David Cronenberg - Consumed

Nathan rolled over on top of her and looked over her shoulder at the photo. He thought fleetingly of that shot of Galapagos lizards mating on a sun-drenched rock. Naomi flicked Camera Roll back and forth with her index finger, nail strangely not clacking, sorting through the varieties of flash and flashless, macro and micro, a shockingly quick dozen of them, some mit scrotal views as well.

“This is making me very nervous, Omi. Kind of existentially unstable.”

She began to edit the photos in a cute retro app, making his cock look like it was shot with an Instamatic in the sixties, and then a Polaroid in the eighties. “You talk pretty, Nathan. But what do you mean? It’s all good. I’m going to give you back your big mother macro lens. I won’t need it anymore.”

“Those are the most terrifying words you’ve ever uttered.” He buried his head in her neck under her hair, nuzzling in a pathetic and desperate way. He spoke to the pungent nape of her neck. “You’re giving me back my big mother cock. You won’t need it anymore.”

Naomi tossed her phone onto a pillow and twisted around under him until they were belly to belly. He thought fleetingly of that fifties French movie featuring Saint-Tropéziens mating on the beach. “You’re very anxious. You don’t have to be anxious.”

“You just spoke German. Since when?”

“The Arosteguys. Reading them.”

“Why not French?”

“Marx was German. Das Kapital . They quote him. They translate.”

“Marx talked about Blitzlicht ? He was into flash photography?”

“He was an all-rounder. A lateral thinker.”

“So Marx. The guy who forced your French guy to murder and eat his wife.”

“Maybe not forced. Induced. Inspired. That’s the way I read it.”

“That’s the other thing. You’re the one who doesn’t read. Not books.” Naomi tried to shrug him off, but he let his muscles go limp, made himself as heavy as that iguana. She had to breathe when he breathed. “Where’s your BlackBerry?”

“I’m suffocating.”

“Me too. Where?” Naomi grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and he spun off her. “Because—and I’ll tell you before you ask me—because you’ve abandoned your faithful BlackBerry, your old friend and lover, the one that was cool with long fingernails, left him, now that you’ve got a new exotic toy to play with.” Nathan pounced on Naomi’s left hand and splayed her fingers, stroking their tips along the edges of her fingernails. “Yeah, right, and you’ve cut your fingernails for the first time since we’ve been together, and it’s not for Last Tango in Schiphol reasons either. It’s for iPhone touchscreen sex.” He dropped her hand and she protectively hid it under her hip. “And I know you’re serious about the Nikon withdrawal too. Nikon, that was our defiant consumerist thing, no Sony, no Canon, our badge of professionalism, our shared sex-tech. So now you’ll go with cool eight-megapixel Jello-cam rolling shutter no-bounce-flash iPhone hipness. And you’ll leave me, you’ll fly to Tokyo to have an affair with the French-Greek philosopher guy, who will then kill you and eat your breasts. And photograph your corpse with your iPhone.”

“That’s really fucking horrible, to say all that. Wow.” Naomi kicked at him with both feet in unison, like a cat on its back. “That’s probably the meanest you’ve ever been to me.” She jumped off the bed, grabbed the iPhone from the pillow, and began to delete the Nathan’s cock portrait photos, one by one, with violent, short-nailed jabs at the trash-can icon while singsonging, “Nathan’s penis: delete, delete, delete…”

BUT OF COURSE a penis is not so easy to delete, and before long, Nathan’s was happily ensconced inside Naomi. It had amused Nathan the first time he noticed it—what he later thought of as “theme sex.” It was dizzy and dreamlike, like a Las Vegas sex room (or at least his imagining of that chimeric thing), and it had come after watching Mutiny on the Bounty , the Brando version, and his sex partner was Sheila Dahms, who was just dark enough of eye and hair to support the Tahitian-themed rec room sex, the drums, the waves, the grass-covered thighs and musky breasts. He felt he was underwater with her, it was so hot and humid, and there was a breeze, the drums, the first sigh of the East on his naked buttocks… And afterwards, after she had jumped up and gone to the bathroom to pee and maybe douche out, as they then did, she came back luminous and said, for a second there I thought you were Brando, and you were still wearing those white breeches and those shoes with the buckles, and we were underwater. It was never like that with Naomi. She didn’t seem to have theme sex, ever. She admitted to distracted sex, thinking about arguments she’d had with her mother or her sister, even ratcheting up the anger and intensity to the point of orgasm. Nathan could not imagine that such a thing could be true, but she swore it was. Was she covering up her own version of theme sex? Maybe it was fantasy/celebrity sex and she was fucking some prepubescent rock star, male or female, and wouldn’t cop to it. Once in a while she’d play and try to guess his theme of the moment, but mostly he stopped mentioning it, holding it back, keeping it private the way she felt that some of her sex things were too private, though he hated that, he wanted to violate every part of her, dirty it up and make it part of him too. And this time, of course, since the theme was Dunja, Dunja and surgery and sexual mutilation, he was not going to play thematic, especially since the doubling up had actually disturbed him, so specific had it been. He became the Hungarian surgeon, inserting the radioactive pellets into Naomi’s breasts with his mouth, holding them between his teeth and pushing them, nuzzling them, into her flesh. And then they became Dunja’s breasts, and Naomi became an amalgam of Naomi and Dunja and someone else—was it Sheila, was she making her comeback bid from the distant past?—and he became Arosteguy, terrifying himself, his conception of the man filtered through Naomi and the internet and those photos he had found with the safe filter off, photos you didn’t want to see because they adhered to the inside of your skull and lacerated your brain. And that website called poundofflesh.comdevoted to the eating of breasts. Nathan/Arosteguy ate her breasts right off her chest, ripped them off with his teeth, and then he came again so voluptuously that it terrified him.

Naomi pushed him off. “What the fuck was that? You actually bit me!” She pulled at her left breast, looking for bite marks on its underside. “I can’t fucking believe it.”

“It wasn’t me. It was Arosteguy.” Naomi’s dismissive shrug. “Sex theme. I know you think they don’t exist.”

“They don’t for me. I don’t have sex fantasies.”

“A sex theme isn’t exactly a fantasy…”

Soon Nathan had her D300s in his hands and was shooting a series of posed pictures. She was still naked, but he had wrapped the sheets around her lower legs so that only her thighs were visible. “Okay, now, can you guess?” said Nathan, hiding behind the camera. “I’m working on a pitch and you’re one of my subjects. What’s my article about?”

“Hmm. You’ve covered my legs with a sheet.”

“Not just covered.”

“You’ve… hidden them.”

“Not just hidden.” Nathan squeezed off some clattery shots as punctuation.

Naomi’s eyes went wide. “You’ve amputated them.”

“Ah,” said Nathan.

Naomi squirmed a bit, then readjusted the sheet. “It’s that one where people want to amputate parts of their bodies because they just don’t feel that they’re the shape they’re supposed to be?”