Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “You know we’re not married, Yukie.”

  “It’s a modern marriage,” she said. “It’s what marriage has turned into, and you’re it. You’re married. Cyber-married. Somehow, the internet is involved.”

  Yukie’s place was in Shinsen, just west of Shibuya Station, on a small side street of slightly shabby concrete-and-tile buildings. Just outside her apartment door, Yukie turned to Naomi and put her hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to make all the usual single Japanese working-girl disclaimers. It’s small and ugly and crowded, and I’m embarrassed to have you see it, much less stay in it.”

  Naomi gave Yukie a quick kiss. “All the more reason for me to thank you. It’s the best place in Tokyo for me, believe me.” Once inside, Naomi was disappointed to see a quite neat, clean, and modern little space that could have been a studio in Brooklyn or Queens. No tatami mats, no futons, no shoji screens. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she thought, since Yukie herself was neat, clean, and modern, though following Japanese tradition they both took off their footwear just inside the door.

  “Are you needing to hide out, though, really?” said Yukie, as she hauled Naomi’s big duffel bag into the kitchen. Sheer white curtains closed off the kitchen from the bedroom, which was also the living room. “Even my friends can’t seem to find me here, so you should be pretty anonymous.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Naomi, thinking about her Dutch seatmate and his continuing interest in her as they waited for their baggage. He kept smiling and nodding at her, trying to catch her eye as though they shared an intimate secret, and it creeped her out, induced paranoid fantasies. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the plane wanted to follow me.”

  Yukie laughed dismissively and closed the substantial metal-clad door behind her. She took Naomi’s hand and led her to the bed, where she sat down and patted the sunflower-pattern bedspread. Naomi left her roller and shoulder bag on the pink carpet and sat beside her, Yukie still wearing her coat and gloves. “You can take the bed. I’m used to sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag.”

  “That doesn’t feel right,” said Naomi. “We’ll work something out. Maybe I’ll sleep on your kitchen table.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” laughed Yukie. “It’s actually not even big enough.”

  Naomi was feeling that deep, heavy jet lag, now that she could let go, could stop traveling. She was almost delirious enough to be serious about the kitchen table; she imagined lying on it on her back, her legs hanging over the edge, dangling slippers. Her eyes felt dead from the inside out, but Yukie’s eyes were luminous with excitement. “So, really? Is there a story for me in this? You know, a unique Japanese angle? Something you wouldn’t want but you can give me? My boss has been hating everything I bring him lately.”

  Naomi was very comfortable with Yukie’s guilt trips—they were so gentle you could ignore them—but she did owe her, and she did need her. Yukie was a media relations agent at Monogatari PR, one of the most powerful public relations firms in Japan—their specialty was spin-doctoring celebrity catastrophes, particularly the political variety—and though she was a junior agent, she knew everybody in the highly incestuous and regimented Japanese media world. “I’m meeting a very dangerous man here in Tokyo. Nobody knows about it.”

  “Not even Nathan?”

  “He knows about it, the asshole.”

  Yukie’s eyes went even wider. “Uh-oh.” She looked down and took Naomi’s hand again, and without looking up said quietly, “Maybe, Naomi, you should give me the name of some contact or something? Just in case? Maybe not just Nathan?”

  “I’ll do that, Yukie. That’s a good idea. And meanwhile, I need a contact from you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Having said the fearful thing, she was able to look up into Naomi’s eyes again.

  “Who’s your gynecologist?” said Naomi.

  “WE HAD A WONDERFUL Portuguese housekeeper living down here for a while, but we lost her to a better offer,” said Roiphe.

  “Oh?” said Nathan.

  “Boyfriend married her. Swept her away.”

  “She forgot to take her flag,” said Nathan, tipping his head towards the small plastic Portuguese flag on the wall. Next to it was a voluptuous poster depicting a Moorish castle in the Sintra Mountains near Estoril, the Vila de Sintra coat of arms prominent in the lower right corner, where the poster was slightly torn. At that point, stuffing his underwear into the light-birch veneer Ikea dresser which sat under the poster, Nathan was already feeling like a Portuguese housekeeper, desperate to create a window in her windowless basement bedroom with the windswept vista of the poster. He would keep that, but the flag had to come down. And why was there no mirror in the room?

  “She disappeared overnight. Left a lot of her junk. Must have been pretty hot stuff,” said Roiphe, hunkered down and shamelessly poking through Nathan’s open camera bag on the furry floor. Shag. Visions of seventies carpet rakes danced in Nathan’s head. Or was shag carpeting really making a comeback? This variant was a muted dark slate, not what you’d consider a 1970s color. Was this insane? Was he really doing this? Would he actually be able to sleep down here, and then wake up, and then function?

  Nathan decided to laugh. “Well, I could probably fill in a bit if things get slow. I’m particularly good with a feather duster.”

  “Damned if I won’t take you up on that, things get hectic. Hey, you’ve got some crackerjack gear in here.” Roiphe held up Nathan’s wireless flash trigger. “Now what the heck is this gizmo? It says,” he began reading the label, “that it’s a Nikon Wireless Speedlight Commander SU-800. Sounds pretty impressive to me.”

  Nathan decided to use his iPhone’s LTE personal hotspot to generate a private wireless signal. Roiphe had handed him his house Wi-Fi password—“Network Name: DoctoR; Password: inFeKt10n!!”—shakily hand-printed in silver Magic Marker on the back of a ten-dollar Pizza Pizza/Toys “R” Us savings card. “I’ll want that back once you’ve logged in,” he had said, obviously not fearing the revelation of his home’s Wi-Fi password to the administrators of the Pizza Pizza redemption program. The old codger protested his technological ignorance too much; he seemed absolutely clear and savvy about all things i and e, and Nathan was convinced that feeling paranoid in the Roiphe household was simply being realistic. He was sure that if he used the DoctoR network, every keystroke would be duly logged, every email kidnapped and archived, and every Skype conversation transcribed for later sinister use. Or did he just need this to be true to make his story more compelling than it threatened to be?

  Certainly Roiphe, after his major song and dance about wanting a lawyer-certified, bulletproof contract binding them together in secrecy and artistic collaboration in such a way that liability and patient-abuse litigation and other such medically inspired legal chicanery would be made impossible, seemed quite nonchalant about dropping the whole matter once Nathan agreed to move in. He had even dropped, for the moment, his demand that they funnel their book deal through a credible literary agency—“I figure maybe Oliver Sacks’s own Wylie Agency”—before he allowed Nathan to record a word or take a photograph. He now seemed perfectly content with some vague understanding whereby they would magically fuse into an alternate-reality incarnation of Sacks, with a movie, an opera, some delicious parodies, and of course vicious attacks by colleagues fueled by jealousy following the release of their book, tentatively entitled Consumed: A Curious Case History. The doctor rehearsed defending himself against accusations of exploitation: “It’s in the hallowed tradition of the clinical anecdote, what we’re doing. Freud did it, Charcot did it, Luria did it. And we’re doing it! It’s an educational procedure, intended to provoke discussion, perfectly legit.” Nathan was happy to let Roiphe’s enthusiasm carry them as far as it might without the complication of paperwork, lawyers, book deals, agents. He needed to feel that he could walk away, literally, in the middle of the night, trundling his camera roller after him, with no goodbyes and no regrets.

  To seal the d
eal, Roiphe had brought his home office’s Pixie—with two sleeves of gray-coded Roma capsules—down to Nathan’s subterranean domain after Nathan had confessed his addiction to Nespresso. He had never seen a Pixie in the flesh. This one was the adorable titanium-colored version, which spookily matched the shag carpeting. “It’s okay, don’t thank me, I have the big mother deluxe one in the kitchen. I won’t go caffeineless.” Nathan was drinking a Roma right now out of the supplied cup and saucer, both in elegant white ceramic with the swooping split-N logo embossed within a beveled square recess, green capped letters on the bottom of each proclaiming “Nespresso Collection, Made in Portugal,” which of course evoked the poster on the wall and the former housekeeper. Synchronicity? Nathan took it to mean that what he was doing there in Roiphe’s basement had cosmic support. There was an undeniable shape to it.

  He had decided to keep the Pixie in the bedroom—on the dresser for now—instead of the tiny but workable nanny’s kitchen just around the corner from the slate-floored sitting room. He wanted it to feel like a European hotel-room adventure rather than a move-in-completely- and-hopelessly situation—move in with your recently widowed father, for instance. Nathan had done that, and it had been bitter and desperate in too many ways to bear experiencing it again, even analogically. Picking up on Naomi’s line of thought, Roiphe had joked that there was no separate entrance to the embedded reporter’s suite, the better to keep an eye on him, but everything worked, including the bathroom with shower.

  It had to be admitted: he was down here because of Chase. He wanted to be in the same house with her. He was not sure why. She was certainly attractive, but immediately gave off those convulsive, anaphrodisiac waves of looniness that tell you not to bother fantasizing. But where in the house was she? Did she know yet he had moved in? Would he be able to hear her? Could she hear him? Would she visit him down here? After finishing the Roma, he tried several times to email, text, and phone Naomi, without success. Then he called Dunja’s Slovenian mobile number, also without success; her phone disconnected after nine rings without accepting any messages, and a disconsolate Nathan wondered if, overwhelmed by guilt at infecting him, she had committed suicide.

  ON THE HONGO CAMPUS of the University of Tokyo, familiarly known as Todai, Naomi walked down the broad, tree-lined avenue leading to the fortress-like Yasuda Auditorium with its dark-red tiles and incongruous stone-arched entranceway, then turned right on the heavily wooded path that would take her to Sanshiro Pond. She could walk with confidence because, of course, she had Google Mapped and YouTubed her route to death before venturing outside Yukie’s flat, whose wireless signal was surprisingly robust. Yukie had insisted on covertly entering the flat’s wireless network password on Naomi’s various machines herself, not letting Naomi watch, a touch of paranoid strangeness that chilled Naomi’s feelings for her. She had to shrug it off. So, experiencing that comforting but oppressive net-preview déjà vu, down the curving series of stone steps she went, past a group of students sitting on large rocks in the pond feeding the carp and koi, past the tiny waterfall, and on to the simple wooden bench upon which sat Professor Hideki Matsuda of the Faculty of Law. In their email exchange brokered by Yukie, Matsuda had made it clear that he did not want to meet Naomi anywhere too public, but he also wanted to be respectful, and the ancient pond seemed a fitting compromise. In response to his wariness, Naomi carried only her iPad in its dedicated Crumpler shoulder bag, and a black nylon shopping bag from La Grande Epicerie in Paris for her mundane stuff and her Sony RX100 compact camera, just in case.

  The professor rose from the bench as Naomi approached and bowed slightly, not extending his hand. “Naomi, so nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you, Professor Matsuda. I’m very grateful for your help.”

  An awkward beat of silence filled by the shouts of students talking to the fish and one another which rose from the other end of the pond. It was obvious to Naomi that there was considerable stress involved in their meeting for this neat, delicate man of about fifty, his suit and tie impeccable, his glasses of fine stainless steel. Eventually, he took a card from an inside jacket pocket and offered it to Naomi with both hands as though it were a business card. She took it similarly with two hands, but it was just a note card, and completely in Japanese—perhaps intended to convey to her that Matsuda did not want her to know anything about him beyond what she already knew. She would need Yukie’s help with the card. They sat down together opposite a tiny, lush island.

  “The philosopher can be found at this address, at the time I have written on the card. It is his current home. He is interested to meet you.”

  Naomi was sure that Matsuda would be happy to leave it at that, to say goodbye right then and there, or perhaps stroll around the pond a bit, elaborating on its creation in 1615, its special heart shape, and its informal renaming to reference the 1908 campus novel Sanshirō by Natsume

  Sōseki—all safe topics, all charming and congenial. But Naomi was not charming and congenial.

  “Professor, you are a personal friend of Aristide Arosteguy, is that correct?”

  “I would not say personal friend, no. We are colleagues in philosophy; he, professionally, and I, well, philosophically, as an outgrowth of my interest in justice and international law. We have run into each other occasionally at various venues.”

  In her face, which she felt sure was burning red, Naomi could feel the wet vegetable heat coming off the pond. Matsuda looked cool. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “No, not recently. We correspond by email. He is a controversial figure on campus, as one might imagine.”

  “As controversial as the cannibal Issei Sagawa?”

  Matsuda flinched away from Naomi a few centimeters, as though the words had shoved him in the chest, but his expression did not change. “That is … not a valid comparison, Naomi.”

  “Professor Matsuda, I will be seeing Monsieur Arosteguy alone. Completely alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  Matsuda adjusted his glasses with both hands. “There are so many levels to that question.”

  “The level that I’m concerned about is the physical safety level. Will I be in danger from the philosopher? I don’t mean philosophical danger, or emotional danger. I mean physical danger.” Matsuda seemed unable to answer. He just stared at Naomi, blinking as a small flock of birds swept over the pond. Naomi pushed. “Some French policemen consider him capable of murder.”

  It was apparent now that Matsuda could not bear these words. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He stood up. “Please give the philosopher Monsieur Arosteguy my regards when you see him.” He bowed, turned, and strode off along the verge of the pond, a briefcase, which Naomi had somehow not noticed before, held stiffly at his side, not swinging.

  6

  NAOMI STOOD IN A residential street in Western Tokyo that looked more like an alleyway than a street. Yukie had assured her that, yes, there were houses in Tokyo and they were much more common than, say, houses in Paris, some of them very large and luxurious, some of them miniature modernist jewels. But as her cab left her, picking its way gingerly past the bicycles, potted plants, baby strollers, plastic garbage cans, and random furniture lining the street, she could see that Arosteguy’s house was neither luxurious nor jewel-like.

  It was after 8 P.M. and the light was fading fast. Naomi pulled out her camera—the compact Sony RX100 again; better to look like a tourist for now—and began snapping off shots in all directions. She steadied the camera against whatever wall or pole was handy to compensate for the low light levels and the resulting slow shutter speeds. The gathering twilight combined with the mercury-vapor street lamps and the incandescent light spilling from house windows made for pleasingly surreal 3D-feeling images. She could almost hear the little camera’s computers buzzing madly in their attempt to balance the color temperatures of the varied light sources.

  After documenting the shop across the narrow street, its steamed
-up windows displaying mysterious aluminum, ceramic, and glass containers, Naomi turned her attention to Arosteguy’s gray-stuccoed two-story house with its sad garden just inside the entrance. It was streaked with dirt and crumbling, its ironwork gate pocked with rust and its garden a rotting, garbage-strewn mess. There was some thin light showing through the second-floor windows, but the first floor was dark. After exhausting every imaging possibility she could think of, scrolling through her shots to see if anything jumped out at her, Naomi put the camera in her bag and crossed the street, trailing her roller behind her.

  On the outer wall, just beside the open gate, a stainless-steel mailbox featured stenciled white numbers—“13-23”—on a blue rectangle. Another blue rectangle contained impenetrable white Japanese characters. Walking through the gate and into the courtyard, which was fitfully lit by stained orange garden lights built into its raw concrete walls, Naomi was tempted to take out her camera and start snapping again—so many wonderful depressing details expressing the decay of this man’s life (as the accompanying copy would have it)—but she resisted. There would be time.

  Facing the sliding wooden doors, Naomi vainly tried to see through their narrow, full-length vertical panes of pebbled glass. She thought she saw a security camera in a hat-like galvanized steel housing above and to the right of the doors, but it proved to be an electricity meter. Electrical wiring crawled haphazardly all over the building’s stucco, many of the corroded screws and clamps barely hanging on. She looked for a buzzer or a doorbell, but there wasn’t one, so she knocked on the glass, which rattled at her touch. After a moment, a dim, watery light came on somewhere deep in the room beyond, there was a scuffle of locks, and the door slid open.

  Arosteguy stood in the doorway, his face hidden in shadow, a large, imposing, shaggy presence. This surprised Naomi; from her YouTube experience of the philosopher, he was small and fastidious about his appearance. She wondered for a moment if this man at the door was someone else, or even if she had the wrong address, but after warily looking her up and down, he spoke, and the voice and the accent were Arosteguy’s.