A BAKER'S FALCON

The exterior is San Francisco at night. The first quandary features fog and darkness and sea salt. Peel one layer from the other. Divorce the compounds. Make a reduction. The question remains: Is any of this cake?

The answer—no, no, none of it is cake.

The studio lights were dimmed. A smoke machine pumped in the fog. This Golden City by the Bay is not real. This location is a figment.

Once undimmed, the lights reveal a private investigator propped at a desk. Is the desk cake? Is that frosting or mud clumped at the heel of his shoe?

He rises. Crosses the room like steam over cinnamon. A stack of cool creases all the way down and a real close talker. “Better begin as far back as you can,” he prompts.

“Well,” says the doe-eyed dame, “well, it was just horrible—”

“What was horrible? The frantic letter your sister wrote? The company she kept?”

“None of that, Sam,” sobs the dame, “it was a room full of black birds and only one of them was cake.”

“Sheesh!” cries Sam, his beard a quarter past five o’clock, “That’s lousy.”

“I know,” she says, and she’s all tremble. So much for fondant. Sam offers her a handkerchief. Is it cake? Again, the answer is no as it fails to dissolve under the weight of her salty tears.

“But birds you say. What kind of birds?”

A shadow appears behind the letters stenciled on the frosted pane in the door.

“Has to be cake,” says the contestant next to me, his voice just hungry with excitement. There’s a baker’s dozen of us with great aspirations to be in on the illusion. The knob turns. Our hearts twist with it, and the shadow floats through the frame and develops wide peep-sized eyes that crystalize yellow in the light. “Gotta be,” insists the contestant, “absolutely, each one a glowing cupcake.”

The marshmallow-eyed shadow draws a gun. This is all done in dramatic closeups and none of us can dare look away. Is the cake outside the frame? How would we ever know?

“Oh, that’s it,” says the incredulous contestant, “that’s the frosting gun,” and he nudges me in the rib like his funny bone is proof of the matter.

“What’s that?” says Sam, and the dame pretends to faint. Note: she feints to faint like there’s no way to have her cake and eat it too. When the shadow pulls the trigger—a thunderclap!

“Hot damn!” yells the contestant, “I thought it was the cake.”

The lead drills a hole in the office desk and Sam jumps to investigate. Pokes at the hole with his forefinger and thumb. He looks cross as he tastes the residue at the end of his fingertips. “Well, I’ll be Bugs Bunny,” he grins, “it’s a carrot cake. And right under my feet this whole time.”

The room is abuzz, folks. None of us saw it coming.

“Simply masterful work,” says our host, whom we also didn’t see coming. A rather large and jolly man, he giggles to himself, “Exquisite staging.” He then turns to all of us. “I’m sure you know why you’re here. Welcome to the stuff that—”

But midline the lights cut out again. Another sudden crack. Like a bunch of eggheads, we all pat our torsos in relief. When the lights flash on again, the office floor is a crosswalk foregrounded against a dark alley’s bottomless throat, and our host is slumped in the middle of it like a moist heap of meatloaf.

“Not cake,” says a contestant. “Most definitely not cake.”

“Unless meat loaf is a kind of cake,” says another contestant. After all, we’re a baker’s dozen, and we all have questions and opinions and expertise, and while I’m weighing whether cake can appeal to a carnivore, Sam unclasps his pocketknife and flashes a grin like a coyote stumbling upon a mountain full of gold.

“Oh, Sam, don’t!” cries the dame, but Sam has already plunged the knife deep into our dead host’s kidney. He corkscrews the blade, and the contestant next to me, the one who is the real expert, exhales, “Whew! It really is cake.”

I wasn’t quite sold yet, but they assured us the dark liquid oozing from a kidney pie under the streetlight was only raspberry filling.

And that’s when a second host, who looked a lot like the shadowy figure from before, issued us our first official challenge for the day—we had to each bake a dark-winged dingus and wrap it in newspaper for the king. In other words, a tribute.

Can you believe that? A whole room full of birds and each one a real cake.

After the dream, she lost clarity of vision. She tried telling the whole, but the whole crumbled. She served it to her husband in fragments.

It’s a gameshow.

A gameshow?

Yes.

But there’s cake.

Yeah, the dream was like the show.

Okay.

You don’t think that’s weird.

Have you been watching the show?

Not really. Just that one time at that hotel for the conference.

That was like a year ago.

Weird, right?

Just takes time for some things to surface.

I guess.

Is that all you remember?

Look, it isn’t always a piece of cake to tell what is and isn’t a piece of cake.

But the bird statue was a cake?

Yeah.

Would have been scarier if it were like a bird-eating cake.

Sure.

Were you a contestant?

I think so.

But you didn’t make any baked goods?

That’s what I’m trying to explain. I was there. I could see what each contestant was doing, but I wasn’t there. It was like I was hovering.

Were you a ghost?

I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet.

I don’t see how you could be deceased and also be a contestant.

That’s how dreams work.

Crazy if that was the last line. Can you hear people in your dreams? I don’t think I can hear people in my dreams.

It was clear everyone was talking, but it was like they were underwater.

Maybe you drowned.

I didn’t drown.

How do you know? You just said you can’t remember how the dream ended. That it was just a bunch of birds. Maybe you got tossed in the Bay.

I’d remember drowning.

My mom used to always make pound cakes and as we were digging into our pieces she’d gasp and say she’d left out some ingredient. But she never could name it.

I’m not your mom.

Then my dad would say that explains it.

Of course, the dream had followed the diagnosis. When she arrived back from the clinic, she hadn’t pulled into the driveway but idled at the curb. Staring into a neighbor’s backyard as if she were on a stakeout, she sought a narrative thread on which to stitch some hidden meaning, but the world no longer felt hardboiled. Clues weren’t so much missing as nonexistent. Leads weren’t dead ends—they were aimless voids. Questioning the shape and texture of it all, she came to the watery conclusion that all hoaxes are elaborate and that everything is a hoax.

She plunged headfirst into that lack of truth as music drifted from across the street. The neighbors were celebrating. Nothing entirely formal, maybe a birthday or a retirement. An anniversary perhaps. Eventually they all went inside, leaving behind what dreams are made of.

Two birds landed beside the remnants of a sheet cake. They inspected the field of buttery icing with their beaks and left no crumb unturned. Were they officers of the law or simply scavengers? On a day like this, what difference did it make? The shadows had started to melt, one into the other

like feathers on a wing.