The Insides Read Free

presumes, but now it terminates at both ends in crudely masoned brick walls. Beneath her feet, ovoid grates mark out eight-foot intervals on the floor; through them she can hear the distant sound of water, running through some vast dank sequence of caverns beneath Manhattan. Above her are the hooks.
    The room—windowless, subterranean—stays cool all year, even now, in the long, sweltering stretches of summer. Part of the reason Jon and Angel even set up in this building in the first place, as the lore goes, was because they saw this room as a quick-and-dirty solution to the problem of where to put all the meat they were going to need in order to makethis venture work. Install some hooks on a track in a vast cool space and you got a start.
    She lifts the goat. She can do this a hundred times a day: she’s six feet tall and has her father’s Germanic-peasant arms. She also has her mother’s welter of wild curls. In a perfect world these would be minor entries in a long list of gifts she’d received from her parents: in this world, though, they’re the two best things she got.
    She returns to the dumbwaiter, where there are two more goats for her. This repeats until all six goats are on hooks, and then she heads back upstairs to start working on the pigs.
    Storing meat in a cool basement is strictly short-term. If it’s down there for more than four hours it starts to attract raised eyebrows from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and if you run a restaurant called Carnage which uses “meat reenvisioned” as its high concept, you’d better be reliably getting DHMH to give you sheets of paper with a giant letter
A
on them or you’re pretty much fucked. So the next part of her job is to take whatever heap of meat is on hand and reduce it down to manageable pieces, ideally pieces that demonstrate some level of finesse, pieces the chefs won’t bring back to you and wave in your face while calling you a talentless abortionist.
    She fishes her battered, seven-year-old iPod out of her apron pocket and slams it into the SoundDock that she keeps on the highest shelf in the prep area (Guychardson, who’s about five foot four, can’t meddle with it up there unless he gets a stool). She punches play on the work playlist, which kicks off with Swans. “Raping a Slave.” As the kitchen fillswith thudding, dirgelike percussion, she pulls her knife kit out from under her station and approaches the prep table, where Guychardson has arranged four sides of pork.
    Together, they butcher.
    She saws her side into thirds, grunts as she works the saw through the aitchbone. Takes the middle section and separates it: chops, ribs. Saws the chops from the backbone, then switches from saw to trimmer as the music switches from no-wave pummel to annihilatory black metal shredding. This mix is eight hours of the kind of music that keeps you from thinking about yourself too hard, which is why she likes it. Guychardson whistles a jaunty melody over the top of it, possibly to annoy her; when she looks up he is pretending to play a set of ribs like a xylophone. He looks like something out of a macabre old-time cartoon. She smirks, in spite of herself, and goes back to finishing the chops; she slaps them down on a twelve-inch platter and racks it in the end-loading cart. She removes some belly fat and plops it into a steel bucket: Angel will turn it into something tasty later.
    She gets the loin out and drops it on another platter, racks it, moves to working on separating the bacon from the ribs. She spares a glance at Guychardson’s work at the other end of the prep table, notes that he’s begun on the rear third of his side, cutting out the hams. That’s her least favorite task to perform on any pig; it takes time, and breaks up the flow of the work. She envies Guychardson his pace. He’s faster than she is. At that part anyway.
    They only work together two days a week, Friday and Saturday, prepping for the really busy nights. The