Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  I hadn’t, but I had no doubt that it was possible. And I had no doubt that if anyone was programming the Dear Respected Leader’s favorite movie director’s hearing aids over the internet from an office in Paris, it would be Elke Jungebluth.

  10

  MY JOURNEY TO THE Jungebluth Audiology Clinic was more than just a short trip in an electric Smart Car, though on the most mundane level that is what I thought it was going to be. We allowed each other a number of “philosospasms” per year; these were episodes of obsessive/compulsive behavior, often involving sexual affairs with students, or periods of deep, intricate despair, or occasionally intense political adventures which made us very vulnerable to the media and the public and caused us great discomfort. But our agreement was that we would support each other during these spasms, and would treat that momentary reality as though it were the only true reality, which, of course, in so doing, it was. And so I trundled along the Périphérique, searching for the off-ramp to the Rue de Vaugirard, Porte de Vanves, which would take me to the Jungebluth Clinic, and soon, there I was, in the sleek, technichrome waiting room with my audiology records being studied by a very serious Sciences Po student who was working in the office part-time and pretended not to know who I was.

  My initial foray into the world of hearing instruments spilled me out into a dismal series of suicide-inducing offices located in seniors’ homes or clandestine impromptu workshops in basement apartments which resembled discount do-it-yourself furniture outlets. Though the technology was often sophisticated, the retailing was sleazy and amateurish. And every time you came back to plug your ears into the aud’s computer, it was a different aud, and often a different program in the computer. The audiologists, in my experience, were all women, or rather, in most cases, girls, and girls who were not very comfortable with intense and demanding old men like me. They wanted to condescend, to help you insert your in-the-canal receiver with your trembling, gnarled, insensitive fingers; they wanted to simplify the technology of the devices (which were created by vast electronics industries incorporating computing power six thousand times that which launched the Apollo 11 moon shot) and hide from you the six separate programs that you could shape in infinitely variable ways, leaving you just a button that switched the things on and off. They did not want to confuse you.

  It was only when I stumbled across Elke at Romme Vertegaal’s insistence that I felt that the world of sound could flower for me in a serious, exciting way after years of muted, dulled, oblivious non-interactions. And now here we were again in Vanves, in consultation, which for her was a commitment involving the intertwining of two lives in a creative project of substantial magnitude.

  Elke was the homely daughter of two German psychoanalysts from Cologne, her father a Freudian, her mother a Jungian, both hearing impaired. Her older brother was a musicologist who specialized in Elizabethan dance and had moved to Boston to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music; he was also hearing impaired. We see here, then, what Freud would have called a neat cathexis ultimately generating the Jungebluth phenomenon. As the only normal-hearing member of the family, and the youngest, Elke absorbed responsibility for the entire familial soundscape; to shape and enhance the aural world for them, and then for everyone she could reach, soon became the focus of her life. Though it’s obvious that a psychoanalyst must be able to hear to function professionally, and a musicologist must as well, Elke found herself dealing with the familiar problems of denial of impairment, as she put it, her brother even going so far as to ask her to listen to recordings that he himself could barely hear, urging her to fill in the aural details with her descriptions. At times, her parents would surreptitiously record sessions of analysis with their patients and then play them for Elke, asking her to transcribe what was said and to offer comments on the nuances of the patients’ modes of expression. Thus there was an immense life pressure placed on Elke as well as an intense sense of duty and responsibility, a potent and not uncommon mixture. And I was the beneficiary of it all.

  As always, we sat in Elke’s rigorously sleek consulting room. I’ve said she was homely, and she was: an impossibly thin and long face; dull, opaque, muddy-brown eyes of noticeably different sizes; lank and unhealthy-looking hair which was graying prematurely in awkward patches; protruding, comically alert ears; a dumpy, uncertainly shaped body which seemed to constantly be causing her distress of some indeterminate kind. But it was an intellectual homeliness, by which I mean her physical presence asked you to discount it and concentrate instead on her penetrating and holistic intelligence, on the immediate and effortless gestalt she created which enveloped you and nourished and even exhilarated you. The subject was Romme Vertegaal.

  “Can you talk to me about him?” I said. “He referred me to you. Does physician-patient privilege operate in audiology? I know that audiologists are not physicians …”

  “Listen to the crickets,” she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.

  “Listen to the what? To the crickets? You mean the insects?” I had immediately thought of Buddy Holly and the Crickets (once even named the Chirping Crickets) and the wonderful naïve music of my youth—“That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!” “Not Fade Away,” “Maybe Baby”—which seemed at that time to flow seamlessly into my studies in Hegel, in Heidegger, in Kant, in Schopenhauer, informing them and infusing them with contemporary sexuality and emotional relevance. My head started to fill with that music, such potent wrappers for the emotions of my youth and the attendant wave of the passage of time, of mortality, that I had a pathetic and juvenile need to confirm that she was not referring to the band, knowing all the while that she could not be.

  Imagine, then, my confusion when Elke lifted herself with cheerfully endured suffering out of her Aeron chair—the contortions of her body conveyed in detail through the austere fabric of her tightly tailored Jungebluth Clinic coat—crossed the room to crouch down before a low-slung stainless-steel cabinet, slid open its opaque glass door, and returned to me with a record album of the classic vinyl format in her hand. Had she in fact been referring to the Crickets, and was this an obscure rendering of one of their original albums? The title Listen to the Crickets unraveled on the cardboard sleeve in a loose, artisanal handwritten font in white across a dark-blue background. Below the title was a high-contrast black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged man with glasses who was not Buddy Holly but was Romme Vertegaal. Below the portrait were letter characters stacked into syllabic blocks which I could just recognize as Hangul, or Korean script. Was it simply the album’s title translated into Korean? You can imagine my shock at seeing the image of Romme connected in any way with Korean words, not to mention insects. My avowed project—undeniably condescending at its core, but induced by forty years of love and intellectual intertwining with Célestine—of forcing reality into Célestine’s absurd Judicious/ Korean fantasy of the kidnapped Romme Vertegaal, was now shriveled into irrelevance by this unexpected validation—at least in part—of what anyone would have assumed was a pathological chimera.

  “That’s Romme” was all I could bring myself to say.

  “Yes,” said Elke. “Isn’t it stunning?”

  “I’m not sure. Are those Korean letters?”

  Elke sat back heavily in her chair, carefully cradling the album on her lap but thoughtfully tilting it towards me so that I could revel in its splendor. It now caught the overhead light in a way that revealed its artful metallic treatment of the subtle shadows of the cover art, which I had not at first noticed. What I had thought was a solid dark blue was now a field of blue-green grass: we were down in the grass with the crickets.

  “Romme has had business dealings with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for some time, and this vinyl record album is the result of some of that work. Not just business, of course. Heavy North Korean technology is made manifest here. The Korean characters translate as ‘The sagacious’—or possibly ‘The discerning’—‘use of insects in hearing technology.’ R
omme’s North Korean partners are not quite as whimsical or poetic as he is.” She slipped on a pair of delicate white cloth gloves that she took from her pocket and slowly, dramatically pulled the thirty-threeand-a-third licorice-colored vinyl disc from its sleeve. “This is the very first iteration of Listen to the Crickets in Europe. It might well be the only one at the moment. More will ineluctably follow.”

  “But what is it? Is it a compendium of insect sounds? Is it connected with the Entomological Society of Korea?”

  “No,” said Elke. “It’s a tool created for programming hearing instruments in ways that their designers never imagined.”

  A completely retro vinyl recording interfacing with sophisticated digital hearing aids and their proprietary digital fitting platforms—I couldn’t imagine it either. But then, I didn’t have to, because five minutes later I was hooked up to Romme Vertegaal’s North Korean venture and in the process of being … tuned.

  “THERE ARE NOW laser turntables that do away entirely with mechanical tonearms and diamond needles and cartridges,” said Elke, as she looped the lanyard of the Connexx wireless controller around my neck. “Using one of those would certainly make life easier for us humble audiologists who simply want to use the Vertegaal tuning method. But Romme won’t have it. Each of us was forced to invest in one of these exotic monstrosities. They’re hideously expensive and difficult to maintain, and that’s why there are not many of us who do what I’m about to do for you. This one is over twenty years old. They were all created by an Israeli woman named Judith Spotheim-Koreneef who worked out of Eindhoven, Holland. Romme optimized Crickets to the audio parameters of her machines using the only sample in Asia at the time. There are a few more there now.”

  We were enclosed in Audio Booth 4, basically an audio recording cabinet floating on foam and designed to be sound-neutral. Words spoken in Booth 4 sounded unnaturally deadened, like inanimate objects. The walls of the booth, the floor, the ceiling, none of it added any energy or shape by reflectance or geometry to the sounds that came out of our mouths, and this had a mysterious effect on the meaning and the impact of the words themselves that was hard to calculate. It made me realize that total neutrality in human communication is destabilizing; there is a paper to be written there.

  In front of me sat an enormous and complex device which could be called, simply, a record player, but whose presence was more like that of an impossibly gigantic specimen of zooplankton. Its use of translucent acrylic for its massive platter and various blocks and cylinders; stainless steel for the weights embedded around the periphery of that platter; titanium for its delicate, multi-counterweighted pickup arm; and threadlike drive belts and electrical filaments, culminated in a coruscating, predatory structure that seemed best fitted for frenetic submarine life. Once Elke switched on the controller resting on my sternum, I was apparently linked wirelessly to this thing, and both of us to Elke’s desktop computer and the Siemens Connexx Trainable-Hearing-Instrument Fitting Programming Interface. She now washed the vinyl disc in a Spin-Clean Record Washer—a yellow plastic trough with rollers and brushes filled with distilled water and one capful of vinyl-washing fluid—lovingly turning the disc on the rollers with gloved fingers, three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise, then removing and drying it with delicate pats of a pristine white, lint-free cotton cloth drawn from a drawer with rubber seals meant to keep dust out. Clamp the disc to the platter with the acrylic puck, flick up the retro toggle power-switch in its steel housing, gently lower the tiny coffin-like myrtlewood cartridge into the vinyl groove, and … nothing. I heard nothing.

  “I hear nothing,” I said, but to no one, because Elke had left the booth, closing the double doors with a whoosh of expelled atmosphere and leaving me in a vacuum. I could just see her through one of the two triple-glazed portholes in the wall, starting to work the Connexx program almost before she had fully settled into the Aeron. I had come to the Jungebluth (there were partner audiologists I never got to meet) to derail my complicity in Célestine’s delusions about Romme, about the insects in her breast, about Pyongyang, assuming that my inquiries there would deliver some proof that Romme was living in Paris or Rome and that he had not been kidnapped by any of the Kims, and that he was not the director of Judicious. This would naturally have encouraged a gentle easing of Célestine out of her compelling body narrative, perhaps with the shock treatment of a meeting with Romme in our apartment once I had contacted him. Would there arise some sort of Capgras syndrome response from her, a denial that the Romme I presented her with was the real Romme? Would she claim that he was an imposter surgically created by the Kims in order to delude the world and, specifically, delude Célestine? These, then, were my own fantasies, which were summarily crushed by Elke’s evidence that Romme had spent time in Pyongyang functioning as a technical consultant, that “some kind of filmmaking” was involved, and that he had been “kidnapped”—Elke used the word innocently, unbidden by me—“by the depth and passion of the culture there, mesmerized and delighted to the extent that he wished to live there for an indeterminate length of time.”

  I was the one who was delusional, not Célestine; or at least I was haughtily and unjustifiably dismissive of her instincts and her sensitivity to some aberrant realities that neither of us had been capable of conjuring up before. Had her left breast become a bagful of dangerous insects? Was that any less conceivable than the invasion of breast tissue by rampaging rogue milk-duct epithelial cells? Well, yes, of course it was, but what if the “insects” were Célestine’s metaphor for something more medically plausible? What if that was the only way she could express her very real awareness of a unique pathology?

  The acrylic platter of the Spotheim-Koreneef device was spinning hypnotically, its corona of glittering weights, like stacks of coins, shimmering with nano-crustacean avidity. And now, through my portholes, I could see the Connexx program reduced to a window on Elke’s monitor, streamers indicating that it was feeding its settings and parameters—everything controlling my Siemens Pure micon receiver-in-the-canal instruments—to another, larger window, which displayed a mixture of Korean syllabic blocks and English words. This was the fitting program devised by Romme and his nameless North Korean Juche comrades which was designed to be used in conjunction with the Crickets album and the neo record player, and to which I had agreed to submit my entire auditory existence for realignment. According to the booth’s Swiss Federal Railways station–style clock, the process took one hour and seventeen minutes, during which time I was projected into a mildly sinister audio landscape of threatening hums, chirps, and stuttering clicks, as well as raspy, non-human breathing (through valved insect spiracles?) and a variety of pulsing, fluid ripplings which suggested the movement of non-human blood through minute, multi-chambered tubular hearts. My interpretation of this auditory world was obviously much shaped by my experience of the Judicious film, Célestine’s inventive pathology, and the album cover, and this interpretation could well have been recorded and analyzed somewhere in the internet ether, because apparently the response of my eardrums and the associated organic machinery inside my head to this soundscape being fed back to the North Korean program (it was called, innocuously, “In Tune with Nature,” I later learned) was tantamount to a reading of my brain’s electrical activity that was much deeper and more meaningful than a normal EEG. I idly wondered if the increasing stress on my shrunken bladder could affect the results and derange my programming; I really had to pee. We had agreed that most of the changes would be funneled to Program 5, my former Music program (which attempted to balance the sounds of all musical instruments and voices as per normal hearing), and that Program 1, Universal, would be left completely untouched for reference. A rocker switch on my left instrument allowed me to cycle through the six programs, which included TV (Program 2), Noisy Environment (Program 3), Outdoor/Sports (Program 4), and Telecoil (Program 6, for special telephone use). I asked Elke to name Program 5 Vertegaal, and that’s how it showed up on the LCD dis
play of my Tek wireless controller.

  I walked out of the Jungebluth Clinic with my ears tuned to my safe, unaltered Program 1, unaccountably fearful of walking on the streets of Vanves while on Program 5—what could happen?—and having forgotten where the Smart Fortwo was parked, as was increasingly usual for me. Fortunately, my iPhone, which was now propping up my failing brain, had the GPS coordinates ready at hand, and its Maps turn-by-turn guidance system got me around the three corners to the little vehicle, which looked so dapper in its Matte Anthracite replaceable body panels. I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily. Once I was in the car, I thought, I would switch to Program 5, the Vertegaal, and allow the new settings to flow sounds never before perceived through my brain; but then I didn’t. My rationale was that the electric car was too quiet, too well insulated—against temperature changes, in order to save the battery, but effectively damping sounds as well—to really deliver anything spectacular, and then I would be disappointed, and then I would get depressed. That was the rationale. But was the whole exercise not really about one thing: the left breast of Célestine? Why play with toys?

  I arrived back at our apartment with my head buzzing as though it were the vessel full of truculent insects; perhaps it was my head that needed to be removed. Célestine was not there. I could not possibly read. I switched on the TV and began to watch the MotoGP world championship motorcycle race from Aragón, broadcast on delay. I knew nothing about MotoGP, but was immediately entranced by the machinery, the strange, padded, hunchbacked leather riding suits bearing ceramic sliding pucks Velcroed to their knees, the futuristic helmets, and the ferocity of the racing. The commentators discussed the increasing sophistication of the electronic controls on even these elemental machines, a worrisome thing, they said, because it took so much control of throttle, traction, braking, pitch control and even lean angle away from the riders that one wondered whether riders would soon be rendered obsolete. Needless to say, the questions of technology raised by the racing stimulated me and happily distracted me, especially since the technologies of MotoGP and Siemens hearing instruments were seeping into each other so that I was soon feeling traction control, anti-lock braking, g-force sensor, and electronic-control-unit elements beginning to operate in my ears. It occurred to me that the speakers of our poor old Loewe, only banal stereo, not 5.1 or 6.1 or beyond, were still quite good, and I was tempted to switch to Program 5 just to see what it would do to the unearthly sound of those multi-cylindered motorcycles. Would it create a brilliant form of Grand Prix motorcycle-empowered hearing? My index finger was actually hovering over the rocker of the left behindthe-ear module when I heard Célestine’s keys jingling as she approached the narrow landing outside our door. Mild claustrophobia normally kept her from using the compact elevator, so she could be heard from quite some distance down the spiraling stairs. I switched off the TV as two Spanish riders started their final lap in the lead, to the wild delight of the Aragón crowd, but the half-life decay, the aftertaste of blended MotoGP/hearing-instrument engineering, remained for quite some time.