David Cronenberg - Consumed

Célestine and I glanced at each other and could see that we were immediately in sync. We were overwhelmed, horrified, and also delighted. After all, the normal terror in the face of life-altering surgery did not exist for Célestine. Like that poor boy in Cologne, she was ready to throw her breast under the steel wheels of the tram if there was to be no surgery. So focused was she on the removal of the insect-sac, as she had taken to calling it (myself, I found this repugnant, but I could say nothing), that she had lost all fear of clinical misadventure, of death on the operating table. In this context, the pretentious rhapsodies of our good doctor leavened a potentially somber occasion with a dose of playful metaphysics, however suspect, that we found surprising and welcome.

Even more surprising, perhaps, was the seriousness with which he conducted his tutelage over the next few days. He had arranged our “gathering” to overlap a colleague’s procedure—only a lumpectomy, unfortunately, but still it was the breast, and of course still illuminating for one who had never been in an operating room—and insisted that we both “audit the performance.” I will spare you the details, but not my reactions: it was sensational and exhilarating to the point that I began to question my sanity, or more accurately my mental health. After that audition I could not wait to take up the scalpel, which Molnár first had me do in a bizarre fashion: he had commissioned a Molnár Clinic app for the iPad and designed an electronic scalpel which allowed one to perform several kinds of virtual breast surgery on the iPad itself. It reminded me of the early days of frog dissection over the internet, but of course was immeasurably more sophisticated—freakishly so, even incorporating (the perfect word) breasts of different sizes, races, and nipple/areola configurations.

Célestine was eager to try out the app, and she became particularly adept at the radical mastectomy, in which not only the breast tissue is taken but also the axillary lymph nodes and even the chest muscles. She seemed drawn to the Asian breast model, and I attributed this to her complex relationship with her Vietnamese general practitioner, Dr. Trinh. Célestine was amused by this idea but didn’t accept it as valid. In any case, she and Molnár had many intense discussions about the need, or lack of need, for a radical mastectomy in her case. Ultimately, she felt that it was not indicated, given that her insects were not analogous to a metastasizing cancer which might invade her lymph nodes; a simple mastectomy would suffice. We agreed that the three of us would write a paper on the collaboration of the patient with the disease, and then, as a consequence, the patient’s collaboration with the physician on the nature of the treatment of the disease.

Molnár tried his best to maintain professional decorum throughout our clinical education, but he got quite drunk at what seemed to be his own restaurant, La Bretonne, and we actually had to endure his sobbing and wailing in happiness as we toasted each other with a particularly medicinal apricot pálinka . “I have so much respect and love for you. I have resisted documenting everything, so much respect is invoked. But I am proud to be interpeded within your long-standing love affair. I feel that I am a lover to you both, in the way that I have read that you have taken on some students as lovers in the past. And yet, and yet I am also your teacher in this enterprise, and you are my students. This is something so delicious and tart, it forces tears to spring from my eyes.” This is not something you want to see in your surgeon, and it did rattle us. It caused us an anxious night in our suite—they had upgraded us spontaneously—at the Corinthia Hotel. But the next morning our doctor presided over our iPad surgery session with full, dispassionate propriety, responding perhaps to the distancing effect that working on an anonymous African breast, delivered by the iPad’s HD Retina display, had for all of us. Molnár assured me that when I began to cut into Célestine’s flesh, the effect of the cool light of the surgical lamps and the masking-off of my wife’s face would have the same effect, and I would have the detachment to be an excellent surgeon. “See how steady your hands are? Beautiful. Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy. You are a natural. You have been rehearsing this your entire life.”

It would not be until after the surgery, later in the hotel, when I could, all by myself, remove the surprisingly large and clumsy surgical staples with the disposable white-plastic-handled staple remover, no more sophisticated than something you’d buy at an office-supply store, that the emotion would kick in, that the vast and deep reservoirs of our personal history together would overflow, and we would be overwhelmed by what we had done.

But here, at the turning point of both our lives, mine and Célestine’s, and in a sense yours as well, dear Naomi, is where I have to end the narrative which has submerged me, and to surface again, and come back to you.

“IT WAS NASTY OF YOU to speak French to me. Cruel. Are you always so cruel? You’re a cruel person?”

“You told me you just forgot all your French. You never said the language traumatized you.”

“I thought you understood.”

“I thought I did too.”

Chase was wearing jeans, black stockings, loafers, and a formfitting stretchy black T-shirt with long sleeves sporting thumb holes. Her thumbs were in those holes, and her hands were half covered as a result. Nathan thought he recognized the style from something Naomi had bought at a store called COS in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He was normally oblivious of the details of clothing. It was like being tone deaf, he thought, a genetic thing, nothing you could do about it; only the general impression ever remained, never the details. When Naomi said, “What was she wearing?” he would fumble for an intelligible answer, and it became a major item in their large storehouse of self-directed jokes. But where Chase was concerned, fashion was evasion, literally a cover-up, and so he forced himself to mentally download the details and store them; and in some cases, like now, as they made their way up the carpeted stairway to the third floor of Roiphe’s house, he resorted to surreptitious technology in the form of his muted iPhone, recording her from behind when she wasn’t looking.

Chase had acknowledged the banning of the doctor from her domain upstairs—“father issues,” she said flatly—and had outlined the rules of engagement for Nathan: no photos up there, no note-taking or voice recording, no reports to Daddy. All those things might come later if she was comfortable with his presence after the first go-round. At the top of the stairway was a small landing overlooking the atrium formed by the spiraling staircase. It was gauzily lit by diffused daylight from the fussy art nouveau skylight above, and connected four doors, all of them closed and, he assumed, locked.

“Which door would you like me to open, Nathan?”

He had seen what was behind one of the doors—her bedroom—when Roiphe had taken him on his late-night excursion to Chase’s tea party, but of course he was not going to mention it; in any case, he was not sure which door it was, so disorienting had that night been. “Maybe you should decide that,” he said. “I’d just be guessing.”

“Yes, I suppose I should shape the narrative for you.” She turned to the door farthest left, pulled out a set of keys on a braided ring, and opened it. “I have a secret color code for these keys so I don’t get confused. See these little stickers? Okay. Come on in.”

Nathan followed her into a short room featuring a steeply sloped ceiling with a gabled dormer whose window looked out into the bristling, serrate leaves of a large chestnut tree that were showing the brown blotches of fungal blight, with crisping edges curled like the vegetable equivalent of Dupuytren’s contracture. Chase flicked on the overhead gimbaled halogen lights and gestured towards the device sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. It looked something like a European clothes dryer, but one with a very high-tech powder-coated steel chassis bathed in violet LED mood light.