The Chili of the Tzadik Nistar

Evan Hannon

Here is old Leonard Tauser, standing in his kitchen in the middle of a hot summer’s evening, air sticky with the promise of a future thunderstorm. He rents a townhouse outside of Dallas, two-bedroom, one-bathroom, covered garage, a dying lawn, a pool with a frayed brown cover held fast by a few strands of fraying rope and electrical tape. Watch as he opens the refrigerator, checks the kitchen cabinets, humming the theme to The Lone Ranger to ward off ill thoughts. Out come white onions in a blue mesh bag, chili peppers in a thin plastic bag, fresh tomatoes and jalapeno and kidney beans pressure cooked the night before, Ziploc bags full of spice all the colors of the earth, paprika and pepper and cumin and Himalayan salt that cost him twice what his budget allows. He’s chosen lamb as his meat, raised on a farm in Texas Hill Country, slaughtered and processed, packaged and shipped to the butcher’s shop in downtown Plano where Leonard purchased two pounds of its ground meat, and which sit now on butcher’s paper like some misshapen organ.

Leonard’s a hefty man, and prefers the wide, soft fabric of Hawaiian shirts, his body a vista of island life painted in pink and green. When he walks you can hear him breathing heavily through his nose, the hairs of his mustache quivering. Red-faced, and happy, happy with himself and with everyone else, ready to greet the entire world with a smile; but in Texas’ hundred-degree summers, Leonard stays inside as much as possible. To keep himself busy, he watches Formula One and reads Bronze Age literature, Leonard himself an amateur translator of ancient Egyptian and Akkadian. Nothing serious, just for fun. The joy, he tells people, is in finding the place where those ancient minds and your own intersect, where, despite the thousands of years of difference, you find that you are brothers and sisters and can understand each other.

But these interests sit in the shadow of Leonard’s great passion. The mantle of his fireplace is lined with trophies and accolades: the Golden Burger, King of Texas BBQ, and champion of Dallas’ Thanksgiving Cooking Triathlon (turkey, potatoes, and pie) three years running. Food is more than a hobby or a career for Leonard, it is the fulcrum around which his soul turns.

Only two activities pry Leonard out of his house in the summer: to hunt for fresh ingredients (his opinion on what constitutes a proper carrot could fill a whole evening), and to volunteer at Revolution Gospel Center, a homeless shelter in downtown Dallas. It’s as beleaguered as those who frequent it, fixtures flickering, scarred walls, the stairwell painted by volunteers year over year. Leonard was there just the other day, filling Styrofoam bowls with a chicken soup of his own design, light in texture but rich in flavor and calories. And who had been there but the boy Elijah, jittery, swaying in and out of the line, unable to stand still, dropping to his knees at times to run his fingers across the checkered linoleum floor, following the border between black and white squares.

Another volunteer had pointed Elijah out to Leonard months earlier and told him the full story, all the sordid details, as if the boy’s trauma were a bit of gossip. There they were, the messed-up boy and his wretched mother, sitting at a table together; boy babbling about the toy car he ran across the table, mother smoking a cigarette as she ate. Mother of two (Elijah three years older than his half-brother) and a heroin addict, a skinny woman with unkempt and oily hair, a skull and crossbones tattooed on her arm, snake bite piercings in her bottom lip. The volunteer had told Leonard about how mom brought men home with her, how she would forget where she was for minutes at a time. And the volunteer told Leonard what Elijah had done.

Leonard stands in the kitchen of his rental in the middle of a hot summer’s evening and recites the facts of Elijah’s history. But here, he stops, feeling nauseous, and skips that painful part.

The state separated the family. Elijah’s brother was taken by his paternal grandparents. Elijah’s father was unknown, and the boy was placed into a foster home, his mother given weekly supervised visits. No visits with his brother, never again.

What Leonard first noticed about Elijah was that his eyes were asymmetrical. The left pupil was just a pinprick, the blue of his iris almost eclipsing the eye. The right was opposite, almost pure black, pupil swollen like a full moon. And the way the boy was always moving, always falling or running or swaying back and forth where he stood, it seemed as if the uneven nature of his eyes had left him perpetually off balance, his world some tilted inversion of the real.

Two weeks after learning the boy’s history, Leonard saw him and his mother again in the food line. When Elijah came to the head of the line, the boy looked up at Leonard, tilted his head to the side and told Leonard he looked like Santa Claus. Then he puffed out his cheeks and stretched out his arms.

“I can’t be Santa, I don’t have a beard,” Leonard had told the boy, smiling.

Elijah blinked his mismatched eyes. “You look like Santa Claus,” he’d said again. And laughed, folding in half, almost tumbling to the ground until his mother, impatient, took his bowl and held it out for Leonard to fill, glaring.

There is Leonard’s treasured cast iron pot, sitting on the propane burner, flame at the lowest intensity, keeping the olive oil hot. One steel knife, a generic brand but sharp; off come the heads and bottoms of the peppers, laying them out in a long strip. Out come the white seeds, knife’s edge scraping out the insides. Onions peeled, ends chopped off, their acid song touching the corners of his eyes. He juliennes all the vegetables and then dices them down further, reducing them to tiny cubes. Leonard is haunted by a headache today, and for a moment it flares up, a pain above his left eye, as sharp as if he’d plunged his knife into his own temple. But the pain quickly passes, and his cooking continues.

His father had been a terse man, uncomfortable expressing himself through words and uncomfortable with his emotional son. Once, at an ice cream parlor, Leonard had seen another little boy, a boy neither he nor his father knew, drop his rocky-road cone. The boy had started to cry. And then Leonard had started to cry, too. Great sympathetic tears in his eyes dribbling down his cheeks and he’d gone to the boy and handed him his own ice cream cone, unable to speak through his great heaving sobs. Embarrassed, Leonard’s father hurried him out of the shop.

“Why’d you do that?” he’d asked his son, somewhere between anger and pride.

“He was sad,” said Leonard.

“That doesn’t mean you have to be sad. It was a nice thing you did. But you don’t need to go crying about it.”

“Why’s that bad?” the eight-year-old asked, and Leonard’s father pursed his lips.

“It’s not your job to go crying for other people,” he said. “If you want to help, help. But don’t go picking up their baggage. Because when you pick it up, it becomes yours.”

But his father had been wrong. Leonard had known it as a child and has known it his whole life. Perhaps Leonard’s brain possesses unique pathways, ridges and grooves unique to him, but he does not keep baggage. When he laughs with someone, when he cries for them, when he feels what they feel it is of the moment, and it passes through him without resistance. He shares the moment and when the moment passes, he moves on. He couldn’t keep their baggage if he tried, he just doesn’t know how.

Among the ingredients is Leonard’s cookbook, a great three-ring binder, each recipe handwritten, laminated, and stored for reference. The pages of Leonard’s cookbook are almost unrecognizable as recipes; they contain no ordered list, no temperatures or portion sizes. Iconography frames the borders of each page, styled after the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks. Constellations, ley lines, ancient patterns that come to Leonard as sudden as the summer rain comes now, ringing against his roof as promised. He’s never been able to shake the feeling that the pictures mean something more than he knows. He’d planned to write a normal cookbook, but when he began, he found himself uncomfortable with the idea of locking the joy of a dish behind mechanical instructions. And so instead he wrote down the ephemeral elements, the philosophy that transformed his food from objects of necessity into prayer.

An excerpt from his chili recipe:

There are many regional variations, and much ink has been spilled defining what separates the Texan Chili from an Oklahoman chili or a Mexican chili and every other subspecies in between. In this author’s opinion, however, these regional variations, while anthropologically interesting, miss the chili for the beans (or lack thereof). The soul of modern chili is unity, the pairing of ingredients both minor and major into something greater and yet equal. The savvy chef should not confuse this egalitarianism with numerical purity… Chili should be eaten before decisions are made, when unsure of where you are in life, when you’re convinced you’ve left the oven on, after the loss of a loved one, when you feel like something terrible may happen…

And so on.

See how the flames grow? Leonard brings the oil to a spluttering simmer. In go the diced vegetable cubes, sizzling as they hit the olive oil. He waits, listens as the vegetables cook, the Maillard reaction, a ritual of flame. A spell of dizziness comes upon him; dehydration, no doubt, and he chides himself for neglecting his water. He closes his eyes for a moment, steadies himself, then waves his hand above the pot as if blessing it, before opening his eyes and feeling a little silly.

“So dramatic,” he says. He looks back, consults his cookbook, takes a deep, rumbling breath that hits the back of his chubby throat in a gurgle. He closes his eyes, counts his breaths. In, out. In, out. He chose silver bullets, hi-yo, hi-yo, the sign of his name, hi-yo, hi-yo, a mask to disguise him, a great silver stallion, and thus began his fame.

But his ill thoughts do not disburse.

Elijah molested his brother without malice. Alone in an apartment with mold growing beneath the wallpaper, with a perpetually deadbolted door and the shouts of other tenants coming through the walls, Elijah and his brother saw videos of men and women doing things, saw their mother doing things with men. And being children, they’d imitated what they saw with one another.

The vegetables are beginning to burn. He stirs them, frowns, and reaches across the kitchen for his spice packets, and throws them in. He does not usually burn the food. Leonard’s dishes are never identical, indeed, the fact that each burger or stroganoff is its own separate creation is a great joy. But Leonard has standards, and he focuses himself, wrestles his mind back to the present, to the chili. He has made many chilis, but this chili is special, it must be perfect.

After that first meeting, Leonard had made it a point to align his schedule with Elijah’s, to talk to the boy whenever he and his mother appeared in line. On those days, he brought pumpernickel, freshly baked; cured pork belly wrapped in fresh sourdough buns; spring rolls made from the lettuce at the farmer’s market. And over the weeks, then months, things seemed to improve for the boy. Mom sought treatment, held down employment, earned longer visitations. And with this, Elijah’s eyes began to change, to find balance and mirror each other. It was something beautiful to Leonard, the little boy who still called him Santa Claus, him and his healing eyes. And then the state granted Mom custody of the boy again. The two stopped coming to the shelter.

Leonard stands in the kitchen of his rental in the middle of a hot summer’s evening and picks up the fat lamb meat, holds it in his hand.

“Thank you for your life,” he says.

The meat hits the bottom of the pan with a hefty thunk. He lets it cook, then leans over and gives a tentative sniff. The odor is… what is it, Leonard? Salty, fat, tempting, but not quite right. He frowns again, stirs, and adds more spice.

And then yesterday. Elijah in line, fidgeting. His mother nowhere to be seen, nowhere in the building, just the boy, falling in and out of a line of disheveled adults who watched him without comment. And when he reached the front of the line, Leonard saw his eyes: one eye black, one eye blue, their difference more pronounced than ever, as if their color were intentionally segregated. Leonard had asked him where his mom was, and the boy had looked up at him, at Santa Claus, and hadn’t answered.

Leonard lets out a stifled cry. He feels tears come to his eyes and turns his face away from the pot. Crying into the chili will ruin it. Crying is not part of the recipe, it will bring sorrow into the prayer, it will upset the delicate equality of taste, unsettle it, like two childish, segregated eyes. And even as one so accustomed to crying, of feeling loss and hopelessness, this time it is different. It is not the sorrow of a moment, but of a lifetime gone and yet to come. He’d hoped that his food in its own small way had helped the boy and his mother, had bestowed some infinitesimally small piece of care upon them. Perhaps it had. But he also knows his cooking alone was insufficient. And he knows there are a million Elijahs,, children suffering and alone, children unbalanced with eyes as different as the sun and moon and who were preyed on, their lives ripped apart like infant rabbits before a murder of crows.

The chili is going all wrong. The meat and vegetables burning, gray smoke rising out of the pot and Leonard adds the tomato sauce, turns down the heat. He must save the chili. His breath comes faster, snorts through the nose as he operates, belly swinging beneath his Hawaiian shirt as he stirs, as he twists. He picks up his cookbook, holds it up above the pot and reads the recipe aloud, his liturgy, reminds himself of the spiritual necessity of cooking, of unity, of chili.

Leonard stands in the kitchen of his rental in the middle of a hot summer’s evening and tries to fix his chili as the subdural hematoma builds in his brain, almost ready to bloom. And as the blood begins to dam, for the first time in his life, Leonard fears the world. He can only do what he can do, he tells himself. The world is the world, and he will do what he can until he can do no more. He cannot lift the Elijahs of the world up, he cannot lift Elijah himself up or his mother, but he can serve them, can feed them, can offer them a beautiful bowl of food and that is itself a gift, the gift of salt and fat and blended spices, a gift he can give and will give, by God. He hasn’t ruined the chili; he will not allow that. He will force it back, force it to become beautiful. Leonard cannot find his breath, opens his mouth, and tries to swallow great ragged gulps of air. He will bring it tomorrow, serve it to those who come for his food, what little he can give, and he will serve them and feed them and when Elijah stands in line he will offer the boy his chili, the boy with his sun and moon eyes, and he will eat it and when he is finished Leonard hopes the boy will call him Santa Claus again and will laugh again. The boy with the sun and moon eyes will laugh again.

Leonard drops his cookbook, and it falls into the pot of chili. His eyes roll back. He falls backwards, head smashing against the kitchen island before his limp body lands on the floor. Less than a minute later, he dies. His cookbook sinks into the chili, plastic beginning to warp and curl in the heat, the pages running red with tomato juice and paprika.

A Tzadik Nistar dies. A load-bearing column of existence disappears and so existence begins to crumble.

It starts in Leonard’s kitchen, in his beloved stew pot, with the matter of his melting cookbook. Ten minutes after his death, physics stops. The attraction between neutron and proton ceases, the quarks that govern their behavior lapse into apathy, no longer interested in their dance and the sinkhole of the universe begins. The borders between atoms disappear and now there is only an expanding anti-border, the end of borders.

Leonard’s house disappears. His neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhood, the entire city of Plano. Outside his mother’s cement apartment complex in downtown Dallas, Elijah kneels on the sidewalk and watches the anti-border press its way through the city. Then he and his apartment disappear, too. There isn’t time for catastrophe, for destruction or fear or disaster or rapture. Even as the mantle and core of the planet vanish, those last people on what remains of the planet go about their day. They sleep or work through the night until they are gone, and then there is nothing left of the planet but a crumb of the Indian ocean, a spec of loose water molecules and sea life and then that too is gone.

Time goes by and the anti-border continues. Our solar system disappears, then the Milky Way. Time goes by and the universe is gone, and then time is gone, too. God turns out the lights and disappears.

And then we try again.

We will skip the preamble, the billions of years, the expansion of matter and heat. Leonard stands in the kitchen of his rental in the middle of a hot summer’s evening. Outside the temperature and humidity build, almost ready for rain. It’s Thursday night—chili night. But this time, there are no awards for cooking on Leonard’s mantelpiece. Every Thursday is chili night because chili is easy; throw the ingredients into the pot, cook it, and serve it up. Simple, efficient. The beef is a frozen square dropped unceremoniously into the pot paired with canned beans and canned tomatoes and onions roughly and unevenly chopped with a dull knife.

Leonard is a gaunt man, ribs visible through his skin. White stubble grows across his high cheeks and his eyes are gray. His temperament is mercurial. He slips through moods with the ease of rolling oil, angry, amused, annoyed, all in the space of a minute. He stands before the pot of chili as it bubbles, singing “War Pigs” off-key and does not think about his cooking. Beneath his shirt, Leonard’s back is a mess of scars. His father was a vicious man full of fear and exercised that fear on his son with a belt. Leonard ran away at sixteen. For three weeks, he hid in a wing of his high school undergoing renovations, and when he was discovered, the foster care system swallowed him. He escaped physical violence, but the system was full of its own miseries. He harbors a childhood of grudges, he distrusts authority. But he is still Leonard.

In the spare bedroom of Leonard’s two-bedroom, one-bathroom duplex lives Elijah. Removed from his mother’s care again, Elijah was put into a foster home, into Leonard’s home. In his room decorated with movie posters he and Leonard bought at Value World (The Fast and the Furious, Jurassic World), Elijah sulks. When Leonard had arrived to pick Elijah up from school earlier, the boy had decided he wanted to play tag and had run out onto the road and into oncoming traffic, a red Mitsubishi nearly flattening him. When Leonard caught the boy, he dragged him by the arm back to his truck, thrown him in, and given him a proper tongue lashing.

“You need to listen,” Leonard said. “You almost killed yourself, kid. You can’t just go doing whatever you want. You need to listen to me and do what I say.”

Elijah’s been in a sour mood since. He fidgets on his bed and brings his heels sharply down against the bedframe again and again, looking out his window at the burr oak outside. His eyes are just as mismatched as last time.

A knock at Elijah’s door. “Foods about ready, kid,” says Leonard through the door.

“I don’t want it,” says Elijah.

“Okay, but I’m not going to save you any,” says Leonard. His tone is playful, and it brings Elijah out of his mood. His emotions roll easily, too. Quick to agitation, but quick to forgive and forget. The boy squeals and scurries off his bed. When he opens his door, he sees Leonard standing there and squeezes himself lizard-like between the door frame and foster father, running for the table. Two bowls sit ready, still steaming. Sour cream in a plastic container, shredded cheese in a plastic bag.

Man and boy eat. There is little flavor to the meal, and Leonard gets up, fetches the salt. He tests the flavor.

“Want some salt?” he asks Elijah.

“No,” says the boy. “I like it this way.”

Leonard shrugs and eats. He’s been told many times that he is a bad fit for a foster parent. Leonard’s childhood was hard. Elijah’s childhood is painful. And yet they remain. Elijah’s mother also remains—she won’t give up her custody; she makes her visitations; she meets CPS requirements. Leonard doesn’t know whether Elijah’s mother will regain custody. He worries about what will happen, but this time, like last time, he will do his best, offer what he can for the boy with the eyes that wax and wane in symmetry, and try to find the place where those eyes can find their unity as summer rain begins to fall, ringing against the roof.