|
Profound despair struck, as it so often does, in the copy room. Naturally, "profound" might be too powerful a word; taken without thought, it implies a certain sort of majesty or gravitas that our subject, Mr. Randall K. Do, most assuredly does not posses. At this point in the narrative, at any rate. Beggar's Chicken The bird is stuffed with vegetables, wrapped in lotus leaves and encased in clay, which releases fragrant steam when opened. "Braised sea cucumber with ducks' web, prawn on banana leaves, roast squab with frog legs...beggar's chicken!" That was home. "Reader response letters...catalog entries, marketing surveys, blurbs...photocopies!" That was work, work, work...and the future, perhaps. Unless the future lay back in the restaurant. Utterly unacceptable. The real future lay out east, right? Out east, a land attainable only through gateways that now lay submerged by time, swallowed by liquid years that had drowned their pillars completely, leaving them inaccessible. "You could think of them as shadows beneath the waves," he said to her. Randall K. Do
Three copies each of pages 351-370 of the manuscript rolled off the photocopier into the output basket. The machine was of a sufficient complexity that it could, if necessary, sort the three manuscripts in a sensible manner, but Randall preferred to do the sorting himself. It made a 2 hour job into a 4 hour one, and it kept the remainder of his non-photocopying duties down to a minimum. On paper, the other duties looked more fulfilling. There were things, other things to be done around the office, talking things and walking from desk-to-desk things that helped your career by giving you something to do besides watching ream after ream of paper spill into the output basket. Or watching rice spill out of the steamer, paddled onto plates, waiting for the tasty bits and spices to complete the picture, to fill it with nuggets of surprise and accomplishment. Of hollow accomplishment. "It's not what I want," he'd told her. Randall cared about the office things. Randall cared, but he cared in a negative way. Randall cared about his career enough to keep showing up at work, but he chose to be in the copy room, hunched over a notebook and The New York Times, alternately reading the paper, and attempting to re-write his own destiny. Grandiose. Strike that. Randall explained it to a friend once, in language that was more clear, and more honest. "When I'm in my notebook...when I'm writing...there's this delicious..." "Sense of control?" "Yes, exactly," he said, wrapping himself around her body. "There's a sense of control because the world's been boiled down to a sheet of paper with ink stains. I can alter the marks, I can delete them, I can tear it all up and start over. Change, negation, suicide, and all in a world where there's no negative consequences: it doesn't matter how many times it falls apart." "It doesn't?" "Yeah, it does, a little, because in the real world, the clock's ticking. But it doesn't matter a lot. It's not particularly scary." "Mm-hmm." "Yet." It was 2:45 in the morning. Randall covered her back in kisses. She closed her eyes and smiled, but stayed awake for him. The two of them stayed awake until the sun came up, blew off their obligations, and rose in time for dinner. Randall blew off a job that didn't really care. Emily blew off a family that felt similarly. Both of them were happy. That was a week before she left for Boston. That was two weeks before the despair. The Despair. Before hunching over the New York Times and letting the newsprint work itself into his face and feeling hot tears stinging their way through the paper. Allen Ichea walked into the copy room, and paused. He cocked his head, and watched with furrowed brow as Randall shuttered quietly, spotting The New York Times with salt water. What did the president of the publishing house say to the junior level editorial assistant who broke down in the copying room? Nothing. He went back to the office with the little trees and the pricey reproduction of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the complicated salt water fish tank, and shut the door. And the president put his feet up on the desk. He laughed for a while, and shook his head. He cancelled his appointments, and he went for a walk, surrounding himself with bigger trees, verdant, dying little deaths, dyeing themselves a multitude of colors in preparation for the advent of winter. The next day, when Randall reported to his supervisor at 8:39, she had a surprise for him. "Mr. Ichea wants to see you in his office sometime this morning." "The president? Why?" Ms. Hutchins shrugged. "Randall, to be honest, I haven't the faintest idea. Not the faintest. I've never seen the old bastard interact with anyone below the level of senior editor, personally. Good luck." Randall headed upstairs at about 11:30 in the morning, hoping that perhaps Mr. Ichea had left for lunch already. However, when he arrived at the massive desk that served as the gateway to the office, he was greeted by a warm and welcoming secretary. "Randall Do? Please go on in. Mr. Ichea is expecting you." When Randall entered, Ichea was sitting at his desk, hands behind his head, watching the complicated salt water fish tank. As he did so, he earned $2.50 a minute. "Mr. Do. Thanks for coming." "No trouble, Mr. Ichea. How may I help you?" "Well, let's go to lunch and have a talk, and perhaps you'll find out. I always find that food lubricates almost any sort of discussion of any worth. Do you know where Izumi is?" Izumi was a relatively good Japanese restaurant two blocks from the publishing house, where Randall had taken Emily to celebrate having survived six months of monogamous commitment. "Yes, I do." "I'll see you there at 11:30 tomorrow morning, yes?" "Sounds excellent, sir." Time passed. Randall went home, paced, called Emily, left a message, looked at the phone bill, threw it back on the table, paced, listened to music, tried to write, failed, tried again, succeeded, stayed up until 3, slept, awoke, and arrived at work half an hour late, and miserable. He photocopied several manuscripts, slowly. Lunchtime arrived, and he set out into the autumn air. Beneath his feet, the autumn pavement was unforgiving, and the autumn traffic was thick as ever. Something about the air seemed to slow the cars down, as though an invisible parade of giant hands had evanesced, and begun working on the problem of slowing down traffic. People drove more slowly. The air seemed deadly calm. Randall felt the street clutch at him like the empty hallway leading toward the office of the principal, or the cramped passage through the pantry that led into the kitchen. When Randall showed up at Izumi, the place was packed. Mr. Ichea was there already, however, and had snagged a booth near the door. Already, the old man had started in on his miso soup. "Good morning, Randall," said Ichea. His eyes gleamed blue and bright from the sharply chiseled features that marked his face, and a ring of miso sat around his lips before he neatly dabbed it away with a linen napkin. "So, before we start into what it was that I was hoping to say, I'd like to learn a little bit more about you." Randall wavered before replying. Should he pepper his responses with the honorific "sir"? Or would Mr. Ichea feel uncomfortable, put at a distance, sucked up to? Randall went with his gut, and carefully squeezed out seven casual syllables "Well…What would you like to know?" Ichea’s face shone with a professionally reassuring grin. "Life story. Birth until now. Keep it peppy and broad." Randall grinned as he sat down, and was pre-empted by the appearance of the waiter. After the order was in, the two men sat and sipped tea while Randall collected himself. "Right. My life's story. Well, I'm writer, more or less." Randall checked across the table, and was pleased to see that Mr. Ichea didn't roll his eyes, or glance out the window. "I've been writing for my own pleasure since middle school...always working on plays, short stories, what have you. My dad is from China, but I was born here. Chicago. My mom's American. She works at the university." The tea was refilled. The day hurried by. Randall wondered: what does the man want from me? Why am I telling him this, and why is he listening? And then: don't the presidents of mid-level publishing houses have anything better to do? And then: "I always slacked off in school. Never cared, which drove my dad nuts. I think my mom was secretly pleased; she'd gotten good schooling beaten into her with a cane, and I think she was happy to help me escape. Emerging from college and high school with a double handful of happy memories, poor grades and a natural aptitude for anything literary, I tried to get a job. You hired me. Your firm, anyway." "And?" "And, well, here I am. Unsatisfied, I guess. I want to write, but I'm generally too tired...generally just not motivated...what's to write about? Photocopies?" Ichea smiled wanly. "And so I'm not sure what to do. Just a couple of years ago, my dad bought his own restaurant, and he won't stop trying to get me to follow in his culinary footsteps, but I don't have any intention of going along with it." "What's the restaurant?" "The Do Lee Palace." "That's an excellent restaurant. The food is art. Beggar's chicken, particularly, once you've broken it out of the clay, of course." "But..." "But nothing. It is an excellent place to learn something that is as fine an art as anything. But perhaps cooking is not your bag, yes?" As if on cue, the waiter swept by their table and deposited a large circular lacquer tray laden with sushi. Mr. Ichea picked up an eel roll, dipped it into soy, and put it into his mouth, where the rice, meat and wasabi fell into a slurry of sharp flavors. "Listen. I'm a big, big believer in simplicity," said Ichea, as the roll disappeared. "Do you think I got where I am by being deep? By being introspective, and fascinated by the intricacies of philosophy?" This threw Randall for a loop. "Well...I would hope that deep contemplation of real world problems at hand would lead you to a complicated, flexible and adaptive moral and practical structure for thinking that would serve as a set of guideposts that..." "No, no, no," said Mr. Ichea, tersely. "To hell with all that, from my perspective. I got where I am by being fast. Fast with my mind, fast with my mouth, biting off exactly as much as I can chew whenever possible. Fast and thoughtful don't mix. You need to boil things down to a gut level, down to clean integers and simple equations, down to the roots." "And then?" "And then you make the best guess you can, grab opportunity by the balls, and hang on. Meanwhile, try not to accumulate enemies." "Ah." "Look, I can tell this isn't what you wanted to hear, and that I'm going to come in on Monday and you're going to be crying all over the copy room again..." Randall looked at the president, horrified. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean..." "Forget it," said Ichea, waving his hand dismissively. "Forget about it completely. You don't think I've broken down? Ha!" Ichea laughed, a little. "I still do, sometimes. Rarely. Privately. But I do. Listen, kid...Randall...I brought you here because it's pretty clear that you're looking for the answers. I have the answers." "You do." "As much as anyone. Here are the answers...no, strike that, the answer. You are either In or you're Out. No in between. Don't let yourself fall into the in between, or you're screwed." "Meaning?" "Meaning that you can't be halfway on anything important in your life, or you get ripped apart. Better to be out then caught. And there'll be more girls." "Uh...," said Randall, unimpressively, as he struggled through a California roll. "Yeah, I know," said Ichea, grinning a smile that took 20 years off his apparent age. "Who said anything about girls? But take my word for it: no matter how rare, or special, or incredible she seemed...there'll be more like her. Just keep your eyes open." Ichea got up from the table, dropping a fifty dollar-bill onto the forty dollar check. "I've got a 1 o'clock to prepare for, Randall, but it's been a pleasure. You're an exceptional young man." Ichea put on his longcoat, picked up his deep green umbrella, and strolled out of the restaurant, letting the glass door swing silently shut behind him. But then the old man turned around, popped his head in through the door, and caught Randall's attention with a raised finger. "Oh, Randall? One more thing." "Yes, Mr. Ichea?" said Randall, as he worked on the last of the sweet shrimp. "You're fired. Good luck." Randall looked at the old man, stunned, and then shook his head. The restaurant teemed with scent, and seemed to grow silent. Ichea smiled, and walked out the door. |