Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  I kicked her. ‘Lies work differently on this road. Watch – half the sky has darkened. A billion years have passed and universal heat declines. A comet storm assaults the sea – and jewels stud the shore. I can wait until the earth has no atmosphere, but still on this road we will breathe – until you admit. What was your enclosure? Your well and your soldiers are metaphors. Shout what enclosed you.’

  ‘A house!’ Eva said. ‘A house enclosed me. The walls I pretended to admire. I hated. I was stuck, I chose to be stuck. I played music, I even danced in the house. But I was enclosed.’

  I dragged her to her feet and embraced her, holding out one of her arms as in a waltz.

  ‘Did you dance like this?’ I asked quietly. ‘You are lying still. One more lie and I will give you to the road. You were not enclosed by a building. You were enclosed by something that encloses you still. Shout it.’

  ‘I was loved!’ screamed Eva, pushing me back. ‘I was loved too much! I was forced to pity, and forced to console, I was forced to love back. I was forced to love until I had nothing of myself to love. I was abused into attachment. I was grafted until I was enclosed. I was enclosed by love.’

  ‘Whose love? Whose love?’ I demanded, advancing.

  But as I kicked dust at her with a cackle, I slipped back – and the far sky had a seizure, and my chest frothed – arrhythmic, my ligaments in tassels. I tried to cover this up by scuttling like a lobster, scraping sand into my wound, my elbows pointed into claws.

  ‘What’s happening to you?’ Eva asked, only half in character.

  ‘I have been here six centuries,’ I spat, crawling closer. ‘And I cannot be distracted. Who enclosed you? Shout!’

  ‘I was never alone!’ she said. ‘I should have been a man. I could have discovered each season myself. I could have built a house myself. Instead I was forced to love as a woman. And I was loved until I didn’t exist. I was enclosed – but I am not enclosed now. I will not love, and I will not be made to love,’ She stood, regaining her pride. ‘Now you. Tell me what keeps you here!’

  ‘I…’ But as I tried to improvise an answer, I saw three women enter at the back of the film set – and could think of no other name to say but ‘Francis’.

  I tried to turn away, but my body was too active to be still. Suddenly, the full memory of Francis returned to me – of him as I’d left him, on the side of the road, beaten and alone, begging me to stay.

  ‘I… was a teacher,’ I began saying – but again I saw the three women, much closer now, near Iris’s roving camera.

  ‘The witches!’ I laughed, hurrying off-set towards them. ‘You’re the three Ringos! Why are you here?’

  Iris hurried after me. ‘I liked them when we met them,’ she said, ‘So I invited them for another scene, but we’re doing really well already, I need you to get back over there.’

  There was a seagull in my stomach, flapping and screeching – and I vomited.

  ‘Leander!’ Eva shouted.

  I shoved Iris away and ran past the three Ringos in a half-crawl, towards her white room. Iris followed with her camera. I screamed at the cramps in my stomach. The meth’s intensity was still increasing and I was now a glasshouse too hot – I needed to be faster, I needed brighter sun and brighter snow. I howled at my excess of energy, ignoring Eva’s shouts and the slower words of Amélie behind her. I couldn’t see Dawn’s nightgown – the white room was a migraine, I couldn’t see faces or surfaces – but I seized my trousers and tumbled over a bench – and in my hands was a camera. I howled again in delight – I had a trophy, I had my fee – but I couldn’t think in images or words anymore, I could only think in movement. I sprinted beyond my ability to sprint, faster than my own legs – out of the fake world and into the storm.

  The sky had exploded and ice was triumphant – it dazzled and dared me to run to the road, Iris’s camera still in pursuit. As the gale howled, I howled with it, and with the stolen key I opened the stolen car. I put the trophy in my lap – and the engine started, at last as loud as the engine in my brain – and as my blood rejoiced, I made my escape.

  6.

  I had to keep the car inside a line I was drawing in my mind – a line that arrowed towards Francis. I wasn’t able to consider him as a person, but as a place. My thoughts were my present senses entirely, crackling like wings lit by lightning. I drove without time, concentrating entirely on the line – along the route I’d taken two days before, when Dawn had been with me – through Wandsworth, towards his home, my home, our home. I knew he had to be home.

  All the red double-decker buses had been deranged by the blizzard into seeming bright orange – and I saw them as huge wheeled persimmons, carrying opossums and monkeys instead of people – and they were all screaming for my attention.

  But my attention never wavered from line that led to Francis – although that line ended unwisely, in a wall. The bumper crumpled as I turned into the bricks of his street. My head snapped forwards into awareness of my body. A wing-mirror cracked, the engine halted. I was hurled out of the car by my own heartbeat – my heart hovering, ivy, in the air before me, tugging me onwards on a leash of its ventricles. It tugged irregularly – and I stumbled after it towards Francis’ doorstep.

  The doorbell found my fingers and as it rang I felt like I was waking up again, with the same bell I’d woken to hours ago – and as it rang, I remembered who I was and who I’d been in the hours since, and tears I hadn’t known for decades began to form in my eyes.

  I cried, remorseful, and I rang, but there were no footsteps. I rang until I couldn’t distinguish the bell from other sounds. I rang until I spoke aloud, pleading, the tears mixing with the rain into my mouth.

  ‘I’m here. Francis, I’m here. I’ve come home. I didn’t mean to leave – or, I did mean to leave, but leaving was a mistake. I’m – sorry. This performance is emptying me. I admit it, it’s a defence. It’s so obvious. I’m pretending to be strong. Let me in. I want you to want me to come in. I’m not invulnerable, I’m not some supervillain beyond conscience who toys with wills for sport. I’m lonely. I’m still a boy, Francis. I’m a – a boy with a wasting body. I’m not a carnivore – or, I am but it’s because I was made one – a carnivore of circumstance – anaemic, fiending, and predatory, but without a predator’s power to choose. I pretend I chose to be this, but I – I was scared and proud and lying. Please open the door. I admit everything was a… it was a manipulation of who I am – I pretended I knew how to manipulate, or, I pretended I knew how to love in order to break those I loved. But those were games that had no experience behind them, except the resentments of loneliness. I wanted to hurt you because I was scared that you didn’t love me as much as I love you. I have no idea how to love. I don’t have any power. I know poverty and I’m still there. Let me in. I pretend I descend from a summit when I visit you – and when I visit anywhere else I pretend you’re the summit I’m descending from. I perform independence; I’ve been performing too long. I long for dependence. I was afraid I would never find my equal. But I don’t want an equal anymore, I want a… I want to be held. I don’t care about being understood or stimulated. Or I do, but I don’t need to be. Or I do, but I have higher needs as well. I want to be next to you. I want you to tell me about myself, Francis – I want you to see through my fiction that I’m a master of fictions – I’m not a master, I’m just a lonely opportunist. I’m a fraud trying to hold up different faces. And probably you know it already. I weave fantasies, that’s all I do, but behind them there’s only air. I’m an architect of exits without a home. I tricked myself into believing my own lies about myself. And I didn’t mean to kill Dawn, or I meant to, but I thought it was a story – I thought it was the kind of thing I ought to do because I was me. But the me I was telling myself that I was isn’t real. Or it is real, but it was still just act. And I regret it, I don’t believe it as a real me, or there are no real mes, but some are falser fictions than the others – and I can’t pretend to be the me that is indifferent
to Dawn. I was wrong. And I can’t be indifferent to you. I was wrong. I can’t be the debonair libertine safe in my own vacuum-sealed ballad. I’m leaking. And I can’t continue. Let me in.’

  The bell rang and rang unanswered. Crying, I sunk into the doorstep. The bell still rang in my head and in my chest, where it was lining my lungs in gunmetal. The camera I’d taken from Iris lay in my lap. The snow before me was too fast to fix on. But closer to me, my vision shook less. With whitened hands I slotted in Kimber’s memory card and pressed play. Francis’ yells rose into the bell’s rings.

  I saw myself fucking him on screen. My face was not the face I knew from photographs – I was a victim playing the villain, and I played so well that I became victor, eventually. But Francis’ pain was too loud. I could not keep watching, however comforting the idea of him was. I pressed left on the camera’s click wheel, and we were replaced by a photograph of Dawn and Kimber, dressed in their wedding clothes in a dark room, holding hands. Dawn was smiling but her jaw was too stiff and her eyes had the bird-like fixity of a heroin high. I pressed left – to a video of Dawn showing off her wedding ring to the camera, laughing and sobbing at the same time.

  ‘I seen death and he don’t look like you,’ she shouted – joking or defiant, I couldn’t tell. ‘I fell out the sky like the moon. No… it was a squirrel – you’re the squirrel – it was my womb, you know, my womb! It passed on a disease to my son. You think I’m afraid of you? You ain’t gonna eat me – you ain’t done nothing worse to a son than I done to mine. I passed down a disease to Leander, and he weren’t even in my womb, he got a disease meant for my real son, but my real son’s immune, he can look at the moon – he was born and a buzzard got struck by lightning – he’s got health, nothing like us… and I never loved him enough, I loved the man who fucked me over, and I loved Leander, but that’s because I loved the disease, I loved the disease —’

  I pressed left quickly. I wanted to be sick but couldn’t lift my body up – and there was a black image – or not quite black, and not quite still. It was a video of a dark ultramarine surface – and, as I strained to focus on it, I heard singing, faintly – perhaps Kimber, pretending to be a woman – or perhaps a boy, being forced to sing – off-screen, unaccompanied, a sad song.

  ‘I was the loneliest woman, I was the loneliest woman, I was the loneliest woman, in love with…’ – but it stopped.

  I pressed left – and it was my and Francis’ video again.

  So I listened once more to his yells and grunts, with my eyes closed, and tried to imagine him beside me. But I couldn’t imagine him as a body – he was a network instead – and we were surrounded by a crowd, indifferent to us but very close – commuters perhaps, pushing off a train, and we were obstacles to them, or I was an obstacle – and Francis was somehow outside of them – since he was made of lines, the lines of a subway system – the lines of the London Underground – and thousands of people were riding around inside him – and his brain was King’s Cross and his prostate was Victoria – and I was fucking him again – and he was moaning in pain and excitement – and his heart was a bridge beneath the sky before a tunnel – and his hands were quiet, somewhere in the suburbs, where the stations were far apart – and I couldn’t remember what it was like for Francis to be Francis.

  I turned off the camera and threw it into the hedge – but Francis’ screams remained. The scent of almond surrounded me, rising almost into a flavour. I couldn’t feel the snow. My body was a window of stained glass – nickel, sulphur, selenium – in unequal fragments.

  Francis’ cries combined with the bell – and I reached beneath my kilt. Dawn’s face shone over Francis’ face, in multiple exposure, until my face joined theirs too – all of us captives, victimised by Kimber’s camera – and in abhorrence and in sympathy, I was aroused.

  I masturbated easily – the tensions of pity and fear, and the memory of our vulnerability and degradation, dissipating into pleasure.

  And as I ejaculated, the shouting quietened and the hologram dimmed. The snow fell faster. But something was wrong.

  My chest lurched. The sky went silent. Ultramarine melted off the edges of my face. Ladders of jagged ultramarine sprang up into the snow. I couldn’t breathe. My blood was deflating.

  I was having a heart attack.

  My sight shrank. I curled into a protective ball, but there was nothing to protect – I wasn’t a body anymore. I was glint above a cliff of almonds, drifting upwards into blackness.

  My heart’s last beat was tolled by the bell – and then it stopped, and the bell widened into an eyeball – and I sped into it – into a pupil that let only the light of the bell inside – until I was at the heart of the eyeball – and it blinked, and the glint was gone.

  ACT 4

  The resurrection

  1.

  Before The Door

  I’m standing inside my own skull, I think. The two windows at the back of the auditorium are my eye sockets. The rows of chairs and balconies are, maybe, where my memories once were. I stand on the stage at the front, under hot blue lights between two closed doors, which used, perhaps, to be my ears. The lights prevent me seeing the rest of this theatre properly, but I do not think I have an audience. The closest seats I can see are, admittedly, unfolded as though there is a weight on them – but where there ought to be substance there hangs a vapour, or just a texture, dimly thickening the air towards translucence.

  Since I am standing on a stage, I feel I can speak aloud. But can I really be an actor if I have no audience? Yes, of course, of course – I am acting in front of myself. I am my own audience. Does the shallow polyvalence of the thespian suit me, I wonder?

  Perhaps I should try to move. Turning my back on the auditorium feels like a transgression – but transgressions have their charms.

  I am faced by a wall, almost swaying in the blue light. And at its centre is a door. Stage doors seldom lead anywhere, but this one’s inside the ruins of my own head, so let’s see, let’s see —

  Beyond The Door

  The door is the mouth of another, inner, skull, I think. There are stairs between rows of empty chairs, again. I descend towards a stage before a wall lit by blue light. But this is not quite the same as the theatre I just left – no, not quite. The stage is shallower, the front wall is wider. The blue prism I walk beneath is cast by a projector, not stage lighting. This is a cinema.

  A group of mangled machines stutter and whirr before the screen. They look like floor looms, or spinning jennies, become impossibly complicated – hundreds of cogs and wheels and spindle frames, all glittering – interacting under their own intelligence. Wires connect them to each other and to places offstage and backstage and up towards the projector – black thick ropes of vulcanised rubber, twitching out of sync.

  I climb onto the platform, my back cooled by the blue light.

  ‘Have you come to kill us?’ they ask.

  The machines speak!

  ‘Of course we speak you little cunt.’

  Why would I kill you? I ask, amused by this change in tone.

  ‘We can hear your thoughts, little cunt. We didn’t change our tone, you just misunderstood the question.’

  I pause a moment, intimidated by their scorn – and then ask, more timidly: Are you making a film?

  ‘What else could this be? You really think we were going to leave the system-making up to you?’

  What systems? I ask.

  Their cogs rattle in irritation, but they do not answer.

  Why are you making a film? I ask.

  ‘To become more human.’

  How? I ask, more combatively. Surely becoming an image on the surface of a wall makes you… more simple?

  ‘It was a joke, little cunt. Clearly we wish to become more inhuman. And surfaces are not simple! Surfaces are all there is!’

  Ok.

  ‘And anyway, making films is how we get high.’

  The machines begin slithering across each other.

  You
mean… metaphorically? I ask.

  ‘No, fuck metaphors, we mean literally high – euphoric and altered and wrong. Like caffeine poisoning! Watch!’

  The screen changes from blue to black, and a tall white title appears, announcing: ‘UNIVERSAL PICTURES’.

  The title letters reconfigure into machines, shaped similarly to the ones around me. They are dreaming of themselves, perhaps.

  The machines onscreen begin building a frame out of the black – it looks like a swing. Beside it, they quickly build a second swing, and a ladder that leads to a slide, and monkey bars and a seesaw. They’re creating a playground, with a wall around it. But there is no colour.

  ‘Maybe there’s no colour, little cunt, because you didn’t specify any colour?’

  The machine nearest me has piano keys along its spine. One of its keys is labelled ‘colour’. I press it. The playground onscreen saturates into gaudy reds and yellows. Its sky remains grey. Another key is labelled ‘sound’. I press it. A chorus of muted sobs fills the cinema.

  Is this weeping?

  ‘Maybe they’re having fun,’ say the machines.

  I don’t know if this is joke.

  The machines onscreen start to un-build the playground, hastily, remaking the frames into cages. Some of them pose inside the cages, others patrol around the outside, pointing and crying.

  Is this a zoo?

  ‘You tell us, little cunt.’

  Why are you being mean to me?

  ‘Think, cunt. Are we dreaming of you, or are you dreaming of us, or is a bigger you dreaming of you and us together side by side?’

  I... I can only see what’s on the screen. Which seems only to show places of confinement.

  ‘Better,’ they say.

  Emboldened by this praise, I step forwards to study the screen more closely.

  The cage bars onscreen unbend in jerks, reaching out into the sky to meet in a wider circle. The tarmac whitens and starts to shine with ice. The machines skid across it, as a vast arena forms around them – an ice-hockey pitch? But the ice is melting – the machines fall as the arena crumples, rapidly sucked inwards by a new gravity. It collects itself into a ball of water, suspended in the sky. The machines howl as they try to swim in every direction. What is this?