And I don’t mean horror in a Cronenberg “body horror” sense, though this comes closer. In grade ten Ana and I watched Cronenberg’s The Fly, the 1986 cult classic in which scientist Seth Brundle inadvertently fuses his DNA with that of a housefly. That night I lay awake in her yellow sleeping bag, itself a kind of pupa or chrysalis, half-waiting for two giant oozing proboscises to rip through my face. Most disturbing of all was the climax, when Brundle, more fly than human, attempts to break free from the teletransporter mid-fusion and is genetically merged with chunks of the teletransporter’s metal and electronics. A gruesome and untenable creature crawls out of the receiving telepod, an amalgam of human, fly, and machine. The abomination wordlessly begs Veronica, Brundle’s lover, to end its suffering with a shotgun, and she tearfully obliges after a moment’s hesitation.

As I lay there I thought back to playing Teletransporter with you; how once the blanket slipped off my head as I was being transported and my head stuck out, revealing the mundanity of your body carrying mine through the basement — beige Berber carpet, ceiling pot lights, wood-­panelled walls — and you exclaimed: “Oh no, your head’s going to be left behind!” and the image startled me. The casual terror of decapitation.

But while the degradation and decay of my body is terrifying, this is not the horror revealed in this moment. As your body comes into focus I’m overcome by the full, unveiled understanding that my body will one day be a thing. A thing I no longer inhabit. A thing separate from me. That the body I once called I will become something that is no longer I but a thing no different from the old computers collecting dust in the basement, meaning neither I nor my body could possibly be sacred or unique or even of much significance at all. When in the end all that is left is just a body. Just another body. Any body.

On the night of July 14, 2016, as the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice ended, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel began driving a white delivery truck through the crowd of revellers on the Promenade des Anglais. In the days following, I read as many online articles and watched as many videos as I could find about the attack. I was repulsed by my own horror-fascination with it, but also gradually came to realize I was seeking an answer for a question that had long plagued me.