Page 8 of Aftertaste

“Just get me a goddamn drink!” He was suddenly shouting, his eyes darting and frantic.

“Chill out, okay? I was just—”

“Now. Now! Before your fucking bar fucking closes and I can’t fucking toast to my poor, dead, beautiful wife!”

In the silence that followed, it felt like all the hot air had left the room. Particles of dust danced slowly in the space between them as Kostya and this sad, strange, large-lipped man gazed across the bar at each other, their stares combusting, gunpowder in a long, still moment before everything sparked.

Steven Tyler snatched a wet glass from Kostya’s lineup and smashed it on the floor. He shattered another and another, smithereens flashing like lightning. Kostya made a lunge for him, but a familiar puff of air hit the back of his throat, an aftertaste coming on. It happened so quickly, so clearly—like it was as desperate to make it into his mouth as this guy was for a drink—that Kostya froze in concentration.

It was a cocktail.

Light effervescence, slight tang. Champagne? Or, no. Drier. Cava. And gin. Lemon juice. Sweeter than sour. Meyers, maybe. And something floral. Elderberry and… and lavender? With mint? Not quite. Something that tasted like this candle his ex used to burn. Patchouli Dreams. Yes, patchouli. Did people even eat that? There was a smear of syrup, too, thick and sweet and tart. A cherry. A Luxardo cherry.

It seemed almost contrived that here they were, in a bar stocked with obscure tinctures and infusions, when someone—this guy’s dead wife, surely?—sent through an obscure cocktail made of just such tinctures and infusions.

Kostya could feel an electric tingle in his fingers. He had never before tried making the dishes he tasted. For one thing, though he was a championship eater, he rarely cooked, and for another, it had always seemed taboo, like chantingBloody Maryinto a mirror by moonlight. But this aftertaste—this drink, here, in this place—was a provocation as much as a libation. A dare.

Steven Tyler broke another glass.

“Quit it!” Kostya whined, and as the guy wound up to smash another snifter, he blurted out, “She liked Cava, right? Your wife?”

He set the snifter down so slowly it seemed like it might never arrive.

“How did you know that?” he asked, his enormous mouth a thin white line.

“I’m going to make you something,” Kostya answered instead. “Sit.”

He turned toward the illuminated shelves behind him and selected a number of jars and eyedropper vials. He gathered ice and a shaker. A jigger. A glass. A bottle of Bombay, but then, thinking it over, smacking his lips together although the aftertaste was gone, swapped for Hendrick’s. There was an open bottle of Cava in the wine fridge behind the bar, and—Kostya nipped a little taste—it was exactly right.

“I thought you weren’t a bartender?”

“I’m improvising,” Kostya answered.

Though that wasn’t entirely true. Something—someone—was guiding him. He’d always been able to pinpoint the ingredients, but now someone was illuminating the pale memories of the aftertaste for him, showing him exactly what he had to do with them, each step apparent. He layered the ingredients together, concocting the drink from the way it had danced around his mouth: the Luxardo cherry and a half teaspoon of its juice was drizzled directly into the bottom of the glass; the Cava and gin went into the shaker with a single drop of patchouli oil, a splash of St-Germain, and a healthy squeeze from the pipette of the preserved Meyer lemon jar. Konstantin added ice, and shook like he was James Bond.

“A Jack and Diet would’ve done the trick.”

“Shut up,” Kostya snapped, struggling to concentrate.

He strained the cocktail into a frosted Collins glass and used a drink stirrer to taste. Nearly there. He pinched a few grains of salt from the well behind the bar and sprinkled them on the drink’s surface. He didn’t even need to taste it again. His stomach gave a lurch, like a leap over a hill, and he just knew.

Kostya slid the glass across the bar.

Steven Tyler lifted it slowly to his lips, hand trembling, and closed his eyes.

“What’s it called?” he asked.

Kostya thought a moment. “A Spectral Sour.”

EYES STILL CLOSED,Charlie Katzowsky—no relation to Steven Tyler—took his first sip of alcohol in nearly a year. Tears streaked his face as he did it, making two straight paths to his chin. It wasn’t the alcohol—though his body did feel like it was unfolding, the tension melting away at the removal of the prohibition—but the drink itself, its flavors and notes and highs and lows. He hadn’t had much hope for this guy beyond being able to pour him a few fingers’ worth of whiskey, butthisdrink—it was poetry.

It tasted like Anna’s last year: sweet and bright and bubbling with life at the start, and then complicated, striated, serious and earthy and saline in drips, and then, at the tail, bitter and nauseous, bilious, whatever floral he’d put in there the exact same scent as her hospital room when things got bad, when she stopped responding to treatment and all the flowers people had sent started rotting at the same time, the air thick with waterlogged stems, suffocating, that awful smell. He took another sip, and he was back with his wife, alive, with her smile and the gap between her teeth, her ringing laugh, her short, sunshine hair dappled with light in his lap in the park, the blanket beneath them damp with dew, and he was reading something aloud, aNew Yorkerreview, but then no! The salt! The way they’d both cried when she said goodbye, the stale wreaths and floral crosses overwhelming the funeral parlor, their petals curling as he wept. He’d taken a third sip when he heard the shlumpy mock-bartender yelp—Holy fucking fuckballs!—and opened his eyes in time to see it happening.

Anna was materializing on the edge of the bar.

She arrived in a million pinpricks of light, each one glowing and fading and glowing again like a field of atomic fireflies. Her hair and face and smile illuminated in ghostly green, beaming at him, all of her exactly how she’d looked at the very end—thin, pale, ready to let go—only absolutely transparent, so clear he could still see the dishwasher’s disbelieving face through hers, the rows of liquors and infusions and syrups behind where her neck and shoulders and breasts were coming into being. She was sitting on the bar, laughing—could he bottle the sound?—with her long, lanky legs dangling down, kicking with life, and when they bumped his knee he gave an anticipatory jump even though they passed right through.

He looked back down at the Spectral Sour, then through Anna’s slender arm at the wannabe mixologist, who was inching his way back into the kitchen.

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