Aftertaste Read online

  Do you remember our first date?

  Zilch’s hand begins to shake. He can only muster a nod.

  It rained the entire time. And you, of course, didn’t have an umbrella. So we shared a copy of Rolling Stone, back when they used to be huge. It covered us both. Cindy Crawford was on the cover. I wanted sushi for dinner and you said you knew a great place.

  Zilch wants to tell her he remembers but knows if he opens his mouth right now it’ll only be a choked squeak. He still cannot turn to face her. She can’t be more than ten steps behind him, keeping her distance.

  And it was a good place, she continues. I used too much wasabi and you ran to the kitchen asking them for a glass of milk. But it only made it worse. You said when you kissed me later that night you liked your kisses spicy and that I should always have wasabi before we kiss. We were barely old enough to drink yet were blissfully, stupidly in love. We used to sit and talk for hours, just talk. We’d sit in your car and listen to your awful tape collection. We used to make love four times a night and dream out loud lying around in your crappy apartment, expanding walls into new rooms of our someday dream home in our heads. We’d never get there. You’d fuck it all up long before then.

  She’s wearing the same wine-colored lipstick she used to, back when he knew her, back before he left her—and later left her again. He isn’t sure if lake water is still running out of his ear or if those are tears on his cheek.

  The wasabi kisses will be the next memory they bleach out of your head if you fuck this one up, babe. I only exist as this, now. I know you want to come see my grave in Wilmington, where I’m buried next to my parents, but you know if you wander too far they’ll pull you out—and maybe you won’t even remember where you were running off to in the first place. Word to the wise: don’t bother going. There’s nothing to see there.

  Zilch wonders, for a fraction of a second, if it’s not them doing this, some kind of mind fuck or a hateful motivation technique—but she looks so much like she did, and sounds so much like she did, that he really doesn’t care.

  You’re not built for this. You know that and I know that. But you have to keep trying.

  He tries not to blink, wants to see as much of her as he can. He knows it’s a mistake, but he’s unable to resist turning around to look at her—to really see her—and when he does, there’s nothing there.

  I’d tell you I love you, that I’d forgiven you, but it’d go against the last thing I said to you, her voice continues, completely disembodied. My feelings haven’t changed. They will never change. And this is all you’ll have of me now. Go do what you’re here for—she needs your help.

  Then her voice spreads out into one long unbroken tone and raises in pitch until the droning in Zilch’s ear returns as it was. With it, the compass also jumps back to full, skull-popping agony; belligerently, as if making up for lost time, punishing him for the few seconds he was allowed with her.

  He’d rather have his gut opened again than have her stolen away from him, over and over. He doesn’t know who to blame—his waterlogged brain, the bufotoxins courtesy of Jolby, or the agents—but right now anger isn’t rising inside him, only loss. He’s still holding the receiver—it’s now just a droning dial tone in his ear—and he looks at where she should’ve been standing, between pumps three and four. There, on the oil-spotty ground, is a set of wet footprints in the shape of a woman’s size six sneaker. Zilch hangs up the payphone with enough force to crack its plastic. He still feels heavy—there’s lake water sloshing around inside him as well as self-hate. One he can get rid of, and he goes around back of the gas station where he finds the automated carwash and an air-pump with a bright red sign reading FREE AIR.

  At the end of the building there’s a coiled green hose and a spigot that looks like it’s for Oasis-use only. But since it’s not marked, Zilch assumes the water is free too. In the dark behind the gas station, with eighteen-wheelers grunting on the interstate nearby and crickets in the field the station buts up against, Zilch removes the duct tape patch from his belly and leans back, prying open the slit in his stomach. He turns on the hose and sprays inside real good, angling himself toward the highway so that, when cars pass, he can actually see what he’s doing. Not that he’s concerned about lake debris so much; he’s just curious, really.

  He regrets it immediately.

  Most people go the whole run, birth to death, without ever seeing any part of their internal organs unless it’s a CAT scan or X-ray. But here’s Zilch, peering in and seeing scraps of seaweed amongst the vein-covered sack of his stomach, the coiled mass of intestine, and whatever the hell that thing is. Zilch reaches in and pinches the seaweed out before dousing everything with the hose. It stings like someone’s tattooing his insides. When it starts to bleed, he knows it’s clean, or clean enough; it’s something you learn in culinary school when it comes to cutting yourself. If it bleeds, the debris is out—if it doesn’t, well, you should probably make a trip to the doctor. He only sees a couple of scarabs, floating dead. They slide out of the wound and onto the ground. He watches them ride the red trickle toward the gas station’s storm drain. It hurts, but not as much as it should. He only feels cold, numb and waxy.

  The sagging edges of the wound aren’t mending. Pinching them together, they don’t take. They flap apart, wide and loose, pornographically. He buttons his damp shirt over the whole mess. Maybe he should’ve used a different method to get those idiots’ attention, he considers. But then, the phrase ‘a different path probably would’ve been wiser’ could be stapled onto every square of the calendar of his stupid life.

  He gets his suit coat—which has lapped the definition of ‘filthy’ a few times now—back on, sits, and tries emptying his shoes, but trying to scrape the sand out is pointless. He puts them back on, even though they’re so full of lake floor grit his soles feel like sandpaper when he walks.

  Back around front, under the glare of the fluorescent lights of the pumps again, more car doors thump-lock as the soggy ex-corpse passes, pale and cold and miles from where he needs to be. Humming Willy Nelson, Zilch continues along the roadside, thumbing for a ride he knows he won’t get, back on the road again, hesitating only momentarily between pumps two and three—where her two wet footprints are already evaporating.

  “Do you know where the Hilton is?” Patty asks, steering her rolling file-folder up to her rental car.

  Galavance nods. “I’ll follow you.”

  They get split up at a red light Galavance doesn’t dare running—not with her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss right there.

  Patty’s car continues on, down to the next intersection, then the next, then out of sight. Galavance arrives as the sun is setting, the parking lot full of minivans and other rentals as remarkably unremarkable as Patty’s. Typically, Galavance hates walking around in her work clothes; she feels like a drone. But it feels like a business meeting as she enters the hotel lobby and notices the bad art on the walls and potted fake plants. Upstairs, passing identical doors—some leaking the sound of TVs, others of people screwing—Galavance gets turned around more than once in the identical hallways. She has always found hotels to be spooky places. The rooms that might be empty behind those doors are scarier than the ones that might be occupied. She imagines beds with no heads on the pillows, chairs sitting empty, each room with crowds of anti-people in muted, watching congress.

  She finds Patty’s room and knocks.

  “One moment,” Patty says. Inside, her TV is on—some talk show—and Galavance can hear her zipping up suitcases hastily and thumping things around. Finally the door opens and Patty is in a tie-dyed T-shirt with a ring of the Grateful Dead bears dancing on it, and some jean shorts. It’s weird seeing her boss in something other than the super-starched Hillary Clinton attire. For once, Galavance feels like the better dressed of the two.

  There’s a pile of take-out containers on the dresser. Of the two beds in the room, the one Patty clearly hasn’t been sleeping in has a massive load of lug
gage on it, all matching in old lady floral print. Galavance catches the scent of something akin to fried onions, and the stale whiff of recent vacuuming.

  Patty closes the door behind them. It’s awkward immediately.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Patty asks.

  “Uh, sure.”

  Patty opens the mini-fridge and from a six-pack of Bud Light that’s already missing three, hands Galavance a can. Not what she was expecting.

  “This way,” Patty says, gesturing to the bathroom. “We’ll get started right away.”

  Inside there are two folding tables, cutting boards. The shower curtain has been repurposed as a hanging rack for a knife set and to suspend the box of sausage labeled SAUSAGE. One end has been cut open and it’s draining a pink gunk into the tub. Galavance can smell the fishy reek they’ll have to, again, find a way to cover up. There are numerous dry and canned ingredients on the fold-out tables. A small army of tiny seasoning bottles, tinned stewed tomatoes and carrots, and some economy-sized boxes of dry pasta. She’s moved the microwave in here as well, and it’s plugged in alongside a hot plate. Some pots and pans, scrubbed and ready, sit stacked inside one another.

  The light in the hotel room bathroom, like all hotel bathrooms, chases away any trace of shadow. The mirror is broad, taking up the entire far wall. Galavance can’t help but notice how small she looks next to Patty, and how much taller. Both of them appear washed out and tired. Red eyes, red knuckles. Kitchen scars.

  They wash their hands at the two sinks, framed side by side in the mirror. “I know this is kind of unconventional,” Patty says, working the soap foam hard between her small hands. “And I’m sorry I can’t put this down as overtime for you. But I do appreciate the assistance.”

  Galavance was kind of hoping that it would count as overtime, but still, showing this bit of dedication—one night away from home—has been promised to secure a pay bump. It’s worth it. “It’s totally fine,” she says, rinsing her hands of soap. She washed them for the full length of time, singing “Happy Birthday” to herself as she was trained, first thing, first day, at Frenchy’s.

  “I don’t know how long this will take,” Patty says. “Do you need to call anyone to let them know you’re here?” She dries her hands and offers Galavance a clean towel from the pile housekeeping has left, all scratchy and bleached of any puke or blood the previous guests had wiped on them.

  “No, my boyfriend probably won’t even notice,” she says and chuckles—the bathroom’s acoustics lets her know how fake her laughter is. “He works late a lot.”

  “What does he do?” Patty asks, dull and unabashedly disinterested, tying an apron on. She offers Galavance her own.

  “He and his friend are building a house,” Galavance says, tying it on, “with plans to sell it.”

  Patty moves to the folding table, grunts to pull down the hanging box of sausage, and pops open the lid. The fish smell leaps out, stronger than it was at the restaurant. It’s nearly overpowering, but Galavance swallows down a gag.

  “Where abouts?” Patty asks, pulling open the plastic liner inside the box, unleashing more of the stink—which she seems unbothered by entirely. “Near where you two live, or somewhere else?”

  “A few miles from our place,” Galavance says. Because it’s just her and Patty, just like earlier that morning at the kitchen, she feels the need to fill the silence. Plus the more talking she does, the less, she hopes, she’ll have to deal with that smell. “It’s this new-development neighborhood,” she adds. “Kind of rough for them right now, since it floods there a lot. It’s basically built on a swamp.”

  “Is this in Franklin County, by chance?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  Patty’s small hands hold a load of the tiny pink cubes of diced sausage, fuzzy with white frost, ready to move over into a mixing bowl. She pours the diced meat out, after a moment, and goes to fetch a plastic spoon from the rack of tools hanging from the shower curtain. “Does he like working there?” she asks, after a very long delay, her broad back to Galavance.

  “I guess, yeah,” Galavance says. “Say, should I … be doing something?”

  “We need to let the sausage get to room temperature. It was frozen—I had it thawing in here all day,” Patty explains. “But it’s clearly not quite there yet.”

  “Why does it smell that way?”

  “We don’t know,” Patty says, facing the unrolled knife kit lying open across the toilet tank. Big knives, tiny cruel knifes. Knives with serrated edges. Knives with big, broad chopping blades. Twenty in all, arranged in descending size.

  “I was thinking on the way over here,” Galavance says, and accidentally stammers, “if the sausage smells like fish, should we really be serving it? It might be bad. I mean, to be honest, this stuff here smells even worse than the stuff from this morning.”

  Patty turns. The fluorescent light of the bathroom buzzes, on and on. There are no windows in here. “I should probably be clear about something.”

  “Okay …” Galavance says, trying to sound as chipper like she normally acts around Patty. But she’s a little freaked out. There’s an air here, now. Something changed.

  “I don’t want to have you sign anything, Galavance, but none of what we do here can leave this hotel room,” Patty says. She doesn’t blink behind her glasses. “Understand?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “Sending the Culinary Inspiration Team to Los Angeles was Corporate’s last ditch effort to save the company, to get our name out there. We can’t afford to market on TV or the Internet anymore—the ads are too expensive. Frenchy’s has been slowly dying since late last year. They’ve had to close a few locations, I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  She had. “I kind of thought that’s why you were visiting, to see if ours was worth keeping around.”

  “It is definitely worth keeping around,” Patty says, her face brightening slightly. “It’s rapidly become the apple of Corporate’s eye, in fact. It’s a very good location in two ways. One, being so close to the mall and movie theater is ideal real estate—good flow there. And it’s also placed quite helpfully near something else.”

  “What’s that?” Galavance says.

  “I’ve been entrusted by corporate to see this menu item through,” Patty says vaguely, gesturing at the bowl of pink cubes. “I’ve worked for Frenchy’s since I graduated high school—a long time, you don’t need to tell me. I’d do anything for them. They paid for my ingrate son to go to school. They helped me when my cheating husband needed back surgery. They let me take two weeks off when my banshee of a mother was in the hospital. And I’ve paid them back every chance I could. Long hours. Long-distance trips away from home, like this one. I’m here because I’m dedicated—like I know you can be too, Galavance.”

  “I’m happy you like your job,” Galavance says, but isn’t really sure why.

  “I do like my job,” Patty says. The TV in the other room has some action movie on and there’s sudden gunfire, loud pops, and screaming. “And I know that for a young person to like their job, they need to be shown they’re something more than an easily replaceable cog. Nowadays, they need to be shown that they’re cared for and cared about and will be looked after, their natural skills put to good use. I see a lot of potential in you. Creativity and an open mind. Thus, speaking on behalf of Frenchy’s, I’d like to ask if you, Galavance, if you would like to be part of something most Frenchy’s employees never get to be. Not even Cheryl, who went to cooking school.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Galavance says.

  “If you say no,” Patty says, “that unfortunately means I’ll have to sever you from the Frenchy’s family. Immediate termination.”

  “You’ll fire me? Just because I don’t help you with this menu item?” Galavance knows there’s something else going on, but she’s playing it slowly, trying not to let things escalate. Not with so many knives presently scattered about the room.

  “It’s harsh, I kno
w. But turning down an invitation to the big leagues is a slap in the face, and Frenchy’s, despite its problems, still has a lot of pride. It can be great again. Like we were in the 90s. The local rival to invading foreign invaders such as McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s. To get here, to spread beyond the Southern United States, we just need help. I know that, corporate knows that, and that’s why I was put in charge of spearheading this. Openminded hard workers, specifically. Like the kind I’ve discovered in you, today.”

  “Can I have some time to think about it?”

  “The work on this menu item needs to start soon, whether or not you choose to be a part of it.”

  “Okay, all right, just give me a second.”

  Galavance steps out of the tiny bathroom and into the main part of the hotel room, though it’s not any less claustrophobic in there either. She goes over to the glow of the TV, passing the second bed to the closed curtains. Parting them, she can see Raleigh in the distance: the airport and the few skyscrapers the town has. She can see the university from here, where her dad went. Not Asshole Amos, but her real dad.

  With the room so bright and it being so dark outside, the window is a mirror. Galavance can see Patty behind her, standing in the bathroom doorway. She has a plastic spoon in her hand, low, at her side, staring at Galavance’s back, the tiny eyes behind her glasses huge and frog-like.

  “Does your boyfriend tell you about how his work day was when he gets home?” Patty asks—not nearly far enough away for Galavance’s comfort, talking loudly to be heard over the TV.

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “Any anecdotes about working on a house in a flood-zone you might want to share?”

  “Putting up drywall is a pain because the humidity wrecks it. Tile is expensive. Plumbing is complicated.”

  “Nothing about the location itself?”

  “There’s lots of mosquitoes,” Galavance says. “Why are you asking me about—?”