David Cronenberg - Consumed

Fingers flying, Naomi was already checking out Grünberg on Wikipedia. The featured portrait depicted a man with wild, protruding eyes, fleshy lips, and thinning, muddled hair. “Of course, I’ve heard of Grünberg from the boating accident scandal. But he was still practicing medicine? Like a regular doctor?” Grünberg had narrowly avoided conviction on charges of homicide involontaire —manslaughter—in a tragicomic drunken boating accident on the Marne River in which two of his three illegitimate children had been decapitated, after which had followed much sour public discussion of the value of genius in the real world.

“That was the basis of all his revolutionary research. Patients like Célestine.”

“You discussed that diagnosis with him?” asked Naomi.

“No. We knew each other socially, but he and I were cool to each other. Probably just primitive jealousy. We’re not immune. But Célestine reported everything back to me. Medical diagnoses, obscure medical websites, this was our daily bread.”

Naomi was incredulous. “He said nothing to you?”

“He was acting here as her doctor, her specialist. He had a professional rigor. He wouldn’t discuss it like café gossip.”

“You saw test results? Blood tests? Bone scans? CAT scans? MRIs? X-rays? Anything?”

Arosteguy shook his head at all of these—short, angry, contemptuous head shakes.

“Could Dr. Grünberg have been lying?” said Naomi. “Could Célestine have lied to you? Could she have not been sick?”

“I told you about the changes in her body. Those were real.”

“Maybe they were caused by something else.”

He snorted disdainfully. “A woman’s natural aging? It’s amazing what people will attribute to that. How they refuse to see things they are terrified to see.”

“Dr. Trinh told me that there was nothing medically wrong with Célestine.”

“Dr. Trinh was infatuated with Célestine. She adored her, worshiped her, could barely look at her without falling on her knees. It was embarrassing. She was pathetic. Célestine never went back to her after Anatole’s diagnosis. And why would Célestine lie to me, tell me she was dying when she wasn’t?”

“To induce you to kill her,” said Naomi triumphantly. “A mercy killing, but not for the reasons you thought.”

“A perversion beyond perversity! What a wonderful invention on your part. You are a dangerous writer after all.”

Soon Naomi was curled up on the couch with Arosteguy, who had his arms around her and was caressing her throat. For both of them, the resonances of philosophical wife-strangling that were undeniably in the air were comforting, not disturbing, offering a linkage to richly textured past dramas full of meaning. Her eyes were half closed and her voice was drowsy.

“But it was hideous, wasn’t it? The actual act itself—the eating, I mean? It was a horror show. Butchery. Those pictures. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. And Sagawa, he was eating a healthy young body. It’s sick of me to say this. I’m shocking myself for even thinking it. But somehow, because Célestine’s body was so ravaged by disease, it makes it more horrible. I can’t believe I said that.”

Arosteguy laughed a short laugh that quickly shaded into a husky whisper, a theatrical technique, thought Naomi, which was probably effective when he was lecturing; she liked it herself, and felt for the moment like a student with cozily limited responsibilities. “Healthy sick thoughts,” he said. “Honest ones. But you are able to say that because you didn’t know her. You didn’t know her body with the intimacy that I did. You see a corpse, a dead, mutilated, anonymous—yes, diseased—body. But not me. I lived in the landscape of that body for so many years. As that landscape changed, my living changed with it. She never stopped being my Célestine. Never.”

Arosteguy kissed Naomi with passion and hunger. She kissed him back with the same. Soon they were naked, half on the couch, half on the floor. “Are you going to bite me?” said Naomi. He did. And she bit him back, on the shoulder, the biceps, the neck. “And then, are you going to eat me?” And he did—breasts, thighs, and then down to her pussy. She stopped him, grabbing his head, holding on to his hair.

“Oh, no, Ari. I forgot. My old boyfriend…”

“Your boyfriend, yes?”

“No, it’s… he just told me that he has Roiphe’s disease. You know. That venereal disease. I mean, I might not have it, Roiphe’s, but I have something…”

Arosteguy snorted. “Do you know my age?”

“Wikipedia says you’re sixty-seven.”

“Wikipedia is correct. And what a force for global harmony that creation is!”

Naomi detected no irony. “What has your age got to do with my disease?”

“Well, we are both diseased, aren’t we? For example, I no longer spurt. I just ooze, in a sinister way, like a popped pustule. For me, those come shots in porn videos, like cake-icing guns going off, they’re pure sci-fi, they’re CGI VFX only.”

Naomi snorted back in deliberate imitation. “What else? Do I get the whole list now, or do I get a chance to make some exciting monstrous discoveries?”

“Over time, with these sexual disabilities emerging gradually, old couples gradually accommodate them, and they don’t embarrass each other, they become part of the domestic seniors comedy you promise to write together, but your memories are thankfully not too good and you forget to do it. But for a youngster to be thrown into the den of the aging lion… I’ve experienced some difficult moments.”

“With your students.”

“The youngsters with enthusiasm and defiance, yes, which protects them from revulsion for a little while, but then…”

“You’re lucky nobody’s blown the political correctness whistle on you. I think those days are long over, even in France.”

“There have been dramas behind the scenes. The French press has had a tendency to be a bit more discreet than the rest of the world, but with competition from Facebook and Twitter… All sexual adventurism is lethal now.”

“Didn’t some of your youngsters have sexual insecurities?”

“Oh, yes, all of them. Célestine and I took full advantage of them in the name of therapy and philosophy.”

“And me? I have a few of those myself. Do you want my list, or do you want to make your own discoveries?”

“Honestly, I think a list would be charming. We can exchange them, and then see if reality matches.”

“I’ll start working on mine right away. But meanwhile, I’m serious about having my own oozing down there. You might catch something nasty. Do you have a pack of cute Japanese condoms lying around somewhere? There must be Hello Kitty condoms. Translated as Hello Pussy.”

“I’m so tempted to say something that sounds like it came from a poorly translated Punjabi erotic tale, something like ‘A cook must have a taste for sauces, no?’ and then go down on you.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“And please don’t do that?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“BUT WHERE ARE YOU GOING? You booked a hotel? How can you afford that? And I thought you needed to hide out in Tokyo.”

“I’m going to hide out even more,” said Naomi, hustling her remaining gear and clothes into her bags.

Yukie watched her, shaking her head. “From me? You don’t trust me?” Naomi turned away from the bed—she had colonized it and the kitchen table and a few other surfaces to organize her packing—and held Yukie by the shoulders. Yukie rolled her eyes up to her, and Naomi was surprised by the emotion she could read in them.

“Yukie, no, no. It’s not like that at all. It’s not.” She hugged Yukie, who let her body stay limp, unresponsive, a full-body pout.