Million little mistakes, p.9
Million Little Mistakes, page 9
The world’s most expensive meal will be prepared by some of the most celebrated chefs in the world and served at the Dome restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand. Ten courses paired with their own rare wine will be offered. Each seat will cost forty thousand dollars. Tax and tip are not included. Aidan wears a tuxedo and you wear a long emerald gown for the occasion. On the menu:
FIRST COURSE
Crème brûlée of foie gras with tonga beans
Paired with 1990 Louis Roederer Cristal
Chef Alain Solivérès
SECOND COURSE
Tartare of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oyster
Paired with 1995 Krug Clos du Mesnil
Chef Antoine Westermann
THIRD COURSE
Mousseline of pattes rouges crayfish with morel mushroom infusion
Paired with 2000 Corton-Charlemagne, Domaine Jean François
Coche-Dury
Chef Alain Solivérès
FOURTH COURSE
Tarte fine with scallops and black truffle
Paired with 1996 Le Montrachet, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti
Chef Antoine Westermann
FIFTH COURSE
Lobster osso bucco
Paired with 1985 Romanée-Conti, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti
Chef Jean-Michel Lorain
SIXTH COURSE
Ravioli with guinea fowl and burrata cheese in a veal reduction
Paired with 1961 Château Palmer
Chef Annie Feolde
SEVENTH COURSE
Saddle of lamb “Léonel”
Paired with 1959 Château Mouton Rothschild
Chef Marc Meneau
—PALATE CLEANSER&—
Sorbet “Dom Pérignon”
EIGHTH COURSE
Supreme of pigeon en croute with cèpes mushroom sauce and cipollotti
Paired with 1961 Château Haut-Brion
Chef Heinz Winkler
NINTH COURSE
Veal cheeks with Périgord truffles
Paired with 1955 Château Latour
Chef Heinz Winkler
TENTH COURSE
Imperial gingerbread pyramid with caramel and salted butter ice cream
Paired with 1967 Château d’Yquem
Chef Jean-Michel Lorain
The dinner concludes with fireworks and champagne spilt everywhere as people hug and kiss good night. It’s delightful! Stupendous, actually, which if you think about it is not a word that comes up often. Good food shows you what’s possible in life. Ordinary ingredients like water, sugar, and salt change from elemental building blocks into exquisite works of art when prepared by loving hands. As Mozart said, this is the key to all genius. “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
The dinner gets you talking about art and passion and how nothing is worth doing unless the sum is greater than the parts. One way or another, everyone must struggle in life, it’s a universal rule. No one knows why it’s a rule, we might have gone with something different, but no matter how much health, wealth, talent, or luck a person has, everyone, absolutely everyone, struggles with something.
And yet.
And yet while everyone struggles, works hard, suffers setbacks, endures spells of mind-numbing monotony, bursts of sheer terror, and black pits of injustice, in the end some people get something for their efforts while others don’t. Some struggles seem to pay you back, while others just make you keep paying. Struggle with childbirth and you’ll be paid back with life; struggle with jealousy and you’ll only be paid back with more pain. Unless of course childbirth results in your own death or jealousy inspires you to achieve greatness—these things can be tricky. One person’s miracle is another’s nightmare. Like loving Jesus or having children or buying timeshares in Florida, we have yet to find one single thing that’s always good, all the time, for every person.
So if you’re going to struggle, then why not struggle with something that’s going to pay you back? What is it you really want to do? What would be a lot of work but give you something wonderful? Well, this trip has opened your eyes to the marvels of traveling, that’s for sure, and it’s opened your eyes to the institution of culinary art. You stay up all night brainstorming ideas, hatching plans, until the sun rises and you’ve narrowed your choices down to two ideas. Two choices that would be assloads of work and pay you back with oceans of love.
One idea is to incorporate traveling and food by starting a specialized touring company that caters to the very wealthy and discerning palates of that quirky group known as “the foodies,” people who live for haute cuisine and will do anything/pay anything/go anywhere to find it. You’d travel the world with these select groups sampling the freshest, rarest, most exquisite foods all over the world. You’d host celebrity chef dinners, tour vineyards, eat mangoes in Thailand, sip hand-pressed rum in the Indies, throw candlelight dinners on glaciers in Iceland. It’d be a nonstop culinary world tour and you could even make money doing it.
The other idea is to buy some gorgeous piece of property abroad and start a vineyard. You’ve always wanted your own vineyard. Imagine making award-winning wines and sharing your love of excellence with others. It would be a little piece of paradise. A sanctuary of tranquility and excellence.
If you start a culinary world tour, go to section 57.
If you buy a vineyard, go to section 61.
31
From section 15
You and Aidan decide to see the Titanic. It’s the experience of a lifetime! The journey lasts twelve days and costs forty thousand dollars each, but it’s deluxe all the way. You fly to Newfoundland first class and check into the Hotel Fairmont, a grand seaside hotel that overlooks St. John’s harbor, where the ship departs the next morning. That night you have dinner at the hotel with some of your shipmates: the Cassmans, the Steins, Dr. Pinkerton, Mr. Ed Peters, the Bellow sisters, and a jolly man who goes by Brewer—all fellow millionaires except for Ed, an electrical engineer who won the trip from a radio station in Ohio.
The next morning, you shop for last-minute supplies: Dramamine, Beemans spearmint gum, extra-strength Tylenol, first-class stamps, a green harmonica, and a shark-tooth necklace on a leather cord. Aidan gets a very expensive new pocketknife that can cut through titanium. Typical. Where does one even run across titanium? A space launch? Mid-afternoon you board the enormous research ship RV Kelvik, a Russian vessel licensed to research and explore the site of the Titanic. Right now they’re looking for two of James Cameron’s robotic camera bots that are still missing from his last film shoot. For the next two days while you’re at sea, you’ll enjoy sweeping views of the Atlantic, sleep in grand staterooms, eat gourmet meals, and meet the pilots, scientists, and researchers who’re responsible for keeping you alive.
You’re introduced to Captain Anatole Sagavitch, chief pilot of the “Pod,” or small submersible taking you over two miles down to the ocean floor. He pilots Alpha, and another equally dashing captain pilots its sister submersible, Omega. The Pods look like enormous orange helmets with glass faces. The faces are framed with a tangle of metal instruments, halogen lights, hydraulic thrusters, robotic arms with rotating jaws, GPS sonar guns, pan and tilt cameras, and backup emergency life-support systems. They’re serious pieces of machinery, able to withstand pressure up to twenty thousand feet. Seven feet of nickel steel separate passengers from the million pounds of water trying to get in.
During the safety drills on deck, you find the interior of Alpha to be surprisingly claustrophobic. You knew it would be small—it only takes six people at a time—but you didn’t expect the walls, covered in instruments, to be so completely close all around you. One wrong move and you’re afraid you might bump an oxygen ejection button or shut down some crucial navigational sensor. Captain Anatole assures you everything will be fine, and for two days you practice shimmying down the airlock manhole and wriggling over into your bucket seat without crashing a kneecap into any of the control panels. Aidan gives you a wink and says not to worry, he’ll be there watching out for your enormous clumsy knees.
Finally the morning of the descent arrives; the weather is overcast but calm and you get the go-ahead from the weather control room. Everyone puts on their heroic astronaut-inspired dive suits. They are one-piece white Kevlar jumpsuits with big metal buckles that are stamped front and back with professional-looking logos that say TITANIC PIONEERS! You hold Aidan’s hand and take your place in Alpha. Once all your safety harnesses are secured and the cross-checks completed, the cables and hoses are removed from the exteriors and a massive crane picks the Pods up one by one and sets them in the water. First Alpha, then Omega.
What’s strange about all this—the crew shouting, the crane hoisting, the splash in the water—is that you can’t hear any of it. It’s all completely silent. The Alpha is soundproof and it’s only after you descend a few hundred yards that the captain turns on the outside speakers, which let the sounds of the ocean rush in. You instinctively dig under your dive suit and tug up your shark-tooth necklace, as though it’s an underwater ID badge. The air seems a little stale in the Pod; is it stale? Did it smell that way in the drills? But then they wouldn’t have just fueled everything up; this is just what it’s supposed to smell like now … and is it a little hot maybe? No. Stop. You look over at Aidan and smile nervously. He gives you a little wink. Thank God. If the Pod gets stuck at the bottom of the ocean and you have to decide who to eat first, at least you have backup.
As the Alpha sinks down through the water and into the darkness, the inky abyss all around you makes you sit on your hands, clench your jaw, and physically will away a panic attack. While the captain is nattering on about depth ratios, winter tidal currents, and native species of coral, you’re calculating, without the benefit of any actual math, just how much pressure this black ocean must be pressing on the tiny glass air bubble you now find yourself in. Rapid-fire unwanted thoughts scream through your head.
Why would you pay to put yourself in imminent peril?
Of all the adventures available, why did you pick the one without oxygen?
When will this end?
Will this end?
Finally someone says, “There it is!” and sure enough, the powerful Pod halogen lights illuminate the fossilized bow of the Titanic. As you strain to look, the captain is reciting a litany of facts. He says before the Titanic went down it was eight hundred and eighty-two feet long, had four electric elevators, two libraries, and two barbershops, as well as fifteen thousand bottles of beer, forty tons of potatoes, and seven thousand heads of lettuce on board.
Why he’s telling you this, you have no idea. Are you supposed to look for fossilized potatoes rolling around the sea floor? Plus, it’s not too comforting to hear all these eerie facts concerning one of the greatest maritime disasters when you yourself are not only at sea, you are under the sea, at the bottom, having willingly completed 95 percent of your own drowning. You shouldn’t have thought that.
An alarm buzzer sounds, which sends the captain into frenzied action. He gets on the radio and starts barking orders. You have no idea what’s going on and the Pod takes a violent turn to the left, as though something smacked its face.
You know from safety drills the Pod has two hundred and fifty hours of life support on board, which roughly equates to three and a half days of oxygen per person. That alone should comfort you; three and a half days is a long time when you have a support ship as big as an oil tanker equipped with every kind of rescue apparatus known to man floating directly above you. Out of the port window you see Omega hovering. It’s come around the wreck and is whisking to your aid, although now Alpha is sinking faster than a nickel-plated anchor.
The interior lights of Alpha go out and the green emergency lights blink on. You hear a loud clanking sound as the sub hits the deck of the Titanic and everything loose is thrown forward, including Brewer, who’s already unbuckled his safety harness. This is beyond ironic. As far as you can gather from frantic Captain Anatole, Alpha has lost a thruster and can go right and left, but not up or down. The captain thrusts hard port side, briefly lifting the vessel, and tries to catch the current. If the Alpha is sideways, the horizontal thrusters might act as vertical thrusters.
At first it looks positive, the Pod lifts and everyone gasps, but a split second later there’s a thundering scraping sound as you hit an unseen foreign object. People are screaming, expecting to feel water rushing in, as the crack sounded so loud it must have split the sub in two, but there’s no such sensation and the sub seems to be sitting innocently on the deck of the Titanic, just as it had sat aboard the Kelvik. The captain shouts, “All right, we have a situation, but there’s no reason to—”
Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
His voice is drowned out by the shrieking of shearing metal as the deck you’re resting on wholly gives way. The Pod tumbles down into the rotten hull of the Titanic, crashing and crunching through honeycombed girders. When you finally come to rest, you are three floors below the deck, farther into the heart of the Titanic than any other expedition has gone. Despite being plunged into the guts, the Pod seems to be functioning. The interior lights come back on, you can still breathe, and the radio still seems to be connected to the outside world. The captain is yelling at someone on the mother ship and you actually catch a glimpse of Omega out a Titanic porthole. It’s circling the ship trying to find you.
This is insane. You are in a submarine sunk inside a ship.
This is not happening.
This is not happening. This is not happening.
The lights stutter out and green emergency lights blink back on.
This is happening.
Now pray. Ask God to save you. Swear you’ll do anything and everything if he gets you out of this. You’ll never buy anything impulsive or ridiculous again, you’ll give all your money to charity.
The captain tells you that everything is going to be all right. They’re devising a rescue plan on the surface and Omega will deposit its passengers on the Kelvik and return to stay below as long as possible. He says the Alpha is fully intact, all the systems and reserve systems are working. You’re going to have one hell of a story to tell your kids. (He probably shouldn’t have mentioned kids because right then everyone pictures their families and all the people back home who would be devastated by their death.) The captain reiterates everything is going to be fine. You’d really like to believe him, but his voice is shaking.
Your only comfort is the pressure of Aidan’s hand. It’s like your life-support line. You clutch at each other without pause and you decide if you ever get off this thing, you are getting goddamned married.
Six hours later the Omega, which has spotted you through a torn opening far on the Titanic’s starboard side and has loyally stayed there with its bright track beam on you, has to surface to resupply with oxygen. “If they have to resupply,” Dr. Pinkerton asks softly, “don’t we?” The captain clears his throat. “The reserve supply kicks in now,” he says. “We’re now on the emergency support system.” Someone starts weeping and none of you say anything. You’re all thinking the same thing—we have three and a half days to live.
Eighteen hours later you are in the dark. The dark of the dark. The Omega had to surface, bad weather is coming, and the captain gently explains you’re going to half reserve, to save energy. So now only two small green lights are on at the head of the sub, above the window. They look like two green eyes staring at you. The one thing you wish the captain would turn off is the outside stereo. You can hear strange faraway booming sounds and random clicking as fish communicating with each other whisk past in flashes of silver and white against the ink.
The Omega returns around nine in the morning, so it says on the clock; all you know is you’re surrounded by perpetual night. Your inner circadian system starts to become disoriented—it should be light by now but it isn’t. Still, you feel better when the captain turns on the entire emergency light system again; it seems practically bright now. Imagine being in a pitch-dark room for twelve hours and then someone turns on a nightlight. It’s blinding.
When the Omega arrived you had just finished a breakfast of bottled water and PowerBars, part of the emergency stash on board. You’re impressed by all this preparedness; it’s as if they expected it to happen, which also makes you sick with anger. They even have a “waste container,” a soft plastic bladder with a biohazard symbol on it and an elongated mouth. This, combined with the privacy of a thin blanket drawn over your lap, is your bathroom. Luckily, fear or adrenaline or perhaps not eating much for twenty-four hours prevents anyone from needing to expel anything but liquid.
The Omega brings news of the new plan, which is that the Kelvik has sent for dive rescue crews and deep-sea welders who can hopefully cut you out of your metal coffin. The Omega’s new position, outside the starboard windows, which you can see through fallen beams, illuminates a new section of your craft and you can see for the first time some of the barnacle-encrusted fixtures around you. Judging by the chair-shaped chunks of coral and wall lamps (one is shiny silver, the others are completely black and covered in mollusks, you have no idea why; it is beyond your somewhat limited knowledge of underwater mineral reactions), it looks as though you have landed in a ballroom. A series of smooth black squares with ornate ridges tumbled into a heap in the corner looks like mirrors and the banquet tables; they are so covered with sea life they now look like coral tables.
The Omega uses its robotic arm to drop off a steel box, supposedly loaded with food and supplies, but the Alpha’s robotic arm can’t reach it, leaving everyone on board just staring at the unrecovered box, which sits there in the gloom. At about ten p.m. the captain says an industrial sub is coming, an underwater vessel specializing in metal cutting, but at midnight it comes across the radio that the surface water is too rough to attempt a dive.
