That was fine as far as it went, though the only dates I had were with suicidegirls.com, and most of my friends were avatars online. You can have a lot of fun that way, but it never felt quite right. I pretty much gave up watching television, because even the losers on prime time had better lives than me.

Then the Unrapture came. That’s not what anybody who goes to church calls it, of course, but it struck the rest of us as funny. The dead came stumbling out of emergency rooms, morgues and mortuaries one summer afternoon. Accident scenes changed in a hurry.

People freaked out, then got over it pretty fast. The dead people can’t be their own next of kin, so the quick got to inherit Aunt Millie’s nest egg, while still having Aunt Millie around.

It got me back to watching TV, once Survivor: Dying to Get Off the Island aired. Turns out the dead are real good at a lot of things that play well on reality TV. Except for American Idol, of course.

The dead don’t sing so good.

 
Knowing that dying wasn’t necessarily the end of the ride made some people careless. Not everybody got Unraptured, far from it, but enough people did that the same kind of folks who planned on winning the lottery figured that falling off the roof while skeet shooting drunk wasn’t going to slow them down much.

It’s hard to shamble down Burnside Street moaning “brains, brains’’ if your own brains had been spattered across the back patio. Coming back from the dead required being pretty much whole. That much the Holy Rollers with their horror of organ donation had gotten right.

Me, I didn’t have a death wish so much as a lack of a life wish. Even the dead were cooler than me. I couldn’t get into their bars, either.

I can’t tell you that I did it on purpose, but one day I accidentally jumped some Cat7 network cable to the commercial 240v feed. Maybe I didn’t care any more. Maybe I was tired of who I’d been for twenty-seven years. Maybe I wanted to be on TV.

What I got was a view into the afterlife that made my eyeballs spin while my ears crackled louder than feedback at a Fourth of July punk rock festival.

 
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.™

“Jeremy.’’

I looked up. Everything felt wrong. There was no other way to describe it. My tendons had been unstrung and taped in backwards. My muscles were knotted like a sailor’s nightmare. Thinking hurt.

“Jeremy.’’

It was a paramedic. Well, at least a gal in a white suit with a penlight.

“Wha . . . ?’’ My voice was wrong, too.

“Ok, buddy.’’ She smiled, first time a woman had looked me in the eye and done that since Mrs. Bagby’s math class in tenth grade. “I’m required to recite you your Pratt Rights. You are now dead. Your estate has passed to your designated heirs or next of kin. A court may take control of your estate according to the rules of your home state and county. You have no rights to your former residence or funds, though you may have limited claims on personal effects. You are no longer a citizen of the United States, but as a decedent on United States territory you will automatically be issued a work permit. Even though you are no longer a citizen, you still bear tax liability.’’

She dropped a sheaf of papers on my chest and patted it, and thus through the papers, me. “The Pratt people will have someone around with a kit and a starter funds grant. Good luck.’’

“Wha . . . ?’’ I wasn’t coming up with much new material.

Mr. Chua, who’d hired me for the job, leaned over. “You’re going to miss your delivery date, kid, if you don’t get back to work.’’

“Right,’’ I said.

And that was it. I was dead.

 
With three days the junk mail started filling up my PO box. I was living—well, residing—in the back seat of my Scion xB, but no one had taken away the box. The post office apparently didn’t care about my recent transition.

It was weird stuff, too. Come-ons for all-new wardrobes, pre-packaged according to my afterlife goals. Did I finally want to make it big in the horror movie industry? How about the poker tour, where the dead had a distinct advantage due to excellent facial control and a total lack of sweating?

Likewise banking services. My credit cards were gone with everything else, but there were people out there happy to take on a 100-year commitment from me. Apparently we dead people had no limit on our life expectancy.

So to speak.

The more interesting material was employment-related. Looking at the ads, come-ons and letters, I found the dead were a lot more risk-tolerant. Work on oil platforms, as salvage divers, as helicopter line-men; some jobs I’d never even heard of, that paid staggeringly well. They required no experience for Pratt-qualified applicants—the politically correct name for the dead.

I didn’t have to string wire through ceilings any more.

On the plus side, I didn’t have asthma any more either.

Once I realized that, I decided to try going to a dead bar.

 
Thaw frozen patties, dust with ground black pepper, broil in oven for seven minutes, serve over hamburger rolls with Velveeta cheese, mustard and onion, garnished with salt and vinegar potato chips.

 
“New, huh?’’ Angel, the bartender at the Revenant Agent was a Portland hipster. Dead, but still a hipster. She had tattoos that glowed and writhed with some chemical that almost certainly wasn’t approved for human subjects.

“Does it show?’’ I asked. No stutter, no sweaty palms. This dead thing wasn’t half bad, was it?

I’d come down in the mid-afternoon, right before happy hour. I’d worked overnight on Mr. Chua’s wiring job, for lack of a need of sleep and lack of a place to not sleep in, so I had the time. It seemed better this way.

“You look surprised.’’ Angel smiled. It was cute on her oh-so-pale face. “The new fish always have a stunned expression.’’

“Yeah. I’ll have . . .’’ I stopped. I didn’t know what it was I drank. When I was quick, I never could cope with the bar scene and I’d never been invited to a lot of parties. Dead, well, what did the dead drink?

“You’ll have an Edmonton Oiler,’’ she told me.

“I will?’’

“Yeah.’’ That smile again. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten since you passed over, right? You need some intake, but there’s not much you can digest anymore. Mostly soft tissues like calf’s brains, and some lubricant to keep it moving. An Edmonton Oiler is just canola oil mixed with brown sugar and rock salt. It works for most of the new fish. You’ll find your taste.’’

My lips puckered at the thought. “What’s that taste like?’’

Her smile quirked. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t taste anything anyway.’’

 
I found work doing high-voltage wiring under hazardous conditions—the upper floors of high rise buildings in progress, out on dam facings, helicopter-accessible wilderness sites. I didn’t have a sense of vertigo or a fear of heights any more, while my hand-and-arm strength was easily three times what it had been.

In other words, I could hang on to myself, hang on to my tools, and had little worry about falling off, in or under whatever I was working on.

I worked maybe ten days a month, and netted more than twice what I’d made when I was alive, even after paying my taxes. Though the dead had to file quarterly, for some reason.

The rest of the time, I barhopped.

Sex wasn’t a big thing among dead. For one thing, nobody seemed to have orgasms. There were a few tantric types searching for a way, and maybe they’d find one. There were plenty of quicks willing to give it a shot, for the sake of the thrill. The kinds of people that used to sneak into morgues for a peek at the cold, blue flesh, I guess. But we didn’t go to bars to hook up, not in that sense.

We went to bars to get away from the rest of you.

Me, I went to bars looking for something to taste.

An Edmonton Oiler goes down smooth. Turns out that whatever it is that does work in our digestive systems seems to benefit, a lot, from the vegetable oil. The rock salt is mostly for texture, and the brown sugar for those of us who can still taste it.

Most drinks in a dead bar are about texture and strong tastes. We’re trying to beat the ashy slickness that lies on our tongues and in the ruins of our stomachs. We’re trying to find something that zings. Those few people without senses of smell or taste weren’t bothered so much, but the rest of us craved something.

Maybe it was because we had no thrills. No sex, no sense of danger, what was there to chase? A lot of the buzz of socializing was missing, though that wasn’t much different for me, of course.

So we looked for texture and taste.

Spices. Flavors. Liqueurs. Strong scents. Subtle influences. Fluids, liquids, gels, semisolids, stews, stocks, crisp, crunchy, cold. Dead bars tried it all, and dead spent their time finding new and different ways to do it. And we were having fun doing it, having a social death together.

Me, I tried them all. Nothing tasted like anything. And so, in time, I began to dream of food.

Ground buffalo meat, crispy pepper bacon, Schwarz und Weiss Amish blue cheese, fresh-sliced tomatoes, bread and butter pickles, romaine lettuce, topped with a fried egg over medium on a toasted onion roll.

 
I got an SMS on my cell phone—VOODOO DONUTS 6AM. It was from a number I didn’t recognize, but still . . . this was how a lot of dead raves went. Six in the morning seemed an odd time, but it wasn’t like we slept.

September in Portland and the rain was already rattling with the promise of winter. We go for damp more than cold in this part of the Northwest, but I remembered hating it when I was alive. Now I found myself downtown in the predawn gloom amid a crowd of dead in front of a door set into a brick wall. A pair of frightened bakers looked back from the other side of the glass.

“God damn them, sticking this in our faces,’’ someone next to me muttered. Srini, his name was. I hadn’t known him when we were quick.

“Bastards!’’ someone else shouted.

A woman wailed: “I want to taste chocolate again.’’

Fists were pounding on the glass door when the sirens began to wail a few blocks way. We smashed the glass, then fled into the morning, trailing rainwater and flour and wishing we could have tasted something besides ashes and defeat.

It went on like that a while into the autumn—dead raids on bakeries and farmers’ markets. The memory of the smell of food was making people crazy, I guess. I tried to stay away, mostly succeeded, spent my time hopping through dead bars and increasingly obscure ethnic restaurants looking for the one spice, the one ingredient, the one thing that would make a difference from the canola oil and calf’s brains I’d been living (or dying) on.

I think it was the chocolate that drove the flash mobs. Our little excursion to VooDoo Donuts had been just the beginning. As the weeks grew colder, the attacks grew more widespread. Polls showed a reversal in acceptance of the dead by the quick, who were growing increasingly uneasy, and with good reason. We were, too. Calf’s brains and canola oil only went so far as a diet. Most of the dead women and many of the dead men would have killed for chocolate.

Me, I’d exhausted my survey of Laotian and Kazakh and quiche restaurants. I’d tried everything exotic between Grant’s Pass, Oregon, and Bellingham, Washington, and as far east as Lewiston, Idaho. You’d be amazed what can be found out there.

As the attacks increased, I saw more “NO DEAD’’ signs in the windows of shops, restaurants, even gas stations and hardware stores. At first they were small, hand-lettered placards, but soon someone was printing slick, glossy flyers with a help line on them: 1-888-DEAD-STOP.

These people had a point.

But it wasn’t chocolate for me. It was the fatty foods—pizza, Mexican, cheeseburgers. When I ran out of ground squirrel in fennel and créme Suisse, I was back to those old American favorites.

They all tasted like nothing in my mouth. I might as well have been eating ashes and stale chewing gum.

So I retraced my steps, driving highways and country roads and gravel tracks looking for the perfect burger. When I was forced to stay home due to paying jobs, I scoured the Internet and Powell’s Books for recipes, ways to approach ground beef. My search for exotic cuisines had been replaced by my search for exotic ingredients, or new ways to combine old ones.

Anything to get the taste of canola oil out of my mouth.

If I succeeded, it wouldn’t be chocolate—not hardly—but it might bring us dead back to some of the simple joys of life.

 
Lean ground sirloin mixed with soy sauce, finely chopped cilantro, white pepper and an egg, pan-fried in a cast iron skillet, served on Texas toast and topped with onion crunchies, jalapeños, shredded lettuce and chipotle mayonnaise, with a side of pico de gallo.

 
“Hey, Jer.’’

It was Angel, on the phone. She and I ran into each other once or twice a month, even though she wasn’t working at the Revenant Agent anymore. Being dead was a big social asset in the Goth scene, if you had the right chops in the first place.

“What’s up, girl?’’ I was mashing a blend of pork and buffalo in the skillet, working with leeks, garlic and pickled jalapȩos. Somewhere along the way my geekiness had sloughed away like old skin. I wasn’t sure when or how, but I wasn’t going to argue if a twentysomething cutie wanted to call me up.

Of course, she’ll be a twentysomething cutie for all of eternity at this point.

“Anything taste good lately?’’

I worked the meat blend and sighed into the phone. She laughed, with an edge to her voice. “I’ll take that as a no. I maybe got a line on something in the taste way. Meet me tonight at Rimsky-Korsakoffee House?’’

“Sure. See you there.’’

She hung up, I kept frying meat for a while. What was left of my heart just wasn’t in it.

 
Rimsky-Korsakoffee was in a converted Victorian in southeast Portland—unmarked, unremarked, an invisible business that had long catered to college students, aging liberals and Portland hipsters not terminally caught up in their own irony. That it was a dead joint now surprised no one.

Angel was sitting at a little carved dining table, something Depression-era from the look of it, half-hidden by a red velvet curtain which looked to have survived a moth attack. She’d ordered us both Edmonton Oilers. Mine had been served in a Flintstones jelly jar, garnished with a stalk of rhubarb.

I sat down and poked at my drink. “Breakfast of champions.’’

“Yeah, well.’’ She seemed subdued. “We’re eternally free and eternally young. The least we can do is stay in training.’’

“Hey, I’m the pessimist here.’’

Another sigh. She reached down and pulled a Little Oscar onto the table. “Pessimize this, Jer.’’

“Would if I could.’’ I sipped my Oiler and nodded at the cooler. “What is it?’’

“New secret ingredient. I got it from Kevin.’’

Kevin was a militant dead rights activist who was probably behind the chocolate mobs, as well as a number of other nuisance activities. Probably a few criminal ones as well. “Oh joy, did he rob a slaughterhouse?’’

“Look.’’ Her eyes met mine, then dropped away. “Don’t think of it that way. You’re the only one of us who cooks.’’

I found that hard to believe. “Everybody’s got a kitchen.’’

“They’re full of canola oil and mice, for the most part.’’

And the various calf brain products which had begun to reach the market, I thought.

“So I cook. Not like I eat it.’’

“Just try this. Make one of your burgers.’’

I cracked open the cooler and looked within. Four bundles of white butcher paper, unlabelled, sitting among bricks of dry ice. “Okay. . . .’’

“Good.’’ She grabbed my hand a moment, a gesture echoing the days when we were both quick and someone like Angel would never even have noticed me in the room with her. “Go make something of it.’’

 
Equal portions ground sirloin, ground lamb and ground beef. Mix with finely chopped ginger, white wine, paprika and mustard powder. Broil and serve with hoisin sauce and wilted spinach on toasted artisanal bread with a side of wok-fried snow peas.

 
The meat was rough-ground and fairly loose. Not dense muscle tissue, then. It was also as much gray as red, like pork could be. I didn’t think very hard, just worked it in the bowl. I knew I’d need a binder for it, so I crushed some stale sourdough baguette, and threw in an egg as well. Since I didn’t know what the meat was supposed to do, I went very light on the herbs and spices—just a little ground parsley and some onion salt.

As always, I pretended I was going to be able to taste it when I was finished.

While the meat was setting up, I thinly sliced a Yukon Gold potato and pan-fried the resulting discs in canola oil with a heavy sprinkling of rock salt and paprika. I set those up to drain, slapped a ciabatta roll brushed with olive oil into the broiler and fried the patty in my trusty cast-iron skillet.

As it cooked, something started happening.

My mouth began to water.

I watched the meat darken and sear. It continued to have a grayish color, like pork, but the smell was heavenly. The patty developed a brown crust where the meat met the juices in the pan. I almost pressed my face into it, drinking the smell, swallowing it down. My mouth watered, twitching in a way that I hadn’t felt since before I died.

When it was all cooked, set on the plate and ready to eat, I almost cried. Instead I took a big bite of the burger. Taste exploded into my mouth, meat and spices and the crunchy ciabatta all combining.

Even the potatoes tasted right.

I cried as I ate, the burger running down my chin and across my hands, warm and full in my fingers, everything I’d missed since leaving the living behind.

Screw chocolate, this was heaven. Food is better than sex, and now I really did want to live forever.

Eventually, I reached for the phone to call Angel. The dead were going into the meat business.

 
Pureed human brains mixed with ground human muscle meat. Mix with bread crumbs and a fresh egg, fold in ground parsley and onion salt. Pan fry, serve over toasted ciabatta with fried potato discs.