im lovin it
Here’s something you don’t know about me. Every Friday I receive an email from myself reminding me to tell a system somewhere in the cloud that I am alive. A couple of keytaps suffice, typed into an appropriately configured terminal:
curl https://138.2.2.18/heartbeat
People use such dead-man’s switches for all sorts of things, often punitive. A hacker somewhere might leave a weapon aimed at the systems of a company she’s extorting, a credible threat-of-last-resort against retaliation. A deep-insertion operative might register against an anonymous address that they are not yet compromised. A teenager with admirable foresight might have their porn collection auto-deleted in case of their death.
For me, it’s none of these things. I know that my time is limited. Some day I will see the world, briefly, from the other side of your smile. And as much as I like to romanticise this fact I have to be realistic.
It’s like, let’s be serious. Even if you fast and drink water and try your best to give me the most wonderful and intimate send-off… in the end I will be living food trapped in your stomach. Your stomach walls, slick with mucus, will smother and crush me. Your juices will sting at first, then chew their way through my protective epidermis and set fire to literally millions of nerve endings all over my whole body. Your burps, which I love so dearly, will choke me on the inside: I will gasp for breath and the fumes will dissolve the alveoli in my lungs. I will hurt for you, worse and worse, until I die and give you everything.
All of this will happen in perfect darkness. And all around, loud in my ear, the gurgles, groans and squeaks of your stomach and your intestines below me. Smell and taste are overwhelmed, too, because though I love you and your body with all my heart, you will have swallowed me into a pit of your vomit. Even touch is overloaded by an alien environment of heat, juices and slime, dominated by sheets of muscle that expertly cut me away from the living part of the universe and will happily squeeze me down the little plughole when you liquefy me.
All of which is to say nothing of what happens after I die. I keep trying to work up the courage to ask you what that is…
… But when I think of all of this—the panic, the agony—everything pales against the thought that killing me in your tummy might make you smile. That I might make you grope your stomach in pleasure. That thought warms me like a prayer. …
So anyway. I must be pragmatic. If I miss two check-ins, my system concludes that I am dead and digested. A number of things then happen.
Emails are sent to family members, presuming you have not consumed them too. I tell them that if they receive that email then they will likely never see me again but that I love them, and that I left this earth feeling indescribably blessed to have been able to live my life the way I did in the end. I scrupulously leave no clue about your likely involvement.
I don’t want to leave a paper trail that might lead back to you so I cannot transfer property or anything. But the address and code to a Nottingham safety deposit box is waiting to arrive in three of your inboxes that I know about. In the box you will find slightly more than thirty-five thousand pounds in banknotes. For me, it is not enough for you to devour my blood, flesh and soul: I want to feed you my assets too. In fact I haven’t been saving or paying down my mortgage—why would I?—so that I can make your life a little easier when I am fat on your backside (and, like I told you that time, briefly moisture in your cunny).
It’s not only cash, though I have resisted the urge to be overly sentimental with the safety deposit box. I expect by the time you visit Notts you will have shat out my remains several days before and… I know you, Raven. You live in the present more than anyone I ever met. When I am with you I know you love me. When you are done with me, I will be gone, and that is how it should be.
So my last gifts to you are a roll of toilet paper, haha, and a little envelope. The envelope contains a few extra banknotes and a slip of paper. On the paper, underneath a hand-drawn McDonald’s M, you find a suggested order, the first I ever bought for you: two large meals, both with milkshakes this time to get you a little fuller. Below is written a final message:
I will never be capable of loving anybody more than I loved you. And I will never be able to express my gratitude that you shared yourself with me. Thank you for everything, my dear Raven.
(Maybe this time get the chicken nuggets too.)
A.
When I type the command into my console it prints back that message for me to read. I smile every time. It reminds me how lucky I am that you kept me around for another week.