A review spliced from meaningless notes, scraps of faded memory
Inside New-York Bagel, after The Dancing Girl and Manny Face left, my Second Self suddenly stood over me and from my mind I said, what the hell do you want, and it said, to be a part of you again, and it wiped my nose with a monogrammed HC handkerchief, and we were made one and whole.
Why did you come for me now, I, The Hunched Cornish, asked him, The Hunched Cornish’s Second Self, from inside myself, and he said he had been pulled toward me inexorably, without any force of will on his part, in the wake of the pain I was feeling that The Dancing Girl had come into New-York Bagel and sat, with Manny Face, at the table next to mine.
My Second Self said a force greater than the two of us seems to have decided on precisely that moment, and no other, to draw us together again, making The Hunched Cornish wonder yet again if there is such a thing as free will.
Jewish bagels, the synagogue: The Hunched Cornish wondered if The Good Witch had been behind my freeze-frame nightmare, or had it been the Kabbalah? Was The Good Witch a Jew?
Leave it to the Jews to take some dough, boil then bake it, put a hole in it and call it a bagel.
Those Jews.
Now gathered again into one ensemble, it took The Hunched Cornish some shuddering moments to draw on his full strength, gather his giant mass up from the table, bones and ligaments cracking, and ask for the bill… and the time.
It was around 6:30 p.m., the waitress said, the night of Saturday, March 23, 2013.
So I’ve been here for 14 months, I asked, shelling out the hryvnias to cover the cost of my more than yearlong stay, plus a generous tip.
Yes, give or take a couple of days. About the bill: Don’t worry, we charged you according to the old menu’s prices.
Well, that was very magnanimous of you.
Yes, we’d like to think so.
I crammed the second half of my lox and cream cheese bagel into my trap and found it was still fresh and delicious. Kabbalah, I thought.
And so The Hunched Cornish walked out into the sheets of pure white snow, still falling, and where it hadn’t been walked or driven over or shoveled or plowed, it was piled in drifts maybe a meter high, and it was so beautiful, dear God, it was so unspeakably beautiful. Kabbalah? Kabbalah?
In one way, nothing had changed. When The Hunched Cornish first got to New-York Bagel with The Good Witch in the middle of the winter of 2012, the city was covered in thick ice and frozen snow. I had sat frozen inside New-York Bagel from one year into the next, and for me the winter had never melted.
But a premonition pushed hard against my conscience, warning me that confessing my love to The Good Witch would only lead to bad, even evil. The Hunched Cornish decided to ignore the voice, preferring to think it was some kind of trick sprung by forces to shut me up, which, as it turned out, they did.
And now here I am, wherever it is that I am, writing this review, with absolutely no relevance to the present moment. Except that I have to write it.
I have to write it.
And what do I have here but a bunch of senseless notes, letters, initials, abbreviations, parts of now meaningless words I scribbled down at the time, which had made perfect sense then. Kyiv Unedited was supposed to open, and this was to have been the review to launch it, but much as I became frozen in time, that never happened either, until now.
Now, all these prices are probably wrong – and on the low side, inflation being a whore, while some of these items may no longer be on New-York Bagel’s menu today, so you’d better go there and check for yourselves:
Cheesecake – UAH 40, topped with their own caramel recipe
Coffee Americano – 12
Tea (out of an assortment) – 16
Bon Aqua half-liter – 12
Other notes:
A so-called New-York Coffee – UAH 16, with cream and their own caramel recipe, like Babushka used to make in Paris;
These same people also own the Vernissage Cafe on Andriyivsky Uzviz in Podil, and apparently there’s also a Vernissage on Artema street, although by now, maybe these are no longer there;
A classic bagel with lox and cream cheese, like the one The Hunched Cornish finally devoured, with other garnishing – UAH 32;
A Caesar with chicken bagel – 27
A Texas with beef bagel – 29
A Manhattan with tuna bagel – 30
And… a Webronsky bagel(???), with a type of goat cheese apparently called something like Webr(???), or was it perhaps Weber(???), together with rucola, walnuts, honey, and cream cheese on a dark bagel with cinnamon and raisin – UAH 47.
Webronsky… Webronsky?!? That’s what the notes seem to say, but The Hunched Cornish doesn’t remember and ultimately can’t vouch for the verity of this information. Keeping the Kabbalah in mind, you may do well to find out for yourselves.
The Hunched Cornish was telling The Good Witch I loved her, and those mocking dark eyes looked right into The Hunched Cornish, and then it was as if The Good Witch’s face began broadening and her lips curled out and fattened to horrendous enormity and reddened and purpled and she began to resemble a frog, and as she turned green and crossed her arms under herself, her fingers turned into suction toes, and a long, long cleft tongue flicked out of her mouth and slapped The Hunched Cornish’s nose, leaving a toxically noxious sticky residue on it, instantly locking his body into a deep paralysis just as he was about to take a bite of his bagel.
And then she hopped away.
You see, The Good Witch is the Saint Stephan website’s [saintstephan.com.ua, sabotaged, 2015?: Fut. Ed.] female, but at the time The Hunched Cornish thought, ‘Who the hell is Saint Stephan that he should have a chick like The Good Witch doing his bidding.’ Little did I know, fool that I was, what awesome power I had pitted myself against.
As for Manny Face – yeah, Manny Face, Jack Step, and maybe a few others – The Hunched Cornish will deal with them later.
The Hunched Cornish, March 25, 2013