Page 39 of Aftertaste

Yeah, that’s us right here! Come join up; we’re taking a breather then heading over to the next stop. More the merrier.

Safe? Course it’s safe. Just a little food tour. Why wouldn’t it be safe?

PART THREESWEET & VICIOUS

You will need a pure heart, and a soul, meaning you are cooking for the right reasons…. You need passion, curiosity, a full spectrum of appetites. You need toYEARNfor things…. You need love.

Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook

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WHEN YOU GETto the Food Hall, you eat and you drink.

You’re starving by the time you arrive, so you pretty much stuff your face with everything.

Pomegranate pips. Mushroom caps. Blood-red wine.

Soda pop. Cinnabuns. Spicy Girl rolls.

This thing you had once on vacation with your parents, at a bed-and-breakfast that hasn’t been there for a decade. This other thing you couldn’t have eaten while you were alive, even if you wanted to, because the restaurant that makes it won’t open for years.

That’s the cool thing about the Food Hall. It serves, like, everything. Anything. Whatever you want. Whatever you feel. It’s full of coffee shops and grocery stores and restaurants. There’s bodegas and clam bakes and a whole island of cheese. Imagined places to hit up for imaginary meals. Carbon copies of your favorites from the Living world.

It’s endless. All-you-can-eat. Edible Eden, basically.

And it’s all there to feed you because that’s the whole reason the Food Hall exists—to nourish the spirits of the Afterlife. To help us get full so we can move On to our next lives.

Some spirits are satisfied by a single bite of a particular dish, or a sip ofjust the right drink. Others take longer to feel full—days in the Hall, or weeks. Months of eating. Some even need years to digest—each meal a way to work through the life they just lived, the memories they need to process, every bite a step closer to fulfillment.

Sooner or later, most spirits get to board the glittering trains departing the Food Hall and move On.

But some of us don’t.

Some of us can’t feel full no matter what we eat.

There’s a Hunger inside that won’t be tamed. Our Living put it there.

See, when we died? Their grief was bottomless. So vast and deep it swallowed them whole. They couldn’t process our loss; they couldn’t let us go. They held on so tight that it held us back. Kept us here. Made us Hungry.

That’s the uncool thing—like, deeply uncool—about the Food Hall. If our Living don’t move on, then neither can we.

We get stuck.

Destined to spend all eternity eating Snickers that won’t satisfy.

CHEF’S KISS

LAST RITES TATTOOis cramped and dark and probably a gateway to Hell.

It’s in a basement sublevel beneath an old meat plant, and while the street above has long since been recast as a gleaming mecca of trendy nightclubs, gimmicky eateries, and unattainably beautiful people, the tattoo parlor looks like something out of Satan’s sketchbook.

The walls are covered in thick, grainy plaster, out of which skulls and bones and whole skeletons protrude. The lighting makes everyone look kind of undead. The tattoo stations are fashioned after old-school electric chairs, with belts and restraints and a place to bite down, so you know right away that it’s going to hurt.

Kostya was sitting in one of these chairs, unrestrained but squirming, while Cal, an overly effervescent tattoo artist, burned a chef’s knife onto his left forearm. Frankie had had one just like it, in the very same spot. It had been his first tattoo, the start of a sleeve he was working on, accumulating ink like belt notches—a knife covering an oil splatter, a sprig of rosemary reconfiguring a kitchen cut, a flame-kissed sauté pan in the place where steam had rubbed his skin raw. Kostya had wanted a tattoo for a while, and though his right arm still hadn’t healed to the point where he could handle blistering needles with ink inside, he couldn’t wait anymore, and offered up his left.

He had thought—somewhat delusionally—that if he just came here, sat where Frankie had sat, chatted up Frankie’s tattoo artist, got the same damn thing seared onto his body that Frankie had, Frankie might feel him on the other side and consent to sending him a sign. To let him know he was okay, wherever he was.

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