Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  “Chase is very, very upset,” he said. “I suppose you’ve heard about it.”

  Nathan had to finish chewing before he could respond. He remembered observing Roiphe chewing his own pork chops, and how he seemed to be having trouble that was possibly caused by slipping dentures. Absorbing Roiphe on top of Naomi, Nathan felt as though he himself had dentures that were slipping. He found it difficult to speak. “Chase? Heard? No. Heard what?”

  Roiphe took his hat off and started to play with the brim. He was backlit against the window, and his thinning hair looked particularly vulnerable and wispy. “That French professor of hers. Arosteguy. You haven’t heard? It’s all over the internet. Too soon to hit the papers.”

  “What … what about him?” Nathan immediately felt sick. He didn’t want to hear it, certain that whatever it was meant bad news regarding the mysteriously unresponsive Naomi, even though Roiphe would be oblivious of the Naomi aspect. Nathan had been careful not to let the doctor know about what was going on in Tokyo; he would be too interested in Naomi’s Arosteguy project for comfort.

  Roiphe shook his head at the incomprehensible weirdness of it all. “They finally found him. Found his body.”

  Nathan put down his knife and fork. “His body? What does that mean?”

  The air-conditioning wasn’t working in the restaurant, and Roiphe began to fan his face with his hat, the backlight from the windows strobing through the straw and bringing Nathan to the point of migraine. “Well, he’s dead. That’s what that means. His body. Apparently he collapsed in the middle of some huge intersection in Tokyo. Some witnesses said blood came dribbling out of both of his ears. Sounds like a cerebral hemorrhage to me, although, well, you never know.”

  “But you said something. They found his body? They had to find it?”

  “Apparently, once some ambulance picked him up, they misplaced his body. Or the police took it to do an autopsy and didn’t let the media know about it for three or four days. Something. Some mystery about it. The witness stuff was suppressed until later. He was a fugitive. The French cops wanted him back in Paris. Maybe that was it. Delicate situation.”

  “Jesus. Fuck.”

  “What. You knew him.”

  “No. You knew him.”

  “Well, I met him once or twice. He had weight. He had substance. I didn’t trust him with Chase, but there’s a paranoid old father for you. And speaking of which, Chase wants to see you. Said she needs you for some solace, whatever that means. Obviously it has something to do with her professor. I dasn’t think of it. I dasn’t. Never seen her so depressed. Disturbing for a parent.” Roiphe used his hat to gesture towards Nathan’s pork chops. “But you should just sit here and finish those first. I’m sure she’ll be able to hang on.”

  Nathan pushed his plate across the table. “I think I’ll go now. Where is she?”

  “Up in the workroom. Hey, if you’re serious about not finishing those. I’m prohibited, I’m persona non grata up there, so I might as well stay here.”

  Nathan slid out of his seat and stood up. “You go right ahead.”

  Roiphe lifted the plate and floated it, wobbling, over to the table in front of him, which stretched the length of the windows. “I’ll expect a full report, natch. For the book. Eventually. And could you tell them to bring me a fresh knife and fork on your way out?”

  By the time Nathan hit the sidewalk, Roiphe was happily trimming off the edges of the pork chops where Nathan had made cuts, evidently contaminating them, and fastidiously lifting the trimmings with his new knife and fork onto the butter dish, where they were safely isolated. Nathan waited until he had walked half a block, well out of the doctor’s view, before he stopped in front of the grandiosely named Village Market—“Variety/Greeting Cards”—intending to open his phone’s Safari web browser. He needed to know just what he was walking into. As giggling schoolgirls tumbled out of the Village Market’s ancient green door and pushed by him clutching Archie comics and Kit Kat Minis, he found himself looking at blurry, tweeted photos of Arosteguy lying facedown on the square paving stones of a narrow, crowded pedestrian street in Akihabara, the games and electronics mecca near Tokyo Station. The handsome square head, the large staring eyes, the long, unruly gray hair matted with the blood which flowed from his ears and curled into the granite interstices. Taken at night under the many varieties of artificial light illuminating the street, the photos displayed surreal colors and vague focus, but Nathan thought he saw bits of organic material—brain? inner ear?—spattering the shoulder of Arosteguy’s jacket and soaking in the pooling blood. The lack of good light and the jostling of the crowd made the one relevant video he could find on YouTube even more of a surrealist smear. It was shot handheld and walking from behind Arosteguy, with two or three shoppers between Arosteguy and the camera, which was framed to highlight the whirlpool of neon above the crowd. At the bottom of the frame, out of focus, you could see something that looked like smoke or a liquid spray, like a messy backlit sneeze, spurting from Arosteguy’s ears, at which point his head jerked back and dropped out of frame, and the holder of the camera seemed to stumble before the image looped skyward and then cut out. It would have struck Nathan as farcical if he hadn’t seen the Twitter photos first, the ones in which Arosteguy looked quite horridly dead.

  The inevitable mutating variations were all over the net, but basically: fugitive cannibal French philosopher found dead in Tokyo street. There had been, as Roiphe had suggested, some mystery surrounding the interval between the loading of the body into a special small ambulance that was capable of threading its way through the backstreets, and the release by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department of the report concerning the noted gaijin’s collapse, which seemed to involve a catastrophic cerebral event. The president of France commented only that the death of M. Arosteguy was a mercilessly compounded national tragedy and that his body must of course be returned to France for burial in the Cimetière du Montparnasse where it belonged, in the company of Sartre and Baudrillard. The desire by Tokyo police to conduct an autopsy under their own control was deemed inappropriate by French authorities.

  CHASE HELD HERVÉ’S L-shaped penis in her hand and dipped its root into a glass pot of white glue. It had been painted to resemble a wormlike larva—a meaty translucent yellow with tobacco striations delineating its body segments, and two black-stippled ovals on the upper shield of the glans representing the chemo-sensory organs found on the larval head.

  “I invented my own parasitoid infestation for her, for Célestine. I felt she deserved her own species, something that lovingly lays its eggs in her—we never see what the adult form looks like—and then the maggots hatch and start eating her from the inside out. They spend most of their lives burrowed into the bodies of their hosts, gently nibbling, so they don’t really need eyes. And it’s really magical and spooky when they finally emerge, poking through, waving around all together, synchronized like those weird women’s Olympic swim teams.”

  She turned away from the paint table and took a half step to the body-parts table, where about two dozen of Hervé’s penile fellows protruded from Célestine’s 3D-printed body parts like immense parasitic fly larvae. After a moment of deliberation, with one hand held under the current penis/larva to catch any glue drippings, Chase delicately planted the creature into a bloody, ragged hole just above the knee of the left leg, giving it a twist to settle it in like a lightbulb in a socket. Some of the penis/larva units had been cut down to different lengths so that they presented a more varied diorama of parasitic emergence, although Nathan thought that their uniform ninety-degree signature Hervé bend worked against the illusion of randomly squirming maggots seeking the light. He thought as well that the entire effect of the piece would be enhanced if the body parts were arranged as a complete body instead of like prime cuts in a butcher’s display fridge—the symbolism of the head between the legs, for example, striking him as too obvious, too desperately provocative—but he was reluctant to criticize her work
for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the fear that she would ask him to donate an erect penis scan of his own in order to provide larval variety to the work. Collaboration with Nathan was in the air in the Roiphe household, but Nathan himself remained wary.

  Light poured down over Chase like a shower of clarity from the angled skylights. She was wearing a schoolgirl uniform—short-sleeved white sailor blouse complete with stripe-edged antimacassar, unbuttoned at the throat; loosely knotted gray-and-burgundy-striped tie; and short box-pleated gray skirt—which he recognized as belonging to Bishop Cornwall School just down the street. But she was not wearing the requisite burgundy jacket, gray knee socks, or black oxford shoes; her feet were bare, as were her legs and her arms, and, raked by the light from above, the hundreds of tea-party scars stood out in relief so that she seemed to be swarming with ants the color of dried blood. It created a strange alliance between her and the worm-eaten Célestine, which, it was clear, was the desired effect. She knew he was studying her.

  “I’m too shy to do this live onstage, putting my Célestine together, but maybe you could video me and we could project it. I could take her apart and put her back together again. I think your super camera does video too, doesn’t it?”

  “It does, sure,” Nathan lied. “They all do now.” Nathan could just see a video with his name attached being presented to a French court; he could barely imagine the confusion it would cause. Well, it would be a unique vantage point for the writer of the definitive article on what was spiraling awkwardly into the Arosteguy/Roiphe/Blomqvist case. “The uniform is a nice touch. Were you a Bishop Cornwall girl?”

  “I was, briefly. My mother kept the uniform. I was shocked that I could still fit into it. I found it in the basement by accident—only, I guess, not by accident. It was in a moldy cardboard box with the school logo on it. That kind of racy bishop’s miter. You can still smell it, the mold.” Pause. “I had a wonderful art teacher there.”

  Chase’s luscious enunciation of the word wonderful, preceded by a telltale flick of the tongue over the lower lip, strongly suggested delicious, forbidden, teacher-student sex, probably involving that very uniform. “To be explored” was the mental note. “So the uniform is part of the performance?”

  “Asians love schoolgirls in uniform. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that? I’m not talking about the moldy smell. Sailor Moon. Did you ever watch that? It was a manga series that became an anime.” She sang the first few bars of the Sailor Moon theme song in a husky, sweet voice, only slightly off-key:

  Fighting evil by moonlight

  Winning love by daylight

  Never running from a real fight

  She is the one named Sailor Moon!

  NATHAN HAD HEARD IT BEFORE. A young cousin from Newark named Leslie had been obsessed with the schoolgirl destined to become a magical warrior who fought to save the galaxy, all while wearing her—admittedly stylized—schoolgirl’s sailor suit. “The Asian element surprises me. For the performance piece, I mean. Does that come from Tokyo?”

  “There are many reasons Professor Arosteguy went to Tokyo. It had nothing to do with extradition treaties. He was always fascinated by the Asian version of consumerism, particularly Japanese, so complex. We keep texting. Kind of compulsive.”

  Texting? Now? From the Tokyo morgue? Nathan tacked. “Maybe you need to dress Célestine Arosteguy’s corpse like Sailor Moon. Just to tie things together.”

  Chase allowed him a quick glance over her shoulder, then turned back to her paint table, where there were only two more larvae, pre-painted and waiting for installation. “You know, that’s a really good idea, the Sailor Moon thing. She is a magical warrior, Tina is.”

  “And your many insect bites? Also good for the performance?” Now that her mini-mutilations had been unceremoniously unveiled, he felt he had been invited to notice them, also without ceremony. He could easily see her onstage, clipping off bits of her flesh and eating them while the wide-eyed Célestine corpse looked on with affectionate approval.

  “Wow. I hadn’t thought of them that way. You probably don’t realize how perfect that concept is.”

  “I’d like to realize.”

  “I’d have to totally poach you from my father for my own project. Are you still positive for Roiphe’s?” So casual a throwaway line was this last that, for a beat, Nathan thought he must have mentioned his affliction to Chase, but then understood it could only have come from her father. Was that a betrayal? Did it indicate a more open relationship between father and daughter than the doctor had suggested? What context could there have been for that discussion? It occurred to Nathan that he did not remotely have a handle on the Roiphes.

  “Not sure. The symptoms have subsided. I have three weeks’ worth of pills to go. Why?”

  Mischievous smile. “I remember reading about Calvin Klein’s daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover’s pants, she was confronted by her father’s name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer. I have to wonder what it would be like to be infected by my father’s namesake disease.”

  “Acquiring it is more pleasant than living with it. But … could be part of the performance.”

  “Could be.”

  “And could we say, then, what the meaning of the performance actually is?”

  “We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”

  “And will you ever get the rest of your French friend Hervé to perform with you?”

  Chase laughed a surprisingly hearty laugh. She held the second-last of Hervé’s replica penises up in the air and whirled it around a few times like a football pennant, then turned back to the Tina-thing, looking for the right socket to plug it into.

  “Maybe not. This is the best part of him.”

  “And speaking of parts.”

  “Yes. You asked me a strange question when we were coming up the stairs: Where is Célestine’s left breast?” Chase decided on a wound in the Célestine-head’s cheek, but after holding the penis/larva in place, she seemed to feel that it was too long, overpowering. At the paint table, she began to trim it back from the root end with an X-Acto craft knife.

  “That was the question.” From Roiphe’s testimony, Nathan had expected to find a weepy, devastated Chase waiting for him in a darkened workroom. Instead, she was as luminous as the room itself, and patently playful. “Do you have the answer?”

  Chase put down the knife, turned around, and crossed her arms, tapping the glans of the bioplastic penis against her lips. The maggot paint, long dried, left no marks. “It’s not really your question, is it?”

  “It’s a question asked by a journalist in Tokyo who was working on a story about the Arosteguys. About Célestine’s murder.” A journalist. Nathan had distanced himself from Naomi without thinking about it, but immediately felt guilty for never having outlined his relationship with her to Chase. Then again, that was not a short outline. He let that dog lie.

  “A journalist you’re in constant touch with? Trading stories?”

  “Journalists are too paranoid to trade stories. Sometimes they help each other with details.”

  With a spasm that seemed almost painful, Chase detached herself from the table and ambled towards Nathan, arms still folded, the abridged penis now lowered and hooked over her left biceps; its oval sensors seemed to be looking up at Nathan. “And so if you get an answer to the question, if you come up with the answer, you’ll just email it to your journalist friend? You’ll quote me? And then what I say will become evidence in a murder case? Something like that?”

  “I would protect you. You’d be an unnamed source.”

  Chase now s
tood in front of Nathan, combatively close. He was not at all sure that he could protect her. Would that be under French law? International law? Canadian law? He had no idea. But he wanted the answer to the question even more, now that he saw what was swimming around in her eyes.

  “That would be so nice of you. To do that. Protect me,” she said. “What would you think if I told you there really wasn’t a murder case?”

  “You mean the French police don’t have a case to make against your old professor?”

  “No, I mean what if there was no murder to be a case?”

  “Madame Arosteguy … Mrs. Arosteguy died accidentally?”

  Chase had actually flinched at the word madame! This was exactly like the reaction le schizo, Louis Wolfson, would have had to hearing even one word spoken to him in English by his one-eyed mother or his stepfather, and it left Nathan unaccountably thrilled and distracted. It just emphasized how much the Chase story was interwoven with Paris, the Sorbonne, with language, the Arosteguys—in other words, the French story. Perhaps there was no other way to do the piece justice than to collaborate with Naomi just as she had proposed. But where was Naomi? The worry sank into his gut like that X-Acto knife. Maybe he needed to meet her in Paris and not wait for her to come to Toronto.