A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

No man wears a sateen shirt without wanting to be petted.

Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It’s an unreadable mess. I didn’t love Casimir.

(There’s so much you can do with rendered duck fat. Like God’s own lard, duck fat is great emperor of fat, the most generous of lipids. Sauté anything in duck fat, and it tastes infinitely better.

It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate.

Just after I first arrived, two women—what do they say?—got all up in my face. It was kind of adorable, really, their desperate grab for dominance. They cornered me as I was exiting the shower; I looked down at them, their faces hot with inarticulate want, and told them that I’d killed a man with a piece of fruit. I let that assertion sit, and I saw their limited wonder about their own personal and painful Achilles’ heels. Then I swept out of the shower area, stunned silence in my wake. These women were merely petty felons clad in stolen dominance, you see, while I was a naked, dripping murderer. There’s a lot to be said for intimidating intelligence and a dearth of conscience, and I possess both.

The students were mostly thirty-year-olds, who, irrespective of gender, wore studious glasses and the kind of asexual, atonal clothing that functions like mental saltpeter.

I can’t, of course, tamper with the MRIs, but even neurologists admit that when it comes to mapping the human brain, we are Christopher Columbus: motivated by dubious ethics to search for a route to Asia and “discovering” these America-shaped continents by mistake. Brains are an imprecise science, in short. Easy to fake and even easier to deceive.

Female psychopaths, researchers eventually realized, don’t present like the males. To which I respond: No shit. We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.

Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.

I have reasons to feel forever grateful to my fake teenage girlfriends, for aside from teaching me about junk food, they taught me how to be feminine. Snuggled in their blossoming Love’s Baby Soft-scented bosoms, I learned to approximate a female—how to talk, how to walk, how to dance, how to flip your hair. How to part your lips as for a kiss but not for a bite of food. How to end your declarative sentences in a question. How to twitch your hips as you left a room. Why you laugh when you feel like screaming. Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.

The first day I walked into the dorm, a building of arterial-red brick and blinding, deep-pocketed white trim, I found Joanne awash in frills, perched on her pouf of a comforter, weeping into a stuffed cat. Her eye makeup had melted with her tears, running in great Rorschach circles around her eyes. She was the very picture of an adorable faux-Victorian waif, so dejected on her bed, like a little broken match girl or a flower-maker gone ulcerative from arsenic exposure. I wanted to put my hands around her slender white throat and shake her. Joanne was just that delicate. While I had rushed my family out the door, Joanne wept over her parents’ leaving. Her fat glycerine tears rolled, unappetizing as beads of tapioca.

I protected my good name with excellent information, and I didn’t fuck anyone I couldn’t ruin. My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man—everyone has at least one devastating piece of information.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone.

Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again.

I could speak Italian passably well. I could argue the basic histories, literatures, and politics of major European nations. I could cook a passably decadent four-course meal using a hot plate and a toaster oven. I could deep-throat a seven-inch phallus. I could research and write a charming, sprightly, thousand-word article in record time. And I could investigate, seduce, and drop a man with elegance and ease. I could, in short, support, nourish, pleasure, and protect myself. I felt like a proud parent of a devious mind.

Deuce worked in the kitchen; she’d spent some number of stolen hours smelting a ballpoint into a shiv, melting the end in the gas burner, then rubbing the pen against a rough concrete corner until it held its edge. The word whispered across the line is that the guard—a squat, hairy comma of a man known to take liberties during pat-downs—grabbed Deuce in her crotch. Her response was to coolly slip her hand into the waistband of her sweatpants, spring her shiv, and, in one silky move, slip it knuckle deep into the guard’s neck. It was, the whisper-line said, like watching a viper uncoil and sink her fangs into unsuspecting prey. The guard’s blood spurted in a high arc of droplets, ruby red on the institutional butterfat yellow of Bedford Hills’s halls.

It was one of those green canvas gas-mask holders from World War Whatever that the kids those days carried to affect affectlessness. Joanne looked around, lost. I was afraid she was going to cry. I hate crying. So pointless, and so damp.

The lifestyle section exists to prescribe a standard of living to which ordinary people should aspire and ultimately fail. The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame.

Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen.

From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.

New York City may have a commercial skin, but it’s built on a skeleton of sex and magic. The bridges hang like jewels around the throat of the night, and the rivers unspool in endless runners of oily gray silk charmeuse. In the soulless corporate canyons of Midtown, the buildings point accusatory fingers at the uncaring sky. The streets flow with an endless human wash, so many people running like dumbstruck salmon, looking for love, looking for money, looking for a place to eat, wanting for fame, hoping for a place to sleep, hoping for a person to sleep with, praying for meaning in the dark before dawn.

Like Venice, New York City is an improbable bunch of rivaling islands, held together by historic bridges, a common language, and a well-earned understanding of superiority. Rome may dwell in the land of cock—and it does, the phallus dominates that city’s skyline; Roman men strut with unquestioned self-confidence, their limbs decked in crimson, in mustard, in peacock blues and greens, each demanding your gaze—but as much as the long penile lines of the skyscraper may define New York City, it’s a place that doesn’t care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or literal, is New York City’s soul. Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name.

I’m being raped, I thought. Fascinating.

An Italian in Siena refusing to take his foreign girlfriend to Rome would be like a Bostonian refusing to show New York City to an Italian: inconceivable.

Aside from New York City, Rome is the only place that I could imagine myself living. Rome wants to lie back and let you stroke it, lick it, and devour it whole.

He didn’t say much. His face turned white, then red, and finally settled into pink. I had unsettled him, and I was delighted. Two hours later, Marco was in my crimson-covered bed at the Hotel Campo de’ Fiori. “Mia cara, ti ho perso così,” he said, “odori come i fiori che crescono dalla figa di Venere. Come mi manchi leccarti, gustarti, il mio sogno Americano.” My darling, I missed you so. You smell like flowers growing from Venus’s pussy. How I miss licking you, tasting you, my American dream.

Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can’t recapture it and you don’t want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger’s heart.

Giovanni. I killed him, and ate his liver. It was an accident, of course. Well, the killing was accidental; the eating was deliberate. I cooked Giovanni’s liver in the Tuscan way: I made a paté using a recipe calling for fegato di cinghiale, liver of wild boar, spread it on crostini, and relished it with a good Chianti and a kiss of irony. The paté was surprisingly tasty, sapid yet nuanced, though I did have to cheat and use a touch of chicken fat to make it creamy. But given Giovanni’s decades-long adherence to veganism and a lifestyle so ascetic it anesthetized his desires, what else could I do.

He did not look good. Giovanni glistened, for one thing. People ought not to glisten, not darkly in the night, not like that. For another, Giovanni’s insides were out, and much of his outsides were gone, trailing down a length of pipe—a long metal rod, rebar, I remember some man calling it—sunk into the ground alongside the guardrails. The rebar stuck straight up as a monolith, stood rampant as a needle, gleaming with a dull metallic evil in the light of the pale moon. Impaled, Giovanni hung on the rebar, glistering ominously. Dying, Giovanni had become the scarecrow that he’d always threatened to be in life. Judging from the glistening and the juicy viscera, he’d not had an easy time of it.

was all surprisingly easy, even with Andrew’s labyrinthine home security system—all you needed to know for the home security code was Andrew’s IQ, 142, and his penis length, 7.5—men can be so predictable. Early the next morning, I returned to find Andrew a rosy shade of dead, opened the windows, aired out the house, sliced off two nice chunks of Andrew’s choir boy buttocks, released the hounds, and let time, canine hunger, and nature take their inevitable courses.

Human meat, in my experience, has a texture that’s most like bear, which I have eaten a few times, both privately and at special wild game dinners at the Metropolitan Club. In the mouth, bear feels at once denser than beef and more ethereal; it’s the Amarone of meats, able to embody in equal parts the earthbound and the celestial.

To eat human is to dine on a chimerical hybrid, a marvelous, mythical meat that has the sensuality of lamb combined with the poignancy of wild game and the naïf quality of pork. To eat people is to get the taste of a Titan. It’s infinite immortalization. It makes a god out of a woman.

For every pleasure she gave him, she took an emotional step back, requiring him to lean farther out, to extend his hand as if wooing a shy forest creature, and to hope with his breath bated that this time, this time, she would feed, petal-pink lips coyly nibbling from his open palm.

Anthropologists like to break essentialism down into two more discrete subsets, materialist and idealist, but, really, only pedants give a warm fuck. You eat a person because the flesh holds a secret meaning, and to eat it is the straightest line between the abstract and the embodiment.

I took Andrew’s rump roast home. I skinned it, trussed it, rubbed it with olive oil, red wine, thyme, lemon, garlic, and salt, and let it sit sit for a few hours. Then I seared it and popped it in the oven to roast until lovely and brown without and a bloody cherry red within. I made a delicious Bordeaux reduction sauce, and I served the roast with crisped tiny Yukon Gold potatoes, caramelized shallots, and sautéed asparagus.

I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche. Mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger. Both establishments serve chopped beef, but one is indiscriminate to the point of ubiquity whereas the other is carnal dining at its bespoke finest. It’s not merely a question of quantity. A mass murderer is blind to attachment; a serial killer, however, holds a close relationship with his or her victims.

Gil loved to lick pussy; he’d spend long hours with his nose deep in my cunt, his tongue lapping like a dehydrated cat, his mouth thick. His cunnilingus was a five-armed starfish of a love, stuck and sucking, beautiful in its stupid devotion. Spaghetti bottarga was the perfect dish to seduce him into finer food.

Gil moaned when I kissed him, like a dog when you rubbed his belly.

He had a roster of vanilla women, a couple he even married, with whom he enjoyed workaday missionary sex sanctioned by the New York Times and the Atlantic (there is no prudery quite like the purse-lipped prudery of liberal publications).

Gil moved fluidly from perversion to vanilla, accepting with good-hearted equanimity all the various pleasures of the flesh from missionary sex to anal.

In retrospect, there are better times than a major economic collapse to write a guide to topflight American restaurants. Voracious has a thick section on value meals—it’s hard to discount the beauty of Florent or Vesuvio Bakery, now both closed, both casualties of the recession that caused rents in desirable locations to skyrocket—but the meat of the book came from restaurants where diners paid an obscene amount to eat hedonistic food, with attendant repressed shame serving as seasoning.

The Diary of Anne Frank—she knows about living in close, unsparing quarters with people you don’t like; it’s an unsurprising favorite.

Gil’s face turned red as arterial spray, then the sanguine hue seeped away, and bloomed a mauve, lavender almost. It was interesting to watch Gil’s skin grow a sweaty gloss and a pallid hue. It was like a sunset, but with motion.

Before the 1980s, when Luminol found its footing in policing, a murderer merely had to clean well to transform a bloody scene of homicide into the very picture of domestic calm. Luminol changed that. Bleach blurs Luminol’s traces, and you can never really be certain that you’ve gotten every splat of blood, and even the miasmic haze of bleach can alert law enforcement to the fact that you’ve cleaned too aggressively and make them wonder about your motives. A little Lysol, a jug of Clorox, and getting away with murder was easy before the days of DNA and Luminol; these days, even Mr. Clean will bite you in the ass.

nautical paint is made with copper to help it withstand fading, and copper always reads a false positive under Luminol.

If there’s one thing that can help a psychopath learn to become a better, more complete person, it’s group therapy. It’s like a drug you take with everyone’s full, smiling approval. Just because I’m a psychopath doesn’t mean I’m incapable of learning and growing, or whatever.

People, fools that they are, seem to have a cognitive block against putting a tongue in their mouths. It makes no sense—a kiss is still a kiss, even after you’ve dined on tongue. Tongue is an amazing foodstuff: you can roast it, pickle it, sauté it, fry it, or boil it, and it will taste just dandy.