David Cronenberg - Consumed

“My experiments. My recent work. With my most recent subject.”

“Who is?”

“My daughter, of course,” said Roiphe. “Chase. But you. Good instincts. We’re gonna need ’em for what comes next.”

NAOMI WAS ON HER JAL flight from Charles de Gaulle to Tokyo Narita. Her laptop was on her seat tray, displaying a photo she took with her iPhone of the elegant first-class toilet in the Boeing 777. She especially appreciated the small orchid in the milky glass vase glued to the lav’s mirror, even though she suspected it was artificial. In her ear, Nathan was complaining. “You flew right over me and I never knew it. I’m crushed.”

Naomi spoke quietly into the airphone, resisting the temptation to talk louder to compensate for the airplane drone. She hated it when she could hear everything that everyone said. And she had a very large Dutch male seatmate—she had seen his burgundy Kingdom of Netherlands paspoort when it slid out of his computer bag onto her seat—who was sitting very close to her because she wasn’t in first class but what they called Premium Economy, which featured something called the Sky Shell Seat. “You fly east to Japan from Paris, not west.”

“Oh, god, that means you’re flying away from me,” said Nathan. He was sitting at the desk in his room in the Bloor-Yorkville Holiday Inn, trying not to be depressed, speaking into his laptop’s mic using a VoIP app. He was looking at one of the nude apotemnophilia photos he had taken of Naomi, talking to it; she had not managed to delete them all.

“Why the sudden romanticism? What’s going on there in Toronto? Should I worry?”

“Things are strange here and I miss you, that’s all,” said Nathan.

The Dutchman beside Naomi ordered a vodka martini. It was not his first. He was very tall, and Naomi could not be sure that he wasn’t actively eavesdropping. “Tell me about the strangeness.”

“Roiphe’s syndrome. A new thing, nothing to do with the old Roiphe’s disease. That’s the sole subject of his past year’s work. I don’t know if he’s inventing it or defining it. He doesn’t want to talk about anything else, and he won’t even give me a hint of what’s involved unless I agree to do this book deal.” Nathan had emailed details of the book-deal gambit to Naomi for vetting. She had thought it would be the perfect challenge to get Nathan out of his journo rut. A book—even if it ended up only being an e-book—how could it not be a good thing?

“And it’s really his daughter? She lives with him and he studies her? She’s his project?”

“Chase. That’s her name,” said Nathan, struck for the first time by the name’s comical appropriateness. “That’s what the situation seems to be.”

The Dutchman’s vodka martini arrived with a cup of nut-like lozengeshaped snacks. Earbuds plugged in, he was watching a bizarre Japanese game show on his seatback screen, and Naomi wondered idly if he could really understand what was being said. He did chuckle from time to time.

“That sounds just sick enough to be yummy,” said Naomi, now working her own screen through some general data regarding the University of Tokyo. She was trying to imagine Arosteguy’s life in exile, and was struggling. It wasn’t just the opaqueness of Japan that was the problem; it was the idea of a French-Greek intellectual murderer in Japan that was the problem. But of course also the source of excitement. She had stumbled across the case of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student at the Sorbonne who killed and ate his classmate, a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt. Judged unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, he had returned home to roam free in Japan, a minor celebrity who painted nudes, wrote restaurant reviews, and worked the talk-show circuit. Although it made Naomi extremely nervous to think about it, the idea of having Sagawa interview Arosteguy aroused her almost unbearably. It was just sick enough to be yummy.

“I wasn’t looking for that approach exactly.”

“Your pieces are as sensationalistic as mine are. They’re just dressed up a bit. Make sure you don’t sign anything,” said Naomi.

“He’s a cagey old codger. I can’t read him yet.”

“Tell him you need a taste to see if it’s going to be deep enough for a book. You can always go with the short piece if you have to.”

“It means holing up here in this hotel for weeks. Maybe longer. I’ll practically have to live with them. In fact, he’s already shown me his nanny suite. In the basement.”

“I’ll come visit you. After Arosteguy.”

“But listen, isn’t it too creepy? I mean, would you do it? Move into a subject’s house? Have a shower in the same shower as your subject?”

“You’d just be another embedded journalist. It’s all the rage.”

“You’ve arranged to meet Arosteguy? He really is in Tokyo and is willing?”

“I got the email address of an intermediary. He wants to tell his story. The boys at Notorious are excited. They said go for it. He agreed to meet me.”

“Hey, the guy could actually be a murderer. Where are you going to meet him?”

“Wherever he says, I guess. There’s speculation that he has a house in the city.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Well, he’s dangerous. But that’s the hook, isn’t it?”

An awkward pause. Nathan was flashing to a sex romp between Naomi and the French-Greek woman-killer in a spooky little Japanese house—did they actually have houses in Tokyo?—after which she confesses to Arosteguy that she’s infected with Nathan’s dose of Roiphe’s, so Arosteguy kills her in a rage and eats her.

“What?” said Nathan.

“I’ve developed some weird discharge,” said Naomi, reading his mind obliquely as usual. “It’s annoying.” The Dutchman turned his head slightly towards her. He must have heard. Well, let him.

“Maybe it’s just your routine yeast thing.”

“No. This smells different,” said Naomi, raising her voice ever so slightly for the Dutchman. She wondered if he knew about the Dutch connection with the Sagawa murder. Was it iconic in Holland in some way? That might be an interesting avenue to explore. “I’ll have to get it checked out. So boring.”

A pregnant pause and a sigh from Nathan. Naomi was on instant alert, fully in the airphone now, the screen pulled out of focus. “Naomi, the last time we were in bed together. In the Hilton. Schiphol.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I had a dose of Roiphe’s disease. You probably have it now too. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Fuck. You should get yourself checked out.”

“What? You incredible schmuck! I can’t believe this. You want me to get myself STD gynoed in Tokyo? By some weird Japanese gyno? Fuck!” At this, the Dutchman actually pulled his right earbud out, the one on Naomi’s side, in order, she was certain, to hear her better. When she glared at him, the Naomi Death Stare, he smiled shyly and turned away. But he left the earbud out.

“I know, I am, I—”

“Who the fuck did you get it from, you unbelievable asshole? Or do you even know?”

“I do know. It was that breast-cancer patient I covered in Budapest. Dunja Hočevar.”

“Oh, yeah, you really covered her but good! Talk about embedded journalists! Fuck!”

“It was a mercy fuck,” said Nathan. “I was into the story and I was vulnerable. I dunno. I mean, she was immune-suppressed and… I dunno.”

“Listen, I have a suggestion for you. Why don’t you mercy-fuck Barry Roiphe?”

Naomi slammed the phone back down into its cradle in the armrest, jarring the Dutchman’s vodka martini. He grabbed it just before it toppled over and smiled an oily smile.

“Sometimes I think these airplane phones are not such a good idea,” he said, but Naomi was already back in her screen, communing with images of Arosteguy.