“Bullshit,” Belle says.
“You don’t get out much, Bob. Besides, we’re not interested in boogie man stories,” I say. “Grandpa Razor’s been calling me, I know he’s just waiting for me to stop by. You tell me where he is and if I get eaten, no skin off your back. You warned me, right? For this thing to end, for me, I have to see him and I have to know what he knows.”
Slow Bob smiles slowly.
“He’s in the Esquire Hotel, penthouse. Good luck.”
TEN
“The best thing you ever did,” Belle says, “is quit.”
We’re in the foyer at the Esquire Hotel and already a handful of junkies have walked up to us to beg for change. This place, it’s the last place you want to be at night. During the day, from what I’ve heard, it’s even worse. The carpets were rust colored once and possibly plush, now they’re gray and they’ve got holes in them the size of sewer covers. In the corners, under the decaying furniture, up the stairs, are chewed-up sunflower seeds, cigarette butts, beer bottles, crack vials, condoms, and rafts of different colored hair. The lights flicker. Even the sun seems to flicker the way it comes through the thick shades. The graffiti of the hand, the divination symbol, it’s all over this place. In fact: I saw the hand sign spray-painted on two buildings on our way down here.
“How’s that?” I ask as we head to the elevators.
I’m ignoring the junkies. I’m ignoring the prostitutes. I’m pretending I’m somewhere else. Belle, oddly enough, does not seem uncomfortable.
Belle says, “I can see it in you. You’re changed. Used to be you had this air about you; people who were willing, who could read it, saw you as someone easy to take advantage of. You being knocked out, strung out, all the time, it was in your eyes. Have you ever seen someone with a concussion? A really serious concussion?”
“Only myself,” I say.
“You looked that way all the time, Ade. Now, not so much. Now you look new.”
We get to the elevator and the first thing we notice is the buttons are missing. Belle takes the initiative and pulls a bobby pin out and sticks it in the metal hole where the button used to be. There is a spark and we hear the elevator groan to life.
This place, it’s lurked just off the highway since before I was born. We’d come downtown, me and Mom, and walk the Platte in the summers and look over the highway where the Esquire was looming, an albino hawk. I heard stories about it the first time in middle school. Kids who wanted to talk tough told stories about decapitated heads found in the Dumpsters there. They whispered zout ghost lights on the eight floor. About the screaming woman who jumped from the roof thinking she was leaping into the sea.
When the elevator comes, the door jerks open. Inside, the reek of piss.
On the back wall is a faded framed poster from maybe 1982. It has a picture of the Esquire gleaming in sunlight. There are futuristic planes flying overhead. The poster reads: VISIT THE FUTURE OF LUXURY, TODAY!
We get inside and hit the button for the tenth floor.
“Going up!” A gutter punk jumps inside just before the doors close. He pushes the button that used to be labeled five. This guy has white-boy dreads and stinks of cloves and B.O. Looking at us, he scratches at something behind his right ear and looks like he goes to say something but doesn’t. He mouth opens and then he closes it, licks his chapped lips. He turns around.
“How many in Denver?” I ask Belle.
“Hard to say, there’s no census or anything.”
“The hand sign. That spray-painted thing.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m seeing it everywhere now.”
Belle nods. “You’re awake now, babe.”
“But I’m not using my abilities? I’m not knocking myself out?”
Belle says, “Kind of ironic, right?”
The elevator moves like it’s being operated by Slow Bob, crawling up floor by creaking floor. We don’t talk until the gutter punk gets out. He waves good-bye, his eyes all bugged out. Belle gives him a weak smile.
When the elevator gets moving again, Belle tells me that she has the feeling that something big will happen. She tells me that with me being clean and all, she can just feel the change buzzing in the air. She says, “How good you look, it makes me feel like I should totally get into swimming or running or something. You know, just clean house.”
“It does feel good,” I say. “But I miss, you know, knowing.”
“Even if nothing ever happens in terms of me evolving to the next level, it’s nice to not know what’s going on when you don’t know what’s going on. Does that make any sense? If it does work, well, how cool will that be?”
“You should quit, Belle. Clean house. You’re already brilliant.”
Belle bats her eyes, says, “You were never this sweet before. I’m not sure how I like it.”
We get to the tenth floor and the elevator doors screech open. The hallway outside is dark, it’s musty. There are greasy stains like shadows on the walls and only one door, a gold-plated one, at the end of the hall to the right.
Belle goes first, says, “What I’m trying to tell you is that I think if anyone can do what you’re trying to do, and I’ve never tried it, you can do it, Ade. Just feels right to me. What I’m telling you is that the Ade Patience of before couldn’t do this, wouldn’t do this. The new Ade, well, I think he can.”
We knock on the metal door and wait.
A voice, the same gnarly one I’d heard on the phone, says, “Enter.”
We do.
The room we go into consists of pretty much just one large banquet table. There are enough chairs around it for a whole school busload of people. At the end of this table, where there windows are overlooking the stadium and the highway, is an enormous old man in a sickly green-checkered suit. Grandpa invites us to sit at the opposite end of the table.
We do.
In front of him there’s this plate with what looks like cheese.
“Go ahead. Take a look,” Grandpa says.
I get up and step forward and peer into the bowl. It looks like a sunk-in cake. The kind you’re supposed to throw away. The kind that didn’t come out right. Before Belle can look, Grandpa Razor pulls the bowl back in front of him.
“This is casu modde, my dears. It’s a most extraordinary cheese. Pecorino cheese, a hard sheep milk cheese from Italy. The cheese itself has a strong, salty flavor. You see it mostly on pastas. But this one is… extraordinary.”
It’s only then that I smell the cheese and feel something in my stomach turn over. The way an engine turns over. And it makes me gag. It’s an entirely muscular feeling. Something I have no control over. It’s instinctual. My body letting me know that the bowl sitting in front of Grandpa Razor, the bowl he’s about to partake of, is completely taboo. Against nature.
“This cheese is illegal. You can only get it on the black market in Italy. Finding it here, middle of the country, unheard of. What they do is take the cheese and leave it outside to ferment. We’re not talking about aging. We’re talking decomposition. As it’s being prepared the cheese skipper, the person preparing it, introduces the Piophila casei. A fly. Said female fly lays eggs all over the rotting cheese and soon, it’s heaving in maggots.”
I hear Belle gag.
Grandpa continues smiling. “The grubs eat the cheese and as they do they produce an acid the starts to break down the fats inside the cheese. It gets gooey quick. Seeps out. Thousands of these little white worms working over time. Producing a spectacular dish.”
I recoil. My guts churn.
Grandpa notices and sighs. “I’m not even done. You eat this cheese while the maggots are still in it. Still alive. These suckers are crazy, too. They can jump. Right up out of the cheese. You need to cover it while you eat it so the buggers don’t leap up into your eyes. Your nose. I’ve heard the maggots can also pass through your stomach unharmed. Get into your gut and start eating you from the inside out. Nasty beasties indeed. There are also allergic reactions contend with. This is, after all, toxic cheese.”