Hatched

by Robert F. Barsky

  This move, which had brought Steve’s family to Texas, was initially traumatic, augmented by the fact that Steve’s father only felt at home in India. But his stock grew into a veritable treasure trove, and the land that he’d been given as further enticement became invaluable, since it was said to sit on some of the most important oil reserves in Texas. And Steve, also the only grandson, inherited the entire lot when his father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. When Steve sold the land to move to NY, he received three hundred million dollars. This unexpected windfall led him to hold onto the oil stocks, which had multiplied in value so many times as to render him a billionaire four times over, probably five.

  That was but a brick in the wall. The real story, as for the TSP, was that Steve’s father, in order to make up for the vast number of business trips he had overseas to America and to Europe, began in his later years to bring his son with him, to both apprentice him in the business, and to make up for days and weeks and months of parenting that had been sacrificed to making a living. An offhand conversation with a family friend, who was introduced to him by his father on one of the trips they’d gone on together in Italy, had in fact generated the particulars of the idea and had unexpectedly yielded the possibility of carrying it out.

  In one of those awkward moments that occur between adults, when a child is projected into a conversational mix in which he or she doesn’t naturally fit, Steve had volunteered his intense obsession with bicycles. His father’s friend, Luigi Carmichael, the son of a notable British father and a glamorous Italian mother, clung to this little piece of information to make conversation, and this interaction intensified when Steve’s father unexpectedly left the room for a few minutes, to pee, and left Luigi and Steve alone together. Luigi, as it turned out, was himself not so much a rider of bicycles, as a connoisseur of them. His profession was to print, and this was why his father worked with him, and a large printing order was the subject that led to the business trip in the first place. But Luigi’s real obsession was machined perfection.

  “There are few consumer goods as carefully machined as Italian bicycles,” Luigi had told Steve. “It’s a technology so precise as to produce track times for racing bicycles that every year exceed existing mathematical formulas predicting possible outcomes.”

  “Because of weight.” Young Steve uttered this with the seriousness that characterized everything that he did, and with the knowledge of his devotion to the sport of riding.

  “Weight, yes.” Luigi smiled with great admiration. He would have loved to have a son, particularly one who seemed so mechanically inclined as this boy—Steve.

  “Weight,” insisted Luigi with a smile, “until bicycles are made of air. Until then, they can always be made lighter.”

  “And faster!” Steve was gaining confidence with this man who shared his love for the sleek, clean, metallic, precise world of technology and engineering. “E-MC squared.”

  “Faster, Steve, yes. Faster. Less M, a whole lot less E!”

  Luigi winked at Steve, and Steve did his best to wink back, producing a kind of squint and a few blinks. They were part of the secret society of those who actually understand something about how things work, a welcome change in a society of people who consume without knowledge of the provenance or the workings of the products they possess.

  On the basis of this conversation, Steve got himself invited to Luigi’s factory, in Monza, near Milano. The purpose was, for him, to see Luigi’s incredible collection of vintage Italian bicycles. But in addition, Luigi also showed him his printing facilities, in which he produced the molds that were used to create stamped numbers, used in a range of precision instruments and, moreover, in the production of currency. As it turned out, in the past years Luigi had been awarded, for the first time ever for a non-American, the contract to create the stamps used to imprint dollar bills with sequence numbers. This had become a special and very lucrative area of work, one that paid for his bicycle collection, his magnificent home in Milano, and a substantial portion of his country residence, near Urbino.

  The precision required for the stamps that make the ten numbers on each bill was famously intense, and only two factories in the world produced stamps suitable for the task, one in Germany, that handled most European currencies in the period leading up to the production of the euro, and Luigi’s, in Italy, that provided the number stamps for the dollar, and for a number of Asian currencies. Steve was enthralled, and, normally shy and withdrawn, he consumed this environment of lathes and presses and delicate stamping devices with the lust of a technology devotee.

  After a profound bonding session between this unlikely couple, centered on Steve’s surprising knowledge of the intricacies of bicycles, in particular derailleurs, and his concomitantly interesting observations about precision gearing and even possible obstacles to producing clean type, Luigi rewarded Steve with a gift of ten golden, titanium-tipped stamps, the prototype that he had just developed, in multiple copies, for the dollar. He would eventually make hundreds of them, since the tips would wear out and have to be replaced, even in spite of the titanium. And so, just like Einstein might have handed out formulas scribbled on pieces of scrap paper for lovers and friends, formulas that were the tangible product of a remarkable man, Luigi simply gave one of the stamping sets to Steve, an indication of the kinds of work Luigi was most proud, and a sign of the bond they’d created that day.

  Steve had coveted this strange gift and spent untold hours focusing his eyes upon the tiny numbers that were promised by the titanium molds that topped the perfectly round, golden wheel that would be mounted on a lathe-like shaft, for the imprinting of those crucial numbers, delicately impressed into the flesh of the cotton-fiber paper. This impression was the first line of defense against counterfeiting, the second being the quality of the number left behind, a quality tied as well to the tips that were the object of Steve’s careful study in the coming years. And it was on account of this little set of golden printing wheels that Steve had suggested forging money during one of the many conversations that Ted, Tom, and he had about how to destroy American capitalism to each of their respective ends. And his ownership of what turned out to be the most difficult to replicate part of the entire process, catalyzed Ted’s stimulus plan. And here they were, all these years later, sitting on the precipice of actualizing it.

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take to make a difference,” continued Steve. “We have to plan on just running the fucking presses until the stamps start wearing down, and I don’t even know what that means. We’re going to need a small army of technicians, Tom, because this whole thing only makes sense if we can do it quickly. And we’ll need to start with the set that I have and hope that we can build a replica of it by the time we need to replace the last one on the presses. We lose the moment they put the phase-out into operation. So with hundreds, say, we’ll need ten billion of them. If it’s twenties, we need fifty billion bills.”

  Tom leaned back in the chair and observed the perfect egg-like interior of Fabergé Restaurant. “Fifty billion bills? Fifty billion?”

  “Yup.”

  Tom definitely needed to get laid. “Fifty billion bills to make a trillion!” He enjoyed the sound of his own voice articulating those words. “Fuck that, Steve. Fifty billion bills would make five trillion if we stick to hundreds.”

  Steve looked around, feigning concern that someone was listening, even though it was clear that they were on their little island inside of the great Fabergé Restaurant egg. But Tom looked so agitated, that he might have drawn attention to himself, and that was exactly what they didn’t need.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Steve. Five trillion.” He looked around him, in awe of his very thought process. Tom looked around the restaurant, as though for the first time. “This place is shaped like a fucking egg, Steve. A fucking egg.”

  “Good place to get hatched.” It was a rare, comical utterance from ever-serious Steve.

  As Tom tried to f
igure out the source of Steve’s newfound sign of life, Elizabeth returned to the table.

  “Can I get you two something else? We have ostrich egg soufflé with roe. It’s divine.” She motioned forward somewhat, pressing her chest in the direction of their faces. It worked.

  “For dessert?” asked Tom, looking exactly where he was supposed to look.

  “The sweetness of the soufflé brings out the warm, sugary flavors of the salmon egg. It’s a remarkable experience,” said Elizabeth, pouting her lips.

  “I’m sure it is,” said Tom, looking up to her face. She smiled, showing a perfect row of teeth, perfect in the way that American girls could be perfect in that realm, more perfect than Europeans, thought Tom.

  “I assure you,” Elizabeth uttered the words like a commandment.

  She was very pretty, in a country-girl kind of way, thought Tom. His scrotum tingled again. Was it the TSP? The fifty billion? Or was it her?

  “It really is delicious.” She implored the two of them, cautiously. “I just tried it before my shift.” That usually worked, since so many men wanted to share in whatever it was Elizabeth happened to be doing. Preferably in the nude.

  Not being privy to her thought process, Steve and Tom just contemplated her words and her offer. “It’s hard to imagine that she’s from the city,” thought Tom himself, “but she sounds the part. Pennsylvania perhaps?”

  “I’ll pass,” said Steve.

  “Pass it is. Steve, I’ve got to go, where the fuck is Ted?”

  They both looked around at an ever-fuller restaurant, but the chair waiting for Ted’s arrival was filled with his absence. Tom prepared to leave.

  “Hold on,” said Tom. “If you are with me, then we do this now. Call Ted. Where are we going to meet?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Steve. “How about here?”

  “Right. Right. And Ted, I’ll call Ted,” said Tom.

  They fell silent, feeling the weight of the moment.

  Elizabeth dutifully brought the bill, and Tom smirked at Steve as he peeled five new $100 bills from his wallet and deposited them on the table. Steve knew that there was at least one too many in that pile, but he also knew that Tom liked the server. Tom always liked waitresses, and every other girl who was forced, for whatever reason, to stand in his presence. And Tom was clearly relishing in their little private joke. Peeling hundred dollar bills from a stack that was hatched in Fabergé Restaurant. Fitting. And enjoyable. Indeed, Tom and Steve both enjoyed the wealth they’d received and built up, forged in very different fashions. But Tom seemed to enjoy it for that reason alone, making Steve realize that Tom could probably have been happy with a very meager salary if properly directed towards pretty women. The dry cleaner woman, the bank teller woman, the bartender woman, the automobile mechanic woman, every woman is a captive audience when you go to them for a service, and that, it seemed, was all that Tom needed to keep him happy. It was his way to their hearts, and their hearts were the conduits to their warm bodies.

  “Let’s build a better planet!” Tom and Steve, now standing and ready for departure, turned towards the sound of the familiar voice. Tina was stationed for them at the door, ready to see Steve off with a warm smile directed to stab at his formality, but instead she turned to greet a smiling, bearded man, the same one who had been in the bar earlier that evening with that young skater boy.

  “Welcome to Fabergé Restaurant,” she paused. “Welcome back to Fabergé Restaurant!”

  “Thanks!” Ted halted his movement towards his two friends in order to properly greet this gorgeous woman, who looked in every way like a Japanese doll. Tom and Steve approached him.

  “Don’t let him in,” ordered Tom. Tina smiled and then looked over at Steve, forgetting whatever it was she had just been told.

  “Where the fuck were you? We’ve had two bottles of port and half a kilo of caviar,” said Tom, matter-of-factly.

  “Stand aside,” Ted continued his rapport with Tina. “The Oriental man over there is about to throw up.” It was one of those moments when the inappropriateness of previous conversations snuck into the current world and sounded insane. Particularly since Tina was clearly of “Oriental” heritage.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Steve, presumably transported back to those bitch-fests of long ago. “He’s Jewish and wouldn’t know the Orient from . . .” Steve paused too long. Rabid insults he could do, but in the face of this young, beautiful woman, he feared his own words.

  “From what, Steve? Are you insulting this beautiful woman?”

  It was Tina’s time to chime in. “Would you gentlemen like a table?”

  This sounded a little odd since they’d just left theirs, but it did provide a solution to the conundrum of coming and going.

  “A drink perhaps?” she continued. This seemed an excellent solution, rather than just returning to the table, now being cleared; they could just sit at the bar.

  “I was just here,” declared Ted, moving towards the bar. “It’s perfect. Let’s go, I want to not build a better planet!” They moved back towards the bar, choosing an end where they could be seated and all face each other. Tina stayed back for a moment and observed them settling in.

  “So where the fuck were you, an IBM staff party?” asked Tom.

  “You talking about my dick again, Tom?” asked Ted, reaching for his groin. He was dressed as he’d been earlier that day when he’d met the skater kid, Jude, but he looked disheveled, worn out, messy.

  “Were you at the Depletion Diary Event?” Steve asked, knowingly. This event had been widely advertised, and aimed to bring people to an awareness of the narrative of nature’s destruction by providing her with a kind of diary, in which each entry reminded the reader of Earth’s depleting resources.

  “Anything like Anaïs Nin’s diaries?” Tom had shared a class in college called “Henry Miller’s Milieus,” and they’d all landed up reading passages from her diaries.

  “More like building a better planet,” said Ted, rather seriously. “Like building a planet. Like,” he looked at Steve, “meeting the natives and converting them. You know, making them better.” The atmosphere, despite the growing stir of voices around them, as the number of tables occupied by Wall Street and others grew, increased. Ted reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded packet of papers. They were illustrated with graphs, interspersed with green-colored text.

  “Making them better as in killing them?” asked Steve, rhetorically. Ted looked up at his two roommates.

  “It’s good to see you guys!” his eyes sparkled, “Steve! Tom! Great to see you!” He looked calm, he looked to be in very familiar company, as, indeed, he was. He turned around. “Where did our goddess get to?” Tina was almost directly behind him but, unfortunately for him, slightly out of his range of vision.

  “Can I serve you gentlemen something?” It was as though she’d removed her invisible cape and was now beside them, at their beck and call. “I was just about to get your server.” Tom and Steve looked at one another, knowingly.

  Ted looked around, expecting to find Robbie, who had mysteriously abandoned his post. “I’ll get it for you,” said Tina, recognizing the question.

  “In that case, I’ll have what you’re having!” Tina had heard that one before.

  “It will be your choice this time,” she said, in a well-rehearsed and crowd-pleasing line.

  Tom smiled. He wanted to say something about what Ted and Tina liked to have when they first wake up, but then thought better of it. He had already slept with two of Ted’s former lovers, and didn’t want to rekindle the sounds of him having sex with them, in the dormitory, to the admiration of all those in earshot of her moaning and yelling. This was yet another of the running jokes of the three of them, that both girls had been dead silent in the months they had dated and slept with Ted, but had turned into major screamers when in the arms of Tom.

  “What were you guys drinking?” asked Ted. “It seems to have affected Steve’s complexion, but I
’m willing to try it!” This was as politically correct as it was going to get, and it was in pure deference to Tina.

  “Port,” replied Tina for both of them.

  “A bottle then!” Trust Ted to up the ante. That bottle was probably worth $1,000.

  “If he has another glass, he will embarrass Tina,” said Tom. “And I can’t stay very long.”

  “Faggots,” said Ted. “Three glasses then. And do you have—”

  “Eggs?” asked Tom.

  “Do you have any eggs here?” asked Ted.

  “I’ll bring you a menu,” said Tina, and thought it best to absolve herself of the conversation before any more port was consumed. She hoped that Steve might linger, might speak with her at some point, and she didn’t want him to enter the state that the three of them seemed to fear, with reason.

  By the time Tina arrived with the menu, the three men were so lost in conversation that they barely acknowledged her. She silently placed them between Ted and Steve and melted into the background, as details of what sounded like a major investment were discussed. Tina was used to such dealings and imagined that more important transactions were undertaken at these tables than at any other boardroom in America.

  Surprisingly, it was Ted who seemed to be leading the conversation, and Tom and Steve, previously garrulous, had turned quiet. It may have been the port, or the eggs, but more likely, it was that the discussion had turned to the other side of the stimulus project: Ted’s NTD.