A Self Discovery Novel
Lost & Found
Chapter 1: The Awakening
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” ― Cynthia Occelli
Jordan Zappa had no memory of why he was lying in a bed, drenched in blood and bandaged all over.
Masked doctors and nurses surrounded him, and one of them was pumping his chest vigorously. The man standing over him looked especially worried. Jordan could feel the weight of the man's body on his heart as he performed rapid compressions on his chest. Then everything went quiet for a moment. Then a surge of electricity shot through his chest. And then once more. Jordan felt like he was being shot at close range deep into his heart.
Jordan could not move a muscle to resist. He was totally at the mercy of these masked men and women who seemed hellbent on crushing and electrocuting him to death.
Jordan could hear someone say, “He’s coming back.” A masked face leaned closer to Jordan and shouted, “Can you hear me, Jordan?” Jordan batted his eyelids to confirm that he had heard the question. The response must have been sufficient because the cacophony of chaos around him eased off a bit.
He had been left alone to catch his breath for a change and see if it persisted. The voice of the man that had called out his name now came into clearer focus for Jordan as he tried to remember what had happened to him. The man, now a few inches away from Jordan’s face, continued, “Jordan, you have just been in a serious car accident. But your life is not in danger. Do you understand what I am saying?” The man spoke in a slow, deliberate tone best described as reserved for toddlers or deaf and hard of hearing older people.
Jordan did the eyelid blink thing again to make sure he was communicating in the politest way possible given the constraints of the unfamiliar circumstances. Jordan was having an out-of-body experience as he considered the contours of his situation.
He was in a hospital somewhere in London on the day he was supposed to be in Cannes to receive the Grand Prix for Effectiveness, one of the most coveted awards in the world of advertising and marketing for the work done by his agency for one of his oldest clients. Jordan Zappa was the 45-year-old C.E.O of the fastest-growing ad agency in London and at the top of his game.
He was on his way to the airport with his girlfriend Stephaine. She had picked him up from the office and offered to drive him to the airport. It was very unlike Stephanie to do this. She usually saw him whenever he got home, which was not often given all the new business he had been chasing lately. He and Stephanie had been living together now for just over a year.
They had met at a marketing conference in Miami. It took three vodkas & Red Bulls for Jordan to convince Stephaine to let him show her his collection of miniature paintings in his penthouse suite. That night Jordan had sex with Stephanie 10 times without losing his hard-on. She, too, confessed to being unable to sustain any more multiple orgasms without needing a spare vagina for the night. Jordan saw this kind of physical chemistry as some sign from the heavens that he and Stephanie were made for each other. Within a week, Jordan broke up with his then-girlfriend and asked Stephanie to move in with him.
Jordan paused his thinking for a second and, despite his excruciatingly painful bandaged head, managed to give himself a little smiling applause for the excellent girlfriend upgrade he accomplished back then.
But in the course of the last 12 months, things had soured and simmered a lot between them. As Jordan soon discovered, Stephanie suffered from what one can only classify as an acute case of paranoid pathological jealousy.
Every woman that Jordan knew was a suspect for illicit debauchery in Stephanie’s eyes. Stephanie’s suspicions were not entirely misplaced as Jordan did hook up with some of his old girlfriends off and on, but Stephanie was still the woman he went home to afterward.
Jordan could see that Stephaine was in one of her moods as he got into the front seat of their Porsche.
“Hi, Baby,” Jordan said as he got into the car and gave Stephaine a light peck on the lips. Jordan saw that Stephanie was still in her black nightgown and bathroom slippers. Her hair looked disheveled, she had missed some makeup on her cheeks, and the lipstick was not her usual shade.
“Hi, Handsome,” she replied, looking enviously at him. She immediately changed her expression to a frown as she pulled the pocket square out of Jordan’s jacket and said, “Why are you wearing that red pocket square today? I told you I don't like it! It makes you look like a pimp”. Jordan looked at the pocket square in Stephanie’s hand and then shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sorry, Darling. It was your present to me, remember?” Stephaine just shrugged her shoulders and opened the window, and threw it out as she drove off towards the airport as she said, “ I changed my mind.”
Jordan liked that pocket square and wanted to stop the car to get it back, but he was already late, and Stephine was in one of her moods.
So he calmly looked at Stephaine and said, “So how was your day, and why are you driving in bathroom slippers?”
Stephanie just smiled at Jordan as she pulled out a receipt from her nightgown and threw it into Jordan’s lap. “My day was busy trying to figure out how many women have you been screwing for the last few days that you have not been home.” Jordan looked at the receipt and saw it was for a dinner he had hosted for one of his clients a few days ago at the Racing Club.
Jordan was not in the mood to argue tonight, but he was not going to sit there and let her accuse him of stuff he had not done.
“What are you talking about, Steph?” Jordan shot back, raising his voice for the first time since they started arguing. “This is a dinner receipt with my client from a few days ago. I was not screwing anyone.”
Stephanie was getting more and more irritated. They had left the city traffic behind and were on the open stretches of the A4.
She just kept quiet and revved up the Porsche 911 to drown out Jordon’s voice. Jordan was regretting this ride already.