Final Ingredient
by Amy DeBellis
Dinner service is such a rush that it takes us a while to notice the dead cook. We’re reeling under a relentless rush of orders, sweat running into our eyes and sizzling off our bodies in the heat. I’m slinging pasta like my life depends on it, the expo and the waiters are screaming—and you gotta understand, in this kind of environment, it isn’t hard for a dead guy in the corner to escape notice. Even alive, Marco was the quiet type. Some of the other cooks probably thought he was grabbing a quick snooze. In a profession where you have to work seventy hours a week and stay on your feet past midnight, you can’t exactly blame a guy.
Finally, Andre, the sauté cook, happens to glance over at the corner for more than half a second and yells, “Me cago en todo lo que se menea!” (Rough translation: I shit on everything that wiggles. Rougher translation: Oh fuck.)
Marco, the potager, is slumped over a huge pot of soup, unmoving.
Joe goes over and confirms that he’s not sleeping. He’s dead, died standing up like a horse sleeps standing up: half-sagging, supported by the wall, his neck bent at an angle that would probably be painful if he were still alive to feel it.
A few of us gather around and hold a quick, frantic discussion of what to do about the body. There’s not enough space on the floor to lay him down, and we don’t have time to haul him away to the back. It’s easier to simply leave him where he is. He takes up less room being vertical.
“The soup is done anyway,” says Ty, the head chef. “Just send it out. And stop looking like a rabbit who got an electric prod up its ass!” he snaps at André. “Everyone calm the fuck down and we’ll finish this service like normal.”
Before returning to my station, I look more closely at Marco. Something is drifting out of his nose and half-closed eyes and slitted mouth, something thin and silvery and almost too translucent to see. It’s faint but luminous. As though he’s crying light. It floats through the air like mucus floats through water, drifting down into the pot below his face.
“Wait!” I cry at the top of my lungs. “Stop! The soup is contaminated!”
Just kidding. You think I’m crazy? During a service like this, nobody wants to interrupt the rush. Everyone is already shaken, half a step away from losing their shit completely and drowning under the tide of orders, and I can’t see Ty looking fondly on me dragging orders back to the kitchen on the basis of what’s probably a hallucination. Plus, I’m out of here in a few days. As soon as I can get that position in Boston lined up.
I return to my station and it can’t be more than two minutes before the waiter comes back, yelling for three more orders of the soup. “They love it! They gave the highest compliments to the chef!”
The translucent stuff is still leaking out of Marco’s face. It’s more opaque now, glowing with an intensity that’s almost beautiful, a silver river in the air. André notices too, hesitates. “Hey…does anyone else see this?”
“Shit…”
“Mierde!”
“¿Qué carajo es eso?”
The whole kitchen can see the the silver light now. Can see Marco’s ghost, or Marco’s soul, or whatever the fuck it is, still slowly leaking into the soup. Everyone’s a little freaked, but nobody wants to interrupt the rush. So: more soup goes out.
The orders slow as the night goes on, but the guests who linger all seem to want a bowl of the soup. We peer out at them through the service area. A woman lifts her bowl up to her face, and I swear she licks it. Runs her tongue around the inside like a dog. Next to her, a man spoons his own soup feverishly into his mouth, dripping in his haste, dribbling it down his shirt.
The next time I look over at Marco I see that whatever’s coming out of his face is thinning out again. Narrowing to a silver thread, growing more and more translucent as it trails into the pot. The orders keep coming in, but by this point they’re only for soup. Nobody even suggests making more. It’s our regular tomato basil, never all that popular before, and we all know why the diners suddenly like it so much. What it is about this particular soup that makes it special.
The silver light: almost gone. Trickling down to a few stray, drifting tears.
Right up until closing we’re feeding diners the rest of it, all the way down to the last drops, scraping it out of the pot with spatulas. Marco’s body slumps against the wall, lids drooping, mouth slightly open, but nothing more is coming out of him. He’s empty. The inside of him all darkness now, like a blown lightbulb. When we finally close, nobody speaks. Ty, the head chef, is looking at the order log like he can’t believe it. André is half-grinning, half-grimacing, clenching his teeth so hard they squeak.
I think again of the position in Boston, but the idea doesn’t grab me the way it’s been doing lately. Now it feels faded, dim and lackluster next to the light that Marco’s body wept this evening. Next to how successful we might be in the near future, if we keep having services like the one we just had.
Only problem is, we need more of that stuff. And from what we know, there’s only one way to get it.
The Molotov Cocktail 