The window was fogged with dust and grease, and stiff to open. Paint cracked as I slid it up. The air outside was wet, the sky dark. Inside the attic was gray with the smoke of singed flesh. Rennel sat under a forty-watt bulb reading one of Sam’s essays.

“Are you helping him cook?” he asked.

“No, I’m just watching.”

Rennel made a face and continued reading.

Sam was dumping rice from a twenty-five-pound sack into a big pot on the floor. California Pearl Brown Rice. He threw the sack into the corner and poured in water from the tap.

“I’m going to write a cookbook.” He looked up to see if I was listening, plopped the pot onto the other gas ring, put a plate over it, and leaned back against the sink. “Call it Zen and the Art of Cookery! There’ll only be one recipe but a lot of philosophy. Like you have to comprehend the essential nature of your ingredients. You look at the meat and say, ‘This is a wild creature, a runner and kicker of heels, an eater of tall grass and a stealer of mares.’ The same with the spices and vegetables. Precisely what is an onion’s attitude toward life?”

His beady little eyes twinkled. The smoke drifted slowly from the frying pan, out the door, and moved weakly toward the window.

“Rice is very close to enlightenment in the Zen sense. It submerges its identity in a vast multitude. Of course, flour is even closer. In the act of making gravy you lift a thousand separate grains of wheat into Nirvana. Their eyes are lost and they drown and are reborn in the universal identity.”

“Gravy.”

“Sure. Or anything else really. See, first you have to understand your ingredients. Like, garlic watches TV in its undershirt and sweats at work. Cinnamon is a southern belle. Those two don’t go together. Onions are hard-core romantics with a defensive cynicism. It’s like a party. You bring all these characters together in such a way as to create a new, overall identity—a different taste than any one of them alone, but they all contribute to it. In things like stew you achieve a successful group therapy, but in sauces or gravy you get them right off to Nirvana.”

“So what’s the one recipe?” I asked.

“Oh, horsemeat and brown rice. That’s just a friendly interaction, but I’m not up to any bodhisattva tricks yet. I just establish their egos solidly enough so that they can have a relationship without getting defensive.”