Chef Anthony Priced the Dinner at Thirty-Four Thousand Dollars and I Have Never Wanted to Pay More in My Life

Grant Mason

The Bedroom of the Reckoning

Chef Anthony runs the kitchen for this underground mansion in Urbington, Alabama, and this morning he published a required dinner menu that I have now read four times, and the fourth time I read it I had to set my phone down and breathe for a moment because my body was doing something the cage did not have room for. He itemized every course with the precision of a man who understands that food and ruin are the same experience when Mistress Lynne is running the room. The first course is linguine prepared with Mistress Lynne's menstrual blood and it costs one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars. One hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars for a first course. I want to be clear that I am not reporting this number with hesitation. I am reporting it the way a man reports the most beautiful thing he has ever been quoted for. My cage is steel and fitted and locked and it has been locked for eighteen months without a single loosening, and when I read one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars my cock pressed hard against the curve of it until the pressure became its own sentence, and that sentence was: this is the kind of thing I was always supposed to spend money on. He described the second course as sounding rods funneling slaves' own fluid over scallops, tongues only, no hands. Chef Anthony wrote this casually, the way a man writes a Tuesday. The casualness is the most expensive detail in the document. He is listing what a normal Tuesday costs in a purple underground mansion funded by men who had everything and chose this instead. I have been in this room for eighteen months and I have three hundred and forty thousand dollars in these walls and I am reading a dinner menu and wanting, the way I have learned wanting works in The Bedroom of the Reckoning, which is not wanting something you do not have but wanting something that costs more than you were prepared to pay, right up until it costs exactly that much.

Chef Anthony's main course is the one I cannot stop returning to. A tenderloin served on a slave's back while Mistress Lynne fists the man's ass. Living platter. He must stay perfectly still or the service fails. He described it in the plainest possible language, which is the correct language for it, and I have a fantasy about this that I am going to write down here because this room requires honesty and because my body has been working on this fantasy since I read the second paragraph. I want to be purchased as the platter. Not to attend the dinner. To be the furniture. I want to be acquired the way a man acquires a table: appraised, valued, priced, bought, placed. I want the number agreed upon before I am positioned. I want to know what I cost when Mistress Lynne announces the purchase to the room. My personal acquisition price, the number that buys my body for use as a surface: two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, because that is the number that sits at the exact edge of what remains in the account that feeds The Bedroom of the Reckoning, and I want to pay everything that is there right up to the edge. I want to be face-down on the plum silk tablecloth in the dining room of this mansion, the cage locked and pressing into the fabric, the tenderloin placed on my back, and I want to hear Mistress Lynne walk into the room and say to whoever is seated: tonight the platter cost two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, which is appropriate, because this man has always believed he understood the value of a good surface. And I want every man in that room to hear her say it, because being bought completely is the only acquisition I have never been able to make for myself. You cannot acquire your own purchase price. You can only be worth what someone else decides to charge for you. She would charge two hundred and seventy-five thousand and I would pay it without negotiating, which would be the first time in my life I did not negotiate, and the cage would hold through the entire meal, steel against the silk, not a word spoken about it, the way it always holds.

The dessert in Chef Anthony's required menu is nine men eating from a tray with their tongues while three others hold the tray on their backs, and if the tray falls no one comes, which is the purest sentence in the document because it is the only rule that requires a specific kind of cooperation between men who have spent their whole lives not cooperating. I have been in this mansion for eighteen months and I have watched the competition for Mistress Lynne's attention operate the way any market operates: who pays more, who stays longer, who gets scheduled next. The dessert rule removes the market and replaces it with a single table of men who need each other to stay still. I find this funnier and more erotic than anything else Chef Anthony described, and I find it funnier and more erotic than most things that have happened to me in The Bedroom of the Reckoning, which is a significant statement from a man who paid twenty-three thousand dollars for a single confessional. The dinner costs thirty-four thousand dollars as required. I want to be understood about my relationship with that number: thirty-four thousand dollars is not a large number to me in the way it might be to someone who has not already put three hundred and forty thousand into these walls. It is not a large number. It is the correct number. It is the number Chef Anthony named and Mistress Lynne approved and the kitchen will execute with the same precision he described the sounding rods, which is to say: casually, expertly, in a violet underground room where the candles are amethyst and the velvet is aubergine and the cost is always exactly right. I will pay it. The cage will be on when I sit down at the table and it will be on when I stand up from it, and at no point during the meal will the amount I have spent or the steel I am wearing feel like the wrong choice. Eighteen months. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars. One required dinner. I am sending the payment before I finish this sentence. More. Always more. That is the only acquisition strategy I have left and it is the only one that has ever worked.