Consumed

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by David Cronenberg


  “Please forgive the decor. Nothing in the house belongs to me. It sat empty for a long time. Tokyo is very expensive.” Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. “I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature.” He shook his head. “The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese ‘the little people,’ I’ve been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study.”

  “Why do you need to become Japanese?” said Naomi, cross-jamming her chopsticks and dropping them into her plate. She fumbled them back into her hand and managed to pick up a shrimp.

  “I cannot be French anymore, and I was never Greek, except with philosophical and familial nostalgia. So what can I be? I am a fugitive. It satisfies my sense of self-drama, but it racks my nerves.”

  “You must be lonely here.”

  “I was lonely in Paris.”

  “Même avec Célestine? Sorry. Even with Célestine?”

  “That was the basis of our love. Our loneliness. Our isolation.”

  “But now that she’s gone? There’s no change?”

  “Now I’m … alone. It is different.”

  Naomi began to see their mutual drunkenness as an agreement, a contract, with clauses allowing almost everything, at least as far as words were concerned. She felt giddily unafraid. “Monsieur Vernier, le préfet de police, seems to believe that you’re innocent, that you didn’t commit murder.” She seemed compelled to throw French words into the mix; she wasn’t sure why. She really had no wish to provoke him, though he seemed to have no problem with the language at the moment.

  “Oh?” Arosteguy snorted a tight little laugh which could have been an expression of self-pity. He had seemed immune to that up until now. “I’ve lost touch with the case, I’m afraid. To my surprise. It seems to belong to many others, but not me. To you, for example. It belongs more to you.”

  “He called it a mercy killing. Is that interesting?”

  “A mercy killing followed by some elegant cuisine, possibly? The French love their cinema. I expect soon to feel the Hannibal Lecter resonances, and maybe then to pose for photographs with Sir Anthony Hopkins, perhaps in the small restaurant of the Hôtel Montalembert.”

  “You don’t want his help?”

  Arosteguy gave a particularly dismissive shrug. “He’s a policeman. And not just for the city of Paris. The police of Paris are national police. Imagine the world he lives in.”

  Naomi rolled out of her sitting position and half-slid towards her camera bag. In it she found her iPad and, returning to her place at the table, began to scroll through the Notes app until she found the words and photos of M. Vernier and the Préfecture de Police on the Île de la Cité.

  “He gave me a message for you.”

  “Really? He knew you would come to see me? He spoke to you and his words went into your ear, knowing that? It makes me feel that he’s here himself. So strange. We’ve discussed Schopenhauer on three occasions, Auguste and I, once on the TV show Des mots de minuit. He seems to be obsessed with Schopenhauer.”

  Naomi read from her notes: “Tell him that I am conducting a philosophical investigation provoked by his case and I want him to help me with it as a good professional and an academic. To do this, he must return to France.”

  Arosteguy popped some noodles and shrimp into his mouth with a theatrical flourish. “You see me eating—look, see?—and of course that seems normal. But for me, to eat anything is not the same now as it was before. Afterwards, I could not eat for a week. I could barely drink water. I almost died here in Japan, such an alien country in any case. But in a way it was that very alien quality which allowed me to disconnect from Europe, from France, from the net of the so-called crime.”

  Naomi put her iPad on the floor beside her and picked at her food, very conscious now of the process of how the lips and tongue worked, the jaws, the teeth, the swallowing, but trying to return to normal unconsciousness.

  “So you recovered fully.”

  “Yes. I hope you have seen that already. There’s a basic life force that expresses itself even in me. It’s crude and merciless, and very hard to overcome.”

  “Why do you say ‘even in me’?”

  “The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.”

  Naomi made an effort to eat the largest shrimp on her plate before responding. “So, Ari, are you admitting to me that you ate the flesh of your wife, Célestine?” She almost gagged on the word flesh, but managed to turn it into a dramatic pause that involved catching some slipping noodles before they fell to the plate. “Monsieur le préfet made it clear to me that nothing, not that, not the fact of murder, had really been established.”

  Arosteguy drew a deep breath, then exhaled deeply, preparing for something special. “Let us say that the question of spousal cannibalism expanded in the media to the point where it took on a potent reality that was not really connected to my life or to Célestine. I was enveloped in that reality, enshrouded, until it became my own, until my own thoughts and emotions were displaced by those thousands that came from television, newspapers, the multiple internet sources, the YouTubes and Twitters, yes, even the car radio and the talk shows, and of course the people on the street, buses, the Métro. I lost possession of my recent past, and my long past, my history. I was colonized, appropriated. I had to leave my dead husk to shrivel and wither in Paris and become someone else, somewhere else. Become Japanese, or failing that—and I am failing that—to become an exile, an isolate, a disconnect. And I have been succeeding at that.”

  “You haven’t really answered my question. Will you answer it in the book that you’re writing?”

  Arosteguy laughed. “That book seems to be a meditation on the philosophy of consumerism. As you might expect, I have a new take on it, though in a sense that’s all I’ve ever written about. Consumerism …” He shook his head, chuckling, then looked at Naomi with an intensity that shook her. “You know, everything that has to do with the mouth, the lips, with biting, with chewing, with swallowing, with digesting, with farting, with shitting, everything is transformed once you have had the experience of eating someone you were obsessed with for forty years.” He smiled. “Of course, every one of those things also becomes a joke in the popular imagination, which is quickly becoming the only imagination that exists—the media imagination. I’ve seen the jokes on the internet. Some of them are very sophisticated, very amusing. Sometimes there are cartoons, even animated ones.”

  “Is that why you posted those photos of your wife’s half-eaten corpse?” Naomi said, holding her breath. “To destroy the jokes? To bring the discourse back to human reality?”

  Arosteguy put down his chopsticks and crawled around the table on all fours. He kneeled close to Naomi. He put his lips close to her left ear and whispered. His voice was somehow even more textured and forceful as a whisper. “If you want to understand, you must experience this mouth, the mouth of the cannibal, the mouth of a thousand bites, a thousand human atrocities.” He didn’t touch her, and he didn’t bite her, and after many long, frozen seconds, Naomi forced herself to turn to him, her own mouth half open, an unformed word lingering. Arosteguy placed his open mouth forcefully over hers. It was not really a kiss—more like a cap being placed over a jar. Naomi was suddenly terrified. She didn’t dare move. Arosteguy began to breathe air in and out of her lungs through his mouth. She had no choice but to breathe in sync with him. She was waiting for his tongue, not knowing how she would react when it came, but it didn’t come. He took his mouth from hers and slumped down beside her.

  “So pathetic,” he said, with a grunt. “So sad. Such a cliché. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing ou
t a classic scene, you don’t feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel … pathetic.”

  Naomi wanted to ask him what work of cinema or literature he felt was being replayed at that moment, but she was afraid to speak, and so there was silence, and she could only hear his heavy breathing and not any breathing of her own. Then he spoke as though they were in the midst of a discussion she had somehow missed.

  “There are other photographs which you have not seen. I’ll show them to you if you fuck me. I’ll give them to you. Nice thick digital files. They are powerful and they will shock you and you’ll be a star. But I need you to be my lover for a while, my Tokyo mistress.”

  “I … Professor, I …”

  “Ari. That’s my name to you. Aristide becomes Ari. We didn’t establish this? No, you’ve barely said my name. Does it taste disgusting in your mouth? You know, Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal, who still lives right here in Tokyo, said that the Dutch girl’s ass tasted like tuna prepared for sushi. That’s enough to make it dangerous for any Dutch woman to visit Japan. He’s considered a tragic hero here, a media celebrity. An artist. I can envision lineups of Japanese men waiting for the Netherlands tourist buses to unload, each with his Suisin maguro bōchō sharpened and ready.” He drank some sake and muttered under his breath, an afterthought. “Of course, she was a Dutch girl. That made it somehow not so criminal. Maybe even praiseworthy.”

  The mention of Sagawa, whom Naomi had initially thought might be a clever stepping-off platform for her piece, now filled her with horror. It was obvious and vulgar and revolting, and it was making it hard for her to physically see Arosteguy. The way he held his face, he was starting to actually look Japanese. “Ari, I … I can’t do that, what you ask,” she said quietly, projecting, she hoped, thoughtful consideration, though there was nothing to consider. “I can’t.”

  Arosteguy launched himself unsteadily upwards and stood over her, towering over the low table and filling the room with his anger. He screamed at her. “Then get out! Get out, get out!” He kicked at the table, lifting it a foot or so before it came crashing back down, scattering the food, the camera, the dishes, then stormed up the stairs, leaving Naomi shaking, her eyes wide and swelling with tears.

  She flew out of the house dragging her roller with her, its contents hastily stashed, its exterior compartments bulging pathologically, cables hanging and jouncing out of the improperly zipped pocket mouths. Her momentum carried her into the middle of the street, which was dark, dingy, and completely deserted. Scared, stalled, and now acutely alerted to her drunken state by her inability to perceive depth, she pivoted on the spot like a pinball flipper, looking for a cab. There was nothing except Arosteguy, strolling casually out of the house and walking up to her, coming very close to her as though nothing had happened, speaking as though continuing an understood subliminal conversation that had to be finished. He took her arm gently, just holding it, not pulling her.

  “We made love frantically, desperately, as though I could possess her and keep her from death,” he said quietly. “But I couldn’t, of course. She was going to die. Her body was changing. She had swellings and nodes and lumps and rashes. I had to forcibly change my sense of sexual esthetics to accommodate her new body. I needed it to still be beautiful for me, though it was changing every day, every hour. And finally, when the changes were all coming to an end, we wanted her to die while making love to me, not fucked by a dozen plastic tubes in a hospital. So we devised a plan, and we carried it out.”

  He bent down and picked up the roller, still holding her arm, and led her back towards his house, its door wide open, the pale fluid of its light washing the plant rags of the garden. She let him take her with him. “I strangled her while we made love. The swollen lymph nodes in her neck made it difficult, but more exotic. You know that in French an orgasm is la petite mort, the small death. And for the English metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘to die’ meant ‘to come,’ to have an orgasm. It was the most intense, exquisite moment in my life. It was a moment you never recover from. I kissed her while she died. Her eyes were full of love and gratitude. Her last breath came into my lungs like a hot tropical breeze.”

  Naomi stopped just outside the door, shrugging off Arosteguy’s hand. Her voice was quiet and small. “I’m afraid of you, Ari. I thought I wouldn’t be, but I am.”

  “And now she was dead, and I was alone. And what was I to do? Wave goodbye like a good bourgeois and soldier on with my life? Plead madness like the good Marxist professor Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife of thirty years in their special permanent apartment in the infirmary of the École Normale Supérieure, no less, and claimed he thought he was just massaging her neck? A few years in the asylum and then a comfortable exile to the provinces?”

  He took her by the arm again and began to walk her into the house. He was giving her things, terrible, precious things. She didn’t resist. “No.

  I wanted to embody her, to incorporate her. I would have had to commit suicide if I had not been able to do that terrible, monstrous, beautiful thing.”

  He slid the door closed behind them.

  “THEY SENT ME TO PARIS. I was afraid to go.”

  “Why afraid?”

  “French.”

  “French the people or French the language?”

  “The language of the French.”

  They were sitting in the living room replaying Nathan’s first conversation with Roiphe there, Chase sitting on the sofa, Nathan in the wingback chair with the Nagra running on the glass coffee table. He was extremely uncomfortable, but it was an exciting discomfort; there was so much strangeness about the situation. If she really had been in some kind of trance, a fugue state, she would not know that Nathan could see right through her soft dress and sweater and striped knee socks to her ravaged skin. But did she really not know? Would she care if she did know? How could he find out? How direct could he be? Could her trance really be some species of bizarre performance art? If it was, was it designed for her father alone, or was Nathan’s presence part of what induced it? And the project, the pretense for their current interview? Chase had suggested a half-truth: Nathan was there to do a book about her father, and that book would include a bit of family history as background—nothing too deep, nothing sensational, and all subject to review by the subjects. No photos, she had said. She didn’t accept Nathan’s line about using the photos only as a memory aid, to make sure he got his descriptions right; it wasn’t going to be a picture book. She would perhaps do a photo shoot with him under controlled circumstances some other time, but she couldn’t talk while being photographed. Something had happened in Paris that had changed her attitude to being photographed, and it was no longer something to be taken lightly, girlishly, playfully; too bad, but things changed, didn’t they?

  “What was it about the French language that scared you?”

  “I learned my French in Quebec, while I was at McGill University in Montreal. I was passionate to learn the Quebec language, to acquire that strange, wonderful, ancient accent that got trapped in Quebec after the French Revolution. But McGill is an English-language university, and I learned my Quebec in the streets. Actually, worse than the streets, because I spent my summers in small towns where they spoke hard-core Quebec worse than anywhere in Montreal. I wanted my French to be rough, and it was.”

  “Why did you want that? I wonder.”

  Chase giggled and then, to Nathan’s astonishment, dug into the green leather pouch tucked in beside her, pulled out a high-tech nail clipper, and began to trim her fingernails. The clipper had a matte titanium finish, a dimpled and contoured lever, and a pivoting plastic clippings catcher that reminded him of an old steam locomotive’s cowcatcher apron. He was fairly certain it was the same clipper he had seen her using in her bedroom, though he had never gotten a clear shot of it. She worked the clipper at eye level and glanced mischievously over it. “Youthful rebellion expressed through the politics of language, mostly directed at my father. And then he twisted it
back on me by suggesting that I use my hard-earned French to study at the Sorbonne. He used to joke that the Quebec language was not really French at all, and that I could prove he was wrong by speaking it in Paris. I would be studying with the most sophisticated writers of French you could imagine, and I was afraid. I would be Anglo Jewish from Toronto speaking bad street Quebec.”

  “What would you be studying? Who were those writers?”

  “The Philosophy of Consumerism. The kids called it PhiloCon, which, I think I recall, can sound a bit naughty in French if you want it to. Do you speak French?”

  “Not really. I can read a bit. If we took a second language it was usually Spanish. And those writers who were supposed to teach your PhiloCon course?”

  “Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy. You’ve heard of them? A married couple. They were kind of controversial in the academic world. Ow!” Chase flapped her hand and then sucked a finger. “That hurt.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nipped a bit of finger. I suppose it’ll be trapped in this little clipping-catcher thing. See? You just flip it down when you want to toss the nail clippings. It stops it from popping the clippings all over the place, the way the old clippers do. It’s a Sally Hansen. Stainless steel. Oh, there’s some blood …” There was some blood, winding its way down her ring finger. She smeared it against her middle finger then sucked them both, watching him.

  It had to be an elaborate construct by Chase, if not by Chase and Roiphe. They must have researched him on the net, somehow linking him with Naomi and her Arosteguy project. Naomi could be so cavalier about the net when she was in that mood, even though she knew all about lawsuits against Tweeters and mob actions against Facebookers. And the clippers, the blood … it was a brilliant miniature piece of theater and almost unthinkable that it was really an unconscious acknowledgment of a psychopathological state. But did he have a role in this drama, or was he just a recruited audience?

 

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