Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “You will forgive my enthusiasm and my presumption. But you must accept that what we are here today to do with each other cannot be subsumed under the mantle of medical procedure alone. For me to put the scalpel into your hand, my dearest Monsieur Arosteguy, is basically a crime, you understand. Though I fully comprehend the emotional ownership of the breast involved with the husband and the wife. In the light of that ownership, the alien surgeon is an intruder, a rapist, a violator. Why should he be allowed to sever that most beautiful organ from that beloved body? Who the fuck is he anyway? No, only the husband should have the right to do that intimate severing with all its resonances of personal history. And so on. But legally it’s a crime. So what’s the solution in our heads? In my head, the solution is that we are not committing surgery, but are creating an art/philosophy/crime/surgery project. The three of us. A collective. The Arosteguy Collective Project. Do you agree?”

  Célestine and I glanced at each other and could see that we were immediately in sync. We were overwhelmed, horrified, and also delighted. After all, the normal terror in the face of life-altering surgery did not exist for Célestine. Like that poor boy in Cologne, she was ready to throw her breast under the steel wheels of the tram if there was to be no surgery. So focused was she on the removal of the insect-sac, as she had taken to calling it (myself, I found this repugnant, but I could say nothing), that she had lost all fear of clinical misadventure, of death on the operating table. In this context, the pretentious rhapsodies of our good doctor leavened a potentially somber occasion with a dose of playful metaphysics, however suspect, that we found surprising and welcome.

  Even more surprising, perhaps, was the seriousness with which he conducted his tutelage over the next few days. He had arranged our “gathering” to overlap a colleague’s procedure—only a lumpectomy, unfortunately, but still it was the breast, and of course still illuminating for one who had never been in an operating room—and insisted that we both “audit the performance.” I will spare you the details, but not my reactions: it was sensational and exhilarating to the point that I began to question my sanity, or more accurately my mental health. After that audition I could not wait to take up the scalpel, which Molnár first had me do in a bizarre fashion: he had commissioned a Molnár Clinic app for the iPad and designed an electronic scalpel which allowed one to perform several kinds of virtual breast surgery on the iPad itself. It reminded me of the early days of frog dissection over the internet, but of course was immeasurably more sophisticated—freakishly so, even incorporating (the perfect word) breasts of different sizes, races, and nipple/areola configurations.

  Célestine was eager to try out the app, and she became particularly adept at the radical mastectomy, in which not only the breast tissue is taken but also the axillary lymph nodes and even the chest muscles. She seemed drawn to the Asian breast model, and I attributed this to her complex relationship with her Vietnamese general practitioner, Dr. Trinh. Célestine was amused by this idea but didn’t accept it as valid. In any case, she and Molnár had many intense discussions about the need, or lack of need, for a radical mastectomy in her case. Ultimately, she felt that it was not indicated, given that her insects were not analogous to a metastasizing cancer which might invade her lymph nodes; a simple mastectomy would suffice. We agreed that the three of us would write a paper on the collaboration of the patient with the disease, and then, as a consequence, the patient’s collaboration with the physician on the nature of the treatment of the disease.

  Molnár tried his best to maintain professional decorum throughout our clinical education, but he got quite drunk at what seemed to be his own restaurant, La Bretonne, and we actually had to endure his sobbing and wailing in happiness as we toasted each other with a particularly medicinal apricot pálinka. “I have so much respect and love for you. I have resisted documenting everything, so much respect is invoked. But I am proud to be interpeded within your long-standing love affair. I feel that I am a lover to you both, in the way that I have read that you have taken on some students as lovers in the past. And yet, and yet I am also your teacher in this enterprise, and you are my students. This is something so delicious and tart, it forces tears to spring from my eyes.” This is not something you want to see in your surgeon, and it did rattle us. It caused us an anxious night in our suite—they had upgraded us spontaneously—at the Corinthia Hotel. But the next morning our doctor presided over our iPad surgery session with full, dispassionate propriety, responding perhaps to the distancing effect that working on an anonymous African breast, delivered by the iPad’s HD Retina display, had for all of us. Molnár assured me that when I began to cut into Célestine’s flesh, the effect of the cool light of the surgical lamps and the masking-off of my wife’s face would have the same effect, and I would have the detachment to be an excellent surgeon. “See how steady your hands are? Beautiful. Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy. You are a natural. You have been rehearsing this your entire life.”

  It would not be until after the surgery, later in the hotel, when I could, all by myself, remove the surprisingly large and clumsy surgical staples with the disposable white-plastic-handled staple remover, no more sophisticated than something you’d buy at an office-supply store, that the emotion would kick in, that the vast and deep reservoirs of our personal history together would overflow, and we would be overwhelmed by what we had done.

  But here, at the turning point of both our lives, mine and Célestine’s, and in a sense yours as well, dear Naomi, is where I have to end the narrative which has submerged me, and to surface again, and come back to you.

  11

  “IT WAS NASTY OF YOU to speak French to me. Cruel. Are you always so cruel? You’re a cruel person?”

  “You told me you just forgot all your French. You never said the language traumatized you.”

  “I thought you understood.”

  “I thought I did too.”

  Chase was wearing jeans, black stockings, loafers, and a formfitting stretchy black T-shirt with long sleeves sporting thumb holes. Her thumbs were in those holes, and her hands were half covered as a result. Nathan thought he recognized the style from something Naomi had bought at a store called COS in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He was normally oblivious of the details of clothing. It was like being tone deaf, he thought, a genetic thing, nothing you could do about it; only the general impression ever remained, never the details. When Naomi said, “What was she wearing?” he would fumble for an intelligible answer, and it became a major item in their large storehouse of self-directed jokes. But where Chase was concerned, fashion was evasion, literally a cover-up, and so he forced himself to mentally download the details and store them; and in some cases, like now, as they made their way up the carpeted stairway to the third floor of Roiphe’s house, he resorted to surreptitious technology in the form of his muted iPhone, recording her from behind when she wasn’t looking.

  Chase had acknowledged the banning of the doctor from her domain upstairs—“father issues,” she said flatly—and had outlined the rules of engagement for Nathan: no photos up there, no note-taking or voice recording, no reports to Daddy. All those things might come later if she was comfortable with his presence after the first go-round. At the top of the stairway was a small landing overlooking the atrium formed by the spiraling staircase. It was gauzily lit by diffused daylight from the fussy art nouveau skylight above, and connected four doors, all of them closed and, he assumed, locked.

  “Which door would you like me to open, Nathan?”

  He had seen what was behind one of the doors—her bedroom—when Roiphe had taken him on his late-night excursion to Chase’s tea party, but of course he was not going to mention it; in any case, he was not sure which door it was, so disorienting had that night been. “Maybe you should decide that,” he said. “I’d just be guessing.”

  “Yes, I suppose I should shape the narrative for you.” She turned to the door farthest left, pulled out a set of keys on a braided ring, and opened it
. “I have a secret color code for these keys so I don’t get confused. See these little stickers? Okay. Come on in.”

  Nathan followed her into a short room featuring a steeply sloped ceiling with a gabled dormer whose window looked out into the bristling, serrate leaves of a large chestnut tree that were showing the brown blotches of fungal blight, with crisping edges curled like the vegetable equivalent of Dupuytren’s contracture. Chase flicked on the overhead gimbaled halogen lights and gestured towards the device sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. It looked something like a European clothes dryer, but one with a very high-tech powder-coated steel chassis bathed in violet LED mood light.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Your 3D printer?”

  “The FabrikantBot 2. This is the very rare floor model. It’s got a huge build volume. Most of them are desktop.”

  “Looks good. What do you fabricate with it?”

  On a night table next to the FabrikantBot was a twenty-seven-inch iMac which Chase now woke from its cozy electronic slumber. Once she had typed in her password, a window snapped up which depicted a congenial green landscape with shadowed mountains, clouds, and blue sky in the distant background; various chunky control icons dotted the landscape’s periphery. On the lawn-like foreground sat a mesh graphic of a cubic volume within which perched a stylized pink great horned owl. Chase kneeled before the computer and began to massage the wireless Magic Trackpad beside the keyboard. The owl responded by rotating in all directions with flawless three-dimensionality. “This is a file I downloaded from thingiverse.com. That’s a communal website where you can find thousands of 3D modeling designs uploaded by the community, all for free—bicycles, engine models, anything. It’s all STL files—I think that means stereo lithography, or something like that—and all the digital modeling programs understand those files. If I were to hit the Fabrik button here on the screen, the printer would start to make me this little owl.”

  “That would be great,” said Nathan. “I’d love to see it in action.”

  Chase nudged her cursor up to the cardboard-carton Dropbox icon in her menu bar and opened the Dropbox folder. “Well, okay. I’ve got a new design waiting right here for me. It’s something my friend in Paris has sent me. I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. It’s an STL file, so I drag it into the virtual build space of the FabrikWare program so that I can scale it up or down and play a bit with his design. Oh, gosh. I’m embarrassed!”

  Gosh. The owl had disappeared, and there on the screen was an eccentric, unapologetically erect penis, presented in the same bland and cheery pink as the owl. Chase turned to Nathan, gray-green eyes vibrant, shining. “Are you okay with this, Nathan? Another man’s sexual organ?”

  He had somehow missed the radiant power of her eyes until just now; probably, he mused, a function of too much looking through a lens. “Pretty much okay, as long as I don’t have to play with it.” She laughed a conspiratorial laugh. “And who is this other man? I mean, is it just a CAD/CAM design fantasy or what? I mean, what I’m seeing is not normal.”

  “Oh, no. Hervé would never do that. He subscribes to the philosophy of the cinema verité filmmakers of the sixties.” Nathan noted that she pronounced the French words in a risibly Anglicized way.

  “They wanted to document reality in an authentic way, right? Even when they were making fiction films. But how does that equate here?”

  “Hervé uses a handheld laser scanner on real objects in the real world—his version of the shoulder-mounted Eclair NPR camera all those verité guys used. Incredibly expensive, but he got an arts grant from the Ministry of Culture and he has some sketchy patrons. He doesn’t design. He might combine, and so on, but the basis is always real-world scanning.”

  “So he scanned someone’s penis with a laser scanner?”

  “It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing. It’s done for movies all the time—actors’ faces get mapped onto the faces of stuntmen so that it looks like they’re doing really dangerous stuff.”

  “Not sure someone would want that penis mapped onto their own.”

  Chase blushed. “It’s Hervé’s penis, of course. He’s not shy about his condition, believe me. He’s managed to turn it into quite a popular tourist attraction. It wouldn’t curve that much if it weren’t erect. I’m sure he had a friend help him with that part of it. Maybe one of his patrons.”

  “So now that it’s on your computer, what are you going to do with it?”

  Chase went back to the trackpad. “So you’ve dropped your file into this virtual build space, and then the interface gives you the tools to rotate it, like this, turn it around, scale it up or down. I think I’ll make it bigger than it really is, just for fun. The software lets you know when you’ve exceeded the physical build volume in the machine, so you can’t make that mistake. Then you get the software’s slicing engine to julienne your virtual object before the machine creates the physical object, layer by layer. They used to call it ‘rapid prototyping’—a very nice term.”

  “You know how big it really is? Your friend’s penis?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen it many times. Now watch.” She hit the Fabrik button and the printer came to life, the print head beginning to surge back and forth with relentless energy on its steel rails. “You see this roll of pink filament back here, on this spool attached to the chassis, looks a bit like a big fishing reel? It could be any color, but I happen to have this intense pink. It’s made of PLA, polylactic acid, it’s a renewable bioplastic. So the print head pulls this filament spooled in the back up through this clear tube here, see? It’s pulled up into the extruder, which heats it up and squirts it out through a macro hole onto the build platform, which, as you can barely see, is slowly descending as the model is printed out layer by layer. You can find tons of videos on YouTube of stuff being printed with speeded-up motion. It’s mesmerizing. Really a lot of fun. The platform sinks down like an elevator and the object kind of mushrooms up on top of it. This thing is probably going to take two hours to build, it’s got so much detail.”

  The print head had already laid down a pink disc—rather small and plaintive on the substantial translucent build platform—which represented a slice through the root of Hervé Blomqvist’s penis. Mesmerizing enough, but Nathan was primarily mesmerized by Chase, who had snapped compellingly into focus the moment she engaged him through the lens of the FabrikantBot 2. She was displaying an unexpected geeky passion that was even deeper than Naomi’s, and for Nathan that was pure, dangerous sex.

  “And what exactly is the condition that your friend … Hervé …?”

  “Yes, Hervé Blomqvist. We were students in Paris together.”

  “Does he expect you to actually do something with that? The thing he sent?”

  “Oh, he knows that I will, and he probably has a good idea what that’ll be.”

  Nathan could only imagine her using the emerging device as an oversized dildo, and immediately got an erection that fused unpleasantly with the image on the computer. “What’s the condition that makes his penis take that extreme bend halfway down its shaft?”

  “Three French doctors,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Hervé said he was plagued by three French doctors: Dr. Peyronie—that’s what the penis has; Dr. Dupuytren—contracture of the tendons and then the fingers so your hand goes like this”—Chase made a claw with her left hand—“and that often goes along with Peyronie’s; and Dr. Raynaud—his feet sometimes go purple from lack of blood circulation whenever it gets even just a tiny bit cold. Three French doctors. Sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?”

  “You seem to know this guy fairly intimately.”

  “We were a very tight group there, at the Sorbonne. It was exciting.” Sorbonne pronounced the way a Midwesterner who had never heard of French might have pronounced it, with the accent on the first syllable: sorbn. Nathan wondered if she would gradually evolve an elaborate meta-language which would annihilate any trace of
French in her speech and thinking, the way le schizo Wolfson had done in transforming English into a compound of Hebrew, French, German, and Russian. It was, in a way, the inverse of Samuel Beckett writing some of his works in French in order to get away from his mother tongue and thus force himself to write, he said, with greater clarity and economy.

  The printer was shuttling back and forth, laying down its strata of PLA on the build platform, which ratcheted lower and lower as the object, the renewable bioplastic penis, grew up like a stalagmite in a cave. It worked with measured enthusiasm, without irony, happy to be creating an extruded twisted erect penis, happy to be creating anything at all. Nathan felt weird to be identifying with the FabrikantBot, but he was. He could understand that feeling of being happy to create anything at all, to just be creative, and it suffused his trepidation about his Roiphe project, the phantom book called Consumed, which he thought maybe the FabrikantBot could print out for him. Why not? Renewable organic plastic books by the thousands.

  “I would love to do the veins in blue or purple, and just the head in pink or red, but this version of FabrikantBot only does one color at a time, and you can’t combine them in one object. I’ve been doing a lot of painting, but it would be great to not have to. I’m trying to get my father to spring for the next iteration, but he’s resisting. The RepliKator 3 has dual heads and uses a hot build platform and I think you have the option of using ABS plastic and it’s more expensive. But it’s not just the money. He wants me to show him what I’ve been doing, and I don’t want to.”

  “Well, he probably wouldn’t want to see Hervé’s penis, although we know he’s seen plenty of them before. Maybe just not in this context.”

  “Oh, but Hervé doesn’t just send me penises.”

  They left the FabrikantBot contentedly chugging away and stepped out onto the landing. Chase locked the door, then turned to the adjacent door. “That one’s my bedroom, and the next one is my bathroom, and that one”—she turned to the facing door—“the one we’re going to look at, is my art room.”