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  Fabergé Restaurant’s lobsters weren’t killed by Clytemnestra who, in cahoots with her lover Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, threw a net over Agamemnon to prevent resistance—and then drowned him. No mythical end for the lobsters, regrettably. They were boiled to death in large cauldrons of bubbling water. Or they were bludgeoned by Johnny, the broiler chef, by being stabbed in the face before being cut in half, stuffed with a variety of different eggs, including lobster eggs (strangely), and served to customers who, depending upon their skill, might be able to extract every sliver of flesh from every tiny tentacle on the lobster’s complex body.

  If John had ever seen what Nate was doing, he’d have embarked upon a homicidal rampage to make the Trojan War seem but a brief interlude from true bloodlust. But there was no sign of him. And so, Jessica thought to herself, he must be either absent, or he was securely ensconced at the dishwashing station that stood on the opposite diagonal of the Yolk, immediately behind the swinging doors leading to the dining room. And if John was at the dishwashing station, as he indeed was, then there he’d stay, all night, no matter what, and this despite the fact that Fabergé Restaurant was his empire, his egg, and, moreover, despite the fact that he was, arguably, the greatest chef of his generation. Jessica’s experience dictated that once exiled to the steaming Hobart washing station, it was impossible for John to leave that area until the kitchen was not only washed, but sterilized, prepared in case some intricate surgery had to be performed on the floor, in one of the sinks, in the walk-in, or on the stove, in case, in short, the future of the world depended on this Yolk being impeccable, untarnished by the outside world, a vault against the destruction of teeming life.

  “Here’s the theory,” said Nate to Jessica, staring at her approach as though she were his pupil, or at least connected thereto, in search of his apprenticeship down upon the floor. “If the lobsters can figure it out, they aren’t actually insect-like mindless beings responding solely to the whims of their immediate environment, and therefore they deserve to live.” Having proclaimed this utterance, Nate rose to his feet, for full effect. “But if they can’t, they’ll be gently and softly anaesthetized, vaporized with the finest distilled but rather steamy water, and then boiled to death before being ripped apart and then prodded for each morsel of glistening flesh by a bespectacled, compulsive, conversationally distracted stockbroker or stockbroker’s mistress-turned-pathologist. Or . . .”—he rubbed his hands together and beamed—“they’ll be decorticated millimeter by millimeter by a little, old lady who actually doesn’t know whether she is in her bedroom or on the top stair of the Eiffel Tower, and in her actions is unaware of whether she is undressing herself after a long day of knitting, or doing the world’s most intricate crossword puzzle, impeded by the obvious handicap of having both hands sawed off and piled in a neat, little heap beside her.” Having finished his oration, Nate resumed his former position on the floor, adjusting the metal implements in advance of the forthcoming event.

  Jessica crouched down beside him, at a respectable but intimate distance. Nate, who looked deeply into her visage with his grey, sparkling, bespectacled eyes, ceased to speak, and instead projected dancing images that flowed through his eyes and into her imagination. There was a sense of urgency whenever Jessica and Nate interacted, and it had been observed on various occasions that the frenetic and sometimes synergetic relationship must have had some kind of history.

  It did.

  The tie that bound and tore asunder this culinary couple was the product of an encounter that had happened to them once upon a time, a long time ago, on a chilly January day in the even chillier walk-in. Jessica’s bountiful body lay before Nate that fateful day, for she had finally given in to his constant overtures, and generously bent over a crate of eggs, embracing the impersonal cardboard and the cold stainless steel with her warmth. Her grey chef’s pants and tiny panties were yanked until they were half way down her silken legs, her apron was hoisted up, and now the body that had occupied every sultry dream since he’d first seen her gorgeous face was now open to his, as he, from behind where she lay, and invisible to her downward gaze, fulfilled his most profound dream, thereby obliterating any chance that anything of an intimate nature could ever happen again, for his sake, and for hers.

  This chilling thrust was their first, and final, act of love, the culmination of what seemed like decades of lust-infused conversations disguised as culinary banter. By his flowery descriptions they were to one day ascend to the very heights of fleshy bliss, her eggs joining to his cum in a dance of love and merriment. But instead, she had just unexpectedly offered her body to him in the walk-in, unceremoniously, as though she herself was an ingredient that could be found and unwrapped for his delectation. She was warm at first, and then cold, and then colder. He had entered her without a word, and pressed his flesh to hers, forgiving and then forbearing, until she smashed a multitude of the eggs over which she was draped, first with her fingers, and then with her face.

  In a matter of moments, he was done, and so were they. Their eternity was extinguished like the lives that by this act had become runny yolks that drooled for wealthy Fabergé Restaurant clients, instead of wonderful, winged creatures pecking the ground seeds to nourish litters of eggs in sumptuous nests.

  From his seeds, to her eggs, and from her eggs, to their death.

  That was years ago.

  It seemed to both of them as though this ghastly scene was recreated each time they looked into each other’s gaze, and when the inevitable image was played back before his mind’s eye, he would slouch in shame and she, in turn, would shudder in disgust. And they would mourn the past. And he would tell a joke. And she would laugh. And he would see the past. And so would she. And they would return to the realm of the living.

  “I, Jess, do hate insects.” Nate made this forceful declaration on his knees, without even straining his long neck. Now he raised himself up again to his full 6’ 6” stature and grinned a sardonic look as he glanced down to her crouching existence. From Jessica’s perspective, Nate’s freckled, reddish skin, orange hair, and green beret-turned-chef-hat made him look the very part of a giant carrot. Erect before her that afternoon, he nonetheless looked inspired. And, as always, he looked sad. She had bent down to him in pity and understanding, and now she rose back up again, with knowledge and the strength to move on.

  The “they” to whom Nate referred, she knew from the many versions of this scene that she’d witnessed over the past four years, were Nate’s creatures of affection: lobsters. These lobsters were now imprisoned in a small cage in the walk-in, but in the course of the shift, they would be released to satisfy the culinary lust of clients who were ready to savor some of the most expensive flesh on the dinner menu. Lobsters, whose natural fate—and even the lobsters themselves probably knew this—was for nothing other than fickle currents and the magnified vision of the heavens seen through the ever-agitated surface of the Atlantic Ocean from which they’d been so unceremoniously plucked. These were the chosen ones, those who had not as yet decided to exit the lobster traps that they’d so effortlessly entered. And so, when the ‘fishermen’ had arrived to raise the traps up to the surface, the single act of their fishermanly profession, these chosen lobsters were careened onto the shore for the short trip to local restaurants.

  To a chef who’d cooked a lot of them, lobsters do indeed look like the “insects” that Nate had called them. But to those in the know, these were clever and resourceful beings, as comfortable in ocean currents as on the slippery coastal rocks that demarcated their breeding ground. But, alas, many of the captured lobsters were known to contain huge sacks of delicious, green eggs, the delight of the Fabergé Restaurant gourmet set, those elite beings who carried with them that discrete but powerful plastic—gold or platinum plastic, preferably—to back up their appetites for luxury.

  The female lobsters also carry around sperm, for up to two years, which can be harnessed for the thousands of eggs she carries within her body. Fab
ergé eggs they are not, but clients in the know about such things suckle them as if they, too, were the precious namesakes of John’s world.

  “And so if they are insects,” continued Nate as he crouched back down to his little lobster colony, “they deserve to die, because all of their insect friends attack my fragile skin whenever I take the trash to the Hole.” It was Nate who’d named two parts of the Fabergé Restaurant where he spent his time: the Yolk and the Hole, the latter being the trash area at the far end of the parking lot. “But if they are fascinating, good-looking, intellectual beings trapped, like one of Kafka’s buddies in the carcass of a giant insect, then I, Snow White’s gorgeous prince, shall kiss them with good-luck lips, tongue them ever so gently, and thereby restore them to their illustrious selves once more, so that they, too, can come and dine upon the magnificent, eggy dishes in which we as eggy chefs specialize here at the Illustrious Fabergé Restaurant with all of their wealthy friends, especially,” he began to feign a Russian accent, “those from Old Country!”

  Jessica looked at him with her usual crumpled face of knowing perplexity. During his little monologue, she was leaning up against the prep table where vegetables were chopped and peeled and shaped and drawn and quartered, their remnants tossed into large, white pails that sit open-mouthed underneath the adjacent sink, awaiting their fill and their eventual purgation into the warm sauté pots of endlessly cooking au jus. She now began to move away from the prep table and towards the sink, into which she peered, searching with great intensity. Nate awaited her ruling on his new event like an anxious coach holding the hand of his thirteen-year-old gymnast in the moments following her routine, concerned that the Romanian judge hadn’t been paid off, or that the American judge was anti-Communist, or that the French judge had other things on her mind that afternoon than ranking the horse, the rings, the mat, and the eventual iron cross.

  Jessica leaned down into the sink, fumbled in the pile of soiled stainless-steel bins therein, and, having apparently found the object of her quest, she rose up, victorious. In her hand was a long, wooden spoon that was covered in a slimy coating, probably some kind of flour-thickened and au jus-infused gravy. She moved towards Nate, who was kneeling over his stainless-steel contraption. He was carefully arranging the first of his lobster contestants for the forthcoming event, prodding and pushing on their behinds, trying to direct them to the stainless-steel obstacle course.

  Jessica approached him, and then banged his SOS pad-like hair, gently, and then a second time, more abruptly, and finally smacked him with a kind of unexpected brutality, a brutality that could only be punishment for a deed as yet unforgiven, an action unforgivable, from a past not shrouded in haze, but rather illuminated by the bright lights of this kitchen.

  “Ouch! Bitch.” Nate ran his hands through his hair and discovered the gooey substance that he pleated out with his fingers and then, awaiting the inevitable moment when Jessica would turn back to him to see the results of her efforts, licked his fingers with intensity, moaning as he did so.

  She turned and stared at him with a look of disgust. “Gross.”

  In response, he brought his two hands to his face and drove his face deep into the space he’d created therein. “Fuck me,” he whispered.

  She turned away from him and kept walking.

  “Fuck me!” he called out loudly. She left her hand trail in her wake, her middle finger up to the sky. They both knew that those two words, “fuck me,” didn’t mean anything, nothing at all, even if once upon a time, in the universe they’d inhabited together, they could have meant the world. He looked sad, pathetic, because “fuck me” were words of dreams and shared urgings, as farfetched as “fly me to the moon upon my paper wings.”

  “Fuck me.”

  Now that expression meant nothing, it had been transformed into gibberish, fuckme, or phucmi. The “fuck” and the “me” were gone, absolved of meaning, devoid of sense. Individually and together the “fuck” and the “me” meant nothing, and that could not change back, not now, not ever. And so Jessica kept walking, and then turned back and threatened him again, knowingly. Putting on airs for the sake of posterity, Nate feigned licking her face from a distance of a few feet, and then formed his lips into an “O” as a preface to whistling, his eternal annoying habit, this time manifested in a bastardized “Stairway to Heaven.” This move from the carnal to some other subject was always safer when it came to their interactions, and therefore, every conversation between them ended, for both their sakes, with a smile, with Jessica playfully shaking her head or flicking him off or grinning in the dismay of broken dreams.

  Nate, superficially riled up, ceased his whistling and shouted to her, suddenly overtaken with genuine reflection, “Hey, wait a second!” Jessica turned around, feigning interest.

  “Led Zeppelin!” he blurted out. “That’s egg shaped. We ought to transport people here in one of those?” She turned away from him, and so he called out to her even louder. “Like the strip clubs do, when they pick up desperate men from the airport in those vans that are painted with the faces of strippers. The Fabergé Restaurant Zeppelin! What do you think? We could travel around in it, you and me, to set an example for guests!”

  No answer. No matter. The round was over. The game was most certainly lost.

  “It would fly, Jess! We’d make it fly! Jessica!” He called out more loudly, with the confidence of one who had in fact penetrated her and brought pleasure out.

  “Would our zeppelin fly?” He was shouting so loudly now that she turned back to him, and feigning attention and interest, she said, “Even though it’s made out of lead?”

  He was desperate now, trying to seize an opportunity as vacuous as the gas within the zeppelin. “Jess! Maybe we could lighten up that lead zeppelin somehow? Maybe we’ll make it out of something other than lead? Or maybe we’ll combine the lead with blended egg whites! Any suggestions? How do we do that, Jess? Maybe we could paint pictures of you on it? That would lighten it up!”

  I watched as Jessica bore witness to Nate’s soliloquy, and then grinned sadly as she turned away from him and pursued her trek to the dishwashing station. She was drawn as to the sirens by another shrilling sound, the expulsion of wind not from a zeppelin descending to Earth engulfed in flames, but from the pierced lips of John whistling tales of ancient glories and not-so-distant conquests of possible worlds.

  Chapter 5

  John was perched intently at his station, the Hobart dishwashing machine, where he produced notes that pierced the hum of the Yolk. He was like William Butler Yeats’s mechanical bird that was perched atop the golden bough in Byzantium. He was disconnected from nature, for his face seemed chiseled, as by a Grecian goldsmith, or hammered, like the precious Fabergé Jewelled Hen Egg. Maybe, instead of being covered in flesh, he, too, was hammered out of gold and gold enameling, and maybe he, too, whistled to keep a drowsy czar and czaress awake. He had set himself upon Hobart’s golden bough, to scrub and clean and rinse and dry for all the lords and ladies of Wall Street, whistling as he did so all that is past, or passing, or to come.

  Fittingly, in this ichthyic setting, he appeared to be moving his bird-like claws ’round and ’round and up and down and side to side. Since there were as yet no filthy dishes to scrub, he was instead polishing Hobart’s giant rectangular washing mechanism, ’round and ’round and up and down and side to side, as though plying warmed oil into a lover’s sun-soaked back. Whatever tune he was rendering was cacophonic and incomprehensible, a tune crackling like Yeats’s own voice, captured Byzantium bound, in a few lines from a BBC recording from another era. He was so completely absorbed by his task, that he was oblivious to Jessica’s arrival.

  “Hello, John!” she called above the din, negotiating past the prep tables and crates that separated off those who cooked for the clients from he who cleaned up their dishes afterwards.

  John didn’t look up, but instead uttered in her direction: “Jessica, we must polish it up today, I’m expecting the ins
pector, a group of them perhaps.” He then turned towards her with authority, looking his Colonel General Captain self. “With all of this talk of salmonella, they’re cracking down!” He seemed to grin, as though he’d watched himself say it, and found it for some reason humorous.

  John always spoke loudly, almost barking, as though every word was an order, part of an effort to keep his troops in line. He barked all the louder because of the sound of the plethora of industrial-strength electric fans that he had installed one summer day when profits were higher, and when cash had flowed more freely. These fans, far more powerful than the size of the kitchen warranted, made it sound in certain areas of the Yolk as though the workers were in fact mechanics doing upkeep inside of a working jet engine.