Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “What about video?” Naomi hefted the D300s in her right hand. “This thing shoots decent video. And I have a microphone and earphones to go with it.”

  “Maybe. When we get to know each other better. And I have some lawyers I need to consult with. They are already angry with me for the event of you. The event of Naomi. They are basing everything on the lack of an extradition treaty between Japan and France, but there are delicate circumstances which complicate things, and public outcry and opinion are dangerously involved.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong about the cannibal thing. It’s pretty potent stuff. But you don’t object? You don’t mind?”

  Arosteguy turned to her and pulled his mouth open to one side with his index finger. The effect was grotesque. Startled, Naomi lowered the camera. Arosteguy let go of his mouth. “Into the very mouth of the cannibal. Don’t you want that picture?”

  “Are you sure you want me to take it?”

  “Take it,” said Arosteguy.

  He pulled his mouth open again. Naomi began shooting. She changed lenses quickly—an extreme wide-angle lens now—and continued snapping, getting very close, optically spreading his face and his mouth, distorting them. Arosteguy played it seriously and intensely, his gums and teeth—quite good, really, with only slight tobacco discoloration—completely exposed on one side and somehow perversely naked. Naomi lowered her camera and checked the LCD screen. The photos were very disturbing.

  “Enough for now,” said Naomi. She reached for her sake.

  “Call me Ari,” said Arosteguy.

  “Enough for now, Ari.” She drained the cup and poured herself more.

  7

  THE DOOR TO NATHAN’S basement bedroom opened a crack, letting in a slash of light that cut across his face, waking him, befuddled, still dreaming himself a child with his white underpants on his head to keep his wet hair from soaking the pillow, something he had worked out with his mother, who tended to remember he needed a bath just before bedtime. When he awoke, the underpants—worn and frayed, the elastic popping out everywhere around the waistband—were always miraculously gone and his hair was dry, just as it was now. And the unutterable sweetness of that dream suffused, in a bizarre, wholly inappropriate way, the sinister shadow that appeared at the entrance to the room, hesitated, then slid elastically over the door frame and the dressing table. When the shadow reached Nathan, it liquidly merged with a silhouette that was Roiphe, tiptoeing in comic fashion.

  “Nathan? Are you awake?” The sweetness quickly leached away at the touch of Roiphe’s nasal voice, leaving a sourness tinged with anxiety, which, Nathan understood, was his default reaction to Roiphe.

  “Not really,” said Nathan. “Do I have to be?”

  “Well, get awake and grab your camera,” said Roiphe. “I was going to wait till we had some major prep time, but it’s happening now, so let’s take it at the flood.”

  “Flood?”

  Roiphe shook his head in mild exasperation. “It’s time to observe the nocturnal habits of an odd creature. Get up, boy.”

  Nathan’s sense of being a boy in his childhood bed was palpably enhanced by his pajamas and slippers, which as an adult he never wore. The slippers were white Crillon hotel slippers bearing the elegant golden, foliate, and crowned letter C logo, given to him by Naomi, of course, who knew he’d be staying in places that did not hand out free slippers; the garden-variety striped flannel pajamas with the big white plastic buttons he had bought at the Hudson’s Bay department store, anticipating that he’d toss them once he was no longer a resident at the Roiphe Hostel. Just the thought of sleeping naked in that basement under that thin, clumped-up acrylic duvet provoked revulsion. And yet it was the pajamas and the slippers, the protective apparel, that transported him to a strange and unexpected place as he followed Roiphe through the darkened house, which sported sly, unexpected nightlights everywhere. Slithering in the sloppily fitting backless Crillon slippers up the teakwood staircase, clinging to the handrail of the wrought-iron balustrade—also foliate in a pseudo art nouveau style—Nathan listened to Roiphe whispering that the series of rooms on the third floor, which they were approaching, had been built “against code.” The trick had been to leave it unwalled and unfinished until after the final building-code inspections had been carried out, and then to have the rooms miraculously appear to the first buyers of the house in all their beautifully executed, dormered glory as “architectural workspace.” Said space now occupied solely by Chase Roiphe. But Nathan was also slithering in his childhood moccasin slippers, slithering downstairs by the light of the potent chromed-aluminum Eveready flashlights that he and his fragile, thin-limbed sister, Shelley, held, making their way before dawn to their living room, which was all but filled by an upright piano and a Christmas tree decorated with everything commercial and nothing Christian—candy canes, reindeer, elves, tinsel, cotton-batting snow, edible stars. There were presents of every size and shape under the tree, of course—the point of the whole exercise. Nathan had sent a SantaGram to the North Pole, and Santa had come through in the most satisfying way.

  LATER, THEY SAT DOWNSTAIRS, with what Nathan thought was perverse appropriateness, in the kitchen. The granite-topped island, whose vast and immaculate surface was interrupted only by a stainless-steel offset double-bowl sink, provided a clinical workspace for what Roiphe, rocking pelvically, rhapsodically, on his spidery wrought-iron breakfast stool, called “our first strategic debrief.” Nathan sat beside him on a sister stool, not rocking, his laptop on the granite in front of them, scrolling through the photos he had taken over the last hour. The fourteen embedded digital clocks strewn around the room, from the MacBook Pro to the ice-maker in the Sub-Zero fridge, the Wolf stove, the Jenn-Air warming drawers, Nathan’s camera (which sat just beyond the laptop), to Roiphe’s own odd cheap plastic wristwatch, all indicated that the time was somewhere between 4:06 and 4:09 A.M.

  “So you see what we’re up against here, son. What we’re working with.”

  “Not really,” said Nathan. “Honestly, I’m kind of in shock. That’s really what I’m working with.”

  Roiphe managed to work some rhythmical sympathetic nodding into his rocking. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I can understand that. And that’s what we’re doing here, right now. Want some ice water? Maybe coffee? Anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “‘I’m good’ is funny. Sounds funny to me. We never used to say that. We’d say ‘I’m fine. I’m all right.’ But they do say ‘I’m good’ these days. So what are we looking at here? What happened? What did you see? What did you shoot?”

  “I’m having trouble believing what I’m looking at right now,” said Nathan, squirming a bit on the stool. Its floral-print plastic cushion was coming loose at the rear left edge, and he was half-consciously trying to slide it back into place with his buttocks.

  “I think maybe you should just verbalize. Keep it simple and direct and we’ll get somewhere fast.” Roiphe was still nodding and rocking, but now with a fierce-eyed intensity that was unmistakably masturbatory, urging Nathan on towards some obscure epiphanic orgasm that he felt was completely beyond him. He decided to keep it simple and direct.

  “Your daughter, Chase, was cutting bits of her flesh off with a nail clipper, putting those bits onto little children’s plastic toy plates, and then eating those bits of flesh using little children’s toy utensils.”

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And what do you think her state of mind was while she was doing this? Was she hurting herself ? Was she in pain? Was she punishing herself ?”

  Nathan wondered if Roiphe was aware that he was recording their conversation through GarageBand on his MacBook. He had it running on Desktop 2, so the app was not visible (though only a three-finger swipe away), and it thus perhaps counted as semiconscious surreptitiousness. Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing
into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother? He was not yet sure how much he wanted Nathan Math the character to feature in Consumed: The Collaboration, but at the very least his side of every exchange with the Roiphes—and who knew who else?—would provide context which might ultimately even have legal consequences, given the weirdness that was emerging from Roiphe’s life and practice.

  Nathan was running his photos within Lightroom, which allowed him to easily manipulate their quality as he and Roiphe reviewed them. He could pull down seemingly burned-out highlights to reveal startling details of expression, and open up clogged shadows to reveal tormented gestures; later, he could play with them as photographic art, tweak them towards meaning that was not yet obvious, though he could not imagine including them in their chimerical book. The “Annals of Medicine” piece had more future reality to it, though it too was unstable, shimmering, flickering—morphing perhaps into a piece for “Annals of Psychopathology,” no pictures allowed. And in playing with the photos, he experienced once again the phenomenon of non-presence, the photographer’s non-authentic existence during the act of photographing; only in reviewing the photos did the event photographed emerge in experience, like the flowering precipitate caused when a crystal of sodium acetate was dropped into its supersaturated solution. But then the experience was moderated by the photo, the lens, the camera, the camera-eye’s response to the light—and that was what Nathan was reacting to now. He was not sure he had actually seen any of these events with his real eyes, a feeling sharpened by the clattering of the big camera’s shutter and mirror, which he could hear as he looked at the photos; the sound became part of his interpretation, even though Chase herself never seemed to react to it or notice it at all.

  Nathan was acutely aware that he was looking at photos of a naked woman with her father sitting beside him, also looking. True, Roiphe was proving to be an unusual father, but some of the photos were, quite by accident, perversely erotic, and Nathan felt that no matter how elaborate and subtly graduated Roiphe’s emotional filters were, he could not fail to see that. Not that there had been a hint of incest in their past that he could sense—at least, not yet—but disturbingly, Nathan felt as though his undeniably surging lust for Chase counted as incest because her father, almost shoulder to shoulder with him, breathing with ragged old-man intensity into the side of Nathan’s face as he searched the screen for signs of something obscure, possibly something sublime, must surely be inhaling it. Once again, it was that paradigm of the retroactive experience: Nathan had not felt anything like this while taking the photos, so caught up was he in the mechanics of getting the shot, but now, looking at them with Roiphe guiding the zooming and the scrolling with surgical insistence, Chase’s muscular nakedness, which revealed the massive scale of her macroscopic self-mutilation (almost every reachable square centimeter of her skin had been attacked as though by swarms of blackflies, the wounds puckered and weeping or scabbing), provoked unsettling reveries in Nathan. Did Chase’s body remind Roiphe of his dead wife’s body? (The former Rose Blickstein, as per the doctor’s Wikipedia entry.) Did it fill him with a bittersweet sexual nostalgia, an incestuous melancholia?

  “She does seem to feel it, feel the pain,” said Nathan. “I see it there, for instance, in this shot. She’s feeling the pain, and feeling the grain of her skin as the metal of the cutting edges separates the cells of her skin, bites through the layers of her skin and the tissue underneath it. But the pain makes her laugh, a weird silent laugh—see there, it’s not subtle, really. So she feels the pain, but she wants the pain, looks for it, like a bodybuilder wants the pain and searches for it.”

  “Happy to be punished? Looking for punishment?”

  “The bodybuilder?”

  “Fuck the bodybuilder. The girl.”

  Nathan zoomed into the photo in front of them. That was ecstasy on her face as she cut herself, not self-pity, not masochistic pleasure. But why ecstasy? The ritualistic elements of her trance—a classic fugue?—were complex and narrative; they were telling a consoling story to Chase, yes. Nathan was shaping the article as he reacted. He would have liked to record these thoughts, just say them to GarageBand so that he wouldn’t forget them, but he was not yet comfortable enough with Roiphe to collaborate in that intimate way, to leave himself vulnerable to the old man’s sarcasm and irony.

  He scrolled to the eating shots, still zoomed. There were other people there with her, somehow, sharing the tiny bits of her flesh that she had doled out onto five little plates with butterfly and bunny patterns. She seemed to be taking on the roles of different characters, rotating through the plates, delicately eating from one, coarsely from the second, ravenously from the third. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling and the walls, he had gotten close to the plates and the teapot and cups, the plastic cupcakes with switchable toppings of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry (each of these crowned by a convincing dimpled red cherry), and the shiny forks and knives in primary colors. The bounce absorbed the warmth of the terracotta walls and raked the covert tea party’s flatware and hollowware with soft red-clay light, instilling sinister drama into the innocent child’s set piece with its transient shadows and throwing into high relief the slivers of flesh and their smears of blood, which might otherwise have disappeared into the bright colors of the Fisher-Price plastic.

  But it was the hands that were mesmerizing, Chase’s hands, with their long, sinewy fingers and paradoxically perfect fingernails, hands that were out of proportion with the child-sized tea things and so seemed, especially when top-lit, to be monstrous as they delicately picked at the flesh bits and lifted them to her open mouth, her tongue extended and waiting. Very close to her now, he had been nervous about swiveling away from the child’s table to follow the trajectory of the hands—she alternated left and right, as though picking berries in a deliriously fecund patch—but the graphic momentum soon carried him to Chase’s face, which seemed swollen with contained excitement. When Nathan half-pressed the shutter release, a cross-hatched red laser pattern sprang from the base of the flash unit, allowing the camera to focus in low light. Caged by those red stripes she looked feral, like a wolverine caught by a self-triggered animal-cam in a remote boreal forest. She barely blinked at the brutal flashing that followed focusing, the harsh light, direct now, revealing scabbed notches taken out of the cartilage at the very tops of her ears, normally hidden by her hair, which was now swept back and held by a plastic tortoiseshell clip, its long, curving, interlocking teeth reminding Nathan of a sprung Venus flytrap. She was conscious enough of what she was doing, thought Nathan, even calculating enough, to avoid cutting her face and her hands—how could she cover up?—so where exactly was her mind now? The face in close-up currently on the screen, terrible, beautiful, used ecstasy as a mask and a shield. What was behind it? And she was talking, speaking for the invisible characters who sat around the chunky green-and-white circular plastic child’s table, talking soundlessly, shuffling around the table on her knees, shifting the chairs about so that she could play each point of view with varying mien but consistent intensity.

  “Okay. Here’s where I do my healing thing. Keep shooting,” Roiphe had said. In the photos that scrolled by now, Roiphe was partially lit by the Hello Kitty lamp on the night table in the corner, which he had flipped on so that he could unpack the beige corduroy Air Canada business-class toiletries bag he had stuffed into the pocket of his navy velour bathrobe. Roiphe was kneeling beside the oblivious Chase, intrepidly tracking down every fresh wound so that he could disinfect it with alcohol and Polysporin, dabbing with a rough precision.

  “For her, we’re not even here, boy. You see that,” Roiphe had said as he worked. “You see how she manages to move around me without acknowledging my presence. Nice little modern dance.” Nathan had caught some of that with his camera, and looking at the photos of Chase evading her father in sinuous slow motion, as though
practicing an exotic variant of t’ai chi, he regretted not having been able to shoot video.

  “She’s very consistent in the pattern of her little spaceout. She’s finished cutting and serving and eating, and now comes the funny social part where she talks to her party guests without saying anything.”

  “And how does it end?” Nathan had asked, still snapping, still finding the evocative angle, at times forcing Chase to weave herself around him as well. (Her arm brushed his hand at one point, and it was ice cold, though the room and the house were fairly warm.) It ended with Chase getting up from her knees and walking over to the metal-tube-and-canvas child’s bed at the other end of the room, where she lay down with a blank face and pulled her covers—teddy-bear sheets and two Hudson’s Bay blankets—over her. The images of her walking away from Nathan—again light bounced off the earthy walls—highlighted her long waist, muscular, low-slung buttocks, and short, athletic legs, a combination which Nathan had always found compelling, though the opposite of Naomi’s short waist and long, slim legs.

  “I don’t think punishment is involved, Barry. I think she’s reliving something, something that was communal. And she’s playing all the roles.” Nathan was leaning on his elbows, speaking to his screen more than to the actual Roiphe, but now he sat up straight and turned to the man himself. “I wonder what that something communal could have been?”

  Roiphe snorted and fastidiously lifted his glasses off his nose with both hands, unleashing his turquoise eyes with deliberate dramatic effect. “Why don’t you just ask her?” he said.

  NAOMI AND AROSTEGUY ate the meal he had prepared. The dinnerware was spartan and shabby, but the meal itself looked good. A lot of warm sake, which they both poured freely. They used chopsticks and sat on the floor at the low table. Naomi’s camera sat beside her tray, muscular and matte black, like a brooding cat. Her voice recorder sat beside the camera, its blue VU-meter LEDs rippling in response to words spoken, its microphone like the beak of a hummingbird straining skyward. Her cat and her bird watching over her, thought Naomi, and, thinking that, became aware that she was drinking too much.