Aftertaste Read online

  “Twelve xabfarbs,” Eliphas says.

  “Is that a lot?” Zilch says.

  Eliphas nods. “A great sum, yes.”

  “I could’ve used the help with the last job. I fucking wandered around aimlessly for a week, compass spinning the whole time before the thing, like it got bored or felt bad for me, sprang out of goddamn nowhere and swallowed me whole. Whole, Eliphas. While I was still fucking alive. Didn’t even give me the courtesy of chewing first to put me out of my misery.”

  “I lost four xabfarbs on that,” Eliphas says, “if it’s any consolation.”

  “Gee, four whole xabfarbs, you say? Sad face.” Zilch faux pouts. “I’ll remember that next time I’m having some limb-removal done by a skunk ape,” Zilch says. “If you can’t actually do anything to help, can you at least tell me what I’m after?”

  “A creature that can hide in plain sight.”

  Zilch scans his immediate surroundings; there are no irregular shadows on the ground that might indicate something invisible is casting them. Nor is there anything semi-transparent hanging from the trees, bending the light around itself like heat waves rising off a highway. No faint silhouette watching from the roof of 1330 Whispering Pines Lane behind him either. He puts out his hand to his left and looks at the old man. “Hot or cold?”

  “No,” Eliphas says, “the trouble lies in the duality of the creature and its host. The host is unaware that they are harboring any affliction whatsoever. And only one—host or parasite—can pilot at a time.”

  “So we’re dealing with something that may not look like a monster, right away.” Zilch recalls the conversation with what’s-her-name in the car. “Those can be tricky.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “With our current data,” Eliphas says, “my brothers and I have decided to declare this a class eight lusus naturae.” The old man smiles, as if Eliphas’s happy for Zilch. “The first you’ve been assigned to, I might add.”

  “Class eight? What the hell have I been going after before now?”

  “Class twos, mostly. The occasional class one.”

  “What was ‘The Insatiable’?”

  “That was a class four, but you were assigned to it by accident. Clerical error. We do not blame you for aborting that mission.”

  “It melted me.”

  “We know. It did not get put on your permanent record. Our fault.”

  “With its vomit. It melted me, to the bone, with its vomit.”

  “We issued an apology. It’s also been appropriately reclassified, to a nineteen.”

  Zilch shakes his head. “So I’m being handed a class eight and there’s no undo button this time?”

  “Your failed attempt against the Insatiable was our fault, as I previously stated. It wasn’t your turn. This time it is—we double-checked—and despite the lusus naturae being above your experience level …”

  “… welcome to the big leagues?”

  “It’s your turn. Be warned: if you fail, more of her will be—”

  “I know, fuckhead. Christ. Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

  “I’m sorry, Saelig.”

  “Sure you are.” Zilch groans. “Fine, whatever. How do I make it dead?”

  Eliphas doesn’t make the old man reply right away. He looks Zilch over, up and down. “You’ve severely damaged your vessel,” he says finally, a little aghast. “Your nanobug count is where it should be after four days post-delivery and you’ve already expired over half of them! What happened?”

  Zilch chews on the corner of his fingernail. “I got hit by a car.”

  Eliphas blinks. “On purpose?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that? No, not on purpose.”

  “You’ll have less time. And you’ll only be allowed to hold onto her so long as you start to succeed at your assignments.”

  Zilch hands knot into fists, and he squishes a few steps across the soggy yard, closer to the boat. “What gives you dickheads the right to mess around in my head, anyway? I’ve got dead spots. New ones. Ones I didn’t make myself.”

  “As an employee, the penalty system was explained to you in full,” Eliphas says.

  “That’s another thing,” Zilch says. “I’m not your employee. I didn’t apply for this shit.”

  “Employee, I suggest you continue with your mission. You have the same information we do now.”

  “Nope, not good enough. I demand answers, you memory-stealing shit-wizard.”

  The old man flinches, and looks at his hands, then at Zilch. “Who are you?”

  “Nice try.” Zilch steps up into the boat with the old man. “You know, I’ve always been curious, what do you guys really look like? I say we crack you open and see. Personally, I hope you’re like that fucking paperclip that was always telling me how to write a resume.” Zilch rolls up his sleeves. “Wanna guess what my most recent job title was? Head of the department of kicking your ass.”

  The old man, hands out, tumbles over trying to get away from him. Zilch, towering, sees that up close, the purplish flicker has indeed left the man’s water old eyes, and he’s beginning to shake. “Stop, please. Take what you want, don’t hurt me.”

  Zilch groans out his frustration and steps back off the boat, shaking his head as the old man tries to offer him his expensive-looking fishing reel. Zilch leans side to side, the old man’s eyes tracking him as he tries catching for that violet glimmer—but he doesn’t find it.

  “Sorry,” Zilch says. “I only called you over because I thought you had a flat tire. My mistake.” Zilch tugs the anchor out of the mud and drops it back into the boat for the old man. “Have a good one.”

  The old man wastes no time wrenching on the pullcord to get his motor started again. He gets the boat turned around and tears off back across the bog in a hurry, trailing a white wake of turned swamp water behind him. Glancing back at Zilch, there was nothing in his eyes but a whole lot of fear and confusion.

  Zilch watches him go. “One day, pricks. One day.”

  Tires squealing, Galavance turns, hard, into a parking lot. The front of Frenchy’s kills her soul a little every time she sees it. All that neon and Parisian whorehouse motif by way of pre-weathered fabricated weather-resistant polystyrene. It looks like the “crashed” Disneyland seafaring vessels.

  In the clinging humidity and noise of the kitchen, Galavance punches in twenty-three minutes late. Daring a peek into the heart of the grill-line section of the kitchen, she sees Patty has already arrived and apparently has been here for a while. She’s going through everything; opening drawers, scouring the reach-in coolers, checking freshness date stickers, prying open the lid of the Tupperware containers and stuffing her stupid fat face inside to sniff-sniff-sniff. She’s a Hobbit of a lady, short and ruddy and freckled, but an angry Hobbit, perpetually scowling, pissed at all she beholds. And right now, that’s Galavance.

  Patty sets aside the plastic container of pre-chopped romaine with an unnecessary slam and says, peachy as can be, “Ms. Petersen. So good for you to join us this blessed morning.”

  “Sorry. I had kind of an eventful commute.”

  “Must’ve been,” Patty says and scoffs, shaking her head. “Because by the time I have, it looks to be a couple minutes shy of no longer being morning at all.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Galavance says. Every eye is on her. The Mexican line cooks eye their Jordans. The wait-staff, her own people, not a single one of them over the age of twenty-one, all made up like work is some kind of beauty contest, stare as Galavance’s cheeks redden. They’re all just happy it’s her and not them on the chopping block.

  “I got in an accident,” Galavance says, praying her voice won’t break. “I had to figure out everything with the other guy and … yeah.”

  Silence. Somebody please fucking say something, please.

  When Patty finally speaks, it sounds prepared. It probably is, a shape-up-or-ship-out competency booster.

  “When Franco
is ‘Frenchy’ Burdeoix started this restaurant in Limoges, France in 1978, he was a pioneer in his field, Ms. Petersen. He had a dream to come to the American South and turn the traditional cuisine of his adopted home on its ear, to inject culture where there was none. To take the cheeseburger and elevate it into a fromage sur la viande. And do you think that the fromage sur la viande or any of our other 101 decadent options became world-famous because Frenchy was late to work every day, unable to separate his personal life from his professional one?”

  “No, ma’am.” She always thought it was weird that Francois, a man from France, went by Frenchy. It’d be like her having the nickname Americany.

  Patty gifts Galavance with a few more moments of agonizing silence under the pitying stares of her peers, then, apparently satisfied, angles her square-shaped body to address the entire staff, her seafoam dress suit so starched the fabric makes snapping sounds as she moves, fanning out her arms. “Do we understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” everyone mutters together.

  Patty points a talon-like fingernail across at Galavance. “Do not let it happen again, Ms. Petersen.”

  Galavance keeps steady eye contact with Patty as she speaks and it nearly hurts.

  “If we find ourselves here again in a similar situation as this one,” Patty adds, “Frenchy’s and you may have to sit down and reconfigure their relationship. Understand me, girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, now that all of that’s out of the way,” the woman says, and after clapping her hands to illustrate the change of gears, she turns back her doom-gaze on everyone else. “What else do I have to do look into before I go? All of you got your performance evaluations—which I hope you’ll take home and think long and hard about, since not a one of them is worth putting on a refrigerator door—what else?”

  The grill cook, Miguel, quietly offers a suggestion: “Walk-in?”

  “Good, Me-gell! Very good. Yes, let’s do that. Come on, everyone. Let’s go and see how many outdated freshness labels we’ll find in there. But not you, Ms. Petersen.” An outstretched palm bars Galavance from moving forward with the others. “I think you have some salt and pepper shakers to refill out in the dining area.” She checks her watch. “We only have half an hour before we open, after all.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As Galavance walks out into the dining room with the canisters of kosher salt and ground black pepper, both roughly the size of paint cans, she thanks God that she’s not a psychic, that she can’t make things move with her mind. Because if she could, Patty would be ripped limb from limb and all of those loose parts would be going back in, just not in the places they came from. Thanksgiving turkey comes to mind. She smiles at this thought, Patty stuffed with her own parts. That hateful mouth packed silent, forever.

  Yikes. I get dark when I’m hung over.

  She’s at table four, refilling the pepper and getting it everywhere, when her cell beeps. She takes it out, using the table to block easy view of what she’s doing from the kitchen, just in case Patty comes storming out of the walk-in cooler.

  A text message from Jolby.

  can u go 2 the bale-bonds place? i got busted w/ a dimebag.

  She compiles a text on her phone’s cracked screen: “I’m sorry. I can’t. I gotta stay my whole shift. You’re just going to have to stay the weekend in jail. Maybe next time you’ll think twice before going to score with Chev.”

  Her thumb hovers over the send button.

  She thinks about this being it. The final straw. That she’ll return to their double-wide (which is under his name, he’ll be quick to tell anyone who will listen), pack up her stuff, and take one last look at his skid-marked underwear. But this time it won’t be a “Jesus, my boyfriend’s a man-child fool who can’t wipe his own ass,” but a “Now where the fuck am I going to live? I guess he wasn’t so bad. Here, let me go get my toothbrush. I’ll get that out in a jiff.”

  Galavance can’t even break up with Jolby in her own fantasies. She feels awful admitting that to herself, that the alternative, that she’d have to shack up with—heaven forbid—her parents, is worse. For all his awfulness, he does make her laugh, though. He’s sweet, generous on occasion, kind. Fuck, I just did it again. She holds down the delete key and erases her first reply. “Fine,” she writes. “I’ll cut out early.”

  Thx babe. I 3> U sooo much.

  She texts: “Yeah.”

  Patty comes up to the table and nearly catches her with her phone out. Galavance palms it, quick as a magician, and smiles as Patty nears.

  “All through?” Patty asks.

  “Yep, last one,” Galavance replies, slapping down the aluminum spout on the salt canister, done.

  “Lovely. We’re doing a tasting back here from some of our new menu items. Want to head on back and try some of it with us?” Not a question. Come, slave. The next round of floggings is to be begin promptly!

  Galavance follows Patty into the kitchen. On the prep table a few halved green peppers are sitting in a stainless steel hotel pan, stuffed with what appears to be chipped, burnt tires and stomped grapes and something viscous and brown. The smell is unreal. Like how your hair smells after the beach, plus the sharp tang of diarrhea and oniony stress sweat.

  Everyone is eating, but it’s obvious no one’s enjoying it. The kitchen guys politely nibble, and the wait-staff are all on thirty-calories-a-day diets anyways, so they take tiny bites like they’re stranded on a mountaintop and it’s their best friend’s ear they’re sampling. Patty, chewing away, is nodding encouragingly for Galavance to take the remaining one.

  “Garlic crouton stuffing with sausage and goat cheese inside a green bell pepper. The Culinary Inspiration Team at corporate headquarters named it poivrons farcis.” Patty attempts to mash the French name through her Dirty South accent and she ends up sounding like Foghorn Leghorn trying to be fancy. Galavance took French in high school (mostly so she could graduate a year early), but knows that every “creation” from Frenchy’s Inspiration Team is really just something you’d find it in The Joy of Cooking translated verbatim into French. Poivrons farcis is literally “stuffed peppers.”

  One bite and Galavance understands why every other employee around her is trying to not make the “This tastes like the bathroom floor of a meth den and I do not like having it in my mouth” face. The sausage is squeaky between her teeth. It doesn’t taste like cow or lamb or pig. It tastes vaguely fishy. Couple that with the richness of the goat cheese, and the mental image she sees is roadkill. Crushed, burst guts sizzling on hot asphalt. She fights to swallow it down, bile coming halfway up to meet it. She swallows again, and takes two of the Dixie cups of water Patty had thoughtfully arranged next to her tray of horrors.

  Patty, suddenly remembering something evidently, lunges for her wheeled suitcase. She carefully sets her own stuffed pepper on a napkin and goes through her file folder until coming to a stack of papers that she disperses around the room. It’s a review sheet for the stewed ass they’ve just eaten.

  “Everyone, fill these out when you’re finished and hand them in to me. Just remember that the Culinary Inspiration Team are fellow Frenchy’s family members and that they have feelings too, so don’t be too harsh.” This coming from you? Galavance thinks.

  The review sheet doesn’t require a name. Galavance can speak her mind anonymously. She jumps at the chance, using the counter of the grill cook’s prep area as a desk.

  What did you think of the sausage?

  It helped me to answer a question I’ve been struggling with most of my life. Now, I can claim, with zero hesitation, that there truly is no God.

  With two words, describe the texture (or “mouth feel”) of the new menu item.

  “Like butts” comes to mind.

  How would you rate the new menu item on a scale from one to ten, ten being stellar?

  I’ve forgotten what numbers look like after you made me put that in my mouth.

  While Patty is busy adjusting one of the
hairnets of the cooks and lingering a bejeweled hand on his swollen bicep, Galavance takes the opportunity to surreptitiously deposit her questionnaire by the briefcase and quickly make herself scarce, ducking back out into the dining area. She doesn’t know exactly why she felt compelled to do it, give it to total strangers guff like that, but all she knows is that after this particularly challenging—okay, downright shitty—morning, she deserves to have a bit of fun.

  The restaurant opens. In this corner of Raleigh there are a few office plazas whose workers make Frenchy’s their lunch break destination. Galavance mans her podium back by the kitchen door, going through the grid for next week. Getting each of her waiters and waitresses’ requests for time off and still having full coverage for every shift is like playing a terrible version of Tetris where there is no pattern to the pieces. She gets it looking right just as Patty wheels her suitcase into the dining room and spots her. “Busy, Miss Petersen?”

  Galavance keeps her worry—she’s deciphered my hand-writing, she knows it was me—packed down. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “There’s a cooler in the walk-in. Bring it out to my car for me?” Patty says.

  “I’m kind of busy,” Galavance says. Schedule done, she now can pretend to be working the rest of the day which requires a great deal of creativity.

  “Cooler. In the walk-in. Now.” Patty shoves the door open and walks out into the parking lot, towing her briefcase on wheels behind her. Galavance cuts through the kitchen, where a few of the dishwashers are standing around, and wonders why Patty didn’t ask them to haul this heavy-ass thing out to her car.

  Out in the heat, lugging the kind of Coleman ice chest she’s only seen loaded with beers around campfires, Galavance makes her way slowly out to Patty, who is waiting by her rental car. Patty loads her suitcase into the trunk and holds the lid up and nods for Galavance to hoist this thousand-pound thing in by herself. “God, what’s in here?” Galavance mutters, accidently out loud.

  “The sausage has to come back to the hotel with me,” Patty says. “It still has the Inspiration Team’s top secret label on it. Can’t have my little ants taking samples home and reverse-engineering all of the Team’s hard work.”