Hatched (6 page)

Jessica approached him, and then banged his SOS pad-like hair, gently, and then a second time, more abruptly, and finally smacked him with a kind of unexpected brutality, a brutality that could only be punishment for a deed as yet unforgiven, an action unforgivable, from a past not shrouded in haze, but rather illuminated by the bright lights of this kitchen.

“Ouch! Bitch.” Nate ran his hands through his hair and discovered the gooey substance that he pleated out with his fingers and then, awaiting the inevitable moment when Jessica would turn back to him to see the results of her efforts, licked his fingers with intensity, moaning as he did so.

She turned and stared at him with a look of disgust. “Gross.”

In response, he brought his two hands to his face and drove his face deep into the space he’d created therein. “Fuck me,” he whispered.

She turned away from him and kept walking.

“Fuck me!” he called out loudly. She left her hand trail in her wake, her middle finger up to the sky. They both knew that those two words, “fuck me,” didn’t mean anything, nothing at all, even if once upon a time, in the universe they’d inhabited together, they could have meant the world. He looked sad, pathetic, because “fuck me” were words of dreams and shared urgings, as farfetched as “fly me to the moon upon my paper wings.”

“Fuck me.”

Now that expression meant nothing, it had been transformed into gibberish, fuckme, or phucmi. The “fuck” and the “me” were gone, absolved of meaning, devoid of sense. Individually and together the “fuck” and the “me” meant nothing, and that could not change back, not now, not ever. And so Jessica kept walking, and then turned back and threatened him again, knowingly. Putting on airs for the sake of posterity, Nate feigned licking her face from a distance of a few feet, and then formed his lips into an “O” as a preface to whistling, his eternal annoying habit, this time manifested in a bastardized “Stairway to Heaven.” This move from the carnal to some other subject was always safer when it came to their interactions, and therefore, every conversation between them ended, for both their sakes, with a smile, with Jessica playfully shaking her head or flicking him off or grinning in the dismay of broken dreams.

Nate, superficially riled up, ceased his whistling and shouted to her, suddenly overtaken with genuine reflection, “Hey, wait a second!” Jessica turned around, feigning interest.

“Led Zeppelin!” he blurted out. “That’s egg shaped. We ought to transport people here in one of those?” She turned away from him, and so he called out to her even louder. “Like the strip clubs do, when they pick up desperate men from the airport in those vans that are painted with the faces of strippers. The Fabergé Restaurant Zeppelin! What do you think? We could travel around in it, you and me, to set an example for guests!”

No answer. No matter. The round was over. The game was most certainly lost.

“It would fly, Jess! We’d make it fly! Jessica!” He called out more loudly, with the confidence of one who had in fact penetrated her and brought pleasure out.

“Would our zeppelin fly?” He was shouting so loudly now that she turned back to him, and feigning attention and interest, she said, “Even though it’s made out of lead?”

He was desperate now, trying to seize an opportunity as vacuous as the gas within the zeppelin. “Jess! Maybe we could lighten up that lead zeppelin somehow? Maybe we’ll make it out of something other than lead? Or maybe we’ll combine the lead with blended egg whites! Any suggestions? How do we do that, Jess? Maybe we could paint pictures of you on it? That would lighten it up!”

I watched as Jessica bore witness to Nate’s soliloquy, and then grinned sadly as she turned away from him and pursued her trek to the dishwashing station. She was drawn as to the sirens by another shrilling sound, the expulsion of wind not from a zeppelin descending to Earth engulfed in flames, but from the pierced lips of John whistling tales of ancient glories and not-so-distant conquests of possible worlds.

Chapter 5

John was perched intently at his station, the Hobart dishwashing machine, where he produced notes that pierced the hum of the Yolk. He was like William Butler Yeats’s mechanical bird that was perched atop the golden bough in Byzantium. He was disconnected from nature, for his face seemed chiseled, as by a Grecian goldsmith, or hammered, like the precious Fabergé Jewelled Hen Egg. Maybe, instead of being covered in flesh, he, too, was hammered out of gold and gold enameling, and maybe he, too, whistled to keep a drowsy czar and czaress awake. He had set himself upon Hobart’s golden bough, to scrub and clean and rinse and dry for all the lords and ladies of Wall Street, whistling as he did so all that is past, or passing, or to come.

Fittingly, in this ichthyic setting, he appeared to be moving his bird-like claws ’round and ’round and up and down and side to side. Since there were as yet no filthy dishes to scrub, he was instead polishing Hobart’s giant rectangular washing mechanism, ’round and ’round and up and down and side to side, as though plying warmed oil into a lover’s sun-soaked back. Whatever tune he was rendering was cacophonic and incomprehensible, a tune crackling like Yeats’s own voice, captured Byzantium bound, in a few lines from a BBC recording from another era. He was so completely absorbed by his task, that he was oblivious to Jessica’s arrival.

“Hello, John!” she called above the din, negotiating past the prep tables and crates that separated off those who cooked for the clients from he who cleaned up their dishes afterwards.

John didn’t look up, but instead uttered in her direction: “Jessica, we must polish it up today, I’m expecting the inspector, a group of them perhaps.” He then turned towards her with authority, looking his Colonel General Captain self. “With all of this talk of salmonella, they’re cracking down!” He seemed to grin, as though he’d watched himself say it, and found it for some reason humorous.

John always spoke loudly, almost barking, as though every word was an order, part of an effort to keep his troops in line. He barked all the louder because of the sound of the plethora of industrial-strength electric fans that he had installed one summer day when profits were higher, and when cash had flowed more freely. These fans, far more powerful than the size of the kitchen warranted, made it sound in certain areas of the Yolk as though the workers were in fact mechanics doing upkeep inside of a working jet engine.

John raised his head even higher, calling out beyond Jessica, beyond the boundaries of Manhattan, to Long Island Sound, all the way down to Boston Harbor and further, further, all the way to the open, turbulent Atlantic Ocean. “We must be on our guard tonight!”

Now he was on a ship out in the middle of a horrendous storm, barking orders with a voice stifled by the gusts of Atlantic air and salty spray. Stifled, yet, authoritative and powerful. Loud, but strangely impotent.

“THEY ARE CRACKING DOWN!”

From across the kitchen came a retort from Nate, who had risen up to look towards John.

“Cracking, you say?” he called. He had spoken with an Irish accent, his voice carrying from across the kitchen, just loudly enough for Jessica’s ears, but a little too muffled for John’s middle-aged hearing. Jessica turned away from John and looked towards Nate, who had brought his hands together to emulate a butt crack, the palms of his hands pressed together.

“You say something?” asked John, looking around the kitchen towards the source of the sound.

“Can I use your spray?” called Nate.

“THE SPRAY? OH, YES. I LEFT A CAN FOR YOU BY THE POT-WASHING STATION, NATE. AND WE HAVE A BOX THAT JUST ARRIVED; WE HAVE A LARGE SUPPLY.” John was bellowing now over the loud sounds of the kitchen.

“GOT IT!” called Nate, grabbing hold of the can of stainless-steel cleaner that was perched beside the hot-water handle of the prep-station sink. John acknowledged Nate’s diligence with a nod, and then set back to work polishing the Hobart.

“Hmmm,” said Nate in Jessica’s direction, causing her to look towards him. “If any of the lobsters win the Stairway to Heaven competition, I’ll fill this with Gatorade and spray the coach!”

From where she was standing, near John’s dishwashing station, Jessica could still hear Nate, and could see him running his little “exercises” with the lobsters on the stainless-steel contraption. These exercises were in fact just warm-ups to the Olympic events staged up and down the course that Nate had set up: long jumping, maze running, high jumping, and flat-out sprinting towards the string-bean finish line.

Nate’s lobster Olympics was cruel, and it was stupid, and some version of it went on almost every shift. But given that the real purpose for those lobsters was to lie around and wait for their being killed for the $87.99 boiled lobster dish ($127.99 with a side of her own eggs), or the $167.99 baked and stuffed lobster (with crab meat, bread crumbs, butter, and herbs), a little attention from Nate may not be the worst possible thing.

“WE HAVE A WINNER!” called Nate, suddenly hoisting one of the lobsters in the air. Luckily for him, he had risen at the very moment John had crouched down to polish the base of the Hobart machine, and so this declaration of victory was out of both eye and earshot.

“This,” thought Jessica, “is going to be a long night.” She sighed to herself. “But that’s fine,” she continued. “Better to be killed with humor than with glumness.”

This was indeed true. In spite of the past, and future, of her own world and the worlds of those around her, and despite all of the strangeness of this restaurant, the city of New York, the country, the planet, the entire universe, right now, for whatever else, was okay. She was at Fabergé Restaurant, undertaking culinary tasks that she’d rehearsed and performed to the satisfaction of John and of multitudes of clients for years, to the palate-ial delight of all concerned. And so her life had meaning, and she brought to this place the genius of her maternal warmth, the generosity of her flesh, the calm of her touch.

This is not to say that Jessica hadn’t enjoyed working as a clothing designer, in that little atelier called “Stitched,” not six streets from where she now stood. Like the rekindled relationship she’d had with Tina during much of that era, a relationship that had resulted in lines of clothing well-suited to exceptionally tiny girls, Stitched felt like it was from another lifetime. After five years of stitching creations from fabulous materials, and five more designing gastronomic treasures from earth’s ovulary creations, Jessica felt as though she had lived forever in the bowels of places that make expensive goods for wealthy, ungrateful, dissatisfied, and unsatisfiable consumers, clients, customers. True, there were the occasional gourmets, or passers-by, like that kid today doing experiments in the dining room, but they were the exception. The general atmosphere of ingratitude, complacency, and entitlement amongst those who enjoy the fruits of places like Stitched or Fabergé Restaurant not only helped her understand the odd relationship between workers and consumers in such rarified places, but also gave her an appreciation for the odd characters who recognize the amazing quality of beautiful products, and the even odder characters who think about what it means to work in such settings. Nate was one such character, someone who constantly measured his relationship to the customer, the product, and the means of production.

In those early days working at Fabergé Restaurant, Nate had provided Jessica with adequate descriptions of her experiences. Encouraged by her interest, he began to build a philosophy that he simply referred to as
resentment
. “Resentment!” he would say. “In French?
Ressentiment
! In Italian?
Risentimento
! In Spanish? Um, fuck, I’m not really sure!” He would elaborate upon this philosophy during the many hours they spent sitting together in the back alley of Fabergé Restaurant. This dark, urban alleyway was a place that he referred to as “his own little pastoral farm.”

“Pastoral farm?” she had asked, during one of the first times she’d ever sat with him there in that dark, dingy, smelly, asphalted space.

“It’s a retreat, Jess. I think about it when I’m not at work, because it’s where I can actually brood.”

“Over what?”

“Everything, Jess. That kitchen where we work is a microcosm for the whole damned thing, for this city of servants and served. It’s a factory that favors all the eating and drinking and preparing, and then it’s a reservoir for all of the resulting pissing and shitting, and then it’s a metaphor for what it means to clean the whole fucking thing up. It all happens in one building. He looked up at the oddly shaped Fabergé Restaurant.

“The Big Apple is the Big Egg, Jess. It’s fertile, it’s fragile, it’s filled with opportunity, but when it’s fertilized, it lands up in these bloody, noisy, filthy streets, and hopes for a place to repose. That’s what the pastoral farm is for, Jess. Repose, reflection, retreat.”

Jess examined him with admiration, illuminated by a few crass bulbs whose rays were able to sneak out of their rooms in order to find their own repose in this, Nate’s pastoral farm.

“Do you like Wordsworth?” asked Nate. Jess hesitated.

“Sure!”

“Do you know ‘Tintern Abbey’?” A rustling sound suddenly made them both aware of some urban creature who took ownership of this space. Alleyways like this one attracted skunks and raccoons, creatures that come to forage in the open bins, digging away, when homeless people aren’t around, in search of prized scraps.

“I have read Wordsworth,” Jess began.

Nate took in a poetic breath and turned towards Jess, darkened by the evening sky, illuminated by the wayward beams. “The day has come when I again repose, Jess, here, under this dark sycamore.” He paused. “This building here,” he motioned towards the nondescript, brick building that made up one of the walls of their little clearing. “Under this dark sycamore, and view these plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts.” He motioned to the open space around them. “Gorgeous, no?”

“Yes,” she grinned. “Gorgeous!”

“These orchard tufts, which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,” he paused, “and eggs.” She smiled, as they both looked up at the egg restaurant before them. “Eggs, which at this season, with their, um, their unfertilized fruits. Did you like that? Unfertilized?”