Hatched

by Robert F. Barsky

  “Wow,” thought Jude, “there’s more here than I bargained for.” He turned the page of the article on mythology and symbolism of the egg and found more nuggets.

  Romans believed that the ingestion of eggs increased fertility. Jude looked around, caught sight of Liz, the unbuttoned and big-breasted server whose hair cascaded downwards in the direction of the male gaze. “I get that!” he said to himself, almost audible, and then chuckled to himself.

  He looked back at his notes and double underlined fertility. This seemed an important point, which helped explain the popularity of this place. “But then,” he thought, “there’s fertility and potency, not the same thing.” He stared up into space and then around him. As he looked onto guests, and thought back to others he’d seen in this place, he thought of the many men, and women, who were here with lovers and who would probably bow-out of the former (fertility) in favor of the latter (potency). Interesting. He wrote that down. He read on.

  Both Romans and Greeks believed that eggs nourished people in the afterlife, and so bodies were buried with eggs alongside them, and eggs were placed inside of tombs. By now Jude’s writing was almost indecipherable, and his right hand was slowly becoming blackened by drips of ink. He even had a stain of black ink on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Where the fuck is this coming from?” he asked, rhetorically, to himself.

  He laid his Montblanc scepter down, and reached into the chest pocket of his jean jacket for a meager, but functional, replacement, and then kept reading in search of inspiration and meaning. He was focused, intent, in the zone, when suddenly: “I brought you something!”

  He almost jumped out of his skin, even despite the softness of the voice and the predictability of his having been addressed in this public space.

  It was Tina. She stood very close to him, and in all of her weightless, scentless, subdued presence placed a tiny, blue egg upon the white tablecloth before him, right beside the notebook in which he was note taking.

  “We had this in the kitchen, I thought you’d like it.”

  Jude stared into her light-blue eyes, and then down to the fragile gift she had laid before him. It was beautiful, and strangely familiar. Jude was shocked by her having initiated this conversation, and stirred his memory to reward her with some appreciation for her kindness.

  “It’s a robin egg?” he inquired, knowingly.

  “Good choice,” she replied, showing her impeccably aligned teeth beneath her, well, faultlessly perfect lips. She seemed warmer to Jude tonight, somehow more human. He had become accustomed to such unemotional relations with her, and he wanted to prolong this surprising moment.

  “I am writing about eggs,” he revealed. He didn’t realize how obvious this was, and said it like a kind of dramatic declaration.

  “Okay,” she uttered, as though giving him permission. “I somehow suspected as much.”

  Jude ignored the jab, in favor of prolonged dialogue. “All kinds of eggs, and their histories.”

  She could think of nothing to reply. If she told him that this was in fact why she’d brought the robin egg to him, she’d undermine the innocent laying-bare in which Jude was so genuinely engaged. She just looked at him, softly. The restaurant had begun to hum with conversation, but it was as though they were the only ones there. “Your eyes are exactly the same color as the robin egg!” Jude thought to himself. That was something to contemplate, and they both seemed to be doing as much, separately and together.

  Jude suddenly felt uncomfortable in the silence. He remembered her few words to him. That he was writing about eggs must have been kind of obvious, he suddenly thought, but then remembered something from his readings for the essay he was researching. The situation may yet be salvaged.

  “I read somewhere that the bluer the eggs, the more, um . . .” He struggled to remember some tidbit of knowledge from the depths of his memory, and he looked down at the little egg on the linen tablecloth as though looking for the answer in the object. She hoped that he wasn’t expecting her to fill in the blank.

  “Oh yes!” He smiled at her, and she grew slightly animated as he did so. This, he thought, is my only chance. She looked at him quizzically. “Healthier female robins lay brighter blue eggs!” he blurted out, as though this was a profound revelation that could possibly kick-start her sentience. “And the bluer the egg, the more the male robins pay attention to the baby!”

  He seemed satisfied by his profundity, but then couldn’t for his life recall how this correlation had been illustrated in whatever bloody article he’d read about robins, and he hoped she wouldn’t ask.

  She didn’t.

  He also hoped that she wasn’t reading his thoughts, because it was all he could do to not make the very inappropriate link between the egg and the color of her eyes. Suddenly distracted by the appearance of a guest at the entranceway to Fabergé Restaurant, she was about to leave, when Jude recalled the unfamiliar bulge created by his wad of small bills.

  “Can I see the menu, please?”

  Tina looked at him, genuinely surprised.

  “Of course,” she said, and turned away.

  “Thank you!” he almost called out, as though she was a half mile away already. “And thank you, for the egg. I’m really grateful, it’ll inspire me.”

  “Careful, though, it’s not edible,” replied Tina, and then seemed to float away, attaining a slight elevation from the earth on those tiny, sculpted legs, apparent beneath the nearly mini-skirt she wore that evening.

  Jude watched her recede from his immediate parameter, and then looked back down at the turquoise-blue egg—quizzically. He then realized that it matched not only her eyes, but also the color of her skirt, and he instinctively raised his head to make a mental comparison between the pastel hues that danced in his mind’s eye. Virtually identical.

  “How fitting!”

  He watched her approach the door to Fabergé Restaurant, and then, recalling his mission, he looked back at his book.

  The Finnish book known as Kalevala tells the story of Ilmatar, who was impregnated by an eagle, producing six cosmic eggs and one egg made of iron.

  “Jeez,” muttered Jude, and read on.

  The eagle sat on those eggs, but was also sitting on Ilmatar, and when she moved, all the eggs rolled into the sea, where the shells broke, creating a churning mass that divided heaven from earth. Jude paused for a moment, for this seemed to be of momentous importance.

  One of the yolks became the sun, another the moon. The specks of eggshells created the stars, and the iron egg turned into a thundercloud.

  Jude looked down at the egg and was suddenly seized by the thought that he’d better protect it. Who knows what might happen when eggs crack? This thought led him to lean back in his comfortable chair and contemplate the celestial horizons of Fabergé Restaurant. He hadn’t ever noticed before that there were cracks all over the ovular-shaped restaurant, some very pronounced but, as he looked more carefully into the dimly lit distance, a plethora of others as well. Indeed, almost every area of the canted roof and walls that surrounded him were cracked. Had they always been like this? He decided that he’d simply not paid attention, since his focus had either been upon the often blank pages before him, or upon the sweet pleats in the fabric that subtly gestured towards the bodies of Jessica, Tina, and Elizabeth.

  These Fabergé Restaurant creations had inspired rivers of cum upon his groin, his legs, and his feet, cum that had spurted, spilled, and then swirled down into the drain, where they were joined to oceans of warm water that bathed and warmed him, inside and out, in his masturbatory shower sessions. Egg whites could be used to seal, to coat, and to make surfaces glisten, and Jude suddenly wondered what the rivers of cum that poured from his body could do for the cracking and cracked Fabergé Restaurant.

  The warmth recedes, ever so slightly, the sound, an eerie whirr, the smell, like a world beyond this shell as it quivers, fractures, ruptures, falls to pieces . . .

  Chapter 24

/>   Nate had returned to the prep area, awaiting the onslaught. Now he needed someone to cajole, in advance of the impending craziness. He saw Russ on his hands and knees before the Hobart washing area, as though he was praying to cleanliness. The god of all things clean, John was manning the dishwashing machine, even though the first dish had yet to leave the kitchen on its quest to be dirty enough to be able to travel into the steamy warmth of John’s Hobart cleaning machine.

  “Russ!” called Nate, loudly enough for those young ears of his, and not loudly enough to capture John’s attention.

  Russ looked up from his scrubbing. “Are you calling me?”

  Nate felt somehow sickened at the thought of this kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, scrubbing a clean floor with what was surely pure bleach. The smell was overpowering, even from a distance of twenty feet. Nate stood there, as though beckoning, and so Russ rose to his feet in the kind of terrified obedience that the food and service industries invoke in people, and hurried over.

  “Yes?”

  “Russ, what are you doing?”

  Expecting to be told that he wasn’t working quickly enough, or that he’d missed some invisible spot on the floor, Russ seemed surprised, and then relieved by the question.

  “I . . .,” he began.

  Nate didn’t care to hear.

  “It’s a big night, Russ. It’s our stand against Wall Street! Against the Wall, and against all Walls! We will Wall-op the enemy! Walk over the bodies of Wall-Mart and Wall-Greens! Tear Down the Wall!” Russ looked dumbfounded. And then Nate picked up a spatula, put it to his lips, and began to belt out a song.

  “All in all it was just a brick in the wall.

  All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.”

  He stared, taunting, at Russ.

  “You! Yes, you! Stand still, laddy!”

  Russ smiled, and then with an effort of recollection, replied: “We don’t need no e-d-u-c-a-tion!”

  “You do.”

  Russ reverted to his semi-obedient, on-guard state.

  Nate wasn’t finished. He continued orating for the new guy’s listening and viewing pleasure with vigor that recalled those hours he spent in similar guises with Jessica, outside near the trash containers.

  “We have it in our power to begin the world anew! America shall make a stand, not for herself alone, but for the world!” Nate had a collection of slogans memorized, and in the days when he’d sit with Jessica outside near the garbage bins, he’d rattle them off, each in a different accent. This one was the easiest, having been uttered in Nate’s version of Thomas Paine’s Anglo-American accent, prevalent, he imagined, in the early days of the American Revolution.

  “Um,” stammered Russ.

  Nate indicated that he was by no means finished. Russ seemed stunned in the face of the coming onslaught.

  “Having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered,” Nate hesitated, as though straining to remember, and then continued in a bellowing voice: “We countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” He grinned. Russ looked to be in awe.

  “That’s Thomas Paine!” said Nate, waving his fist.

  Russ looked ready for flight, but Nate shouted at him, this time loudly enough to be heard throughout the kitchen.

  “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated and where reason is left free to combat it!”

  John looked up from the Hobart that he was examining, in preparation for the evening. He glared at Nate.

  “That was Thomas Jefferson,” whispered Nate into Russ’s ear, and then pushed him away and shouted in John’s direction.

  “THE DIRT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED, AND THE REASON IS THAT THE INSPECTOR WILL WANT YOU TO COMBAT IT!”

  Nate loved to chant revolutionary slogans for the pleasure of John, who, satisfied that he was simply initiating the new guy into the proper way of working at Fabergé Restaurant, smiled a rather wicked smile, and returned to his un-named task. It was an odd game of mimicry, imitation, revolution, and deceit.

  “What kind of a place is this?” thought Russ to himself.

  By now Jessica and Johnny were also looking towards this odd interaction, knowingly, while Boris seemed to be fiddling with the fly on his chef’s pants.

  Jessica uttered her mantra to herself, in order to prepare her for the evening: “It’s going to be a long night!” This time she was almost audible, and she’d uttered it directly in Nate’s direction.

  “À bas le roi!, À la guillotine!!” Nate said, as though replying.

  Russ had understood only one word, but seemed to get the point of it.

  “The lobsters?” he inquired innocently.

  Nate smirked and looked right into Russ’s eyes.

  “Oh, yes, lobsters, Russ. The lobsters!” he repeated, and then turned his gaze in the direction of Boris, who raised his head, oblivious to the goings-on in the kitchen, and then returned to the little problem he was having yanking the fabric of his chef’s jacket off the fly of his pants.

  “And capitalists, my boy, capitalists!” Nate continued, right back into Russ’s bewildered face. Then he paused, as though to clarify.

  “Capitalists, Russ! The people you’ll be serving tonight!” Nate looked down at the bleach-infested rag that Russ was donning in his right hand, and feigned scorn, to get the point across.

  “All of us, Russ!” He paused. “Do you know what Proudhon said after the failure of the revolutions in 1848?”

  Russ had no clue who Proudhon was, but looked enthralled, for Nate’s sake.

  “‘We have been beaten and humiliated . . . scattered, imprisoned, disarmed, and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands!’ That’s what he said! Little did he know how humiliated we’d become! And not just in Europe!” He stared at Russ. “Let go of your rag,” he commanded, motioning towards the rag. “Tonight, we begin by serving, but we will end by conquering!”

  Mystified, and sensing the glare of John’s regard burning into his auburn-colored locks, Russ dutifully tucked his rag into the apron strings of his kitchen uniform, turned around, and walked back towards the dishwashing station.

  As Russ marched, Nate sang, with his best French accent, the refrain from “La Marseilleise.”

  Aux armes, citoyens,

  Formez vos bataillons,

  Marchons, marchons !

  Qu’un sang impur

  Abreuve nos sillons !

  Jessica had to almost hold herself back from emotion, hearing those words, words that Nate had sung, and then translated, and then sung again, so many times for her.

  “Arm yourselves, citizens!” she recalled, carried away, emotional.

  Hearing her sweet, powerful, eternal voice singing those enchanted lyrics, Nate approached her, and with the certainty of yesteryear guided her to the walk-in, singing, and she, despite herself, joined him.

  And I joined him too:

  Arise children of the fatherland

  The day of glory has arrived

  Against us tyranny’s

  Bloody standard is raised

  Listen to the sound in the fields

  The howling of these fearsome soldiers

  They are coming into our midst

  To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

  “Arm yourselves, citizens!”

  Form your battalions

  March, march

  Let impure blood

  Water our furrows

  What do they want this horde of slaves

  Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?

  For whom these vile chains

  These long-prepared irons?

  Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage

  What methods must be taken?

  It is us they dare plan

  To return to
the old slavery!

  What! These foreign cohorts!

  They would make laws in our courts!

  What! These mercenary phalanxes

  Would cut down our warrior sons

  Good Lord! By chained hands

  Our brow would yield under the yoke

  The vile despots would have themselves be

  The masters of destiny

  Tremble, tyrants and traitors

  The shame of all good men

  Tremble! Your parricidal schemes

  Will receive their just reward

  Against you we are all soldiers

  If they fall, our young heroes

  France will bear new ones

  Ready to join the fight against you

  Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors

  Bear or hold back your blows

  Spare these sad victims

  That they regret taking up arms against us

  But not these bloody despots

  These accomplices of Bouillé

  All these tigers who pitilessly

  Ripped out their mothers’ wombs

  We too shall enlist

  When our elders’ time has come

  To add to the list of deeds

  Inscribed upon their tombs

  We are much less jealous of surviving them

  Than of sharing their coffins

  We shall have the sublime pride

  Of avenging or joining them

  Drive on sacred patriotism

  Support our avenging arms

  Liberty, cherished liberty

  Join the struggle with your defenders

  Under our flags, let victory

  Hurry to your manly tone

  So that in death your enemies

  See your triumph and our glory!

  Chapter 25

  The first orders of the night had begun to trickle into the Yolk, and the bustle of activity grew to the sound of the whirring industrial fans, now turned on full blast in anticipation of the busy evening and the long night. Johnny was already putting small, steel ramekins into his broiler ovens, most probably from the Renaissance section of the menu that included simple delights like oeufs heaumés, egg yolks in half the shell, set close to the fiery source of heat in the broiler oven. For the more adventurous, tonight there was also the Eyroun in Lenten, a counterfeit egg made by delicately placing strained almond milk solids back into a shell, and then roasting it back to solidity.