David Cronenberg - Consumed

“NAOMI! OVER HERE!” Yukie was waving wildly as Naomi pushed her baggage cart with its streamlined wheel covers out through the glass doors of the immigration area. “So wonderful to see you again, my honey!”

“Yukie, hi! Oh, thank you for coming to meet me. You’re such a doll.” Yukie was wearing a bizarre dark-brown faux-fur coat with mauve and purple highlights, magenta leather gloves, a pink-striped fluffy scarf, and thick, clear-plastic oval sunglasses—all normal for her. Her hair was still long and full down her back, and it gave Naomi comfort to see her looking the way she remembered her.

They took the Narita Sky Access bullet train to Nippori Station, and then they were in a cab nudging its way through the Tokyo streets to Yukie’s flat. In the cab, Naomi was slightly disappointed that their cab driver wasn’t wearing white cloth gloves, but at least the white-doily-draped seatbacks and headrests—so frilly and lacy they seemed Victorian—and the right-hand drive matched her internet-researched expectations. Yukie was taking photos of Naomi with her iPhone, and Naomi reciprocated by clacking away with her Nikon.

“Oh, it’s so good to look at you again,” said Yukie. “You know, you look so more mature now, not so little girl.”

“Does that mean old?” said Naomi, hiding behind her viewfinder. “No, of course not. I’ll show you photographic proof.” Yukie scrolled through her shots, chose one, and held it out for Naomi to see. Even front-lit by the phone’s LED flash, smiling sweetly as she peeked out from behind her camera, Naomi did look pretty good still, looked viable, she thought, whatever that meant.

“C’mon, I mean really,” said Yukie. “Look how glamorous and sexy. It must be the marriage thing. Nathan must be a terrific, sexy, supportive husband.”

“You know we’re not married, Yukie.”

“It’s a modern marriage,” she said. “It’s what marriage has turned into, and you’re it. You’re married. Cyber-married. Somehow, the internet is involved.”

Yukie’s place was in Shinsen, just west of Shibuya Station, on a small side street of slightly shabby concrete-and-tile buildings. Just outside her apartment door, Yukie turned to Naomi and put her hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to make all the usual single Japanese working-girl disclaimers. It’s small and ugly and crowded, and I’m embarrassed to have you see it, much less stay in it.”

Naomi gave Yukie a quick kiss. “All the more reason for me to thank you. It’s the best place in Tokyo for me, believe me.” Once inside, Naomi was disappointed to see a quite neat, clean, and modern little space that could have been a studio in Brooklyn or Queens. No tatami mats, no futons, no shoji screens. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she thought, since Yukie herself was neat, clean, and modern, though following Japanese tradition they both took off their footwear just inside the door.

“Are you needing to hide out, though, really?” said Yukie, as she hauled Naomi’s big duffel bag into the kitchen. Sheer white curtains closed off the kitchen from the bedroom, which was also the living room. “Even my friends can’t seem to find me here, so you should be pretty anonymous.”

“I’m not sure,” said Naomi, thinking about her Dutch seatmate and his continuing interest in her as they waited for their baggage. He kept smiling and nodding at her, trying to catch her eye as though they shared an intimate secret, and it creeped her out, induced paranoid fantasies. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the plane wanted to follow me.”

Yukie laughed dismissively and closed the substantial metal-clad door behind her. She took Naomi’s hand and led her to the bed, where she sat down and patted the sunflower-pattern bedspread. Naomi left her roller and shoulder bag on the pink carpet and sat beside her, Yukie still wearing her coat and gloves. “You can take the bed. I’m used to sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag.”

“That doesn’t feel right,” said Naomi. “We’ll work something out. Maybe I’ll sleep on your kitchen table.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” laughed Yukie. “It’s actually not even big enough.”

Naomi was feeling that deep, heavy jet lag, now that she could let go, could stop traveling. She was almost delirious enough to be serious about the kitchen table; she imagined lying on it on her back, her legs hanging over the edge, dangling slippers. Her eyes felt dead from the inside out, but Yukie’s eyes were luminous with excitement. “So, really? Is there a story for me in this? You know, a unique Japanese angle? Something you wouldn’t want but you can give me? My boss has been hating everything I bring him lately.”

Naomi was very comfortable with Yukie’s guilt trips—they were so gentle you could ignore them—but she did owe her, and she did need her. Yukie was a media relations agent at Monogatari PR, one of the most powerful public relations firms in Japan—their specialty was spin-doctoring celebrity catastrophes, particularly the political variety—and though she was a junior agent, she knew everybody in the highly incestuous and regimented Japanese media world. “I’m meeting a very dangerous man here in Tokyo. Nobody knows about it.”

“Not even Nathan?”

“He knows about it, the asshole.”

Yukie’s eyes went even wider. “Uh-oh.” She looked down and took Naomi’s hand again, and without looking up said quietly, “Maybe, Naomi, you should give me the name of some contact or something? Just in case? Maybe not just Nathan?”

“I’ll do that, Yukie. That’s a good idea. And meanwhile, I need a contact from you .”

“Oh, yeah?” Having said the fearful thing, she was able to look up into Naomi’s eyes again.

“Who’s your gynecologist?” said Naomi.

“WE HAD A WONDERFUL Portuguese housekeeper living down here for a while, but we lost her to a better offer,” said Roiphe.

“Oh?” said Nathan.

“Boyfriend married her. Swept her away.”

“She forgot to take her flag,” said Nathan, tipping his head towards the small plastic Portuguese flag on the wall. Next to it was a voluptuous poster depicting a Moorish castle in the Sintra Mountains near Estoril, the Vila de Sintra coat of arms prominent in the lower right corner, where the poster was slightly torn. At that point, stuffing his underwear into the light-birch veneer Ikea dresser which sat under the poster, Nathan was already feeling like a Portuguese housekeeper, desperate to create a window in her windowless basement bedroom with the windswept vista of the poster. He would keep that, but the flag had to come down. And why was there no mirror in the room?

“She disappeared overnight. Left a lot of her junk. Must have been pretty hot stuff,” said Roiphe, hunkered down and shamelessly poking through Nathan’s open camera bag on the furry floor. Shag. Visions of seventies carpet rakes danced in Nathan’s head. Or was shag carpeting really making a comeback? This variant was a muted dark slate, not what you’d consider a 1970s color. Was this insane? Was he really doing this? Would he actually be able to sleep down here, and then wake up, and then function?

Nathan decided to laugh. “Well, I could probably fill in a bit if things get slow. I’m particularly good with a feather duster.”

“Damned if I won’t take you up on that, things get hectic. Hey, you’ve got some crackerjack gear in here.” Roiphe held up Nathan’s wireless flash trigger. “Now what the heck is this gizmo? It says,” he began reading the label, “that it’s a Nikon Wireless Speedlight Commander SU-800. Sounds pretty impressive to me.”

Nathan decided to use his iPhone’s LTE personal hotspot to generate a private wireless signal. Roiphe had handed him his house Wi-Fi password—“Network Name: DoctoR; Password: inFeKt10n!!”—shakily hand-printed in silver Magic Marker on the back of a ten-dollar Pizza Pizza/Toys “R” Us savings card. “I’ll want that back once you’ve logged in,” he had said, obviously not fearing the revelation of his home’s Wi-Fi password to the administrators of the Pizza Pizza redemption program. The old codger protested his technological ignorance too much; he seemed absolutely clear and savvy about all things i and e , and Nathan was convinced that feeling paranoid in the Roiphe household was simply being realistic. He was sure that if he used the DoctoR network, every keystroke would be duly logged, every email kidnapped and archived, and every Skype conversation transcribed for later sinister use. Or did he just need this to be true to make his story more compelling than it threatened to be?