David Cronenberg - Consumed

Before she ascended, Célestine sat on my bed and kissed me with as much passion and sensuality as she could while keeping her mouth shut tight, as was her new habit, the unspoken fear being the migration of insects from one body to another. I missed the mouth that fell wide open at the first touch of my lips, fell open with the evaporation of social will and any hint of reservation or resistance, the mouth that mindlessly invited—no, begged for—complete invasion and possession. I wondered if that mouth would ever return, perhaps immediately on our return trip from Budapest. And after the kiss, the by-now-ritual hearing-aid stethoscopic examination of the breasts and abdominal cavity, Célestine pulling open the top of her pinstriped cotton pajamas (they looked like the New York Yankees’ home uniform, though she never wore them at home) and giving her breasts to me, now not her lover but her diagnosing physician. I could hear the vibrations of the rails in her flesh, and I could hear the insects too, clamoring for my attention and creating little capsules of sound that, in the overheated compartment, began to say rhythmical, nonsensical things to me, the way you might hear voices in the motor of a treadmill you were jogging on, or in the gnawing of an electric pencil sharpener. But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, it seems, that we construct meanings where there are none.

So too, the insect voices speaking to me from deep within Célestine, for by the time she left my bed for her own flight deck, the nonsensical, rhythmical things had become sensical, sequential, gnomic things that were full of meaning. I could still hear them through the upper bunk, shifting in tone and clarity as Célestine shifted from back to side. The insects knew why we were going to Budapest, and they were feeling persecuted. I turned off my Pures and put them into their puck-like container, which sported separate niches for each instrument, both receivers, and extra batteries, but as I placed the container on the fold-out table crammed tight to my berth and turned out the light, the insect-voice residue was still strong in my ears, like a bubbling, chittering excrescence of wax.

And so we rocked and rolled our way through a dreamy nighttime landscape towards Munich, and then wrapped ourselves in the modernist, leather-clad luxury of the Railjet, which left Munich at 09:27 and arrived in Budapest at 16:49, after pauses in Salzburg and Vienna.

YOU KNOW HERVÉ BLOMQVIST, of course. He sent you to me, and that was very much in accordance with his assumed role of social enabler and political provocateur, with a special emphasis on combining the two. He met Zoltán Molnár when Molnár, a notorious Hungarian surgeon who at times had been sought by Interpol for his involvement in the illegal international trading of human organs for transplants, and who was in the habit of materializing as if by magic as the proprietor of pop-up transplant clinics in places like Kosovo and Moldova, slipped surreptitiously into Paris to conduct clandestine seminars on the politicization of the human body and the response of the international medical establishment to that politicization. According to Hervé, who was, as you know, an intimate member of our intellectual family even as a student, Dr. Molnár flaunted his vested interest in subverting the establishment of government regulation of the organ trade, while at the same time making an inflammatory case for the humanistic benefit of that regulation. Let poor people in impoverished countries sell their kidneys to the rich, he said. It’s organic capitalism of the best kind, and is good for everybody, and should be monetized and industrialized to the maximum degree.

Naturally we googled the good doctor to the maximum degree before we made an appointment for Célestine’s mastectomy at the Molnár Clinic on Rákóczi út in Budapest. We eschewed the offer relayed by his office of a package deal which included a Malév flight and a room at the Gellért; we wanted some distance between ourselves and the very enthusiastic doctor, and the all-inclusive deal, which involved meals at a restaurant called La Bretonne, felt like an entrapment, an intimacy urged with such intensity that it bordered on the salacious. And yet, what we were seeking was intimate, was perversely salacious, and we were aware that our diffidence was an emotional paradox which would not stand up to rational scrutiny. Only Dr. Molnár, Hervé assured us, of all his many subterranean contacts in the medical world garnered during his sub-rosa gamboling, would agree to allow me to perform Célestine’s mastectomy under his supervision. Only Dr. Molnár, said Hervé, with that disarming boyish sweetness that lightly masked a rather ruthless intelligence, only the good doctor would see that the removal of Célestine’s insect-infested breast was a neurological imperative and not a psychiatric one. Molnár was of the school that believed apotemnophilia arose from a congenital cerebral dysfunction and that its symptoms could be relieved only by complying with the patient’s wish for amputation. Needless to say, it pleased both Molnár’s and Hervé’s sense of anarchy and social subversion to support this view, and it didn’t take much for Molnár to absorb Célestine’s case into his already edgy caseload. He had presided over only one other apo event: a male twenty-eight-year-old sex worker in Cologne who wanted to remove his left leg below the knee and who, frustrated by the reluctance of any doctor to amputate when there was no apparent physical reason to do so, tried on several occasions to jam his leg under a moving tram, causing great consternation in the city’s Stadtbahn offices, not to mention the streets themselves. After the man visited the Molnár Clinic (according to the colorful emailed brochure originating in Romania), the patient’s life improved on every level, including the professional, for he found a thriving specialized clientele in his new incarnation which he had never known existed.

And so we encountered the flamboyant doctor in his lair in a dense industrial suburb of Budapest which housed, among countless other international corporations, the Israeli Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. This proximity to legitimate medical businesses gave some comfort to me and Célestine, although the clinic itself was undeniably shady, located, as it was, totally underground in the poured-concrete entrails of an enormous, deteriorating complex. We found ourselves in the windowless Executive Director’s Consulting Room, slumped in red-and-yellow butterfly chairs that had somehow survived the sixties, waiting for our preliminary tranche of instruction from the chef himself. On the walls were posters in several languages, which seemed to be extolling the virtues of medical tourism in several countries—Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, India—none of which was Hungary.

“My luminaries!” he sang out. “I am thrilled to have you here. I have been rereading both your works in preparation for our glorious collaboration.”

“Collaboration?”

“You will forgive my enthusiasm and my presumption. But you must accept that what we are here today to do with each other cannot be subsumed under the mantle of medical procedure alone. For me to put the scalpel into your hand, my dearest Monsieur Arosteguy, is basically a crime, you understand. Though I fully comprehend the emotional ownership of the breast involved with the husband and the wife. In the light of that ownership, the alien surgeon is an intruder, a rapist, a violator. Why should he be allowed to sever that most beautiful organ from that beloved body? Who the fuck is he anyway? No, only the husband should have the right to do that intimate severing with all its resonances of personal history. And so on. But legally it’s a crime. So what’s the solution in our heads? In my head, the solution is that we are not committing surgery, but are creating an art/philosophy/crime/surgery project. The three of us. A collective. The Arosteguy Collective Project. Do you agree?”