The Taste of Her

The implant was Alec's idea, sort of. Not really. He just worked the counter at the clinic and mentioned it one Tuesday while Macy was getting her annual scan.

"New tongue mod," he said. "Restores sensory range. Mostly marketed at people who burned out their palates. Chefs, smokers, chemo patients."

"I'm two of those categories," I said. "Minus the chemo."

"Then you're literally the customer."

He was thirty-four and had his sister's smile, which was Macy's smile too, and I trusted it more than the brochure. That's the honest reason I signed up. The other reason was that I hadn't tasted anything properly in maybe six years, and I was starting to cook the way someone paints by numbers.

I'm Jefferson. I'm sixty-two. I run the fusion kitchen on level 40 of the Jade Arcology, the one with the reclaimed reef windows. Been cooking since I was nineteen. That's forty-three years of chili oil burns and tasting spoons and the slow, stupid erosion of the only sense my job depends on.

The surgery took twenty minutes. Alec did the calibration himself, which felt like a perk.

"Six hours of nothing," he told me. "Then everything comes back. Might come back louder than before. Report anything weird."

"Weird how?"

"Weird like, the implant doesn't just restore taste. It cross-wires. Texture, temperature, pressure. All of it gets translated into flavor notes." He shrugged. "About half the users love it. Half get it reverted."

"Why?"

"You'll see."

Macy picked me up in the tram pod at four. Macy is fifty, textile restorer, hands always smelling faintly of cleaning solvent no matter how many times she washes them. We've been together three years now. Met at a cooking class when she was forty-seven and I was fifty-nine, both of us pretending we signed up for the food and not the loneliness.

"How's the mouth?" she asked.

"Numb."

"Sexy."

"I know. Very sexy. Like kissing a bicycle glove."

She laughed, and we went home, and at 9:48 that evening everything came back at once.

I was brushing my teeth when it hit. The mint hit with the force of a fire alarm. The water tasted like a river. I stood there rinsing and spitting and rinsing, and I could taste the fluoride, the paste's glycerin, some ghost of the plastic in the brush handle. I could taste my own mouth, which sounds gross, and was gross, and also kind of wonderful.

Then I walked out to the living room where Macy was reading, and I said the thing.

"I can taste the salt in your voice."

She looked up over her reader. "You what?"

"Your voice. When you talk. It's got salt in it."

"Jefferson." She lowered the reader slow. "Are you high?"

"I'm calibrated."

"Voices don't taste like anything."

"Apparently mine do. Yours does." I sat down on the arm of her chair. "It's not really the voice. I think it's you. Sitting close to you. The air off your skin. It's got salt in it and something like... green tea?"

"You are making this up."

"I swear on my knife roll."

She put the reader down. She was doing the squint she does when she thinks I'm being charming instead of credible, which is most squints.

"So it works," she said. "Good. You've been cooking like a hostage for six years."

"Thank you for that."

"You have. Destiny said so at the last staff party. Loudly."

She's right, Destiny did say so, loudly, at forty-two decibels at least. But that's tomorrow's problem.

"Come to dinner," Macy said. "I made the braised short ribs. Let's see if your fancy new tongue earns its keep."

---

The ribs were good. The ribs were so good I had to put my fork down between bites like someone being tested.

"Stop looking at me like that," Macy said.

"I can taste the char. The Maillard. I can taste the... the soy going dark at the edge, and the star anise is doing this whole..." I waved my fork. "It's a room back there. The anise has its own room."

"Okay, it works."

"It really works."

She was watching me eat with her chin in her hand. Fifty years old, gray coming in at the temples that she finally stopped dyeing last spring, and I had been kissing that face for three years and tonight, for the first time, I was going to find out what it tasted like.

"Careful," she said. "You're making me feel like the side dish."

"You're not the side dish."

"No?"

"No. You're the tasting menu."

"Oh my god." She laughed into her wine. "Sixty-two years old and that's your game."

"It's not a game." I set the fork down. "Macy. The tech told me something. The implant doesn't just restore taste. It cross-wires everything. Texture, heat, pressure. It all comes through as flavor."

She went still. I watched her get there.

"Everything," she repeated.

"Everything."

"Like."

"Like a hand on your arm would be, I don't know, salt and warmth. Like where you're warmest, it'd be stronger. Brighter."

The kitchen was quiet. The arcology hums at night, always, that low tide-engine drone under everything, and I heard it clearly the way you hear a room when two people stop talking.

"So," she said. "You're telling me your new tongue turns my body into dinner."

"When you say it that way it sounds bad."

"It sounds amazing, Jefferson. It sounds like the best review I'm ever going to get." She reached across the table and took my wrist. Her thumb moved once over my pulse. "How does that feel? Right now. My hand."

"Warm. Salty. A little like ginger, actually. Right where you're warm. Ginger and brine."

"Ginger," she said.

"Like fresh ginger. The kind that bites a little."

She looked at her own hand on my wrist like it belonged to somebody else. Then she looked at me, and I know that look. Three years of that look. It's the one she gets before she decides something.

"So the question," she said slowly, "is whether that's a fun novelty or whether it actually changes anything. Whether you'd feel me differently. Feel more."

"That's the question."

"And you want to find out."

"I mean." I turned my hand over so I was holding hers. "Only with you. Obviously. You'd have to want to also. There's no version of this where I experiment on you like a lab rat without you being into it."

"Well." She took a breath and let it go. "For the record, I have been sleeping with a man who kisses like a bicycle glove for three years, and I stayed anyway. So I'm a little invested in how this turns out."

"That's cold."

"That's honest." She was smiling though. She squeezed my hand. "Okay. Yes. Tonight. We find out. But we go slow, and you narrate, because I want to hear it. Every stupid flavor."

"Ginger," I said. "Brine. You're going to get tired of hearing it."

"I've waited three years to get tired of hearing it."

We cleared the table together. She washed, I dried, the way we do, hips bumping at the narrow sink. Normal. Domestic. Except every brush of her shoulder against mine was coming through loud, citrus over a warm salt base, and I kept losing the count on the plates.

"Jefferson. You're holding that bowl like it owes you money."

"Sorry. It's a lot. It's all a lot."

"Bedroom," she said. "Before you get sensory overload in my kitchen."

She turned the water off and dried her hands on the towel, and she did it slow, and I understood that she was nervous too. Good. We could be nervous together. That had always been the whole deal with us, the actual foundation. Not passion first. Two people being scared in the same direction.

We walked down the hall. She stopped at the bedroom door.

"One condition," she said.

"Name it."

"You tell me everything. No chef's filter, no polite grading. If I taste like fish, you say fish."

"If you taste like fish I'm having you looked at by a doctor."

She laughed and pushed the door open.

She didn't go in. She stood in the doorway with her hand flat on the frame, and I watched the smile drain out of her shoulders first. Her face caught up a second later.

"Actually. Wait."

"Okay. Waiting."

She turned around and leaned on the doorframe instead of coming through it. Arms crossed. I know what crossed arms mean on this woman. Crossed arms are a loading screen.

"Say what you're thinking," I said.

"I don't know if I like this." She said it to the carpet. "The implant. The whole thing."

"You liked it an hour ago. You made a joke about reviews."

"I liked it when it was a joke." Her thumb was picking at her sleeve. She does that with old silk. Little test pulls, checking the weave. "Jefferson, sit with this for me. You spend six years not really tasting anything. Six years. And then a twenty minute surgery hands it all back, and the first thing you want to do is run it over my body. Like I'm course three."

"That's not."

"Isn't it?" She looked up. "You described my hand like a dish tonight. Ginger and brine. You had a note structure. You had vocabulary."

The hallway was very quiet. Down on level 40 the kitchen had the reef windows and the steam and the noise, and up here we had the tide-engine drone and forty feet of carpet and nothing else.

"Maybe I did," I said. "It's the only language I've got. Forty-three years, Macy. Since I was nineteen. I never learned words for feelings that weren't about food."

"I know. I know that's true. But hear how it sounds." She pushed off the frame and walked past me, back down the hall, and I followed her like an idiot, like a dog on a leash it can't see. She stopped at the kitchen counter where we'd dried the dishes five minutes ago. She put both hands flat on it.

"I think I'm scared of something dumber than that," she said. "I think I'm scared it replaces me. That's the real thing. The implant gives you taste, and the taste is so good, and in a year you realize the only reason you can feel me at all is the hardware. And underneath, you're still numb. And I'm married to the hardware."

"We're not married."

"Don't correct the hypothetical."

"Sorry."

She laughed once, a short bitter thing with no floor under it. Then she rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and her whole body did something I'd call deflating if I were a kinder narrator.

"God. Okay. That came out bigger than it's been sitting in me. It's not a wedding speech. It's just." She looked at the ceiling. "It sat in me all through dinner while you were raving about anise."

"How long have you been carrying it?"

"Since Alec's counter. Since the calibration. When he said half of people keep it, half get it reverted, and you didn't even hesitate." Her voice cracked a little on the end. "You didn't ask what it costs. You just wanted the flavor back so bad."

That landed. I'm not going to dress it up. It landed right in the middle of my chest where the numb thing lives.

"You're right," I said. "I didn't ask."

"Thank you."

"But I'll tell you what I actually thought, in the chair, while Alec was calibrating. I thought, I hope this works, because I kissed her last week and felt almost nothing, and she felt me not feeling her, and she didn't say a word about it, and she's been not saying words about it for three years." I put my hand over hers on the counter. Warm. Salt base. I didn't say it out loud. "I didn't know how numb I'd gotten. That's the honest answer. Not the food. The food was fine, the food is always fine. I couldn't feel anything, Macy. Tastes, touches. It all came through at the same flat volume. Six years of that. And I just. Adjusted. You adjust."

She was quiet a while.

"That's the saddest thing you've ever said to me," she said.

"I make a mean short rib though."

"Shut up." But her hand turned over under mine. Held it. Her thumb did the pulse thing again. "I'm sorry I called you a dish reviewer."

"You kind of are right, though. It's the only language I've got. So teach me another one. Or be patient while I misuse this one."

"Both. Probably both." She exhaled. Then her chin came up and she got that look again, the deciding one, and I felt the whole room change pressure. "Okay. New challenge."

"Name it."

"Stop describing. Show me. You've narrated my wrist to death. Show me what it actually feels like, from the inside, the part that isn't a review." She stepped in close. Her gray temples were level with my chin. "Because I've been picturing it all dinner and if it's going to change things I want it to change them tonight."

"Here? The counter?"

"The bedroom is twelve feet away, don't be precious." She took my hand and put it on the