Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “The oven fan has been left on. I can hear it now,” I said.

  Célestine laughed and pulled my head towards her breast with exaggerated nonchalance.

  And then I heard them. The insects. They were there inside her breast, and I could hear them.

  THERE ARE APPARENTLY BIOMARKERS present in exhaled breath which can be analyzed by a mass spectrometer for indications of many kinds of cancers and other diseases. Could there be an equivalent in exhaled or otherwise emitted sounds? Could Romme Vertegaal and his North Korean colleagues be in the vanguard defining a revolutionary new medical diagnostic system? Could my innocent, pragmatic Pure hearing aids have been transformed into an audio analogue of the mass spectrometer by the Listen to the Crickets program? In the light of day, none of this would stand up to scrutiny. But there, in the bed with Célestine, it was darkest night, and I could hear the insects in her left breast, and they sounded alive and present and real. I had always suspected that insects have what I think of as “species personalities”; that is to say, not personalities as individuals, but as individual species, so that certain of the nymphaline butterflies—the admirals, commas, anglewings, tortoiseshells—all have a habit of landing on your head when you are trying to catch them, and when you move abruptly, they fly off, only to circle and return to the top of your head—behavior you would never see in a monarch or a tiger swallowtail. In Célestine’s bunched breast, now covered with the liquid sheen of excitement, there were eight species of insects I could discern, all by the sounds they made, sounds which generated an image in my mind of the organs—legs or wings stridulating, tymbals vibrating—which produced those sounds. As part of my life’s philosophical enterprise I had—naturally, it seemed to me—been drawn to entomological studies, because I could not see how a philosopher could avoid engagement with the existence and meaning of such forceful yet utterly non-human life-forms. It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable. But as a student of insect life I could not become more than a dabbler, so immeasurably deep is the subject. The lecture I delivered at the Club Immédiat, which I titled “Entomology Is a Humanism”—a playful, though pointed, reference to Sartre’s famous lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”—incorporated most of the substance of my entomological learning, and is there for all to see in all its shallowness. I could not, in other words, accurately name the species of every insect represented in Célestine’s breast. And how many of them could there be? Was there only one specimen of each species, so that the answer would be eight? Or, following the paradigm of Noah’s ark, was there a male and female of each animal? A cicada, certainly. A mud-daubing wasp. A robber fly. An assassin bug. Several species of ant. My mind swelled with odd, comically disorienting images that seemed to bring along their own sound tracks: the savage swarming of the marabunta, the billion-strong soldier-ant army in the 1954 Charlton Heston movie The Naked Jungle; a show on the Discovery Channel examining insect parasites that turned their hosts into zombies serving the needs of the parasites; a YouTube parody of The Green Hornet in which the masked hero is actually a hornet that is fatally swatted by his Japanese sidekick, Kato, whose sound track was “Flight of the Bumblebee,” complete with theremin hornet-buzz effect as per the old radio show. (I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen this Hornet video or hallucinated it.)

  I pulled away from Célestine in horror and confusion, and she laughed a small, sympathetic laugh and released her breast, which seemed for one hallucinatory moment to ripple with inner turmoil before finding its innocuously normal position of gravitational repose. It was, as I’ve said, my favorite breast, the larger and more accommodating one (the left one is usually larger, apparently because of the way the heart pumps blood), but now this breast was overwhelmed by waves of meaning and symbolism even beyond the metaphorical freight which those long-suffering organs are accustomed to bear. It dissolved almost cinematically before my eyes into a rapidly cycling series of objects—a bag, a nest, an egg, a yurt, a hive—each one of which provoked an excruciating emotional response which left me trembling and drained.

  “You know now, don’t you? You know now,” she said, studying my every tremor with involved curiosity.

  But I didn’t know. For obvious reasons, I could not believe my ears—in the most literal sense. It occurred to me that the insect sounds I thought I heard were actually being generated by my hearing instruments themselves, and not being passively received by them. Could they not have been programmed to fabricate those sounds, their creative computing power barely stressed by what they were ordinarily required to do? Could Romme, in concert with Elke, have constructed this unlikely elaborate scheme in order to drive me insane or, even more perversely, to seduce me into collaborating with Célestine in the deepening of her own insanity?

  The look on Célestine’s face was so benign—no, more, benevolent, even saintly—effortlessly overflowing with compassion and understanding and kindness, that I could not bring myself to voice these cavils at what was obviously a near-religious cathexis for her. And then again, I could still hear them, and I had the sense they were speaking to me, though I could not understand what they were saying.

  I could understand what Célestine was saying. “Now you see why we have to cut this off. We have to do it before they spread everywhere. We don’t have much time.” She said this sweetly, gently, without apprehension. It disturbed me that she said “we,” though her desire to have my approbation and support was normal for us; but in this context, it discharged a sinister undertaste which must have altered my expression. “I want you to do it,” she said. “Why would you leave it to anyone else? It’s something we’ve talked about, and now it’s here.”

  I imagine it’s incomprehensible to a young couple that they might one day be talking in many modalities—sometimes joking, sometimes despairing, sometimes brutalizing—about killing each other or mutilating each other. It’s common enough to find articles about the ethics of euthanasia and pulling the plug on your spouse under dire medical circumstances, or the logistics of accompanying your wife to the Dignitas clinic in Zürich to end her life, but Célestine and I often found ourselves proposing hypothetical acts of violence which only peripherally had to do with aging, senility, and easeful death. She would castrate me; I would cut off her breasts—both surgeries committed with kitchen utensils ready at hand. She would strangle me with an old bathrobe belt; I would stab her with the twin-horned, sharp-pointed titanium sculpture I was awarded for my pamphlet “Consumerist Cinema”; we would take an overdose of barbiturates and lie down in our bed together, holding hands, in the manner of The World of Yesterday’s author, Stefan Zweig, and his young wife, in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis. We offhandedly devised many imaginary scenarios during the course of any given day, a habit that began as acerbic banter between two hypersharp intelligences, whose function seemed to be to absorb the venom of normal mundane tensions, anxieties, jealousies, resentments, and nano-betrayals, but gradually transformed into a daily hedge against death, an acknowledgment of our painful ephemerality, and a bid to take the kitchen utensils of mortality out of the hands of happenstance and put them back into our own drawer.

  You can begin to understand, then, the accumulation of circumstances that created our gestalt. I went from humoring Célestine, not certain whether she was beginning to suffer from dementia or was, rather, deliberately developing a fantasy, a willed hallucination involving a unique form of apotemnophilia, to inhabiting this complex psychosis completely. It’s too bad you never got to sit in a room with Célestine. You would have felt her power to seduce and hypnotize.

  THE NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH left Paris Est at 20:05 and was the first leg of our journey to Budapest. We had chosen the City Night Line Schlafwagen Cassiopeia, operated by Deutsche Bahn, to be followed by Austrian
Railways’ Railjet high-speed train into Budapest’s Keleti station, in order to accommodate Célestine’s newly emerged fear of flying, or rather her fear of cabin pressure change, which might aggravate her own small passengers. It can’t be denied that the sense of occasion promoted by many hours of rail travel was also part of the transit stratagem, meant to validate the purpose of our trip and to lend the whole enterprise some of the credibility which it was lacking. For one must ask, as I’m sure you are, just how insane was Célestine, and how irresponsible was I to be complicit in that insanity. She was so convincing in the invention of the details of her malady and the conspiracy surrounding it that it took on a compelling substantiality, like being swept into the reality of a brilliantly written novel or charismatic movie: it’s not that you believe in its literalness, but that there is a compelling truth in its organic life that envelops you and is absorbed by you almost on a physiological level. I remember experiencing a small earthquake in Los Angeles—only a four-point-six, I think—when I was there as a guest of the Academy the year they decided to develop a special Oscar for Philosophy in Cinema. A small earthquake, and yet the forced awareness that the earth beneath your feet was volatile, not stable, was terrifying, and for days afterwards I was sure I could feel the earth trembling and threatening. I live with it still; it is ready to strike me at any moment, a special vertigo which is now part of my very physiology.

  Célestine was like that earthquake. Célestine was also like that first LSD trip, the one you perhaps took in a deli in Brooklyn, where suddenly the colors all shifted towards the green end of the spectrum and your eyes became fish-eye lenses, distorting your total visual field, and the sounds became plastic, and time became infinitely variable, and you realized that reality is neurology, and is not absolute. Célestine was a personal hotspot, emitting her own special Wi-Fi signal which connected you to the Célestine web, and only the Célestine web. There was of course an element of unconditional support, a solidarity with one’s primary partner in the world adventure no matter where it took you both. I was now shoulder to shoulder with Célestine at the barricades, just as she had been with me during my shortlived lunatic political career (which almost landed us both in prison and taught us the old lesson about philosopher-princes).

  We took a deluxe two-berth Comfortline compartment with an en suite toilet and even a shower, complete with toiletries, which we never used. Unusually, Célestine wanted the upper berth, which she normally said made her feel like a piece of carry-on luggage stowed in the overhead bin, but now made her feel as though she were flying over the green canopy of a Caribbean island rain forest. She clambered up the white metal ladder, hooked to the upper berth by our resolutely cheerful sleeping-car attendant, like an eight-year-old girl on her first trip away from home. I must confess that the perforated plastic card-key lock system and security dead bolt inside the compartment completely killed that old Orient Express sense of exotic bonhomie, and replaced it with the feeling that one had been admitted to a rolling minimum-security prison for white-collar criminals heading, possibly, to the grotesquely ornate St. Gilles lock-up in Brussels. (For some reason, I flashed that the criminal/philosopher/artist Jean Genet was also riding on this prison train and was feeling quite at home.)

  Before she ascended, Célestine sat on my bed and kissed me with as much passion and sensuality as she could while keeping her mouth shut tight, as was her new habit, the unspoken fear being the migration of insects from one body to another. I missed the mouth that fell wide open at the first touch of my lips, fell open with the evaporation of social will and any hint of reservation or resistance, the mouth that mindlessly invited—no, begged for—complete invasion and possession. I wondered if that mouth would ever return, perhaps immediately on our return trip from Budapest. And after the kiss, the by-now-ritual hearing-aid stethoscopic examination of the breasts and abdominal cavity, Célestine pulling open the top of her pinstriped cotton pajamas (they looked like the New York Yankees’ home uniform, though she never wore them at home) and giving her breasts to me, now not her lover but her diagnosing physician. I could hear the vibrations of the rails in her flesh, and I could hear the insects too, clamoring for my attention and creating little capsules of sound that, in the overheated compartment, began to say rhythmical, nonsensical things to me, the way you might hear voices in the motor of a treadmill you were jogging on, or in the gnawing of an electric pencil sharpener. But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, it seems, that we construct meanings where there are none.

  So too, the insect voices speaking to me from deep within Célestine, for by the time she left my bed for her own flight deck, the nonsensical, rhythmical things had become sensical, sequential, gnomic things that were full of meaning. I could still hear them through the upper bunk, shifting in tone and clarity as Célestine shifted from back to side. The insects knew why we were going to Budapest, and they were feeling persecuted. I turned off my Pures and put them into their puck-like container, which sported separate niches for each instrument, both receivers, and extra batteries, but as I placed the container on the fold-out table crammed tight to my berth and turned out the light, the insect-voice residue was still strong in my ears, like a bubbling, chittering excrescence of wax.

  And so we rocked and rolled our way through a dreamy nighttime landscape towards Munich, and then wrapped ourselves in the modernist, leather-clad luxury of the Railjet, which left Munich at 09:27 and arrived in Budapest at 16:49, after pauses in Salzburg and Vienna.

  YOU KNOW HERVÉ BLOMQVIST, of course. He sent you to me, and that was very much in accordance with his assumed role of social enabler and political provocateur, with a special emphasis on combining the two. He met Zoltán Molnár when Molnár, a notorious Hungarian surgeon who at times had been sought by Interpol for his involvement in the illegal international trading of human organs for transplants, and who was in the habit of materializing as if by magic as the proprietor of pop-up transplant clinics in places like Kosovo and Moldova, slipped surreptitiously into Paris to conduct clandestine seminars on the politicization of the human body and the response of the international medical establishment to that politicization. According to Hervé, who was, as you know, an intimate member of our intellectual family even as a student, Dr. Molnár flaunted his vested interest in subverting the establishment of government regulation of the organ trade, while at the same time making an inflammatory case for the humanistic benefit of that regulation. Let poor people in impoverished countries sell their kidneys to the rich, he said. It’s organic capitalism of the best kind, and is good for everybody, and should be monetized and industrialized to the maximum degree.

  Naturally we googled the good doctor to the maximum degree before we made an appointment for Célestine’s mastectomy at the Molnár Clinic on Rákóczi út in Budapest. We eschewed the offer relayed by his office of a package deal which included a Malév flight and a room at the Gellért; we wanted some distance between ourselves and the very enthusiastic doctor, and the all-inclusive deal, which involved meals at a restaurant called La Bretonne, felt like an entrapment, an intimacy urged with such intensity that it bordered on the salacious. And yet, what we were seeking was intimate, was perversely salacious, and we were aware that our diffidence was an emotional paradox which would not stand up to rational scrutiny. Only Dr. Molnár, Hervé assured us, of all his many subterranean contacts in the medical world garnered during his sub-rosa gamboling, would agree to allow me to perform Célestine’s mastectomy under his supervision. Only Dr. Molnár, said Hervé, with that disarming boyish sweetness that lightly masked a rather ruthless intelligence, only the good doctor would see that the removal of Célestine’s insect-infested breast was a neurological imperative and not a psychiatric one. Molnár was of the school that believed apotemnophilia arose from a congenital cerebral dysfunction and that its symptoms could be relieved only by complying with the patient’s wish for amputation. Needless to say, it pleased both Molnár’s and Hervé’s sense
of anarchy and social subversion to support this view, and it didn’t take much for Molnár to absorb Célestine’s case into his already edgy caseload. He had presided over only one other apo event: a male twenty-eight-year-old sex worker in Cologne who wanted to remove his left leg below the knee and who, frustrated by the reluctance of any doctor to amputate when there was no apparent physical reason to do so, tried on several occasions to jam his leg under a moving tram, causing great consternation in the city’s Stadtbahn offices, not to mention the streets themselves. After the man visited the Molnár Clinic (according to the colorful emailed brochure originating in Romania), the patient’s life improved on every level, including the professional, for he found a thriving specialized clientele in his new incarnation which he had never known existed.

  And so we encountered the flamboyant doctor in his lair in a dense industrial suburb of Budapest which housed, among countless other international corporations, the Israeli Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. This proximity to legitimate medical businesses gave some comfort to me and Célestine, although the clinic itself was undeniably shady, located, as it was, totally underground in the poured-concrete entrails of an enormous, deteriorating complex. We found ourselves in the windowless Executive Director’s Consulting Room, slumped in red-and-yellow butterfly chairs that had somehow survived the sixties, waiting for our preliminary tranche of instruction from the chef himself. On the walls were posters in several languages, which seemed to be extolling the virtues of medical tourism in several countries—Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, India—none of which was Hungary.

  “My luminaries!” he sang out. “I am thrilled to have you here. I have been rereading both your works in preparation for our glorious collaboration.”

  “Collaboration?”