“Yeah.’’ That smile again. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten since you passed over, right? You need some intake, but there’s not much you can digest anymore. Mostly soft tissues like calf’s brains, and some lubricant to keep it moving. An Edmonton Oiler is just canola oil mixed with brown sugar and rock salt. It works for most of the new fish. You’ll find your taste.’’
My lips puckered at the thought. “What’s that taste like?’’
Her smile quirked. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t taste anything anyway.’’
I found work doing high-voltage wiring under hazardous conditions—the upper floors of high rise buildings in progress, out on dam facings, helicopter-accessible wilderness sites. I didn’t have a sense of vertigo or a fear of heights any more, while my hand-and-arm strength was easily three times what it had been.
In other words, I could hang on to myself, hang on to my tools, and had little worry about falling off, in or under whatever I was working on.
I worked maybe ten days a month, and netted more than twice what I’d made when I was alive, even after paying my taxes. Though the dead had to file quarterly, for some reason.
The rest of the time, I barhopped.
Sex wasn’t a big thing among dead. For one thing, nobody seemed to have orgasms. There were a few tantric types searching for a way, and maybe they’d find one. There were plenty of quicks willing to give it a shot, for the sake of the thrill. The kinds of people that used to sneak into morgues for a peek at the cold, blue flesh, I guess. But we didn’t go to bars to hook up, not in that sense.
We went to bars to get away from the rest of you.
Me, I went to bars looking for something to taste.
An Edmonton Oiler goes down smooth. Turns out that whatever it is that does work in our digestive systems seems to benefit, a lot, from the vegetable oil. The rock salt is mostly for texture, and the brown sugar for those of us who can still taste it.
Most drinks in a dead bar are about texture and strong tastes. We’re trying to beat the ashy slickness that lies on our tongues and in the ruins of our stomachs. We’re trying to find something that zings. Those few people without senses of smell or taste weren’t bothered so much, but the rest of us craved something.
Maybe it was because we had no thrills. No sex, no sense of danger, what was there to chase? A lot of the buzz of socializing was missing, though that wasn’t much different for me, of course.
So we looked for texture and taste.
Spices. Flavors. Liqueurs. Strong scents. Subtle influences. Fluids, liquids, gels, semisolids, stews, stocks, crisp, crunchy, cold. Dead bars tried it all, and dead spent their time finding new and different ways to do it. And we were having fun doing it, having a social death together.
Me, I tried them all. Nothing tasted like anything. And so, in time, I began to dream of food.
Ground buffalo meat, crispy pepper bacon, Schwarz und Weiss Amish blue cheese, fresh-sliced tomatoes, bread and butter pickles, romaine lettuce, topped with a fried egg over medium on a toasted onion roll.
I got an SMS on my cell phone—VOODOO DONUTS 6AM. It was from a number I didn’t recognize, but still . . . this was how a lot of dead raves went. Six in the morning seemed an odd time, but it wasn’t like we slept.
September in Portland and the rain was already rattling with the promise of winter. We go for damp more than cold in this part of the Northwest, but I remembered hating it when I was alive. Now I found myself downtown in the predawn gloom amid a crowd of dead in front of a door set into a brick wall. A pair of frightened bakers looked back from the other side of the glass.
“God damn them, sticking this in our faces,’’ someone next to me muttered. Srini, his name was. I hadn’t known him when we were quick.
“Bastards!’’ someone else shouted.
A woman wailed: “I want to taste chocolate again.’’
Fists were pounding on the glass door when the sirens began to wail a few blocks way. We smashed the glass, then fled into the morning, trailing rainwater and flour and wishing we could have tasted something besides ashes and defeat.
It went on like that a while into the autumn—dead raids on bakeries and farmers’ markets. The memory of the smell of food was making people crazy, I guess. I tried to stay away, mostly succeeded, spent my time hopping through dead bars and increasingly obscure ethnic restaurants looking for the one spice, the one ingredient, the one thing that would make a difference from the canola oil and calf’s brains I’d been living (or dying) on.
I think it was the chocolate that drove the flash mobs. Our little excursion to VooDoo Donuts had been just the beginning. As the weeks grew colder, the attacks grew more widespread. Polls showed a reversal in acceptance of the dead by the quick, who were growing increasingly uneasy, and with good reason. We were, too. Calf’s brains and canola oil only went so far as a diet. Most of the dead women and many of the dead men would have killed for chocolate.
Me, I’d exhausted my survey of Laotian and Kazakh and quiche restaurants. I’d tried everything exotic between Grant’s Pass, Oregon, and Bellingham, Washington, and as far east as Lewiston, Idaho. You’d be amazed what can be found out there.
As the attacks increased, I saw more “NO DEAD’’ signs in the windows of shops, restaurants, even gas stations and hardware stores. At first they were small, hand-lettered placards, but soon someone was printing slick, glossy flyers with a help line on them: 1-888-DEAD-STOP.
These people had a point.
But it wasn’t chocolate for me. It was the fatty foods—pizza, Mexican, cheeseburgers. When I ran out of ground squirrel in fennel and créme Suisse, I was back to those old American favorites.
They all tasted like nothing in my mouth. I might as well have been eating ashes and stale chewing gum.
So I retraced my steps, driving highways and country roads and gravel tracks looking for the perfect burger. When I was forced to stay home due to paying jobs, I scoured the Internet and Powell’s Books for recipes, ways to approach ground beef. My search for exotic cuisines had been replaced by my search for exotic ingredients, or new ways to combine old ones.
Anything to get the taste of canola oil out of my mouth.
If I succeeded, it wouldn’t be chocolate—not hardly—but it might bring us dead back to some of the simple joys of life.
Lean ground sirloin mixed with soy sauce, finely chopped cilantro, white pepper and an egg, pan-fried in a cast iron skillet, served on Texas toast and topped with onion crunchies, jalapeños, shredded lettuce and chipotle mayonnaise, with a side of pico de gallo.
“Hey, Jer.’’
It was Angel, on the phone. She and I ran into each other once or twice a month, even though she wasn’t working at the Revenant Agent anymore. Being dead was a big social asset in the Goth scene, if you had the right chops in the first place.
“What’s up, girl?’’ I was mashing a blend of pork and buffalo in the skillet, working with leeks, garlic and pickled jalapȩos. Somewhere along the way my geekiness had sloughed away like old skin. I wasn’t sure when or how, but I wasn’t going to argue if a twentysomething cutie wanted to call me up.
Of course, she’ll be a twentysomething cutie for all of eternity at this point.
“Anything taste good lately?’’
I worked the meat blend and sighed into the phone. She laughed, with an edge to her voice. “I’ll take that as a no. I maybe got a line on something in the taste way. Meet me tonight at Rimsky-Korsakoffee House?’’
“Sure. See you there.’’
She hung up, I kept frying meat for a while. What was left of my heart just wasn’t in it.
Rimsky-Korsakoffee was in a converted Victorian in southeast Portland—unmarked, unremarked, an invisible business that had long catered to college students, aging liberals and Portland hipsters not terminally caught up in their own irony. That it was a dead joint now surprised no one.
Angel was sitting at a little carved dining table, something Depression-
era from the look of it, half-hidden by a red velvet curtain which looked to have survived a moth attack. She’d ordered us both Edmonton Oilers. Mine had been served in a Flintstones jelly jar, garnished with a stalk of rhubarb.
I sat down and poked at my drink. “Breakfast of champions.’’
“Yeah, well.’’ She seemed subdued. “We’re eternally free and eternally young. The least we can do is stay in training.’’
“Hey, I’m the pessimist here.’’
Another sigh. She reached down and pulled a Little Oscar onto the table. “Pessimize this, Jer.’’
“Would if I could.’’ I sipped my Oiler and nodded at the cooler. “What is it?’’
“New secret ingredient. I got it from Kevin.’’
Kevin was a militant dead rights activist who was probably behind the chocolate mobs, as well as a number of other nuisance activities. Probably a few criminal ones as well. “Oh joy, did he rob a slaughterhouse?’’
“Look.’’ Her eyes met mine, then dropped away. “Don’t think of it that way. You’re the only one of us who cooks.’’
I found that hard to believe. “Everybody’s got a kitchen.’’
“They’re full of canola oil and mice, for the most part.’’
And the various calf brain products which had begun to reach the market, I thought.
“So I cook. Not like I eat it.’’
“Just try this. Make one of your burgers.’’
I cracked open the cooler and looked within. Four bundles of white butcher paper, unlabelled, sitting among bricks of dry ice. “Okay. . . .’’
“Good.’’ She grabbed my hand a moment, a gesture echoing the days when we were both quick and someone like Angel would never even have noticed me in the room with her. “Go make something of it.’’
Equal portions ground sirloin, ground lamb and ground beef. Mix with finely chopped ginger, white wine, paprika and mustard powder. Broil and serve with hoisin sauce and wilted spinach on toasted artisanal bread with a side of wok-fried snow peas.
The meat was rough-ground and fairly loose. Not dense muscle tissue, then. It was also as much gray as red, like pork could be. I didn’t think very hard, just worked it in the bowl. I knew I’d need a binder for it, so I crushed some stale sourdough baguette, and threw in an egg as well. Since I didn’t know what the meat was supposed to do, I went very light on the herbs and spices—just a little ground parsley and some onion salt.
As always, I pretended I was going to be able to taste it when I was finished.
While the meat was setting up, I thinly sliced a Yukon Gold potato and pan-fried the resulting discs in canola oil with a heavy sprinkling of rock salt and paprika. I set those up to drain, slapped a ciabatta roll brushed with olive oil into the broiler and fried the patty in my trusty cast-iron skillet.
As it cooked, something started happening.
My mouth began to water.
I watched the meat darken and sear. It continued to have a grayish color, like pork, but the smell was heavenly. The patty developed a brown crust where the meat met the juices in the pan. I almost pressed my face into it, drinking the smell, swallowing it down. My mouth watered, twitching in a way that I hadn’t felt since before I died.
When it was all cooked, set on the plate and ready to eat, I almost cried. Instead I took a big bite of the burger. Taste exploded into my mouth, meat and spices and the crunchy ciabatta all combining.
Even the potatoes tasted right.
I cried as I ate, the burger running down my chin and across my hands, warm and full in my fingers, everything I’d missed since leaving the living behind.
Screw chocolate, this was heaven. Food is better than sex, and now I really did want to live forever.
Eventually, I reached for the phone to call Angel. The dead were going into the meat business.
Pureed human brains mixed with ground human muscle meat. Mix with bread crumbs and a fresh egg, fold in ground parsley and onion salt. Pan fry, serve over toasted ciabatta with fried potato discs.
THAT SATURDAY
Devon Monk
So when I finally made up my mind to steal a head from across the street, I had to do it fast because Jugg’s dad is crazy. Not crazy ha-ha. Crazy come-meet-my-family-of-stone-heads-and-have-tea-with-us crazy. If he caught me stealing the heads out of his yard, he’d explode. Worse, he’d tell my mom I did it. My mom’s not super-crazy, but she and I aren’t really into the same things any more. She likes long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners and grave-robbing. Seriously, I’ve hated the beach for years.
Jugg’s pretty much my best friend now, even though he’s a boy and I’m a girl. His house is right across from mine, so I walked over and went into his side yard, figuring I wouldn’t get caught taking a head from under the tree.
The head was dark grey, almost black. It had no ears, but a really long nose and its eyes were big as baseballs. It stared straight up at me, mouth half open, like maybe it had just figured out it couldn’t breathe.
“You’ll get in trouble, Boady.’’ Jugg strolled up next to me.
Jugg was right. I was pretty sure his dad wouldn’t like me messing with them. Just like I was pretty sure my mom would go headcase if she ever saw what I kept under my bed in my room. Kids my age weren’t supposed to know how to raise the dead.
Still, I had made up my mind. I wanted a head. I needed a head. And I was going to get a head.
I pushed the rock to one side so I could get my fingers under it and I heard a pop—kind of like the sound of a dandelion root breaking. The head finally rolled forward and hit another rock head that was about the size of a bowling ball with a scream on its face. The head-on-head thunk was the same deep sound I remembered hearing inside my ears when my arm broke last summer.
I got a good grip on the loose head and lifted, straightening my knees at the same time. My back hurt, and something in my chest twanged pain down my stomach, but I had that rock off the ground. Oh yeah. The rock was so mine.
All I had to do was hang onto it across the street, then up the stairs to my front door, and inside the house, and down the hallway to my room. A little itch of sweat tickled my lip and I glanced at my house across the street. It suddenly looked a whole lot farther away. Maybe messing with the heads wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe putting the rock down would be the smart move. After all, I didn’t want to make Jugg’s dad mad.
“Wow,’’ Jugg said. “Is it heavy?’’
“No,’’ I huffed.
“Yes it is. Your face is getting red.’’
“Shut up, Jugg.’’
“You’re gonna drop it.’’
“Shut up, Jugg.’’
“I never thought you could do it, Boads. You’re pretty strong for a girl.’’
I thought about saying “Shut up, Jugg,’’ again, but needed that breath to start walking. The rock was so heavy my arms hung down to my knees. My thighs bumped into my hands with each step and I kind of wanted to rest the rock on my thighs, because it seemed like it would be easier to carry that way, and maybe I wouldn’t drop it and break my foot. I decided to rest the head on my right thigh, and then take one regular step and one nutso-groaning step to push the rock forward.
While I grunted, Jugg sauntered along beside me, chewing a wad of pixie stick paper.
“Man, are you gonna get in trouble.’’
Shut up Jugg.
“Where are you gonna keep it?’’
Shut up Jugg.
“What if your mom finds out?’’
Shut. Up. Jugg.
“Doesn’t that hurt? Your fingers are all white. Man, you sweat like a hog. Bet you can’t make it up those stairs.’’
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!
“Want me to open the door?’’
“Yes, you idiot,’’ I said, all out of breath. “Hurry!’’
Jugg looked mad at me calling him an idiot and purposely took forever opening the door. All I could do was stand there sort of bent in half, the rock
resting on my thigh, and both my legs shaking so hard they were pounding in opposite beat to my heart. One little drop of sweat slid down my bangs, slithered into the curve of my eyelid, then down my nose and blipped onto the rock. The rock soaked up the sweat, and—I swear this is what happened—its eyes moved.
“Jugg,’’ I panted, kind of worried now.
The rock rolled its eyes. It didn’t have any eyelids, a fact I think both it and I were pretty disturbed to discover.
“Yeah, I know. Shut up.’’ He walked into my house. “Man, I love the smell of your house.’’
“Uh, Jugg?’’
Maybe the rock heard me even without ears. Maybe it noticed it was not attached to a body or, I dunno, maybe it didn’t like where my hands were on its bottom. Whatever. It now stared straight at me, and even with no eyelids, I could tell it was angry. Crazy angry.
Another drip of my sweat plopped onto the rock’s lips. It moved its mouth, chewed, and smacked, real quietly. Then it smiled a freakishly huge smile.
I wanted to drop it right there, but was pretty sure my mom would notice a head in the hallway. The rock kept smiling, its eyes crazy-angry. It stared at my face, watching the slow dribble of sweat itching down my nose. Maybe it wasn’t crazy-angry. Maybe it was crazy-hungry.
So how was I supposed to know rocks liked sweat? I wiped my face on the shoulder of my T-shirt, trying to soak up the sweat. When I looked at the rock again, its mouth was back in scream mode. Oh, yeah, it was angry.
“What is the smell anyway?’’ Jugg called back. “Cinnamon?’’
Jugg the wonder-brain was no help. My hands were starting to sweat and I didn’t want to know what would happen when the butt end of the stone soaked that up.
“It’s cedar,’’ I said to Jugg. I took a step forward and thumped my way through our living room that was hardwood floor, wood walls and wood ceiling. Then I grunted down the hallway, also made of wood, wood, wood. My fingers were slipping, so I thunked faster, leaning my shoulder and hip along one wall for better leverage. I wanted to look at the rock’s eyes, but didn’t want to tip my sweaty head down. If a couple drops had made it wake up, I didn’t want to find out what more would do.
Better Off Undead Page 18