Hatched

by Robert F. Barsky

  There was one man directly behind Jude, a rather tough-looking character, greying, big head, sunglasses, around John’s age, perhaps a little younger, maybe early sixties. Beside him, directly behind John’s seat, was the guy that Tina once described as “the new guy.” Jude had last seen him in the slow-motion panic that ensued in the wake of Fabergé Restaurant’s collapse, rushing to help an equally young kitchen worker whose mouth was oozing blood. When his victim refused assistance, the new guy had set himself to cleaning up debris, as though to seek approval from those around him. Jude and Ted had commented upon his devotion, as they made their way to the harried world beyond Fabergé Restaurant, and now the new guy was doing something similar for his former employers.

  The older man and the new guy cast a glance at Jude, and then turned back to one another for a long and sensual kiss. Jude watched in shock as they both moved their respective hands to their un-respective groins, and began to squeeze and caress, just as Tina’s mouth engulfed Jude’s anxious cock. The juxtaposition of what he was seeing and what he was feeling was too much, and Jude suddenly felt as though he needed to defend himself, rather than give in. He mounted resistance against his wet dream come true, partly because his wet dreams never included John-the-Once-Owner. He gently pushed Tina’s head away from him and squirmed away from her warm body.

  Jude suddenly felt the need to speak.

  “Um . . .,” he began.

  It was very difficult to know exactly what to say at this point. He recalled some of the ghastly scenes in a French play he’d once seen in a high school class, in which three people, two women and one man, were condemned to stay for eternity in a room together. The man was repelled by one of the women, a lesbian, and attracted to the other, but the lesbian, as it turned out, went both ways, or seemed to. This version of hell was one in which characters couldn’t ever close their eyes, leave the room, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. They were compelled to live, to endure, to experience each moment without reprieve, even though each moment was filled with the possibility of pleasure and torture, the torture of unfulfillable pleasure and the pleasure of possible pleasure, impeded by the torture of another, or one of the others.

  “Behind Closed Doors!” Jude thought to himself as the Cadillac roared down the highway in Long Island towards some unknown destination. He felt Tina’s tiny hand once again upon his sex that, despite all remonstrations, was still bursting for her touch. He hesitated, but then saw John’s sordid smile, and, by extension, the scene that was surely unfolding in the back seat.

  There are only so many captains that can be guiding a single ship at any given moment, and even as Jude felt Tina’s warm breath moving downwards once again towards his begging midriff, and even as his hands almost inadvertently touched her soft hair as she moved downwards towards him, he felt a countervailing desire to take wing and fly from this open roof to the safety of his own sane solitude.

  Always deferential towards John, the one-time owner of the illustrious Fabergé Restaurant, Jude cautiously asked John-the-Driver to stop the car. “Please, I need to get off.”

  The pun was not lost on John.

  “It’s okay,” said John. “She likes you.” It was a kind of command, of the type offered by bosses accustomed to giving, and not receiving, directions. “It’s okay.”

  It was as though the ice-cold water that he was spraying upon his psyche was now leaking out and providing the requisite cold shower to forestall any further consequences to this dubious voyage. Indicating, but not necessarily acting upon, a desire to distance himself from soft, gentle, untouchable, and surprisingly warm Tina, Jude leaned toward the door and placed his hand upon the chrome handle.

  “Please, can you slow down?”

  John released the pressure on the gas, and even if it wasn’t quite clear whether he actually planned to stop the car, Jude tugged at the door handle, and the massive door opened up. Tina seemed uncertain as to which direction to go, and what to hold on to, as the imminent flight of Jude became manifest. In the end, she leaned forward, steadied her grip by grasping dials upon the dashboard, and, as Jude turned towards her for one last look into her hungry, black eyes, echoed in the distance by the piercing blue-grey gaze of John, he leaped out of the car.

  Luckily, given the rather unsafe velocity of the vehicle he had just abandoned, Jude was able to benefit from a recent refusal on the part of Nassau County to give in to requests—mostly from maids, butlers, and chauffeurs, and not from taxpaying homeowners—that sidewalks be laid in the place of the grassy ditches that lined the streets of Long Island’s highway. For this reason, and probably this reason alone, Jude was able to leap from Tina’s tempting grasp and land, unscathed, upon the hard reality of undesired lust and yet another side of the road.

  “Right,” thought Jude as he watched the Cadillac disappear. He also caught one final glance around from Tina, and what seemed unmistakably to be the eyes of John that from this distance filled the rearview mirror, as though the Cadillac quite literally had eyes in the back of its head.

  Jude still felt vaguely aroused, but also in a state of pleasurable shock. “This,” he thought, “has to be part of my novel.” The American Dream, a beautiful convertible Cadillac, an even more beautiful woman, a powerful man who has more powerful weaknesses than he would ever show, a road trip towards, well, who knows what. Busted eggs. “Not to mention whatever it was that was going on in the back seat!” he mused with a grin.

  Jude’s mind suddenly turned pragmatic, as he realized that he was even further from wherever it was that he’d left his truck, and, possibly worse still, he didn’t even have the work order for the apartment job for which he was now undoubtedly already late. This little job was supposed to be the coming days meal ticket, the transition as he tried to figure out how the fuck to get back to his soon-overdue egg manuscript. Ever since the Fabergé Restaurant collapsed, literally, and all of the aristocrats were cast out into the Manhattan nighttime, Jude had struggled to recover. He had at times wondered what happened to the cast of characters in the restaurant that he’d come to know so well; he had never imagined that the two pillars of Fabergé Restaurant were spending their days careening around in a Cadillac!

  Suddenly struck by the enormity of his current situation, Jude grinned to himself, then stood up straight, stuck out his chin, filled his lungs with a large gulp of Long Island air, and shouted out to the entire world, with a massive grin on his face: “Christ, it’s still early afternoon, and I’ve had a world of woe already! What the hell do they do around here at night?”

  Chapter 3

  It’s probably not a bad idea to pay attention to signs. Had the Greeks heeded the many illfated omens that they themselves observed prior to and in the course of the Trojan War, we might all still be eating healthy Mediterranean diets. Instead, we’re treated to massive doses of hormone-infested animal products, taste-manipulated processed foods, and forcefed animals that have been shaped into vaguely recognizable delicacies. Instead of deriving our foods from picturesque Mediterranean-style gardens, we are encouraged to gorge ourselves on facsimiles of food, formed like Disney-inspired facsimiles of real products, and then manufactured inside of weird steel and glass buildings in the industrial suburbs of Cleveland.

  It did not have to be so. Something clearly went wrong along the way, and it may very well be related to our inability to read signs properly.

  History is replete with signs that adequate observation may be rather valuable. The unmistakable Carl Jung claims to have foreseen through his dreams the calamity that was World War I, and the veritable plethora of miscues leading up to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria would suggest that fate itself didn’t want the plan to fail, and so the war’s catalyzing moment found success in the most unlikely of alleyways. Franz Ferdinand had come to Bosnia in 1914 in order to make an inspection of the Austro-Hungarian troops stationed there. Their presence angered the Serbian freedom fighter group known as the Black Hand, which was part of
a movement seeking the independence of Slavic people from Austro-Hungarian rule. Having attempted the assassination of other Austro-Hungarian officials, seven members of the group seized this opportunity and conspired to kill the archduke during his visit to Sarajevo.

  This particular plan was hatched in another restaurant, called Le Bibent, Argot for “bien boire,” to “drink well.” Located on the central square of Toulouse, in the south west of France, it featured (and still to this day serves) specialties that make it appropriate for the hatching of plans. Its most celebrated eggy entrée is the Œuf parfait en cocotte, cuisiné façon Basquaise, mouillettes au Noir de Bigorre, served with wine and followed-up with a shot of café crème. Other choices include the Œufs mimosa de «Mamie Constant», the Œuf mollet roulé à la mie de pain, Etuvée de poivrons doux et lardons croustillants. And among the appetizers is the unmistakable Œuf mimosa et ventrèche de thon. For dessert? Why not: the egg-white-based Ile flottante, caramel à la fleur de sel, or, better still, the enigmatic flan aux Œuf à la vanille, subtitled les Œufs, “comme autrefois.”

  We’ll never know if Gavrilo Princip, one of the instigators of World War I, ate any eggy dishes at Le Bibent, or if “comme autrefois” is a code for the fact that he did; what we do know is that on June 28, 1914, members of the Black Hand were stationed on the procession’s route, and when the cars containing the archduke and his wife passed by, two of the presumed assassins threw their bombs—but missed. Well, to be fair, they didn’t really miss, since they did manage to injure twenty people, but they did miss their actual target.

  The driver of the car realized that there may be a bit of danger in the vicinity, and so managed to veer from the scene. Miraculously, he managed to pass three other assassins who had been posted at key points along the route, but none of them could act quickly enough to carry out their orders. Gavrilo Princip, presumably still basking in the glow of his wonderful meal at Le Bibent, figured that the whole plan had gone to hell, and may, for all we know, have been planning his return reservations in that isle of eggy delights.

  Instead, however, the driver of the car made a detour so that the archduke could visit the twenty wounded victims in a nearby hospital, but he got lost and, amazingly, landed up on the road upon which Princip was walking, proving the fact that no matter how great the coincidence that Jude should encounter John and Tina in Long Island, there are even greater, and possibly more significant happenstances in the litterbox of history.

  The car, knowledgeable perhaps of the need to fulfill the archduke’s somber fate, managed to break down right beside the would-be assassin, who dutifully fired two shots from a rather questionable firearm. The firearm, also in apparent cahoots with destiny, managed to fire two bullets: the first one burst the jugular vein of the archduke, and the second pierced the heart of his poor wife, Sofia. Both died, presumably, instantly.

  That first hunk of lead, now referred to rather infamously as the ‘bullet that started World War I,’ is now on display in the Konopiště Castle, near the town of Benešov, in the Czech Republic. On its account, many have claimed Gavrilo Princip as the most important person of the twentieth century. The plan that was hatched in Toulouse led to his shot, the shot found its target, and the target’s death dutifully set off a chain reaction that led to the deaths of millions of people, most of them innocent civilians, and paved the way for the horrendous atrocities of both World Wars.

  None of the preceding facts suggest that we ought to be honoring Princip, or even the eggy dishes he may have eaten in Toulouse. What we should be honoring instead is, of course, chance.

  Chapter 4

  As chance would have it, on the very day that Jude’s Crackerbox had broken down and John’s otherwise culinary life was being played out inside of the yolk of a shiny, red Cadillac, Ted and a group of workers were in a large Manhattan warehouse, overseeing the crating of fruits, counterfeit of course, sown over the past two months.

  The presses that were churning out near-perfect replicas of twenty and fifty dollar bills weren’t high-tech, but they did the job admirably well—so well, in fact, that a plan that seemed to have as much chance of succeeding as Princip’s, was indeed succeeding, to the tune of 3.2 billion dollars—and counting. This phenomenal sum towered before the bare eyes of Ted, Steve, and Tom, who had gathered on this Friday afternoon to admire what a couple of billion (real) dollars, and a whole lot of undocumented Chinese workers, were able to produce. Thousands and thousands of wooden crates filled with uncut US currency transformed an otherwise nondescript warehouse into a city of rectangular wooden edifices.

  How many fifty-dollar bills can be contained in a 4 by 8 by 4 plywood box? That is, how many single bills can be contained in 128 square feet of space? If there are 7,000 similarly sized boxes, and each contains the same number of bills, how many bills are in those boxes? And if, for arguments sake, the individual bills are worth $50, how much money is that? That is, how many $50 bills can be held in 896,000 square feet of space?

  This was the question that the three friends were pondering together, in awe and mutual admiration, when Ted’s cellphone rang.

  “Yup?” Most calls on that phone of late were from environmental groups with which Ted worked closely, and so he was informal, and his voice was kind.

  “Um, hello?” The voice on the other end sounded far away, and rather lost in background noise.

  Ted’s number was private, and screened, so his first impulse was to just hang up; instead, and by chance, he waited patiently on the line for a response.

  “Hello? Sir? I’m sorry, um, Ted. Um, Ted? This is Jude. Jude, from the restaurant.” Pause. “From Fabergé Restaurant, the broken egg. Downtown.”

  “God, I am such an idiot,” thought Jude.

  “Jude! Lifesaving Jude! How are you, my friend?” Ted’s eyes twinkled.

  Tom and Steve exhibited some surprise at Ted’s demeanor in regards to this kid, about whom they’d heard in the context of Ted’s stories about the collapse of Fabergé Restaurant. Ted raised his finger, indicating that he’d be a few moments. His two friends glanced at each other, then back to him.

  “Great! Well, actually, not so great. I’m really, really sorry to call you like this.”

  “How else are you going to call me?” quipped Ted.

  “Um, well, you know what I mean. I mean, well, sorry to call you like this, like out of the blue.”

  “It’s okay, what’s up, Jude?”

  “I, I need help. I’m so sorry.” Jude was worried about calling a rich friend in need of something, since he assumed, rightly, that this was one of the only reasons that friends call rich friends.

  “What do you need, Jude? You helped me out of that scrambled cauldron, remember? I told you, call me if you ever need anything!”

  Jude relaxed. “I do need something, and I swear, I don’t know who else to call. And it all involves John, you know, that John guy who owned Fabergé Restaurant. And even Tina! And—”

  “Jude?”

  “Sorry. My truck broke down. I’m on Long Island. I got a lift from John. He passed by me on the road and picked me up.”

  “John? Did he take you home?” Ted turned towards his friends, his eyebrows raised.

  “This conversation is starting to drag on rather longer than it needs to,” mumbled Steve to Tom, and there was a whole lot of work to do.

  “No, um, it was like a sex car, a—,” blurted Jude.

  “A sex car?” Ted’s eyes lit up, and Tom began to squeal with laughter.

  “Shhhhhh!” indicated Ted, barely able to control himself.

  “Ted?”

  “No, it’s okay, Jude. I’m in a bar. Rather noisy here.”

  “I’m really sorry, it was so bizarre. I got them to drop me off and now my truck is on the side of the highway, and so am I. But we’re not together.” He realized that he was making no sense whatsoever.

  “Are you okay, Jude?”

  “I just need your help. I swear, I’m so sorry, I don’t h
ave any money, and my truck is broken down, and I don’t even know where I am.”

  “Okay, listen, Jude. Call AAA, or a garage, or something, whatever your moving guys do when your truck is broken. Have them fix it, and then call me with the bill, I’ll pay for it. Do you have enough money for a taxi?”

  “Yes, I can get, um, somewhere. I’m on the 107, somewhere past Brockville.”

  Ted paused and then mouthed something to his two friends. They came closer.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Ted?” asked Steve. Tom, as though aware of Ted’s meaning, looked more curious.

  Ted whispered into the din, and Tom leaned his ear towards Ted to hear him. “He can do it for you. What you were saying.”

  Tom backed away and lifted his shoulders. Steve just shook his head.

  “Jude, listen to me. Call the tow truck, arrange to fix your truck. Then take a cab to, um, do you know the Stardust Diner? It’s a couple of blocks west of Radio City, on Broadway. Meet me there.” Ted looked at his watch. “I’ll be there in an hour, that should give you enough time.”

  “I know it, yes, I have been there. Christ, thank you, Ted!”

  “Watch out for Christ, Jude!” Ted smiled broadly. “See you soon.”

  Chapter 5

  “What the fuck do you mean, this is a sign? This is a pain in the ass, Ted. We still have to figure out—”

  “Tom, it’s fine. We will make the public statement. Harrison’s Shipping is on board. They have enough trucks. We have all this,” Ted motioned towards the huge crates, “and it’ll be cut by next week. It’s fine. But if you still want to go back to Nashville, this guy can bring you there. He’s a mover!”