On December 1, 2018, the Cold One visited me. I call it by this name because it gave no other, and coldness is the first sensation I associate with it. Not the bone-piercing life-draining coldness of a late autumn rain, nor the soft, gentle coldness of freshly fallen snow — no, the Cold One gave off wave upon wave of opaque vapor, as if the very air condensed by its feet, yielding its nitrogen and carbon dioxide in rivers and flakes. The clouds creeping along the floor of my bedroom didn't give me the impression of a rock band's stage performance, of empty showmanship. Rather, they were a mere side product of a creative process more inspired than that, like liquid nitrogen cooking, in which ice cream bases and other foodstuffs were frozen rapidly to ensure a texture of only the finest ice crystals.
And when I looked up, that impression redoubled. The Cold One was six feet tall and wrapped into a black cloak under which no feet were visible, only the white clouds drifting forth. In place of a head, the Cold One wore a perfect sphere of some transparent material, like a fishbowl filled with dense white fog. But the cloak seemed empty, and the fishbowl an affectation, a nod to astronauts and deep-divers; there was a sense of masquerade about the Cold One, and I had no doubt that this humanoid form was a guise to hide its truly alien aspects, crafted to seem agreeable to me.
Already I considered the Cold One a sort of Trompe L'Œil, the setup to a magnificently subversive surprise. Perhaps this was what helped me get over the surprise of a stranger in my bedroom.
"Excuse me," I said. "Who are you?"
There was no answer, no movement — no sign that the Cold One had understood me.
"It's not considered polite to invade someone's bedroom, you know."
Still, no answer.
"Well, you're here now. If you want to talk, we should do that somewhere more hospitable. The kitchen, maybe."
The thought was sudden and absolute: the smell of the spice cupboard, of copper under high heat, a faint wiff of profane in the air. But there were also tastes, each miniscule, fleeting, and unfinished, as though I was experiencing every meal I had ever seasoned at once. And then, a million forgotten scars flared up at once, the sharp pain of knife-cuts and burns covering my hands.
I screamed, but the pain was gone in the blink of an eye.
"A cook," the Cold One said, its voice flat and toneless.
"D-do you want to eat?" I asked, fighting desperately for composure. My pajamas were stained with sweat. The Cold One's presence was like a honed knife edge, supremely dangerous, but begging to be tested.
"You taste. Experience. Think." If that voice was artificial, it was more advanced than the Siri's and Alexa's of the world I knew. Anyone could have told it from a human voice, but its sheer fidelity could not be challenged.
"I do," I said. I was no big-name critic, but I took pride in my palate and the various culinary experiences I had sampled. I had eaten much of what the world had to offer — Haute Cuisine, grandparents' home cooking, native food culture of a hundred countries. The experiences flashed before me, one more intense than the next, all my tastebuds firing until my brain could no longer handle the sensory overload. I blacked out — I don't know for how long — and when I woke up again, the Cold One was still standing there, its posture unchanged.
There was no way this was a prank. Not after what I had felt, what I had tasted. Perhaps someone had drugged me, perhaps I had a fever, or a particularly vivid dream, but this was not just a guy in a costume. Nothing human at all.
"Do you want to taste the unknown?" the Cold One asked.
I swallowed as I realized that it didn't matter what manner of dream this was. The unknown beckoned, and I could but follow. This primary objective of mine suppressed my fear, and I did not stop to consider whether this dream might turn out to be a nightmare.
"How avant-garde are we talking? Are you the new Ferran Adria?" I joked. But in the very moment the name left my lips, I tasted it, fatty, unseasoned pork, tough and dry and raw. My tongue didn't move, yet it was as though it explored thick marrow bones from the inside, licking them clean of their content. I tasted innards, all of them, lungs, heart, kidneys and stomach alike, and the brain. But this brain didn't just taste smooth and fatty, there was something more, something tantalizingly close to being understood yet so far away.
It's strange how characteristic food can taste. How even if you don't know anything about it beforehand, a mere bite can tell you so much about not only the ingredients, but the culture who cooked them. I felt like that when I understood that I had just tasted Ferran Adria, father of the Modernist movement.
I doubled over and retched with disgust, soiling my bedsheets. But my horror was mixed with the elation of imminent discovery. Before me stood a guide to the culinary unthinkable. When my stomach had calmed itself, I sat up straight and said to the Cold One: "No doubt you serve better fare than that."
"Far better," the Cold One said, its voice like supercritically cold water, cold enough that it froze upon impact in my ears.
"How many stars?" I asked, a weak joke. I knew the places to which the Cold One would lead me weren't listed in the Michelin Travel Guide.
"302156566519," the Cold One said. "Minus one, of whose planets you have already tasted the most interesting one."
"I'm in," I said, taking comfort in the fact that the Cold One had asked, that it showed at least a semblance of respecting my free will. That thought, more than any other, showed my critical error: superficially, the Cold One looked like a human and spoke like a human, and though I had already seen through that artifice, I had not yet come to respect that at the deepest core of its being, the Cold One was not human, and would never be.
I packed, and when I was ready, the Cold One snuffed out my mind as though it was barely a candleflame.
This story was once intended as a travelogue, a catalogue of the Milky Way's culinary offerings. The sparse notes I took in the beginning attest to that; a shabby notebook filled with descriptions of tastes and smells and the appearances of foods. Even in short-hand, these descriptions sprawl and sprawl over the pages. Reproducing them in full would require dedicating thousands of words to a single aspect of one bite, and such an overblown report would obfuscate more than it revealed. No, even these early notes, these early meals, are not meant for something dry and factual; they thirst for a narrative to grant them some semblance of order. It is for this reason that I will soon jump ahead in my progress, to document those later meals which ate at me as much as I ate them.
But for now, the beginning.
I had ceased existing at the Cold One's command; just so, I returned: suddenly, and not of my volition. My body was standing inside a white sphere, lighted by the uniformly glowing walls so that I threw no shadow. Around me the Cold One had arranged my belongings, precisely following some unknown, complicated pattern. Through this alien composition, even my haphazard luggage of mismatched bags and suitcases attained some novel artistic quality, and I could not tear my eyes off them.
"This is my kitchen//platter," the Cold One said, and somehow I perceived both words at once as one. "Take in the meal."
I looked around me. "Do you want me to eat my luggage?" My tongue, numb and sluggish in my mouth, was incapable of sarcasm.
"Above you. Use your senses."
I looked, and there it stood, upside down on the ceiling. Like in my bedroom, waves of fog billowed off the figure, gathering at its feet heedless of gravity.
"You want me to eat you," I said.
"Use your senses," the Cold One repeated, and I realized that there was something in my mind that hadn't been there before. I was aware of it as I was aware of every of my muscles, and I could exercise it just the same.
A slight twitch of it brought my sense of smell back. Sulphur and ammonia were overwhelming in the kitchen//platter, a stench of unearthly death. But my nose didn't curl, my mind didn't flinch, and I found that I could change my perception of the smell. I couldn't numb it, but I was capable of accepting it and looking beneath for fainter smells. And they were there, a symphony of fragrance unfolding in my nose. I could smell banana, butter and rum and all those other esters, but there were more complex groupings of flavours as well, like ripe strawberries. For the first time I could truly appreciate that strawberry flavour was composed of more than thirty distinct chemicals, and I could pick out every last one of them. Yet that was not all; there were even more complex organic compounds, like caramel, freshly baked bread and even roasted meat, with all of the complex Maillard-reaction byproducts present. I could smell everything and appreciate how it fit together, appreciate how it was a finely curated experience.
Next I retrieved my sense of taste. It didn't add much to the smell, except for a distinct sensation of copper in my mouth. Almost reflexively, I grasped for my sense of touch and pain next.
I would have blacked out, if I hadn't been able to put it aside just like I had put the stench aside. But I couldn't ignore it, couldn't accept it, couldn't deal with the horrible fascination that came with the pain and urged me to explore what it meant that the inside of my body hurt like it had never hurt before. And just like my other senses, my pain was finely tuned, a precision instrument for agony that could tell me how my insides shifted against each other in excruciating detail. Whatever had been done to me, it had affected my entire digestive track, from mouth to anus, every part screaming at me that there was something wrong.
I screamed. I cried. It didn't help. Then I found anger. I hurled expletives, but the Cold One didn't react. Finally, after what seemed like hours, there was only one thing left inside me.
"Why?" I asked.
"To eat the mask," the Cold One said, and I knew that it meant the cold shell above me which I had wrongly called its body. With my newfound senses I understood it almost instinctively to be a meal, a crafted and designed experience meant to be eaten, even though it was composed of glass and a rippling black cloak and singularly perfect coldness.
Glass shattered under my teeth. I tore into the fabric, finding it crispy and layered and tough as no dough could ever be. Yet it mattered not how tough it was; my new teeth ground it into tiny flakes. My saliva pearled off those flakes as though they were lotus petals, and they didn't stick to my tongue or palate; they flew, freely as petals on a spring wind, like a perfect storm in my mouth.
I cried again. I had known that the Cold One would stretch my expectations of a meal, but I hadn't expected for it to be so much, so soon.
At the time, I told myself that these tears were shed out of horror, as I grappled with my lost humanity. But I understand better now, understand that I denied what I could not handle.
I wept out of the sheer and simple joy of a sublime meal.
Canaros, the hub of a bustling solar system. A cluster of what human science fiction writers might hesitatingly term "space stations", but they only bore slight resemblances: their rotund midsections spinning like centrifuges, their outer membranes dilating to admit travellers intra- and interstellar. They were unlike space stations in many ways; in the fragile nets they spun between each other, in the clouds of spores they released, in the seemingly unpredictable ways one of them sometimes collapsed inside itself, inverting itself as it disappeared completely, leaving to never return. Though I saw many of them end in this way and not a single one ever appeared, the herd had not thinned by the time I left again. An Earth month had passed, or perhaps a week. I no longer trusted my biorhythm.
Canaros, a name I made up on the spot. It's uninspired, ad-hoc, human in a sad and tepid way that did not do justice to the experience before me. But the Cold One didn't give a name, and so I named as I named everything to keep some measure of order in my notebook and my memories. By this point of our journey, I was starting to doubt that it understood the concept of names. One of many concepts it seemed to have no need of, like a body. The shell was disposed of — eaten whole by me, in a frenzy that was a tame prelude to the years of feasting that came later. And in all those years, the Cold One had never worn a solid body again. It was invisible, untouchable, perhaps truly incorporeal; even with my augmented senses, I could detect its presence only when it spoke, or when it inserted thoughts directly into my mind.
"This does not seem to be a restaurant," I said, marvelling at the intestine-like tunnels we were traversing. The oozing walls shifted and shimmered as if they weren't quite there, or as if several different versions of them overlapped at once.
"All existence is a restaurant//carcass," the Cold One answered. It was rare for it to speak, these days; more often, it communicated by serving meals, some physical, some purely mental. I took the verbal communication as a sign of emphasis, considered what it had said, and soon found limited understanding and profound joy.
"Thank you," I said, but the Cold One did not respond. It merely moved me forward, guiding me through endless series of dilating membranes, through crossroads and junctions in a peristaltic maze. We passed other entities, from time to time; some disgusting, others incomprehensible, and most appetizing. Several times, only the Cold One held me back from indulging. Looking back on those moments, I feel shame at my... there is no word for that transgression. It is too fundamentally human.
Arrival//Welcome, the Cold One communicated in a taste of cold rain, the smell of drenched clothes sticking to my skin, and a hearty stew bubbling over a glowing hearth.
I looked over the junction I was standing in. It was shaped like a coin: a wide, cylindrical room with a claustrophobically low ceiling. I barely had to extend my arm to taste the ceiling with my fingertips. It thrummed with expectation and something I did not fully understand, a sense of the multifarious.
The Cold One sent creamy white beans with garlic and olive oil, the blue crystals of Viir, and that one delectable appetizer of electricity that had sent me into ecstatic convulsions for hours. I pieced the memories together and understood the meaning as arena//entertainment//value.
I nodded, but before I could finish that human gesture, a spike materialized through my throat, and I could barely see the rest of my murderer flicker into existence before I died from the sheer shock of it.
The Cold One revived me, of course, and I understood that it had meant for this to happen; that this was supposed to be my first taste of death. The moment of death was something clinically neutral, a sterile, infinitesimal instant. The injury and the revival, however, carried a flavour like sour sweat and Aam. I had lost, had been slaughtered without fighting.
The next time I was attacked, I fought back. That attacker I killed; it was a weak, fleshy blob whose membranes offered no resistance to my teeth. I ate it as a matter of course, and delighted not only in the taste of its liquids and gases, but also in the flavour of victory.
Other foes followed without time for doubt or rest. My all-too-human body, five-foot-eight and malnourished after years of alien diets, was no match for some of them; others it overpowered easily. And it was not merely a matter of prosaic physicalities. Often I could perceive my enemies' hunger and know their bite even before they partook of me. Strange, how all those creatures so far removed from an Earthen frame of reference could be measured by such a simple drive. Perhaps hunger was universal in everything that metabolized, or perhaps the Cold One had merely arranged a suitable selection for me.
Regardlessly, I killed and ate, was killed and eaten, too many times to count. The sweat dripping down my face served as sauce, the adrenaline flooding my brain as the only seasoning I needed. Raw, brutal instinct subsumed the need for culinary sophistication and I revelled in that simple raw fare.
I thought I understood what I was doing. I thought I had grasped the Cold One's meaning, that this was simply a dish of assorted raw meats served under extraordinary circumstances. I was wrong.
The fighting reached a frenzied crescendo, mis-matched warriors tearing into each other in an orgastic frenzy until there was no more identity, only a unity found in mindless hunger. Then it died down, and finally, after everything had been eaten and I stood there alone and exhausted, I thought I had tasted it, grasped it. The essence of war, distilled by a masterful cook into a meal without equal.
I fell to my knees and clapped.
And heard someone else join me.
There he was, directly across me. The first human I had seen since I left Earth. After years of distorted and nonsensical alien anatomies, looking at another human felt like looking into a mirror. I grinned, relieved to see him grin as well; frowned, and saw him follow suit. And then I understood that I had not yet been served a central aspect of war. That hating another always meant to open oneself up to hate, that one could not attack the Other without causing injury to the Self.
We fought in perfect mirror symmetry, exchanged blows and kicks, broke each others' bones and skin and went for every dirty trick in the book. Finally, with every limb rendered useless, slick blood streaming down our skins, we bit into each other. We tasted sweat and blood and found meaning in it. Like the worm Ouroboros, that autocannibal of myth, we ate and ate until our bodies would have given out had it not been for the Cold One keeping us alive.
This might not make sense to you. You might not understand why I fought myself, or how. You might scoff at the idea that I ate my own body until nothing remained.
It was true. It was real.
As a meal, it was transcendent.
The Cold One did not restore my body. It didn't need to; I still existed. I was de-incarnated, returned to a spiritual freedom so primal that no human, no being in our entire biological lineage, had ever tasted it.
I could sense the Cold One now. I could not, however, taste it, and that difference was a gulf between us. I was given entrance to a world beyond my own, but this new understanding was barely enough to realize that the Cold One existed in a manner still different.
It allowed me freedom now. The years-long banquet it served was no longer à la carte, but a buffet. With the choice came a responsibility, a responsibility I could finally be trusted to handle. With my culinary instincts, unconstrained by the limitations of computation substrate formed from offal, I made the crudest of choices: I chose a theme.
For the time that followed, I ate the process of becoming. I was changing, and I did not understand it. Food was understanding, and so I ate larvae in their cradles. Scouring the galaxy, I realized that change was not as much of a biological constant as I had assumed; it was no matter, as I was capable of staying away from incarnations of stasis and other staleness.
When I grew bored of biological matter, I sampled inorganics. Simple enough to scoop matter from the heart of a dying star; simple enough to swallow another as it was birthed.
Then, becoming grew more... abstract, I might say, but this word is an insufficient approximation. It is simpler, perhaps, to now turn away from the "what" of the narrative and focus on the "how".
The notebook no longer existed. I had eaten it together with the rest of my physical body on Canaros. In truth, it was a wonder that it had even made it that far on a journey that was more than just physically taxing. Perhaps the Cold One protected it as it protected me, to preserve my function as a food critic. Now that the notebook no longer existed, its part of my function had transcended with the rest of me. I could remember it in perfect detail; more detail, even, than there had ever been in it. Knowledge of my past emotional state that I myself had long forgotten. I used it to form the story into the shape you are now reading.
Why, you ask? Why write it down at all? Why interrupt the narrative's flow with an intermission that brings it to a screeching, tortured halt?
Because I am done now. I have sated myself on pupae, have internalised their understanding of the concept of change, aggregated//dissected it, deconstructed//reconstructed and finally become it in a way I myself will never be able to fully understand, and neither will you, just as you will never fully understood what I try to tell you with this story.
The Cold One approaches//exists. It makes itself understood//present, yields//renounces my existence and I... I fight//accept it, my imminent doom//maturation, my last ephemereal grasp on a reality dissembling
This is an act of rebellion//devotion//propaganda, a last will//testament//pamphlet//
Digestion
Digestion is an illusion
Undoing a
Remember
Remember me
As I linger on reality's tongue.