The Boat by Nam Le

– the place, recently renovated, seems a lot cheerier than I remember. An odious young man is attending me. He's got so much gel in his slicked hair it pulls his face back tight. Traversing the harried catwalk of the front room I noticed him eyeballing my outfit; I'm at one of the most overpriced joints in town and still this kid-waiter makes me feel overdressed.
    For starters, I order the crab salad with the grapefruit gelée, the spiced squab pastrami and the sea-urchin panna cotta. Then I remember Apelman's advice. The Leech might take offense if I don't wait – Brits being sensitive about things like that. How sensitive are they, though, to punctuality? I bark at the waiter and cancel the order. He smiles as though I've just made his day. For a second I'm worried his face might crack.
    Half an hour later, I tell him to check the restaurant, both rooms.
    "Under what name?"
    "Kozlov," I tell him. Her mother's maiden name. When he comes back I tell him, "Or Sharps. Jason Sharps."
    I hear a rowdy burst of laughter from the main room. When Gel-head trots in again, I tell him I've changed my mind. I'll order a bottle of red wine. I'm in a wine room, for God's sake! As I drink the room shrinks around me. It feels damp now, and smells – it smells like the inside of a janitor's closet. It smells of sickness, of dripping fluids, of saturated tissues. Forty minutes late. Fifty.
    My body feels alien to me. I don't know it at all, I want nothing to do with it, I disown it. There's something inside me and it's dying – not me. So this is how it feels. Betrayed by your own body. I'd thought she lived most of her life on the surface of her skin but she'd found a way to get beneath, my Olivia. She'd discovered the flesh was hollow. I flew into a jealous rage. She left me. I begged her to come back. Who picks up a smack habit in their thirties? I thought. After fifteen, sixteen years together- wanting for nothing. Well, wanting for something, obviously. She blamed her body and so did I. She quit time and time again and then, at last, the time came when she didn't need to quit anymore.
    More than an hour late. I signal for a second bottle. I know Gel-head's smirking behind his mask. I want to smash it in. I've been getting like this lately: irate at people I don't know.
    "Would you like to reorder any appetizers, sir?"
    No, he's a good kid. Just doing his job. I shake my head, lean over to squeeze his arm – give him some man-to-man contact – but he skips back, bumping against the wire mesh screen of a bookcase-like cabinet. The dust-rimmed clinking of a hundred bottles fills the room. He freezes, gapes at me – untrained to deal with the moment – then scuttles out.
    Don't get me wrong, I like kids – Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can't throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can't help but hate how they look at me, how they don't look at me, I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they're chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them – how they're right-and how everywhere this cult of youth, this pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty-duped, drugged, damaged, pixelated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.
    I'm almost done with my second bottle. All this alcohol will do wonders for my piles. Ninety minutes. Gel-head comes back in and delightedly hands me a cordless phone.
    "Henry?"
    As with her call last week, I feel as though I've stumbled upon the middle of something. Her voice is slow, sleepy, warm with music. Nothing like her mother's. I'm surprised, anew, by its power over me.
    "We're really sorry. We've been trying you at home all