Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  ‘I confess, sir. I failed him. I confess, sir… killing the creature was a mistake… the police… killing Dawn, I killed her, sir, I killed too many… I needed to find a way out, a way to see, sir, and see you, and deserve you, sir, a way to redeem, a father, sir, a way out.’

  ‘You are forgiven,’ I said, and forced his head forwards to suck me off.

  With my free hand I reached towards Dawn’s suitcase, for the wine bottle inside – and as Kimber kissed me, cumming, I smashed it across his head.

  The room leapt three stories upwards, suspended in silence. Kimber fell. Adrenaline surged in me, tangling with meth – as space reset around us. The air zipped itself open and zipped itself back up, adjusting to the absence of Kimber’s voice.

  The carpet was a cloud, Francis a kite. The ceiling righted. Numerals fluttered from my eyelashes, trailing the scent of rosemary. I could hear my own heartbeat again – but my synaesthesia gave it a different green now – an ivy.

  ‘That seemed rather… easy,’ I said at last.

  With the silence broken, Francis gasped into hysterical tears – and pulled back on his trousers.

  ‘How the… how was…’ he stuttered, his voice unnaturally high, and younger, and ashamed.

  I ignored him, shuddering in triumph – and picked out the key from Kimber’s jacket pocket and unlocked Francis from the bed. He tried to hug me, but I resisted, pulling him by our joined wrists towards the table, to take up the gun.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no, no!’ Francis shouted, pressing the gun into his chest, wrapping himself around me. ‘You can’t use it.’

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘Shoot me then.’

  I jittered in frustration. Francis overpowered me and flung away the gun. I writhed in his grip, pleasuring in his scent of coconut oil. He vomited into the suitcase. I whooped as he made himself pick up the other key from within his sick.

  My bones were fluid. The meth’s leverage was increasing. The thread of self I’d found inside its noise was loosening again, and I was regressing towards a more instinctual state. Was Kimber dead? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I couldn’t remember.

  ‘I want to swim across a misted lake and dive for pearls,’ I said. ‘I’ll grind them in my teeth until they bleed.’

  Francis freed me from the cuffs and cuffed Kimber’s body to the bed. I pulled bloodied trousers onto myself, but was bored before I could find my trainers. Broken glass bit my feet, tripping me towards the camera. I twisted it off its tripod and smashed it onto the kitchen floor.

  ‘What do we do?’ Francis asked.

  I knelt among its shards, instantly regretful, searching for the memory card. Words babbled out of the carpet towards me and into my mouth, reversing down the back of my neck, into my stomach. I saw the card – the same cobalt-blue as the shoe that had stamped on me by the canal – and at this memory, the vinegar in my muscles thickened with sea-salt. I put the card in my pocket.

  ‘The key!’ I cried, unable to keep on any object for long.

  I leapt towards Constable Floris. She was stiff. I searched her pockets for the key to her car.

  ‘No!’ Francis said.

  But he meant nothing to me now, and I skipped away – untucking the front door like a shirt, to the stairs, until I was running, exultant, down the tower, out of the tower, with the key – the scent of copper whisking the air into a vortex – and the street unhinged from the sky.

  Francis ran after me, his shoes faster than my bare feet – and caught me near the exit. But I elbowed him away, scurrying through the sleet to the car. My muscles were cymbals – and my mind was a lattice strung between satellites.

  ‘Where you going?’ he cried, holding the car door open.

  ‘I have meetings to go to,’ I said, trying to push him away.

  ‘We got to wait here,’ he said. ‘We need the police. You can’t go away. Where you going to go? You can’t leave me.’

  I kicked him viciously away and slammed shut the door. Little silver bullets ricocheted into my eyes as my hand stammered the key into the ignition.

  ‘I don’t need you!’ I shouted.

  Francis beat at the locked window, repeating our parting at the gallery – although this time I was in the driver’s seat, wasn’t I? Ha! I lurched the car forwards, barely able to feel the wheel beneath my hands – and abandoned him to meet the dawn alone.

  5.

  ‘Who is that? Is that Leander?’

  I was pacing in the doorway of the film studio, in meth-addled idiocy, trying to catch my own tail. Time was disjointed. The blizzard tasted of blackcurrant.

  ‘Leander… you’re… you have no shoes. This is insane.’

  The claret cashmere of this voice was familiar, and in spurts I saw that it was Amélie speaking, wearing an enormous white parka.

  ‘Snow in October is what’s insane,’ I said, curtseying. ‘The sky has been raped.’

  ‘You’re freezing!’ Amélie said. ‘You need a blanket.’

  ‘Method acting, it’s what I promised,’ I said.

  She unlocked the main door and ushered me inside. The Costcutter bag she was holding seemed to be whistling like a kettle. We shuffled across a lobby, into a dark hall with high ceilings.

  ‘Are you really alright? You’re bleeding. I didn’t think… well – we approached you to be extreme. But I must say this was… unexpectedly extreme. Iris says we need what you can give us.’

  She put down her Costcutter bag – and as I stared, its handles merged into a mouth – and it whispered, ‘Poetry is dead.’

  ‘Poetry isn’t dead!’ I shouted.

  ‘I… didn’t say it was,’ Amélie said.

  She was wrapping a rug around my shoulders. I heard and saw in shards, finding myself at different doors without awareness of travelling between them. We’d come to a long white table.

  I nearly fell over – but a chair appeared, and its wheels skidded me back through the gloom to the Costcutter bag. Amélie seemed suddenly far away, flicking switches.

  ‘Poetry isn’t dead,’ I told the bag. ‘Poetry has won. Haven’t you been in the world recently? What are chat threads and newsfeeds – and all those other columns of digital lines – where our own words are mixed up with news and quotes and captions and pictures? That isn’t prose. We think through scrolling now. We think in mosaics. All those failed late modernist epics – with their collages and cut-ups and parodies – were just guessing at what was about to happen – the internet and wifi and phones – that altered our mode of writing – into poetry. Poetry has won. And so the secrets of the sublime perhaps moved to prose – because prose has been abandoned.’

  I retched onto the stone floor, spinning in the chair.

  ‘That’s not how I think,’ the Costcutter bag said.

  ‘How do you think then?’

  ‘I think your tone is disrespectful,’ the bag said. ‘I just want the truth.’

  I retched emptily again.

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ I said.

  The bag went silent, and temples of light dropped from the mile-high roof in rows – fanning out into the hangar’s corners.

  Amélie reappeared. ‘You need to eat,’ she said anxiously. ‘I don’t like this… extremeness. It’s not… safe. I don’t think Eva… We. Here.’

  She handed me a donut from inside the bag and I swung gleefully in the chair, the blanket a cape behind me.

  ‘I need to check my audition video,’ I said, biting into the battered dough.

  It tasted of oven-cleaner and marmalade and sent a swarm of wasps into my chest as I chewed.

  ‘We, we didn’t need an audition video,’ she said timidly, unsure how to manage me.

  ‘I need to watch it, to remember who I am – I need to remember my character.’

  ‘Well you can… you can borrow my laptop.’ She gestured to the silicone glow on my left – and I squinted until I understood it as a computer.

  ‘Perfect, I’ll do it in the toilet,’ I said, snatc
hing it up and galloping towards the dimmest arch.

  ‘Bathrooms are that way,’ she said.

  I spun on my heel and cantered in the direction she indicated, cradling the machine, its purr to my ear a counterpoint to the purr in my veins. Bolts of light smoothed past me like satin – I turned a corner, through a door, or two doors, into a dim green cave with a cord above a sink. I pulled it, and a pharmaceutical neon flattened the cave into a room – with a toilet beside me and a hand-dryer behind. I knew that I’d been in a space much like this recently, though that previous space had lacked the aroma of peppermint gladdening the air here. Also, here, I knew I was alone. But I could not feel alone – my body was lagging and jostling and jumping over itself, and my mind was in splinters around its outside.

  I set the laptop beside the sink and inserted into it the blue memory card from my pocket. I clicked and dragged and clicked and entered – but the screen was incomprehensible. Everything was copying. A picture of a dragonfly, or a monument to a battle that nobody won, kept popping up – the wings striating into concrete beams, its topaz tail into iron rods. My gaze refused to read, bouncing instead off the pixels like water repelled by turpentine. The screen was an animal in a trap, over-animated and dizzied. I shut it and removed the memory card.

  ‘Leander?’ called someone beyond the door.

  I jumped up to check the mirror – but I didn’t understand it either. The mirror did not work. It did not reflect me – it was matte. I moved but nothing opposite me moved. I had lost my own reflection. I drank from the tap, afraid I’d lost my own shadow too. Or perhaps I was only a shadow now, and that was why I had no reflection. I hopped out of the bathroom, the laptop under my arm.

  ‘What the fuck? You look worse.’

  It was Iris, recoiling from the hug I’d attempted. Her voice tingled with a brighter teal than it had had yesterday.

  ‘You wanted me as a beggar,’ I said.

  ‘You should have gone to hospital. You’re filthy.’

  ‘I went to hospital, I got completely cleared, completely cured. I’m fit in body and mind and antimatter. You wanted a beggar – I am ready to beg.’

  ‘This is… too much commitment. Ok, I’m going to take some photos – and you need to eat something because I know that’s real blood. And I don’t know what else you’ve smeared on yourself but there’s sick and wine and mud and it’s… that’s not healthy. I don’t want to know.’

  I followed her down the tunnel, sucking the taste of fennel from the air and the taste of rocket from my knuckles. But as I replaced Amélie’s laptop on the table, Iris seemed to disappear.

  ‘This way,’ she called, from the other side of the hall.

  She was domed in UV light, pointing to a white booth.

  I ran to her. And as I ran, my chest constricted, like my teeth were biting into my own heart – and I tripped, panting, a tulip opening inside me. My pulse tripped too. More lights had turned off, but others seemed brighter. I smiled, and straightened, remembering how to inhale – and ran onwards, towards the white room.

  ‘Stand over there,’ Iris said. ‘Fuck you look like a druid. Can you take off that top – what is it? Looks like a nightie.’

  I peeled off Dawn’s forget-me-not gown, and approached the blank wall.

  ‘Actually just wear your boxers,’ Iris said, adjusting a camera onto a tripod.

  I took off my trousers, but was naked beneath.

  ‘Fuck, ok,’ Iris said. ‘Let me do the lighting. But I need you to wear something. Wear…’ She looked around her studio. ‘Wear something small from that.’ She pointed to a clothes rack.

  I approached it and roved my fingers over its fabrics, unable to distinguish material from colour. I chose the coarsest blackest cloth and swung it off the hanger, dislodging others to the floor. It was a kilt and smelt of yew leaves. I pulled it on.

  ‘Perfect,’ Iris said, swivelling a light box towards the wall.

  As I winced, the light box turned into a cobra. I returned to stand before it and before her camera. In my earlier shoot that day, I’d had Francis as a scene partner – so now, I supposed, I must be my own supporting act. I lifted my feet in a slow-dance, my arms attempting Grecian curves.

  ‘No,’ Iris said. ‘Try standing still, look straight to me, and think about the first heart you broke. Good, now think about the boy you loved when you were eight, or seven – and imagine he has the same bruised eye as you – and you are in competition for whose eye is more handsomely swollen – whose is more impressive.’

  She clicked her camera in swift shots, occasionally adjusting dials on its side. I was thinking of Francis, of when I’d met him a year ago – first as a poster, and then as a person, beside the poster – at the launch of some menswear range no man our age could possibly afford. My smile smiled at the Francis I’d known then. I allowed myself no recent memories, though I suspected I was concealing a meaning from myself. I was disconnected from my day – hovering instead inside a past that could make me smile.

  ‘Good confidence, I think I’ve got it, but try a few looser ones,’ she said, removing the camera from the tripod and crouching to snap closer angles.

  I dotted the blood from the gash in my side across my lips to rouge them. Iris laughed in disgust.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on set.’

  ‘Should I just wear this?’

  ‘Yeah – your wounds are part of your appeal. You need to keep them out. They’re why we hired you, aren’t they? But I don’t believe you went to hospital.’

  ‘I’m method acting. I swear I went to hospital. I’ve never been in better health.’

  She shrugged, refusing responsibility for my folly, and turned to leave. As I followed her out of the room, the petals around my heart infolded again, and a thorn pricked me so centrally that I stumbled, forgetting how to breathe. Iris was walking towards Eva, newly arrived – so I coughed my lungs into motion again, and stood to jog towards them.

  ‘He says he’s in character,’ Iris said.

  ‘Shit – we can’t do this,’ Eva said. ‘He needs to be in hospital.’

  ‘He says he went to hospital.’

  ‘Iris. What’s wrong with you? He’s fucked up, I’ve never seen him look this fucked up.’

  ‘That’s perfect.’

  ‘No, it’s not, we can’t do this,’ Eva said, louder.

  ‘Yes it is,’ I interrupted. ‘Use me, use me, use me. I am a beggar. And I won’t have energy forever. Upload me to your digital afterlife. I’ll guide your character into such a revelation that she won’t remember who she was.’

  Iris and Eva looked at each other with misgiving, but were summoned by Amélie to the set. I hobbled after them, seeming only able to move in spurts – which in too little time took me to a dark road.

  Jagged boulders rose around me and black sand glistened in mud tracks underfoot.

  ‘Just warm up, get into it – you need to be absurd,’ Iris said, walking over to a low table laden with lenses and cameras. ‘I’m going to use a dolly – so I’ll be coming close and backing away and going around you.’

  As Iris chose her tools, Eva changed into worn boots and distressed her hair. I performed lunges across the dirt, staring up at spotlights and dangling microphones. The wasteland they’d built seemed to have its own wind – and I could imagine horizons beyond the rocks where weeds and pits hid scorpions.

  ‘I answer only to bronze,’ I said, in an oratorical voice. ‘And the sand answers only to me.’

  Time skipped again before I could speak another line, and I knelt, with pincers in my ribs – certain that it was midday. But I blinked twice, and the studio lamps had not altered. It was night again.

  Eva approached, followed by Iris’s camera.

  ‘My ears are sore from music,’ I said. ‘I have heard enough sound! I covet static. And there is static in you.’ I walked towards Eva. ‘The wet hiss of deafness too… Which words do you want from me?’

  Eva’s face
had transformed into a fretful younger girl’s, though some resolve remained beneath its weary exterior.

  ‘I’m lost,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell which one’s the north star.’

  ‘Star-travel won’t work on this road,’ I said. ‘This road is out of time – and stars tell time. You stepped eight thousand years in two paces, and one pace closer, you will lose four hundred. The stars are shifting – some are born and are failing. They are not navigable here. Trust only the dust.’

  I bent to kiss the ground before her feet – and she recoiled.

  ‘I won’t run,’ she said. ‘But you cannot touch me.’

  ‘I cannot touch you,’ I said, reaching out to streak her face with the blood of my fingers. ‘But I can tarnish. Touch is too innocent for this hour. Look – you stepped another millennium sideways – now the earth is warmer, and a queen has built the last bomb. But come my way, here, to this gutter ridge, yes – and the era is altered. See the north star has moved again – and there is a gap in the archer’s belt. A month’s sail from here, in this time, a scribe is writing the first words of a syllabic tongue – and soon walls will be built about his city, so that it can be sacked.’

  I backed away from her into the rock.

  ‘What time do you want?’ I asked.

  Eva stared until a tear streaked her cheek. ‘I don’t want any,’ she said.

  ‘But you don’t want none.’

  ‘I’m… I’m lost,’ she repeated.

  ‘You cannot be lost if you have nowhere to go. What you seek is permission, and nothing could be more expensive. You must shout until you believe it. Shout what enclosed you. You were enclosed, when you were younger, and that enclosure threatens you still.’

  ‘No!’

  I crawled towards her with my hackles raised and then leapt and struck her in the throat. Her lily of the valley perfume recalled to me the plucking of a string.

  ‘You don’t have enough names,’ I crowed, as she fell into the mud. ‘Shout the name of your first enclosure. You must shout.’

  ‘I hid in a well!’ Eva said. ‘I hid until the soldiers had gone. But I wanted them to find me. I wanted to be taken.’