His furniture is a model of spare elegance. The joins on tables, ottomans, and sofas could not be more precise. They can’t be what they are with even one bit less material. She sees the furniture for what it is almost reflexively, of a piece with the books in a way that’s just beyond the edge of her senses.
The smell of dinner wafts through the house. It’s warm and savory and mouthwatering. Daniel walks with an eager bounce. Even before the first bite, dinner already feels impossible. It’s only been about twenty minutes since Ahdi invited them and food out of nowhere is an affectation that’s, as far as Ellie knows, unique to Daniel.
More stuffed bookshelves cover the dining room walls. The Platonic ideal of a table fills most of the room, surrounded by the Platonic ideal of chairs. They’re all built from something glass-like, and Ellie can only see them by how they function. They distort the floor, bookshelves, and ceiling when she looks throughthem. Slight and delicate looking, they’re also built out of more tiny gears than she can count. The table and chairs give her the sense that even after both an earthquake and a nuclear bomb, she would be gone, but they would still be intact and usable.
Three place settings sit on the table along with a tea service. They’re the sort of thing a good restaurant-equipment store might sell, but they seem to float rather than rest. She’s not sure what the Platonic ideal of a chopstick would even be. Then again, she wouldn’t have had a clue about the Platonic ideal of table or chairs until she saw these.
She isn’t sure this is a room one would sully by, say, having a meal in it until Daniel sits in one of the chairs. The grin is still pasted on his face, but he doesn’t so much bounce as vibrate. He practically blurs.
“Yeah, he’s a lot,” Daniel says, catching the awe on Ellie’s face. “The house is more or less always like this.”
Ellie eyes warily the chair next to Daniel. The contradiction is hard to take. Gossamer struts look like they should shear and collapse the instant a mote of dust lands on the chair, but the math checks out. There may be bridges with less load-bearing capacity. Besides, Daniel is sitting comfortably, his chair easily supporting his weight. It’d be rude to just stand there.
When Ellie sits, the chair adjusts, its gears spinning and struts telescoping and contracting. Her body bobbles and pitches as she shifts her weight against the thing. It makes weirdly comforting purring noises as it morphs below and behind her.
“Ellie, sit like a normal person, not like someone who can sense every stress on every one of its joints. Pretend it’s a typical chair. Don’t try to help it out. Sit and let it do its thing.”
She forces herself to stop. For a split instant, it feels like the chair will buck and shove her into the table. In the time it takes to think that, all the stress and strain leaves her body. The chair is clearly supporting her weight but it feels like she’s levitating.
“Wow.” She turns toward Daniel and her chair fluidly adjusts to her shift in weight. “This explains so much about you.”
Daniel is exactly the man who grew up in a world where Platonic ideals are the norm. Putting every detail in its proper place is a matter of habit.
Ahdi walks in with a tray of small plates. He smiles when he sees Ellie comfortably seated. The plates are filled with spicy smashed cucumbers, pickled radishes, and thinly sliced pig’s ears braised in soy sauce. They smell the way you want to remember better days of the past. She hasn’t had anything like this in years. Either she has been in Boston or Mom has been too sick to cook. Ellie forces her breathing to steady.
“Why don’t you two get started?” Ahdi turns back toward the kitchen. “I’ll join you in a moment when I bring in the noodles.”
Daniel pours a cup of tea for Ellie and pushes a cup to the other side of the table for Ahdi before pouring a cup for himself. Ellie savors the steam and the earthiness, as well as the hints of ginger and ginseng that hit the back of her throat. Daniel attacks the appetizers, piling chili-flecked cucumbers next to thin slices of radish next to tangles of sesame-specked pig’s ears with the precision and grace someone else might save for a particularly difficult tap combination or a roundhouse kick. He empties his plate one sliver at a time, working from one side to the other, as if each sliver were worth a life.
Ellie picks at her plate. It’s not that Ahdi’s cooking is bad. She could bear that. The man has to be incompetent at something, although it’s apparently not cooking. What she can’t bear is how the cooking reminds her of her mom’s. The cucumber is crunchy, spicy, and garlicky. It’s both cool and hot sliding down her throat. The radishes are sharp and sour and lovely. They cut through the chili oil in the cucumber. If the pig’s ears are beautifully gelatinous with a crunchy center, she may cry. She leaves the pig’s ears alone.
Ahdi enters carrying a tray with three large bowls of noodle soup. Ellie finally places the savory smell. Meatballs, some made of fish, others made of pork. Aldi catches the glint of recognition on her face.
“There’s more in the kitchen.” Ahdi sets the tray down and places a bowl before Ellie, then a bowl before Daniel. “Eat up.”
“Fishballs!” Daniel’s face glows with joy. “You know, Ellie, the first time I tried to generate an equivalence report, it came out unintentionally as a piece of fish.”
Ellie has never seen Daniel volunteer anything about himself unprompted. Usually, the idea of being the topic of conversation causes him to beat a strategic retreat.
Daniel and Ahdi exchange glances. Ahdi’s eyebrows rise and Daniel responds with a grin.
“Your cousin spent the next several minutes singing ‘Tilapia, I just made a piece of tilapia’ and so on.”
“I was, like, twelve or whatever!” He folds his arms across his chest but the indignation doesn’t quite play. “And, for the record, I sang ‘ate’ at first but you insisted that I had to make a tilapia before I ate it and so I should save ‘ate’ for the second half of the quatrain.”
“He improvised several choruses and a bridge. I thought he’d never stop singing ‘tilapia.’”Ahdi sits across from a momentarily appalled Daniel. “I was impressed.”
Ellie sees what they’re trying to do. Daniel has made himself deeply uncomfortable in order to make Ellie laugh, and Ahdi is going along with it. In Ahdi’s defense, watching Daniel squirm is a rich, indulgent dessert made with too much butter, sugar, and chocolate. Too much of it is a horrible idea, but a morsel is divine. Daniel tries to make himself as small and as unobtrusive and as harmless as possible. Hurricanes have done better pretending to be gentle breezes. She smiles despite herself.
Steam from the bowl drifts to her face. She stirs the rich brothwith her spoon. Thick, flat, glutinous rice noodles swirl like galaxies marked with giant fishball and meatball star clusters. She takes a bite of a fishball. Her eyes well up with tears. They sell frozen fishballs in Asian groceries, but nothing in this bowl has ever been anywhere near a freezer. She recognizes the bouncy texture, how they soak up the broth, the flavor that’s both delicate and pronounced. They take her to her mother’s stories of living by the ocean as a kid. It is both delicious and not quite what her mom would have made. She has never been both so near and so far away.
“Oh, Ellie, I’m so sorry.” Ahdi leans forward and offers his hand. “I was hoping you’d find this comforting.”
“No, it is. This is exactly what I wanted for dinner.” She’s surprised to realize how true the words are as they tumble out and she takes his hand. “It’s just… I miss her… so much. I haven’t had this since she…”
“I know. I try but it’s never what your mom makes. Made.” His smile is warm and he gives Ellie’s hand a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
“I can show you. Or at least I can try.” Memories of her mom patiently teaching her how to cook flood her mind. “She would want that, I think.”
