Chase flicked on the lights in a room that was a mirror image of the printing room, although this one’s dormer window was shuttered. There were two rough wooden trestle tables: a very long one the size of a picnic table, and a shorter, square table crowded with cans and tubes of paint, brushes, strips of cloth, rectangular plastic palettes with lids, painting knives, jars of water.
“See, there, I told you about the painting. You can paint directly on PLA with acrylic paint. You can sand it first too, if you want to create different textures. It would be perfect if I had a sink in here, you sometimes need water, but the bathroom’s right next door. It’s kinda messy right now.”
Chase turned away from the paints and stepped over to the big table, on which rested many large, lumpy objects covered by a bed-sized canvas sheet. Standing before it, she paused and took a deep breath—with odd reverence, thought Nathan—then leaned over and began to carefully fold back the sheet. Now gradually exposed were the thermoplastically replicated body parts of a mutilated and dismembered female human, distributed in no discernible order. They were painted crudely, but convincingly enough to induce revulsion in Nathan, reminding him of a horrifying butcher shop he had once come across in a small town in Spain. A single hacked-off breast, chunks of thigh and calf, fingers separated from one hand, a torso split into quarters, a startled head cut open and splayed with swollen tongue protruding. Almost every square inch of observable skin surface had been gouged, as though savaged by the mouths of a large school of piranhas, and each gouge had been lovingly detailed with necrotically dark-red acrylic paint.
“Hervé sent me these, piece by piece,” she said, tossing the neat bundle of the sheet under the table. “I’ve arranged them and finessed them with paint.” She turned to Nathan and leaned back against the edge of the table, hands behind her. “You know, I wanted to call this work Consumed, but my father beat me to it. Unless you can convince him to give your book another title.”
Nathan recognized the tortured body parts from the photos that Naomi had directed him to. In the aggregate, they were Célestine Arosteguy.
“YOU ACTUALLY DID IT, THEN. You cut off your wife’s breast with her consent.” Naomi was thinking journalistically and legalistically; it was an astringent approach she had to take in order to keep her balance in the thick liquid night of the late Tokyo summer. They were outside in the drab, desperate garden because the house had become too hot, too sultry, too intimate and airless. She was sitting on a lichen-stained concrete replica of a hand-cut stone bench pushed back against the far wall. The heavy-lidded orange lights built into that wall splashed her face with a medicinal glow like a disinfectant, sculpting her with deep, flushed shadows. Arosteguy paced around the garden in front of her, occasionally kicking at some piece of household garbage obscured by the darkness that rippled in cross-currents before him.
“You know, a colleague of mine—I won’t tell you who it was because you would look him up—we were at a strange karaoke event, in Paris, not here, and I was forced by circumstance to sing the song “Je t’aime … moi non plus” like Serge Gainsbourg, with the colleague singing the Jane Birkin part in falsetto. I only did it as an homage to Salvador Dalí, who is quoted in the song’s title referring to Picasso’s communism. Gainsbourg had asked Birkin to sing it so that she sounded like a little boy, and my colleague did that too, with no apparent effort. It was a moment of revelation about him that I could have lived without. And after that kitsch moment of bonding he told me that he had a savage dream, and the dream was that in a moment of passion he would cut a woman’s breast off. He was actively looking for a woman who would agree to let him do it for money, and also a doctor to guide him. He was a very fastidious and scrupulous man. I don’t know if he ever realized his desire.”
“Is that how it felt to you? Was it sexy? Was it passionate?”
“I enacted surgery. I committed surgery. And Célestine was right, as always. I wanted to keep the breast, preserve it somehow, take it to the taxidermy shop on Rue du Bac, something, even if grotesque. I couldn’t let it go. I really did feel that she was diminished by its loss, but even more selfishly, that we were diminished, our life together, our sexuality. I can’t imagine the complexity if we had had children that she had breastfed. And I said these things to her, but she wouldn’t let me keep it, and Molnár was on her side—for psychological reasons, he said, as well as health, as well as legal. Imagine being stopped on the train back to Paris … But for her it was simple: destroy it and everything inside it, like a wasp nest you’ve pulled down from the eaves with a fishing net and stuffed into a garbage bag. Burn it and the winged adults and the white grub larvae and the eggs. Burn it.”
Naomi had no doubt that Arosteguy was lying about everything (well, perhaps not some of the details of their personal life and habits), that his confession was a novel, an art project, and that he was making her his collaborator in its shaping and its dissemination. But this did not dishearten her or even challenge her sense of journalistic integrity, which, to be truthful, was always only a theoretical thing, a professional playing card, secondary to entertainment and the continuance of work, or even tertiary, with her own creative fulfillment, never spoken of, a surprising first place. If the lie was complex and enthralling—and it was, it was—then there might be a book in it, with the ever-present desire to dig for the chimeric truth driving it on, providing the suspense, and no need ever to certify that truth. She could lead her readers to wonder if the photos of Célestine’s body parts would reveal the presence of two severed breasts, thus refuting the mastectomy tale she was being told. She could press the prefect of police, M. Vernier, for this information without explaining its importance to him. She could try to examine the torso herself, the actual torso—this was an exciting thought; but had it been preserved as evidence or had it already been buried or cremated?—to see if the left breast had been surgically removed, stitched and healed, rather than brutally hacked off. The photos she had seen only revealed the torso’s left side, and a shadow obscured the wound. Was this deliberate on the part of the police? Were they even police photos? Had Arosteguy posted them himself ?
“But didn’t you enjoy it, the cutting?” she said. “On some level? Now that I know you …”
“You would like to inhabit my body as I approach Célestine lying on the table, inhabit me as in those sci-fi movies where a warrior climbs into a giant robot nine stories high and operates its immense arms and legs from inside the robot’s glass head.”
“Yes. Exactly like that.” Of course she was recording, and of course he knew it. The Nagra sat on the faux-stone beside her, blinking happily. He wouldn’t perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.
“All right, then. I approach her body, and it is her body, because her face is hidden in a sterile cloth tent erected around her head. And it is not exactly Célestine, because her color is wrong, she’s blue and green, and so in a sense is not alive, not sensible.” The French often got that last word wrong in English, Naomi observed; in French it meant sensitive, responsive, sentient. “And her smell is wrong, a harsh disinfectant smell. And I swear to you, her breast is outlined and bisected with dotted purple Magic Marker dashes—cut here!—like some terrible nightmarish cartoon, a large teardrop shape with the nipple in its center.
“Molnár is hovering over my right shoulder, my scalpel side, whispering to me, his prize pupil, urging me on, sensing my reluctance and fear, but also sensing—you will not be surprised to hear—that I have an erection, and I am suddenly flooded by the emotions of my karaoke colleague, as though his words of that night have swarmed my brain and have become my words, my thoughts, and now I am about to fulfill both our dreams by cutting off the breast of my wife.
“I am about to make the first cut. Molnár has cautioned me not to think in terms of perfection, of making the p
erfect cut, because that leads to paralysis; it’s impossible with flesh in any case. ‘Look at that footage of Picasso making his drawings: no hesitation,’ he says. In a sense, no thought at all, just pure instinct and a desire for the reality of the drawn line, whatever it happened to end up being, a certainty that it would be right. But still I tremble when I first sink into her breast the hot needle of that terrible electronic scalpel, with its disposable blade for disposable flesh.”
Arosteguy had been pacing constantly as he spoke, and so now, when he suddenly stopped, it had the impact of a gunshot. “It’s too banal,” he said.
“What is?”
“This voice-over description. This talking-head interview.”
“Oh, no! What do we do?”
“I need you to bare your breast and then I reenact it. We collaborate.
How great for your article or even a book. How dangerous I am. How brave you are. How perverse and yet somehow sweet.”
“But can’t people see us here?”
“We’re gaijin. They don’t care what we do to each other, or even what Japanese citizens do to us. Remember Sagawa? And many other crimes against gaijin? Not worth worrying about. And sex surgery? This is Japan, my darling.” Arosteguy had been fumbling around in the pockets of his corduroys and now produced a short, thick, Japanese Magic Marker with a very thin tip, which he brandished like a cigar. “We will play doctor. You will be Célestine, the willing, excited patient. I will direct your performance. I will play two roles: the somewhat reprehensible but roguishly charming surgeon, Dr. Zoltán Molnár; and then the entirely reprehensible and ponderously unappealing French philosophe, Aristide Arosteguy. I will direct my own performance but will entertain any suggestions offered by my co-star regarding stagecraft. And we will cover the entire process of breast removal as far as I remember it.” The effect of their communal drinking was beginning to manifest itself in his slurred pronunciation and the general mistiming of his mouth and his body. Naomi had been matching him drink for drink—sake and then beer—primarily to keep his narrative rhythm from faltering, but she now regretted it, certain that her own timing must be deranged even though she couldn’t gauge it—a bad sign for her.
As she began to unzip her fleece hoodie, Naomi felt doubly whorish: she was going to expose her breasts in a Tokyo backyard; and she was doing it knowing that it was only for the article, for the book, for the perversity of the narrative and the commercial value of her Arosteguy project, taking it so far off the rails that it was probably irresistible to any publisher, paper or electronic. The feeling did not daunt her; she was enjoying the transgressive whorishness of it in the most childish way. A huge advertising blimp floated into view overhead, its flanks lit up by an animated slideshow featuring a line of Finnish fitness equipment. Naomi watched dreamily as a miniature collapsible treadmill, suitable for modest apartments, was demonstrated, and imagined Célestine and Ari treading side by side in Paris. As though induced by her fantasy, Arosteguy took two resolute steps towards Naomi, fell to his knees at her feet (groaning slightly as the bursitis swelling the tip of his right knee expressed itself), laid the Magic Marker on the bench, and took her hands in his before she had managed to completely unzip. “Let me unbox you,” he said.
“Do what?”
“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism. I love them. You watch as an anonymous Vietnamese teenager lovingly opens the box he has just received which contains … One of those, possibly.” Arosteguy flicked his fingers towards the Nagra. “He is in ecstasy—we can ascertain this only from his voice and his boyish hands with the edgily bitten fingernails, the camera never wandering from the box and its contents—but he is a master of delayed gratification, as are his thousands of viewers. He will slit the tape holding the box shut with a special box-cutting knife. He will first take out the smallest inner box containing the charger and charging cords and the instruction manuals in several languages. He will fastidiously cut open the tiny heat-sealed plastic baggies holding the battery and the earphones and the adapters. And then finally, with a tremulous flourish, he will lift out the bubble-wrapped object of desire itself, the electronic device, saying, with feigned nonchalance, in lightly accented English, which is the language of consumerism, ‘And, well, okay, so here it is …’”
So here it was: Naomi’s left breast, unwrapped with a tremulous flourish by Arosteguy, though not without some difficulty, because she was by happenstance wearing her white compression sports bra—she had thought she might find time to go jogging around the neighborhood—and the sports bra’s slender metal front clasp had, with the familiar innate maliciousness of small mechanical things, seized, forcing Naomi to twist it open for him before allowing him to complete her unboxing. She was traveling with only two bras this time around, and she would have preferred to be wearing the lacy black Victoria’s Secret underwire with removable straps, but the whole procedure seemed to be occurring on an intellectual level, and he didn’t seem put off by the white bra’s unsexiness.
She sat braless, hoodieless, and mysteriously comfortable, her hands spread and resting palms up on the bench as Arosteguy dangled the bra from a finger, letting it rotate gently in the provocative light of the garden like an unexpected flounder. “Afterwards, we fitted Célestine with a special mastectomy bra. It had a pocket on the left side for a prosthetic breast. It was called Amoena, I think, a very beautiful, classical name. Actually two pockets, as though it were waiting for her to lose the other breast. The breast form called Energy Light, Size 4, seemed to match her remaining breast perfectly, though the missing one had been larger. All a question of balance and symmetry and weight and social acceptance. The inside of the prosthetic had a transparent bubbly surface, like bubble wrap, to allow breathing, but it still got hot and sweaty, though there was the promise of a NASA-developed material which could maintain normal breast temperature. The outside was flesh-colored and had a not very enthusiastic nipple at the tip, and its consistency was remarkably malleable and lifelike, though too homogeneous in feel to be a real breast. She wore it twice, I think, and then abandoned it. I used to find it perched on a bottle of liquid paracetamol in our laundry closet next to the washing machine, like a conical Chinese hat. In fact she stopped wearing bras altogether, and made a fetish of wearing tight sweaters and T-shirts that emphasized her amputation, saying that as a child she had a cat with one ear, and now she was one herself.”
“I don’t think I could be so brave.”
“You can’t know how you would react, which is why we must reenact. We shall become reenactors, like those guys who refight the Battle of Waterloo with those old muskets, with their anachronistic little blue earplugs securely in place.” Arosteguy began to manipulate her left breast in a dispassionate, utilitarian manner, lifting it with three fingers like a baker appraising a nascent pastry, pinching it gently above and below the nipple, then folding it to demonstrate where the scar would end up being. His face was very close to her, and she could feel his breath on her skin, hot from his mouth, slightly cooler from his nose. She gave herself over to the sense that she was channeling Célestine, that part of her body was not her and could easily be parted with; she found that thrilling. “Tina was completely awake and alert, and sitting, as you are now, when Molnár marked up her breast. I would be speaking Hungarian to you now if I could, as Molnár spoke to his staff members over his shoulder, in order to produce the authenticity and strange clinical magic of that moment. He told them to give me an Ativan, because I started to wilt, to faint like a small girl; I could not allay the anxiety that washed over me. The Ativan was very subtle and effective; I could feel everything except the anxiety. Célestine, on the other hand, was calm and solicitous; she smiled and petted me and pitied me as the great doctor began to draw a child’s treasure map on her breast. Like this.” The tip of the pen felt hot—Naomi was sure that it was the thought of the electrocautery needle that made it feel that way—as Arost
eguy tracked out with confident dashes a large teardrop shape with its point near her armpit and its body angled towards her sternum, encircling her nipple. He then marked a line from end to end through the nipple. “This is the line of the scar.”
“The nipple would be gone?”
“There was discussion about sparing the nipple and also a possible reconstruction of the breast. Molnár launched into a very pompous meditation on the social significance of the breast and lactation, and on the evolutionary innovation that the mammal represented. Tina just laughed and said that she was intrigued by becoming half a boy, and that she would only be interested in a boy’s nipple for that side, not a woman’s. The doctor talked to her about the difficulty of imbalance. She said that it would be a duality, not an imbalance, and that she looked forward to it.”
Arosteguy drew back, marker in hand, to study his work. Naomi looked down and lifted her breast with her left hand to share the study. “It makes me think of those teardrop tattoos that prisoners have on their cheeks,” she said.
“I had a student with one of those. It was disturbing to look at. He often covered it with makeup.”
“It usually means that they’ve killed someone.” Arosteguy pondered this in silence; she had the impression that he hadn’t understood the import of the tattoos, and so some meanings and understandings were consequently shifting in his head; she could almost feel the blocks rearranging themselves, and thought of Tetris, her favorite childhood computer game. “I’m sure you could get someone here in Tokyo to give you one,” she added thoughtfully. “I would go with you and document it.”
He tilted his head up to face her again and laughed an openmouthed laugh. “Perhaps I’ll need two of them. Are you ready for me to cut you?”
IF ONLY SHE HAD BEEN able to trust Yukie. Naomi scrolled through the photos that Arosteguy had taken of her lying on the concrete bench in the garden, her eyes closed and mouth open in mock anesthesia, her marked-up breast looking pleasingly full, its nipple erect (would Célestine’s have been erect at the moment of cutting, pleading in its own way to be spared, or would it have retracted in fear, her bravado caving at the last moment?), her arms pressed against her sides so that they would not flop down from the narrow bench, her right breast demurely covered by her hoodie. But the badly focused, awkwardly framed images reminded her that handling a camera was not an innate human capability, and that even under the duress of alcohol and sexual weirdness, the media-savvy Yukie would have produced sharp, well-composed photos that she could use to accompany her long piece or book. They would have said so much about Naomi’s approach to the latest flavor of parajournalism, which involved an artistic collaboration between subject and journalist and by its own definition was self-limiting to very rare pairings of the same. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s “saturation reporting” was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos. She remembered studying the concept of parajournalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, journalism that mixed the factual with the invented without attribution; but in her work with Ari, as she was beginning to think of it, the fiction, the creative invention, was all his, and since he was her subject, his fiction was admissible.
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