Ambrosia

Maybe nobody ever would’ve known about the food at Mann Memorial if Jorge Suarez hadn’t gotten cancer. Maybe Carver would have given up before I got there. Maybe I’d still be able to eat without retching. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

I first heard about the Ambrosia at Derek Schmidt’s 35th birthday party. My old college roommate was my only connection to the high-end dining scene by that point, and conversely high-end dining was my only connection to him. In our youths, drunk on life and Modelos and willing to rack up fabulous credit card debt, we had gleefully torn through Miami’s gourmet scene while Derek’s string of perplexed and picky girlfriends stayed behind.

As the years wore on, my stagnant editor income could no longer cover even an occasional gourmet splurge. Derek, though, had become a real estate mogul of some nebulous sort, his moon-faced ginger mug popping up on For Sale signs of distressed commercial property. Every so often he would call me up to fill a seat at a steakhouse chef’s table or an experimental fusion pop-up. He always offered to pay so long as I shared the wildest things on the menu with him, an offer I always begrudgingly accepted. Together we had eaten bubbles of smoke, slurped down still-wriggling octopuses, and sucked cilantro-flavored foam out of a plaster cast of a pompous head chef’s mouth.

He claimed to like how I described flavors, that I could crystallize into words the sensations that would otherwise fade away as inchoate sense memories. That slightly turned uni would now live forever as “Poseidon’s booger”, the black ant salt as “angry dirt-flavored pop rocks”. I did my best to manufacture these quirky similes every time, but mainly I think he just invited me because he was lonely. I seldom saw the other diners more than once or twice before they cycled out of his life.

This time he had chosen a nominally Tuscan hole in the wall near Little Haiti. Derek was finishing his white truffle pasta (“like heavy rain on a walnut farm”, I had obligingly described after trying a bite) when conversation turned to Suarez’s new article.

“So what do we think?” Anita said over her third glass of tawny port. “Has old Jorge gone nuts?”

“His writing is still eloquent. He certainly doesn’t seem demented,” one of the brothers on the other side of the table, Chaz or something, opined.

“What’s this? Jorge Suarez? I thought he retired a couple months ago,” I said. Somebody handed me a phone with the article pulled up, the familiar byline picture of the old man gazing at me with his doleful brown eyes.

In the featured image Mann Memorial Hospital rose out of the surrounding water, a gleaming edifice of steel and plate glass reflecting the golden sunset back into the swamp; this had been hastily photoshopped beside a stock photo of a metal cloche. The headline proclaimed “I Wrote About Food for the Herald for 37 Years. I Saved the Best for Last.” I skimmed the text while the conversation flowed around me.

…fortifying, restorative, joyful, all the things that hospital food—all food!—should be, but so seldom is. Separate courses are neither practical nor desired. Seared asparagus, blistered grapes, walnut praline, braised pork, dotted atop a delicate sweet potato and carrot puree create an impression as complete and perfect as a Seurat…

“I think he’s just pulling our legs. He’s always liked a good joke,” the other brother said.

“But on his deathbed? That’s commitment to the bit,” said Chaz.

“Even if he’s telling the truth, it could just be, like, death euphoria. My grandma got that way, towards the end,” Anita said.

“And the whole thing about the food of the gods that you can only eat if you’re dying? It’s like a campfire story. Give me a break,” the brother scoffed. That tidbit jogged my attention back to the article.

…within the inner sanctum of the palliative care ward, the hospital hides the greatest degustation of all, the dish which impelled me to write this article despite my complete inability to describe it. My orderlies will not name for me the ingredient, singular. I have taken to calling it, with apologies to my mother-in-law’s marshmallow salad…

“I guess none of us will ever know for sure,” Anita said.

“Unless somebody gets cancer real quick,” Derek quipped. Uncomfortable laughter.

…AMBROSIA. It is the single greatest Food I have ever tasted, such that it almost renders meaningless a life spent eating, or making, anything else…

“What do you think, Mike?” Derek asked me.

I finished reading and held the phone out into the middle of the table to be retrieved by whoever it belonged to. “I think it’s all for the pun.”

“The pun?” Chaz asked.

“Yeah, didn’t you read to the end of the article?”

“We’re not all blessed with your attention span, Mr. Editor,” Anita slurred.

I smiled, though something about the fervent tone of the piece had disturbed me. “I think he just wanted to finally mean it when he said something was ‘to die for’.”

Suarez’s account of his experience at Mann Memorial was briefly the talk of Florida foodie communities, chewed over between bites of omakase up and down the peninsula. Some dismissed it as senile ramblings, or wires crossed between morsels and morphine. But others, particularly those who had known Jorge personally, thought it had to be the truth. Surely the editors wouldn’t have let the emeritus food critic embarrass himself by publishing a deathbed delusion.

A few hours after the review dropped, the account @LauderdaleGourmet sleuthed out the identity of Mann Memorial’s executive chef by finding a PDF of an old internal newsletter. Under a lead story about a ‘temporary one-week shutdown of visitation due to the novel coronavirus’, a headline announced that acclaimed local chef Hamish Carver had joined the team. He was to direct all culinary efforts at the facility, from the visitor cafe to bespoke patient dietary plans to last meals for the dying. He had, the article claimed, “big plans”.

Nobody could remember eating at Carver’s previous restaurant, The White Leek, open in St. Augustine from 2015-’17, but it apparently had been good enough to make him a James Beard Award finalist. His only other online footprint was an old master’s thesis on experimental protein cultivation.

The Herald reported three weeks later that Suarez had passed away. He had insisted that his obit on file be updated to link to his review of Mann Memorial.

With its champion gone, the hospital’s food program faded from the discourse. Hamish Carver couldn’t be enticed to do an interview, and no other members of the food scene were hospitalized that far into the hinterlands of Broward county. Scattered blogs affirmed that the options for visitors were top-notch, but the dishes being served to patients remained mysterious.

Later that year Michelin, making its first ever survey of the Miami area, sheepishly awarded the Seabreeze Cafe off the MM lobby a Bib Gourmand for excellence in affordable dining. According to their secret shoppers, Carver’s deft interpretations of American classics interspersed with always-surprising daily specials would be delightful anywhere, but were downright miraculous in the context of a hospital. The write-up included an impish note that “dining in the attached hospice facility is reputed by some to be even better, but the price of admission is higher than any of our reviewers was willing to pay.”

After that birthday meal I went quite a while without hearing from Derek. On my occasional check-in to facebook I saw that he got married again, to Anita. Then divorced, again. Not long after that, he invited me out for drinks, alone.

He looked like shit sitting at the faux-1920s bar top. The indignities of encroaching middle age—thinning hair, thickening waist, wrinkling face—hadn’t been so noticeable when I saw him regularly, but now the cumulative effect was striking. I wondered if I looked as old to him. He seemed to have already downed a couple of old fashioneds, and the bartender was preparing him another.

“Blanton’s in a cocktail? I guess Anita didn’t take it all in the split,” I noted as I sat next to him.

He smiled sadly. “I have really good lawyers. Do you want one?”

“A lawyer? No, Sam and I are doing fine,” I joked.

“A bourbon.”

“I’m fine with well,” I said, half to him and half to the bartender, who nodded and reached for a bottle of Buffalo Trace.

“Fine with well. Imagine that. Good to see you again, Mike,” Derek said into his drink.

“Good to see you too,” I lied. I idly flipped through the menu of bar bites. “Why no fancy restaurant this time? Not to sound greedy.”

“I’m bored of that shit,” he spat.

“Bored? That’s the last thing I’d expect from you. Why the change of heart?”

He looked up at me and launched into a slightly slurred tirade. “It just sort of dawned on me all of a sudden. I went to this place in Denmark, supposedly the pinnacle of fine dining as experience.” He punctuated the concept with air quotes. “And they were serving me the usual crap, and all the while there were these videos of ecosystems damaged by climate change or whatever on the ceiling and after a bit I thought ‘wait a minute… this is boring. This is just a dressed up Captain Planet moral. They’ve run out of things to do with food so now they’re showing me stupid little PSAs’.

“And I tried to think back to the last time I’d gotten something new, truly new out of one of those experiential tasting menus. To think of any bite I’d taken of quail egg or kangaroo that brought me more joy than a chicken nugget did when I was five. And I couldn’t. And it just turned to ash in my mouth. So I left before the last ten courses.

“Nobody’s doing anything new in Miami. Or New York. Or Paris. We’ve done everything that can be done with food. Cuisine has hit a dead end. Every dead end. And it’s dripping out into theme park bullshit and political grandstanding and pretending it’s still moving forward. The whole space has been explored and I’ve been to every inch of it and I realized I still haven’t found any place I liked better than home.”

He drained his drink, gestured to the bartender. “You know what, maybe I’m fine with well too.”

“You fellas want to eat something?” he asked.

Derek snorted. “I always used to.”

“The burger, please.” I closed the menu.

“Sorry to dump on you like that right off the bat. I’ve been in a dark place since. Well. Anita. But how are you doing? Still into the food scene yourself?”

“No, not in years. That was a time in my life, and I had fun, but it’s over now. Especially at today’s prices. The squeeze is on in the publishing industry. Everybody thinks they can replace flesh and blood employees with AI.”

“Can it do what you do? Is it a good editor?” He seemed halfway to genuine interest.

“No. Not yet anyway. But the people with the money don’t realize that, or don’t care. I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.”

“Have you got a Plan B?”

I sighed. “Sam keeps telling me to go to nursing school like him. Says it’s going to be the last gig standing when the AIs take over all the email jobs.”

“Well, he might be right. They don’t have a robot that can tap a vein or wipe an ass,” Derek mused.

“How depressing though. I don’t want to live in a world where all that humans are good for is cleaning up after each other’s failing meat bodies. Where our whole species gets encysted into a useless fleshy appendix in the guts of a… a gleaming robot economy.”

“Insisted?”

“Encysted,” I emphasized. “Like, closed off into a cyst. A sealed little ball of pus.”

“Sounds like you’re already getting the hang of the nursing lingo.”

“All part of the job.”

Derek stared into his drink again, and for a moment I wondered if he’d had too many and was about to slip off his barstool. But then he looked up with some of the old manic gleam back in his eye, the gleam that had once led to us slurping oysters from a floating restaurant off Virginia Key at midnight or hazarding our lives on the skill of a trainee fugu chef.

“Do you remember,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing, ”that final Jorge Suarez article?”

It took me a moment to recall who Suarez had been, and then what his final article had been about. “Oh right, the hospital with the chef.”

“Hamish Carver,” Derek said, too readily.

“Right, right. Mann Mem. Sam’s visited there before for some sort of networking event; he said the food really is great.”

“Even still?”

“It was about six months ago, I think.”

Derek seemed suddenly to sober up a bit. “Interesting. Did he get to try that dish old Jorge was so high on? Ambrosia?”

I shook my head. “No, Sam didn’t get to eat that, it’s only for the hospice ward.”

“I see.”

He said no more about it for the rest of the evening, but I could tell as we parted ways that the notion was still lodged in his brain. The notion that there might still be one truly New food experience in the world, in his own backyard even, but inaccessible except to the dying.

Sam’s shift kept him overnight, so the Lyft returned me, staggering, to an empty apartment. Once I got my fingers to work I googled ‘Mann Memorial Hamish Carver’ and found that he eventually had given an interview to some foodie channel after racking up a second Bib Gourmand. Annoyingly, it was only in video form, no transcript. I impatiently scrubbed through. He had dark eyes, dark hair cut so short it looked like it had been drawn on with a marker, an unplaceable accent with a flat affect.

“...healthcare is one-sixth of the economy. It may be one fourth by the end of next decade. It’s only getting bigger. It dwarfs the size of the food economy. Food’s maybe one tenth of the economy. There’s so much money in healthcare that it could eat our entire food system alive. Every hour you spend hospitalized costs more than a Michelin-starred meal. Yet suffering people, people who need life’s simple pleasures the most, get slop. The closer you get to death, the more miserable your diet becomes. My mission is to reverse that.”

Something about the rhythm of his speech made my skin crawl, or perhaps it was just the clamminess of the air conditioner fighting against the warm November night. I muted the video and turned on auto-captions, but the AI struggled to transcribe him and began producing uncanny nonsense text. “The elf cares is them is them host dee pocketed gore manned on the plan it. You can a chief things that no rest or aunt would be able to do. New front ears.”

At some point, while scrubbing through trying to find information about Ambrosia, I fell asleep. When I awoke at four AM with a pounding headache the autoplay algorithm had taken me to a 2019 video of Jorge Suarez talking about his philosophy of dining.

“I’ve lived for food,” he said, laughing, though his brown eyes still looked a little sad. “Someday I suppose I’ll die for it. I can’t think of anything else worth doing either for.”

I next thought about Derek about a year later, when Sam interrupted my pharmacology flash card study time in that cheerfully oblivious way he had.

“Oh, by the way, I saw your old friend at work today! Dylan.”

The contraindications of Diazepam evaporated from my brain as I looked up from the computer. “I don’t think I know a Dylan.”

“Some D name. The guy you used to go to all those fancy restaurants with.”

“Derek?”

“That’s right, Derek! Anyway, he looked terrible. Hard to believe you two are the same age,” he said, and leaned down over the back of the office chair to kiss the top of my head.

“There’s a lot of ways to be forty,” I sighed.

“Stop that. You’re thirty-nine, and you can be for as long as you want.”

“Uh huh.”

“Anyway, he said to say ‘hi’. Maybe you should check in with him, poor guy. He was going to the oncology unit all alone.”

“He has cancer?” I said.

“HIPAA, darling.”

“Oh. Right. I was just studying that.”

“He’s not my patient so I can’t see his chart, but you could tell me he has just about anything and I’d believe it. Especially cirrhosis.”

“He was certainly working on that last time I saw him,” I recalled.

“Funny thing is he kept asking me about getting transferred out of the HCA system. I kept telling him there’s nobody better in the area for whatever he’s dealing with, but he had his heart set on some other facility up in Broward. People get funny notions.”

“Out of time. Please try again,” the flashcard program scolded me.

“Oh, sorry for interrupting!” Sam said.

“No problem, dear.”

He puttered out of the room again, no closer to doing whatever small task had brought him in a minute earlier.

I returned to the flashcards and tried to tell myself I didn’t know exactly what facility Derek had requested to transfer into.

When the publishing house finally folded a few months later, my escape plan remained incomplete. I ended up as a med tech floating through an archipelago of Ft. Lauderdale-area nursing homes while I continued to work towards a more remunerative credential. I hoped to make the jump to pharmacology, where I could spend my days with powders and pills, far away from the nasty corporeal concerns of the elderly.

Ownership of the Long Term Care facilities changed constantly. Whenever I went to a new one I signed my paperwork with a pen from two rebrandings ago, cursing myself for still haunting those warrens of sweltering hallways and piss-soaked oubliettes.

I was surprised one day to find that I had been scheduled for a shift at Mann Memorial.

“Isn’t that a hospital? I’m not a nurse,” I said to my diagonal quasi-boss, a woman ten years my junior. “Are they even part of the same company?”

“They are now. Actually, they’re the ones who bought us. They’re phasing out of general practice and building a new LTC wing. If you can pass meds here you can pass them there.”

So that night I reluctantly drove out on I-75, with a yawning expanse of twilit swamp on my right and the city of Weston on my left. I’d always seen it from the air flying back into MIA, a square film of emerald subdivisions clotted and curled into endless black retention ponds. I hadn’t known what its convoluted shapes reminded me of until I started studying. Now I knew it looked like a slice of diseased human brain on a microscope slide.

Mann Mem still stood almost alone at the very edge of the Everglades nature preserves, overlooking dozens of miles of sawgrass and reptiles. Its five stories loomed on the perfectly flat horizon, obtruding like an alien artifact from the manmade lake that surrounded it for drainage. As I approached from the east it blotted out the sun, then the sunset. I could now see, adjunct to the main building, the new wing under construction. It stood one story shorter, and instead of silvery plate glass windows much of its facade was still clad in Tyvek.

Check-in had been automated, based on facial recognition. I looked around the cavernous lobby and didn’t see another soul. The famous Seabreeze Cafe shut its doors at seven, but I didn’t think I’d have wanted to eat there anyway. At the bank of elevators I found that only the leftmost of the three actually worked.

When I stepped out of the elevator onto the fifth floor, an acute sense of vertigo washed over me. Across from me, a deeply tinted window looked out on the tractless expanse of swamp, the sun reduced to a dying amber sliver on the horizon. To the left and right the hallway seemed to stretch on forever, and for a moment I felt as though I’d been transported into a dimension that was nothing but hospital, an infinite sprawl of wide hallways and rubberized corners and antiseptic odors that could slowly digest a person from cradle to grave. The word ‘encysted’ bubbled up into my mind unbidden.

A soft electric whir brought me back to reality. The automated med cart wheeled out of its alcove by the freight elevator, its back bristling with translucent orange bottles that rattled slightly as it halted next to me like a well-trained dog.

I sighed and started my rounds, led along by the eager robot. These pills were heavy duty, far stronger than anything I typically passed at the nursing home. I quickly realized why, as I visited room after sterile room and helped push narcotics down the throats of the sickest old bastards I’d ever seen. The fifth floor was the palliative care ward.

Despite their dire situations, the patients’ demeanors were pleasant, cheerful even. One bald old woman even made me laugh. It was a phenomenon I’d seen at the nursing homes: sometimes fighting to live kills you, and accepting death livens you up.

A few of them, when I collected their completely empty dishes, asked for seconds. I lied that I’d see what I could do. Normally the dying don’t have such healthy appetites. It seemed like they’d licked their plates clean.

The atmosphere was so much less dolorous than I’d expected that by the time I made it to the end of the floor, I’d almost forgotten about the last name I’d seen on the list of patients.

The med cart trundled itself through the door ahead of me. His lights were off, his TV dark. His bloated body seemed to fill the room, a vast misshapen lump on the bed, hidden beneath blankets and throws.

A strange but enticing smell lingered in the doorway; musky, savory, with just a slight hint of decay.

“D. Schmidt?” I read, feeling sick to my stomach already. “Are you awake?”

“Hello, Mike,” he said, his voice thick, his breathing labored. He kept his face turned away from me, the patchy ginger hair that remained on his scalp just barely visible by the moonlight gleaming through the window.

“How did you know it was me?” I asked.

“You expect me to forget the voice of my best friend?”

My heart dropped. Best? I’d spoken to him once in the last five years. I’d completely failed to check in on him when he got sick, though sick hardly seemed to encompass the depth of the dysfunction I sensed from his distorted form before me.

“I’ve got some meds for you.” My voice cracked.

“Leave them on the table. There’s something much better you can do for me. Hamish brought you here. As a favor.”

“I’m supposed to...”

“Leave them. On the table. There’s something there for you.”

I didn’t want to take another step into the room. But I did.

On the plate on the table I saw a single chunk of something, about the size of a cherry, sitting in its own thick juice. In the darkened room I couldn’t even tell what color it was, but as I stood over it I realized that it was the source of the scent that I had noticed walking in, a scent that reminded me of truffles and venison and something else I couldn’t quite place. I hated that it made my mouth water.

“Try it,” Derek whispered.

“How did this happen to you, man?” I blurted. “Were you sick when we met at the bar? When did you know?”

“I was sick for a long time before that,” he said. “But I’m well now. I’ve tasted it. That was all I needed.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Ambrosia. I made it for you. It wasn’t easy.”

“No, I… your disease.”

“Oh, this and that. Hamish knows more about it. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to grow a tumor. If you try.”

“Jesus Christ. You gave yourself cancer? Because of a crazy old man’s article?”

“If not for that article,” he groaned, “I would have just shot myself.”

I stood still for a second, listening to his whistling breath, fighting the urge to vault over the empty med cart robot and run screaming from the room.

He shifted his bulk in the bed, as if to turn around to see me. “Are you going to eat it?”

Seized with a sudden terror of seeing his ravaged face, I plucked the morsel of Ambrosia off the plate and popped it into my mouth.

For a moment, the hospital and the decaying patients and the febrile swamp and the crushing weight of debt and the plight of the whole wretched planet faded away, and I felt the stars shining bright and peaceful all around me, and every cell of my tongue lit up in biochemical ecstasy that I had never known before. It didn’t taste like anything else, at least not any more than it tasted like everything else. It tasted like Taste itself, the sense in toto, like staring at the Big Bang or listening to the singing of the Sun, almost too intense to withstand, but bracing, purifying, divine.

I remember thinking, as my saliva broke down the last of the chemical bonds and left my mouth bereft, that it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. And then thinking immediately afterward that that was a foolish category error, like calling your first orgasm the best sneeze you’d ever had.

When he heard me swallow, his bulk settled back to its original position.

“Good,” he breathed. “Good. Now you can tell me. Like you used to. You can tell me what it tasted like.”

I hesitated before admitting, “No. I can’t.”

I walked the rest of the rounds on autopilot, the memory of the Ambrosia still rewiring my brain. Derek had killed himself just over the description of it. What would I drive myself to do after tasting it?

The nature of Carver’s program now made sense to me. He had created the ultimate food, as dangerous as heroin, and he could only safely share it by contriving this strange hospice set-up, because it was too perfect to serve to anyone who had anything left to live for.

But I did have things left to live for. I had Sam, and… I had Sam, I firmly told the dark little hungry voice beginning to whisper to me from my hypothalamus.

The other three floors had very few inpatients to deliver meds to. I knocked out the dozen remaining occupants of 2, 3, and 4 in quick succession. Part of the work of transitioning into Long Term Care, the still-rational part of my brain supposed, clearing out the room stock for conversion.

But would the LTCF still serve Ambrosia to its residents? That might push experiencing it back from “final weeks” to “final years”. How far back could you push that before something about humanity broke? “Final decades”?

My mind raced down wild slopes of extrapolation, the sort that had been coming true more and more often lately. Ambrosia in baby formula. Encysted.

I realized I’d been staring at the closed elevator door for a solid three minutes. For whatever reason, it wasn’t coming. The staircase stayed locked unless the fire alarm got pulled, to prevent dementia patients from wandering off. I was trapped on the fourth floor.

I briefly thought about running through the window and throwing myself on the mercies of the gator-infested waters below. Could I sustain just enough injuries to get more Ambrosia?

Instead, I wandered toward the new wing being built. At the end of the floor a construction wall filled the hallway like one video game texture clipping through another. I tried the door handle and found it unlocked.

I stumbled through it into a skeletal, dusty version of the hallway I’d just left, future walls framed out in bare wood arrayed within a vast skeleton of steel. A fireproof concrete rectangle contained the staircase here, easy enough to find. I held my phone out in front of me and padded down all six flights as quickly as I could.

Back on the ground floor, in the thick of the humid night air, I found my way back to the seam joining the new wing to the old building. I located the door into the main hallway, but it was locked. That probably saved my life.

Cursing all the while, I began to quest along the seam between the old hospital and the half-built LTCF, hoping to find another door. Right at the edge of the building, behind a billowing clear plastic tarp, I found one. My key card worked. The sudden blast of A/C sent a chill up my spine.

Inside the hallway, the automated lights failed to turn on. The dull red glow of the exit sign above me glinted off imperfections in the linoleum floor. As I walked through the echoing corridor I felt more than ever like the entire hospital had been abandoned except for the few dozen dying souls above me. I knew rationally there had to be nurses on call somewhere in the building, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had lurched into some new paradigm where humanity was a dead player, suitable only to languish as patients in the vast cool alimentary canal of the autonomous Hospital.

I realized I had no clue where the lobby was relative to my location, but my feet had been carrying me along anyway. An involuntary urge steered me towards a door left slightly ajar. I only consciously realized as I put my hand on the knob that I’d been following a scent, that my mouth was once again watering.

The chamber I entered was dark, even darker than Derek’s room had been. Soft electronic whirs and beeps fluttered in every corner like a colony of robotic bats. I knew some of the sounds: the low pumping rhythm of an apheresis unit, the hum of a dialysis machine, the billowing undulation of mechanical lungs.

And that smell. The heady, umami smell of Ambrosia filled the room with an almost tangible heaviness, as if you could rip off a chunk of the air and devour it like cotton candy.

I swept my phone light up through the space in front of me. It caught the base of a vast device that could, in theory, be called the evolution of a hospital bed; a bank of machines carrying on a ghastly imitation of human organ function; a glittering web of IV lines all leading to the same pockmarked pit of flesh; and at the center of the entire apparatus a shape even bulkier and more inhuman than Derek’s. A blob of skin the size of a fatted hog, covered in a dense forest of knobby cherry-sized nodules in various stages of harvest and regrowth.

What kills me is I still can’t even remember what color the Ambrosia was, even seeing it alive, in the full spectrum light of my phone bulb. There’s a lot I can’t remember. I have only scattered impressions and reconstructed knowledge of running through a loose sheet of Tyvek, of mucking to my car as the moist earth sucked at my shoes, of vomiting in the passenger seat, of shoveling my sick out the window because even half-digested the aroma of that piece of Derek was too enticing, of driving seven straight hours to my parents’ house in Valdosta.

The only thing I remember clearly—all too clearly, every time I try to take a bite of anything that tastes like anything at all—is seeing the face of the thing that was Ambrosia. And it staring back at me with the sad brown eyes of Jorge Suarez.