Aftertaste

Hidden by high clouds and moving at a roaring clip, the three agents inside the aircraft man their stations. The first, the pilot, keeps them on course. The second and arguably most important keeps an eye on their geographical position, scanning for cemeteries three miles below. The third, currently without a task, twiddles his thumbs and stares out the window pondering how the word cloud was invented. Cloud. Cuh-lowd. What a weird word.

The flight suits of all three are covered with sigils and runes and alchemical symbols. Each wears a set of deer antlers glued to their helmet. Not by choice, mind you. It’s just the uniform, comes with the job.

Receiving a nod from the first agent watching the gridded world on his screen, the third agent now eagerly unbuckles himself from his seat, draws a pentagram in the air with his index finger as he stands, and steps into the tail section of the aircraft. He opens a refrigerated drawer, a plume of steam fogging his visor, and he bends to peer in. With a long, quad-knuckled finger he skims through the neat rows of vials within. Each is marked with a hand-written name and separated into two columns—a rough colloquial translation from the agents’ language: TOP PERFORMERS and TOTAL FUCK-UPS.

The agent pauses, having forgotten since takeoff some hours ago which employee is next. Slightly embarrassed, he leans his head into the main compartment. Uh, brother, who’s up again?

The one watching the grid sighs. Zilch. Unfortunately.

Do we really want him on this, brother? Do you remember how things went sending him after the Insatiable?

The map-watching agent shrugs, his jumpsuit making a crunchy sound. He’s up to bat. We can’t skip him again. But do hurry. I’ve got a useable grave coming up, brother.

Yes, brother. The third agent returns to the drawer—his steps knock crooked when they rumble over some turbulence—and skims down to the very bottom of the total fuck-up category, removes the appropriate vial, and gives it a shake, which he’s always been told helps to wake the employee inside, currently in jelly form.

He clicks the glass tube containing the yellow fluid into a needle cartridge and carefully carries it over with both hands to load the Employee Delivery Module into the cannon at the tail section of the craft. He kneels to peer into the cannon’s adjacent monitor, tweaking the crosshairs to settle them over the grave scudding by far below, helpfully marked with a big red X by the map-watching agent.

His brother, up front, barks over the intercom: Fire when ready, brother.

Good luck, employee, the agent whispers when the crosshairs and red X align. He squeezes the cannon’s trigger and a thunderous crack trumpets the employee’s departure. The agent moves quickly to watch from the side window the powdery line marking the rocket’s trip as it screams across the sky in a long, high arc. Then it vanishes through the clouds, hurtling meteor-fast toward its destination.

The Employee Delivery Module punches through the cirrus nimbuses and down into a bright sunny morning waiting beneath, toward the grave. It breaks the sound barrier twice. Twenty yards, ten, five, and it pierces the world with a muted thud, the dirt only slowing the needle-tipped rocket a fraction. Roaring through five feet of dirt, rocks, worms, and tree roots in an instant, the module continues to advance. The coffin lid gives minor resistance but the rocket, equipped for this exactly this type of obstruction, sprouts a corkscrew and bores. Wood chips fly up and away and dirt pours onto the well-dressed corpse inside. The determined EDM has, at last, broken through. Its needle pieces the corpse’s chest with a fwap, finding purchase between two gray ribs. It injects the yellow employee fluid into its new vessel and some seriously heavy metal imagery takes place as the body begins to convulse with new life. Hands ball into bony fists and jaws part to silently scream. The employee is being born again in essence, soul finding meat and weird science making things get gooey again, where, previously, there’d only been dust.

In the aircraft, already several miles from the drop-zone, a green light winks on and all three agents, behind their rune-scrawled visors, smile as one. They will go out tonight, for drinks and to celebrate a successful delivery, their job well done. Meanwhile under the table, far from their bosses’ prying eyes, they will make bets on the employee’s likelihood of success. Saelig Zilch’s odds don’t look so hot.

The corpse’s first breath is distinctly soil-flavored. And with the realization that, yet again, he’s woken up under-fucking-ground, he begins franticly scrambling for the surface, clawing at the dirt, with hands that are not his.

Punching through the surface, he gulps in fresh air with a guttural reverse-roar. It’s so bright up here it makes the back of his eyes scream. His vision is at first nothing but a kaleidoscope of mending cones and rods, but with each blink he has a better view of his surroundings, and he eventually realizes he wasn’t so far off to begin with: surrounding him are nothing but granite head stones and weeds. Not the nicest graveyard he’s ever been reborn into.

Still in the cheap black suit his borrowed carbon had been buried in, Saelig Zilch grabs at handfuls of grass around him, and tearing them out by the roots as he tries to pull the rest of his body free. It is a slow process; the muscles in his new body are atrophied and it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to dig themselves out from under several feet of compacted ground. But soon enough he is out, and crawls away to secure some distance from the grave in an awkward scuttle, afraid of sliding back in—because that’s happened before. And what’s worse than dragging yourself out of a grave? Doing it from the same one twice.

With each ragged pull of the humid air, his lungs wheeze as they repair themselves—the vessel, what remains of it, tailoring to him. Cells rebuild. The nanobugs assimilate or recombinate or whatever the scientific term is—overwriting the DNA of the poor sap who died and looking more and more with each passing moment like Saelig Zilch.

The skin, what the body has left, almost immediately begins to lose its chalkiness for a healthier hue. His eyes balloon back up to refill the sockets, blank white one blink, blue-blue the next. His hair becomes an inky black with twin shocks of silver on the temples, as it had been when he’d last been alive. All of this, mind you, hurts a great deal.

Zilch lies on his back, drops his chin to his chest, and notices the rocket-powered syringe still harpooned in his chest rocking back and forth with each labored breath. He has to use both hands to draw the needle from his new body—it’s at least eight inches long and he swears he feels it pop free from his spine, giving him a flash of pain when it dislodges.

He studies the side of the gizmo. A screen flashes delivery complete twice and goes dark. There is a switch on the side—it’s currently set to DELIVER, the other ABORT. He’ll need to hang on the needle for later—this is far from his first rodeo—so he pockets the module and peers down inside his shirt to watch as the puncture wound fills in, making a sound like someone blowing a bubble as it closes.

Things inside him click, crunch, squeak, and gurgle. His teeth reset like a player piano with sticky keys. It gets quiet once things settle, complete, and all he can hear, then, is the machinegun chorale of the cicadas in the trees and grass around him, the sound thunderously loud to his new eardrums.

He sits up and raises a one-finger salute to the sky. Made it, assholes.

The inner ear of the formerly-interred gives Zilch a seasick kick once he’s standing. One step, then another, tottering like a gin-dipped toddler.

Down the path of the cemetery he goes, wavering, his black suede loafers crunching on top of the walkway gravel. He admires the glint on some of the newer headstones as he passes, the marble of many is still fresh and the carved lettering sharp. A few of the names chime something in him, faraway. And those dates, birth and death. He tries to ignore the nagging feeling of déjà vu. Memories are just stains, and no matter how many times he does it, being reborn is like waking suddenly from a bizarre dream, and it can take some time to shake his head of the fragments bouncing around inside.

He pops the collar of the burial suit’s jacket, a mannerism that feels full of fake bravado even to him, as if he’s trying to convince himself, This doesn’t bother me, not at all, just another day at the office. But thoughts continue to be triggered, his brain making damp clicks as vague memories surface, none of which he likes very much. He suddenly remembers how badly he’d botched the last job. How long ago that was is impossible say, because to Zilch the splice between the end of one job and the start of the next is indiscernible—he was screaming and bleeding to death not ten minutes ago, to his mind, then boom, he’d awoken in a different body, buried alive and still screaming, as if he’d snapped out of a dream and woken up in a new one. A nightmare loop.

Being eaten alive, that was a fail. And not a particularly positive memory to have lodged in his head. So he closes his eyes, sucks in his breath, trying to scramble his thoughts, to bury that one deep in his subconscious. He does, but immediately another one surfaces, horrifying in a completely different way: her face, her laugh, the color of her eyes and her hair and her cupid bow lips. It may still be a dream, or a memory of a dream, or even a dream made up of rearranged memories. But he suddenly remembers, for certain, that her name was Susanne. Her name was Susanne. Those assholes made sure to leave him that much.

Her name was Susanne, he says, the last recitation accidentally out loud.

But enough standing around in a graveyard muttering to yourself. You’re here to work, so get to it, he thinks grimly. Zilch has wasted plenty of jobs sitting around getting all philosophical already; it’s a dead-end. He scans his surroundings, squinting past the sun. Task numero uno: it’s good to figure out where the hell they dropped you.

Clues one and two appear to him over at the graveyard’s perimeter, where there are wildflowers beyond the fence, crowded on the grassy shoulder dividing the boneyard property from an unpaved country road. The raw dirt of said road is orange, just like that of the grave he’d crawled out of, iron-rich. Clue One.

Clue Two are the flowers. Zilch tests himself on what he remembers about plants. (They have no problem stealing his memories from his former life but leave the rest the parts of his brain filled with useless trivia. But who doesn’t like a dash of insult on their steaming hot injury, right?)

He remembers. That’s the gory, spiked head of … Bee Balm.

The buttery pastry on a stem: that’s Yellow Jessamine.

That triggers a strong memory of … salads. In particular, one he’s made for a wedding he’d worked as a caterer some years back, with Susanne. It was a salad with wildflowers and radicchio and grated carrots. It had been a big deal among gastronomical trend-followers. The bride had called herself a foodie (a term he and Susanne always hated) but had wanted something to represent her groom—a southern boy—and his roots. Virginia. That where the wedding had been, Virginia. Bee Balm and Yellow Jasmine grow in Virginia. It had been about as hot that day as it is today. Except then, Zilch had been sweating out the previous night’s bottom-shelf vodka. Now, he just stinks like turned earth—he picks a wad of it out of his ear.

So between Clue One and Clue Two he deduces: I’m somewhere down South.

But with the high number of conifers among the growth across the road, it’s can’t be too far south. The orange dirt he just scraped out of his ear helps narrows it down more.

Apparently his nanobugs have gotten his gray matter working well enough to produce a headache—the kind you might get when a dentist misses your mouth and opts for a frontal lobotomy instead of a sucker following a root canal. You know, for the LOLs.

He clutches his head, eyes watering, and turns with the pain as it shifts about his skull—from his left brow to over his right ear. A compass needle demanding to be followed.

Under the hot sun, Saelig Zilch follows the pain compass out the gate and onto the dirt road. Fuck my stupid un-life.

The oscillating fan stands guard at the corner of the bed, droning, scanning right to left over Galavance’s frame. It was too hot last night for covers, or even a sheet. She’s in a Papa Roach T-shirt that’s been laundered so many times it looks shotgunned. Poking her finger like a mole through one of the many holes, she considers how much the shirt, which isn’t even hers but Jolby’s, feels like new pasta. Pasta. Pots and pans. Steam. Kitchen. Time clock. Late. "Shit."

She doesn’t feel the hangover—didn’t even realize it’d been waiting, coiled inside her head—until she sits up. Blammo. Then she remembers the light dinner and a whole bottle of white zin Three Buck Chuck. She stares into the white plastic face of the fan, slowly shaking its head at her. Tsk, tsk. Galavance sits on the corner of the bed, begging the clawed thing in her skull to go away.

It’s sitting here, staring at her boyfriend’s hillocks of dirty clothes (sharing foothills with the mound of clean clothes, dangerously blending territories) that she spots something terribly honest. A pair of his tidy whiteys, crotch-out, with an earth-tone smudge the size of a thumb print driven deep into the fabric. It feels like the skidmark is looking at her.

Jolby keeps asking her to bring leftovers home from work, and she does it because she hates cooking, but Americanized French cuisine—with about ten times the necessary grease—does a serious number on her beau’s guts. Maybe Galavance needs to consider which is worse, cooking or doing his butt-burnout laundry.

This was nothing new to her. Soiled underwear, a flecks of orange on the bathroom wall where he’d missed lurching into the bathroom for a loud, three a.m. barf-a-thon, the fact he seems allergic to washing his dirty dishes. But when you’ve dated someone for going on damn near a decade—shrug—that’s just how they are, love it or lump it.

Where else are you gonna go? he says without saying. We’ve been together forever. Imprisonment marshaled with a banal, lazy fist. Partly his, partly hers. She could leave at any time. Could being the operative word there.

She’s still thinking about fists as she pours cereal into a coffee cup because it’s the only clean dish left in the place, wondering how sometimes—okay, often—she’d like to make another kind of fist and render Jolby’s head to skull-mulch. She considers how much it pleases her to think about this when she thinks of her hands, her fingers, picking up his shit-stained clothing sans jewelry, engagement or otherwise. Not even a cheap-ass pewter promise ring from Walmart.

I wouldn’t even care if it did turn my fingers green, I want something, she thinks.

That was what she would say, you know, if she cared that much. I’m a modern woman. I shouldn’t need that validation, that existence-confirmation, but at the same time, aren’t I fucking owed? I wash his underwear. And I don’t (often) complain.

Having eaten, Galavance steps into her work pants, slipping Jolby’s T-shirt off. She snaps a bra, and dons her work-issue polo with FRENCHY’S stitched onto the chest. She speedily tries working her white-blond hair into some semblance of a style before giving up opting for a simpler ponytail, then applies her makeup, hastily but with expertise.

Her purse is light forty bucks. Half her cigarettes are gone, too. Along with her lighter. Jolby, for a stoner, is an early riser. He’s been gone since before dawn.

With her embarrassingly out-of-date pay-as-you-go flip phone, Galavance punches in the number for work on its cracked screen while stepping out into the morning’s soul-burning heat. She tells her boss she’s going to be a few minutes late. Her boss, three years her junior, gives a moment of dead air. He’s probably shrugging and expecting her to divine that through the phone.

Whatever, he says at last. But you remember Patty’s coming by today, right?

Galavance’s eyes shoot wide. "What?" Whether it’s the news, the sudden heat pounding across her, or a combination of both, her stomach turns.

Ch’yeah, man. Patty’s coming for the new test location menu items and shit. Said she was gonna make sure we’re, you know, on the ball. And shit.

You’re gonna be there, right? she asks. Her boss is a fuck-up, the only one bigger than her at this particular location. He’ll soak up some of Patty’s rage for Galavance, if he’s there today. But he just laughs.

Screw that. I called in. Have fun.

She doesn’t say goodbye, just closes the phone and grinds her teeth. Goddamn it.

Stomping across the mildew-stained Astroturf carpeting the patio, she dances between the neighbor’s dog’s shit piles and beer cans land-mining the front yard, and hops in her bubblegum pink Cavalier. The dial thermometer hanging on the side of their double-wide says it’s eighty-three outside, but in the car it feels at least three times that. Galavance starts the car up and immediately mashes the switches to drop all four windows—one screams and shudders in its reluctant descent. She tests the wheel with exploratory pats. Cool enough. She backs out of the gravel driveway and drives down and out of the court, never bothering to acknowledge any of the octogenarians in their front yards, watering pathetic flowerbeds, even though they wave at her, denture teeth big as playing cards, too white, too widely presented.

Happy old people. Fuck ’em.

The Go-Go’s Greatest Hits has been stuck in her car’s CD player for months. Some days she doesn’t mind. But today the next track is Skidmarks on My Heart. She cannot help but shake her head—it’s too potent a coincidence.

With no time to stop for a coffee, she needs nicotine, ASAP. She feels around blindly for the goddamn lighter. Cup-holders, passenger seat, nope. She knows Kit Mitchell Road like the back of her hand. She’s confident she can look away for one little second.

Flame blessedly set to cig (the lighter had fallen under her seat), she glances up just long enough to register that there’s a pale man in a brown suit coming up fast, too fast to do anything but realize she’s going to plow into him and there’s no way to avoid it.

Tires scream. She screams. He screams. We all scream for vehicular manslaughter.

Thumpa-thump.

The Go-Go’s continue, trapped in the 80s on a spinning plastic disk, undisturbed by the collision. "Head over heels, no time to think …"

Hands automatically readjusting to ten and two, Galavance stares through the spiderwebbed windshield at the road ahead, now scattered with broken grille plastic. The headlight bracket rolls along like a coin on its edge. All she can say right now is Oh, over and over again. Oh. Oh. Not good, not good.

Then, as if her day couldn’t get any weirder, in the rear-view mirror, as if only suffering a minor ouchy, the man she’s hit (and not just clipped but bulldozed over) rises to his feet. The shoulder of his dark jacket flutters loosely, shredded. Tie askew, flopped over one shoulder. One side of his face is chewed and ribbed with bleeding road rash. Something skitters across his face—or is that the sunlight playing tricks on her?—and makes a beeline for the edge of the wound and either vanishes or … goes inside him?

"You kids have got to slow down out here," he says, coming up next to the car, hardly limping.

I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.

Well, thank God you didn’t do it intentionally.

How is this possible? she thinks. I saw him spiral through the air like some kind of deathwish ballerina on malfunctioning spring-heels and now here he is … talking, walking, goddamn alive?

The man leans down to the window and looks at Galavance, still holding the wheel as if she’s about to edge over the big hill of a rollercoaster. "Are you okay?" he asks with raised eyebrows and chin down, the picture of uncertainty.

I’m so sorry, mister. Hey, I mean, do you need a hospital?

Not necessary. He coughs and frowns into his palm. Wiping whatever he brought up on a pant leg, he says, Where are we?

Kit Mitchell Road.

But, North Carolina, right?

Yeah, she says. As gently as if the man’s a shaken bottle of nitroglycerin, she asks, Say, you sure you don’t wanna see a doctor?

I’m always this pale if that’s what you’re getting at. Even before— he cuts himself off. He steps back from the car, hands on his hips, squinting into the morning sun. Up close now, she sees his suit isn’t brown, but black, just covered in layers of dirt. He was dirty before she hit him. Why is some filthy suit out here in the sticks?

She places a hand over the shape her cell phone makes in the pockets of her form-fitting khakis. She could call the cops, sort this thing out legitimately, correctly, but doesn’t want to. She’s seen Orange Is the New Black. She wouldn’t last long in prison.

I shouldn’t be talking to you, he says. Another car passes and he moves way off the road this time. I’ve got somewhere to be.

Oh, God. He’s like some gangster or something. Did he bury someone out here and his buddies left him? Or, fuck, is he all dirty because he was the one buried? Galavance’s hands squeak on the steering wheel, tightening.

He’s looking over her Pepto Bismol pink vehicle closely. "Your wheels still good