David Cronenberg - Consumed

“She mentioned the 3D printer to me. Said she’d show it to me.” “Really? Well, that would be rare. She’s sure never let me see her using it, I can tell you that. And hell, you should see the damned thing. Not cheap! She insisted on the best, and then, like I said, after setting up and outfitting the whole third-floor suite for her, three rooms and a bathroom, she won’t let me see what she’s actually doing with it in what she calls her workroom. Actually locks the door on me. I could break in, of course, but I’m scared to. Might set her back into that catatonia she was enveloped in when I brought her back from France. You should’ve seen her, stiff as a board and all bundled up with blankets even though it was as hot a summer as today. So she said she’d show you? Well, there you are, you’re a part of my course of therapy. We collaborate on Chase as well as the book, and that gets her over some of her father issues too.”

Nathan wasn’t ready to delve into the father issues, but he suspected that they would have deep and tormented roots. “Wow. That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? I’m just a journalist.”

“These are radical times, boy. Can’t you feel it? You need to stretch with the times, stretch to the breaking point. I sensed the second I saw you that you were ready for a life breakthrough, and this is it. No telling where it’ll lead.”

“I’m not sure how much she’ll want to collaborate after the door slam.”

“Just don’t speak French to her again. I’m sure it’ll be all right. She’s kinda intrigued by you. She’s been pretty reclusive since I brought her back.”

“Have you ever heard of the book Le Schizo et les langues ? Written in French by an American, Louis Wolfson, a schizophrenic who couldn’t bear to speak English, or even to hear it spoken, and retreated completely into other languages, but mainly French. In his case, it was mother issues.”

“Well, there you are, you see? Destiny has called in a specialist for me, and it’s you, boy.”

“WE COULDN’T TAKE PHOTOS after the diagnosis. Every photo displayed the lie. Every photo was already a memento of a life that was gone, a photograph of death. Compared with those innocent early family photos, the pictures I finally took of Célestine… afterwards… they were honest, they contained no betrayals, no lies, no deceit. So they were horrible, but they were pure.”

The futon had been folded back into its couch configuration, and Naomi, now in yoga pants and gray fleece Roots zip-up hoodie, had taken possession of it, spreading all her electronic paraphernalia protectively around her: MacBook Air on lap with shield-like lid open, glowing Apple logo a talisman against Arosteguy, who sat on the other side of the low table, slumped in the segmented brown velveteen beanbag chair. She had originally recorded him using the Nagra’s uncompressed WAV files, which were huge but so beautifully detailed; the lossy MP3s would have been more than adequate for transcription, but she wanted the full quality of Arosteguy’s smoky voice, anticipating at least a radio program if not a video documentary. For the moment, though, she had been playing back a key passage of Arosteguy’s Célestine testimony through her Air’s tinny speakers—not resonant, but clear enough for condemnation. The Nagra sat on the table close to Arosteguy, its blue LED modulometer twitching in sync with the distant street sounds, waiting for him to speak. Naturally, he had tea and an RIN cigarette to play with while he generated a response, and he sipped and inhaled and exhaled with exquisite cogitation. Finally, he glanced up at her with calculated, sheepish charm and smiled.

“I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Célestine . There are so many blogs and articles in the ‘Living’ sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Célestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.”

He took an intense drag on his cigarette that was rich with unspoken, ironic drama, or at least Naomi interpreted it that way. She felt humiliated to have been deluded, suckered into a sympathy fuck, and at the same time triumphant and eager for a scoop that was beyond the internet’s reach. Undeniably, it was Nathan’s photos—their full meaning still cloudy—that had brought Arosteguy to heel, and it meant that she and Nathan were still some kind of team, perhaps not on the scale of the Arosteguys but pleasingly outlandish in its own way, and maybe she would encourage Nathan to fuck Chase Roiphe if he hadn’t already, just to sharpen the parallels. The thought made her giddy, and some juices began to flow.

Arosteguy seemed to be fading away into his own head now, and Naomi reflexively became the interrogator. “Ari, let’s start with the basics. Was Dr. Trinh telling the truth? Célestine did not have brain cancer or any other kind of cancer?”

Still pacing the inner landscape of his own skull, Arosteguy answered without looking up, as though Naomi were inside that skull with him. “Dr. Trinh, yes, she was telling the truth about that.”

“And so… why is she dead? What killed Célestine Arosteguy?”

“Célestine woke up in the middle of the night. She shook me to wake me up. When she could see the light swell back into my eyes, my consciousness, she said, with great, husky gravity, ‘We must destroy the insect religion.’” He raised his head and looked at Naomi, but she felt, with a deep visceral chill, that he was looking at Célestine. “That was a pulled trigger, it was a terrifying shot fired into my brain directly from her mouth.”

“I don’t understand the reference.”

Aristide laughed; he was now looking at Naomi. “No trigger for you, then. Because obviously you’ve never read the famous essay.”

For Naomi, this was the pulled trigger, the terrifying shot fired into her brain directly from his mouth: her ignorance, her lack of depth. Yukie was able to flaunt this thinness, could flip the veneer into the structure, the wood-grain paneling becoming the table itself, just like all her social contemporaries; if you knew too much, if you were too aware or too educated, you were vulnerable to special varieties of pain and anxiety, and, worse, you were not cool. But Naomi was not Yukie. It caused her anguish that she had not read the famous essay, had not known it existed. But strangely, given any kind of handle at all, she could imagine it, and this had always been her quick, saving grace: not knowledge, exactly, but intuitive invention. “I’m sure I can find it on the net. Title?”

Arosteguy stubbed out his dying RIN and quickly lit another one. “The essay was called ‘The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion.’”

Yes, thought Naomi as she netted madly, here it is: Weber. Capitalism. Vatican. Luther. Entomology. Sartre. Consumerism. Beckett. North Korea. Apocalypse. Oblivion.