could tell, and the front door was still bolted shut. The house lights weren’t on, either. He quickly clocked in at the bar PC and then flipped one of the switches on the wall by the server info board and the restaurant lighted up. He checked the special events annex and the storage area near the defunct retail counter and found nobody.

            When he had finally built up enough courage to reenter the kitchen, he found the man now standing over the cold-side faucet, straining what appeared to be the full weight of his upper body into a pass of a massive vice grip. He was now neither humming nor singing. After a moment, he ceased his effort and gave Jux a sweaty smile.

            “Tati’s having it fixed,” Jux said stupidly.

            The man ran the back of a forearm across his forehead. “Doing what I can,” he said. “Are you the kitchen manager?”

            Jux shook his head. “Not even close.”

            The man clicked his tongue and set the vice grip on the steel counter of the line. “Well, since there’s no one else here, I’ll just tell you that this faucet is broke as a two-bit hustler in Reno. Which means it can’t be fixed. When’s the kitchen manager arriving?”

            “We don’t have a kitchen manager, exactly,” Jux said. “Can I ask you something?”

            The man shrugged.

            “How did you get in here?” Jux asked. “Everything’s locked, I mean it was, and there’s nobody here. Was Tati in earlier?”

            The man frowned. “Tati?”

            “The owner,” Jux clarified. “About this tall, maybe wearing glasses. Probably looked a little bit like he didn’t know where he was.”

            The man shook his head. “Don’t know about that,” he said. “Though, maybe he is the one I need to speak with about this faucet.”

            Jux squinted at the faucet. “If you didn’t speak to Tati,” he asked, “how did you know to come here? I still don’t understand how you got in here. Did Junior arrange it?”

            “I don’t know about junior or senior,” the man said. “I don’t most certainly know about no señor, either, if you get me.”

            Jux gripped his forehead.

            “Can you maybe call up your kitchen manager?” the man asked.

            “We don’t have one,” Jux said. “I can call Tati, the owner, but I really don’t want to.”

            The man inhaled deeply and picked up his barbarian club of a vice grip. “Let me tell you why this has to happen,” he said. “This faucet here is set up with a few, well, let’s just say non-standard parts. Not to suggest it’s jury-rigged, because I see no indication of that. But the fittings don’t match up to plumbing industry standards, and that means there’s nothing I can do to fix the leak. You’re going to need to replace the entire unit.”

            Jux sighed. “That’s the prognosis.”

            The man inclined his head. He was balding, so, when he did so, Jux saw the massive sunspot of the man’s pate.

            “I’ll call him,” Jux said.

            “I can get a new unit over here today,” the man promised. “Delivered and installed and ready to roar by three pee em.”

            Jux nodded thanks and went out to the bar to make the call.

            “He’s there already?” was Tati’s response. “I told him to meet me there at eleven.”

            “Yeah, it’s weird,” Jux said. “Everything was shut down, lights off, locked up when I got here, but there he was. I honestly don’t know how he got in here.”

            “That doesn’t matter,” Tati said. “My guys know what they’re doing.”

            “He says he can have a new unit installed today in time for dinner service,” Jux said.

            There was silence on the line.

            “Brian?” asked Jux.

            “Tell him to wait for me,” Tati said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

            After hanging up the phone, Jux reentered the kitchen, finding it empty. He crossed to the back room and opened the door to the dock, finding it, also, empty, and the rear gates closed and latched from the inside just as he’d left them upon arriving.

            He breathed deeply for a moment and then got out a cigarette and had a smoke. Only a puff or two in, there was a crashing noise from the kitchen, so he grunted and looked around for a place to set his cigarette, deciding quickly on settling it into one of the grooves along the top of the closed plastic lid of the dumpster, which he’d seen others use to momentarily store lit cigarettes in the past.

            The kitchen was empty, but one of the ramekins housed on the top shelf of the kitchen island had fallen and its shards were scattered across the floor. Jux frowned and held his breath, listening for any sign of presence.

            A minute later, as he was sweeping up the shards, there was a series of noises from the dining room that sounded like chairs scooting around, so he abandoned the sweeping, leaning the broom against the prep table, and cautiously peered out into the dining area.

            The lights were now off again, which he didn’t like, but there was enough sunlight coming in through the tall windows to scan and navigate the room comfortably. He discovered that a few of the chairs had been taken down from their overnight perches on tables, but, still, there was no one about. That’s when he heard the broom handle slap against the faux tile of the kitchen and, rushing back in to have a look, thought he saw some ambiguous dark shape just as it left through the back room. He picked up the broom and then second-guessed himself and leaned the broom against the counter again and collected a long chef’s knife from the hanging magnetic rack.

            The dock was empty and the gate still closed and latched from the inside. He was panting and holding the blade down away from his side as he looked around. There was a gap between the top of the gate and the slotted roofing, which he had himself used in the past to enter the dock in the morning, but he’d had to park his vehicle right next to it on the outside in order to scale up. The space between the lower edge of the gate and the concrete was too small for anyone larger than a malnourished child to squeeze through. Whoever, or whatever, had been able to quickly mount the gate and slip through the gap from the inside would have to have been acrobatic, indeed. Maybe they could fly.

            Then a sour smoky scent pricked his nostrils and he turned to discover that a patch of grease under the dumpster was glowing with low, blue flames. His cigarette, however, was still perched in its nook on the lid of the dumpster, the cherry fading behind a fat shaft of ash. He deftly collected the cigarette, flicked the ash away, and gave it a few rapid puffs to get it going fully again, all while shouldering into the dumpster to move it a couple of feet from its spot so that he could stomp out the low blue flames with his black service no-slips. Once it looked like the little fire-to-be was extinguished, he leaned against the dumpster to enjoy the rest of the cigarette, but the dumpster shifted at his weight and his elbow hit the side and the cigarette came loose and its fiery little cherry shattered into the soiled concrete of the dock. He stared down at it in defeat.

            Only seconds later, there was a banging sound on the tall metal gate, accompanied by a voice. “Hey, it’s Mario the plumber,” this voice called.

            Jux sighed. “Are you fucking kidding me,” he muttered.

            “Is that Brian?” the voice asked. Mario the plumber, allegedly.

            “Who is it, really?” Jux responded, leaning a bit to examine the cuffs of the man’s jeans and his scuffed workboots through the small space under the gate.

            “I just told you,” the man said, “Mario. Brian said that the sink faucet was leaking. I know I’m a bit early, but…”

            “Hold on,” Jux said. He went over to the gate and undid the latch with a creak.

            This was not the man he’d seen earlier. Aside from the clothes, this plumber was somewhat shorter, olive-skinned, and wore a bulky utility belt from which hung, among other things, an only moderately sized vice grip. “You good?” the plumber asked.

            Jux eyed him, but, after a moment, realized that he was still gripping the big chef’s knife. “Oh, uh,” Jux stammered, “yeah, I’m good. Come on in. Brian should be here soon.”

            They went into the kitchen and Jux showed him the leaky faucet.

            Mario had his head slightly tilted to the right as he nodded slowly, examining the fixture. “Oh boy, is that leaking,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

            Jux eyed him. “Mario, right?”

            The plumber smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to jump down the pipes or anything.”

            Jux exhaled. “Good,” he said. “Great.”

            “I honestly don’t understand why you’re always going on about that front door not functioning,” Tati’s voice suddenly boomed as he entered the kitchen from the bar, gripping some papers. “I just opened it up without any trouble at all.”

            Jux shrugged. “You just got here, right?”

            Tati looked down over his spectacles at him. “Yes,” he said. “Was that not made clear?”

            “It’s been a weird morning,” Jux admitted.

            “Well, if it has to do with the stresses of teaching at the community colleges, I can’t help you,” Tati said, looking at the chef’s knife still in Jux’s grip. “I have already explained to you why that’s a bad idea.”

            “Yeah, I know,” Jux said. “Actually, there was a plumber already here this morning, and I didn’t let him in. And he was working in the dark and he left without saying anything. I don’t even know how he left, either, because the back gate was still latched from the inside when I went to see where he was.”

            Tati was frowning at him. “No,” he said, “Mario and I both just now arrived.”

            “I get that,” Jux said. “It wasn’t Mario and it sure wasn’t you. I talked to this guy. He said that the sink would need to be completely replaced because it used, like, unsanctioned parts or something.”

            “That doesn’t make sense,” Tati said.

            “Tell me about it,” Jux said with a sigh.

            Tati fingered through the papers in his grip and produced an envelope and held it out to Jux. “Looks like you forgot to pick up your check yesterday.”

            Jux frowned at the envelope for a second and looked over at the whiteboard, which had scrawled upon it, in addition to a list of items he’d soon be preparing, the questionable phrase, “YO you moms fucks beyech.” There was a crude phallus inscribed nearby, but it wasn’t apparent whether this was intended as a phallus or was just the abandoned beginning of some other crude phrase. Jux sighed again and took the envelope. Herbed cheese spread was on the prep list, so he jiggled the check envelope at Tati in a kind of thanks and said, “I need some herbs.”

            Tati watched him leave the kitchen, and Jux felt it.

            “Like specifically rosemary and thyme, FYI,” Jux called back as he cornered into the bar before creeping cautiously through the server station toward the front storage where, in the light of the freezer through the frosty translucent door he opened the check.

            He had been hired as a dishwasher at ten dollars and forty cents an hour, an amount that, at the time, was standard for Tati’s Wine and Spirits, slightly above the norm for similar gigs in restaurants in the area, and yet sadly low for anyone thinking that it would really pay the bills. Recently, however, Jux had been promoted to “line support,” which was something like a hybrid of dishwasher and line cook, which meant, interestingly as it always is with promotions, a job that was generally less brutal, was, in fact, considerably easier, and paid more. Ten dollars seventy, to be precise. That thirty-cent raise he’d already seen on the last couple paycheck cycles, as relatively insignificant as it was considering that he only worked a maximum of twenty hours a week. However, the restaurant had announced just a couple weeks before that they were all getting raises—ten-seventy instead of ten-forty for dishwashers, eleven-ten instead of ten-seventy for line support—and the little bump went similarly up the chain through the various hourly kitchen positions that each had their perks of more interesting and sometimes less strenuous work and their drawbacks of greater responsibilities: prep cook, cold-side line cook, hot-side line cook. Whether or not the salaried executive and sous-chefs were seeing similar buffs to their compensation was not public knowledge, but all the part-timers suspected they were raking in fat stacks of cash.

            Anyway, it was in the light of the freezer that Jux took a moment to examine this most recent of paychecks, on which the raise was supposed to have been applied, and couldn’t for the life of him conclude that, in fact, he’d been compensated appropriately for those thirty to forty hours he’d slogged through over the last two weeks.

            First he was thinking about the trends of the old paychecks—what it had been like in the first few months when he was strictly dishwasher at ten-forty an hour. Yes, he’d done some line work along the way and even stepped in during a crisis moment or two for a line cook’s shift, but it’s not like he’d been granted a bonus for stepping in; it had been a pretty standard pre-tax four to five hundred dollars each two-week cycle at the beginning for his 18-22 hour weeks. His last paycheck, if he was remembering correctly, was significantly higher, but that was primarily the result, he figured, of that week last month when he’d picked up two extra days and almost even filled in for Max as a server. Of course that had not happened, and everyone knew why it was good that it didn’t—Jux would have been mean to the guests he was supposed to serve, no matter how hard he might have tried not to be—but he’d still worked two extra days, and, suddenly, there in the gloomy glare of the freezer light, he felt like it was impossible, completely impossible, to tell whether or not the amount on this check in his hand accurately reflected what he’d done according to the new pay schedule. It didn’t look different from his previous checks, though he did consciously try to work through a mental spreadsheet of data and project the numbers onto a plot that he could analyze but, really, what was he doing? Was this not some serious fucking Bartleby the Scrivener shit here or what? Verging on it, getting close to complete rejection of this responsibility with questionable positive consequences, getting close to telling that shifty bastard what he thought, getting close to—

            Rosemary and thyme. That’s why he was there, looking down in brief shock at the big blade still gripped in the hand not holding the check and envelope. Soft cheese spread, comprised of chopped fresh herbs, a tiny pinch of black coarse ground pepper, and some EVOO. That’s what he was doing. That’s why. That and ten thousand burned crostini.

            He tucked the check back into the envelope and folded it and slipped it into a rear pocket, executing all these motions while maintaining caution with the blade that he was still, for some reason, gripping.

            Back into the kitchen, the first thing he did was settle the knife onto the rack with a magnetic click. Tati was staring in befuddlement at the whiteboard.

            “Where’s Mario?” Jux asked as he set the bundles of herbs on the prep counter and set to washing his hands.

            Brian Tati looked at him, straight through the spectacles this time. “Who?”

            Jux reciprocated the loopy stare. “Mario,” he said. “The plumber who was just here. And please don’t tell me he wasn’t here.”

            Tati stared at Jux. “Oh, him,” he finally said. “He’s good. One of my best guys. He already took care of the faucet.”

            There was the sound of rustling in the back room and then Abuse appeared, bouncing his eyebrows. “What’d I miss?”

            “Goddamned Mario the plumber, that’s what,” Jux said, bouncing his eyebrows and heading over to the cold side sink, which was, gloriously, no longer leaking.

            “Fuckin’-A, man,” Abuse said. He nodded at the sink.

            “You know,” Tati informed them, “compulsive use of bad language is an indication of low IQ.”

            “No it isn’t,” Jux said, “except maybe in the case of whoever wrote that on the prep board over there.”

            “An English professor can’t think of more precise and creative words to use?” Tati prodded.

            “Listen, I can go all morning talking about how adapting diction to appeal to various discourse communities is actually a demonstration of rhetorical prowess,” Jux said, “but I’m still a little preoccupied by the fact that there was some other plumber in here this morning when I arrived. Are you sure you didn’t call two different guys?”

            “I only have one plumbing guy,” Tati said. “Mario.”

            Jux was nodding. “And he fixed it.”

            Tati inclined his head. “I don’t think I understand why you are having difficulty here.”

            “You know what?” Jux began, retrieving the herbs from the counter and going to the cold side sink. “I’m just going to go ahead and get started on this cheese spread.”

            “Boursin, I hope,” Tati said.

            “Yeah, cream cheese with herbs,” Jux said.

            “Boursin,” Tati repeated.

            “Just fucking say it so he gets out of here,” Abuse whispered from the cooler.

            “You want me to say it?” Jux asked. “Okay. Boursin.”

            Tati made a kind of indignant grunt.

            Then Jux held the fragrant bundles of fresh thyme and rosemary under the faucet and reached out to turn the handle. Nothing happened.

            “What are you doing?” Tati asked.

            Jux turned the lever a couple of times and then tried the hot water lever. Not a dribble emerged. “What is this treachery?”

            Abuse frowned at Tati. “Didn’t you say Mario fixed it?”

            Jux kept opening and shutting the valves, producing no new effects.

            “Jux,” Tati said. “The leak is fixed. It couldn’t be repaired, so Mario shut the water off at this sink.”

            “What?” Jux asked. “Like, we’re not going to have water here?”

            “The leak is fixed,” Tati said. “That’s what matters. The drain still works, so pour away. He just sealed off the main pipes down there.”

            “Why?” Jux cried.

            “I couldn’t just let it keep leaking,” Tati said. “The numbers you presented were horrifying. This is a green kitchen.”

            Jux and Abuse were both staring at him.

            “Since when?” Abuse asked.

            Tati leaned slightly back to demonstrate that he’d been insulted. “Since always,” he said.            

            “Huh,” Abuse said, glancing at Jux with a shrug.

            “But now it isn’t functioning at all,” Jux noted.

            Tati eyed him. “I can’t think of a better way to promote water conservation.”

            “How are we going to rinse the potatoes?” Jux cried.

            “Didn’t you tell me that you were a registered Green?” Tati asked.

            “That’s irrelevant,” Jux said. “Being a registered Green doesn’t mean not rinsing potatoes.”

            “Or doesn’t it?” Tati countered.

            “What?” Jux asked. “What does that mean?”

            “We pride ourselves here on innovative culinary approaches,” Tati said. “I’m sure that you will, collectively, find some way to rinse the potatoes without wasting water.”

            Jux was gripping his forehead.

            Tati left the kitchen.

            “What does he want us to do,” Jux asked, “put the potatoes in a barrel full of sand and scour them like a suit of armor before a joust?”

            Abuse frowned at him. “You sound like Kieran.”

            Jux shook his head.

            “Green kitchen,” Abuse mumbled.

            “I mean,” Jux said, looking around, “there are definitely patches of green shit under some of these fixtures.”

            “Nothing on this goddamned menu has ever been organic or sustainably sourced,” Abuse said. “Back in the day, the kitchen manager Rebecca suggested that we start buying organic produce and fair labor proteins, but Tati just literally ignored her. Then he fired her like two weeks later.”

            “Damn,” Jux said.

            “And let’s not forget about the, ahem,” Abuse added.

            Jux stared at him.

            “Rancid grease in the storm drain?” Abuse offered.

            “Oh, right,” Jux said. He cringed. “I really don’t like to think about that.”

            “I should have warned you,” Abuse said.

            “Pretty sure you did,” Jux said.

            “No, I mean before offering to get you a job here,” Abuse clarified. “Working here is nothing more than a series of increasingly compulsive and complicated moral compromises and personal humiliations. It destroys you. First you don’t realize that you’ve become the thing you hate until it’s too late, and then you either kill yourself or toss whatever shreds of dignity you think you have left right out into the dumpster and live with it.”

            Jux was staring at him in horror. “So where are you on that spectrum?”

            Abuse pulled out a cigarette. “I gave up giving a shit a long time ago, my friend. A long, long time ago.”

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