“Dinner! Dinner!” cried the chorus line of waiters, simultaneously thrusting their dishes in my direction.

My eyes ran down the line of red, white and blue plates, all heaped with some gray-green, lumpy and otherwise indistinguishable mass. They all looked the same, but I nodded at one of the waiters to bring over his dish. He had a camera slung over his neck, a notepad in one hand, and fingers smudged by newsprint. Smiling, he put the plate down in front of me.

“What’s in this?” I asked, swirling my fork in the mixture. There were jagged pieces of dark metal into the glop. The consistency of the dish seemed gritty.

“Some shrapnel, some desert sand. A hint of WMD. You may not see it, but the chef guarantees it’s in there.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s there,” chimed the other waiters, nodding their heads.

I stared at them for a moment, and then peered at my dish. I wrinkled my nose and lifted a forkful of the fodder to my mouth. Before I tasted it, I said, “What’s this like?”

“It’s sweet, sour, salty, bitter, delicious, disgusting—“

“How can it be all those things at the same time? It’s one thing or another thing, isn’t it? It’s one thing and not the rest,” I answered.

All the waiters shrugged. I grimaced, squinted my eyes shut and put the fork in my mouth. How could I describe what it tasted like? What words could I use that the waiters hadn’t already used? Maybe the one waiter’s description was right—but what if I only thought that it was correct because I had heard it beforehand? I couldn’t look at this dish objectively. The chef and the waiter had left their mark, their opinion of the dish, before I had even been served. Their ideas influenced how the dish was presented to me, and their words influenced my perceptions of its taste.

“I don’t think I want it,” I said to my waiter. “I’m just not hungry for it. Why is this—stuff being made in the first place?”

Hanging his head, the waiter removed the dish from the table and rejoined the line of other servers. The other waiters, one by one, stepped up to offer their dishes, but I turned them all down. They eyed me suspiciously, murmuring amongst themselves. Someone clucked their tongue, and the other waiters followed that example. Before the entire line turned around and filed back into the kitchen, they wagged their fingers at me.

They were clever. At first I thought I had been the one with power, the power to choose. But there was nothing to choose. Everyone was carrying the same thing upon red, white and blue plates. Even if I refused, I knew the—mess was still being made in the kitchen. And now they, the waiters and the chef, made me feel guilty for refusing, for voicing my dislike. I was a silly child. I didn’t—I couldn’t—appreciate the labor that was going into my food. They chastised me, and by doing so, they were flaunting the fact that they were the ones with control, not I. But maybe they were not so powerful after all, because I recognized that they were trying to control my thoughts and I was resisting.

The only thing I seemed to be sure of was that I didn’t seem to know anything for certain. Everything was jumbled up. Even the dish itself was a mixture of things, some things that I could identify, other things that I couldn’t, and some things whose presence I wasn’t even sure of. Everything seemed to be a struggle. A struggle to find out information—what exactly was I being fed? A struggle for power, between me, the restaurant patron and the waiters and the chef.

The fork, which they hadn’t taken away, still had some gray stuff clinging to its tines. I picked it up, and rotated it in my hands. I wasn’t hungry for this mess they were feeding me. Why did someone always have to be hungry? The waiters were hungry to serve something—anything—to me, to other people. As for the chef, I didn’t know what his craving was. It’d be all too easy to assume that he was hungry for the stuff that he was cooking up, but maybe he didn’t want it. Maybe he really wanted to make something else but felt he had to cook whatever he was serving now, in order to get to the object of his lust. Was it even possible for humanity not to be hungry?

There were too many questions, too many “maybe”s. The clashing of pots and pans from the kitchen made me look at the clock. It had been the five o’ clock crew that had visited me, and now the six o’clock crew was preparing to come out, and eager to serve. Then there would be the seven o’clock waiters, then a lull, followed by another chorus line at ten, then at eleven.

“I don’t know,” I said out loud.

I thought I heard an echo, but I couldn’t even be sure of that.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws