by Chris Eaton
He felt no real stakes in his own life, as though his own existence was nothing more than a movie. Or like he was reading a book. A bad one.
Archie Nots, the lawyer who had approached him about the accident, said that was good enough. Chris Eaton felt uncomfortable about it. But Julie assured him that this was for the best. He needed help. More than she could offer. They couldn’t afford to live without it. Without something.
Why, he asked.
Why what?
Why did he need help?
***
They kept a close watch over him in the weeks following the Pentagon attack. Security was tight. As the only survivor in the area of the impact, he’d become a bit of a celebrity. People were talking about miracles. And so his room at the George Washington University Hospital was made completely off limits to everyone except his medical attendants, his wife, and the occasional agent in black suit and sunglasses.
There was nothing wrong with him. Not even the excessive dust inhalation seemed to have affected his lungs. Yet he seemed reluctant to speak to anyone about what had happened. He responded physically to all of his examiners with utmost respect and immediacy, but when asked direct questions, he remained silent. Only when they left him alone with Julie did he confide in her that he wasn’t sure why he was there. He couldn’t remember what had happened, could only recall going to work like any other day, taking a nap in the storage closet, and then waking up here. His body was sore. He wanted a beer.
But he would talk to no one else, would trust no one else. They were out to get him, he said, and he wasn’t even sure who yet, but someone. Them. He had developed some outlandish conspiracy theories, many of which were based around the numbers 9 and 11. Not only did the Twin Towers stand like an enormous 11 over the New York skyline, and the first plane to hit them was Flight 11, but New York was also the 11th state to be added to the union. The words New York City, The Pentagon and Afghanistan were all comprised of 11 letters. Likewise the name Ramzi Yousef, who had masterminded the 1993 WTC bombing. Flight 11 had 11 crew members; and 92 passengers (9 + 2 = 11). Flight 93 had 38, which also adds up to 11. The number of passengers on Flight 175? 56. The total number of people on the same planes including crew members? 81, 45 and 65.
The date of the attack: 9/11; 9 + 1 + 1 = 11
9/11 is the 254th day of the year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11
The number of days remaining in the year after 9/11: 111 days.
The winning numbers in the New York State lottery that day? 9-1-1.
It seemed too ridiculous and random, and yet all these connections had to mean something. And the more he looked into it, the more meaning it seemed to take on. He became equally concerned with the numbers 7 and 15, and the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. The names Lincoln and Kennedy both have 7 letters in their names. Both men were elected exactly one hundred years apart, and were both assassinated on Fridays, by gunshot, while seated beside their wives. Lincoln was shot in Box 7 at Ford’s Kennedy Theatre; Kennedy, in the 7th car in a convoy of Ford Lincoln Continentals. Both were succeeded by men named Johnson, a name that also has 7 letters.
On the side of evil, both assassins had 15 letters in their names, split into three words. His name – Chris Avard Eaton – was actually the same, which perhaps put him on the wrong side, too. Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and hid in a warehouse; Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and hid in a theatre.
Both were originally detained by men named Baker.
Both failed to make it to trial, killed by a single shot from a Colt revolver.
He’d also become convinced that the true cause of the Iraq War was salt.
***
About a hundred years ago (he told Julie the next time they were alone), with the production shift from primitive solar evaporation to deep rock mining, global salt prices had unexpectedly plummeted. Global warming had likewise threatened the winter road-salt market, and it had become necessary to devise more and more ways to use the world’s only edible mineral. Luckily – if you believed in luck – there was Sir Humphry Davy, a known Freemason and, in fact, the son of a suspected founding member of the English branch of the Illuminati. A century earlier, building on the research started by other members of his order (the Bulgarian and Spanish scientists, respectively, Christo and Varea), Davy had perfected a process for splitting the salt compound into its two basic elements, sodium and chlorine, but at the time the only reason for working on this was to supply the explosives used by groups like Christo’s displaced Bulgarians, who were attempting to retain freedom under their Turkish oppressors by roaming the Balkan Peninsula as armed kurdjalii, as well as Varea’s many sons and nephews in the Peninsula War for Spanish Independence against Napoleon. For decades the Illuminati used their processes solely for terrorist warfare; but as time wore on, and empires were overthrown in France, Spain, and even Bulgaria (with the 1876 uprising and massacre, and the subsequent Russo-Turkish War), the secret society’s salt producers were left with businesses that were becoming increasingly obsolete. And in a world where money was becoming the weapon rather than the stepping stone to purchase or produce other weapons, what was a secret society to do?
In the early-1900s, therefore, the Illuminati set their members to creating more and more uses for the salt and its basic components. Gradually implementing its New World Order through scientific discovery, it took salt from the curing and preserving of meats and fish to much broader application: the production of cleaning products and bleaches; for use in making certain dyes; glazing pottery; as a natural remedy for sore throats; the creation of high-powered magnifying lenses for microscopes; in the production of ink; mining silver; refining oil; fertilizers, insecticides and medications; cosmetics; plastic and polyester; rayon; PVC pipes, cellphones and flat screen TVs; and as the environment became more of a political issue, using salt in solar panels for producing electricity, as well as greenhouse gas sequestration. By the sixties, they’d made salt the leading ingredient in about ninety-five percent of the world’s chemical processes. Even after the Cold War, when the U.S. and Russia began dismantling their nuclear arsenals, they discovered they could dispose of the dangerous materials in a more environmental way by dropping them into pits of molten salt.
Perhaps the most ingenious idea, however, was created by the German novelist and food writer Tonia Hersc, who was likely one of the first women let into the group despite the Illuminati being supposedly pro-feminist from their outset, almost immediately before the First World War.
***
Hersc had grown up in the Lower Saxony region of Germany in the late-1800s, the only child to a father who owned several potash mines and refineries, a man who was both thick and watery at the same time. How he had come to be part of the Illuminati was a problem facing the entire organization, with inheritance of invitation outrunning inheritance of brilliance. It was her grandfather, Jeorg Hersc, who was the true member of the order, a man of unparalleled thinking who had written several books of poetry (including Du Hasst, 1836) and existentialist philosophy (Stille Nicht, 1845) while also mastering the field of geology and discovering massive deposits of potassium carbonate in the area he eventually settled. Her father, who wasn’t even worth naming, was not even a real businessman, not in the best sense of the word. He was more like a placeholder, someone to be called at meetings until someone better emerged to really answer to it. Tonia ran away from home when she was fourteen, somehow making it to Paris on nothing more than the change and jewelry she’d stolen from her parents’ dresser on the way out the door. There she lived on the streets for several years until a young dressmaker near the Opéra Garnier, named Jules-Joseph Villars, spotted her and hired her to stand as his living window mannequin, a marketing trick that built his business for several years. By day, she walked around a tiny glass box; at night, she slept on a pile of discarded material shards in the back. She was barely a real person – just the idea of a person that Villars would create to entice his customers. She also began to fall fo
r Villars, and on top of her nine hours of daily prancing and primping, she began to cook his meals. The daughter of a rich mine owner, she had never made a dish in her life, but she asked the women at the markets how best to prepare food that might win a man’s heart, and they took her aside and whispered to her all of their secrets.
She was a natural. And soon Le Boutique Villars was known as much for its fashion and its living mannequin as it was for the smells that held and caressed every nook and corner of the shop. They began selling soup on the side, then pastries, and eventually full lunches, until one day she had the pleasure – or would have had the pleasure, had she know who he was at the time – of serving Auguste Escoffier before he took off for London. He offered her a job in one of his kitchens in Cannes, first at the entremetier station and then as chief Saucier, after which she quit because making food for strangers was not the same as making food with love. She discovered, however, that what she loved about food was not the preparation of it but the consumption. Under Escoffier, she was exposed to some of the best food in the world and, with her famous first review for Michelin, which contained the line, “A meal that doesn’t end with cheese is like making love to a beautiful woman with only one eye,” Tonia Hersc began her food writing career.
Meanwhile, she and Villars were married. On their honeymoon, they attended the Frankfurt Automobile Show, and Jules-Joseph was struck particularly by the new portion dedicated to aircraft. Over a Wednesday and a Thursday, Villars barely wanted to leave the grounds, able to stand inside an early Zeppelin prototype, run his hand along the French Bleriot IX (which never really achieved sustained flight and would only have been of use as a little island hopper, if one could nail the accuracy needed to hit each island), and admire the workmanship of the German Etrich Taube, which was built to resemble a giant dove from below. Villars was transfixed and mesmerized by these flying vessels, insisting they skip Berlin entirely and remain for the stunt show on the weekend, where two early Aviatiks clipped wings during a simple demonstration of side-by-side maneuvers, and they witnessed both pilots plunging to their deaths. He was visibly distressed, insisting again that they end the honeymoon immediately and return to Paris. He was quiet for weeks, would not even open the shop when she went back to Cannes to work at the restaurant. He sent her telegrams and letters full of increasing sadness and loss, despair, unable to shake the visual of those falling men, wondering what they must have felt as they struck the ground. When she returned for her next visit, the boutique was covered in large swaths of silk, and she was happy to see him working again. But on returning to Cannes, she heard the news reports about the man who was intending to jump from the Eiffel Tower to test his new frameless parachute suit, and she knew this happy part of her life was over. The autopsy revealed that Jules-Joseph had died from a heart attack during his fall.
***
Hersc begged Escoffier’s forgiveness, quit the restaurant, and swore to never leave another lover’s side again, of which she would have many, including: her second husband, the dashing foreign news correspondent from England, Chauncey Ackart; a stunt driver of motorcars; Tour de France winner Henri Pélissier; Paris-Brest winner Charles Terront; Vélo editor Henri Desgrange; Paris’s prévôt des tromptemps; and almost immediately on returning to Paris, a torrid affair with the married chemist-in-exile, Luis Petrousa, from whom she would pick up a thing or two, not counting the mild case of gonorrhea. Before her death in 1938, she would write several dozen books of poetry and fiction, although only one is widely known outside of France, called Frou-Frou (1944), about a young French street urchin based on herself (Frou-Frou was the name she had given herself when she had first arrived in the capital), who is hired to clear tables at a ritzy hotel, and her relationship with the cultured and moustachioed maître d’ who realizes he is in love with her. Frou-Frou was later made into an unsuccessful film, an even less successful Broadway musical, and despite all of this, into an updated television series renamed, for some uncertain reason, Lou-Lou. She would also publish scads of cookbooks, written under various pseudonyms, as well as two books under her own name on the lost city of Atlantis, in which she was a firm believer. The first of those cookbooks, Pains d’Amour Perdu (published by Berowne and Dumaine in 1910), inevitably caught the attention of the city’s elected prince of gastronomy, Curnonsky, who tapped her to write for the fledgling Michelin Red Guide, as well as vouching for her at Le Journal. It was then – now writing mostly under the name Tatienne Villars – that she began to be followed, and not merely as a journalist. Curnonsky told her not to worry, that it was probably someone from Le Temps. The importance of good food in France had reached such a zenith that both papers wanted to know who the other would be reviewing, so there were often men in long coats following him. And she believed him until the night she came home to discover that her apartment had been completely overturned, with two men standing at the foot of her bed holding the shreds of Jules-Joseph’s failed parachute.
***
They’d been searching for her for some time, but she’d been hiding under so many assumed names that it had taken them some time to verify it was her. It wasn’t until they found the locket she had stolen from her mother (which had proven too sentimental an object to sell) that they knew for sure. Her father was dead, they said. Her mother was useless. Her father’s business – her business now, she realized – was failing. And thus the Illuminati had finally come looking for her. The order had always assumed her father would sire another child, but her mother proved to be more than useless, she was also barren – a complication arising from Tonia’s own birth. These things normally passed from father to son, but as the only child of the Hersc they would no longer even name, they extended invitation to her. Many of their best people, they assured her, were working on the salt problem as they spoke, but they understood she was working with Petrousa, by which she could tell they meant screwing but their point was made.
She agreed, not out of any filial obligation or Illuminatic gratitude but because the entire economic structure on which her grandfather Jeorg Hersc’s ideals had rested was in peril. She first approached the problem as all the others had, on primarily a volume level, trying to devise procedures that might involve as much salt as possible with each use. Petrousa didn’t even ask why, just threw himself into the game of it, and tried combining various amounts of the separated chlorine with crude oil, hoping to invent some sort of polymer for use in making giant rubberized balloons for gigantic, cruiseship-style flying dirigibles, like the German Zeppelins but more on the scale of the Titanic. He accidentally exposed the experiment to too much sunlight, however, and the substance hardened into a useless white solid inside his flasks. After that, he threw himself into one of his legendary pouts and refused to help any more. But even if he had succeeded, Hersc considered, while the amount of salt per project would be large, how much call would there really be for so many flying cities. Even if she could just find a way to get every person in the world to use a little bit, on a regular basis, she might solve the problem in one go.
Then, through a series of columns published over the war (one of many efforts by the paper to put some joy in people’s lives), Hersc published countless recipes that she had altered to include a pinch here and a dash there. Sometimes she used the war as a reason, citing properties in salt that could boost the body’s perceived caloric intake, or allow the body to retain more water, as both malnutrition and dehydration were an initial concern. But as the war ended and a new cultural boom came to France, she shifted her message to that of taste. Tatienne Villars had already gained such prestige for her scathing critiques (“This new habit of beating eggs rather than whisking is like combing your hair with a rake”) that everyone began to listen. Salt, she said, was a flavor enhancer. Everyone had agreed with Curnonsky when he said: Good cooking is when things taste of what they are. Now she was saying that salt made things taste like what they were, only more so. Much like The Emperor’s New Clothes, even the top chefs began to b
elieve her, to notice the difference for themselves and to repeat her aphorisms at dinner parties and in cafés. From the top restaurants, it spread to the general population of rural France and then, because French cuisine had become the de rigueur fine-dining choice across the globe, to the rest of Europe and North America. Hemingway wrote an essay for The Toronto Star about it, which was summarily picked up through the Associated Press by everyone from The New York Times weekend edition to The Washington Post. By the mid-twenties, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a new cookbook or revised edition of an old one without salt in most recipes. By the fifties, salt was just a given, and a major cash business. Why did the terrorists attack the U.S. in 2001 in the first place? Because it was the wealthiest nation on Earth, and the leading producer of salt. And why attack Iraq in response? Anyone who claims the reason is oil is simply short-sighted. It just happens that salt domes were created in the same cataclysmic events that rendered organic materials into petroleum. In fact, these salt domes were what enabled the oil to develop, acting as a barrier to keep the oil from dissipating. Why else do you think Iraq is such a desert? The oil just helps us know where the salt is.
