Soft Yellow Lie

The bread came out warm and real, like it always does. They get that right.

I asked The Waiter for real butter. I always ask. What they try to give you is a distraction, a soft yellow lie. They hope you'll smear and consume the evidence before you notice.

"It's the same thing," The Waiter said.

It is not the same thing.

The Friend was looking at the menu and not at me. Which is how it usually goes. "Just eat the butter," she said.

“It’s not butter,” I said absently. I spread a little on a crust and watched it. Real butter resists. It has dignity. This melted too fast, too eager, sliding loathsomely into the warm grain like a parasite escaping the light. Whipped margarine, which is what this is, moves like it knows something. Like it’s running from something.

"You're doing the thing," The Friend said.

"I'm not doing the thing."

"You're doing the butter thing."

“It’s not butter,” I said.

The Waiter had already gone, back toward the kitchen, through the swinging doors that don't quite close. I watched them swing. Once, twice, slower, slower. Until they didn't.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody ever does.

I picked up the knife.

*

"I'm going to the bathroom," I said.

The Friend didn't look up. "Okay."

She should have looked up. If she'd looked up, maybe. But she didn't. I told myself that meant something. I stood, and the room kept eating.

That's the thing about The Keg. Everyone is so occupied. Forks going down, forks coming up. Nobody watches the doors.

The bathrooms are to the left. I went right.

The doors that don't quite close didn't quite close for me either. I went through sideways, into the heat and the steel and the noise. Nobody stopped me.

The Cook was at the far counter. He was scraping.

There was a tub, the big kind, the catering kind, and the label had been peeled and the peeling had been done carefully, the way you peel a label when you do not want anyone to read it. He was working a flat blade around the inside, and the stuff that came up was pale and even and it held the shape of the blade too long. Butter doesn't do that. Butter forgets. This remembered.

He looked up. I smiled the way you smile when you've taken a wrong turn to the washroom. He smiled back. We held it. Two people agreeing not to say a thing.

Then he stepped on something. The something gave, like rotten fruit. And there was a sound under the floor. Like a throat clearing.

He moved his foot. There was a seam in the tile I had not seen, a square of it, and a recess where a ring of steel sat flush. A trap door. In a restaurant. Under the prep station, where the deliveries come up, where the deliveries go down.

The Cook went back to scraping. He had decided I was nothing.

I waited until he carried his tub through to the line, and then I knelt, and I pulled the ring, and the floor came up easier than a floor should.

Stairs. Going down farther than the building had any business going.

I went down.

*

You don't expect cold under a steakhouse. You expect more heat, more grease, the underside of the same machine. Instead it got cold and it got quiet and the walls changed from cinder block to stone, old stone, fitted stone, stone from before the parking lot and the highway and the name on the sign.

There were tunnels. I want to say I was surprised. I was not surprised. Some part of me had known since the first time The Waiter said it's the same thing with that face, that nothing-face, that this went down. I just hadn't known how far down meant.

I followed the light. Like a moth, I guess.

The tunnel opened into a room with a ceiling I couldn't find. Pillars. Candles, real ones, the kind made of human fat. And down the middle, where the pews would be if I let myself call it what it was, a long aisle of tubs. Hundreds. The catering kind. The peeled kind.

At the end stood The High Priest.

I knew him by the apron. Same apron as The Cook, same as The Waiter, but clean, impossibly clean. Clean the way a thing is clean when it has never once done honest work.

He was at an altar. On the altar was a churn.

He was making it.

I had it backwards this whole time, is the thing. I thought they were buying the margarine cheap and lying about it to save a dollar. Small. Human. Forgivable, almost. But that's not what the churn was for. He was taking it in pure. I could see the blocks, gold, sweating, real, more real than anything upstairs. He was working it, and praying over it, and what came out the other side was pale and even and held the shape too long.

They weren't passing margarine off as butter.

They were turning butter into margarine. On purpose. As an act of worship. Worship of corruption. Of entropy. Of death, and decay, and the ending of things.

He looked up. Of course he looked up. He was the only one in the whole building who had been waiting for someone to look.

"You wanted the real thing," he said. Not a question.

"There is no real thing." He lifted a hand toward the tubs, the candles, the dark above us where the ceiling refused to be. "There's only what we agree to call it. Up there they call it butter and they're happy. You came all the way down here to be unhappy about the truth."

He smiled, and it was The Waiter's smile, and The Cook's smile, the same nothing passed hand to hand to hand. "Was it worth it?"

I ran.

I remember The Cook not looking up, and the doors that don't quite close, and the dining room going forks-up forks-down forks-up like a sea that had never heard of me, and The Friend staring slack jawed at the menu, never looking up. I remember the door to the parking lot and the cold real air and thinking out, out, never again, never, out.

There was something wrong with the air. It seemed… whipped.

*

The bread came out warm and real, like it always does. They get that right.