The Ghost Kitchen

Do you believe in fate? What do you mean when you say ghost?

Where I live, everything is symbolic of the whole—a microcosm. Imagine a filthy teeming canal with romantic gondolas paddled by mimes gliding through it, murky corridors lit up by lanterns and fire, sponsored by Dunkin Donuts.

In an industrial part of Providence (earthly) stands a building which only sells food to delivery app drivers. This is where I work. Imagine a restaurant with no OPEN/CLOSED sign, no servers, no cashiers, no high-top chairs, no bathroom stalls, no beautiful hostess. Only we know where to enter—a secret, card-locked door around back. What we do here is not illegal—not technically.

Surprised, I was, but not skeptical when I learned that ghost kitchen was the term for fake restaurants like my job. Ever since Tony’s death and subsequent re-appearance, I’ve believed in things like coincidences—also, ghosts. All things follow along a set of potential pre-defined paths. Synchronicities remind you of the nature of fate.

Usually Tony only appears when I’m on the floor alone. Most of my coworkers can’t see her, but they didn’t know her like I did. We were always on the floor alone, with nothing but the red ambience of the deep fryer. Why should Tony’s soul be in the ghost kitchen? Me, I’m not sure why anything happens at all—that’s for Providence (divine) to decide.

My theory—ghosts appear in the context in which you knew them best.

These days I forget the particularities of almost everything about Tony and her life story. This is how it usually goes with memories. Did you know that, scientifically speaking, ninety percent of our memories are fake? If everybody were honest, we would understand that these scenes running through our heads all day never happened at all. Our ghosts’ faces are revisionist histories.

Dead Tony’s eyes are huge, black and glittering, like an anime girl or The Fly. Every so often, a chunk of her mottled blue skin sloughs off. This is because my sentimental brain envisions a dead person as decomposing, even though Real Tony’s body was cremated. Dead Tony’s pixie cut is peppered with kid’s barrettes like so many neon maggots. I wonder why I still envision her with her haircut from high school and not the outgrown mullet she had when she died.

Tony and I met as kids, though we were never super close back then. You could already tell she was special. Not that she was ever going to be a brain surgeon or a ballerina or anything. She was just significant. As in—you understood that you were interacting with someone with a strange and unusual fate.

When Tony was alive, this wasn’t a ghost kitchen. We were not the kinds of people who would work in a ghost kitchen. We were the kinds of people who cared whether places had souls. We worked at a gentrified loaded French fry chain with a mascot of a humanoid goose-like figure choking on a French fry. His human hands grasped desperately around his feathery neck, miming asphyxiation. Like so many of us, he was in permanent need of a savior, or at least someone CPR-certified.

At the time of the accident, we weren’t talking. Imagine my best friend and I icily pressing the buttons on the microwave, stirring the egg powder so angrily we spilled it over the counters.

We were fighting because Tony had gotten herself this fuck-ass boyfriend for whom I didn’t care. She told me I just hated all men, but it was never about the man part, ever. It was about the her part, and the me part. She said—Don’t be like that.

The boyfriend wasn’t all that bad, it turned out. At the wake, he seemed really broken. He cried and even hugged me, which was really big of him considering last time he saw me I was up to my second knuckles in his girlfriend (long story). I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of guilt. Before the wake, the boyfriend had existed only in hypotheticals. We would play a game, me and Tony, where I would stop right before she came and say something like, Sorry, I just realized I’m violating the sanctity of your relationship, and make her beg me to continue.

To be fair (and this was something I accepted only after she died), Tony was right to call me out for my behavior. I was very much in love with Tony before she died, even if I wasn’t fully aware of that at the time. Once, before we had actually slept together, I masturbated to Instagram Tony, then I ripped out most of my eyelashes and confessed the sin to Rebecca, my online therapist. Rebecca told me this was just exploration, and that it didn’t necessarily mean anything. She, who was not technically licensed, was wrong—I really was in love with Tony.

I felt—feel—so sad. But did I ever really imagine her death before it happened?

You would hardly be able to blame me if I did—if, back when she would make out with her boyfriend in front of me, I used to envision shoving both of their heads in the Frisky Fries deep fryer as the choking goose watched on.

I don’t tell a lot of people this, but yes, it’s true, if you must know. That we had shared an unspoken romantic love for each other became like her death—part of our story. The longer she remains dead, the more certain I become. We were in love, yes. It only makes sense that way. The whole thing happened as if planned.

I ask my question again and again. In memory, Live Tony mouths No, rosebud mouth frozen in the O-gape, and Dead Tony, dunking another set of frozen fries into the sizzling fryer, says nothing, its own No.