David Cronenberg - Consumed

“Well, what do you think?”

“Your 3D printer?”

“The FabrikantBot 2. This is the very rare floor model. It’s got a huge build volume. Most of them are desktop.”

“Looks good. What do you fabricate with it?”

On a night table next to the FabrikantBot was a twenty-seven-inch iMac which Chase now woke from its cozy electronic slumber. Once she had typed in her password, a window snapped up which depicted a congenial green landscape with shadowed mountains, clouds, and blue sky in the distant background; various chunky control icons dotted the landscape’s periphery. On the lawn-like foreground sat a mesh graphic of a cubic volume within which perched a stylized pink great horned owl. Chase kneeled before the computer and began to massage the wireless Magic Trackpad beside the keyboard. The owl responded by rotating in all directions with flawless three-dimensionality. “This is a file I downloaded from thingiverse.com. That’s a communal website where you can find thousands of 3D modeling designs uploaded by the community, all for free—bicycles, engine models, anything. It’s all STL files—I think that means stereo lithography, or something like that—and all the digital modeling programs understand those files. If I were to hit the Fabrik button here on the screen, the printer would start to make me this little owl.”

“That would be great,” said Nathan. “I’d love to see it in action.”

Chase nudged her cursor up to the cardboard-carton Dropbox icon in her menu bar and opened the Dropbox folder. “Well, okay. I’ve got a new design waiting right here for me. It’s something my friend in Paris has sent me. I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. It’s an STL file, so I drag it into the virtual build space of the FabrikWare program so that I can scale it up or down and play a bit with his design. Oh, gosh. I’m embarrassed!”

Gosh. The owl had disappeared, and there on the screen was an eccentric, unapologetically erect penis, presented in the same bland and cheery pink as the owl. Chase turned to Nathan, gray-green eyes vibrant, shining. “Are you okay with this, Nathan? Another man’s sexual organ?”

He had somehow missed the radiant power of her eyes until just now; probably, he mused, a function of too much looking through a lens. “Pretty much okay, as long as I don’t have to play with it.” She laughed a conspiratorial laugh. “And who is this other man? I mean, is it just a CAD/CAM design fantasy or what? I mean, what I’m seeing is not normal.”

“Oh, no. Hervé would never do that. He subscribes to the philosophy of the cinema verité filmmakers of the sixties.” Nathan noted that she pronounced the French words in a risibly Anglicized way.

“They wanted to document reality in an authentic way, right? Even when they were making fiction films. But how does that equate here?”

“Hervé uses a handheld laser scanner on real objects in the real world—his version of the shoulder-mounted Eclair NPR camera all those verité guys used. Incredibly expensive, but he got an arts grant from the Ministry of Culture and he has some sketchy patrons. He doesn’t design. He might combine, and so on, but the basis is always real-world scanning.”

“So he scanned someone’s penis with a laser scanner?”

“It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing. It’s done for movies all the time—actors’ faces get mapped onto the faces of stuntmen so that it looks like they’re doing really dangerous stuff.”

“Not sure someone would want that penis mapped onto their own.”

Chase blushed. “It’s Hervé’s penis, of course. He’s not shy about his condition, believe me. He’s managed to turn it into quite a popular tourist attraction. It wouldn’t curve that much if it weren’t erect. I’m sure he had a friend help him with that part of it. Maybe one of his patrons.”

“So now that it’s on your computer, what are you going to do with it?”

Chase went back to the trackpad. “So you’ve dropped your file into this virtual build space, and then the interface gives you the tools to rotate it, like this, turn it around, scale it up or down. I think I’ll make it bigger than it really is, just for fun. The software lets you know when you’ve exceeded the physical build volume in the machine, so you can’t make that mistake. Then you get the software’s slicing engine to julienne your virtual object before the machine creates the physical object, layer by layer. They used to call it ‘rapid prototyping’—a very nice term.”

“You know how big it really is? Your friend’s penis?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it many times. Now watch.” She hit the Fabrik button and the printer came to life, the print head beginning to surge back and forth with relentless energy on its steel rails. “You see this roll of pink filament back here, on this spool attached to the chassis, looks a bit like a big fishing reel? It could be any color, but I happen to have this intense pink. It’s made of PLA, polylactic acid, it’s a renewable bioplastic. So the print head pulls this filament spooled in the back up through this clear tube here, see? It’s pulled up into the extruder, which heats it up and squirts it out through a macro hole onto the build platform, which, as you can barely see, is slowly descending as the model is printed out layer by layer. You can find tons of videos on YouTube of stuff being printed with speeded-up motion. It’s mesmerizing. Really a lot of fun. The platform sinks down like an elevator and the object kind of mushrooms up on top of it. This thing is probably going to take two hours to build, it’s got so much detail.”

The print head had already laid down a pink disc—rather small and plaintive on the substantial translucent build platform—which represented a slice through the root of Hervé Blomqvist’s penis. Mesmerizing enough, but Nathan was primarily mesmerized by Chase, who had snapped compellingly into focus the moment she engaged him through the lens of the FabrikantBot 2. She was displaying an unexpected geeky passion that was even deeper than Naomi’s, and for Nathan that was pure, dangerous sex.

“And what exactly is the condition that your friend… Hervé…?”

“Yes, Hervé Blomqvist. We were students in Paris together.”

“Does he expect you to actually do something with that? The thing he sent?”

“Oh, he knows that I will, and he probably has a good idea what that’ll be.”

Nathan could only imagine her using the emerging device as an oversized dildo, and immediately got an erection that fused unpleasantly with the image on the computer. “What’s the condition that makes his penis take that extreme bend halfway down its shaft?”

“Three French doctors,” she said.

“What?”

“Hervé said he was plagued by three French doctors: Dr. Peyronie—that’s what the penis has; Dr. Dupuytren—contracture of the tendons and then the fingers so your hand goes like this”—Chase made a claw with her left hand—“and that often goes along with Peyronie’s; and Dr. Raynaud—his feet sometimes go purple from lack of blood circulation whenever it gets even just a tiny bit cold. Three French doctors. Sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?”

“You seem to know this guy fairly intimately.”

“We were a very tight group there, at the Sorbonne. It was exciting.” Sorbonne pronounced the way a Midwesterner who had never heard of French might have pronounced it, with the accent on the first syllable: sorbn . Nathan wondered if she would gradually evolve an elaborate meta-language which would annihilate any trace of French in her speech and thinking, the way le schizo Wolfson had done in transforming English into a compound of Hebrew, French, German, and Russian. It was, in a way, the inverse of Samuel Beckett writing some of his works in French in order to get away from his mother tongue and thus force himself to write, he said, with greater clarity and economy.