Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “Would it hurt for you to be more positive?”

  “Oh, Nathan. It hurts when you become sentimental and ordinary. Why would you ever do that?”

  “Ouch!”

  “Did you get good pictures? Were they shocking? Will Molnár put them up on his wall to excite his customers eating their goulash? Should I make a pun about ghoulash? Ghoul lash?”

  “I get it, I get it,” said Nathan, still stung, unable to smile. If she did recover, what would they talk about? Her dream of going back to architecture school at the University of Ljubljana and building luxury houses on the banks of the Sava with her father? How ordinary and sentimental would that be? “I got some very good shots of your operation. I’m not sure that you’ll like them, but I’ll email them to you if you want me to.”

  Dunja took his hands in hers and pulled him towards the bed. He tried to lurch his chair forward, but it was too flimsy, bending and twisting until it popped out from under him, leaving him standing in a half-crouch like a jockey. She laughed again, and he took a step and settled on the bed, the lowered metal side rail digging into his thighs no matter how he shifted his weight. “Did it turn you on when Zoltán cut into my breasts? I almost convinced him to give me just a local anesthetic, but he copped out.” Nathan enjoyed Dunja’s sporadic sixties drug/rock lingo and wanted to ask her exactly who she learned her English from, but it never was the right moment.

  “Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up.” Dunja became quiet, still. What he had just said, his expression of sexual normality, was not what she wanted to hear; he knew she would take it as rejection. He spoke very gently, skating on perversely thin ice. “When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful.”

  Dunja’s elegant big hands covered Nathan’s, squeezed them gently and pulled at them, shook them in slow motion, as though trying to reason with him through them, hoping that unspoken arguments would travel up his arms and down to his heart. “Nathan, oh, Nathan. You are really so sweet and lovely. But I have markers in my genes that say my cancer was destined to metastasize; and it has, it’s everywhere in my body, in my lymph nodes, you’ve felt them and caressed them, and you know it’s true. I’m not going to get out of this one, I’m really not.”

  “But Molnár told me …”

  “Molnár is a very strange and flaky man. He is a surgeon, a mechanic. He doesn’t want to know about things he can’t attack with machinery. I was completely surprised to wake up and find that I still had tits at all. I was sure he’d get so excited that he’d cut them right off. I was almost disappointed to see them, and looking only a little battle scarred too. He’s referred me to another clinic, this one in Luxembourg. It sounds very sketchy to me, just like Molnár, but I have a marker in my brain that means I’m destined to go there too, to let them do things to me until I’m dead.”

  Nathan could only just manage to keep looking into her searching eyes, feeling at that moment very sentimental and ordinary, and therefore mute. Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? Could he make a case for her new, diseased self as the most avantgarde form of womanly beauty? He didn’t dare, but she did.

  “While I’m still alive, I’ll have nothing special left to seduce with except the scent of dying. That will be my lethal perfume. And I want it to be what seduced you, you see? Because that’s my future, and I don’t want to live it alone. So you might find me calling you to give advice to my next lover. I might want you to encourage him to go deep into me and not be afraid. Or I might call you one night and ask you to fly to me and then strangle me to death while you fuck me from behind. Why not? Why waste the situation?” Dunja paused, her eyes never stopping their desperate search of his eyes. She smiled a freakishly kind, loving smile. “Would you come to me, Nathan? Would you come to me then, if I called you?”

  Nathan headed for the sliding glass doors of the Malév Duna Club Lounge. As he walked in, he recalled Naomi saying, “Just kill me,” when he complained to her about something on his cell. Approaching the check-in counter, he thought about strangling Naomi to death while fucking her from behind. Her hands were tied behind her with a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe belt. His hands were powerful around her long throat. Her face was twisted into a beautiful, open-mouthed, terrifying expression of ecstasy, and the fantasy-Nathan knew that it was the end of sex, that there could be no more sex after this sex. At the desk, an extremely unattractive and excessively uniformed matron—that cloying red scarf printed with little multicolored stylized wings—explained to Nathan why the photocopied membership card and other obscure paperwork Molnár had given him was not valid, and that she therefore had to deny him entrance to the promised land of the Duna Club Lounge. As he rollered away from the lounge and headed towards his gate, Nathan could only marvel at the Molnáresque perfection of it all.

  CHARLES DE GAULLE was undergoing extensive renovations. After walking for miles past dormant moving sidewalks, Naomi had to lug her roller bag up a double set of stairs—the small glass elevator was absolument for disability use only—then over a platform randomly strewn with cafeteria chairs (but no tables) that were served by a huge, lonely, lopsided automatic drinks machine, then down another set of stairs which led her into a dense mass of travelers standing numbly in a corridor with no seats at some distance from a gate with no seats. The horror of it was exacerbated by the near impossibility of getting out her laptop and opening it without cracking someone in the head. Naomi dug her BlackBerry Q10 out of the roller’s side pocket. She preferred it to Nathan’s iPhone in any text-intensive context like the ones she usually found herself in; she needed real, physical buttons (you couldn’t type on an iPhone when you had decent fingernails) and was dreading the possible imminent collapse of the BlackBerry empire. Such was the perilous life of the ardent tech consumer.

  As she fired up the Q10, she remembered with a pointy shot of adrenaline that she had left her Crillon pin on Dr. Trinh’s desk, so rattled had she been when she left her office. This was especially annoying because the entire day and a half in Paris after that had been tainted—a strange metallic taste in the mouth and a general warping of colors, like a migraine aura—by the Dr. Trinh debacle. Not only had she not gleaned anything useful from Célestine’s doctor, she had unexpectedly bumped into the limits of her intellect, or at least her education, and felt bruised by the collision.

  Or was she selling herself short? The Crillon pin, for example. She could imagine Dr. Trinh picking it up from her desk with ancient silver North Vietnamese surgical tongs and sending it out to her favorite counter-surveillance lab for analysis. But it was a perfect excuse for further contact with the doctor, if Naomi could devise a more efficient tactic for dealing with her. She could send Hervé to pick it up, primed with some innocent French bad-boy questions which, coming from him, the doctor would feel safe in answering. How close a collaborator could she afford to make Hervé? As if in answer to that question, her Q10 began flashing its email alert light. It was him.

  “You did not get a very good review from Dr. Trinh,” he wrote. “She was very quick to contact me and to let me know that I should stay away from you because you obviously wanted to do damage to the memory of our dearest Célestine. She also said that she did not feel that you were very intelligent, or maybe you were just American, she’s not sure, and that you used shock tactics that reminded her of American military policies in Vietnam. I asked her if she would pose nude for me, for my book that you liked the idea of. She said that her culture forbids it. We had a nice discussion about cultural assimilation and the sensuality of the East. I do not think she will do it.”

  Naomi’s thumbs began to fly. “I’m very disappointed to hear about
the doctor’s reaction to me. Did she really talk about the Vietnam War?”

  “Ha ha, got you there. No, I made that up. She did say that she didn’t trust you, though, and that you deliberately left some pin or something in her office as a kind of symbolic marker or presence. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  “Did you really ask her to pose nude for your book?”

  “Yes. All that is true.”

  “Does that mean that she was Célestine’s lover?”

  “Yes. I was once in bed with both of them. One day I’ll tell you about that. It was very interesting. It made me think of Karl Marx.”

  “Was there anyone in the Arosteguys’ life together that they didn’t …”

  The corridor, which was lined with glass, had become unbearably hot as the sun edged over it, and the constant irritated nudging through the waiting crowd by passengers trying to get to their baggage or some other flight was ramping up the general hostility. Someone stubbed his foot on Naomi’s roll-on and rammed her with his shoulder so hard she could feel the density of his bone and muscle—it felt intentional, a punishment, and Naomi gasped—causing her to inadvertently hit the Send button on her phone. Now other people started to wedge their way through the gap that Naomi had left as she stepped forward under the blow, and she was separated from her camera bag. She rotated herself on the spot so she was confronting the surge and worked her way back to her roller. Facing that direction, she saw the marquee of an airport electronics chain, and with her bag safely back in hand, she plunged towards the oasis of the kiosk.

  IN THE CORNER of the room between the minibar and the TV dresser unit crouched two sets of unopened bags: two camera rollers, two backpacks, two small black Samsonite four-wheel Cruisair Spinner suitcases with faux carbon-fiber-weave finish (Naomi and Nathan aspired to Rimowa Topas, the sexy German dentable aluminum stuff, but that was, for the moment, out of their range). It was not so much that they had the same taste in gear, but rather that they collaborated on their consumerism; it was a consumerist dialectic that led to the same commodity. That’s what Naomi was thinking in the floating part of her mind as she sucked Nathan’s cock—so delightfully, boringly, not curved much at all, not a mutant organ in any way, but a classic, modern circumcised penis—in room 511 of the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel. And she was surprised to find herself thinking in Marxist terms, because up until that moment at the electronics kiosk, in which she discovered three books by the Arosteguys—cheap-looking rushed editions in American English pumped out to take advantage of the philosophy-cannibalism scandal—she had barely heard of Karl Marx or Das Kapital. And yet those books, small, with large, inviting typefaces, and so easy to read, like owner’s manuals for hitherto undiscovered parts of the brain, made her feel as though she had been born a Marxist economist. Not that Marxism was the subject of the books, but that the lexicon of Marx somehow underpinned the Arosteguys’ evidently profound understanding of contemporary consumerism—and of Naomi herself, as it turned out.

  The lack of an available direct flight, which would have been a short hour-plus hop from Paris to Amsterdam, meant a seven-hour ordeal involving a layover in Frankfurt. But the time dissolved in an odd way, because instead of wandering among the randomly strewn high-tech shops of that stainless-steel commercial kitchen of an airport, punctuated by intense bouts of Wi-Fi hotspotting, Naomi found herself settled into a lounge chair near her gate, submerged in the deep inner sea of the Arosteguys—a warm sea nurturing a coral reef inhabited by the most bizarre and engaging creatures—continuing a dive she had begun on the flight from Paris. By the time she came up for air, she had been transformed into a quiveringly, giddily passionate Arosteguyan.

  And now those three books—Science-Fiction Money, Apocalyptic Consumerism: A User’s Manual, and Labor Gore: Marx and Horror—lay innocently on the glossy desk by the window as Nathan unexpectedly, and somewhat unsportingly, came in Naomi’s mouth, phlegmy and bitter. It was her breasts that did it, or rather, it was all four breasts—two of Naomi’s, two of Dunja’s, superimposed on each other, the image fermented in Nathan’s brain and downloaded through his penis into Naomi’s hot, distracted mouth. Or so it felt to Nathan, absorbing Naomi’s jet lag and distraction as his own, and confusing her breasts, beautifully wobbling as she sucked, with Dunja’s larger, mutilated ones, and somehow even adding Dunja’s swollen armpit glands—six breasts?—to the mix. He had his arms behind his head and wasn’t even touching Naomi’s breasts. It was the distance that made the hallucinatory laminating of breasts possible, and his usual come-control ineffective. Or had he even tried to exercise that control? Was he like a small dog who punishes his mistress for staying out too late and leaving him locked in the kitchen? Naomi never swallowed unless she was very drunk. Naturally, she had a rationale. It was more porn-like to just let it dribble out of her mouth, to let it form a stringy bridge to his penis and his pubic hair. She did it now, not startled, exactly, but maybe puzzled by his betrayal of their routine, which was that they would decide in advance of her mouth enclosing him whether this was foreplay or this was it for now. Naomi didn’t like sexual surprises. She was always willing to play, but she wanted structure.

  And so it was a surprise to Nathan, then, that Naomi, abstractedly wiping her lips with the back of her hand, said, “What do you think about Marx and crime, Than?” No sexual reprimands, and a reversion to her infantile name for him, Than, suggesting a thumb-sucking, asexual state of mind.

  “Well, I’m not sure, Omi. It’s a huge subject, I guess. You’ve been deep into it? Marx? That’s a first for you, isn’t it?”

  Naomi rolled onto her back, flattened by the enormity. The ceiling was a stained plaster swirling. It matched her mental state. “I’ve been deep into the Arosteguys.”

  “They’re Marxists?”

  “I’ve been reading them. I realize I have no education. It’s intimidating and depressing. It hurts my head. I need the internet to read them. And exhilarating. I’m not sure what they are. Were. She’s very dead. And dismembered.” Naomi folded both arms over her eyes, shutting out the oppressive ceiling. “Omi, Than.” Nathan began the cursory wiping of his penis with an obscure corner of the bedsheets, a habit Naomi had forced herself to decide was endearing. Was it a passive-aggressive statement? Did he hold off doing that when she swallowed? She couldn’t remember.

  “That’s us,” he said. “Omi Than. We sound like a Vietnamese gynecologist.”

  Naomi shook her head under her arms. “So weird that you say that. So weird.”

  “Because?”

  “Because there is a Vietnamese gynecologist in my life. Or almost.” Naomi unfolded and rolled back over to face Nathan, lips still sticky. “Célestine’s GP. Dr. Phan Trinh. She definitely had an intimate knowledge of her patient’s vagina.”

  “And a Marxist? A criminal?”

  “Dr. Trinh? No, I was thinking about Aristide when I said that.”

  “A Marxist and a criminal?”

  Naomi rolled off her side of the bed and squatted beside her camera roller. She dripped a few drops of lazy viscous fluid into the carpeting as she unzipped the bag and groped its innards. “I was thinking more like a Marxist and therefore a criminal. I mean, the way he—they—wrote made me dizzy-crazy, made me feel intelligent and deep, and you know how seductive that is for me, you used it yourself to get me into bed that first time.” And now she flopped back onto the bed, a white-and-silver iPhone 5s in her hand. “Lemme take a shot of you cleaning your cock.”

  Nathan stared at her in disbelief. “You have a bag full of the highest of high-tech photographic shit that you’ve lugged all over the globe, and you’re shooting my manhood with a cell phone? And since when do you have an iPhone?”

  “Since Charles de Gaulle. It’s a natural segue from my well-documented-by-you desire for disembodiment. I want to junk the camera roller bag and travel with only this, this implement. It shoots HD video too. And you can edit it on the phone, while flying. Touch focus
. Dual LED flash. Fingerprint security. Great macro. Look.” And she swooped down to within centimeters of his cock-head and started snapping, the phone making an absolutely delectable shutter sound, reminding Nathan of the Australian lyrebird that would replicate the shutter sounds of forest paparazzi to seduce a mate. Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off ? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it? “And now mit Blitzlicht.” The LEDs embedded in the glass back of the phone blasted the tip of his cock with 5,400 Kelvin degrees of cool-blue daylight. He thought he could feel it. She held the phone up to his face. “You see how the flash throttles down for the macro shot. Perfectly exposed, matches ambient color temperature, doesn’t blow out your cock, as it were.” She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.

  Nathan rolled over on top of her and looked over her shoulder at the photo. He thought fleetingly of that shot of Galapagos lizards mating on a sun-drenched rock. Naomi flicked Camera Roll back and forth with her index finger, nail strangely not clacking, sorting through the varieties of flash and flashless, macro and micro, a shockingly quick dozen of them, some mit scrotal views as well.

  “This is making me very nervous, Omi. Kind of existentially unstable.”

  She began to edit the photos in a cute retro app, making his cock look like it was shot with an Instamatic in the sixties, and then a Polaroid in the eighties. “You talk pretty, Nathan. But what do you mean? It’s all good. I’m going to give you back your big mother macro lens. I won’t need it anymore.”