A Dusty, Poorly-Lighted Place
He cuts into his steak. It’s rare. He told me in the car that he’d asked around and this was how everyone told him to have it. There’s no point having it any other way, they’d said—it’s got to be bleeding a bit.
‘Are you really only having chips?’ he asks.
‘They don’t do anything else,’ I say. ‘Besides that.’
‘You didn’t have to come if it bothers you.’
‘It doesn’t bother me.’
He nods and puts the piece of steak in his mouth and a smile creeps across his face as he chews. My stomach flips, but I manage to force a smile in return.
‘Good?’
‘Yeah!’
I dip one of my chips in their little bowl of tomato sauce. The sauce is mostly sodium, but without it the chips would probably be inedible. They’re lab-grown but might as well be made of newspaper for all the flavour they have on their own. I put the chip in my mouth and the sauce lights up my taste buds and I eat the rest in an undignified rush. When I look up again his steak is gone.
‘I guess I was hungry,’ he says, slightly embarrassed.
‘I guess so.’
Flecks of blood and meat cling to his face. He looks like a baby given chocolate for the first time. My stomach flips again and I look past him and out the window. It’s raining heavily and I feel the urge to drag him outside and hold him under it until he’s clean. Instead I just hand him a napkin.
‘Well then, shall we pay?’
He frowns at me, but then he looks around the restaurant and agrees. This can’t have been what he pictured: the deserted tables, the dimness, the silence. What a let down. I feel bad for him, but I don’t want to stay any longer than we have to. The place could be raided at any minute.
The woman at the counter glances at him as she adds up our bill. I follow her eyes and see a dark patch on his t-shirt spreading like spilt wine.
‘That happens sometimes,’ she says. ‘Here, take another bandage.’
He thanks her and gives me his card and goes to the bathroom with the bandage. ‘Cash only,’ the woman says to me.
‘Oh.’
I dig in my backpack and find my little stack of emergency notes. I can’t remember the last time I paid for anything with cash. I count some out and hand it to her and look around the restaurant. The tables are set as if guests are expected, but the settings, other than ours, are covered in dust. The whole place is covered in dust actually, even the floor. I run the toe of my shoe through it until she hands back my change.
‘I can’t give you a receipt,’ she says.
‘I know. That’s okay.’
‘Well, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Of course.’
She’s nervous. Has been since we arrived. She’s relieved that it’s over and hurries through the swing door behind her. Soon I hear a door somewhere further back open and close. I imagine her jumping through a bathroom window, landing on the bonnet of her car, and speeding away. I wonder how much she’s been paid for this.
I tap his card on the counter and return to running my shoe through the dust on the floor. I start to draw things: a knife, a fork, a plate with a steak on it, though you’d probably need a caption to interpret this. Around the steak I draw a wobbly circle—a pool of blood. I look at it for a moment and then scuff it out.
I glance at the kitchen door. Earlier when they’d gone back there, I hadn’t had the nerve to peek. They’d been back there a while too, maybe half an hour. There weren’t any screams and he said it hadn’t hurt, but still, I should have peeked—people will be disappointed.
The restaurant is silent, but I hesitate and listen to convince myself that the woman is really gone. I slip behind the counter and push the swing door cautiously and poke my head through. The kitchen is large and stainless steel, deserted and dark. Only, in the back, I can see a little bit of light under a door.
I enter the kitchen and creep towards the door. Again I hesitate, but I can’t hear anything on the other side so I open it.
Inside is an operating theatre of sorts. What looks like a dentist’s light is suspended above an old hospital gurney, and beside it there’s a tray table holding various esoteric tools. I picture him lying on the gurney while the restaurant woman slices at him with these archaic looking things. Even with the pain blockers it must have been horrible.
I get closer and see that the tools aren’t particularly clean—it looks like they’ve been wiped off but nothing more. I poke at a blob of what I assume is his flesh stuck to a scalpel. I pick it off and roll it in my fingers, mush it around.
A memory occurs to me as I mush the flesh blob, one I must have buried. I was seven or eight and I tripped going up the stairs and gashed my arm on an exposed screw in the railing. I didn’t scream, I just sat there and squeezed the gash together with my fingers—opening it, closing it. Then I started digging around in it, in the same way I would sometimes dig around in my nose. I dislodged a small piece of flesh, which I promptly popped into my mouth, as if it were nothing more than a booger. The flesh was warm and firm and I liked the vaguely metallic taste of it. It didn’t feel wrong; it was a part of me—it was me. But when Dad found me sitting there, blood streaming down my arm, I had swallowed it quickly, in case he discovered what I’d done.
The blob I hold now is cold and unappealing—no longer alive, no longer him. I flick it at the wall. There’s nothing else here, no other evidence of the procedure, so I head back towards the front of the restaurant. It’s been a while since he went to the bathroom and he’s probably ready to leave.
He isn’t waiting when I come back through the swing door, though. The silent and empty restaurant has an ominous air, like a scene from a dream right before it becomes a nightmare. The rain has stopped so I wonder if he has taken the chance to make it to the car. I go to the window, but he isn’t out there either.
I find the bathroom and knock at the door, but there’s no answer. I call his name—still nothing. The door looks feeble so I give it a yank and I hear the lock break on the other side. I slide the door open the rest of the way and see him lying beside the toilet with his head propped at a right angle against the wall. His eyes are closed and he looks peaceful, content even, despite the awkwardness of his posture. I step towards him and blood splashes my shoes, staining them. There’s so much of it. I wonder how it could all come from just one person.
The pool of blood settles and becomes a fluorescent red mirror. I crouch and look at myself. I disturb the reflection with my fingertips; the ripples deform me. I look at him and see the wound at his hip, the exposed flesh. I reach out and touch it. It is still warm.
All I had to eat was chips.
Matthew Gore grew up in Invercargill. He now lives in Wellington, where he writes as often as he can. His work explores possible futures and alternative pasts, as well as the paranormal and the strange.