Hatched (24 page)

Jessica owed to Tommy her job at Fabergé Restaurant, because when she “interviewed” with John-the-Owner, an experience distinctly different from being forced into nearly ingesting the totality of Tommy’s long but strangely skewer-like and off-center penis in her mouth that horrible evening, she had “lost it” on the subject of the horrors of microwaved food. John, in no way seduced by Jessica’s womanly virtues—her remarkable warmth, her engulfing embrace, her soft skin, her even softer hair, her warm and quivering lips—
was
totally seduced by her obvious culinary talents and her even more obvious wisdom. And so he hired her, sight-seen, and had never looked back upon his decision with anything other than pure delight and self-congratulation. And Jessica had found a place to thrive, a nest in which she could foster growth, just as Nate had found a perch from which to watch the machinations of the overly moneyed and sow the eggs of their destruction.

It was 4:00 p.m. on this fateful evening in Fabergé Restaurant, and there was an ominous feeling, which everyone eventually confessed to have felt after the fact, that this shift marked both a termination and a rebirth. The lunchtime cleanup tasks were complete, and so Nicky was nearing the end of his shift, since he had been in early to prepare the day’s sauces and had already finished making up all of the sandwiches, soups, and creations-out-of-leftovers that the weekend lunches implied. The Yolk seemed strangely business-like, with all of its employees, like the carefully wrought details of the Fabergé egg, in their ordained places.

Nate was arranging each of the different eggs available on that night, from ostriches, chickens, quails, ducks, gulls, guinea fowls, pheasants, emus, and, of course, the many fish eggs and lobster eggs that made up such central portions of the Fabergé Restaurant menu. It was crucial to have the eggs properly arranged so that in the middle of the kinds of rushes that could occur when tables of six, eight, ten, or twelve people all ordered different versions of the egg universes Fabergé Restaurant had invented. In the most recent trend in chicken egg consumption, that involved Fabergé Restaurant offering a whole range of different colored chicken eggs, the kitchen had become even more chaotic. Everyone knew that one chicken egg could be substituted for another, without consequence in most cases, because most of the clients knew as little about eggs as they did about the fine champagnes they insisted upon choosing with such apparent, but in fact in actual absence of, knowledge or skill. But under John’s watchful gaze, which by this point in Faberge’s history was as much a product of each employee’s own imagination as related to his actual observation from the Hobart dishwashing station, such substitutions were rare, and even more rarely mentioned.

“Jess!” called Nate. Jessica felt the impending strain of this evening, in light of the pinch-hitting presence of Boris, and was secretly happy to walk over to Nate, who stood in a kind of familiar stance of ordering chaos, behind the steel prep table.

“Nate,” she replied, simply.

Nate looked at Jessica and wallowed in her warmth and her generosity, qualities that were reflected in every attribute of her being, from the gleeful curls of her long hair to the effervescence of her twinkling eyes; at the same time, however, he was brought down by the weight of his own sadness, crushed by the knowledge that their existence together was tied to this magnificent, fragile, Fabergé Restaurant. It was true, ruminated Nate. He had lost Jessica on that fateful evening in the frigid walk-in, lost her to the smashed shells, the shattered yolks, the jelly-fish-like viscous dripping of the yolks. He lost her forever in the very moments that followed his disrespecting her body, her warmth, and her friendship. But he hadn’t lost her entirely, he thought to himself, because she was close to him now, and, unlike in the depths of the long nights he now spent by himself, she responded, in the flesh, to his beckoning. As she approached him, he felt the very world of love and passion and lust and joy of eternity, and he simultaneously felt the cold, hard steel of the chef knife’s blade as it re-entered his self-inflicted wounds. He could barely breathe, and his heart, pumping wildly, felt like the engine of his demise as it drowned his innards in blood, blood that pumped for her, for Jessica.

“Hey, Jess!” Nate quickly finished, placing the last of his collection of eggs into the stainless steel containers that John had bought specifically for that purpose, not so long ago. As he did so, he felt the burgeoning of that dreaded sensation of nostalgia, and loss.

“Jess. It would have been completely different had Bakunin prevailed during the First International. I was reading last night, this guy named Rocker.”

“Rocker? You barely listen to anything harder than light jazz!”

“Very funny. And the Marseilleise, Jess, don’t forget!” She looked at him knowingly, since he had learned that anthem in several languages, including Polish and Greek, and had sung it to her in each of the versions he knew.

“Oh, and it’s not rocker, Jess. Rudolph Rocker, an anarchist, a German guy who left Germany in 1933.”

“Good idea.”

He didn’t seem to notice her reply, but was now in the Nate zone, a place of pent-up, self-indulgent, radical joy that could be released in her presence with impunity and pleasure.

“Jess, listen to me, Rudolf Rocker! He’s amazing. He wrote that Greece was such a success, and Rome such a disaster, because Greece had promoted diversity against Rome’s ‘all roads lead to Rome’ mentality, the sense that as long as things were done the same way, the right way, that they would lead to . . .”

Jessica had stopped listening only moments into the non-conversation. Nate, she knew, was recalling those evenings they had spent together, usually by the garbage bins, rethinking the world in all of its glories and its failings. She had loved him then, loved his disconnect from the world, loved his eloquence and his care for all those not himself, and she had imagined him warm and compassionate, generous and giving, in the way that those Americans felt who had latched onto Rosa Luxemburg and the Voltairine de Cleyre and yes, even the unattractive Emma Goldman and doctrinaire Leon Trotsky. But no more. In Nate’s presence, Jessica now wanted to laugh, because in the absence of laughter came tears, in the presence of tears came the recollection of all moments lost in a frigid non-world of preservation and destruction they called the ‘walk-in.’

Nate knew that he was wasting not only the breath that came from his pleading lungs, but the thoughts that had been born in his breast as he lay awake, the heavy Rudolph Rocker book opened up before him in his desperate hands, as he sought, with all of the universe’s futility, to imagine himself with her the night before.

Jessica acknowledged Nate’s existence and oration, and then, after listening to him for a few moments, she walked, quite literally, right past him to Johnny, who was carefully arranging sizzle pans for the evening’s onslaught. Nate continued for a few moments, speaking to the inner shell of Fabergé Restaurant, and then stopped, mid-sentence. Jessica had foregone her usual compassion, because she suddenly felt that she needed to speak to Johnny, this boy-man, this tall, handsome, and very kind person who seemed but a boy in a man’s frame, a man in a world he didn’t wish to see. She needed to be at work, and not in Nate’s fantasy land, and her own sense of camaraderie at work led her to a broad series of alliances, on different grounds, all through the many shifts she had spent at Fabergé Restaurant.

Johnny wasn’t a sexual being, and so was hardly a man, but he—in his quiet, his calm, his abstinence—said little, said nothing, exposed nothing, to a world of prying eyes. And so, Jessica appreciated Johnny. And she thought that he must come from another universe than her own, a place that could provide her with some solace in hard times.

She was not far off from the truth.

“Johnny . . .” Jessica looked around, suddenly. “Where is, um, what’s his name?”

Johnny said nothing.

Jessica looked at Johnny from below his gaze. She observed the world from around 5’ 3”, while he, a 6’ 2” lanky, strong boy, had eyes that conveniently looked out upon the Fabergé Restaurant world at the level of the large broiler that John had purchased for larger, of course, egg-filled birds.

“Boris.” It had come to her in a flash. “Johnny, where is Boris?” Jessica was so beautiful in her chef’s garb; she seemed to keep the world safe and warm and sensual, the world that was otherwise slaughtering nature’s creations for the sake of a pharmaceutical-spoiling taste bud that is the last vestige of a Fabergé Restaurant client: paid-up, but hopeless. Johnny still said nothing, and he threatened to remain mute to Jessica’s inquiries until her gaze, imploring in its quiet beauty, insisted.

“He has gone out,” mumbled the usually crisp and clearheaded Johnny. “For a smoke.”

Johnny had thought by responding to Jessica with short bursts of speech he would be saved from the ravages of leaking blood from his mouth, but he was wrong. Crimson tides sent waves unto the sides of his lips and created great red droplets that careened their way down his all-American, carefully carved face.

Jessica looked into his big, blue, watery, pain-and pleasure-filled eyes with despair and adoration. She knew that his entire mouth was filled with blood, and that he’d swallow it all only as a last resort. Seeing the rivulets of blood carving pathways down Johnny’s soft skin, Jessica hesitated to engage in any more “conversation” with him, and so she just stood knowingly before him, quietly giving him the special moments required to distribute the life force that he had secretly accumulated after what was undoubtedly a moment or two of blissful pain.

“John is serving the Taster’s Menu tonight,” she opened.

Johnny looked at her, calmly, and then looked more animated, as though the life-giving blood was kicking in. Jessica watched him, finally seeing the telltale rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. He had swallowed.

“Okay.” He really was matter-of-fact, even when his mouth wasn’t full of blood.

“I’ll help out tonight,” she continued, as though oblivious to Johnny’s antics. “I don’t think that Boris has worked with most of it, but we’re probably going to go through half a crate of lobsters anyway, and even if he just sticks to them,” a strange image, she thought. “We should be okay, Johnny, and so,” she repeated lovingly, “I’m going to help you out. We can work on the Taster’s Menu together.”

“Great!” He smiled. His eyes twinkled, and his skin, irritated in a few small places on his face and fingers, looked fresh and vibrant.

“He is so cute,” thought Jessica, looking at his boyish good looks, “but what a weird habit!”

Johnny’s “habit” was actually weirder than Jessica knew, since she could see but the external signs of what was going on in a body purposefully ravaged to fulfill his lust for flesh and blood, about which she had guessed, based on the state of his cuticles and his obvious habit of chewing on the inside of his lips.

What she didn’t know was that Johnny’s lust for tidbits to consume extended far beyond those realms, and into scabs, snot, any protruding skin he could scratch off, and even hairs—particularly those that seemed to him to be out of place—and earwax, and even the “sleep” in his eyes in the morning, a delicacy that he cultivated by mildly irritating his eyes before going to bed each night. He had also learned that by rubbing certain areas of his body, like the inside of his ears, the tender skin between his toes, the brittle skin of his elbows and knees, he could provoke his body to produce that delectable, clear fluid that seems to occupy the areas immediately beneath the first and second layers of the epidural. This was an especially desirable product, since, when hardened, it became a kind of crunchy nugget that invoked flesh, but was far more delicate.

In short, Johnny was a connoisseur of the body
qua
body, and Jessica didn’t doubt that this odd phase in his life—who knows how long he had been doing this—probably wouldn’t last, particularly when he found the pleasures of sharing in the intake of bodies, as lovers do, from the licking of lust-induced sweat to the smelling of passion-filled inner thighs. It was impossible for Jessica to figure out who would fulfill this lustful role, because it was entirely unclear as to whether Johnny was gay or straight or both, and he would clearly appeal to many people, at different ages and times.

Although he had worked for John off and on throughout the past four years, doing exclusively broiler cooking, Jessica had never seen Johnny with a significant, or even insignificant, other. Had she in the many months and years been less connected to Nate, she would have explored him; as it was, though, she had simply never had the chance. As he turned back to wipe down the handles of the broiler, Johnny looked as clean, fresh-faced, and youthful as could be, and had she not been witness to his self-induced pint o’ blood, she would never have imagined that he was occupying himself from the inside out.

Jessica had joined the army of people in the “service industry,” as Nate called it, because she, Jesus-like, was adept and inclined to bring solace to the hungry, healing to the sick, and warmth to the shivering. At first she imagined that Johnny was more pragmatic, that he had enlisted to make up for whatever fissure there was between the fees at NYU and his scholarship’s breadth and depth. She knew from John that Johnny was studying engineering and came from a family that could barely cover his tuition, or that of his older brother Michael, had the two of them attended SUNY or CUNY. But it was impossible to imagine that his father, who owned a small hobby shop in a little strip mall in Locust Valley on Long Island, could cover the cost of private-school tuition. But as Jessica came to learn of Johnny’s lust for flesh, she understood that this wasn’t just a part-time source of income subsidy.

She looked over to him again, as he stood, tall and noble, surveying the kitchen in those early prep hours, from his lofty height. He was neat, tidy, well-kempt, except for a few patches of missing flesh, and he was absolutely reliable in an area of the kitchen that required impeccable judgment. She knew that if a piece of meat or fish or any baked casserole was returned to the kitchen, it was because the client didn’t know the definition of medium or medium rare, and not because the dish was incorrectly prepared. She followed the line of his right arm, down from his shoulder to a white towel placed upon the steel prep counter in front of him, and then to a small chef knife that lay just askance. On its tip was a small globule of blood. That, she knew, was the reason why he was cooking flesh instead of folding sheets or serving coffees or shoveling earth. With the tools of the trade, he could carve out pathways of warm ecstasy to flow from his wounded palate to his lustful tongue. She looked into his eyes and imagined kissing him into submission, her tongue upon his pearly white teeth, her warm saliva mingling with the warmth of his mouth, and then she, imploring now, fantasized biting into his lips while he, realizing her quest, succumbed, and came with all of his essence into her warmth.