“Those are the most terrifying words you’ve ever uttered.” He buried his head in her neck under her hair, nuzzling in a pathetic and desperate way. He spoke to the pungent nape of her neck. “You’re giving me back my big mother cock. You won’t need it anymore.”
Naomi tossed her phone onto a pillow and twisted around under him until they were belly to belly. He thought fleetingly of that fifties French movie featuring Saint-Tropéziens mating on the beach. “You’re very anxious. You don’t have to be anxious.”
“You just spoke German. Since when?”
“The Arosteguys. Reading them.”
“Why not French?”
“Marx was German. Das Kapital. They quote him. They translate.”
“Marx talked about Blitzlicht? He was into flash photography?”
“He was an all-rounder. A lateral thinker.”
“So Marx. The guy who forced your French guy to murder and eat his wife.”
“Maybe not forced. Induced. Inspired. That’s the way I read it.”
“That’s the other thing. You’re the one who doesn’t read. Not books.” Naomi tried to shrug him off, but he let his muscles go limp, made himself as heavy as that iguana. She had to breathe when he breathed. “Where’s your BlackBerry?”
“I’m suffocating.”
“Me too. Where?” Naomi grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and he spun off her. “Because—and I’ll tell you before you ask me—because you’ve abandoned your faithful BlackBerry, your old friend and lover, the one that was cool with long fingernails, left him, now that you’ve got a new exotic toy to play with.” Nathan pounced on Naomi’s left hand and splayed her fingers, stroking their tips along the edges of her fingernails. “Yeah, right, and you’ve cut your fingernails for the first time since we’ve been together, and it’s not for Last Tango in Schiphol reasons either. It’s for iPhone touchscreen sex.” He dropped her hand and she protectively hid it under her hip. “And I know you’re serious about the Nikon withdrawal too. Nikon, that was our defiant consumerist thing, no Sony, no Canon, our badge of professionalism, our shared sex-tech. So now you’ll go with cool eight-megapixel Jello-cam rolling shutter no-bounce-flash iPhone hipness. And you’ll leave me, you’ll fly to Tokyo to have an affair with the French-Greek philosopher guy, who will then kill you and eat your breasts. And photograph your corpse with your iPhone.”
“That’s really fucking horrible, to say all that. Wow.” Naomi kicked at him with both feet in unison, like a cat on its back. “That’s probably the meanest you’ve ever been to me.” She jumped off the bed, grabbed the iPhone from the pillow, and began to delete the Nathan’s cock portrait photos, one by one, with violent, short-nailed jabs at the trash-can icon while singsonging, “Nathan’s penis: delete, delete, delete …”
BUT OF COURSE a penis is not so easy to delete, and before long, Nathan’s was happily ensconced inside Naomi. It had amused Nathan the first time he noticed it—what he later thought of as “theme sex.” It was dizzy and dreamlike, like a Las Vegas sex room (or at least his imagining of that chimeric thing), and it had come after watching Mutiny on the Bounty, the Brando version, and his sex partner was Sheila Dahms, who was just dark enough of eye and hair to support the Tahitian-themed rec room sex, the drums, the waves, the grass-covered thighs and musky breasts. He felt he was underwater with her, it was so hot and humid, and there was a breeze, the drums, the first sigh of the East on his naked buttocks … And afterwards, after she had jumped up and gone to the bathroom to pee and maybe douche out, as they then did, she came back luminous and said, for a second there I thought you were Brando, and you were still wearing those white breeches and those shoes with the buckles, and we were underwater. It was never like that with Naomi. She didn’t seem to have theme sex, ever. She admitted to distracted sex, thinking about arguments she’d had with her mother or her sister, even ratcheting up the anger and intensity to the point of orgasm. Nathan could not imagine that such a thing could be true, but she swore it was. Was she covering up her own version of theme sex? Maybe it was fantasy/celebrity sex and she was fucking some prepubescent rock star, male or female, and wouldn’t cop to it. Once in a while she’d play and try to guess his theme of the moment, but mostly he stopped mentioning it, holding it back, keeping it private the way she felt that some of her sex things were too private, though he hated that, he wanted to violate every part of her, dirty it up and make it part of him too. And this time, of course, since the theme was Dunja, Dunja and surgery and sexual mutilation, he was not going to play thematic, especially since the doubling up had actually disturbed him, so specific had it been. He became the Hungarian surgeon, inserting the radioactive pellets into Naomi’s breasts with his mouth, holding them between his teeth and pushing them, nuzzling them, into her flesh. And then they became Dunja’s breasts, and Naomi became an amalgam of Naomi and Dunja and someone else—was it Sheila, was she making her comeback bid from the distant past?—and he became Arosteguy, terrifying himself, his conception of the man filtered through Naomi and the internet and those photos he had found with the safe filter off, photos you didn’t want to see because they adhered to the inside of your skull and lacerated your brain. And that website called poundofflesh.com devoted to the eating of breasts. Nathan/Arosteguy ate her breasts right off her chest, ripped them off with his teeth, and then he came again so voluptuously that it terrified him.
Naomi pushed him off. “What the fuck was that? You actually bit me!” She pulled at her left breast, looking for bite marks on its underside. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“It wasn’t me. It was Arosteguy.” Naomi’s dismissive shrug. “Sex theme. I know you think they don’t exist.”
“They don’t for me. I don’t have sex fantasies.”
“A sex theme isn’t exactly a fantasy …”
Soon Nathan had her D300s in his hands and was shooting a series of posed pictures. She was still naked, but he had wrapped the sheets around her lower legs so that only her thighs were visible. “Okay, now, can you guess?” said Nathan, hiding behind the camera. “I’m working on a pitch and you’re one of my subjects. What’s my article about?”
“Hmm. You’ve covered my legs with a sheet.”
“Not just covered.”
“You’ve … hidden them.”
“Not just hidden.” Nathan squeezed off some clattery shots as punctuation.
Naomi’s eyes went wide. “You’ve amputated them.”
“Ah,” said Nathan.
Naomi squirmed a bit, then readjusted the sheet. “It’s that one where people want to amputate parts of their bodies because they just don’t feel that they’re the shape they’re supposed to be?”
“They roam the earth looking for a doctor who will cut off a perfectly good arm or leg. An arm and a leg.”
“Or else they do it themselves with a chainsaw or a shotgun. Yeah. What’s it called?”
“Apotemnophilia.”
“Yeah. Body dysmorphic disorder, on the street.”
“Psychotherapeutic amputation.”
“Amputee identity disorder, with a twist of bioethics. It sounds juicy.”
“Speaking of ethics,” said Nathan, getting very close to her with the camera, “I believe I might be experiencing a touch of acrotomophilia. What should I do about it?”
“Hmm,” said Naomi uneasily, “I got the philia part.”
“A sexual attraction to amputees.” Nathan started to nuzzle her thighs.
Naomi whipped off the sheet and sat up. “I think you just managed to creep me out.” She held out her hand. “Gimme my camera back.”
“Aw.”
“I don’t do medical. You do medical, remember? I do crime. It’s cleaner.”
“Sometimes hard to separate them. But I thought you were giving me your camera. You were going iPhone solo, remember? I could use a backup.”
Naomi snapped her extended hand at him and Nathan gave her the camera. She immediately started to delete the photos.
“I think you’ve just rejected my pitch, and that is a crime,” said Nathan.
Naomi swung off the bed and started fretting the Nikon back into its roller. She spoke into the wall with her back to him. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be going to Geneva for that … what was it? Worldwide Genital Mutilation Conference? Honestly, I think that’s more interesting than the amputation thing. There were so many articles about it for a while, then it tanked into hotness oblivion. It’s interesting about diseases, how they peak and tank. The politics of genital mutilation, now, that’s endlessly hot.”
“Thanks for the encouragement. I was thinking that my apotemnophilia piece would segue into that exact meditation. But never mind. The Geneva mutilation piece is off. No, I stay here in this hotel and finish the Hungarian thing, just in case there’s something in Europe I missed and have to pick up. I email it to my agent, shamelessly begging him to get me The New Yorker—”
“That’s still Lance, isn’t it?”
“It is the same old Lance. Then maybe I just go home to NYC. To where you aren’t.”
“I hate that part.”
“The New Yorker part?”
“The part where we say goodbye,” said Naomi, now sitting on the floor and playing with her new iPhone, still not looking at him.
Nathan stood up and leaned against the windowsill. “And you leave me alone in yet another hotel room,” he said.
Naomi looked up and flinched, almost startled to see him, as though she had just discovered an exotic bird at the window. Using the High Dynamic Range option, she took his flashless backlit picture with the phone. “I leave you desolate and alone. And I go back to Paris.”
NATHAN WAS FINISHING UP his solitary room-service meal. On a website called mediascandals.com was a page devoted to Dr. Zoltán Molnár. His iPhone quavered and he answered it. “Hi, it’s Nathan.”
A very little female voice: “Nathan?”
“Yes?”
“It’s me. It’s Dunja.”
“Dunja? Where are you?”
“I’m at home. You know. Somewhere in Slovenia.”
“Yeah.” An awkward pause. Her voice was too little for comfort. “How are you?”
Dunja inhaled raggedly, suggesting to Nathan that she had been crying just before she called him. “Nathan, I think I gave you a disease. I’m so sorry.”
“A disease? You mean, literally?”
“Roiphe’s, Nathan. Roiphe’s disease. Dr. Molnár just phoned to tell me. It showed up by accident in some tests …” Her little voice hung there, suspended, weightless.
Almost without thought, or rather exactly like thought involving memory and information, Nathan was googling Roiphe’s disease and within seconds was downloading data into the conversation. Fingers flying and swiping.
“Roiphe’s?” said Nathan, net-borrowed argument tinting his tone. “Nobody’s had Roiphe’s since 1968.”
Dunja’s tone was the flattened tone of unassailable logic. “I’ve been immune-suppressed for a long time, and I have it. And so do you, now, I think. Probably.”
“The Roiphe’s survived all that radiation?”
“Radiation is not a treatment for Roiphe’s.”
“No,” said Nathan, “I see that.”
“You … you see that? On your computer? On the internet?”
A photo of Dr. Barry Roiphe on the cover of Time magazine, May 1968. He looked lanky and shy, a bespectacled Jimmy Stewart. The caption, in screaming yellow, read, “Dr. Barry Roiphe: Sex and Disease.” Dunja began to sob huge, liquid, globular sobs. For a moment, Nathan thought the sobs were coming from Dr. Roiphe himself, his apologetic, twisted grin now morphing into a rictus of grief and shame.
“I wonder whatever happened to him?” said Nathan.
“Who?” said Dunja, amid shudders.
“Roiphe. Dr. Barry Roiphe.”
NATHAN WAS HAVING A PEE, and it hurt. He talked to the pain: “Ow, fuck, ow, shit, that really hurts! Barry, Barry, what did I do to you?” The pee dribbled to an uncertain halt, then dripped morosely. Nathan shook his penis angrily and reached over to his shaving-kit bag. He took out a large magnifying glass with a ring of battery-operated LEDs, swiveled around to the sink, flicked on the LEDs, flopped his penis over the edge of the basin, and examined its tip. The word suppurating came to mind. “Fuck,” said Nathan. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Back in the Schiphol Airport Lounge, despondent, he sat with laptop closed while others browsed with professional intensity. He hadn’t finished his Hungarian piece, his Slovenian, Dunja piece. The hotel room had started to feel like a disease ward, a holding compound for infectious disaster. His phone released the frog trill that said Naomi. He would have to consider changing her ringtone. The endangered frog species thing. Spooky, symbolic, something not good. Slide to answer. “Yeah, hi. Nathan.”
“I hear airport. Are you in an airport?”
“Yeah. Checked out early. You home?”
“Well, the Crillon. Not exactly my home away from home. Comfy.”
“I’ll bet. You sound edgy.”
On Naomi’s laptop was a grid of several horrific black-and-white photos under the heading “Arosteguy Crime Scene Images.” The photos showed the torso of Célestine Arosteguy, which was missing various pieces: one breast, half a buttock, the soft area around the belly button. Bite-sized lesions everywhere. “I’m back in my room, and I’m alone and I’m freaked out.”
Nathan was surprised to hear Naomi mention being alone, something she never did; with social media, net, phone, camera, recorder, she never seemed to feel alone. “Yeah? How come?”
“Oh, the CSI photos of Célestine Arosteguy. They’re hideous. How could the guy do that? I just can’t believe it. He’s such an attractive character, but … I dunno. Maybe. God. I’m sending you the URL.”
“Maybe don’t,” said Nathan. An African lady with a pushcart came around cleaning up bottles, cups, cans, newspapers. She took Nathan’s cappuccino before he was finished with it. “I’m not in the mood.”
Naomi got up from the desk chair and twirled onto the bed. She got under the duvet with all her clothes on, including shoes. “I need your advice, Than. You have to see this stuff. I can’t have it in my head all by myself. He ate pieces of her. I mean, I knew that, but now I’m seeing it.”
Nathan lifted the lid on his own Air, the third generation one with no SD card slot. It was actually Naomi’s hand-me-down. She needed that slot, she said. Needed it for photos, especially now that those little cards had become ubiquitous, even on pro cameras. He couldn’t bring himself to press the power button. “Is this crushing loneliness I feel just for you, or is it really, underneath, the harsh metallic edge of existential longing?”
“That’s the airport talking.”
“Could be.”
“Well, it’s all for me, honey. Don’t try to sidestep it. Feel it.”
“I do feel it.”
“Soon you’ll be back home in our apartment and you’ll feel cozy again,” said Naomi.
Nathan began to feel the eyes of his loungemates flicking up at him. Why would they be listening? “I’m not going right back to NYC. I’ve been diverted to Toronto. You know, Canada.”
Under her covers, Naomi felt a twinge of … could it be separation anxiety? Her nest wasn’t busy enough. She slid out of bed and began to gather electronic devices, dumping them on the duvet as she found them. “But you’re not in the air yet. How can they divert you?”
“I diverted myself. I’ll email you the address and stuff.”
Naomi jumped back under the covers again, the nest reconstructed, ramparts, moats, drawbridges. “What’s going on? Toronto? What, Sunnybrook Hospital?”
Nathan’s voice went sotto. Paranoia thickened in his brain like Alzheimer’s plaque, as it always did when he got that shiver of a great idea for a piece. “You remember Roiphe’s disease?”
“Oh, sure. The thing that killed Wayne Pardeau. But they cracked it, didn’t they? Extincted it.
Only samples left in stainless-steel containers. After that, pas grand-chose, as I recall.”
“In itself, as diseases go, ultimately, pas grand-chose, no. But extinct, also no.”
“You have a brilliant angle on it?”
Nathan’s sharp, involuntary intake of breath went unremarked. “Let’s say compelling. I have a compelling angle on it.”
By now Naomi was on the same pages Nathan had been on—with the Air, not the old MacBook Pro for the moment—and she was looking at Roiphe’s house in Toronto in Google Street View. A freshly built faux chateau, Victorian kitsch pastiche of the worst kind. Oh, well. What did you expect? An old Canadian Jewish doctor with some money. But nice leafy street. “Roiphe’s there, isn’t he? In Toronto. You’re going to see him.”
Nathan had heard the rustle of Naomi’s keyboard, but out of his inexpressible guilt he wanted to compliment her. “Hey, that’s pretty good for somebody who doesn’t do medical. Try this. Do you know Roiphe’s first name?”
“Are we playing Faster Fingers or are we thinking?” Faster Fingers was their code for supplanting brain/memory with Google Search.
“Too late for the first-name thing, I guess.”
“I’m looking at Barry’s face right now,” said Naomi. “Rabbinical Jimmy Stewart, somehow. Holy Blossom Temple or something in my Toronto past. Do you know Alzheimer’s first name? No fingers.”
“Sure: Aloïs. But did you know that Alzheimer’s assistant turns out to be Creutzfeldt of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s? You know, human mad cow disease? Sort of ?”
“I forgot what you do.”
Nathan, starting to cook now—and it was in articulating things to Naomi that the cooking really happened, part of their closeness, though he worried it didn’t really work in the opposite direction—edged himself down lower into the lounge’s carpeting, bringing the phone closer to floor level. He didn’t want his lips read. “What happens if this guy, Barry Roiphe, the guy the disease was named after, what if he’s lucky enough to discover another hot disease? Do they call it Roiphe’s 2?”
“That would be lucky?” Naomi was drifting, fingers of her left hand working the iPad, her right the Air, both all over the net and some juicy SMSs rolling in on the iPhone. The juiciest: “Greetings from Tokyo, Naomi. Here’s the email address you wanted: [email protected]. Let’s talk soon.” The avatar in the message bubble was an actual photo of a pleasant-looking young Japanese woman that was framed like a painting; a little 3D-rendered brass plate at the bottom of the antiqued frame bore the signature “Yours, Yukie.”
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