Gia had briefly dated Magnotta ten years earlier. They met at a strip bar he was working at, and he became her first lover since she had begun living as a woman. She said he used to punch his head in the shower sometimes and joke about killing his family, but of course she had assumed it was empty rhetoric. She recalled how once he looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m afraid that when you look into me you’ll see there’s nothing left inside.” She believed he was a profound narcissist and that this had disfigured his sense of reality. Narcissism was something Gia had spent a lot of time thinking about. Her art practice was her own body; she had transformed herself into a kind of living sculpture, and her work concentrated on the muse of herself as a virtual image and cyborg. And though there were other commonalities between Gia and Luka, like their plastic surgeries and sex work, it was narcissism that proved the most fascinating and complex intersection for her. But whereas Gia’s narcissism produced searching works of art that deconstructed consciousness and selfhood, Magnotta’s had made him a psycho killer.

“If you watch the video you can literally see him trying to become an image,” she said, her face flickering in candlelight. Will and I were sitting with her in the dark of our kitchen, having just finished installing her apartment in the front room. “I don’t buy for a second that he’s getting any kind of sexual pleasure from what he’s doing. He’s doing it to enact and embody the image of the serial killer.”

“But to what end?” I asked.

“An augmentation of self. Fame,” she said, running her finger through the wax pooling on the table. “I mean, why else mail off body parts to the establishment? The prime minister? He wanted attention. From male figures of power especially. It was as if, in some sense, he saw those limbs as pieces of himself. He was spreading and amplifying himself across the country. And the world.”

She said that ancient peoples couldn’t conceive of themselves as moving images. People had to take mind-altering drugs in front of cave paintings to see a moving image, and even then it would have been considered the workings of spirits.

“I remember being a teenager in the eighties when ‘virtual reality’ was considered a kind of oxymoron and now you guys” — nodding to Will and me — “millennials don’t even really know what life is without a virtual self.”