“Elke, did you happen to record that Skyped conversation with Célestine? I’m surprised she left herself that vulnerable. And did she not care that people thought she was dead? Or was she even aware of that? If it were ever posted on YouTube …”
Elke stood up. “You have been very kind to me. I shall try to connect again with my DPRK technical affiliates, who seem to have disappeared along with Monsieur Arosteguy. If this continues, I shall return to Paris to lick my various wounds. I’m sure you understand.” And she stepped around the low table, bent down, and kissed Naomi on both cheeks. She smelled of sour caked makeup and anisette.
Once Elke had left, Naomi rumbled the house again from top to bottom, only this time it was not an expression of longing and abandonment, but a focused hunt for hard and possibly hidden information. She assembled all devices that could be considered information-bearing entities on the living room table, and she included her own arsenal of electronics just in case she needed to remind herself of critical words that Arosteguy had spoken which only now would reveal their true import. The appearance of the real Elke, who was absolutely as described by Ari during his long “confession,” which Naomi had comfortably, even happily, taken for lies, or at the very least, artful delusion, had snapped things into focus like a phase-detect DSLR camera.
The programming of the hearing aids, the connections with North Korea, all the most hallucinatory, paranoid imaginings, were real, and the consequences for her proposed article, now obviously needing to be a book, were that she was miles further from the totality of the story than she had ever thought. Could she go to Pyongyang herself as more than just a tourist under the strictly controlled jurisdiction of the state-owned Korea International Travel Company? She understood that journalists, particularly of the North American variety, were rarely granted visas. Would Romme Vertegaal give her an interview by Skype or, much preferably, travel to meet her somewhere? Would this put her in danger? And was Célestine really alive and in the capital of the Hermit Kingdom? Could Elke’s Skype event with Célestine have been faked? It would be easy to create a monologue for a virtual Célestine, animating the many images and voice recordings that she had trailed behind her over the years; or, given the stutterings and audio glitches expected when Skyping at such distances, adroit operators could create the semblance of a conversation, of specific responses to comments or questions. It would be a nuclear event if Naomi could track and confirm Célestine’s fate. Or was Elke just lying? Perhaps Naomi would pick up the thread of her nascent Elke relationship once she was back in Paris.
And then finally she found the coffin-shaped red plastic 64 GB Verbatim thumb drive wrapped in plastic film and sunken clumsily into the greasy cream contents of a white jar marked, in English, “Kanebo Moistage W-Cold”—it seemed to be an olive-oil-based cold cream, though Ari’s blotched and pebbly facial skin belied any use of such a balm—and the growing heap of electronica became irrelevant except for the MacBook Air, which she would use to scour the drive’s contents. She thumbed the slider to extend the USB connector and slipped it into the Air’s left-side USB port. It would be two more days before she found herself scrolling through images depicting the dismemberment and cannibalization of Célestine Arosteguy.
12
THE FEAR MADE NAOMI feel closer to Ari, almost to the point of a destabilizing fusion. As her own fear of kidnapping by DPRK agents amplified (they would probably pose as entomologists or audiologists), she was certain that she was picking up that vibe from Arosteguy himself, and that he in turn picked up hers. This fusion, however, proved to have its own usefulness. Once she had found the Verbatim drive and discovered that it was encrypted, she felt she had to become Arosteguy to stumble upon the drive’s password. She spent the two days after Elke left crawling nanoscopically through Arosteguy’s electronics, none of which had even the simplest password to protect it. She combed through his Contacts app, his email, his desktop littered with disparate thumbnails of photos (some in 3D, though she never found the necessary 3D glasses), folders, magazines, technical PDFs, user manuals. She trolled the websites revealed in the History menu of his Safari browser, desperate for any clue that would unlock the thumb drive. She delved into arcana in his old MacBook Pro that she had never paid attention to before: Disk Utility encryption; FileVault; recovery keys; the Keychain Access app in Mac Utilities. She plunged deeply into security forums on the net and came up with a few passwords that Arosteguy had used for some political and philosophy websites that demanded them; but he had obviously been careless about, or more probably disdainful of, securing anything at all, apocalyptically inviting, she felt, the world’s swarms of viruses and scams to come and overwhelm him, to take his machines and his past life away, to leave him stripped and dripping, as she had herself seen him more than once.
She could not leave the house, of course. She could not risk being rendered to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to one of the undocumented gulags, concentration camps, apartment prisons, there to rot while the boy deity Kim Jong Un matured and hardened into a ripe old age, attended to by his court philosophes Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy, who would be unaware that she was so near. She knew that this scenario was ridiculous, and yet it stirred painfully in her viscera as a living and undeniable creature, and when she accidentally tripped onto the official, rather sumptuous English-language webpage of the DPR of K, as they called it (it was in Ari’s browser history, and finding that he had visited it many times chilled her to the bone), she jumped back from the screen of his laptop and immediately slammed it shut, terrified that the webpage could track her, could send her Tokyo coordinates directly to the deadly entomologists, who would kick down her door, muscle her into a waiting Audi, blindfold her, drug her, expunge her. She blamed her creative paranoia on a lack of protein; she had been reduced to eating nothing but plain instant ramen noodles for three of the four days since Ari’s disappearance, nothing else edible having been left except for a small bottle of soy sauce, which lasted just over one day.
She was in the bathroom when it occurred to her that the Verbatim stick might have been encrypted by someone other than Ari, and this thought depressed her and led her to consider flying to Paris to seek the help of Hervé Blomqvist, whom Elke had labelled an IT genius and who would have reasons to help her unravel the mystery of Célestine’s fate. Or would he? Tina might in fact be dead, and Hervé might be implicated in some way, either in the murder itself or in some aspect of covering up details. A perilous course to take, then. More depression. Naomi opened the jar of cold cream in which the thumb drive had been hastily (it seemed to her) concealed and began to smear some over her cheeks, which, like most of her skin, had become hot, dry, and stinging. When she used “kanebomoistagewcold” as a password, the Verbatim unceremoniously unlocked with that delicious metallic Mac padlock sound effect; when the drive appeared on her desktop, it called itself “La mort de Célestine.”
THE NAME WAS PROVOCATIVE ENOUGH. Was Ari being direct and Célestine was dead, or was Ari being ironic, given that Célestine was not dead, and her death had been faked? And was it Ari himself who had named the drive, or had it been someone else? Opening the drive, Naomi found two folders, “Vidéo” and “Photos.” She opened the video folder and there found one long QuickTime file called “PRIVATE.” It was not password protected, and so when she double-tapped her trackpad, the QuickTime Player opened on a mysterious frame, which, when she tapped the play triangle, revealed itself to be an extreme close-up of Célestine’s mastectomy scar, just a Rothko-like abstraction until the camera pulled away to expose a calm and thoughtful Célestine submitting herself to the camera clinically, without carnality, as though for a mammogram. The revelation of the scar triggered a shot of adrenaline in Naomi: first, because the mutilation of Célestine was shocking; second, because it meant that at least part of Ari’s confession was true, though the cause could still have been cancer rather than an apotemnophile’s hallucination about a buzzing horde of insects nesting in
her breast. The camera moved over to Tina’s right side, prompting her to take her remaining breast in both hands and offer it to the lens, compressing it analytically and accentuating its engorged nipple. The camera was still very close to her, making it difficult to determine where she was lying, or even if she was lying; the force of gravity on her breast, which would have at least hinted at whether she was upright or flat on her back, was negated by Tina’s breast-holding, and the camera spent some time in extreme close-up mode, surveying Tina’s face and then body, tracking down her only slightly protruding belly until it arrived at her thinning bush of graying pubic hair, where it lingered as Tina rotated her hips gently towards the lens. Naomi estimated from the detail of the pubic hairs, especially as the camera moved, that the video bit rate was reasonable, probably the AVCHD high standard of twenty-four megabits per second. The color was very good; the room was apparently lit by muted daylight coming through a window somewhere to the right, the skin tone cool and accurate with no yellow contamination by incandescent lights.
Eventually the camera backed away, floating languorously, so Naomi could see that Célestine was lying, not on a bed, but on a worktable set up on a mezzanine overlooked by massive wooden ceiling beams. The beams—pockmarked oak smeared with a white glaze—were of a now-extinct size and configuration that suggested they were medieval, and thus that the apartment was likely in the Jewish Marais section of Paris. It was not, then, the apartment of the Arosteguys. Célestine, somehow comfortable lying exposed on the rough butcher-block surface of the table, continued to intimidate Naomi, who was certain that if she had a mastectomy she would never allow herself to be photographed naked, much less reveal her wound publicly.
When a slim-hipped naked young man entered the frame, Naomi immediately knew it was Hervé, even before he walked around the side of the table to place his hooked penis in Célestine’s coolly accommodating mouth. He brought with him something metallic that looked like a ray gun from a 1950s sci-fi movie, pale blue and silver and trailing a black cable. The muscles of his forearm were taut from supporting the substantial weight of the mysterious device. The naked young woman who entered from frame right, however, she did not immediately recognize, even after the woman had knelt at the head of the table in order to kiss and lick Célestine’s mastectomy scar, her sinewy left arm stretching out so that her fingers could burrow into Tina’s pubic bush. It was not until the camera drifted into a low-angle close-up that Naomi could identify Chase Roiphe, the star of Nathan’s Toronto portfolio, and some of the pieces began to click into place.
But not all. After less than a minute of casual sex play among the three of them that seemed more like a social ritual than a hot orgy, Hervé stepped back from Célestine and became absorbed in the manipulation of a complex array of buttons on the body of the ray gun. Chase also detached from Célestine, who seemed to understand this as a signal to pose for what Naomi assumed was some kind of 3D capture. Tina swept back her long gray hair and draped it behind her so that it hung over the end of the table like a curtain. With a laugh, she then arranged herself into a grotesque, contorted pose, which Chase helped her to achieve by minutely adjusting the angles of her asymmetrically bent legs, splayed fingers, twisted arms, arched neck. It struck Naomi that she was playing the role of a tormented corpse in a 1960s Hammer horror film.
Chase stepped back to watch as Hervé squeezed the trigger on the pistol grip of his ray gun and began to sweep laser light over Célestine’s body; a grid of red crosshairs, emanating from the device’s twin spacepod-like nozzles, undulated like a ghostly manta ray over the contours of her flesh. Hervé brushed Célestine delicately, meticulously spray-painting every inch of her body with the light as she fought to hold the arranged position, her belly contracting with laughter as some unheard words were spoken and jokes were cracked. The camera floated gracefully around the trio, at times moving in to follow the sweep of the lasers and then tilting up to catch the expression on Chase’s face, so full of love, excitement, amusement, sensuality. The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent-shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed; if you looked only at their bodies, the two youngsters could have been siblings, Chase’s a female version of the bicycle-hardened physique of Hervé. Now Chase closed the eyes of Célestine, as one might close the eyes of a cadaver, in preparation for Hervé to work the scanner over her face, but abruptly, the video ended. Naomi could not be sure that the camera operator was Arosteguy (the framing and movement were so assured!), but she knew he was there somewhere, watching and guiding.
Ultimately, she was disappointed by the video, wondering if after the scanning, whatever it was intended to do, there was sex among the four of them, and wishing that somehow she could have seen that instead. The confirmation that Chase Roiphe was sexually intimate with Hervé and the Arosteguys was of course valuable, and established the luscious necessity of a focused visit to Toronto, to Nathan, and to the Roiphes. Naomi was now convinced that Chase’s bizarre trauma was connected with the death of Célestine Arosteguy; the mouth aspect, the French-language revulsion, the self-mutilation, the eating of her own flesh, were too perfect. She quit QuickTime Player and double-tapped the “Photos” folder, which popped open to reveal two sub-folders: “Célestine est morte” and “Des photos pour M. Vernier.”
THERE WERE 147 JPEGS in the “Célestine est morte” file, which Naomi immediately decided to import into Lightroom so that she could catalogue and organize them with all her other research photos. As the thumbnails of the images loaded into the Import screen, she saw that they were all black and white and had been deliberately degraded in quality to give them a vintage feel in the Hipstamatic style—very contrasty, heavy vignetting, digital grain added to mimic Kodak Professional Tri-X panchromatic 35mm film, the old high-speed standard for newspaper and documentary journalism. All were starkly lit by a harsh on-camera flash in the tradition of the 1940s Speed Graphic flashbulb crime-scene photos of Weegee, and it occurred to her that the subtle linking of these images to socially historical crime photos was an attempt to authenticate them, because now that the importing was concluded and Naomi could examine them full screen in Lightroom’s Library module, they struck her as quite obviously posed and theatrical and manipulative, qualities that disturbed her even more than the content of the images itself.
The setting was not the attic workroom of the video, but the now-familiar space of the Arosteguys’, not much changed from its configuration in the various interviews that Naomi had seen. The sequence of the photos told a little story. Célestine is dead and has been dismembered, as per the police photos, with her body parts strewn randomly around the apartment and her torso on the couch. Hervé, Chase, and Arosteguy himself, gradually revealed to be completely naked as the shots’ perspective widens and they emerge from behind various elements of furniture, take their turns biting small pieces from her thighs, her hips, her shoulders, her belly—but never all three in one frame, which suggests that one of them is always assigned camera duty. Blood is dripping from their mouths and from the bite-sized wounds they are creating, and there is a glazed, zombie-like affect to all their faces which somehow embraces primordial pleasure as well as toothy efficiency. Célestine’s severed head, hair swept back as in the video but now parted to display a crudely cracked-open and hollowed-out skull, sits on the small table next to the old Loewe TV, watching the ghoulish trio with half-closed eyes (her brain is eventually to be found on the kitchen drainboard). And most shockingly—in a way that Naomi felt only she could appreciate—Célestine’s torso begins the session with two full breasts, and when all the mouths have had their way with her left breast, violently ripping and tearing and seeming to eat it on camera, what is left is a raggedly circular bloody wound, not a clever mastectomy scar. Her right breast, though also savaged, remains attached to the torso.
The missing breast. Naomi ob
sessively scanned the face and body of Arosteguy in every photo in which he appeared, searching for a hint of mischief, of irony, of theater and performance. She wanted him to be sending her a message that said, “I was fantasizing for you about the mastectomy, the Hungarian surgery. It never happened. What you are seeing now is the reality. We three are cannibals and we ate that breast.” But she found nothing but ritualistic solemnity on the faces of all three. And it was bracing, in a distancing, Brechtian V-effekt fashion, for her to see Ari’s naked body in this context, from this perspective, so familiar in its powerful fullness, its slope-shouldered monumentality, that she could feel the weight of him on her, could feel his teeth in the meat of her shoulder, and yet also feel how separate she was from him, how alien he truly was. In the video, Célestine’s body had reminded Naomi of the famous sequence of photos of the nude Simone de Beauvoir taken by the American photographer Art Shay in a Chicago apartment’s bathroom. They both had the same good muscular rump, slightly heavy legs showing age-puckering behind the knees, and slim waist, though Célestine had fuller breasts, and Naomi had never seen a photo of Beauvoir with her long hair down (even primping in the Chicago bathroom after her shower, she wore high heels and her hair up in a tight chignon). Or perhaps Naomi was forcing a physical connection when it was really the seduction of students that linked them, a scandal even in those days before political correctness, and for which Beauvoir and her eternal president Jean-Paul Sartre were infamous. She had never discovered a nude photo of the tiny, toad-like Sartre.
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