Warnings from the Future Read online

  THE TOP OF FRESNO

  Sunsets from Apogee were not particularly impressive. The coastal range was so far west and so gentle, and so much smog hung in the intervening distance, that you couldn’t see the mountains. The sun, rather than truly setting, seemed to just get blurry and dim and then fade away. Nor was the view after dark any more exciting. None of the other towers in town were as tall as the old Fresno Bank Building, atop which our restaurant, perched like a kitsch flying saucer, slowly rotated. Several of the other skyscrapers were abandoned, and only the hospital was fully lit in the nighttime. The streetlights uptown were too distant and regular to be inspiring. The poorer neighborhoods nearby reminded us of their plight through their dimness. So when Iris called me at ten thirty on my Saturday off to let me know the rotator gears were filling the restaurant with the smell of raw tires and she’d had to shut the motor off, I didn’t jump out of bed.

  She launched into her updates as soon as I picked up the phone, so I was able to act like her call had woken me up. “You need me to come fix it tonight?”

  “For these old hats? I’ve been dosing out so much free sherry they think we’re still spinning.”

  “I’ll check it out in the morning.”

  It wasn’t too much to worry about, she said: the Bulldogs were playing, and it had been quiet for a Saturday. The customers didn’t mind, or didn’t let on. Most of the people there were boosters, like her, and in a place with as few boosters as Fresno that meant they were all her friends. None were there for the novelty of a changing view. The motive common among them was pity, either for her or for themselves. I’d gone in for payroll paperwork that afternoon and knew the slender blue dress she was wearing. I could picture her, pulling out a chair from a two-top in the unoccupied side of the dining room, using one hand to hold her phone to her ear and the other to pick up a thin vase and smell the mums. This time of night, especially with something the matter, she’d have a port glass or a champagne flute, but she would be sipping slowly. She drank enough to make her regrets feel poetic, and no more.

  “Is that your bed you’re sleeping in, Nick? Dee called in sick tonight.”

  Dee was one of the waitstaff. I was tempted to tell Iris I kept my dick out of the restaurant, but that had a charge I didn’t want to add to the conversation. I mumbled instead that it was my bed, and Dee had probably called in because of her boyfriend’s gig at Tokyo Garden. I visualized receiving dental anesthesia, trying to get more sleep in my voice, though I knew it would do nothing to rush her off the phone. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk to her. I wasn’t sure if she was flirting, wasn’t sure if I wanted her to be. “Not sure” was something of a mantra for me at the time, a blank check I refused to fill in.

  “Frank there?” I asked, hoping the invocation of her husband would sober the chat.

  “Football game. The sedative effects of warm Coors.”

  I let a silence hang, considering a fake snore.

  “It’s a clear night,” she said. “I’m not sure why. If you lean against the windows and look up, you can see the constellations.”

  “Good thing this happened after dark. Send smoke out the top of the building before sunset and you’ll have pictures all over the web.”

  “The gators.” This is what she called the Fresno residents who loved to disparage the city. It sounded more mature than haters.

  “The gators,” I said.

  “Sounds like you’re waking up,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to come in tonight?”

  Our conversation would be much the same if I were there. Though probably bawdier, more direct. Restaurant talk. This was the hour of coffee and port, mousse and Black Forest cake. The latestayers talked from table to table. The men watched Iris’s hips as she strolled her territory. She was in her forties, and looked her age, but no less good for it. This late, she let the seams of the restaurant show: Lupe playing Lola Beltrán loud enough to be heard in the dining room while she scrubbed down the kitchen; young bussers without their aprons, their top buttons undone; plates, still steaming from the dishwasher, clanking as they were piled at the salad station. Iris conveyed the sense that this was the hour she was most herself, a self that was both elusive and present. Her plaintiveness made her sexy. I wanted to think that she did this out of instinct—that she didn’t know why, but that I, with a male intuition, discerned the unconscious allure: a chance to satisfy the unsatisfied—but I was fairly certain she knew exactly what she was doing. What was it, then, that tamed our conversation? The presence of witnesses, maybe, but more the understanding that the promises she made when she was too nakedly herself would fade away as quickly as the impressions made on your skin by a pillow. In person, the context was clear. On the phone we were just one voice against another, wide open.

  “Night, Iris,” I said, knowing she would appreciate the spirit of an abrupt goodbye.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said, squeezing the words in just before I ended the call.

  I preferred to come in early despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I rarely had reason to. The sunrises from Apogee actually had something to them. I arrived Sunday morning in time to see a red ball squeezing up between the snowcaps of the Sierra Nevadas. Rain a few days ago had turned the sky blue again, brilliant blue above the soup of colors spilling out over the tops of the mountains. The restaurant was beautifully quiet. The repetitive sound of a wire brush scouring mussels in the kitchen was its own kind of silence. Our chef, Lupe, and her husband Phil liked to shop and prep early and take the midday off. We couldn’t support a lunch service on the weekends. Iris had tried to establish a Sunday brunch, but all the brunch people lived ten miles north in the sprawl. The sprawl, the sprawl—Iris hated the sprawl. Sprawl is what happens, she said, when you have a city no one wants to be a part of.

  Just standing there, facing east, I somehow made enough noise to be heard from the kitchen. “What you looking at, Nick?” I heard Phil shout.

  “The sprawl,” I said.

  “The sprawl, the sprawl,” Lupe said. “All full of the gators.”

  In the kitchen, Phil was hulling strawberries while Lupe took the beards off the mussels. They offered me eggs. I said I’d had cereal. “You insult the chef,” Lupe said. It was a sort of routine, comforting as a rerun.

  “Iris safe to drive last night?”

  “Frank picked her up,” Lupe said.

  “Even though he was less safe,” Phil added.

  The access hatch for the machine room was in the middle of the kitchen. I had to move pots out of the way and crawl through some open shelving to get to it. As assistant manager, I had become the de facto mechanic as well. There are only a few real mechanics in the country who do this kind of work, and their travel costs, let alone the specialty fees, run to the ridiculous. Technologically, a rotating restaurant isn’t much more than a huge lazy Susan with a motor to turn it. Tending the machinery usually just meant changing the oil and tightening some bolts that tended to vibrate loose. Occasionally it meant scouring the web for diagrams and message boards that contained the information I needed. Twice I’d tried calling the Top of Waikiki, who’d sold us the restaurant structure and its associated machinery, only to be brusquely reminded that they were the busiest restaurant on Oahu and the auction had not included consultations.

  Climbing down the ladder offered some of the pleasures of descending into a submarine, even if it was only a half story down to a crawl space. The skunky, rubbery smell lingering down there actually enhanced those pleasures. After scooting on my back to the motor, I did the few things I knew: changed the oil, though what was in there wasn’t too dark; cleaned the rotator belt; removed and cleaned the contact plate. Meanwhile, the sound of non-rubber soles started clacking from the surface above me. The vibrations shivered through the metal framing of the crawl space. When I’d finished my maintenance, I flipped the local start lever. The motor farted some black musk in my face.

  “Hasn’t had anything?” I heard Iris say
ing as I returned to the bottom of the ladder. She was talking with her mouth full. “If you make it, he’s not going to turn it down.”

  After washing my face, I sat down across from her and her plate of steak and eggs. I could hear and smell my steak searing in a pan. I hadn’t been sure I wanted breakfast, but now I knew I did. Iris was holding the steak in her hand to eat it, as if it were a crust of bread, but she managed to do so without looking like a barbarian. She used a corner of it to pop an egg yolk.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Beyond my powers.”

  “Call Waikiki?”

  “Assholes.”

  “Well, shit,” she said. She stirred her yolk with a fingertip. Behind her, Phil gagged with indeterminate authenticity. “Give me a few minutes.” She fished her phone from her purse and took it out to the dining room, still holding her steak in her other hand. That’s when I noticed she was wearing the same blue dress from the night before, and that in places it was rumpled. This immediately enraptured me at the same time it put a knot of discomfort in my gut. I pictured her nudging her high heel off with her bare opposite foot and collapsing on her comforter, saw the light creases in the exposed backs of her knees. I saw her getting up in the morning next to a hairy-backed mound of snoring husband, tugging her hem down, and washing off yesterday’s mascara. It felt, more than anything, like the dirty excitement of stumbling in on her changing.

  She returned, saying she’d talked to some friends at Overlook in San Francisco, and that if we went up tonight they could give me a tutorial and even some spare parts. “We?” I said. “You’ve got to keep the restaurant open.”

  She checked something on her phone. “Twelve in the reservation book. So probably, what, twenty, all night? You realize that’s a loss.”

  “We’ve already done half the prep,” Phil said, laying his knife on the countertop.

  “Paid holiday,” she said. “You really want to complain?” Lupe wiggled her eyebrows at Phil. Then, holding my gaze, Iris said, “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  Lupe and Phil looked at each other, and then at me, as if this were a terribly ill-advised offer. If they hadn’t, I don’t think I would have accepted.

  We left Fresno in a car that fit only the two of us. Her Mercedes felt like a whole different animal than my old GMC, a thoroughbred compared to a mule. I was driving so she could cancel the night’s reservations, and, I suspect, so she could watch me enjoy it. As we burned up the 99 and then west to Los Banos, I prayed all the highway patrol officers were still in church. Meanwhile, Iris chatted for twenty minutes with everyone from the list. They were all regulars, all the heart of a struggling downtown revitalization effort. Most of them owned their own hip but unprofitable businesses there and benefited from the circle of support. The mayor was on the list too, and the president of the junior college. I imagined they would feel relief at their Sunday off, and pictured them secretly, guiltily chowing down at the Olive Garden in the eastern sprawl. At the end of all those calls, she had one more to make.

  “Frank,” she said. “The rotator is broken, and I’ve got to head to San Francisco for some parts”—“no, closing for the night”—“yes, big trails of black smoke; turn it on during the day and we’d have pictures all over the web”—“honey, you can’t just turn an escalator into stairs”—“tonight, but probably late.” The voice she used with him sounded like something out of musical theater. She signed off with kisses and closed her phone.

  “In that case, he’ll play an extra round of golf.”

  Frank was one of the developers building predesigned lofts downtown. Rather than actually converting the abandoned industrial spaces we had, they were pouring and sealing new concretefloored apartments with exposed ducts and piping. But his actual money was from new housing tracts on the outskirts of town in all cardinal directions, projects that were still ongoing, continually increasing the sprawl, the sprawl. Iris surely knew all this, but she never revealed whether she’d found the penance of his downtown investments, including the restaurant, adequate, and I had my suspicions. Like many wealthy men, he indulged the artistic fancies of his wife, though her art was in trying to make Fresno a genuine city. Like most people accepting patronage, she could not help resenting it.

  As we passed some invisible boundary, the smell of a dairy infused the car.

  “Thank God we’ve got the top up,” I said, “though I’m not sure how much difference it makes.”

  “I kind of like it. It’s an authentic smell.”

  “Authentic cow shit.”

  “I like lots of bad smells. Skunk, old fruit.”

  “How about the smell our rotator is making?”

  “No. No burn smells. That’s human, inauthentic.”

  “By that logic, your restaurant smells worse than a dairy.”

  I didn’t mean for this to come out barbed, but it did. I could tell I’d wounded her, and she looked away for a minute before she responded.

  “Did you know that revolving restaurants are completely out of style? Before us, the last time one opened in the US was 1996. Top of Waikiki got a new one because Hawaii is time-locked. Blended drinks, cocktail umbrellas, floral print. Style doesn’t matter.” I told her I didn’t know how much it mattered in Fresno, either. We might not be time-locked, but we were so far behind the times we might as well be. Trends migrated to Fresno like poor retirees. I was trying to be conciliatory, to make the case for Apogee fitting Fresno, but her expression made it clear how badly my attempt was going.

  “It’s lonely, isn’t it?” I asked. “Believing in Fresno, believing that you can change its vision of itself.”

  She put her hand on my leg.

  “Sure it’s lonely,” she said. “What isn’t?”

  She had me there.

  We sped along the highway like bandits until the traffic in San Jose stopped us cold. Iris was able to get out and fold the top down in the middle of the carpool lane. This kind of gridlock on a Sunday afternoon was a bit bewildering. In Fresno, the only Sunday traffic happened in clusters around the bigger churches at 9 and 10 a.m. Things were different, I surmised, when you had a place people wanted to go. Creeping up the peninsula like that, half a mile at a time, should have been excruciating. In places where the freeway paralleled pedestrian paths, we could only watch with envy as people walking their dogs outpaced us. But here on the coast, we didn’t need speed to get the wind in our hair. The sun was warm. The air was cool, and it had a bit of the ocean in it. We could see out to the bay, see the little triangles of windsurfers drifting across the dark water. Being stopped for all this was just fine.

  She’d asked me earlier what wasn’t lonely.

  I thought, but didn’t say: this isn’t.

  * * *

  The woman who greeted us at Overlook wore aggressive bangs and a dress that probably cost a month’s rent. She seemed to be one of those people who only exist in the great cities, with the looks of a model, the style of the rich, the unblinking attitude of the young. Though my age or younger, she was the general manager of a glitzy restaurant in a cultural capital, a person whose résumé you imagined printed in gold ink. She introduced herself as Cherise. From the way she and Iris shook hands, it was clear that this friend wanting to help her out was actually a stranger on the other end of a business transaction.

  We’d ridden up in glass elevators, looking out over the garden atrium of a twenty-story luxury hotel. The restaurant was no less impressive, with a glittering granite front desk, hanging light fixtures that must have been individually polished, and a dining space that even with twice the tables we had seemed less cluttered.

  “Look how beautiful it all is,” Iris said. “If I had a whole staff like Nick, I believe we could manage something like this. He’s the lieutenant who keeps everything running. I’m just sort of a figurehead. Nay,” she laughed, “a mascot.” As Cherise led us on a quick tour of the restaurant, Iris continued to sing my praises in a way that was cloying and embarrassing and made me feel
like I was touring a college campus with my mother. I blushed, but Cherise smiled at me like she believed every word.

  “Is your repairman from the company or an independent contractor?” I asked Cherise as we approached the center of the restaurant.

  “Oh, these motors aren’t so complicated. I give them a knock myself when I need to.”

  She flipped up a grate, revealing stairs like those that led down to New York City basements. “Well,” Iris said, “I’m useless at this kind of thing. Why don’t you go get a look, and I’ll see about our hotel room.”

  “Hotel room?”

  “Look outside. It’s getting late.”

  A swatch of pink sky was visible in the doorway to the dining area, through which Iris disappeared before I could protest. Cherise offered a knowing smirk, but did me the kindness of letting it go quickly. At the bottom of the steps there was room to stand without crouching, and we simply walked back to the motor and stood next to it.

  “The first thing to know is that all rotating restaurants are basically the same. Some different details, but it’s like in geometry with circles and equilateral triangles. What’s the word?”

  “Similar.”

  “Every restaurant is similar. Different size, same technology.”

  She couldn’t stop it while anyone was dining, but she opened different compartments and explained in great technical detail how it worked and what could go wrong. I surmised that the old bearings at Apogee were binding and forcing too much torque from the motor. She agreed. They had a spare set of bearings, she said, that “my lady” could buy. How strange it was, Cherise in her elegant dress and her stylish makeup and me in my Sunday second-best, down there in that industrial compartment, a refined dining room only six feet above us. It felt like a scene from a movie.

  “I’m not above poaching a resourceful employee,” she said as I followed her back into the dining area. “I can’t create an assistant manager position, obviously. But start as a waiter, show your stuff, you’ll move up quickly. You know the biz: lots of turnover—come on, you’ve got to prefer San Francisco to Fresno.” Her glance around indicated that I should do the same. The sun had set while we were underneath the restaurant, and the city had been illuminated. Straight in front of me, the towers and scalloped cables of the Bay Bridge looked strung with Christmas lights. Far to my left, the same was true of the Golden Gate. The Transamerica Pyramid and the other skyscrapers around us were all lit, no blighted buildings blocking the view. It was beautiful.