Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  Iris laughed, dispelling the vision. ‘So step one is controlled over-acting?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Step one is underacting. You have to be mysterious. Initially your focus should not be on your target, but on his friends. They must be seduced first – so that they talk to him about you, while you remain intriguingly unavailable. He needs to want to meet you. Unfortunately, you have to have some kind of charisma to do this, so you may struggle here.’

  ‘Are you trying to neg me?’

  ‘Would that work?’

  ‘Fine, let’s say I have no charisma. What happens then?’

  ‘Fake it,’ I said. ‘You need to be outrageous, outspoken, witty, and in possession of a tortured past.’

  ‘Ok – but what if I bump into my target during step one, when I’m supposed to be unavailable?’

  ‘You have to bump into him occasionally, but just act like you don’t consider it worthwhile to get to know him properly. This is most effective when the target considers himself the ringleader of his group. And then once his friends have been charmed – and they have begun to invite you to their gatherings, and miss you when you do not come – you can advance to step two. Step two is a prolonged single moment of focus on the target – for example spending eight hours at a house party talking only to him – as though you have finally recognised his value. Your attention will feel like a reward after the indifference you displayed during step one – and you must use this sense of reward to overwhelm him. Your personality needs to be hyper here, so that he experiences this as the most electric interaction of his life; you need to make him feel clever and desirable and newly understood. You tell him turbulent stories from your adolescence – fictional or true, doesn’t matter – so that in return he confesses his rarest agonies, the ones he hasn’t told his friends. This creates a quick bond, and makes him see you as more special than them.’

  Francis suddenly appeared before us, almost within reaching distance, his eyes desperate to meet mine. I spun Iris around and forced her past a row of elegant teenagers.

  ‘Step three,’ I continued, ‘is the hot and cold game: the next time you meet after step two’s electric connection, you must act like there was no electric connection. Following this let-down, you oscillate between treating him as marginal when among his friends, and as your kindred spirit when alone together. Step four is the escalation of this – so when you’re in a group, you entertain his friends and ignore him, as in step three – but with the addition now of brief public touching. For example, suddenly stroking him, putting your head in his lap, even mock-kissing him, while talking to others – as though you have a shared secret language of gestures that he doesn’t quite understand. The aim is to make him accustomed to an overfamiliar physicality, until he returns it – and so too begins to press his cheek to yours when greeting you in a group, while merely hugging the others. You need to seem as though you are unaware that you are physically attracted to him – like you haven’t thought about the meaning of all this touching – but are simply compelled by instinct.’

  Iris and I were dancing between the women around Francis, obnoxiously locked into our own conversation, as he fought to attract our attention. Ketamine had made her smile seem both uneasy and defiant – and her chin now had a constant tilt.

  ‘Step five,’ I said, ‘is private touching – again non-sexual, again seemingly unconscious – like resting your head on his arm, or playing with his fingers absent-mindedly when you are alone together. Step six is to bombard him with attention through messages and phone calls and invitations to social events – all still under the guise of friendship – until he relies on your attention to feel happy, like a chemical dependency – and begins to bombard you back. Finally, step seven is to withdraw this attention at random, to keep him insecure. When together, you act like soul-mates, but speak about other loves and other needs like you’ve never considered him a sexual option – though you must avoid explicitly discussing sexual orientation, because this can lead to denials and repression. And when apart, you should appear to forget about him – until he is forced to beg for your attention. Once you have made him addicted, you can choose whether to fuck him or cast him aside.’

  Francis had by then long been trying to interrupt. His face still had its default self-assurance, but his pout had widened with exasperation. Eventually he shouted, ‘Leander! Leander!’

  I refused to look around. He shoved a model out of his way and grabbed my shoulder.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh hi,’ I said vaguely, like I’d forgotten whose friend of a friend he was.

  ‘Why you wearing a dress? What’s wrong with your eye? How do you know each other?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I smiled and shrugged off his hand, adding ‘Cool,’ to no one in particular.

  I tugged Iris aside and bent my head to her ear to resume our conversation, reducing him to an interruption.

  ‘Wait – where you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Huh?’ I asked, confused that he was still speaking to me. ‘Oh – we’re… going to get a drink?’ I waved my hand dismissively.

  Iris laughed. I walked her quickly away as Francis’ circle attempted to re-engage him.

  I watched him watch us retreat in dismay – until he was folded into the sky of a forbidden purple enclosure – and a river somewhere beat itself like a drum.

  ‘You genuinely looked like you’d only seen him once in your life!’ Iris laughed. ‘For like three minutes.’

  ‘Very self-confident people are the easiest to break – because they aren’t used to being treated as unexceptional. But you can only break them after you’ve made them desire you – and they are the hardest people to goad into real desire.’

  We were back in the gallery’s first room. The photographs here were of faces alive but deformed – by acid attacks, bullets, bombs, or beatings; an eye gouged out, a dangling cheek, a pair of rotting lips. They were shot as if for a high fashion editorial – hyper-saturated, with steep shadow gradients. Most of the visitors seemed unaware of these pictures – or if they looked, they looked only briefly, unaffected, and were instead more focused on each other, in a sociality that was competitive rather than amiable.

  ‘So how did you goad Francis into desire?’ she asked. ‘Was he in my place on your arm, laughing as you dismantled somebody else for your amusement?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose Eva was the person we dismantled. But that’s over now.’

  ‘I almost forgot you’re a complete cunt.’ She had something like wonder in her voice. ‘But I still want to know how you got to him.’

  The row of photographs I was trying to focus on gave way to a plough of stars – driven by an ox down a terrace of moon-mansions – which each imploded as it passed.

  ‘Just like I said,’ I replied, ducking under flying moon-mansion shards. ‘The seven steps. I mean it wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t wanted it on some level already – the task was to ease him out of the phobias that society had walled him up in. He would embrace me lengthily in front of his friends; I let him be overly affectionate to me when he was drunk. I would always act open and available – but never predatory, so that he had to make the first move, never me – until finally he was high, we were at a bar and he kissed me goodbye on the cheek, and then kissed me again on the mouth and stayed there. The next morning I messaged him an emoji with no clear meaning – so he was forced to worry for a while, and make the next move as well. I refuse to seem to take him seriously – he thinks that I think I’m just a passing joke to him – so he is forced to insist upon his sincerity. I didn’t see him for ten days before today. But he still clings to his dignity, and I’m still replacing my easy-going passivity with indifference. Like any addiction, I’ll make him give up parts of himself that were once fundamental, make him break his own rules and betray his own values to get back at the high – and all he’ll receive in return is an echo of what he wants.’

  ‘So… which emoji did you tex
t him?’

  ‘Probably the dolphin.’

  We had waded through the bustle to the gallery’s second room. Its four unequal walls each had two pairs of triptychs: eight actors expressing three different despairs in parallel. The subjects were shot similarly to the survivors of the previous room: only head-and-shoulders, lit in high contrast. On the wall behind us, three photos of Eva were paired with three photos of Francis – but the photographer had extracted from them personalities I had never seen in them before. They wore their three traumas with an ambivalence that was also somehow a conviction, so that each face contradicted the other.

  ‘These are actually quite good,’ I said, shifting my arm over Iris’ shoulder. ‘Each photo seems to say “this is the real me and the only real me”, but then there are two other photos which say the same thing – about a different “real me”. And I know Francis has never suffered like that. The other exhibitions he was in were mostly photos of pretty naked nineteen-year-old boys, or refugees with green eyes. This is… better than usual.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Why? Did you help?’

  Iris laughed. ‘You’ve been talking about yourself for so long that you didn’t bother to work out anything about me.’

  ‘What? Were you the photographer? I thought it was a man?’

  ‘Why?’ she asked with mock indignity.

  ‘Because…’ I floundered. ‘Because didn’t it say it was Lars something on the door?’

  ‘Lars Vasari. That’s me.’

  My lungs turned to white metal tigers – clawing through my intestines, and through my belly button – and then out into the airy autumn around us, and further out, into afterthoughts.

  ‘How is that you?’ I asked.

  ‘You didn’t wonder why I had access to the kitchen? Or why everyone here knows me?’

  ‘I assumed… some connection. I didn’t assume you had a male pseudonym.’

  ‘It’s not a pseudonym,’ she said.

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s the name I used to have. Before I transitioned.’

  ‘I can’t tell if you’re lying or not – you’ve become interesting.’

  ‘Admit it – you’ve been out-manoeuvred.’

  ‘I’ve not been out-manoeuvred,’ I said. ‘I’ve been… narcissistic. But that’s my brand. And your brand, apparently, is that you’re a trans woman who takes photographs under the name of the man she used to be?’

  ‘Being trans isn’t a brand. And I was never a man – I just used to have certain anatomical features that made people assume that I was.’

  The gallery floor spun again, and I fell – its walls dimmed from white to the dark of a planetarium – and the pole of a gas planet appeared across its dome, with a storm shaped like a hexagon – and from this storm burst forth another, smaller planet – rocky, pocked with craters – a planet that had known days as longs as years and been told such secrets that it was allowed to be seen only at morning and evening, never at night.

  Iris lifted me back up. The gallery righted.

  ‘So, so why do you work under your old name?’ I asked.

  ‘I hated it for years,’ she said. ‘But then I began to find its power fascinating – it had been a violence inflicted upon me, and I wanted see if I could alter that meaning. It’s like a drag-name, except the drag was the first fifteen years of my life. And as a photographer, I like the performance of identity. I like to capture fake selves, selves formed under duress, past selves. I like how the meaning of the body changes under violence.’

  ‘So does Iris refer to the eye of a camera?’

  ‘No, I just liked the name. I don’t predicate my personhood on my job. And I didn’t even have a camera when I started hormone therapy, when I was fifteen. Why did you choose Leander as your name?’

  ‘How do you know I chose it?’

  ‘Because you care about self-fashioning as much as I do.’

  ‘I just liked it,’ I said, repeating her weak answer.

  ‘Isn’t it Greek?’ she pushed.

  A waiter shaped out of helium passed with a tray of cocktails – we took two and clinked them and giggled and downed them and then put them back empty on the tray.

  ‘There’s the story of Hero and Leander,’ I said. ‘The priestess and the boy. They live either side of a narrow sea, they fall in love, each night she lights a tower-lamp for him to swim to, one night the lamp goes out, he drowns, she kills herself.’

  ‘How is he you?’ Iris asked. ‘If anything, you present yourself more like Hero, the priestess – you light the lamp to lure Leanders to your tower, till you turn off the light and they drown.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Or,’ she went on, ‘you see yourself as more fundamentally the Leander, but pretend to the world to be Hero? Or, maybe you just like being the anti-Hero?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to have a stable meaning,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in that. “I’m this, I’m that” is boring – we should speak of fluidities. I don’t know what I am. I’m Hero and Leander and anti-Hero and anti-Leander and neither, depending on the lighting.’

  ‘You’re only saying that because I just said I’m trans. You’re trying to bend the conversation into a shape that will endear me to you.’

  ‘But isn’t it working?’ I asked. ‘You are endeared. And maybe these are coincidentally also my core beliefs.’

  The floor was moving in an elliptical orbit, I supposed, around Francis – accelerating as we came closer to his room – back around the gallery’s circuit. But I refused to fall again – I would be a water clock, obeying not the sun – not Francis – but the moon.

  ‘But you essentially just said you don’t believe in core beliefs,’ Iris said. ‘Because you’re always changing.’

  ‘I believe in core beliefs, I just don’t believe in a solid me, a solid core – I believe in a series of processes, exchanges, relationships.’

  ‘And are those relationships always sexual?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as though I’d missed her sarcasm.

  ‘What if the other person isn’t attracted to you?’

  ‘They are.’

  She laughed. ‘I think we both need more ketamine.’

  ‘That, coincidentally, is another of my core beliefs.’

  ‘Hold this.’ She gave me her purse.

  We had entered the third room. Its four walls now only had one triptych on them each – the same photographs as had been on the upper row in the pair in the previous room, but deformed into grotesques. Francis’ three photos were alone – Eva’s had not been promoted to this room. His symmetries had been subverted: in one photo his forehead was twisted into a distended chin, in another his hair was replaced by an ear. Beneath each triptych there was a single capitalised word.

  ‘“TRAUM”, “TRAUMERIE”, “TRAUMA”, “TRAUMATA”,’ I read aloud.

  Iris moved to stand in front of me, her head against my chest. With our bodies as a shield, she unsealed the pouch of ketamine in her purse.

  ‘What do these words mean?’ I asked. ‘Traum is German for dream… traumerie is dreaming. Trauma is trauma… What’s traumata?’

  ‘Wounding words from a loved one,’ she said, scooping a key into the plastic pouch and lifting its powdered tip to her nose and inhaling it.

  ‘TRAUMA DREAM was the name of your exhibition, wasn’t it?’

  ‘DREAM TRAUMA,’ she said, now lifting a key’s-worth of ketamine to my nose.

  I snorted. A couple nearby laughed at our activity. Iris closed her purse.

  ‘So now the photographs themselves are being traumatised?’ I asked, spluttering at the bitterness behind my throat – which leaked across my senses into teal the texture of silicone.

  ‘Or the photographs themselves are beginning to dream…’

  ‘You split up Eva and Francis before I did,’ I said. ‘Her photos didn’t make it to this room.’

  ‘But I loved both of them at least, unlike you.’

  �
�N-no,’ I stuttered. ‘You just fantasied about having them both for yourself, but didn’t do anything about it. I acted upon it. We had the same instinct, but you were too scared to act.’

  ‘This is my action,’ she waved unsteadily at the walls.

  I followed her hand with my eyes – and the room filled with saltwater ice, as our gravity lessened – and we were at the bottom of a gulf, surrounded by white volcanoes that spat magma hundreds of miles up into the sky. I blinked – and Iris spoke on.

  ‘Fantasies can be their own bodies,’ she said. ‘And don’t you ever do art?’

  ‘I do what I’m doing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Well it’s not living, is it? When I was fifteen my myalgia got so bad that whenever I closed my eyes I imagined bullets coming at my face. I even went deaf for a few days – and then sound came back and every colour was a howl.’

  ‘What’s myalgia?’

  ‘Chronic pain from chronic illness. An invisible illness in my case. I wrote in biro on my thigh “You’re not allowed to kill yourself until your next birthday”. So I forced myself to wait for the day I turned sixteen, by which point my next birthday was a year away – and so I had to wait another year. And so on. Sometimes I had nothing to cling to except that rule. But I’ll probably break it eventually.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I want to fly. Maybe I’ll leap from a cliff.’

  ‘So —’

  ‘So that’s my art – survival.’

  We woozed into the fourth room. Again there was a reduction: only two triptychs from the previous room remained – one of them Francis’ – doubled on opposite walls. And now their fabric was also harmed – with burn holes, rips, erasures, smears. In some places the gloss was sticky, in others dull. The central Francis photo of the wall beside me had been given an ornate gold-gilt frame, while the others were bare.

  ‘Lars!’ someone shouted. ‘Found you at last! It’s a wonderful show, wonderful – I’m here from i-D Magazine, again, yes?’ A slim, fumbling man had pressed himself into us, blocking our way. ‘Can I ask a few quick questions?’