David Cronenberg - Consumed

Nathan was acutely aware that he was looking at photos of a naked woman with her father sitting beside him, also looking. True, Roiphe was proving to be an unusual father, but some of the photos were, quite by accident, perversely erotic, and Nathan felt that no matter how elaborate and subtly graduated Roiphe’s emotional filters were, he could not fail to see that. Not that there had been a hint of incest in their past that he could sense—at least, not yet—but disturbingly, Nathan felt as though his undeniably surging lust for Chase counted as incest because her father, almost shoulder to shoulder with him, breathing with ragged old-man intensity into the side of Nathan’s face as he searched the screen for signs of something obscure, possibly something sublime, must surely be inhaling it. Once again, it was that paradigm of the retroactive experience: Nathan had not felt anything like this while taking the photos, so caught up was he in the mechanics of getting the shot, but now, looking at them with Roiphe guiding the zooming and the scrolling with surgical insistence, Chase’s muscular nakedness, which revealed the massive scale of her macroscopic self-mutilation (almost every reachable square centimeter of her skin had been attacked as though by swarms of blackflies, the wounds puckered and weeping or scabbing), provoked unsettling reveries in Nathan. Did Chase’s body remind Roiphe of his dead wife’s body? (The former Rose Blickstein, as per the doctor’s Wikipedia entry.) Did it fill him with a bittersweet sexual nostalgia, an incestuous melancholia?

“She does seem to feel it, feel the pain,” said Nathan. “I see it there, for instance, in this shot. She’s feeling the pain, and feeling the grain of her skin as the metal of the cutting edges separates the cells of her skin, bites through the layers of her skin and the tissue underneath it. But the pain makes her laugh, a weird silent laugh—see there, it’s not subtle, really. So she feels the pain, but she wants the pain, looks for it, like a bodybuilder wants the pain and searches for it.”

“Happy to be punished? Looking for punishment?”

“The bodybuilder?”

“Fuck the bodybuilder. The girl.”

Nathan zoomed into the photo in front of them. That was ecstasy on her face as she cut herself, not self-pity, not masochistic pleasure. But why ecstasy? The ritualistic elements of her trance—a classic fugue?—were complex and narrative; they were telling a consoling story to Chase, yes. Nathan was shaping the article as he reacted. He would have liked to record these thoughts, just say them to GarageBand so that he wouldn’t forget them, but he was not yet comfortable enough with Roiphe to collaborate in that intimate way, to leave himself vulnerable to the old man’s sarcasm and irony.

He scrolled to the eating shots, still zoomed. There were other people there with her, somehow, sharing the tiny bits of her flesh that she had doled out onto five little plates with butterfly and bunny patterns. She seemed to be taking on the roles of different characters, rotating through the plates, delicately eating from one, coarsely from the second, ravenously from the third. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling and the walls, he had gotten close to the plates and the teapot and cups, the plastic cupcakes with switchable toppings of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry (each of these crowned by a convincing dimpled red cherry), and the shiny forks and knives in primary colors. The bounce absorbed the warmth of the terracotta walls and raked the covert tea party’s flatware and hollowware with soft red-clay light, instilling sinister drama into the innocent child’s set piece with its transient shadows and throwing into high relief the slivers of flesh and their smears of blood, which might otherwise have disappeared into the bright colors of the Fisher-Price plastic.

But it was the hands that were mesmerizing, Chase’s hands, with their long, sinewy fingers and paradoxically perfect fingernails, hands that were out of proportion with the child-sized tea things and so seemed, especially when top-lit, to be monstrous as they delicately picked at the flesh bits and lifted them to her open mouth, her tongue extended and waiting. Very close to her now, he had been nervous about swiveling away from the child’s table to follow the trajectory of the hands—she alternated left and right, as though picking berries in a deliriously fecund patch—but the graphic momentum soon carried him to Chase’s face, which seemed swollen with contained excitement. When Nathan half-pressed the shutter release, a cross-hatched red laser pattern sprang from the base of the flash unit, allowing the camera to focus in low light. Caged by those red stripes she looked feral, like a wolverine caught by a self-triggered animal-cam in a remote boreal forest. She barely blinked at the brutal flashing that followed focusing, the harsh light, direct now, revealing scabbed notches taken out of the cartilage at the very tops of her ears, normally hidden by her hair, which was now swept back and held by a plastic tortoiseshell clip, its long, curving, interlocking teeth reminding Nathan of a sprung Venus flytrap. She was conscious enough of what she was doing, thought Nathan, even calculating enough, to avoid cutting her face and her hands—how could she cover up?—so where exactly was her mind now? The face in close-up currently on the screen, terrible, beautiful, used ecstasy as a mask and a shield. What was behind it? And she was talking, speaking for the invisible characters who sat around the chunky green-and-white circular plastic child’s table, talking soundlessly, shuffling around the table on her knees, shifting the chairs about so that she could play each point of view with varying mien but consistent intensity.

“Okay. Here’s where I do my healing thing. Keep shooting,” Roiphe had said. In the photos that scrolled by now, Roiphe was partially lit by the Hello Kitty lamp on the night table in the corner, which he had flipped on so that he could unpack the beige corduroy Air Canada business-class toiletries bag he had stuffed into the pocket of his navy velour bathrobe. Roiphe was kneeling beside the oblivious Chase, intrepidly tracking down every fresh wound so that he could disinfect it with alcohol and Polysporin, dabbing with a rough precision.

“For her, we’re not even here, boy. You see that,” Roiphe had said as he worked. “You see how she manages to move around me without acknowledging my presence. Nice little modern dance.” Nathan had caught some of that with his camera, and looking at the photos of Chase evading her father in sinuous slow motion, as though practicing an exotic variant of t’ai chi, he regretted not having been able to shoot video.

“She’s very consistent in the pattern of her little spaceout. She’s finished cutting and serving and eating, and now comes the funny social part where she talks to her party guests without saying anything.”

“And how does it end?” Nathan had asked, still snapping, still finding the evocative angle, at times forcing Chase to weave herself around him as well. (Her arm brushed his hand at one point, and it was ice cold, though the room and the house were fairly warm.) It ended with Chase getting up from her knees and walking over to the metal-tube-and-canvas child’s bed at the other end of the room, where she lay down with a blank face and pulled her covers—teddy-bear sheets and two Hudson’s Bay blankets—over her. The images of her walking away from Nathan—again light bounced off the earthy walls—highlighted her long waist, muscular, low-slung buttocks, and short, athletic legs, a combination which Nathan had always found compelling, though the opposite of Naomi’s short waist and long, slim legs.

“I don’t think punishment is involved, Barry. I think she’s reliving something, something that was communal. And she’s playing all the roles.” Nathan was leaning on his elbows, speaking to his screen more than to the actual Roiphe, but now he sat up straight and turned to the man himself. “I wonder what that something communal could have been?”