Page 29 of Aftertaste

Serious inquiries only.

This was followed by a fringe of paper tear slips along the bottom, sayingTEXT FOR DETAILSand giving Kostya’s phone number.

Thinking back on the whole episode—the way he’d just dashed off the text at Kinko’s, the way he’d printed the flyers without a single moment’s hesitation—made him cringe. He’d been so confident. So convinced that this would work.

Granted, he’d been aided and abetted by several glasses of juniper-flavored courage. He’d spent the better part of the morning curled up on the couch with a bottle of Hendrick’s, thinking about Saveur, and his dad, and how that hot, mean psychic had probably been right about him. Hehadbeen a coward, entrapped by his own hesitations. Unfit to handle the Dead.

“Maybe you should switch to decaf,” Frankie suggested.

He’d walked out of the bathroom to find Konstantin becoming one with the couch cushions, in the exact same position as the day before, wearing the same clothes and the same indelible look of dumb disbelief on his increasingly plastered face.

“Or,” Frankie reconsidered, “phew! At least change the bandages. Your arm smells like the Sunday special.”

The doctors in the burn unit had talked him into a xenograft of tilapia skin, which meant that they’d applied the parts Kostya used to trash at Saveur Fare to the painful, searing open wound on his arm, and wrapped the whole thing in gauze. Just twelve to fourteen days smelling like fish sticks and he’d have a jump start on a new epidermis, they promised.

Kostya took another sip straight from the bottle.

He kept replaying it in his mind’s eye, the scene with Michel. It scalded every time. His meekness, his spinelessness, his irrational fear. And of what, in the end? Michel Beauchêne’s fury? His disappointment? Whatever awful lapdog instinct he had brought out in Kostya’s subconscious, it had cost him his shot at seeing his dad again. Maybe his only shot.

Kostya had tried making the liver again—and he’d succeeded, over and over, the flavor precisely what he had eaten before Michel yanked the plateaway. But his father hadn’t shown. The aftertaste, it seemed, had to be fresh for it to work. The spirit had to still be there. All Kostya could do now was wait and pray that the aftertaste would reappear, that his dad would return on his own.

Frankie wrenched open their living room window.

“Alright, my guy. Enough. Outta the house.” He snatched the bottle out of Kostya’s slackening fist. “First, shower. Then go.”

“Where’m I s’posed to go?” Kostya slurred back.

“Anywhere. Nowhere. Till you find some meaning, or a restaurant concept hits you. Maybe you’ll figure out your next career move. At least till the room airs out.”

Kostya shrugged and didn’t move.

“Okay.” Frankie tried again. “How ’bout this? Do me a solid—go by the FedEx on 9th and print me out a couple more copies of my résumé. Keller called back.”

“Shit.” Kostya sat up straighter. “You steppin’ out on Rio?”

“I’m just taking a meeting,” Frankie said, in a voice he usually reserved for conversations about commitment. “Anyway, you scratch my back, and how’skadhiand garlic naan sound? I’ll hit Kalustyan’s for asafetida.”

A drunken smile curled over Kostya’s mouth.

“Stop tryna get in my pants.”

“You’re a cheap date, Bones. Don’t ever change.”

IT WAS HALFWAYto FedEx, pressing the button for a walk signal, that the thought occurred to him. If therewasstill a chance to see his dad, however slim, he couldn’t just wait around for his aftertaste to appear. While Kostya felt fairly confident about his ability to make the dish again, he couldn’t risk tastingpechonkain a cab, or on the subway, or anywhere else he wouldn’t have access to ingredients, to a kitchen. He had to learn to trigger the aftertastes for himself. To make them come when called. Like pushing a button.

And to do that, he needed practice.

By the time he got to 9th Avenue, the vague, inebriated plan had taken shape.

Flyers. A ghost test kitchen. One diner at a time.

Hell’s Kitchen Supper Club.

KOSTYA HADN’T EXPECTEDto receive any inquiries, not really, not based on his garbage ad, but barely a day later his phone exploded, firing off messages from several strangers all requesting reservations, the first of whom (Louise) he’d given his home address and a date (February 1) along with instructions to spend the day of her dinner stewing in thoughts of her dearly departed.

Louise was the music director at Our Lady of Sorrows on the LES and saw the flyer outside of Trinity Church after a workshop on organ maintenance. She seemed quaint, he thought, in her text messages. Mild. No-nonsense. Then again, she could easily have been an axe murderer, a religious zealot, or—heaven forbid—a social media influencer.

With Frankie’s help, Kostya transformed their pocket-sized apartment into a workable restaurant. They hauled their stained couch, broken television, and cheap, particleboard console to the curb, and arranged a Craigslist dining set—PLANT YOUR ASS-CHEEKS IN JUDE LAW’S OLD CHAIRS!!! MANHATTAN PICKUP ONLY!—in the space to create a dining room. They strung up a shower curtain (aKeanu Reeves Jesus with Dogprint, the last option left at their bodega) to separate the kitchen from the eating space. They scoured every visible inch of the apartment with bleach, and as they scrubbed some thirty years of grime from the ancient kitchen laminate and the crumbling brick of the exposed wall, Kostya—his melted arm still covered in a patchwork of fish-flavored bandages—made plans to pinball all over Manhattan to gather ingredients.

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