He wants to be done.
He wants to be done wanting.
He wants to have been done. These are his wants. He is want, nothing but want and instead he is folding the knives and the forks into the napkins so it looks like the knives and forks are being tucked into a rough white sleeping bags, like they are camping. He does this again; he does this again. The gray plastic tub of knives and the other gray plastic tub of forks will not ever be empty. More and more packets of silverware like each fork and knife have been abandoned alone on a tundra and forced to share a sleeping bag for warmth so they don’t get hypothermic. Body heat, he says to absolutely none.
This is Making the Silverware. This is one of many things he has to do before he can be done. This is side-work and side-work is the worst part of life. The rest of the shift–the enforced uniform and bright green apron, the requirements about how long his hair can be, the necessary big-smiled greetings of overly fat children, the forcing of appetizers onto families that don’t want and can’t afford the extravagances of spinach and artichoke and cheese melted together for forty five seconds in the microwave at the servers’ station—all of that is over for the night. It was terrible and laborious, and he hurts everywhere, but it is here, now, it is the Making of the Silverware that is the worst. It will take him twenty minutes. It will take him an eternity.
In the other room he can hear the bartender going through all his own side-work. The Wiping Down of the Bar, the Cleaning of the Taps, Replacing the Paper That Spools Through the Credit Card Machine Like a Blanched Diseased Tongue. The waiter stops rolling the forks and knives together because he is now, again, overcome with want. The way frosted winds can sweep down an empty avenue at two in the morning on the walk home, covering everything in a cold that is meant only and exclusively for him, the waiter is immobilized wanting the bartender.
This bartender, in particular, is special. He has a mouth full of real human teeth. His eyes are both the exact same color and shine bright and clear in a well-lit room. There is skin covering every part of his body. And while these aspects might apply to every human on the planet, they somehow apply more to this bartender than the rest of the world. He is the most person the waiter has ever known.
This want for the bartender is visceral. It hangs off the waiter heavy and wet, it drips on the floor and pools around his feet. He is ravenous and his gut is stuffed full wanting. This bartender has biceps that strain the cuff of the short-sleeved shirt when he shakes the cocktail shaker; he has legs and feet that wear shoes, and when he walks, he walks laterally behind his bar. There is a rubber mat beneath him designed to catch all the night’s spilled beer and ice, so the bartender is raised up an inch or two, so he is just slightly taller when he is a bartender than he is when he’s a normal human being.
Without all the diners the restaurant is cold. The air conditioner still assumes there are dozens of people eating and drinking and shouting loud for more iced tea. But there is nothing. It is empty and so the air conditioner is cooling only the absence of people, filling the space they once occupied. It is only the waiter and the bartender and the ghosts of the rest of the world gradually growing colder and colder.
The waiter stops making the silverware and begins The Marrying of the Ketchups. He pours ketchup from the old bottles into still older bottles of ketchup until the older bottles of ketchup are full to the top with ketchup and they are now brand new bottles of ketchup ready to be put on tables so the next day’s diners will think they’re blessed enough to receive a brand new bottle of ketchup; so they will consider this their lucky day. The waiter uses a funnel to marry; he jams the tip of the cone into the neck of the bottle like he is force feeding the ketchup, the way one might make ketchup foie gras; he feeds the ketchup its own self, a tortuous cannibalistic ritual.
The waiter once met a boy at a cookout who had a small pet pig with him. The pig’s name was Sir Frances Bacon. While no one was looking, the waiter snuck the pig a piece of ham and the pig devoured it noisily. He fed pig to a pig and the boy who owned Sir Frances Bacon was horrified. This is what the waiter thinks about as he pours ketchup into itself. He thinks about a boy bustling a pet pig up into his arms and storming out of a party. He thinks about how hard it is to storm out of anywhere holding a small pig. The whole party laughed, as the boy stormed off. He remembers wanting the boy with the pig at that moment, almost as much as he now wants the bartender. Wanting to be as angry as the boy was, to be the pig in arms full of itself, wanting to storm out of the party. Old ketchup smells decidedly different from new ketchup. It is sweeter, slicker than a fresh bottle. It comes out just that much slower; it is shy about itself, unsure if it is still good ketchup and the waiter has to knock on the side of the bottle with an insistent palm. Right on the 57, like he was taught.
The bartender is a flirt. He flirts with everyone. Everyone that moves, that drinks, that breathes, he flirts with them all. He is easy about it. Everyone wears his flirting like a soft dusting of flour. It is as easy for the bartender to flirt as it is for him to walk laterally behind his bar, strutting from one end to the other floating an inch and a half off the ground. The waiter wishes he had this capacity for interaction. He wants to be the bartender. And still at the same time he wants the bartender. The bartender is straight and therefore a piece of the waiter wishes he, himself, were straight, while another piece wishes the bartender were not straight. And so, there is now a universe where they switch, and it is the bartender who is queer and it is the waiter who is straight and, in that case,, if the bartender were pining for him the waiter wonders if he would acquiesce.
The bartender is only an assortment of sounds, glasses going in and coming out of a dishwasher; bottles of liquor being picked up and wiped down and put back; water sloshing out of sinks, of refrigerator doors being swept open and closed. At the moment the bartender does not have a name. Yesterday the bartender had one. Yesterday the bartender was a singular entity in the world, with a name and a childhood and an apartment. Today the bartender is an edifice, a cliff-face against which the waiter can throw all his lust. Tomorrow. Who knows what tomorrow’s going to be? The smell from the bar is a sweet syrup. Like oranges left to rot for a year. The waiter imagines that sleeping with the bartender would smell the same. A sickly sticky sweet. This turns him on. It then turns him off that he is turned on by the idea of oranges turned sour. Tomorrow though, tomorrow it will be different. Tomorrow the bartender will have his name back.
The waiter opens the servers’ fridge where the desserts are kept and looks at the crème brûlée. The crème brûlée looks the way it always does, pale and darker in spots, like a petri dish in a lab experiment, rife with deadly toxin that if mishandled, this one crème brûlée could set off a chain reaction of infection and disease that would wipe out the entire city skyline. He stares at the desserts thinking precisely nothing. They are mandated by the city’s health department to check and verify the quality of the desserts that are stored in the servers’ fridge. But he does not know what he is looking for or how to verify anything. None of the waiters do. So they all open the door once a shift and look at the crème brûlée as if they are making sure it has not become sentient and wandered off to start a new civilization of desserts. This is what constitutes verification. He can safely say that the deserts still exist.
His want still exists. This desire. This fog. Viscous want heavy with him panting inside of it. Full of all his intended consequences. There is nothing to see outside of this fog. Desire is wanting something so absolutely that it loses a name. that the waiter loses his name as well. He returns to the forks and the knives and rolls and rolls and rolls them into their sleeping bags and concatenates the forms of doneness.
He does it. He wants to do it.
Wants to be done by the bartender.
To have had it done. He did. He wants to have did.
He both wants the bartender and wants to be the bartender and wants to be did by the bartender and he wants to be done with wanting the bartender because want is an oyster that has lost its shell; amorphous and gelatinous unrecognizable without the hard outer crust that keeps it contained. His want untethers him from the world.
The fork looks like it is having its way with the knife. All of the forks piled up are having their ways with knives. There are no spoons.
The spoons are all left out.
The poor spoons.
Tomorrow there will be nothing but names. The world will have a name. The whole of existence will be a catalog of names. Every tree, every frog, every piece of lichen from kingdom to phylum to class to genus to species there will be a litany of names for everything. But at this moment with the dust spiraling around the restaurant, there is nothing to name but the want and the lust. The dust is the cast off of every single diner that evening. The dust is all of the world. All skin flaked off and floating so really it is the world there with the waiter, the whole of the world lusting after this one, single, clear, actual footed and toothed bartender. This is desire. This is the stuff of want. And like that, the bartender leaves.
It is an absent leaving. It is over the shoulder. It is with a bag that is all black leather and more expensive than the waiter could afford. As he’s leaving the bartender throws behind him the name of another bar. The one he’s going to now. It is neither an invitation to join nor an exclusion. It is simply a fact.
The waiter stares at the perfectly formed pyramid of silverware, stacked like freshly cut logs might be stacked. Stacked like forty campers fucking in their sleeping bags would be stacked if one ever stacked camping children on top of each other. He’s made this pile of forks and knives only so it may be ripped apart, pulled open, used and dirtied and thrown away to then be rerolled again tomorrow by another waiter who may as well be this same waiter.
None of these forks will ever again lie with these exact knives, be wrapped in this one napkin. This is a singular experience for all of them. The bartender is gone. The waiter stares at this edifice, this new pyramid of silver. This tower of babel. This hanging garden.
And he wonders if he is going to follow.
B.C. Edwards is the author of two books, The Aversive Clause and From The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes. He has written for Mathematics Magazine, Hobart, The New York Times, The New Limestone Review, and others. He has been awarded the Hudson Prize for his fiction and a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Edwards currently serves on the board of the Poetry Society of New York and has a directorship at Mount Tremper Arts a non-profit performance residency in upstate New York . He attended the graduate writing program at The New School in New York and lives in Brooklyn with his husband.
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