David Cronenberg - Consumed

“Is that why you posted those photos of your wife’s half-eaten corpse?” Naomi said, holding her breath. “To destroy the jokes? To bring the discourse back to human reality?”

Arosteguy put down his chopsticks and crawled around the table on all fours. He kneeled close to Naomi. He put his lips close to her left ear and whispered. His voice was somehow even more textured and forceful as a whisper. “If you want to understand, you must experience this mouth, the mouth of the cannibal, the mouth of a thousand bites, a thousand human atrocities.” He didn’t touch her, and he didn’t bite her, and after many long, frozen seconds, Naomi forced herself to turn to him, her own mouth half open, an unformed word lingering. Arosteguy placed his open mouth forcefully over hers. It was not really a kiss—more like a cap being placed over a jar. Naomi was suddenly terrified. She didn’t dare move. Arosteguy began to breathe air in and out of her lungs through his mouth. She had no choice but to breathe in sync with him. She was waiting for his tongue, not knowing how she would react when it came, but it didn’t come. He took his mouth from hers and slumped down beside her.

“So pathetic,” he said, with a grunt. “So sad. Such a cliché. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don’t feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel… pathetic.”

Naomi wanted to ask him what work of cinema or literature he felt was being replayed at that moment, but she was afraid to speak, and so there was silence, and she could only hear his heavy breathing and not any breathing of her own. Then he spoke as though they were in the midst of a discussion she had somehow missed.

“There are other photographs which you have not seen. I’ll show them to you if you fuck me. I’ll give them to you. Nice thick digital files. They are powerful and they will shock you and you’ll be a star. But I need you to be my lover for a while, my Tokyo mistress.”

“I… Professor, I…”

“Ari. That’s my name to you. Aristide becomes Ari. We didn’t establish this? No, you’ve barely said my name. Does it taste disgusting in your mouth? You know, Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal, who still lives right here in Tokyo, said that the Dutch girl’s ass tasted like tuna prepared for sushi. That’s enough to make it dangerous for any Dutch woman to visit Japan. He’s considered a tragic hero here, a media celebrity. An artist. I can envision lineups of Japanese men waiting for the Netherlands tourist buses to unload, each with his Suisin maguro bōchō sharpened and ready.” He drank some sake and muttered under his breath, an afterthought. “Of course, she was a Dutch girl. That made it somehow not so criminal. Maybe even praiseworthy.”

The mention of Sagawa, whom Naomi had initially thought might be a clever stepping-off platform for her piece, now filled her with horror. It was obvious and vulgar and revolting, and it was making it hard for her to physically see Arosteguy. The way he held his face, he was starting to actually look Japanese. “Ari, I… I can’t do that, what you ask,” she said quietly, projecting, she hoped, thoughtful consideration, though there was nothing to consider. “I can’t.”

Arosteguy launched himself unsteadily upwards and stood over her, towering over the low table and filling the room with his anger. He screamed at her. “Then get out! Get out, get out!” He kicked at the table, lifting it a foot or so before it came crashing back down, scattering the food, the camera, the dishes, then stormed up the stairs, leaving Naomi shaking, her eyes wide and swelling with tears.

She flew out of the house dragging her roller with her, its contents hastily stashed, its exterior compartments bulging pathologically, cables hanging and jouncing out of the improperly zipped pocket mouths. Her momentum carried her into the middle of the street, which was dark, dingy, and completely deserted. Scared, stalled, and now acutely alerted to her drunken state by her inability to perceive depth, she pivoted on the spot like a pinball flipper, looking for a cab. There was nothing except Arosteguy, strolling casually out of the house and walking up to her, coming very close to her as though nothing had happened, speaking as though continuing an understood subliminal conversation that had to be finished. He took her arm gently, just holding it, not pulling her.

“We made love frantically, desperately, as though I could possess her and keep her from death,” he said quietly. “But I couldn’t, of course. She was going to die. Her body was changing. She had swellings and nodes and lumps and rashes. I had to forcibly change my sense of sexual esthetics to accommodate her new body. I needed it to still be beautiful for me, though it was changing every day, every hour. And finally, when the changes were all coming to an end, we wanted her to die while making love to me, not fucked by a dozen plastic tubes in a hospital. So we devised a plan, and we carried it out.”

He bent down and picked up the roller, still holding her arm, and led her back towards his house, its door wide open, the pale fluid of its light washing the plant rags of the garden. She let him take her with him. “I strangled her while we made love. The swollen lymph nodes in her neck made it difficult, but more exotic. You know that in French an orgasm is la petite mort , the small death. And for the English metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘to die’ meant ‘to come,’ to have an orgasm. It was the most intense, exquisite moment in my life. It was a moment you never recover from. I kissed her while she died. Her eyes were full of love and gratitude. Her last breath came into my lungs like a hot tropical breeze.”

Naomi stopped just outside the door, shrugging off Arosteguy’s hand. Her voice was quiet and small. “I’m afraid of you, Ari. I thought I wouldn’t be, but I am.”

“And now she was dead, and I was alone. And what was I to do? Wave goodbye like a good bourgeois and soldier on with my life? Plead madness like the good Marxist professor Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife of thirty years in their special permanent apartment in the infirmary of the École Normale Supérieure, no less, and claimed he thought he was just massaging her neck? A few years in the asylum and then a comfortable exile to the provinces?”

He took her by the arm again and began to walk her into the house. He was giving her things, terrible, precious things. She didn’t resist. “No.

I wanted to embody her, to incorporate her. I would have had to commit suicide if I had not been able to do that terrible, monstrous, beautiful thing.”

He slid the door closed behind them.

“THEY SENT ME TO PARIS. I was afraid to go.”

“Why afraid?”

“French.”

“French the people or French the language?”

“The language of the French.”

They were sitting in the living room replaying Nathan’s first conversation with Roiphe there, Chase sitting on the sofa, Nathan in the wingback chair with the Nagra running on the glass coffee table. He was extremely uncomfortable, but it was an exciting discomfort; there was so much strangeness about the situation. If she really had been in some kind of trance, a fugue state, she would not know that Nathan could see right through her soft dress and sweater and striped knee socks to her ravaged skin. But did she really not know? Would she care if she did know? How could he find out? How direct could he be? Could her trance really be some species of bizarre performance art? If it was, was it designed for her father alone, or was Nathan’s presence part of what induced it? And the project, the pretense for their current interview? Chase had suggested a half-truth: Nathan was there to do a book about her father, and that book would include a bit of family history as background—nothing too deep, nothing sensational, and all subject to review by the subjects. No photos, she had said. She didn’t accept Nathan’s line about using the photos only as a memory aid, to make sure he got his descriptions right; it wasn’t going to be a picture book. She would perhaps do a photo shoot with him under controlled circumstances some other time, but she couldn’t talk while being photographed. Something had happened in Paris that had changed her attitude to being photographed, and it was no longer something to be taken lightly, girlishly, playfully; too bad, but things changed, didn’t they?