David Cronenberg - Consumed

Roiphe snorted and fastidiously lifted his glasses off his nose with both hands, unleashing his turquoise eyes with deliberate dramatic effect. “Why don’t you just ask her?” he said.

NAOMI AND AROSTEGUY ate the meal he had prepared. The dinnerware was spartan and shabby, but the meal itself looked good. A lot of warm sake, which they both poured freely. They used chopsticks and sat on the floor at the low table. Naomi’s camera sat beside her tray, muscular and matte black, like a brooding cat. Her voice recorder sat beside the camera, its blue VU-meter LEDs rippling in response to words spoken, its microphone like the beak of a hummingbird straining skyward. Her cat and her bird watching over her, thought Naomi, and, thinking that, became aware that she was drinking too much.

“Please forgive the decor. Nothing in the house belongs to me. It sat empty for a long time. Tokyo is very expensive.” Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. “I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature.” He shook his head. “The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese ‘the little people,’ I’ve been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study.”

“Why do you need to become Japanese?” said Naomi, cross-jamming her chopsticks and dropping them into her plate. She fumbled them back into her hand and managed to pick up a shrimp.

“I cannot be French anymore, and I was never Greek, except with philosophical and familial nostalgia. So what can I be? I am a fugitive. It satisfies my sense of self-drama, but it racks my nerves.”

“You must be lonely here.”

“I was lonely in Paris.”

“ Même avec Célestine? Sorry. Even with Célestine?”

“That was the basis of our love. Our loneliness. Our isolation.”

“But now that she’s gone? There’s no change?”

“Now I’m… alone. It is different.”

Naomi began to see their mutual drunkenness as an agreement, a contract, with clauses allowing almost everything, at least as far as words were concerned. She felt giddily unafraid. “Monsieur Vernier, le préfet de police , seems to believe that you’re innocent, that you didn’t commit murder.” She seemed compelled to throw French words into the mix; she wasn’t sure why. She really had no wish to provoke him, though he seemed to have no problem with the language at the moment.

“Oh?” Arosteguy snorted a tight little laugh which could have been an expression of self-pity. He had seemed immune to that up until now. “I’ve lost touch with the case, I’m afraid. To my surprise. It seems to belong to many others, but not me. To you, for example. It belongs more to you.”

“He called it a mercy killing. Is that interesting?”

“A mercy killing followed by some elegant cuisine, possibly? The French love their cinema. I expect soon to feel the Hannibal Lecter resonances, and maybe then to pose for photographs with Sir Anthony Hopkins, perhaps in the small restaurant of the Hôtel Montalembert.”

“You don’t want his help?”

Arosteguy gave a particularly dismissive shrug. “He’s a policeman. And not just for the city of Paris. The police of Paris are national police. Imagine the world he lives in.”

Naomi rolled out of her sitting position and half-slid towards her camera bag. In it she found her iPad and, returning to her place at the table, began to scroll through the Notes app until she found the words and photos of M. Vernier and the Préfecture de Police on the Île de la Cité.

“He gave me a message for you.”

“Really? He knew you would come to see me? He spoke to you and his words went into your ear, knowing that? It makes me feel that he’s here himself. So strange. We’ve discussed Schopenhauer on three occasions, Auguste and I, once on the TV show Des mots de minuit . He seems to be obsessed with Schopenhauer.”

Naomi read from her notes: “Tell him that I am conducting a philosophical investigation provoked by his case and I want him to help me with it as a good professional and an academic. To do this, he must return to France.”

Arosteguy popped some noodles and shrimp into his mouth with a theatrical flourish. “You see me eating—look, see?—and of course that seems normal. But for me, to eat anything is not the same now as it was before. Afterwards, I could not eat for a week. I could barely drink water. I almost died here in Japan, such an alien country in any case. But in a way it was that very alien quality which allowed me to disconnect from Europe, from France, from the net of the so-called crime.”

Naomi put her iPad on the floor beside her and picked at her food, very conscious now of the process of how the lips and tongue worked, the jaws, the teeth, the swallowing, but trying to return to normal unconsciousness.

“So you recovered fully.”

“Yes. I hope you have seen that already. There’s a basic life force that expresses itself even in me. It’s crude and merciless, and very hard to overcome.”

“Why do you say ‘even in me’?”

“The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.”

Naomi made an effort to eat the largest shrimp on her plate before responding. “So, Ari, are you admitting to me that you ate the flesh of your wife, Célestine?” She almost gagged on the word flesh , but managed to turn it into a dramatic pause that involved catching some slipping noodles before they fell to the plate. “ Monsieur le préfet made it clear to me that nothing, not that, not the fact of murder, had really been established.”

Arosteguy drew a deep breath, then exhaled deeply, preparing for something special. “Let us say that the question of spousal cannibalism expanded in the media to the point where it took on a potent reality that was not really connected to my life or to Célestine. I was enveloped in that reality, enshrouded, until it became my own, until my own thoughts and emotions were displaced by those thousands that came from television, newspapers, the multiple internet sources, the YouTubes and Twitters, yes, even the car radio and the talk shows, and of course the people on the street, buses, the Métro. I lost possession of my recent past, and my long past, my history. I was colonized, appropriated. I had to leave my dead husk to shrivel and wither in Paris and become someone else, somewhere else. Become Japanese, or failing that—and I am failing that—to become an exile, an isolate, a disconnect. And I have been succeeding at that.”

“You haven’t really answered my question. Will you answer it in the book that you’re writing?”

Arosteguy laughed. “That book seems to be a meditation on the philosophy of consumerism. As you might expect, I have a new take on it, though in a sense that’s all I’ve ever written about. Consumerism…” He shook his head, chuckling, then looked at Naomi with an intensity that shook her. “You know, everything that has to do with the mouth, the lips, with biting, with chewing, with swallowing, with digesting, with farting, with shitting, everything is transformed once you have had the experience of eating someone you were obsessed with for forty years.” He smiled. “Of course, every one of those things also becomes a joke in the popular imagination, which is quickly becoming the only imagination that exists—the media imagination. I’ve seen the jokes on the internet. Some of them are very sophisticated, very amusing. Sometimes there are cartoons, even animated ones.”