Hatched

by Robert F. Barsky

  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 wer
e 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.

  The problem was, if Jude was going to make it to the beach during the heat of the day, then he had to pick up this guy’s stuff quickly, drive to the beach for some fun, and then quickly drive to the allotted Manhattan destination to drop off his load of furniture.

  “Don’t think about the fucking beach, you idiot,” thought Jude as he maneuvered his legs up and down, in an effort to create a kind of Hans Brinker to the soft-tissue dyke in his groin. This motion caused him to press and release the gas pedal in regular waves, with the occasional violent thrust of the pedal towards the floor of the cab. The effect was to release huge puffs of smoke into the Long Island atmosphere, and small puffs of gas from his anus into the cab. These violent thrusts of anything in a vehicle this old was risky, and although an octogenarian accustomed to shoveling snow from the outside steps of his Boston apartment could probably do so right up to the very end, and another octogenarian accustomed to pulling quack grass in Tennessee can do the same thing, they’d likely suffer inordinately by having to change places. So, too, with old Crackerbox, for it was now being placed in an unusual position of emptying and then flooding its various working parts. And so when it was suddenly subjected to unusual pressures on its well-worn rubber tubes, it conked out and became a silent ghost of a machine, drifting down one of those lovely, tree-shaded, old highways of Long Island, un-propelled and undirected.

  “Shit!” exerted Jude. Visions of glorious fantasies, like eating fried clams while staring into the eyes of beautiful mover-loving nymphets, were suddenly shattered. He steered his giant Crackerbox to a shoulder soft enough, and not in a good way, to dampen the vehicle, but hard enough, also not in a good way, to hold its weight. Jude’s moving world came to a standstill, abruptly, and he was low like a giant, plastic bag filled with urine and squeezed into the cockpit of the Titanic post-glacial incident.

  He turned the now-impotent key, slid it into a space between his jeans pocket and his bladder, pushed open the seemingly 287-pound door, and eased himself down to the much-desired land of Long Island. There would likely be no move today, and so no clams to nourish and lubricate his innards, no visions of perky breasts to provide food for shower-time fantasies, and, moreover, questions of how he would negotiate his return home to the Raskolnikov-sized cubbyhole of a room that he rented in the West Village.

  “Maybe I should just move here, tonight?” he asked himself, as though joking with a friend.

  “Great idea, idiot. I’m sure that two or three million dollars should definitely secure a garage large enough to hold a bed and both of your skateboards!”

  That conversation done, he looked around and tried to figure out the next best plan.

  “Call for assistance?”

  “That’ll be fucking expensive, and maybe it’s just something minor that I can figure out for myself. Hitchhike to the closest town, have a beer, and regroup? That has the advantage of . . .”

  All of this internal metaphysical debate was sufficiently intense to deny him direct access to the physical world. But he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that if he didn’t pee, right then and there, that he’d have other calamities to address. He awkwardly waddled to the ditch side of the truck, undoing his belt buckle as he did so. He was trying to trick his bladder into thinking that he was doing the necessary preparations, so as to both forestall the explosion and promise his bladder that the explosion was imminent. It was a photo finish. He managed to free his penis just as the stream began to flow, and the grateful weeds below him were offered the gift of much-needed nourishment in the form of acrid, coffee-scented urine.

  Chapter 2

  It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that Jude was hitchhiking. After a remarkably long piss, he was in such a state of blissful delirium that he was standing on the side of the road, staring at the tall Long Island trees, and contemplating, pace Shelley’s ruminations on birds and mountains and glaciers, both the magnitude and the magnificence of nature. It was early afternoon on a Friday, and there was surprisingly light traffic, considering the wonderful destinations available to those in search of summertime-like experiences.

  There was one car that did drive by Jude, causing considerable ruckus and a degree of consternation, since it seemed to swerve TOWARDS him as it approached. It was a bright-red, 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, with its white, leather-like top down, revealing a group of four people in what appeared to Jude as joyful party mode.

  His eyes followed its passage, and then watched it swerve towards the shoulder, where it abruptly stopped. The driver turned towards Jude, and then threw the car into
reverse so as to head towards Jude’s broken-down truck. More curious than excited about this nature-shattering event, Jude walked towards the car. It contained one older gentlemen in the backseat, alongside of what seemed like a much younger boy—perhaps his son—and another rather mature-looking man in the driver’s seat, alongside a very young, or certainly much younger woman, perhaps his daughter? The front passenger side door burst open, and a small but insistent hand grabbed his own and urged him in beside her. There was lots of room, as her small body only occupied around half of the luxurious, white-leather bucket seats. He landed beside her, and she turned to greet him. It was Tina.

  “You need a ride?” asked John, grinning sardonically. “Close the door!” he said, as he smoothed the Cadillac up to a cruising speed. Jude was in a state of shock as he grasped the enormity of the situation. Tina had cuddled up, and was by now all but sitting on him. It was like the scene in Tristan and Isolde, when Tristan found himself between an excited Isolde and her sleeping husband, an intimate victim of treachery and lust. Tina reached around Jude’s neck to hold him closer to her. John looked over at them, all but allowing the car to drive itself as he took in the sight.

  “Go ahead,” urged John-the-Watcher, smiling sardonically. Jude was frozen in his newfound role as objectified object of desire, and so didn’t obey, he just sat there, stunned.

  Tina, by contrast, did, as it were, go ahead. Her right hand, always so punctual, so directed, so careful, so task-oriented, was now on Jude’s hands, arms, and thighs, in their quest downwards. Jude stared at John as he felt Tina’s gentle touch, and wondered, unconvincingly, where this was all heading. She tugged on his belt buckle, released it, and positioned herself over Jude, bending down towards his chest, and then lower, and lower, as she simultaneously lifted up his sweaty tee shirt.

  John, apparently satisfied with the direction things were taking in the front seat, looked into the rearview mirror to check out how things were going in the back. As Tina’s surprisingly warm mouth engulfed Jude’s nipples, and then she lowered herself further, towards his hard-on, her warm mouth breathing soft plumes of desire. Uncertain as to who was about to witness this long-awaited event, Jude suddenly swung his head around, in the direction of the backseat.