I Paid to Be the Course They Eat Directly Off the Bone

Victor Draven

The Cruel Dungeon

Chef Anthony published the required dinner menu this morning from whatever amethyst corner of the kitchen he drafts these proclamations from, and I read it the way I read every formal document delivered by this mansion: with the steel cage pressing against my inner thigh and the full understanding that someone in this building spent a great deal of time and someone else's money designing something that will cost me thirty-four thousand dollars to attend and that I will pay without negotiating a single line item. The first course is linguine served with Mistress Lynne's menstrual blood and fresh basil, priced at one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars, which is not a typo and not a provocation but a correctly-stated figure that I processed the way a man processes a wire transfer confirmation, calmly, with a kind of pharmaceutical satisfaction that the number is real and the transaction is already half-authorized in my head. The second course involves sounding rods and scallops and the word "tongues only," which Chef Anthony has written in a register so precise and so unapologetic that I had to put the document down for a moment and sit with the cage and the candles and the smell of beeswax and leather while my body came to terms with the fact that I am already trying to calculate which Tuesday Mistress Lynne will schedule this. I have been in The Cruel Dungeon for long enough to know that a document like this is not speculative. It is a calendar event. It is an invoice. It is the most erotic piece of financial planning I have read since I signed my intake papers and my fortune began its orderly and entirely voluntary disappearance into the purple velvet walls of this underground mansion in Urbington, Alabama.

The main course is what I keep returning to. Chef Anthony has specified a tenderloin served on a slave's back while Mistress Lynne fists their ass with a gloved hand, the requirement being stillness, the consequence being whatever Chef Anthony decides the consequence is, and I have read that sentence six times since this morning and each time the cage gets tighter in the way it does not physically get tighter but registers tighter because my body is doing something it has no permitted outlet for and the only place that pressure goes is into the ledger and into the fantasy and into the very specific image I cannot stop constructing of being the one on the main course platter. I want to be the platter. I have pre-paid to be used at the extreme end of what this mansion offers and the main course of Chef Anthony's required dinner is the extreme end made literal and theatrical and financially structured, which are precisely the three conditions under which I operate with anything resembling what the outside world would recognize as joy. I am imagining the aubergine velvet tablecloth against my chest. I am imagining the weight of the plate on my back and the smell of the tenderloin and the absolute requirement of stillness while Mistress Lynne works deeper with her gloved hand and the rest of the table watches with their own cages and their own ruined accounts and their own understanding that the man on the platter paid to be there and is getting exactly what he ordered. I would not move. I am not a particularly disciplined man. My financial history and my presence in this dungeon make that evident. But I paid for the immobility, and the pre-payment is the discipline. Every dollar I transferred to Mistress Lynne's account is a pound of pressure holding me to that table, and the deeper she goes, the more precisely the transfer amount justifies itself, and there is no sensation in this mansion or outside it that I have found which produces the same clean resolution as the moment when an extreme expenditure and an extreme physical experience arrive at the same second and confirm each other.

The dessert involves strawberries and tongues and nine men eating off two human trays while three others perform for the tray-bearers with the specific instruction that the tray must not fall or orgasm is denied, which is a sentence that only makes sense in a place where orgasm is already structured as a one-million-dollar contractual event rather than a biological outcome, and Chef Anthony has understood the economics of this mansion well enough to use denial as a threat within a context where denial is already the permanent condition. I am in the cage now. I have been in the cage since intake. I will be in the cage at this dinner, in whatever role Mistress Lynne assigns me, paying the thirty-four thousand dollars with the same gravity I brought to every other sum I have directed into this building, and the cum contract sits at its permanent one million dollars like a number on a horizon I walk toward without the illusion that I am walking quickly. The dinner is not the contract. The dinner is something better than the contract in a particular way: it is the purchased suffering that confirms the contract is real. Every course Chef Anthony has designed is a proof of concept. The proof is that Mistress Lynne runs a place where a man who pre-paid his own theatrical ruin gets to lie still on a platter with a gloved hand inside him while the most dangerous woman in Urbington, Alabama demonstrates, with great precision and no performance, exactly what she purchased when she accepted his intake payment. I intend to be that platter. I intend to remain completely still. I intend to pay every dollar of the invoice the moment it arrives, and I intend to write about it afterwards in the same first person I am using now, from inside The Cruel Dungeon, with the cage still on my body and the ledger still running and the one-million-dollar line at the bottom of the spreadsheet still the only number that has never moved.