David Cronenberg - Consumed

The Japanese vegetable scent—water lilies? ginkgo leaves?—that Naomi had caught her first day with Arosteguy now flooded over her as he called back on his way down the staircase. “Perhaps you would like to go out for a late dinner. Perhaps not. Let me know. We can eat here as well. I cook.” Later, Naomi had her laptop and cameras set up on the bedroom table and was sitting on the bed—there was no room for a chair—working over her first Arosteguy photos, cropping and color grading them in Adobe Lightroom, then Dropboxing them to her editor at Notorious . The photos she had created were very moody and dramatic, and showed that beneath the current shabbiness, Arosteguy was a refined and handsome man.

She dabbed at the trackpad, hitting the Upload button as though the Air might explode in her face, but it all seemed to work smoothly. She’d had to let Arosteguy mess with her computer, switching the keyboard to Japanese in order to type in the neighbor’s network password, and it felt like a violation, not the less disturbing because it was a consensual one. As the photos churned away into the ether, her email chime went off. It was from Nathan, and it said, “Naomi, I need to talk to you about Arosteguy and Roiphe. Odd things, funny parallels. You told me your cell phone wouldn’t work in Japan and it doesn’t. You must have gotten a Japanese phone by now. Call me. Nathan.” Naomi immediately replied, “Send me pictures of you and Roiphe fucking each other. I’ll call you to comment.” She was surprised by the spontaneous depths of her own vindictiveness, but rather pleased by them as well.

In the bathroom, she checked herself out in the plastic-framed mirror, leaning close to finesse the subtle eye makeup, the just-perceptible lipstick. She had put on the sexiest outfit she had that you could still do physical work in—formfitting beige light wool sweater, tight black cotton pants—without allowing herself to wonder why she bothered. She had started her course of antibiotics.

NAOMI HAD HER SPEEDLIGHTS and her Nagra set up in Arosteguy’s tiny galley kitchen and was shooting him as he cooked. She had made a fetish of culinary ignorance, part of her integrity as a media professional somehow, and so she could only see that he was manipulating a lot of tiny shrimp and clumps of what looked like seaweed with a delicate knife. A small jug of warm sake and two mismatched cylindrical ceramic cups sat beside the sink. They both drank randomly.

Arosteguy too had cleaned up a bit: he was shaven now, and had washed, or at least brushed, his hair, though she hadn’t heard him in the bathroom. He had also changed his clothes, looking very professorial in a thick sweater and corduroy pants. Zooming in on her D300s’s LCD screen to check her focus, Naomi could see thin, transparent wires trailing from his hairline down into his ears. “Are those hearing aids in your ears,” she asked, “or are you listening to music?”

“Bionic enhancements. And through them, I am in constant contact with certain satellites.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I have no sense of humor. But my Greek father, a violinist, and my French mother, a pianist, were both quite deaf before the age of fifty, and they both wore hearing aids. Of course, they were analogue then, and very primitive, but now they’re digital. I like the French word, numérique , better. It’s more descriptive, and it doesn’t confuse with the reference to human fingers, to the digits.” He turned and waggled his fingers at Naomi. They were short and powerful, and with them he pulled a hearing aid from his left ear and let it dangle in front of his face so that she could shoot it. A rather shapely silver capsule—to match his hair—fitted behind his ear, and a transparent plastic lead containing the thinnest of wires fed into a translucent twin-domed bud—it looked like a tiny jellyfish—that plugged into his earhole. “It’s made by Siemens. German, of course. They’re not as good as real ears, but they’re good.” He gently coaxed it back into his ear and turned again to his cooking. “This moment reminds me of a famous family moment in Paris when my mother was cooking and somehow, adjusting the clip that held her hair back from her face, she popped her hearing aid out of her ear and into her bouillabaisse without realizing it. And I was the one who ate it.” Arosteguy began to heave with laughter at the memory. “The toxicity of the battery was of some concern, as you can imagine. They were much bigger then. But they couldn’t imagine how to get it out of me at that time in French medical history without the possibility of doing terrible damage to my young stomach and intestines, so we just waited for the inevitable. My mother found it quite annoying to be unbalanced in her hearing for all that time, and ultimately they gave her a new pair, even better than what she had.”

Naomi was zoomed in on a shot she had just taken of his cheekbone, which was very shapely but smeared with a light discoloration that reminded her of her grandfather, a dermatologist, who had told her that the skin became a garden of weird life-forms when you aged. “Cover it with makeup when it happens,” he had said. “You can’t fight ’em. Too damn many of ’em.”

“Do you always shave at night?” said Naomi. She asked questions partly to get Arosteguy to turn towards her so that she could find new angles on his face, which was beginning to seem endlessly interesting to her.

“I hadn’t spoken to anyone for a week before you. I realized with a shock that I did not look very civilized.”

“You look like a three-star French chef at home now.”

“That alarms me. I don’t cook French anymore. I cook Japanese. Well, I’m trying. My friend Matsuda-san is actually a wonderful cook. He’s teaching me. I can only do the simplest things. So subtle, so subtle and complex what he can do.”

“Professor Matsuda? I got the feeling that he wanted to distance himself from you.”

“In public, yes, of course. Not in private.”

“Well, his teaching must be good. Even your posture is starting to become more Japanese. And you look like you know what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” said Arosteguy. “You too.”

“Yeah?”

“Photos of the cannibal Arosteguy cooking a meal. Later, photos of the cannibal eating the meal. I’m sure you will be able to sell these around the world.”

“What about video?” Naomi hefted the D300s in her right hand. “This thing shoots decent video. And I have a microphone and earphones to go with it.”

“Maybe. When we get to know each other better. And I have some lawyers I need to consult with. They are already angry with me for the event of you. The event of Naomi. They are basing everything on the lack of an extradition treaty between Japan and France, but there are delicate circumstances which complicate things, and public outcry and opinion are dangerously involved.”

“Well, you’re not wrong about the cannibal thing. It’s pretty potent stuff. But you don’t object? You don’t mind?”

Arosteguy turned to her and pulled his mouth open to one side with his index finger. The effect was grotesque. Startled, Naomi lowered the camera. Arosteguy let go of his mouth. “Into the very mouth of the cannibal. Don’t you want that picture?”

“Are you sure you want me to take it?”

“Take it,” said Arosteguy.

He pulled his mouth open again. Naomi began shooting. She changed lenses quickly—an extreme wide-angle lens now—and continued snapping, getting very close, optically spreading his face and his mouth, distorting them. Arosteguy played it seriously and intensely, his gums and teeth—quite good, really, with only slight tobacco discoloration—completely exposed on one side and somehow perversely naked. Naomi lowered her camera and checked the LCD screen. The photos were very disturbing.