David Cronenberg - Consumed

He yawned and stretched and half sat up. “I suppose a photo of the deflated, semen-encrusted penis of the notorious French philosophy cannibal could be of interest, even if taken with an iPad.”

“Only five megapixels, but a nice documentary quality. Probably all you need for a book.” He pulled in his legs to make room for her and she sat next to him. “And speaking of documenting, there’s something on this”—she waggled the iPad—“I want to show you. Or do you want me to make you some tea first? I think I’ve mastered those two crummy little rusty burners.”

“I was endlessly fucking you in my sleep.”

“Your snoring was very sexy.”

“Snoring?”

She did her best to replicate his snoring, not sure if he simply didn’t know the English word or was surprised to hear that he had been snoring. It came off sounding a bit like one of the mocking green pigs from Angry Birds, a free HD copy of which she had on that very iPad.

Arosteguy laughed. “You must do sound effects for me more often. You have a great talent there. But show me what you want to show me. I usually wake up with clarity that rapidly fades, so maybe now is the best time.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close with a deep grunt in a way that she found disturbing, neither very French nor very Japanese, and perhaps quietly desperate; it didn’t feel like part of whatever their relationship was, felt more like the incestuous embrace of a father and daughter (was this what Nathan meant when he talked about “theme sex”?), Arosteguy sitting there with his exposed thighs and penis and balls, she naked under her skimpy, threadbare happi coat, and it gave what she was about to do—show him Nathan’s photos knowing that they had explosive potential (though she wasn’t sure what that would be)—an ultra-perverse sheen.

She unlocked the screen and angled it towards Arosteguy. “These are photos my friend Nathan took. He’s working on a piece in Toronto.”

“I know the city. Very nice. Friendly. I was there in 1996 for a Third World energy symposium. What are these photos? Who is that girl? Nice haunches. What is she doing?”

Naomi paged rhythmically through the photos, Arosteguy reacting with little grunts and exhales as though still asleep, until she paused at the first shot showing Chase in close-up. “Ari, do you recognize her?”

Arosteguy cantilevered his head forward and squinted at the screen. Naomi spread her fingers over the shot as though stretching out a membrane, enlarging it until Chase’s enraptured, openmouthed face filled the viewer window. Arosteguy jolted back as though struck in the head, his right hand violently clenching Naomi’s shoulder. He stood up, roughly raking his arm across Naomi’s shoulders as he pulled away from her, backing away from the futon, eyes blazing with anger. Naomi felt herself shriveling up like a spider touched by a lit cigarette, but still had the presence of mind to activate the iPad’s Voice Memos app, and this had a soothing, distancing effect, allowing her to float into that protected space which is professional observer , safely placing Arosteguy on that rotating specimen platform under the magnifying glass. He paced back and forth, muttering to himself, then snatched his tight-fitting navy corduroy pants off the floor and struggled his way into them without underpants, which he seemed never to wear. Thus armored, he sat back against the front windowsill, pushed his lips out into a flexing pout as though silently rehearsing his next sentence, and then said, “Who is your friend who sent these photographs?”

“His name is Nathan Math. He’s a journalist. Lives in New York.” Arosteguy nodded. “Boyfriend?”

Naomi, shrugging with an insouciance she did not feel, said, “Sometimes.”

“So, your boyfriend and you. A classic American journalistic conspiracy.”

“Ari—”

“Why have you done this? How do you know Chase? What are you two trying to do to me?” He pronounced her name “Shass,” which almost tilted the whole melodrama into farce for Naomi.

“I don’t know her. And I wasn’t sure that you did either. She’s back home in Toronto with her father, a doctor, Barry Roiphe. She’s in some kind of weird therapy with him, and Nathan is in their house to write a medical article about them. And she told him that she had studied at the Sorbonne with you and Célestine. That’s all. A coincidence, not a conspiracy.”

Arosteguy barked out a harsh, phlegmy laugh, and the phlegm seemed to remind him that he needed a cigarette. He roamed around the periphery of the room until he found the pale yellow flip-top pack with the bold red Japanese character crowning the letters RIN, and was soon inhaling deeply. Naomi was surprised that he smoked cigarettes with cork-tipped filters, her surprise a matter of style rather than smoking arcana (she had never smoked); she felt he should be a Gauloises man, just like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless , Gauloises Caporal without filter in the classic soft French-blue pack with the machinelike winged-helmet logo; but of course he was resolutely turning Japanese. She had a very strong impulse to photograph his pack of cigarettes, could see even across the room that the same red Japanese character on the pack was printed on each cigarette just below the filter. Given the importance that consumerist impulse, passion, and identity had in the social philosophy of the Arosteguys, it seemed imperative that she eventually apply to the couple themselves their own approach to psychology: consumer choices and allegiances were the key to character and to all social interactions. She was sure Arosteguy was conscious of that as he struggled—how serious was he? was it merely ironic?—to become Japanese by consuming Japanese items. She could see the conundrum exemplified by Western versus traditional Japanese clothing; he was too proud, too aware, to allow himself to become a caricature of a Japanese man who clings to tradition—if he were to become Japanese, it would be a current and forward-looking variant of the same—and so it was left to minor items like cigarettes and food to carry the transformation.

“No, but really, I admire you and your boyfriend Nathan. A new and modern version of Les Liaisons dangereuses . A very compelling partnership for the Information Age. It should make for a very nice entertainment.”

“Ari, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The smoke in his lungs really did seem to relax him, modulate his rage into sarcasm, a relief for Naomi. “I know it seems ridiculous, but it really is a complete coincidence. Nathan is with the Roiphes because of Roiphe’s disease. I told you, he gave it to me and then decided to research it. That’s how it all happened.”

“An unexpected coincidence, then. Okay. And then some unexpected consequences?”

“What would those be?”

Arosteguy stubbed his cigarette out on the sill, folded his arms for a meditative moment, then walked back to the futon and sat down beside Naomi. He gently took the iPad from her lap and held it up in one hand. “May I play with these? The photos of Chase, taken by Naomi’s good friend Nathan?” Naomi gave a shuddering, terse little nod, eyes wide, nervous, excited. He hunched over and began to examine the images, scrolling through them and expanding them with forensic intensity.

“What are you seeing?” said Naomi.

Without looking up, he said, “I am seeing that Aristide Arosteguy will soon be caught in a lie, and so he might as well tell everything to his priestess confessor.”

“What was the lie?”

“That is exactly what a priestess would want to know. But isn’t she curious about the mechanism of revelation? The priest of my childhood, for example, Reverend Father Drossos, a terrifying man, was obsessively, perhaps unnaturally, concerned with the mechanism of revelation. Of course, there were sinister and familiar reasons for that.”