The first time our eyes met, I wanted to put them in my mouth. I’ll give them back, I imagined promising their charming owner, who was watching me intently from the open bar. I just want to hold them for a minute. To squeeze them gently between my teeth, and marvel at their smooth, polished texture against my tongue. They were such an astounding shade of green, I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t taste exquisite.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him that night. I was far too shy, and had drunk too much to compensate; one of my acquaintances from the History Institute had been kind enough to pour me into the last electric rail-car of the night. It jolted along the track, the city a featureless blur of light below. I kept the vomiting at bay by recalling those eyes. They’d sought my gaze in return, I was sure of it. I resolved to gather my courage in time for the next salon. Maybe—I allowed myself to think, queasily, self-consciously—he felt it too. That near-irresistible urge, surprising and delightful in its surprise, to put me in his mouth. I wondered which body part he’d been drawn to; my eyes were not so lovely as his.
Two weeks later, we were both in attendance at the Biology Institute’s fundraiser, him at table twelve and myself at thirteen. It should have been a stroke of luck, but I was a coward, and unused to any company save my own. He spent the night charming the other guests while my table-mates debated the finer points of artificial wombs. I tried not to look like I was watching him, but near the end of dinner he tipped his glass at me with a little smile. His eyes were even more beautiful in the lushly engineered landscape of the greenhouse.
I’d just eaten, but suddenly I was starving.
Next time, I told myself when I got home. He’d smiled at me. Acknowledged me twice now. That meant something. Next time, I would at least learn his name.
That night, I dreamt of him; we kissed, and bit off each other’s lips sweetly, one by one. He whispered his name in my ear as he handed me his eyes, but I’d forgotten it by the time I woke up.
It was three months before I saw him again. He was not at Madame Dufresne’s betting parlor, nor at the twilight salons held by a rotation of fellow academics whose disciplines I had never bothered to learn, and in the meantime I began to despair that I had imagined our connection. Worse still, that I had imagined him. I couldn’t take the electric rail without thinking of him, hoping I’d encounter him by chance; night after night, I rode to the end of the line and back again, watching the Eastern Sector power grid shut off and light up again in rippling waves. Over a decade away from the Northern Sector, and I’d never gotten used to the principal city’s bright restlessness. Nothing ever closed, nobody ever stopped moving. It never rained. It occurred to me for the first time that I might be lonely.
It was a new thought. Unsettling. I had never made an attempt to approach someone before, never wanted to; people interested me in abstract ways, how the tales and songs and bones they left behind could be used to reconstruct entire societies, but any closer and they simply lost their allure. I took no particular pleasure in the minutiae of my own life, let alone anyone else’s. Food, drink, social engagements, art and gambling and music, all were simply a means to an end. Madame Dufresne in particular was known to favor academics and scientists whose company she enjoyed, and could be counted on for reliable patronage in return for the satisfaction of collecting every intellectual in the city under her roof once a month. But in those three months, I found myself changing. Found myself paying attention, for the first time, to the modern world and the people in it; to the taste of food and drink, the breadth and splendor of it, and to the emerging thrill with which music struck my ear anew. Color seeped into my life like a spreading rot. Gambling made my heart race. By the third month, I was ravenous for anything I could experience, and often woke in the middle of the night with cravings that could only be soothed by eating something luscious and green.
Then it was the first salon of the summer, and he was on the roof of the Art Institute, holding a cocktail in one hand, a woman on his arm. His eyes were as beautiful as ever. I did not want to give them back this time. I wanted to crush them between my teeth like the sweetest grapes that had ever grown, and drink them down like wine. And yet, I was also shamefully glad to see him again, if only for the assurance that my newfound awakening had been ushered in by something real. I turned to flee, but it was too late; the Arts Chancellor had caught sight of me, and once in her pleasant, perfumed grasp, there was no escape.
“—and you know how it is, the lack of funding this year has been—oh yes, here we go, Ulloch, I’d like you to meet someone—”
“Chancellor, that’s very kind of you, but I don’t—”
“Nonsense.” I was thrust in front of the very man I’d been fleeing from just as the lanterns came to life, and we were bathed in jeweled light—red and purple and gold—where it poured through the stained glass. “Professor, this is that archaeologist I was telling you about. Ulloch, meet Julian Severin. He teaches our master’s candidates.”
His eyes met mine for the first time in three months. My mouth watered. I swallowed and stammered a greeting. What it was, I couldn’t say—I forgot it before it left my lips.
“Charmed,” Julian said, and introduced his date as Mm Idelle Talish, a councilor for the Eastern Sector. She bowed prettily and we exchanged pleasantries while I tried not to look at her arm. The prosthetic was high-quality, judging by the way it matched her skin, but it had the tell-tale unnatural shine of synthetic flesh. She was very beautiful, but the thought of eating her repulsed me. I did not want to pluck her large gray eyes, nor chew on her jeweled ears or taste her painted purple lips. My appetite, it seemed, was for him alone.
“Ulloch is an old friend,” the Chancellor said, patting my arm. “He’s on loan to the Archeology Institute to help them catalog everything they discovered in those ruins last year. You know, the ones just outside the Western Sector.”
“Oh, yes, I know who he is,” Julian said, eyes alight, luminous in the rhythm of fire and shadow playing across his face. Enthusiasm had transformed him, softened his narrow, angular face into something open and boyish. I sipped my drink, hand trembling, but it did nothing to abate the deep, aching hunger that had opened within me at the sight of his smile.
“It’s really not that interesting.” I hated myself for saying it—if it wasn’t interesting, what reason did he have to continue talking to me? “Unless trying to figure out what a particular style of pot from a thousand years ago was used for excites you.”
“I’m sure there’s much more to it than that,” Julian said, enthusiasm undimmed, and Mm Talish slipped her hand from his arm, looking amused.
“Well, now you’ve got him started. Ulloch, pleasure to meet you. Chancellor, shall we go get a drink?”
The women departed, heads bent together in confidence as they walked, and Julian turned the full force of his attention to me at last.
“Shall we walk?”
Over the next hour, I learned that while Julian’s true love was oil painting, he flirted voraciously with a variety of other disciplines, and most of all, had a deep and abiding fascination for the mysteries of the past. How we could guess and theorize and read whatever texts remained, could restore art and reconstruct buildings and events, but we would never know the full truth of what had been lost to time. It made him sentimental, he explained, which in turn made him a better artist—his painting was always at its best when he was feeling tenderly existential. His hands moved when he talked, and I had the sense he didn’t realize he was doing it—they operated as of their own accord, sketching invisible images in the air.
I imagined biting off his fingers, one by one, and in doing so somehow absorbing their skill, so that I too might instinctively create beauty. But hungry as I was for his flesh, I was even hungrier for his favor, and under the intense focus of his questioning I began to open up. Not just about my current work or academic career, but about myself: where I’d grown up (the coldest edge of the Northern Sector), if I’d always been interested in history (yes), if I thought the universities were aiming to bleed us all dry by having eight competing alumni drives at the end of the year (emphatic yes). I even found myself telling him, after another cocktail and apple brandy, about my passion project, which I’d been working on under the table for a number of years.
“—so it’s not exactly a popular area of study, but I’ve always found the vanished Northern clans fascinating. They left behind so much and so little at the same time.” I set my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. We’d wandered to the outskirts of the rooftop pavilion, where the light pressed up against the cool darkness of the evening, and all that was visible were slivers of the shingled dorm rooftops below and the smear of the city beyond. “It took the better part of a decade, but I’ve managed to reconstruct a good amount of their most important rituals. It’s writing it all down in a coherent fashion that eludes me.”
“Really? You’ve been telling me about it just fine.”
“I’ve never been much of a writer.”
Julian chuckled and finished his brandy. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. I wanted to set my teeth there and feel the motion before I bit down. I bit my tongue instead, and its fleshy wriggling between my teeth calmed me, if not by much.
“The vanishing clans. Those are the cannibals, right?”
“That’s reductive.”
“But true nonetheless.”
“Alright, yes, but it’s not as lurid as it sounds.” I cast about for another drink, but neither waiters nor bar were within striking distance. Being asked questions about myself was one thing; this conversational tangent had already left me disoriented and exposed, a bug whose peaceful rock had been turned over and thrust into blinding sunlight. Julian waited, looking more interested than ever, and this gave me the courage to go on. “That is to say, the cannibalistic aspects of clan life were ritualistic, but in all my years of research, I never once found those rituals to be violent.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t do human sacrifices or eat prisoners of war. In fact, it was somewhat taboo to consume the flesh of opposing clans, for fear their hatred and rage would seep through and poison the spirit of the eater. Instead, they considered it a sign of generosity and reverence—dying elders would offer up their bodies as a way of passing their strength and wisdom onto the next generation, wedded pairs would eat each other’s bodies if one died unexpectedly, children would consume their parents’ bodies when they died, and so on. It was all very controlled.”
“Well,” Julian said, “how progressive of them.” We chuckled, but he quickly became thoughtful again, brows drawing together. “You don’t consider cannibalism sort of … inherently violent?”
I had, once. I had even started my research with that unconscious assumption, driven by a voyeuristic curiosity about my long-gone ancestors and arrogantly certain I knew what I’d find. But my research had led me to the remaining first-hand sources, so rare and hard to access that I’d had to bribe my way into my university library’s restricted section one hour at a time, and what I found there was a common thread. A thread everyone who encountered them seemed to feel, even if they still found the practice abhorrent; a thread woven through the past three months of my own life and growing stronger by the day. Julian’s beauty inspired nothing in me but incandescent happiness and longing; there was no anger or hatred or fear in the way I wanted to crack him open and gorge myself on his insides.
“I think it was out of love,” I said.
“Love,” Julian said, like he was tasting the word for the first time.
“They were so devoted to each other, they never wanted to be apart. Instead, they perpetuated a cycle of endless connection through the most primal act we have. That doesn’t seem violent to me.”
Up close, his eyes were strange. An unbroken, vivid green, with no discoloration or striations of the iris or blood vessels limning the whites. They glowed like an animal’s in the low evening light, like an animal in the hills hunting something, before the hills were all replaced with cities, before we’d separated ourselves from the hills and the forests and oceans and all the rest of what used to be and replaced it with the endless trudge of progress.
“You’re an interesting man, Ulloch,” he said, and I had to turn my head so he couldn’t see the look on my face. I was afraid it would give me away. When I turned back, he was holding out a holographic business card, his name and address visible on both sides of the thin glass. “Come by my studio sometime. We can talk more about love.”
Ten days later, I was at the doors of his building, waiting to be scanned in. It was embarrassing, over-eager, but I couldn’t wait. My hunger pangs were out of control—I would wake doubled over and moaning in the middle of the night while cramps ripped through me, and lay wet and useless in my bed once they’d subsided, until I was sure I’d permanently stained my mattress with sweat. The day after the benefit, I’d ordered several cases of meat online. Nothing lab-grown—and the cost reflected it, I’d be lucky to make rent next month—but real meat, with blood vessels and muscle and history, and when it arrived I sat on my kitchen floor and ate it raw. Ground beef by the squashy fistful and limp, uncooked bacon and dripping steaks marbled with fat, until everything stank and my front was drenched with juices and sweat and my stomach cramped again. The whole apartment smelled like rust and iron and something worse, eggy and rotten underneath. I breathed it in, nauseated and exquisitely satisfied. The meat was gone within hours, but the smell remained for days; I could sit in any of my rooms and do nothing but breathe for hours.
It wasn’t enough. I had to see him again.
Security finally let me through, and I took the stairs instead of the elevator so I’d have time to compose myself. The truth was, despite my anxieties, I had no intention of doing anything to Julian that wasn’t enthusiastically welcomed. I didn’t want to hurt him; I wanted to love him more deeply than I had ever loved anyone, and to be loved in return. Growing up, the topic of the vanishing clans had been near-taboo, an uncomfortable pall over the lineage of half the people in the Northern Sector, but the more I researched and read, the more I envied them. From the first time a child helped consume their beloved dead, they were never truly alone. I was an only child; my father died when I was too young to remember him; my mother and I had barely spoken since I left home. It was too late to know them in a way that mattered.
But Julian. Julian, I could know more intimately than any living person. I could keep his beauty for myself. And even though it defied all reason or hope, I thought he might want to know and keep me too.
The studio took up the entire fourth floor, and he was waiting to let me in when I arrived. Humid air gushed out, dense with the smell of oil and turpentine. Jangly, airy music I didn’t recognize piped from an overhead speaker. “I’m in the middle of work,” he said, waving off my attempts to apologize. “Give me a minute and then we’ll sit.”
I wouldn’t have told him this, but I was surprised by the size of the place. Sleek, too, made of bright synthetic wood, and the outward-facing wall was entirely clear, so the view of the city sprawled unimpeded below us. I sat in the armchair up against the opposing wall; if I got too close, I would be seized by an irresistible impulse to walk through it and step into the sky. Julian went to his easel and started cleaning his brushes. Old brushes, nothing modern or digital at all. Independent wealth, I figured, or a patron—the Arts Institute attracted people with too much money and an interest in spending it on something few others had.
“Can I see what you’re working on?”
He hesitated.
“It’s fine if you don’t want me to.”
“No, no, I’m being modest. You can see it if you like.”
Most of the art I saw on a day-to-day basis faded into the background like pleasant wallpaper. Enormous virtual murals scaling the sides of buildings and scrolling across billboards, engraved metal portraits of the Institute Chairs in the halls of the university, stiffly beautiful images flickering across the television late at night, all of it slick and shiny and remote. Julian’s painting was still in the early stages, rough-edged, each brushstroke visible, oil still glistening on the canvas. It was so obscenely human that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
“It’s nowhere near done.”
It didn’t matter. The heart in the limp, outstretched hand bled like a real one, and though it was unfinished, the canvas had already begun to resemble a snowscape. Burning red on desolate white. Life, asserting itself where life seemed alien and unwelcome. Sacrifice, offered freely. I had to put my hands in my pockets so I didn’t rip into the canvas and eat that unfinished heart. Even with that layer of fabric between me and it, I could feel the paint under my nails.
“It’s beautiful.”
“In case it’s not obvious, I’ve been thinking about our last conversation.” He wiped his hands on his shirt, which was half undone and streaked with paint. “You really like it?”
“I do. Although, I’m surprised that my research left such an impression.” I wanted his eyes most of all, but the tender indent between his collarbones would make a perfect appetizer, salty and sweat-bitter. “Most people don’t want to hear about it at all, if I’m being honest.”
“Cannibalism tends to make people uncomfortable.”
“So does the past.”
“Shame. Sometimes it feels more real to me than any of this.” He gestured at the glass wall, and the city beyond. “It’s why I still teach traditional painting, though god knows there’s no money in it. Someone has to keep it alive.”
“My distant ancestors were from the vanishing clans.”
I’d never mentioned it to anyone before, lest it color public opinion of my work, but he was so open with me, so unconcerned with how he might be perceived, that I had to bare my own throat. I had to be worthy, somehow.
Julian’s expression shifted; he moved closer, let the full weight of his attention fall on me, and I tried not to move or grimace, caught off-guard by my own reticence. This was what I wanted. He was slightly shorter than me, but his presence made him seem taller. His sparse chest hair had paint flecks in it. His teeth were very white.
“Finding your roots?”
“Something like that.”
There was something strange and thick about the silence that followed, and I realized it was the silence; the music had turned off, leaving only the faint hum of central air. He didn’t touch me, but it felt like he was. Like it had already happened and time was just catching up; an inevitability, the same way I knew I’d walk through the glass wall or eat the painted heart or savor his fingers one by one if given the chance. We were close enough now that his breath warmed my lips.
“What is it that you want from me, Ulloch?”
Soft. Kind. So close.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.” Outside, past his head, a startled pair of birds darted through the gunmetal blue sky, fleeing from something I couldn’t see. “You’re almost there—don’t disappoint me now.”
Any moment now, he would smell the panicky animal funk of my sweat and see the way I cowered, and turn his back on me. I would never have this chance again. I would be alone, starving, and it was this that drove me to finally meet his eyes, to touch the fragile silk of the skin just below them, his stubble scraping the heel of my hand.
“I can’t help it.” My voice was so quiet I could barely hear myself. “How could anyone not want a taste?”
Gently, and with great reverence, Julian took my wrist. My hand shook as he guided it to his left eye, which blinked at me wetly, and then he set my thumb and forefinger to either side of it, something cool and slick kissing my skin.
“Go on,” he said. “Take it.”
Whirr-click. The eyeball popped out and into my fingers, beautiful green iris spinning wildly. I fumbled, nearly dropping it, but he steadied me, and then I was holding it, his implant twitching like a living thing in my palm. The raw red socket of his eye blinked, the connector port gaping back at me.
“Is that what you wanted?” His grip on my wrist tightened. “Is it everything you imagined?”
“Julian,” I said, or thought I said—my tongue was numb.
“Put it in your mouth.”
Julian’s face was eerily calm, smooth, inhospitable as the moon. He was much stronger than he looked. The implant found its way to my lips little by little, and his remaining eye watched me from under a heavy lid, glowing poisonously in the weak sunlight. Just like in my first and most feverish dreams, I put it in my mouth and held it between my teeth, but it was cold and metallic and tasted like nothing at all.
Julian watched. His lips parted in something I might have previously thought a smile, something satisfied, peeling back from the gums, and it occurred to me then with a jolt that he could still see, somehow; that he could see down my throat and maybe further, to all my own raw slimy twitching vulnerable insides, and the horrible intimacy of it took the strength from my legs and then I was kneeling, swaying, on the hard synthetic wood floor, his fingers steadying my chin.
“Would you like the other one,” he said.
I nodded. There was nothing else I could do. He took it out and put it in my mouth next to the other one, and when I ran my tongue across them he sighed with pleasure. Leaned down and pressed his forehead to mine, and then he reached behind his back and drew a knife. A wicked, curved, ancient thing with a handle made of bone, and when I realized, I could have wept. Julian caressed my cheek with the flat of it, turned it, pressed the blade gently against my mouth. It left a little indent on my lip, like a lover’s tooth, and then flesh parted and blood trickled thin and hot down my chin. The knife, a northern knife, a ritual knife, traveled up to rest on my cheekbone, the point aimed at my eye, and the smell of oil and paint and blood and him was making it hard to breathe, and for a moment the past and present and future all blurred together and flecks of snow landed on my skin, my breath steaming the air in front of me in faint opaque clouds, and a thousand years ago and a thousand years from now it was all still the same, one unbroken line of civilizations rising and falling and rising again as we escaped our nature only to find it again, and time again, time again love would be made flesh.
“My turn,” he said.
Content warning: Cannibalism
