out before us, blazing in the middle with fire.
We began double-dunking everything on it: egg rolls, spring rolls, scallion pancakes, dumplings.
“We’re going to need more duck sauce,” she called to the waiter. “A lot more.”
And then again when our main dishes were served.
“More duck sauce,” she said, thrusting the bowl at him, as though it were his fault for not knowing we’d decided to bathe in it.
I wanted to be submerged in all the sauces. The pepper steak was so good I would have eaten the gravy on its own. I sighed audibly as I plunked a bite of the tender meat in my mouth, escorted by a slice of onion. Was there wine in this motherfucker?
“Well?” asked Miriam.
“Moist,” I said.
“And?”
“Juicy.”
But my favorite was the sesame chicken. I liked the way the sweetness contrasted with the spice, also that there were no vegetables in it. I didn’t need to see another vegetable ever again. It was so decadent to put sesame seeds and flour on chicken and fry it up in a fattening sauce. This was what made it so delicious—the knowledge that underneath all those carbs and fat was chicken, which could have been healthy, but for the sake of taste was not. It was like a Fuck You to chicken. It was a Fuck You to everything!
“Fuck me!” I said in celebration as I took a joyful bite.
Miriam laughed, taking a sip from the Scorpion Bowl. Then she cut carefully into a piece of chicken with the side of her chopstick, elegantly and with slow precision, as though nothing had to be inhaled urgently. There was plenty, and there would be plenty. She surveyed her plate, strategizing, map-making. This was how it was going to happen, then this, then this. She took one noodle and draped it around the chicken, then put a piece of egg from the fried rice on top. She dunked it all in some of the spare chicken sauce and sesame seeds on the side of her plate. Then she raised it to her lips, closed her eyes, opened them again, and bit in. I watched her chewing thoughtfully.
“You seem interested in my chopsticks,” she said.
“I like the way you feed yourself.”
“Yes, I am good,” she said.
“You are.”
“Want me to make you a bite?”
“Okay.”
She used her chopsticks to assemble the same bite for me: chicken, noodle, egg, sauce. Then I used my chopsticks to take it off her plate. I popped the big bite in my mouth.
“Now chew,” she said.
“Mmmm.”
“What do you taste?”
“It’s a miracle,” I said. “A real simultaneous chicken-and-egg situation. It’s like, what came first? Neither!”
“Yes.” She laughed. “And?”
“I mean, the way the noodle is hugging both of them at the same time.”
“I know,” she said. “Now swallow.”
I swallowed.
Proudly, she made another bite for herself. As she brought it to her lips, she stared at me with those ice-blue eyes. Fuck, I thought. I might love this girl.
Beside her, the pu pu platter was still burning. It was a big wooden bowl with a gun-metal grate in the center that released a steady blue flame. The blue was rimmed in red.
I stared at the fire. I squinted at it until it became two flames, twins. Then I blinked, and it became one again. I could see something in there burning, a little charred thing, probably a piece of an egg roll skin. But the longer I stared, the more the thing looked alive—like a tiny figure being incinerated. It had a torso and a neck. It had a skull. I hoped the figure wasn’t a bad omen.
Just an egg roll crumb, I said to myself. You’re drunk.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the figure was a person, a symbol of something foreboding. Was the figure me? Was I being burned up in the fire? I felt dissociated, separate from myself. All my thoughts and beliefs, my little machinations and schemes, what were they? To calm myself, I tried to add up numbers in my head: 365 and 780 and 1,250 and 195. I could not remember how to do math. I couldn’t add up anything. My certainty of what was what—it was turning to ash.
I felt a strange and terrifying loneliness in the midst of that crowded restaurant. I wanted to stand, to run to the bathroom, to try and puke everything up. But my legs were trembling. So I stayed sitting down.
I put my elbows on the table and took deep breaths. I held my hands up to my eyes.