Motherless Brooklyn

“Uni,” she said, nodding at the tiny block of wood. It held a thick smudge of green paste, a cluster of pink-hued shavings from a pickled beet or turnip, and a gobbet of glistening orange beads-the urchin eggs, I supposed. It wasn’t three bites of food altogether. The bowl she set down was a touch more promising. The broth was milky white, its surface rippled from underneath by a thick tangle of vegetables and chunks of chicken, and decorated on top by sprigs of some sort of exotic parsley.

“I also brought you something you might actually like,” she said quietly as she drew a small ceramic ladle and a pair of inlaid chopsticks out of a pouch in her robe and set them at my place. “It’s Thai chicken soup. Eat it and go, Lionel. Please.”

Tie-chicken-to-what? went my brain. Tinker to Evers to Chicken.

Julia returned to Fujisaki’s table with her order pad, to contend with the corporation’s contradictory barked commands, their staccato pidgin English. I sampled the uni, scraping it up in the ladle-chopsticks were not my game. The gelatinous orange beads ruptured in my mouth like capers, brackish and sharp but not impossible to like. I tried mixing the three bright colors on the wood, blobbing the tacky green paste and the shreds of pickled radish together with the eggs. The combination was something else entirely: An acrid claw of vapor sped up the back of my throat and filled my nasal cavity. Those elements were apparently not meant to be mixed. My ears popped, my eyes watered, and I made a sound like a cat with a hairball.

I’d garnered Fujisaki’s attention once again, and the sushi chef’s as well. I waved, face flushed bright red, and they nodded and waved back, bobbed their heads, returned to talking. I ladled up some of the soup, thinking at least to flush the poisons off the sensitive surface of my tongue. Another reverse: The broth was superb, a reply and rebuke to the toxic explosion that had preceded it. It transmitted warmth in the other direction, down into my gullet and through my chest and shoulders as it passed. Levels of flavor unfolded, onion, coconut, chicken, a piquancy I couldn’t place. I scooped up another ladleful, with a strip of chicken this time, and let the nourishing fire flow through me again. Until placed in this soup’s care I hadn’t realized how chilled I was, how starved for comfort. It felt as if the soup were literally embracing my heart.

The trouble came with the third spoonful. I’d dredged low, come up with a tangle of unidentifiable vegetables. I drank down more of the broth, then gnawed on the mouthful of pungent roughage that was left in my mouth-only some of it was rougher than I might have liked. There was some resilient, bladelike leaf that wasn’t losing the contest with my teeth, was instead beginning to triumph in an unexpected skirmish with my gums and the roof of my mouth. I chewed, waiting for it to disintegrate. It wouldn’t. Julia appeared just as I’d reached in with my pinkie to clear it from my mouth.

“I think part of the menu got into the soup,” I said as I ejected the bulrushes onto the table.

“That’s lemongrass,” said Julia. “You’re not supposed to eat it.”

“What’s it doing in the soup, then?”

“Flavor. It flavors the soup.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “What’s the name again?”

“Lemongrass,” she hissed. She dropped a slip of paper onto the table by my hand. “Here’s your check, Lionel.”

I reached for her hand where it covered the slip but she pulled it away, like some version of a children’s game, and all I got was the paper.

“Lasagna ass,” I said under my breath.

“What?”

“Laughing Gassrog.” This was more audible, but I hadn’t disturbed Fujisaki, not yet. I looked up at her helplessly.

“Good-bye, Lionel.” She hurried away from my table.

The check wasn’t really a check. Julia’s scrawl covered the underside:

THE FOOD IS ON THE HOUSE.

MEET ME AT FRIENDSHIP HEAD LIGHTHOUSE TWO-THIRTY.

GET OUT OF HERE!!!

I finished the soup, carefully putting the mysterious inedible lemongrass to one side. Then I rose from the table and went past Fujisaki toward the doors, hoping for Julia’s sake to be invisible. One of them turned as I passed, though, and grabbed my elbow.

“You like the food?”

“Terrific,” I said.

It was the one who as a monk had applied the paddle to my back. They’d been guzzling sake and his face was red, his eyes moist and merry.

“You Jerry-Roshi’s unruly student,” he said.

“I guess that’s right.”

“Retreat center a good idea,” he said. “You need long sesshin. You got an utterance problem, I think.”

“I know I do.”