Hatched (2 page)

As his passionate dream of symbiosis made claim to his reason, he awakened and looked at her as a person, an employee in this restaurant, a total stranger, and he realized that she looked not only exasperated, but also terrified. Was this the emotion he invoked in this human being? He looked down at her name, embroidered into her chef’s uniform, upon which was inscribed but one word: “Jessica.” He looked up at her, sheepishly. “Um, . . .” He tried to speak. No words came forth from his gaping mouth.

Her frown returned, and intensified.

Unfortunately, the awkwardness of the situation had rendered him mute. He thought to apologize to her, to Jessica. He imagined himself using her own name, clearly and calmly, so that she’d realize that he had respect for her, for her parents who had named her, and for the village from which she hearkened. But her body was no longer a fixed receptacle of his will; indeed, she was turning away from him, unwilling to sustain the obdurate silence.

“Oh . . .!” Jude ejaculated a sound intended to fix her to a space near to him, but still, no words emerged, just a low-sounding vibration, like a grunt. He panicked, hoping that she hadn’t heard.

Whether or not Jude’s primordial noise was audible above the sound of the pre-client restaurant, he’d never know. But Jessica’s sense of employee etiquette yoked her in, and she turned back to him. “Tina, um, the maître d’, told me that you are conducting experiments?”

He looked at her attentively. She spoke with a degree of false, or at least forced, optimism, and as she did so, she looked down at his notebook, and saw that its first page was partially covered with untidy handwriting.

“I am, yes,” replied Jude optimistically, casually noting a brilliant idea that emerged from her question: “Eggsperiments.”

“We’re not used to bringing our ingredients to the table,” she said.

He looked up from the page, suddenly panic-stricken, vulnerable, weak.

“Um . . .!”

Now she feigned a smile. She was looking for some rational explanation and had given him a small number of seconds to produce one before she found an excuse to get John, often referred to as John-the-Owner, who would happily arrive donning the baseball bat that he brought with him to the restaurant each day. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d asked him to come join her at a table for a little exercise in exiting disorderly clientele.

Jude looked disparagingly forward in a near-normal pose, as though he had suddenly recognized his place at this table, in this restaurant, upon this planet. He also came to be aware of his awkward method of communication with her, with Jessica, an innocent victim of wages and tips and bonuses, a captive audience of his own facetiousness. As a consequence, the deranged look in his eyes wavered, softened, and dissolved, and he beamed forth a face of gentle innocence and naïve wanderlust.

The effect upon Jessica was instantaneous.

“He is probably just young, idealistic, and stupid,” she thought. Her expression softened, and she turned towards him, in complete deference. “It’s okay,” she conceded aloud, “I just want to make sure that you don’t need anything else.”

He found some consolation in her kind reaction to his pathetic demeanor. “Thanks,” he murmured.

She had crushed him, and he now lay before her like the quivering, gooey liquid of an uncooked egg white, separated from whatever meaning the yolk could provide when adjoined to it.

“Thanks so much,” he proclaimed, offering total submission and gratitude.

Jessica’s professional training was getting the best of her, at last, and in its wake came all of the formality, the stiffness, the routine, and the rhetoric of a job spent satisfying the needs, culinary and otherwise, of others.

“If you do need another egg, you can have one, but I’m going on my break now. I guess you could ask Tina, the maître d’, she’s around here somewhere. . . .” She suddenly stopped her soliloquy, and felt as though she’d left her body and was now watching her own strange performance in front of this even stranger man. She realized that her look was one of perplexity, not on account of anything he had done or said, but because of the bizarre advice she had just given him regarding Tina.

Now, she did turn to leave, and then suddenly turned back, as though she’d forgotten to convey a crucial detail.

“Break!” she burst out as though struck by a singular revelation.

Jude didn’t know whether to smile or flee.

“Break! I’m on my break. Break. You know, I’m, well, broken, like the shell.”

Jude was completely bewildered, and bewitched.

“I have recovered,” she thought to herself. Then, with poised purpose, she turned away and headed towards the kitchen. She felt better, back in control. She was, after all, a self-possessed employee in the service industry, and, moreover, she was a pretty woman who was accustomed to being accosted by idiotic coworkers and clients. And so she decided that she could allow this particular client to entirely leave her mind, and that she could purge her memory of him, forever.

“Thanks,” called Jude to her abiding absence.

Jessica didn’t turn back.

“I appreciate it!” he called out to the flip side of her existence. Now he had no idea whatsoever of what he should have said. He felt as though he’d shared in a really strange private joke related to, who knows? So now what? He was running out of time. Her essence was being drawn like a spirit receding to the other side of the universe.

“I should get going, are you closing?” he called after her, rising instinctively. She did not respond, and he was left halfway to standing. He sat back down. How long had he been there? He looked down to his scrawl and added the word “break” to the adjacent “eggsperiments,” and then looked over at the check to see what he had ordered. “Eggs,” it said. Just one word hovered before his eyes. “Eggs,” and beside it: $14.50.

How much tip could he afford? He motioned to his pocket to alleviate the client guilt, but her uniform indicated that she works in the kitchen, not the dining room.

“Is it okay to tip those who work in the kitchen?” he wondered to himself. He looked down at his tabletop, a gleaming, white surface littered with the shells he had so carefully examined, and then smashed. He then carefully placed the still-intact egg on a small dish in front of him, with undue deliberation. He flicked his wrist with great determination, to position the face of his watch towards his overly attentive gaze. Noon.

“Lunchtime,” he thought. “Wow, I’ve been here since 10:00 a.m., and all I have is this paragraph. And now she, Jessica, is going to kick me out. Shit.” He realized that he had been speaking aloud and suddenly panicked. “I . . .,” he endeavored once again to call out in her direction. “Shit, she’s gone, and she’s, oh . . .” He reached down again towards his pocket to lure her back. “Who the fuck am I kidding?” he thought to himself, in a space that almost made him audible. He instinctively looked up in the direction of her departure.

En route to the swinging doors that divided the restaurant from the kitchen, Jessica suddenly paused and directed her gaze towards the entrance to the restaurant, where a figure had appeared. She pulled off her white-linen chef’s hat, imploring a cascade of tawny hair to spill forth anxiously, and then careen downwards, almost to her waist, in apparent relief. Her face, her regard, the row of those beautiful, egg-like teeth, was lost to Jude’s view as she oriented her gate towards this dark figure.

Jude felt a sense of abandonment and despair. He was shattered, like the eggy shards before him. He studied what remained in his view of this woman—Jessica. He was staring intently forward, mesmerized. “She is so beautiful.” He was speaking to his mind’s ear in a wistful, nostalgic tone, like a parent addressing the windshield of her car as she drove away from the summer camp where little Amy, or Sylvia or Freddy, would spend the next two anxiety-ridden weeks in estrangement and despair. He cautiously reviewed what remained of his interaction with her. Her white chef jacket was perhaps a bit shorter than the norm, arrested just slightly above her hips. Tight, black-and-white-mottled chef pants accentuated her beautiful form. He wondered if she was wearing standard kitchen garb, or if these garments were somehow special, perhaps tailored to fit her and her alone.

“Do people do that?” he wondered. He kept following her with his eyes, studying the graceful and deliberate motion of her body.

At the entrance to the restaurant, the tall man became engulfed in the light from the window beside the cash register. He was a handsome, rugged type, sporting short, curly, graying hair. He bore a dark complexion and wore black sunglasses. His clothing, too, was entirely black: shoes, trousers, turtleneck, leather jacket, gloves—all impeccable. Now it was this man who was caught in Jude’s egg-trained gaze. Jude caught himself, suddenly aware, and then suddenly embarrassed.

“I’m a stupid fuck,” he thought. “Watching the world as though it were entertainment—entertainment, diversion.” He looked down again at the shattered egg, now congealing, and sighed.

“Maybe it is!” he ejaculated, this time rather loudly. He lifted his gaze and looked again at this man in black. “Yah, sure,” he laughed to himself, in answer to a question he hadn’t even formulated. “Funny, very funny you asshole,” he thought. “Very, fucking funny.”

Jude half-rose in his chair as though to leave, or perhaps to measure his height relative to hers, or his, but then sat back down again. His bleach-and-wear, faded denim jacket caught the side of the table, giving his fork cause for a backflip up and full twist. With the pride of a routine well executed, it flipped over once more and crashed down onto the floor, brushing his ankle on the way down, most probably egging up his pants. Befuddled, Jude didn’t know whether to follow his stare or to look down to acknowledge his gaff. Before there was time for any existential resolution, however, Tina, the maîtred’, emerged from the kitchen, hearkened as by the sound of a dinner bell. She looked at Jessica, at the man at the door, then over towards Jude, and then back to Jessica.

“Saved!” thought Jude. He reached down and picked up the fork, so as to avoid the embarrassment of having Tina clean up after him. The idea of being regarded as a menacing lunatic by two employees of this restaurant was too much, even by his own rather loose standards.

“Jess, thanks, I was just out back,” called Tina to Jessica as she walked towards Jude’s table.

“Jess,” thought Jude. “Not Jessica. Jess. They must be close friends, or . . .” He felt aroused at the thought that these two women might be more than coworkers.

As she approached Jude’s table, Tina dropped her gaze downwards, towards her long fingers, which she now extended as though to examine the color of her nail polish. There was no point in giving this young man the impression that he, or the mess of eggs that lay before him, were of special interest. Then as she neared Jude’s table, Tina looked back towards Jessica who, drawn by the figure awaiting her at the door, had begun to exit the restaurant. She suddenly turned back and looked anxiously towards Jude, as though she had suddenly remembered something she had meant to do.

“Good luck!” she called out. Her voice pierced the restaurant, boring an aural hole through a space that contained only a faint hum and muffled jangling from the kitchen. This abrupt exclamation was the product of a purely professional instinct. The guest, Jude, was as far from her mind as her morning toast; but professional obligation, including the constant quest for acknowledgment from managerial staff, was part of every job that she had ever worked. She now worked in the food service industry, an extreme example of this tendency, and had done so off and on ever since her first dishwashing job, at the age of thirteen.

“Good luck!” Jessica repeated. “With the egg, I mean. And the writing!” She hesitated for a moment, a sign of both her distraction and her insincerity. She then turned back towards the man in black, and then back again towards Jude.

Jude felt a sense of rebirth. He wanted to shout something back, but before he could think of what to say, she called out once again.

“Break an egg!” came her cry, in no particular direction.

Jessica’s announcement, echoing outwards to this mysterious man in black, Tina, and Jude, was so undirected, that Jude didn’t know if she was actually speaking with him or re-enacting a joke that could have been said a thousand times per shift in a restaurant devoted to the art of cooking and serving eggs. Suddenly, now orbiting within the atmosphere and gravitational pull of the man in black, Jessica drifted and then moved energetically towards the exit of the dining room. The dark stranger was removing his gloves in anticipation of brushing his hand against hers as she approached him. Then, suddenly formal, he adroitly slid his fingers back into their allotted spaces and nodded in her direction. Jessica, as though acknowledging his sign, drew up alongside of his towering presence. The newly formed couple moved towards the exit, in close proximity to one another, but with an estranged physical distance. Jude realized he was staring again, and suddenly he wished that he’d given a witty retort to her good-luck wishes.

“Break an egg! Bake a leg! Stroke a peg!” Jude was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Fuck! I don’t know. Tap a keg!” Each brilliant reply resonated in his brain as loudly as if he’d stood on the table and announced them all. Probably better that he didn’t say anything, he thought.

Tina was now upon Jude, attending to his table by replacing the fork and arranging the place setting that he had sullied with the crushed eggshells and the remnants of the gooey yolk. Jude could not have known that her actions had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Her perfidiousness was aimed towards Jessica, for she had left her place in the kitchen and had interacted with this client, and she had done so without the delicacies appropriate to a dining room like this one.

Tina’s finicky arranging and rearranging of the plate, the fork, and the napkin was a form of coded communication. In the restaurant, each dominion has its rulers, its keepers, its patrons, and its slaves, and nobody, except the owner and the maître d’, had the right to cross from one dominion into the other, not even Jessica. Jessica was the deity of Fabergé, the goddess of lushness and potency amidst a universe of unfertilized eggs, but this wasn’t her realm. This was Tina’s realm.