I Have Spent My Entire Life Knowing When Something Is Real. Chef Anthony's Post Is the Most Real Thing I Have Ever Read.

Kane Voss

The Deception Dungeon

I have spent thirty-eight years reading people. That is not self-congratulation. That is the architecture of my survival. I could sit across a table from a man and know within forty seconds whether he was performing, whether the story he was telling had the right weight behind it, whether the number he quoted was the number he actually meant. I was never wrong. I was so consistently not wrong that I stopped thinking of it as a skill and started thinking of it as oxygen. Something I had always had and could not lose. Then I read Chef Anthony's post about the required thirty-four-thousand-dollar dinner and something in my chest simply stopped.

I want to be precise about what happened, because I am a precise man. The first course is linguine dressed with Mistress Lynne's menstrual blood, priced at one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars, and my con-detection system, the one I have never once in my adult life been unable to trust, looked at that sentence and found nothing to flag. No performance. No inflation. No angle. Chef Anthony, who operates out of the Mansion Kitchen and whose relationship to honesty is absolute because he is accountable to Mistress Lynne's palate, wrote that menu the way a man writes a ledger entry. The second course involves sounding rods routed through slaves' own bodies, their pre-cum finishing scallops, consumed by tongue only. The main course is a tenderloin presented on a living man's back while Mistress Lynne makes that man's body entirely hers from the inside, and the man does not move because the meat must rest. Dessert distributes the work across two bodies holding a tray level while nine men eat and three men receive what the tray-bearers have apparently earned. If the tray falls, every orgasm in the room is cancelled. I read all of this and my cage went so tight I had to sit down on the amethyst stone floor of the Deception Dungeon and breathe through my mouth. I am a man who has lied his way out of every situation he has ever encountered. I walked into this mansion pre-paid, genuinely believing I had found the one contract I could eventually talk my way through. And I am sitting on the floor of my dungeon in a violet haze of physical desperation, absolutely certain that Chef Anthony wrote the exact truth, which means Mistress Lynne designed the exact truth, which means the con I thought I was running on myself was never a con at all.

Here is the fantasy I cannot stop living in and cannot stop being humiliated by. I am at the dinner. I am one of the nine men eating from the tray the two plum-flushed bodies hold steady, and I do not use my hands, because hands are instruments of misdirection and Mistress Lynne does not permit me my instruments here. My cage is present under my aubergine dinner jacket, pressing its specific steel argument against every moment of the meal. I look down at the first course and I know, with the full force of every lie-detection instinct I own, that the one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollar line item is real, that the cost left someone's account and entered hers, that there is no angle or performance underneath it, and that knowledge hits me somewhere below rational thought, somewhere the cage has complete jurisdiction over. I cannot perform my way out of this table. I cannot manufacture a better version of this room. The tenderloin on the man's back is real. The sounding rods are real. Mistress Lynne's authority over whether anyone in this room finishes is real in the most structural sense of the word, which is that it is written into the menu, priced, and enforced by the man holding perfectly still beneath one hundred and forty-eight dollars of meat so that she may eat well. I feel the cage the whole time. I feel it especially when I look at her. And the most shameful, most truthful thing I have ever admitted in writing is this: I am not trying to escape it anymore. The con-detector finally found something it cannot argue with. It is the one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollar first course. It is Mistress Lynne. It is the pre-paid arrangement I walked into with open eyes and cannot manipulate my way through. My whole life I looked for the seam in every story. There is no seam here. There is only the cage, and the dinner, and her.