The Insides (3 page)

And then she stands there, alone, her hair and fingers stinking of iron and offal and brine and smoke, her head ringing with the memories of the roaring noise which soundtracked her day’s work. Now, on the evening air, she hears the murmur of a line out front, just beginning to form. People have come to dine on the food that she’s handled and prepped. There’s satisfaction in hearing that murmur, satisfaction in being exhausted from long hours of labor. This is as happy, these days, as she ever gets.

She rides the 6 back to the Bronx, walks the quartermile from the station to her apartment. When she gets inside she flips on the light and finds a little tableau that Victor has laid out for her: a Glencairn whiskey glass, a spoon, an unopened bottle of single malt Scotch, and a note. T
REAT FOR YOU IN THE REFRIGERATOR
, says the note. P
AIR W/ THE
S
COTCH FOR BEST RESULTS. XOXO

Well, OK. She opens the fridge and finds a table-setting card marked with an O, propped against a coffee mug filled with chocolate mousse.

She sits down, fills the glass halfway with Scotch, and takes a bite of the mousse. Holds it in her mouth, disassembling it, the way she knows Victor would want her to do. She detects honey, vanilla, but also the faintest note of something dank, like a rotting leaf; echoed by the bogginess of the Scotch that she uses to swish it away. It is a wholly Victor concoction: delicious, but delicious in a way that has a little bit of difficulty in it, something the faintest bit unlikable for the mouth to puzzle over.

She texts him as she’s mulling through the second mouthful. He’ll be at work, but somehow he manages to always be checking his phone, even in the middle of churning out God only knows how many desserts for a Friday night rush.

T
REAT DELICIOUS
, she texts. W
HAT’S IN IT?

By the time he texts her back she’s forgone the spoon and has begun scraping out the recesses of the mug with her finger.

I
NFUSION OF
C
AVENDISH TOBACCO
, reads his response. It is so characteristically Victor that she has to roll
her eyes. It’s a little gimmicky; it excites on a kind of shallow level, designed as much for its attention-getting qualities as for anything having to do with the way the end result will actually taste. It’s something that Victor would describe as
sticky
, something likely to get passed around on the food Tumblrs or whatever other Internet things he keeps up with. It’s the side of the industry that she hates—just do good work, she thinks, and you will never need to worry about all that shit—and his engagement with it would make her insane if he didn’t have the talent to make things that actually tasted good in addition to being, whatever, clickable.

His obsession with attracting and retaining attention: she chalks it up to his one brush with celebrity some years back. He’d created a confection that ended up as the
now
dessert for a season: the Black Cupcake, made from squid ink and a near-perfect dark ganache. The thing landed him a gushing interview segment on the Food Network, made his career at the tender age of twenty-one. Everything he’s done since then has seemed designed, at least in part, to try to reclaim some of that glory, working hard to dispel the notion that he’s the one-hit wonder of the dessert world even though the only person in all of New York who holds that notion is probably himself.

E
XCELLENT WORK AS ALWAYS
, she texts back, and she means it. She waits a minute to see if he’ll say thanks or anything, but she doesn’t really expect him to, and he doesn’t. She pours herself another glass of Scotch and downs it a little too quickly, and then staggers into her bedroom without brushing her teeth and presses her face into the pillow.

At around three a.m. she’s awoken by the sound of
fucking: Victor’s brought some boy home, as he’s known to do. She groans with irritation and slaps the wall blearily, once, twice, and then she spins back down into sleep, not quite waiting to register whether the noise has ceased.

She dreams. Faces rise in her mind: the faces of people she doesn’t want to see, churned up by the fitfulness of her sleep. People from her life before. They float up like leaves, dislodged from somewhere down below. They break the surface of the calm black water and they turn there in a wide slow gyre, disturbing the stillness, all night long.

Logan International, Boston, Massachusetts. Maja gets off the airplane, submits her form and her passport for inspection, answers the familiar questions, and, everything in order, she is once again stamped into the United States of America. She checks her watch, which she set to local time during the night, when she was over the ocean, sleepless. Her appointment with the prospective client is in three hours. She is right on schedule. Jet-lagged, of course, but she’s come to prefer doing these initial consults that way. Get off the plane, get to the client: that’s been her rule in recent years. A flight leaves her higher functions blunted and her nerves raw: put another way, it leaves her sensitized, sensitized in the exact way that makes it easier for her to do the work that the clients will be expecting.

She drags her suitcase and garment bag into the airport bathroom, inspects her reflection in the mirror, checks her gums for bleeding. She runs a hand over her ruff of short black hair, aiming to give it some mussy volume, hoping to
better show off the few thin lodes of gray. She’s forty years old this year, but flight draws out her premature markers of age, sharpens the network of lines in her face, enhances the sense that she’s lived a life spent focusing with powerful intention.

You look good
, says the Archive.

Well,
she thinks back,
we all end up with the features we deserve
.

You sure about that?
asks the Archive.

This she ignores. She washes her hands for a long time in the steel sink, aware, as always, of the ways in which airports facilitate the passage of bacteria, but she doesn’t splash any water on her face: she doesn’t want to lose the dark circles under her eyes; she wants as little color as possible to return to her lips. Jet lag legitimately helps her work but it also enhances the theater of what she does, it also makes her look more dramatic, scores another point with the clients. Clients—the kind of clients who want what she has to offer, anyway—like to see her this way. A little ragged at the edges. A little haunted-looking. It makes her look exactly like the person they’re hoping will come in through the door.

So cynical
, says the Archive.

You were always supposed to be the cynical one
, she replies.

That was a long time ago
.

Mellowing out in your old age, are you then?

She rearranges the strap of her purse, grabs the handle of her suitcase, and heads briskly back out into the flow of people moving through the airport. She stands in a designated zone outside and catches a shuttle to a rental car place, negotiates the pickup of the compact car she’s reserved for
the day. She declines the GPS that the rental agent tries to upsell her on; she curtly waves off the cheaply printed regional map that he tears off for her from a pad of same. “I know the area,” she says, in her accented English.

The car’s been sitting in August light all morning, and as she opens the door she can feel heat push out in a wave. She lowers herself into the sun-baked driver’s seat, closes the door behind her, and smiles, allowing herself to enjoy the sensation of sudden sweat prickling in her armpits, beneath her dark blazer and her linen dress shirt. Outside of saunas she’s only experienced this kind of heat three or four times in her life, and all of them have been here, in America. It’s good to be back.

Somebody died the last time we were in America
, says the Archive.
Am I remembering that right?

They both know the answer to that, so she doesn’t reply. Instead she starts the car and turns the air conditioner on as high as it will go, lets the crisp cooling streams blast against the exposed bone of her sternum with the force of a massage. She’s almost embarrassed by the luxuriousness of it. She makes a series of precise, incremental adjustments to the mirrors and then heads out onto the road.

She lied before. Back at the counter, when she said she knows the area. Not strictly true. She’s been to the States several times before but not to this sector, not to New England. Nor has she studied the area closely on any map. She could not tell you the name or number of the highway that she pulls onto to head south. She only knows that south, along this road, is the way to the client. Once she’s exchanged more than a few e-mails with someone, she knows the way.

Before long, she’s outside the city limits. Here, both sides of the highway are lined with trees and occasional lakes. The sky is blue, dotted with thick storybook clouds and a single distant helicopter. Summertime. The nearest vehicle on the road is a Jeep, loaded up with mountain bikes and a kayak made from florescent plastic, like an enormous toy. The spare tire is hidden by a cover which bears the legend
LIFE IS GOOD
. Maja has to marvel at this touching declaration of optimism, so unlike anything she’d see in Norway.

She pulls up alongside the Jeep, spares a quick look at the driver and passenger. Tanned girls, with plastic sunglasses and matching blond ponytails. They appear to be singing along exuberantly with something on the radio. Maja gives her head an almost imperceptible shake, expressing some admixture of bafflement and appreciation. She doesn’t think poorly of the girls, she just can’t imagine being them. She wonders what kind of person she would have become if she’d grown up here. Would she have soaked up solar energy and synthesized it into a greater enthusiasm for life, into the surplus of
pep
so evident in these two beside her?

She knows one thing. She wouldn’t do what she does. She wouldn’t have the skill that she has. The whole reason she has it, the only reason she discovered and honed it, is because she grew up in Hammerfest, where she suffered through two months of darkness each winter. As a child, she never trusted that the sun would return. It would be gone for so long that she would begin to believe that it had been obliterated, snuffed out utterly by some cosmic malevolence. The thought would deliver her into terrors from which no assurance could release her; she would sit in her
closet and shudder for hours. Eventually she learned that the fear could be dispelled if she could sense where the sun was, if she could locate it in space somewhere. It didn’t matter whether it was a few degrees beneath the horizon or on the far side of the planet; as long as she knew where it was she would feel better, breathe easier. And so it was the first thing she taught herself to find.

She’s nearing the exit. She glances at a sign on the side of the highway, an unnecessary reflex of confirmation. She takes in no data other than the icons of fast-food restaurants emblazoned there, which make her smile wryly again with appreciation for this strange country, which embeds fast food directly into their institutional signage, as though it’s part of their infrastructure. She clicks the turn signal on, takes the exit, contemplates actually stopping for a burger. She usually doesn’t eat meat, hasn’t eaten it regularly since puberty: it’s too easy for her to know where it’s been, too easy for her to trace it back to a cut-and-kill floor in some industrial packing plant. To feel animal pain and human overwork in every bite. But she wonders whether she will ever actually understand this country without eating a Whopper or a Big Mac. She should try one of each, maybe. It would be unpleasant, she’s certain—it would
hurt
—but as an experience it might serve as a rite of passage in some way, a bit like getting a tattoo. Another tattoo: she already has a pair, one thin black band around each bicep. She got the left one when her mother died and the right one when her father died. She didn’t get one when her brother died: she remembers him in a different fashion.

She checks the clock. Time is beginning to get tight
and she wants, as always, to be punctual. She’ll have to explore the full extent of the American Experience some other day. She accelerates out of the turnoff ramp and blasts past the restaurants and gas stations clustered there; she hangs a right, roars down a few miles of ragged road, lined on both sides with sunken bogs, undeveloped lots, roughly cleared areas, scrub, stumps, brush piles, an occasional bulldozer or loader standing idle. And then, she rounds a bend and comes upon her destination: an office park, an expanse of mirrored buildings and wide green lawns, rising incongruously from the mud and sand of the landscape. She pulls up the long wide driveway and enters the mazy roads of the park.

To the eye, the place seems quiet. There’s not another human being to be seen. The only activity on the lawns is the movement of water flung by sprinkler systems. She can feel the presence of people, though, workers, behind the glass and steel; she can feel the accumulated mass of their unfolding activity. It hangs in the air like a sort of atmospheric heaviness, like a subsonic thrum.

The involuted roads in here don’t follow an obvious logic but they pose no more problem for her than any other part of the trip so far. All she has to do is keep following the trail that leads her to the client; it might as well be a series of arrows painted on the surface of the road, pointing the way. She is led, in the end, to a long brick outbuilding, one of a series of similar buildings unglamorously filling in the back of the park. It houses six separate businesses behind identical generic facades facing a strip of parking spaces.

Ten minutes early, she notes with satisfaction as she
pulls the car into a space. She looks in the rearview mirror and musses her hair again.

From her suitcase in the passenger seat she retrieves a box of black nitrile gloves; she opens the box and dons a pair.

She emerges from the car, strides across a sweltering strip of asphalt, steps up onto the curb. The glass door behind which lies the prospective client is stenciled with the words
THE RIGHTEOUS HAND FOUNDATION
.