We think an awful lot alike.
I peel back the shells of eggs with my fingertips and dig nails into vitreous, solidified whites. It smells like sulfur and I can already see the greenish film covering the yolk. He runs a knife through radishes, expertly holding the tiny red bulbs with his deft fingers and prying away the skin and etching out roses and flowers; each finished product is neatly placed in a bowl of sediment-laden ice water. Bobbing apples. Aztec hearts. He'll take them to wash, later, and then dip them in vinegar briefly to ensure they do not brown.
"Don't you think empathy is a disease?" I ask, and I wipe my hands on my pants, to which he looks disappointed as he gestures to the towel only a few inches from my elbow. He doesn't answer the question, but his silence spurns me to elaborate: "would you consider, then, an abundance of it a disease, a disorder?"
Money has trickled into this kitchen for years and solidified like stalactites, carving through rock and wood and granite countertops. For a moment, I don't think he's heard me, and that'd be uncharacteristic of someone who I infer is as meticulously keen as he is; he answers me right as I begin to restate my question.
"I don't see why you seem bent on verifying it as an affliction," he says, voice neutral, and he seems to figure that conversation has no place in cooking. He sets the bowl aside, and he assumes his professional stance, the barren wall of tight skin and aging bones as porous as limestone. I feel like I'm being interrogated—which, I guess, I might be, given his nature. He's a terrible conversation partner; he asks questions and lets you feel stupid on your own accord. "I would assume, though, that—if one was to go on the blandest sort of description—empathy is an evolutionary failure. Instinct and adaption bred us to be most capable and wholeheartedly interested in our own perseverance and not much more; if you spend so much of your time identifying with others, what time is left to think for your own future and your best interest? You and I could learn a thing or two from solipsists," he murmurs, and his voice is low and pious, a sacrosanct saint, a priest in church. I like that about him; the religion that hovers above his head like a golden motto, a byzantine halo, is tantalizing and romantic. The muted blues and conservative shoes and invisible cross hanging around his neck, oil-shined prayer beads glistening like fresh pearls from how often he rolls them between the pads of his fingers and thinks about God—does he thank Him for his daily bread? I think that he might have more important things on mind: radishes, me, murders to solve. I think he thanks God for small things, like the spiders in the hallway and car accidents that only injure and don't kill. He seems the type. I'm still too small to talk to God.
"You could also argue that empathy is one of the few factors that sets us as a species apart from animals and creatures, something that led us to create civilization and the variable that led to the basis of a desire for justice and liberty, the nature of your profession: the ability to identify with our fellow man. Fellow man." He stresses, and it sounds like a lecture. He is very pleasing to the eye, his eyes, my eyes, God's eyes, when he says this, a balanced scale. Libra. Justice. Blind justice; I think he is pleasing to everyone's eyes with the blind as an exception. The way he refuses to take a side would normally irk me, but it just makes him seem wise, above a mere human like me, like he actually manifested roses out of vegetables and dirty water instead of just chopping them up into that shape. His myopic nature is incredible; no distinct solution or decision, but yet I understand that he knows exactly what he's saying.
"That is true," I verify, and his expression is unreadable as he goes back to preparation. My name comes from his lips and I like to think he'd say hymns with the same lilt and tone—Ameya—Doctor, that's spotless pronunciation, by the way—and he asks if I can check the oven's temperature for him.
