Taft 2012 (13 page)

“Kowalczyk. Hungry man.”

A laugh bubbled up on Castro’s unshaven face. “Hungry! I like hungry. I’ll warn you right now, though: here at Atomizer, we’re not concerned with anything so pedestrian as filling stomachs.”

“So it’s all about taste over substance?” Kowalczyk said, grinning.

“Taste? Why, that’s even more boring.” He pointed toward a line of nearby sous-chefs, each in some stage of unpacking, kneading, slicing, or microwaving a particular packaged food product. “Atomizer isn’t about flavor or sustenance. We’re all about the
process
.”

Castro snapped his fingers and waved at a cook from the line. “Phillip! Bring us over an order of the, oh, the Deconstructed Nacho Roe.”

Phillip nodded and removed a bowl from the nearest microwave, added a few shots of some powdered substance, then dumped it all into a machine set up on a wheeled cart. With the cord trailing behind, he pushed the cart over to their table. When he pressed a button on the side of the machine, it started whirring and purring like a dervish.

“What you see here,” said Castro, patting the vibrating cart, “is a centrifuge.” A moment later Phillip switched off the contraption and spooned a few hills of miniscule, iridescent yellow globules onto the plates in front of them. “We take your average, off-the-shelf cheese sauce, add a secret recipe of eleven binding agents, fillers, flavor enhancers, and emulsifiers, and … 
voilà
! Caviar-shaped nacho cheese!” He picked up a piece of triangular, tortilla-shaped bacon from a platter Phillip had supplied and dug into the sticky pearls of goo.

Taft reached for the bacon, then stopped himself. “And where does the cheese sauce come from? Is it made from scratch?”

“
Scratch
?” Castro spat the word. “Mr. President, please! Nothing at Atomizer is made from scratch. That’s our whole philosophy and branding strategy! With all due respect, old buddy, we’re living in the twenty-first century. ‘From scratch’ is a quaint and outmoded notion. Atomizer is all about engineering the engineered, manipulating the manipulated.
Processing the processed
.”

Kowalczyk sat with his arms crossed. “Any chance I could get a burger?”

Castro snapped his fingers again. “A burger! Of course. Phillip?”

Half a minute later, a sandwich arrived and was placed before Kowalczyk. “This is the world-famous Atomizer, the very burger our restaurant is named after. Please, enjoy.”

Kowalczyk stared at his plate. Sitting there, steaming and sweating, was some object that roughly resembled a hamburger. He picked up his fork and lifted one end of what might have been the top bun. Instead of a patty of meat, the bottom bun held a mess of wet confetti that stank of death and ketchup.

“Allow me to explain,” said Castro. “We don’t use anything as conventional as ground beef in our Atomizer. What you see before you is a chemically formulated, aerated amalgam of beef, cheese, and toppings. Would you like a little more?” Before waiting for an answer, he turned to Phillip and said, “Let’s make this a Double Atomizer for Mr. Kowalczyk here!”

Phillip left and hurried back with an unlabeled aerosol can. He lifted the top bun of Kowalczyk’s burger, shook the can, aimed it, and pressed the nozzle. Out flew a slurry of burger-matter that landed on the bun like some brownish, curdled, flesh-scented snow.

Kowalczyk coughed. “Well, ah, that’s something else, I’ll give you that. And I’d love to try it. But, you know, I’m a vegetarian.”

“Since when are you—” Taft started to protest, but Kowalczyk kicked him into silence under the table.

Castro winked at him. “There’s the beauty of it: the meat and cheese we use is so processed, before and after we receive it here in the kitchen, that the FDA has qualified our food as legally vegan! Granted, the government has some pretty loose definitions of words like
vegan
,
organic
, and
natural
. And hopefully it’ll stay that way, assuming Mr. Fulsom has his way.”

“Fulsom?” Taft’s stomach lurched at the name. “The TurkEase manufacturer?”

“Yes! The one and the same. We have an exclusive contract with Gus Fulsom. In fact, he’s one of the silent partners here at Atomizer. Everything on our menu is made from Fulsom-brand products. It’s funny you should mention TurkEase. That’s what I was mixing up when you came in. The Atomizer buns are made of it—not wheat, but turkey byproducts!”

Taft and Kowalczyk traded pained glances, memories of their disastrous TurkEase Thanksgiving swimming up into the backs of their throats.

“See,” Castro went on, munching on Kowalcyzk’s untouched Atomizer, “Fulsom supplies the most processed foods we can get a hold of, and at a significant discount. In return, we help counter some of the stigma against processed food in general—and what better way than by reimagining it as haute cuisine! In essence, we’re doing something very noble here. And do you know what that is?”

Taft gulped. “Keeping this stuff off the streets?”

“No, Mr. President,” he said, his mouth full and his eyes narrow. “We’re extracting purity. Purity from corruption.”

“Purity from corruption? Pardon me for laughing, but I know a good many politicians who have said, in essence, the same thing. And they were all snakes.”

“Well, I can assure you, Mr. President, that Gus Fulsom is no snake. In fact, you should meet him someday. Who knows? You two might even have more in common than you realize.” Castro let his words hang in the air before calling over Phillip one last time. “Box up a couple more Atomizers for Mr. Taft and his friend! And throw in a couple plates of Nacho Roe and Salmon S’mores.”

Castro rose from his seat and jabbed his thumb toward the other end of the kitchen. “In any case, I have to get back to work.
Pardon me for hijacking you two, but we haven’t had a president eat here in, oh, at least three weeks. Let alone one of such … moral appetite.”

With that, Castro left them. Taft and Kowalczyk looked at each other, glanced at Phillip stuffing two enormous plastic bags full of Atomizer fare, and bolted toward the door.

T
he bones of Chicago were intact and recognizable as Taft wandered with Kowalczyk past renovated storefronts and sporadic pockets of aging nightlife. But new flesh had grown up around it: more concrete, more steel, more glass. Taft patted his belly, which was now grumbling. Kowalczyk heard it. “Maybe we should’ve just stuck with the hot dogs, huh?” Kowalczyk said.

“Way ahead of you, my good sir.” Up ahead, a neon sign in the shape of a bun-clad wiener blinked yellow and red in the window of a small establishment tucked between a tobacco shop and some sort of nightclub. “Despite the lateness of the hour, it appears our salvation is at hand.”

Kowalczyk groaned but matched Taft’s quickening pace. “I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be looking for a hot dog to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.”

The first thing that hit Taft when he opened the door to Herbert’s Dogs wasn’t the smell of frankfurters. It was the smell of something burning.

“Hey, guys, sorry. I was just, uh, doing inventory.” A young
man, wire thin with unkempt black hair and bulging eyes, came out from the back room and took his place behind the counter. “Welcome to Herb’s. What can I do you for?”

Taft chuckled. “Inventory, indeed. Are you Herbert?”

The man grinned. The tang of smoke seemed to emanate from him. “Um, there isn’t any Herbert. I’m Rob. First time here?”

“You might say that.” Taft peered up at the grimy, yellowed plastic of the backlit menu that hung above Rob’s head. “What’s your specialty, sir?”

The young man stepped out from behind the cash register and bade them to sit down at one of the dingy-clothed tables. He was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with some monstrous horned skull and logo that read M
OTÖRHEAD
. “You just leave that to me. On a scale of one to ten, how hungry are you?”

Taft spread his arms. “Need you ask?”

He nodded appreciatively and then turned to Kowalczyk. “You?” Kowalczyk wrinkled his nose and held up two fingers. Rob shrugged. “Suit yourself. You guys just sit tight. A dozen Bombers and two buckets of nacho fries, coming up.”

Before Taft or Kowalczyk could protest or even ask what a Bomber was, Rob disappeared into the kitchen, leaving a lingering whiff of illicit smoke.

“Well, I guess we’d better just sit back and enjoy the ride.” Kowalczyk swept a tangle of discarded straw wrappers from a grimy booth and slung himself into it. “I could eat a horse at this point—assuming it wasn’t packaged in a Fulsom Beef Jerky wrapper.”

Taft joined him. He was too exhausted to bother complaining about the absurdly small space between table and seat. He leaned over as best he could. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this Rob fellow was inebriated.”

Kowalczyk grunted. “Well, definitely under the influence. He’s
high
, Bill.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Although what kind of hooch he’s high on, I am entirely at a loss.”

Kowalczyk chuckled. “Not booze. Pot.”

“A pot of what?”

“Bill, the guy’s been smoking pot. Can’t you smell it? Pot. Weed. Reefer. Marijuana.”

“Ah, yes. That would explain it then.” Bill heard an eruption of sizzling come from the back of the eatery. It smelled and sounded like a heart being thrown on Satan’s own brazier.

“Doesn’t that, I don’t know, freak you out or something?”

“Why would it? It’s far from the most reputable indulgence, I’ll admit. Not that I’ve ever tried it myself. Have you?”

“Well, not in a long time. They give you so many piss tests in the Secret Service, you might as well hook up a catheter that drains straight into the head office. But back up a second—you’re not uptight about pot? I just figured that, you know, being president and all, not to mention that you’re, you know …”

“The oldest man on earth?”

“Yeah, right, that. I’m embarrassed that my history is so rusty, but wasn’t marijuana totally illegal in your time?”