Hatched (32 page)

I could feel the atmosphere shift, as the membrane between my shell and the whites of my innards became pervious to the world, hanging on now but by the strands of keratin that had been sewn into the outer structure to maintain its strength against cold nights or jarring winds. I felt a rush of air as the cell of the crater between the shell and the interior grew, and the albumen’s four layers were expanding and contracting, as though all of Fabergé Restaurant had abandoned its gills in favor of lungs.

This movement created tension in the chalazae, those opaque ropes that secured John’s sacred Yolk within the center of his creation, and I could feel strange pulsations of the vitelline membrane that enclosed and retained the integrity of my structure. It was not long now, not long. I felt a sense of impending doom coupled with the bitter sweetness of nostalgia, for all of those days, all of those shifts that had combined to fertilize this life—the hatching of Fabergé Restaurant.

Chapter 29

It was very difficult to know what precipitated the final cracking, chaos, and eventual collapsing of Fabergé Restaurant, although there are a few viable culprits. The most obvious was the wire, strung above the sauté stove that, if burnt through, would set off an emergency baking soda dump. This dump was designed to extinguish fires, especially the nasty grease fires that could erupt if oil-filled pans or cauldrons were heated to extreme temperatures. While it was true that John was generous with the port, marsala, and with other so-called ‘burnt’ wines, and certainly true that he was in an unusually generous mood when he reassumed the helm that night, it was unlikely that he would precipitate disaster on that scale without a bit of help. And truth be told, he did receive a bit of help from Nate, who, in preparation for what he had always described to Jess as the “last st®and,” with the encircled
R
added (orally) for emphasis, had lowered the threshold of it being set off.

“Jess,” he had cooed one night during their garbage-run romantic embraces, “if the baking soda plunge is about to happen, you’ll know, because it makes a twanging sound first, like the Achilles heel of the bourgeoisie being snapped midstride.”

Jessica didn’t even bother to ask what this could possibly mean.

“Jess?”

“Nate.”

“Jess, it’s our little secret.”

“What is?”

“The baking soda plunge! I lowered the wire.”

“For the triggering mechanism over the sauté station?” she corrected him.

“Right, the triggering mechanism. I lowered it.”

“Why?”

“To honor the eternal battle between workers and the bourgeoisie, between the haves and the have-nots, between us, Jess, and them.”

Jess placed her hand upon Nate’s chest and leaned her head upon his shoulder, causing her tussle of warm, blonde hair, peeking out of her chef’s under-hat, to tickle his chin and cheek. These were special times, before the walk-in catastrophe, and even before his dream of entering her life, repeatedly and forever. These were also innocent times, enjoyed by people with not-so-innocent motives.

“Jess, the revolution must come, but too much planning can only lead to calamity. The anarchist way is to foster spontaneity.”

“How do you foster spontaneity?” she asked, rather dreamily. It was unusual for her to even pay sufficient attention to the details of his rantings to notice such incongruities, but the description that night was imagistic, and her mind had followed his words into constructions of how it might all come down.

“Spontaneity, creativity, they can both be fostered. Conditions can be made right for them to flower and to flourish. Most of the conditions are negative, Jess, like eliminating the barriers that are erected to keep poor people from living up to their potential. But some are positive, like giving people a say.”

“Lowering the trigger is giving people a say?”

“No, that’s just putting a trigger into play. It won’t do anything, except douse a flame. But if the flame doesn’t want to be doused . . .”

“Like if the lobster doesn’t want to die.”

“Exactly. Then it’ll bring the whole thing down.”

Those words sounded like revelation on this special night, or perhaps they were the very triggers of change, because flames did indeed leap up in front of John. As a result, the lowered wire was consumed by flames, tripping the mechanism that is designed to release a mountain of baking soda. John’s carefully crafted, Fabergé-like masterpieces, some of them still simmering before him, were stifled and then choked under the weight of the white powder.

This preliminary explosion was a trigger to another calamity, the cracking and then the collapse of Fabergé Restaurant’s precious external shell. As the precious edifice began to collapse, all of the miniature egg facsimiles were toppled, like the czarist regime that preceded them. By the end of the evening, all that remained of the Fabergé Restaurant were memories of the great creations that had collapsed, as though all of the air of this rarefied world had been set free from this rarefied realm of eggy production.

Nobody was injured in the crack-up, not even slightly. It was as though the restaurant had pelted its clients with eggs, rather than letting them fall, Humpty Dumpty-like, to their crushing death. The structure, built of remarkably light materials, wasn’t heavy enough to dent the skulls of the frightened elite. And, to their credit, the servers and kitchen staff showed remarkable talents for alerting guests as to the direction they needed to take to exit the egg. Those closest to the the Yolk were guided through it, and as a result they witnessed first-hand John-the-Owner’s obsessional desire to impress not just the guests, but NASA, Carl Fabergé, and all of the perfectionists who roam this world.

Nate had provoked this collapse, but he was as surprised as anyone when the growing cracks in the shell became fissures, and then projectiles. Rather than wallowing in the success of his plan, however, he immediately assisted his intended victims by gingerly escorting them to the Fabergé Restaurant parking lot. There, chauffeurs and cabs and a seemingly endless array of New York’s finest were amassed to offer solace and assistance. In so doing, they were witnesses to the downfall of Fabergé Restaurant and, unbeknownst to them, they were present for the hatching of a plan that was aimed at heralding a (courageous?) new world.

There was but one moment of concern, when a conscientious ambulance driver spotted a young man who had apparently been hit in the mouth, perhaps by a part of the collapsing egg structure? He rushed to Johnny’s side, but was rebuffed.

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” said Johnny, as trickles of blood dripped down the side of his mouth. “I think I just bit my tongue in all of the chaos.”

“You really should have it looked at!” called the emergency respondent, amidst the brouhaha of the occasion.

“I will,” said Johnny. “Don’t worry, I will.”

The exception to the surprising calm that prevailed as Fabergé Restaurant collapsed in slow and delicate motion was the couple who had been thrown together by the bizarre machinations of fate and time: Jude and Ted. Ted, mid-sentence, and mid-caviar-scoop, had heard the cracking noise, looked up at the impending collapse of the structure, and, strangely enough, smiled. He and Jude had been talking about “possible worlds.”

“Fiction is a possible world,” he’d said.

“Possible? Not likely?”

Jude hesitated. “Possible, and thus as likely as not-so-likely. Possible.” He was impressing himself with his reason. “I write to create, but I hope to create by creating.”

Ted dug into his scoop of caviar. “Create by creating, I like that. You ought to put it into your novel. You can bring down a whole way of seeing the world, if you can create something that new.”

“Maybe that’s the definition of the Great American Novel?” mused Jude, as Ted deposited the contents of the caviar onto his tongue for delectation. “Bring it all down, in order to raise us all up?”

It was at that moment that the roof and walls, connected in the ovular, eggy form, began to slowly collapse upon itself and, with deference and care, upon those who inhabited its shell. They didn’t realize that the time had come for their expulsion into the world beyond Fabergé Restaurant; and years later they’d still be talking about the many signs they’d missed that hearkened in the collapse of that empire. As the pieces that once supported this magnificent structure floated downwards, Ted remained transfixed by the very utterances of his dining companion, and recalling at that moment a story of this, their last supper, he stared at him in accusation and disbelief.

“Jude! Jude! Jude!” The cracked segments of the shell were falling all around, and chaos was ensuing, in slow motion, as the clients realized the magnitude of the disaster around them.

“Jude!” called out Ted, as the lights flickered, and smoke combined with debris to obscure the restaurant’s inner sanctuary. “Jude!”

Ted was staring at Jude as if in revelation, too enamored to move, too amazed to even stand up. He just stared into Jude’s moist, glistening eyes and called out for every being in the vicinity of his table, of this embryo, and of the world it promised: “JUDAS!”

Part 2

Chapter 1

When it comes to the business of operating a small moving company, there are undeniable advantages to owning one’s own equipment. They who own tend to reap, and they who move tend to work for the reapers. But there are obvious disadvantages as well, since those who own their own trucks tend to drive them far past their expiration dates, hoping that they were assembled on days when the assembly line workers were well-paid by their bosses, and well taken care of by their spouses. Trucks, like people, tend to last a really long time if they can make it past a certain age, somewhere in the vicinity of a million miles, in the same way, counter-intuitively, that people who make it past ninety tend to do so in remarkable health, and with an unusually good quality of life, as long as they’re not connected to some ungodly life-supporting apparatus. If they were assembled well and, the metaphor holds I suppose, well-nourished in the early days, they build up immunities to the crappy luck of severed axles, ill-connected oil pumps, and faulty break lines, and hopefully they’re equally immune to the even crappier luck of black ice, and sleep-deprived truck drivers.

In all of these regards, Jude had been relatively lucky. He never relied on his truck in order to support a family or a serious drug habit or some unlikely financial ambition. For this reason, he didn’t have to drive it, or himself, into the proverbial asphalt-covered ground. And he had chosen, fortuitously but rather accidentally, to buy a very old and very driven 1961 GMC DF7000, a vehicle that bore the virtue of having been born on a relatively calm day—luckily, since the ’61s were in fact rather known for containing an array of potential defects. Dubbed within the industry “the Crackerbox,” the DF7000 was a very good-looking, old truck, but it did have some rather odd characteristics. One peculiarity, perhaps its most important, resided within its two-stroke Detroit diesel engine. When these rather mythical beasts were allowed to idle for a long time, they would start pumping oil out through relief tubes onto the ground, and this gave them a very bad reputation, particularly amongst drivers who spent lots of time idling at, say, the borders between Mexico and the US, or in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Jude was lucky he had not landed up with a proverbial lemon, and he was further aided by the fact that he seldom undertook long trips, which meant that his rig was given time to recover from the many stresses of the road.

Since truckers who sell their rigs tend to imagine that their buyers know the reputations of the vehicles, and since Jude, although very young at the time of the purchase, did display some interest in the history of various vehicles, the vendor, who called himself “Crackerbox Joe,” surrendered his truck’s deed for the paltry sum of $2,800. Jude didn’t realize that this was a steal, given what other people were paying for their vehicles at the time, but he did know that he could make his payment back by only a few moves, something that was, and most certainly is, unheard of in the moving business. Crackerbox Joe even went so far as to throw in a remarkably solid and retro-cool Nabors furniture van, unit #1973B, for a mere $500. The resulting rig was a bit heavy, noisy, and manifestly old-fashioned, but it was also really old-fashionedly solid. And, moreover, it was very cool looking. Jude received considerable (undeserved) praise from old-timers for his judgment and taste, but also some affectionate gazes from younger drivers, who saw this young mover as a dude of the roads, someone who was blissfully but also hipsterly oblivious to the comforts, and insane costs, of renting new machines.

No matter how well his rig had been constructed, though, there were always risks associated with driving a vehicle that is considerably older than its driver. One such risk was associated with pushing the vehicle in ways that were unfamiliar, since this tends to lead the vehicle, and its driver, towards uncharted territory. As Jude was driving to the apartment belonging to his client, a young man living in the undesirably named but rather cute part of Long Island called “Locust Valley,” he began to think about how close he was to the venerable Long Island beaches. Thoughts of the sugary-soft sand and gently rolling waves stimulated in his groin that reflex that connects flowing water external to the body to the flow of urine internal to the body.

Jude had started his day in a Manhattan diner, where the terrible food was rendered edible by the even more terrible coffee. This leads the patrons of such diners to oscillate between dishwater-flavored coffee and clapboard-consistency toast, salt-infested, oily, cardboard bacon, and wallpaper-paste pancakes. This endless repetition of bacon to coffee and back to bacon, and then from wallpaper-paste pancakes to coffee and back to pancakes via toast, had led Jude to consume (unbeknownst to him) the equivalent of 2,000 mg of caffeine through the conduit of 40 or so ounces of a notoriously diuretic liquid. The result was a kind of Hoover Dam effect, whereby basins of light-brown sludge presses up against a wall of clapboard and wallpaper paste. The resulting pressure threatens the structural integrity of the dam, just as the pressure of the breakfast threatened to send oceans of waste through Jude’s bladder and anal canal.