When Kelsey turned 35, she started looking for God.
That was the year Kelsey extended the hours Choo-Choo-Soo-Shi in Echo Park to serve all night. She had inherited the restaurant from her mother seven years earlier.
She was lowering her mouth to her straw to slurp the chocolate milkshake two booths down from these young girls, who evoked some potent combination of jealousy and repulsion. Here she was, in a maroon sweatset that blended into the booth and hair that would stay up in a bun on its own accord, looking at girls who were probably uglier than her but in short enough clothes that they could get away with asking for raw fish past midnight. But even those girls were not immune to the harsh realities of the world, as the waiter made some comment pertaining to fishiness and womanhood and they stomped out. Hah, she thought to herself, but momentarily faced a bigger victory: the midnight market for raw fish in Los Angeles was one that Choo-Choo-Soo-Shi could meet.
So she converted what had been her mother’s distinctly dingy sushi-diner into a 24-hour sushi bar. The transition wasn’t radical; they already operated until 12 AM, and the lighting, which mimicked both a school hallway and an In-N-Out with its industrial-grade troffer lights, had the dinginess of the diner that wasn’t the fraudulent warmth of the overpriced pizza places Christmas-wrapped in fairy-lights. Choo-Choo-Soo-Shi was the one industrial-grade white light emanator in the street, with a window at the height of the oblong conveyor belt, where three sushi chefs usually stood. When Kelsey was sixteen, her mother made her the after-school manager, and informed her that the most Asian or attractive sushi chef was to be assigned to face the window.
Her mother now had no involvement with the restaurant. When she first gave the restaurant to Kelsey seven years ago, she came every day as a customer. Around 6 PM each night she would arrive and ask the host (usually Kelsey) to sit at the back of the oblong counter (so she could face the window and give Asian credibility to the restaurant) and would order one piece of sushi at a time and stay until eight. She had a very sharp bob, and was generally very small and short, so from the outside she almost looked no different than the maneki-neko on the shelf above her, the only difference being that she brought tea to her mouth at a freakishly even interval.
“I’m not your personal Yelp reviewer,” her mother would reply, sipping her tea. She didn’t look at her, and never broke eye contact with the street.
Two years ago, Kelsey instituted a 90-minute seating rule.
“You can’t put a timer on my meal,” she said to the poor waiter
“I’m sorry, but it’s protocol,” the 19-year-old replied with burning cheeks that revealed an impossible dream of being an actor.
“I’m not halfway done with my meal. Are you going to prevent me from finishing the meal? Let me speak to the manager.”
Such began Kelsey’s overhaul of Choo-Choo-Soo-Shi which left her and her mother largely estranged. There was the 90-minute rule (which her mother violated), actual trains on the conveyor belt, digital ordering, and finally, all night operations.
“You are making my restaurant a convenience store,” she said to Kelsey, monotone and stone-faced.
“I am opening us up to a new market.”
“You are inviting gangs and drunks.”
“They already come.”
“Who’s going to run it?”
“Me.”
Her mother adjusted her customer hours to come in at 8, never staying past 10. At 12, the sushi chefs would stockpile slices of sushi and clock out. From 12 AM to the following noon, Kelsey stood alone behind the conveyor belt, visible to the street, waist-up.
It was naturally during these hours that Kelsey started to look for God. It didn’t start with a need—she did not suddenly desire God, or want God—but rather, she was hit with a conviction that God might be here. Though she had initially been ambiguous about his existence, enough people seemed to believe that she had been loosely won over. This or that, yes or no, she was less sure of, but one thing she was sure about: if they were right, and if God did preside in L.A. proper, he would preside here, in Choo-Choo-Soo-Shi, under lights so harsh her mother often claimed were good for microbe detection.
It was 2 AM on a Saturday and no one had come in, and she had taken a seat on a cart behind the counter. Only a sliver of her head would have been visible through the window, but the doorbell chimed.
She stood up and saw nothing more than teenagers who hardly looked older than fourteen. Still, it was the start of something prophetic. And at a certain point, though she had started the all-night business to rake in more profits, finding God was so much more important than finding the forty dollars that the kids would probably try to steal anyways. So after she welcomed the guests by nod and grunt, she turned off the light. Because you cannot find the light in the light just as you cannot find a stain in a surplus of color. It was silent for a moment as everyone adjusted from the blinding white light to the equally blinding lack of it.
“What the fuck woman.”
“What the hell.”
A plate clattered divinely on the floor (it was Kelsey).
“Turn the lights on, woman.”
“Yeah, bitch.”
Someone had clearly learned a new word.
“Let’s just go.”
“Yeah, bitch, we’re leaving.”
There was no movement for a second, and eventually footsteps shuffled out.
But Kelsey responded to none of that because she was looking for God in the crevices of the sushi-track rim within her restaurant—better to start in a small area, she thought. She felt her way around the circumference of the oblong track and got on her knees to scour the cupboards. God was somewhere underneath, on the ground.
Her hands moved from sweeping the ground with her fingertips and then to the insides of the cupboards. He was not in the vinegar, nor in the chopstick drawer or sporks, or the very large holder of rice or the su-shi-train plates. Her hand got stuck in a cup and she used that to scoop through the green tea and the miso soup mixture—he was in neither of those and he didn’t seem to be in the ginger either.
She had to check the plumbing. She had checked everything on the ground so he probably was underneath, so she dislodged the pipe under the sink and stuck her cup-hand there, but he didn’t seem to be there.
She seemed to do all of this in one breath—when her hand got out of the cup (the cup had gotten stuck in the pipe and she had gotten unstuck) she felt herself panting, sweating, as she sat back against the refrigerator. Though she could not see it or feel it, a pool of blood was starting to pool under her butt, where she had sat on broken plate shards.
Feeling no physical pain, Kelsey started singing to herself “Take me to the chap-pe-el” (usually followed by “we’re gonna get married” but that part she had no interest in).
What was she looking for? She was looking for something not entirely visible, not entirely tangible, not entirely a glow-in-the-dark beetle whose bum lit up, but some kind of reminder that the strange and ephemeral can manifest as physical, biological. That ineffability can be seen in tuna, though she was trying very hard to find it.
When the sun rose, he would no longer be here, she concluded. What would be there was the torn tuna and the flood of soy sauce, but God probably had gone home for the night. She would look again tomorrow.
Tomorrow was Wednesday, when she would visit her mother in the hospital. She was largely vegetated and frustrated these days, the latter Kelsey discerned because she knew her mother. She knew that the wordless glare was not one of fight, or even admonition towards her, but probably something along the lines of “get me out.”
Indeed, Cindy did not entirely disagree and was holding back the correction that she was still looking for God and hadn’t yet found him, but she had no time as her mother continued:
“THERE ARE OTHER THINGS TO LOOK FOR.”
And here Cindy tried to piece together the gown she had just ripped, to conceal things necessary to repair their relationship,
“LIKE AMBITION OR A HUSBAND OR A CHILD,” she concluded, and went back to sleep.
Kelsey had looked for those things before, but she had never looked for God before. She watched her mother sleep and planned where she would look for God tonight.