David Cronenberg - Consumed

His friends were certain that he committed suicide in some fiendishly clever way that involved the absolute dissolution, possibly by automotive chemicals, of his body, and that was also the tentative official police version of his disappearance. Célestine, however, was sure he went to China and disappeared into the vastness of that country, despite his height. And then came Judicious , and Célestine knew that he had ended up in North Korea, making propaganda films for Kim Jong Il, and then real movies for his possibly more volatile successor, the boy-king Kim Jong Un, movies which had certain messages directed at her, Célestine, Romme’s eternal and transnational love.

And so, that night when Célestine shook me awake to tell me that we must destroy the insect religion, I knew we were in trouble. I just didn’t know what shape that trouble would take. Perhaps in the cards was an approach to whatever clandestine North Korean representatives in Paris we could find with the suggestion of a special visit to their homeland from two famous French philosophers, with an emphasis on the philosophy of cinema. Once there, Célestine would try to contact Romme Vertegaal, who worked under the pseudonym Jo Woon Gyu (the listed director of Judicious ), and would elope with him, or rather would marry him under the auspices of Supreme Leader Kim, auspiciously replicating the forced marriage of Simon Sheen to his actress ex-wife after they were both kidnapped, and symbolizing the divine fusion of political philosophy and cinema in the Workers’ Paradise of the North. Could Célestine really think in these terms? Profound emotion lay beneath all her thinking, but it never stopped her from being crystalline in her logic, rigorous in her doctrine. Everything connected with Romme, on the other hand, was soaked through with girlish lunacy, and was very disturbing and destabilizing to me and to us.

But even given all the time I spent living in her head and in her body, I never could have anticipated Célestine’s actual Korean strategy.

WE DRIVE AN ELECTRIC Smart Fortwo in Paris. I took Célestine to a North Korean restaurant where she was to meet some mysterious collaborators on her Romme Vertegaal project; it was famous for its startling military-theme design featuring the graphics and colors of totalitarian kitsch. She asked me to leave her there; she would call me when she was finished. I became worried that she was getting into a potentially dangerous situation. I fantasized that she herself would be kidnapped and spirited off to Pyongyang. That she didn’t want me involved troubled me even more: it meant she was communing with Romme, almost the only time that she could not also commune with me, and of course that was distressing. I confess that I parked our car some streets over and lingered across the street from the restaurant.

As I stood there smoking, sheltering in the entrance to a carpet shop, I mused, oddly enough, on the fact that even in his youth, Romme had worn hearing aids—originally Phonaks, but when last seen, Siemens—as a result of a childhood disease. When I finally accepted that I needed them myself, I thought of Romme’s claim that they were tuned to the music of the spheres, and then, more seriously and mundanely, to certain satellite frequencies. He was never ashamed of or reticent about his hearing disability; he was more likely to be boastful and aggressive about it—he politicized it, like everything else—and so it became a cause. After he had worked you over in a café, you felt as though you ought to at least pierce your eardrums with a fork tine in solidarity with him, and also to experience firsthand the divine creation of Swiss and German audio technology. In a kind of audio-homage to him, I went to his own audiologist when it came my time to be fitted. By then, digital technology had enhanced the sophistication of these devices beyond science fiction to the point that they could be linked to cell phones, satellite GPS, and many other communications devices. It was commonplace to call them hearing instruments , an appellation with empowering artistic overtones, as opposed to hearing aids , a term unfailingly evocative of aging and infirmity. My own Siemens instruments featured Bluetooth, six separate programs tailored for different hearing environments, rocker switches for program shifting and volume control, and a wireless controller that looked like a garage door opener. Mme Jungebluth cryptically assured me that she numbered several international intelligence agents among her clientele, none of whom was hearing impaired.

I was certain that any of those agents would have been listening to Célestine’s dinner conversation if he stood where I did on that corner, and recording it and transmitting it to some distant Siberian outpost, but I was left, pathetically, only to imagine it. And then I saw Célestine emerge from the ornately carved doorway of the restaurant in the company of two Korean men in dark suits and ties, one middle-aged, one quite young. She turned to face them, paused, and hugged them, one after the other, with great, joyous warmth. The young one handed her a padded manila mailing envelope which he took out of his inside jacket pocket, and as she stuffed the envelope into the pocket of her coat, he put his hands together, bowed, and turned away. His companion did the same. As the two men walked off down the street, Célestine took out her old Nokia clamshell and called me. I quickly muted my own phone’s ringer and turned my back towards the restaurant.

“Yes?”

“I’m on the street outside the Eternal President. Will you pick me up?”

“Of course. Give me ten minutes.” But I stood there for at least five, watching her like a spy, like a curious stranger, like a talent scout for an Albanian sex-slave trader, analyzing her body language as she paced and smoked, rhythmically patting and squeezing her coat pocket to make sure that the envelope was still there, seeming to take pleasure and security from whatever was in it.

Back in the car, Célestine was distracted and joyful, a very disturbing combination. “How was it?” I said. “The Eternal President. I’ve never been in there. I assume the name refers to Kim Il Sung. The walls must be covered with glorious images of him in that Stalinesque North Korean style.”

It took Célestine too many seconds to reply to what I said, almost as if she had to decide to absorb it first and then decide to respond. “Not just the walls, but the plates too. Kim Il Sung as the Sun King, laughing, happy, emanating yellow rays of light, encircled in red, adored by soldiers and workers of all ages. And the floor show: beautiful young girls in strictly cut, short-skirted military dress and cake-shaped peakless caps, but executed in cartoonish colors and fabrics, pastel chartreuse and fuchsia, performing perfectly synchronized choreography that seemed to mock military exercises while somehow glorifying them at the same time. And singing songs that did the same thing, pop versions of army songs, soldier songs, aggressive and cheerful and threatening. It was exhilarating in its alienness.”

“And the food? You ate?”

“Oh, yes, we ate. Fish and soup—I think it was dog, honestly—fried dumplings, fritters, and kimchi, and a lot of things I couldn’t identify. The music seemed somehow to mix in with the food. It made it humorous to eat, even ironic. My friends assured me that it was authentically North Korean, not South, but that only the elite there would experience the high quality we were presented with.”

“Your friends were Korean?”

It was here that Célestine looked at me for the first time since she got in the car, almost surprised to discover that she’d been talking to another person and not to herself. “Oh, yes. They were Korean. South Korean, but very helpful.”