Chapter 1
“You guys aren’t actually planning on going through with this dinner, are you?” asked Miguel for the thousandth time.
We were all sprawled on the living room couch, sleep-deprived and tired of fighting.
“Uh, yeah,” said Piglet.
“Maybe…” said Hugo.
“Maybe,” I said, meaning yes.
That money was our salvation. It’s true I didn’t take the news very well at first, but I began to wrap my head around it with time.
Once Hugo came home and I told him the whole story, the possibility took on a less dangerous shape, the way a lie told so many times over gradually takes the place of the truth.
Now, as I write this, I can see that I sound greedy or reckless, but you’ve got to understand that the situation was dire.
Bukowski kept breaking down and we were about to be evicted.
One single dinner to raise the money didn’t sound so bad.
Miguel rapped on the coffee table to get our attention:
“Cannibalism?! That’s some real heavy shit. Insane, disgusting. How can you not see that?”
“It’s not cannibalism,” said Piglet. He flicked a lighter repeatedly until he managed to spark the joint he was holding. “If all we do is prepare the dinner, we’re not the cannibals.”
“I … I can’t do this!” Miguel pressed his palm to his forehead, ready to burst into tears. “If we get caught…”
Piglet chuckled, choking a little on the smoke escaping from his mouth.
“Look, like I already explained, the ad got taken down after a few minutes. I held on to the list of interested emails and resent the invitation using a fake email with a VPN and a hidden IP address. It’s impossible to track.
Not even hackers could find me. I used a secure account, and only I have access to the card.
We’re clean. Any other questions, handsome? ”
“It’s going to get out. The cops will find out.”
“There’s zero reason for this story to get out,” Piglet argued. “I imagine the diners also have no interest in landing in jail.”
“Look, Miguel, I’m scared about the cops too, okay?” I said sincerely. “But I think Piglet’s right: This will all stay between us.”
“Piglet is right? The guy who spent all our money on a whore?!”
“I told you not to talk about Cora like that!”
“Well, she is a whore! And I’m not going to commit a crime just because you’re an idiot. I mean, I’m a doctor, I save lives!”
“Miguel, man, calm down, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack,” I said.
I grabbed him by the shoulder before he could leave. This conversation had gone completely off the rails. I looked at Hugo, who was leaning out the window, watching the neighboring buildings.
“There’s nothing more to discuss,” he said, without looking at us. “There’s death behind every meal. People prefer to shut their eyes to it, but it’s there. Death.”
“So we’re going to kill someone? That’s your brilliant idea? Kill a human being and stick him in a pot?”
“Nothing like that,” said Piglet. “We can get any meat and pretend it’s human. Wild boar, woolly mammoth, snake … There are so many animals out there.”
“No way. My kitchen is not a circus,” said Hugo, walking back to the coffee table in that seductive way of his. “And anybody who’d pay for this kind of dinner must have already eaten all kinds of exotic shit, maybe even humans. I can’t prepare just any meat.”
“So why don’t we just back out, then?” Miguel ventured, shrugging. “Since Hugo refuses to lie, let’s just cancel. We’ll send an apology email.”
Piglet let out a snort. “The money’s already in our account! Also, I don’t want to cancel. It’s the first brilliant idea I’ve ever had in my life.”
“See? We’re not criminals or cannibals. The point is this money’s going to pay off our debt, Miguel,” I reasoned. “We’ve just got to do this one thing and voilà, we’re back in the green. No more, no less. Just this one time.”
Miguel put his glasses on the coffee table and rested his head against one of the cushions, massaging his eyelids with his fists. You could almost see the steam rising off of his head. After a moment, he made a proposition. “What if we don’t do the dinner and just keep the money?”
“That’s also a crime…”
“A less serious crime!”
“We’re a serious company,” Piglet protested, joint hanging from his mouth.
His eyes were already getting red and droopy.
“I even found a corporate-sounding email template online that we can send. ‘To ensure your comfort and the quality of our services.’ Good, right? Listen, if we don’t do the dinner, the Seagull Meat Company is going to look bad. ”
“Company? There’s no fucking company!”
Hugo sat in the armchair, elbows resting on his folded knees.
“You know … this reminds me…” he said with a smirk.
“Once, at culinary school, our instructor asked everyone to prepare a surprise dish, and we all had to try to guess what it was. This one student brought in a grilled cut of meat, marbled, real tasty, with this unique texture. Only after everyone had tasted it did he reveal that it was dog meat. It was pretty funny. Some of the girls passed out, some of the guys wanted to punch him, even the instructor was so outraged he tried to get the guy expelled.”
“Was it really dog?”
“Yeah,” said Hugo. “His German shepherd had died two days earlier and instead of burying the dog, he thought: Why not?”
“Did he get kicked out?”
“They tried, but they couldn’t. Was it weird? Yeah. But it was also unheard of, innovative. If the idea behind the assignment was to escape the obvious, to think outside the box, he did exactly what he was asked to do. And besides, what’s the difference between killing a dog and a pig? Or a steer?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m saying we need to do this, Miguel. Is it weird? Yeah. Is it a little dangerous? Sure. But it’s also a challenge. It’ll be fine dining, fancy shit, quality ingredients, selected cuts. Nothing vulgar or violent.”
“The only difference is the meat will be human,” Piglet said, all matter-of-fact.
Miguel shook his head slowly, staring at the floor. His heart was telling him to keep refusing, but his head was starting to convince him otherwise.
“And where are we going to get human meat?”
We glanced around at each other. We already knew the answer, but it was hard to just come out and say it.
“We need a cadaver,” Piglet began.
“Yeah … A homeless person, somebody without a family,” said Hugo. “Somebody who won’t be missed.”
It was my turn to seal the deal. I sat down next to Miguel and, looking him in the eye, trying to sound as gentle as possible, I asked, “You’re still doing your residency at that hospital, right?”