The Animals That Move Along the Ground

            As a toddler, Henry Leonard gave his mother’s friends the creeps. He was too polite.  A charming baby. He hated to be a bother. Later, at the Boston College of Communication, his room was sparse and immaculate and he was always on time and always alone. His mother’s last words to him were, “Be there at 8 p.m.,” and he was at Balthazar at 7:30 p.m., secretly scorning her as early as 8:10 p.m. for being late to her own party. By 8:30 p.m., he was laughing about her uncharacteristic tardiness, and by 9 p.m., he felt completely superior. It wasn’t until he got home and got the message that she was dead that he felt bad for having been so smug. 

But that was long ago, and she was gone, and he was still always on time. That was his secret to finishing college despite spending every allowable moment in bed with her face floating in the ceiling, looking down at him and frowning. It was the only facial expression of hers he could fully remember. His dedication to organization helped him get by. It helped him get his internship at Food & Wine and his first freelancing jobs at Gastronomica and The Observer. By the time he was 30, he had lived all over the world and eaten in the most incredible restaurants in the universe—all because when someone said to be somewhere at 8 a.m., he was there at 7:30 a.m.

            Food criticism came easily to him. He relished every nuance of every dish and when he really thought about it, it started that night at Balthazar as he ate by himself while his mother spilled out onto the floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Emergency Department.  The corn ravioli and grilled chicken paillard had seemed so ordinary at the table but took on such significance after he got the news of her death that he now took a microscopic view of every bite. He savored the intentional care of every garnish and luxuriated in the colors that were presented to him on spare, hand-fired stoneware. You never knew when a meal would change your life. He wanted to remember. 

            Since moving to Los Angeles to work for The Times, Henry’s restaurant reviews had quickly become the most popular section of the publication. He was a tastemaker, literally. Though he took care to preserve his anonymity for the work’s sake, people still stopped him at Vons or the gas station with tears in their eyes, thanking him for making them aware of the ceviche at Arrozco. They told him how the oxtail soup at Domo had saved their failing marriage. Henry knew this was possible. He had eaten these dishes and knew they could ease pain and regret. They were proof that life didn’t have to be a cruel slog, even if only for the duration of a few bites. Every restaurant was an opportunity. He sat down to each meal like a gambler hoping for a big win. He was waiting for his ship to come in. 

Fame and adulation were supposed to be the most delicious things of all, but lately, they made it impossible for him to do his job. In just the last two weeks, there had been several instances where someone accosted him in public, complaining about one recommendation or another. One man told him that the shrimp ramen at Afuri was so bad it made his daughter cry. Another woman said he wouldn’t know a good calzone if he sat on it. This confused him. The shrimp ramen he had was incredible. He remembered it distinctly, like he remembered all dishes. But if readers were recognizing him, surely the restaurants were as well. Were they making him special dishes with ingredients they didn’t serve to everyone else? It had happened to critics before. For years, it wasn’t a problem for him to be inconspicuous, but lately, he was noticing subtle signs that his cover had been blown in the behavior of restaurant staff. He sometimes felt eyes on him when he walked in the front door. A server’s hand would quake when setting a plate in front of him. The scallops jiggled like terrified children. While he did his best to keep his picture out of the articles, his well-known manners and obsession with order regarding the table preceded him. More than once, he watched a sweating restaurant owner wait for him to arrange his silverware just the way he liked it and place his napkin gingerly in his lap, then rush out, coming back with an armload of what he now thought might be premium ingredients that other diners weren’t getting. 

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***

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            At Palazzo one night, the solution became clear. He sat alone, waiting for his risotto in the dim dining room, and scanned all the faces bobbing in and out of the kitchen door and weaving between the tables, searching for any kind of recognition on their part. When a scrawny, balding man in his early fifties popped his head out from behind the bar and made eye contact, he thought he saw a twinge of fear. He watched as the man called a server over and whispered into his ear. The server answered with a shrug and Henry read his lips as he whispered back “maybe.” He needed to throw them off. 

            When the server came to see if he wanted any wine before dinner, Henry heard himself say six words that had never before come out of his tightly set, careful mouth. 

            “Just give me the house red,” he said. 

            It hurt him to say it. It had been years since he drank anything other than Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon or Beaulieu Vineyard Georges de Latour Private Reserve. Saying “house red” felt like pulling barbed wire through his teeth.

            “Surely you would like something a little more special than that?”

            “You’re right,” Henry said, “why don’t you put an ice cube in it?”

That clinched it. He almost jumped out of his skin. He wanted to take it all back, order the Patrimony Cabernet Sauvignon and say it had been a little joke, but it was too late, he was already headed to the wine cellar or the liquor store down the street; wherever they kept the horrible thing he had just ordered. He watched as the server walked past the owner with a small shake of his head and a look of relief washed over the manager’s stressed, glistening face. 

            The feeling when the house wine was plopped carelessly in front of him, an ice cube splashing about in it like an old tire in a pond, was unexpected. It was like finding the best spot in hide-and-go-seek. Crouching there, safe and secure in the womb of a dark closet or hidden crawlspace. No one was going to find him there. The risotto that came out was practically thrown at him and had been carelessly slopped on the plate. It tasted worse than it looked. Henry was thrilled. He felt like trash with his chilled swill and sloppy gruel festering on the table. He had never felt so disgusting. Such degradation and debasement. And he wanted more. 

***

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            For the next week, he went about his life much as he always had but sprinkled little transgressions here and there to scratch the itch. He put a bag of frozen gnocchi on the shelf in the cookie aisle at Vons simply because he decided he didn’t want it and didn’t feel like walking all the way back to the frozen section. It was an incredible feeling. Once, he even picked his nose openly at a stop sign and when he turned and saw a woman looking at him with disgust, he felt a tingling arousal of his senses. A shock of pleasure in his body. A heightening.

            He left his shoes untied. When he spilled coffee down his shirt front while sitting in traffic on the 10, he didn’t bother putting on the extra one he kept in the car. When people pointed it out to him at the office, he just shrugged. They looked at him with confusion and pity, like he was going insane. One morning, while sitting at his desk at The Times, he farted. He did not try to hold it in or let it gently seep out. He bore down as soon as he felt it bubbling up,  pinching his butt cheeks together like the embouchure of a trumpeter’s lips. The sound it made was heavenly. The smell was biblical. Kevin Doran, the photo editor who sat next to him, popped his head over the wall of the cubicle and stared. Henry just turned his eyes up to him and met his gaze, completely blank. Content in his filth and wild with freedom and beautiful abandon, he wondered what was next. How he could keep this going. 

            Every day, he forced himself to do something others found repugnant. Something his old self would have been disgusted by. While he had trouble building up the courage in the moment, he found the other side of the threshold divine, like jumping off a high cliff into a warm, luxurious pool. The steps to the edge were the hardest part, but after jumping, all he wanted was to climb back up and do it again. To feel the joy as he burped in the dry cleaner’s face, or knocked over cakes at the Normandie Bakery on La Brea Avenue. That one had been particularly difficult to work up the nerve for, but the jolt was so pure that without even thinking, he did the other thing. The other, much worse thing. 

            He had been sitting at his usual table, eating Normandie’s renowned religieuse. The one he made famous with a glowing, well-deserved review. A table with pre-boxed cakes sitting by the door caught his eye. They were so precariously balanced. All the work that had gone into them. The way the chef pâtissier had arranged them, and how before that, she had carefully measured and folded the batter. It could all be destroyed in an instant. Henry was sure there would be yelling and confusion. They loved him there. He always got the biggest pain au chocolat and they always had coffee waiting for him. Every year, he sent them a Christmas card. They would think it had been an accident. That made it all the more important to make it as egregious as possible. When he got up and walked over to the table, his arm was shaking as he pulled it back. He looked right at the cashier, who always watched him intently, trying to anticipate anything he wanted. Time slowed as his arm hung in the air. When he swept it forward, annihilating the first cakes he made contact with and throwing the rest on the ground with the broad reach of his forearm, he felt like a bird floating over a wide, open valley. Free. 

            What he did next, though, was something else entirely. It was a new height. A shot up into the atmosphere where God lived and all humans burst into flames except for Henry Leonard. He stood over the cakes, watching the delicate frosting slide off the crumbled messes, and without thinking about it or hearing the commotion from the counter, he pulled his pants down and defecated on them. It was easier than he thought it would be, and more thrilling than he could ever imagine. It was only when he was tackled by Andre, the dishwasher, that he was brought out of his singular reverie, with his pants around his ankles and his filth all over the Normandie Bakery’s immaculately scrubbed tiled floor. 

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***

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            Dan Tamarin had not become the editor of the Los Angeles Times by struggling with words, but when his food critic Henry Leonard walked into his office reeking of piss and looking like he slept in a chemical toilet, he was speechless. He heard about the incident at the bakery and had been bombarded with complaints from the staff of the paper, but he had to see it to believe it. The second Henry walked in, he believed. 

            “Henry, sit down.” 

            “Are you sure?” 

            Dan looked at him from the bottom up. 

            “No, actually, don’t.” 

            They stood looking at one another, each one wondering what to do next. 

            “What the hell is going on with you?”

            “What don’t you like about it? Tell me everything.”

            “You’re covered in piss. You shit on a pile of cakes. You smell like a septic tank, I mean what the fuck, Henry?”

            “I ate part of a rat yesterday.”

            “What?”

            “I found it in the garage. Already dead. I cut out a little piece of its belly and cooked it in a cast iron pan with some rosemary and garlic.”

            Dan gagged. 

            “You want me to write it up? I’m thinking “Good Things in Unexpected Places.” It could run as a series. I plan on trying a raccoon next. They’re all over the place.”

            “Get the fuck out of here. I can’t have this. Get some help,” Dan said.

            Henry stayed put for a moment, absorbing Dan’s disgust as he picked up the phone and dialed security, savoring his revulsion.

***

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            Wandering around Koreatown that night, he heard a commotion in an alleyway. A kid in a stained, white dishwasher’s smock was pushing a big, black garbage bag full of something squishy over the lip of a dumpster. The bag tore and the contents splashed all over him. Henry could smell the fermented, sour odor even from a safe distance. The kid screamed into the reeking night sky and tore his apron off, just as another man wearing pristine chef’s whites came out of a door. 

            “Hey,” the chef said. 

            The kid looked at him and turned on his heels, pushing past Henry and disappearing down Irolo Street. The chef looked down at the stinky mess all over his dumpster and alley. 

            “You need a new dishwasher,” Henry said. 

            The chef looked up at him, startled.

            “Apparently,” the chef said. 

            “I’ve got it,,” Henry said.

            “I’ll get you some gloves.”

            “It’s okay.”

            Henry bent down to pick up a handful of what he now recognized as soft miso tofu that had been left in the back of a walk-in refrigerator for far too long. It was putrid and molding. He smelled it, and watched the chef’s eyes as he lifted the globby mess to his tongue, licking a generous portion off his palm.

            “I’m sure it was delicious.”

            The chef waited as Henry picked up every last bit and put it in the dumpster, wiping his hands on his shirt when he was done. 

            “Come on,” the chef said, “let’s get you set up in the dish pit.”

***

            Every morning, Henry pulled himself off his mattress on the floor, still reeking of fish, garbage, and sweat. His new apartment on the corner of East 47th and Compton Avenue got all the sunlight in the morning and he covered the windows with stained sheets to keep the heat out. He made coffee in a pot crusted with calcium deposits and dirt. Something about the slightly metallic taste and the rough, gritty texture of the cheap coffee made him feel alive and electric. Like the minerals were connecting points and letting a current flow freely. 

            He opened the kitchen before any of the cooks showed up. He reached under the gas stove and lit it, pulling his hand away, covered in grease and dirt left from the night before. There was half a loaf of Banh Mi bread sitting in the dish sink’s drain. He pulled it out and threw it in the trash, letting it squish and fall apart like paper pulp in his fist. When the cooks got there, their loud, hungover voices bounced around the dish room’s walls, grating like a fork against porcelain. Henry shuddered with pleasure. They all held their noses when they walked over to throw their pans in the sink. 

            “You should put yourself in that washing machine, Hank,” one of them said, nodding toward the industrial dish sanitizer. 

            “You love it,” he said, putting his pointer and middle fingers on either side of his mouth and wiggling his tongue at them in a crass display. 

            The cooks liked Henry because they could count on him to kill the rats that had become quite fearless in the cacophony of the busy kitchen, darting around under the chef garde manger’s feet. On Henry’s second day working there, he spotted one of the vermin making a run for it between two prep tables. Without thinking, he lifted his leg up and kicked the rat as hard as he could. It hit the far wall with a dead thud that left a splatter pattern of guts and blood all over the white surface. It laid on the ground, writhing and convulsing pitifully, concussed and confused. The cooks all watched as he walked over to it calmly. He looked at the grill chef, who had stepped so far out of his way that he was now almost sitting on top of the flaming steel behind him. Henry stared into his eyes and slowly brought his foot down onto the rat’s head. With a crunch and a squish, all movement ceased. 

            “You’re pretty fucked up,” the grill chef said.

            Henry picked up the rat with his bare hands, letting brain and blood drip down his fingers as he tossed the corpse into the trash. 

            “I used to be much, much worse,” he said.