Hatched (10 page)

Indeed. With his remaining $12.00 he’d be permitted access to that beautiful place, with its dark mahogany chairs, heavy teak tables, glistening, Italian, crystal-adorned, yellow-light-bulb chandeliers, replica (he assumed) Fabergé eggs, a white-and-yellow polka-dotted, wall-to-eggy-wall carpet, and bright, impeccable washrooms with yellow towels laid out inside of an antique table to dry the hands of those who’d been privileged enough to use those gleaming, modern faucets that rushed warm water over the scented, liquid soap that recalled fields of Provence flowers that had been gently enticed to release the sweetness they employed to court life-giving bees so that they could discharge scented eggs into the immediate vicinity.

“$12.00. A bargain,” he thought.

And it was while Jude was lost in thought that Tina suddenly floated through the doors from the kitchen and surveyed the half-dozen occupied tables.

“Ah, Tina!” he thought, looking towards her sterile beauty, her doll-like face, and her tiny body. “$12.00!”

He thought that she would approach, and thus provide him with a reason to defer the moment when he was to commence his writing; but instead she took a seat at the first small table in the dining room, crossing those scarily thin legs, and seating herself upon the beckoning chair. He looked at her and tried to figure out if he was fascinated, or attracted. Attraction is a human experience, fleshy and warm, whereas, he thought, Tina was too perfect, at least on the outside. How might she respond to someone warm touching her? Would the scratch-and-sniff function be activated, releasing just the right amount of lubrication? And if it did, how much is just the right amount? Whatever the quantity, he was convinced that her scent would invoke both innocence and truth. He shifted a little in his seat, reflecting upon the number of men who find that kind of woman attractive, and concluded that it had something to do with her innocence.

A moment later, as Jude ruminated upon his own views on innocence, a man who resembled an impeccable executioner, or the captain in an elite force who was taking time out from the crucial task of ridding the world of everyone who didn’t share in his upright, moral values through the careful execution of the murderous tasks for which he had been impeccably trained in a past so distant that no trace remained of his teachers or the books they once used for instruction, walked into the dining room. This man was John, the owner. All of Jude’s lascivious, irrelevant, irreverent, and unhelpful ruminations vanished into the egg-infused air.

John bore a special weight that righted rather than tipped Fabergé Restaurant. The brute outside hid the silent, impeccable machinations within, and like those objects his father hurled into deep, dark space, each of his creations stood as testaments to the power of beauty in the heart of the destructive, chaotic movements towards distant time.

Chapter 9

John surveyed his Fabergé Restaurant, taking in the thirty-seven tables of varying sizes, as well as the seven or so people who, scattered haphazardly through the dining room, engaged in the crucial tasks of eating, drinking, and helping pay the increasingly unwieldy bills that he received. Bills seemed to arrive ever more frequently, particularly of late, when it had grown more difficult to rid himself of the pollution they were bringing to his otherwise perfect eggsistence. He scanned the room, ruminating.

When his gaze met Jude’s, there was a perceptible hesitation, the result either of a particular interest on his part, or perhaps just a consequence of the fact that Jude was studying him with such intensity. Jude had once heard that a paranoid person recounts with certitude that everyone on the street is staring at him, with some degree of truth, because he himself is staring at everyone on the street to see if they are staring at him. “I,” thought Jude, “am that person. I’m doing it to you, Mr. Executioner. And I was just doing it to Tina.” He forced himself to look away.

John did not.

Jude looked down to the Montblanc emblem on the pen before him, and when he looked up again, John was speaking intensely with Tina, at once releasing Jude from his grasp and from the fear that perhaps they were both onto him and to the meager balance in his bank account. This could be a real problem. Where would he find inspiration if he got kicked out of Fabergé Restaurant, banished from the silky world whose shell protected him from the evils of New York City? The proverbial clock was ticking, and he instinctively looked at his watch. It was 4:00 p.m. He had two hours before the supper crowd would begin to arrive, and at that point he’d have to leave. Since returning to Fabergé Restaurant, he’d written exactly nothing, about eggs, or anything else. “But so what?” he thought. Nothing compelled him to leave except his own sense of respecting the place and, more to the point, of knowing his place in it. If he owned a restaurant like this, he wouldn’t want someone taking up as much space as he did, with his notebook on the table, his smelly jacket draped on the chair behind him, his Montblanc pen, his $12.00 (which used to be $303.00. Bastards! And what would it be tonight?).

Jude suddenly rose from the table. He was feeling guilty for his own existence there, desperate for some kind of legitimacy.

“The bar!” he suddenly exclaimed to himself. He looked over and saw, yes, the bar was open.

“Okay,” he thought, “no matter how expensive this place is, $12.00 must be substantial enough for a drink of some sort. I can at least afford a glass of mineral water. Better not buy that Norwegian stuff though. Who needs Norwegian water?” he asked himself. He gathered up his things and moved towards the Fabergé Lounge, which was cordoned off with a dark, wood partition and a yellow sign. There was one other person there, who was seated right at the bar. There was also a bartender who was polishing wine glasses, and intent, it would seem, to do so without any disruption. Jude considered his move towards the bar, since it meant that he had, first, sat down and taken up space in the dining room, and in so doing, he had ruffled the tablecloth, moved the chair, and “used” a space. It was as though he had checked into a hotel, taken a shit, used some of the toilet paper that had been carefully arranged so as to create a flower-like ornament on the dangling few sheets, washed his hands using the fresh bar of soap, left a ring of soap in the sparkling sink and fingerprints of soapy water on the faucets, soiled the floor with the dust of the world that he’d dragged in on his feet, sat down upon the bed, found the remote in its special remote spot, fired up the television, put his feet upon the bed, watched a few minutes of some football game that could have been played this year, last year, or any other year in the last decade without anyone really being able to tell the bloody difference, and then, disgusted, turned off the television, removed himself from the bed, feigned to unwrinkle the bedspread through broad sweeps of his filthy sweatshirt on the surface of the 800-count Egyptian cotton, and then left the room in search of another place to repeat the same acts.

This rumination led Jude to think about the servers who had carefully arranged the table, about the dishwasher who had made all of the white-and-yellow (of course) dishes so clean and shiny, and the cleaner who made those gorgeous Fabergé Restaurant toilets so pristine, and he felt a pang of remorse. And then he thought about the fucking bank that had stolen all of his money, and he walked, briskly, towards the bar.

He chose a seat behind the sole guest, a bearded, bespectacled man, mid-forties, well-dressed, but somehow disheveled nonetheless, exuding the image of discarded wealth. He was nursing a scotch and reading the
New York Times,
arranged in front of him according to the rules that had been set down on some ancient tablet in downtown London. Jude had seen this form of origami before, most noticeable on his first (and only) trip to Europe in his late teens, and since then he’d noticed that it was a well-known form of ordinary wisdom that manifested itself in folded newspapers.

Indeed, from the number of men who folded newspapers in this way, it seemed to Jude reasonable to believe that the sacred text known as, hmm,
The London Tablet,
is consulted by all mid-level businessmen to teach them how to fold their newspapers so as to minimally impinge upon those seated anonymously beside them in the subway or the train. This paper-folding ceremony is affected thousands of times per day by those en route to Fleet Street, Wall Street, or back home to the miserable little duplex situated on a street of miserable little duplexes, indistinguishable from one another, far from the city center that sucked the miserable life out of the peons who make white-collar, nonproduction pay. It seemed oddly out of place in this sumptuous restaurant, suggesting that this type of establishment had not always been accessible to this client of Fabergé Restaurant, no matter how wealthy he now looked. This client looked up for a moment at the bartender, who was now shining champagne glasses, and then cleared his throat and looked around the bar, revealing a dark beard, flecked with grey, and patchy skin blotched with redness. But even from afar, Jude could see shining, expressive eyes. His expensive suit and shoes and watch and, is that a necklace? No, it was some kind of a chain, a gold chain, probably made of solid gold.

“Hmm,” Jude calculated. That gold chain looked to weigh around one pound, and the news plastered on the front pages of all of New York’s daily newspapers pegged the precious metal at around $4,000 per ounce, which would make that necklace alone worth, who knows? $64,000? At the going rate, that meant sixty-four egg essays, or, hmm, around two thousand service charges at his fucking, fucking, fucking bank. That was a lot of money. The client cleared his throat again, as he manipulated the newspaper from one quarter of a page to the next, and then he cleared his throat again, twice, as he continued the operation towards dissecting the contents of the paper. And then he cleared his throat. Again.

Jude prepared the barroom table for writing, setting out the notebook right in front of him and his Montblanc pen to his right. He then pushed back against his jean jacket that he had maneuvered into position behind him. This jacket was an extension of the blanket he had owned as a child, and it similarly served as a kind of spiritual protection, in addition to offering a bit of padding to the already-padded, dark, leather pillow that adorned the bar chair. He had read somewhere about transitional objects, or some such term, things that people used to substitute for, or wean themselves off of, activities that had been crucial to their development. Thumbs are portable nipples, teddy bears are portable mothers, and so blankets, here Jude strained his memory. “What the fuck are blankets?” he wondered. “Wombs? Blankets are portable wombs? That’s fucked up. So my jacket, well,” he smiled to himself. “There’s an image!” Comfortable and rather inspired, and in position to write, Jude courageously reached down and grabbed the Montblanc pen, cleaned its rather filthy tip with his finger, and began to write, leaving the meager ballpoint on the tabletop.

The egg. Perfect imperfection. Balanced, strong, impeccable, the very seat of life, flawless, even with the almost imperceptible flaws of mottling upon its delicate, yet, hardy shell.

He hesitated. “Is the eggshell delicate or strong? How am I supposed to convey both?” He thought of a woman—strong, delicate, the center of the world—carrying the eggs of the species within her very body, until they are stimulated into life-creating division through fertilization. He pondered this for a moment, sucked on the end of the pen, smiled to himself, and then giggled, perceptibly.

Human eggs. Perfect imperfection. Millions of them present at her birth, they . . .

“Can I get you something?” Jude literally jumped, not quite out of his skin, or shell, but close, it seemed.

“Jesus, sorry, dude, you okay?” The bartender had apparently abandoned the smears and spots on the glasses in favor of sneaking up on Jude at his little table, and he now stood before him, pen in hand, almost jokingly. How much of an order would Jude, with $12.00, possibly make? He looked down at his smeared scribbles. And how could mankind explain the creation of writing? Who invented the alphabet? Why did people only start writing thoughts down five thousand years ago?

“Um . . .” He looked down at his fingers, sensing an oozing substance, and realized that his pen was leaking onto his hands. “Why can’t I write with a fountain pen, given how much it’s worth? How many drinks would this fountain pen buy?” He had muttered this under his breath, but his lips had been moving perceptibly, and the bartender had clearly seen them.

“Can I help you?” the barman repeated, looking rather concerned. This was the second time today that someone working in this place had questioned, if only momentarily, Jude’s sanity. And Jude was becoming aware that wasn’t the best of trends to uphold.

“Hey. Sorry, I’m inside of my own mind,” he said, trying to sound sophisticated. The bartender didn’t look impressed, so Jude tried another tack. “I’m mining. My brain, I mean,” he grinned.

No response.

“I’m, well, trying to write something.”

The bartender stood in silence. He didn’t seem to care in the least about any of these personae: insane, funny, or possibly brilliant. He was a big man with a messy, frizzy beard, thick glasses, the type that was trendy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s, and had now become the mark of the particular brand of hipster that frequented bars and clubs in Manhattan. In spite of them, he looked solid, well-built, if on the heavy side, comfortably wearing a suit that looked rather trendy, like an Armani, or, at the least, an Armani knockoff, something that resembled those advertisements close to the women’s lingerie ads he used to jerk-off to in
Vanity Fair
. Jude was ready to talk to this guy, partly because he was so taken aback by having been so totally surprised in his thoughts. Now there was nothing to say. Except what was required.

“Can I see your list of whiskeys?”

“We have most everything, what would you like?” This guy was either being really professional, or was a real prick. Probably both. Jude was in trouble, because who knows how much a place like this would charge for whiskey? And which one, if any, might be less than $12.00?