David Cronenberg - Consumed

“I think I see one finger,” said Nathan.

The man lowered his finger and pointed to an obscure booth in the back. In it sat a gangly gray-haired man wearing big non-chic plastic glasses. Cardigan and flannels. Straw hat. “I was wrong. You can see after all.”

“Thank you.”

Nathan walked over to Roiphe’s booth and stood for a moment while the doctor tried to saw through one of his three pork chops, face low to the plate, oblivious. Nathan subtly swayed on his feet, studying the man. He had by now of course watched lectures, interviews, and news footage of Roiphe, and had read his learned papers—no trace of humor there—which often included photos of the man going back to his graduation from the University of Toronto medical school, class of 1957. But he had not recognized him: the collapsed posture, the big glasses with those distorting bifocal blobs, the weird hat. Roiphe’s head eventually came up, the eyes smeared behind the lenses, the glasses crooked on the notched, reddened nose. The doctor looked puzzled. Why was this young man just standing there? Was he a waiter?

“Dr. Roiphe? Nathan Math. Thank you for agreeing to meet me.”

A hint of a delay, like an old transatlantic phone call, and then a thin-lipped smile. “Oh, yes. Sit down, sit down. Just having a couple of pork chops. They’re tough, but I need the exercise.” Roiphe worked his jaw comically; the effect was grotesque. Nathan slid into the narrow booth and felt the rough texture of the scarred seat through his jeans. “You want anything?”

“No, no thanks,” said Nathan. “Hope I’m not taking you away from your patients.”

“Oh, no. Man’s gotta eat, doesn’t he? And, too, I’m pretty much retired. Well, I still practice a bit. Just to keep my hand in. I’ve become a bit of a tinkerer, though. A bit of an experimenter. So, tell me again. What’s this all about?”

From his research, Nathan had calculated that Roiphe would respond to a fairly melodramatic pitch about his life and his work; he came across as a failed but still eager self-promoter. “For one shining moment, you were the king of fear,” he said.

Roiphe’s eyes managed to startle into sharpness behind the bifocals. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Roiphe’s. Roiphe’s disease. You made the cover of Time magazine.”

Irritated, Roiphe went back to his pork chops. The way he chewed suggested false teeth, but Nathan couldn’t be sure. The doctor’s jaw sawed sideways; maybe it was an eating style. Still chewing, Roiphe came up for air, blinked, spoke. “Not me, for god’s sake. The disease. Surely you don’t equate the two. And the politics surrounding the disease. All sex, all hysteria, very American.” He wiped his mouth with a thin paper napkin. The stubble on one side of his poorly shaven chin shredded it, so that in effect he wiped his mouth with his fingers. He sucked those fingers as he squinted suspiciously, as though trying to focus on an especially noxious varmint. “Why is it, exactly, you wanted to talk to me?”

Nathan figured he had to scale back the drama. “I’m writing a piece about medical fame. The scary kind. You know—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. Names that people are terrified to hear. Afraid that their doctors will speak those names to them.”

The doctor burst out laughing, a short, liquid bark that spewed shreds of chop across the table. “Roiphe’s disease was a leaky pecker or a mucky twat. Hardly in the same league.”

“But Roiphe’s could be lethal if it was left untreated. I mean, Wayne Pardeau died of Roiphe’s.”

“Who?”

“Wayne Pardeau,” said Nathan. “A famous country-and-western singer.”

“Never heard of him. But it was probably drugs that killed him. Usually is.”

“Do you have an inferiority complex about Roiphe’s? Was it not a potent enough disease to bear your name?”

“What an odd young man you are. You sound like a headline in a Victorian yellow newspaper. I suppose you’ve heard of yellow journalism? Sounds like you practice it.”

“Did it ever bother you that it seemed at one point to have been cured? Wiped off the face of the earth? Did that not consign you to some kind of medical oblivion? Of historical interest only?”

Roiphe fastidiously scraped the apple sauce off his remaining chop with the butter knife, wrapped the chop up in a napkin, and stuffed it into his pocket. Nathan was sure the grease was already weeping into his cardigan. Rising with some difficulty, Roiphe said, “Maybe you should be talking to Dr. Alzheimer while the talkin’s good. I assume that you’re getting the check.”

Nathan twisted himself out of the booth and without being too obvious about it blocked the cramped aisle. He pulled out a neatly folded pink diagnostic report and held it out to Roiphe. “Doctor, please take a look at this.”

Out of some ancient reflex, Roiphe snatched the report, unfolded it, and began to read, face close to the paper and head twitching from side to side, as though he were smelling it rather than reading it. Nathan had spent a week getting to know Toronto in preparation for Roiphe, and that had included a visit to a walk-in clinic for STDs on Queen Street West; he could look forward to twenty-eight days of Ciprofloxacin, mild diarrhea, genital irritation, and the possible but unlikely advent of ruptured tendons, psychotic reactions, and confusional states. “Looks like you have a hefty dose of Roiphe’s. Makin’ a comeback, I guess. Your triglycerides aren’t that great either.” He looked up and shook the paper before handing it back, as though to purge it of dust or mites. “Does that mean I owe you something, or do you owe me?”

Nathan tried to peer around the reading blobs in the doctor’s glasses to get at the real eyes. It then occurred to him that at this close distance, which didn’t seem to unnerve the doctor at all, it might be preferable to look through those blobs for better eye contact. The result was a palsied head movement that suggested extreme shiftiness on Nathan’s part. “I would like to discuss the narrative of my infection with you,” he said breathlessly, his chest tight.

Roiphe barked out another laugh, sounding particularly like a Jack Russell. “The narrative of my…” He shook his head. “Look, son. I long ago left the field of venereal pathology, if that’s your hook. I’m just not very interesting. That’s the real problem. Now Parkinson, there was an interesting man.”

“Why don’t you let me decide that? What kind of patients do you have now? What are you experimenting with?”

Roiphe studied Nathan for a beat, jaw thrust forward, lips pursed, then took his glasses off. His eyes were large and smeary even without the bifocal blobs, but they were also the most amazing, unnatural turquoise, and they shocked Nathan. He was sure those eyes could see things that normal eyes couldn’t.

“You could come by the house tomorrow, if you’d like. Just around the corner. My office is in the house. Tomorrow. Not too early. I’ve never been a morning person, believe it or not. Just show up.”

SURROUNDED BY MARBLE in the bathroom of her suite in the Crillon, Naomi sat having a pee, and it was hurting. She watched herself in the door mirror howling in pain like a child. “Ow, ow, ow! That hurts!” She looked down at her white cotton panties—a little threadbare around the elastic, she noticed—and saw what looked like a mayonnaise stain in the crotch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Sitting on her bed with the Air on her lap, new panties on, travel yoga pants on, diagnostic wad of Kleenex in panties providing reassuring pressure, Naomi watched another downloaded clip of Arosteguy lecturing, this time with the tinny Air sound turned off. She gazed intently at Arosteguy’s image, then, provoked by that image, bounced off the bed and started to set up an image-making session of her own.