David Cronenberg - Consumed

“But didn’t you enjoy it, the cutting?” she said. “On some level? Now that I know you…”

“You would like to inhabit my body as I approach Célestine lying on the table, inhabit me as in those sci-fi movies where a warrior climbs into a giant robot nine stories high and operates its immense arms and legs from inside the robot’s glass head.”

“Yes. Exactly like that.” Of course she was recording, and of course he knew it. The Nagra sat on the faux-stone beside her, blinking happily. He wouldn’t perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

“All right, then. I approach her body, and it is her body , because her face is hidden in a sterile cloth tent erected around her head. And it is not exactly Célestine, because her color is wrong, she’s blue and green, and so in a sense is not alive, not sensible.” The French often got that last word wrong in English, Naomi observed; in French it meant sensitive, responsive, sentient. “And her smell is wrong, a harsh disinfectant smell. And I swear to you, her breast is outlined and bisected with dotted purple Magic Marker dashes—cut here!—like some terrible nightmarish cartoon, a large teardrop shape with the nipple in its center.

“Molnár is hovering over my right shoulder, my scalpel side, whispering to me, his prize pupil, urging me on, sensing my reluctance and fear, but also sensing—you will not be surprised to hear—that I have an erection, and I am suddenly flooded by the emotions of my karaoke colleague, as though his words of that night have swarmed my brain and have become my words, my thoughts, and now I am about to fulfill both our dreams by cutting off the breast of my wife.

“I am about to make the first cut. Molnár has cautioned me not to think in terms of perfection, of making the perfect cut, because that leads to paralysis; it’s impossible with flesh in any case. ‘Look at that footage of Picasso making his drawings: no hesitation,’ he says. In a sense, no thought at all, just pure instinct and a desire for the reality of the drawn line, whatever it happened to end up being, a certainty that it would be right. But still I tremble when I first sink into her breast the hot needle of that terrible electronic scalpel, with its disposable blade for disposable flesh.”

Arosteguy had been pacing constantly as he spoke, and so now, when he suddenly stopped, it had the impact of a gunshot. “It’s too banal,” he said.

“What is?”

“This voice-over description. This talking-head interview.”

“Oh, no! What do we do?”

“I need you to bare your breast and then I reenact it. We collaborate.

How great for your article or even a book. How dangerous I am. How brave you are. How perverse and yet somehow sweet.”

“But can’t people see us here?”

“We’re gaijin . They don’t care what we do to each other, or even what Japanese citizens do to us. Remember Sagawa? And many other crimes against gaijin ? Not worth worrying about. And sex surgery? This is Japan, my darling.” Arosteguy had been fumbling around in the pockets of his corduroys and now produced a short, thick, Japanese Magic Marker with a very thin tip, which he brandished like a cigar. “We will play doctor. You will be Célestine, the willing, excited patient. I will direct your performance. I will play two roles: the somewhat reprehensible but roguishly charming surgeon, Dr. Zoltán Molnár; and then the entirely reprehensible and ponderously unappealing French philosophe , Aristide Arosteguy. I will direct my own performance but will entertain any suggestions offered by my co-star regarding stagecraft. And we will cover the entire process of breast removal as far as I remember it.” The effect of their communal drinking was beginning to manifest itself in his slurred pronunciation and the general mistiming of his mouth and his body. Naomi had been matching him drink for drink—sake and then beer—primarily to keep his narrative rhythm from faltering, but she now regretted it, certain that her own timing must be deranged even though she couldn’t gauge it—a bad sign for her.

As she began to unzip her fleece hoodie, Naomi felt doubly whorish: she was going to expose her breasts in a Tokyo backyard; and she was doing it knowing that it was only for the article, for the book, for the perversity of the narrative and the commercial value of her Arosteguy project, taking it so far off the rails that it was probably irresistible to any publisher, paper or electronic. The feeling did not daunt her; she was enjoying the transgressive whorishness of it in the most childish way. A huge advertising blimp floated into view overhead, its flanks lit up by an animated slideshow featuring a line of Finnish fitness equipment. Naomi watched dreamily as a miniature collapsible treadmill, suitable for modest apartments, was demonstrated, and imagined Célestine and Ari treading side by side in Paris. As though induced by her fantasy, Arosteguy took two resolute steps towards Naomi, fell to his knees at her feet (groaning slightly as the bursitis swelling the tip of his right knee expressed itself), laid the Magic Marker on the bench, and took her hands in his before she had managed to completely unzip. “Let me unbox you,” he said.

“Do what?”

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism. I love them. You watch as an anonymous Vietnamese teenager lovingly opens the box he has just received which contains… One of those, possibly.” Arosteguy flicked his fingers towards the Nagra. “He is in ecstasy—we can ascertain this only from his voice and his boyish hands with the edgily bitten fingernails, the camera never wandering from the box and its contents—but he is a master of delayed gratification, as are his thousands of viewers. He will slit the tape holding the box shut with a special box-cutting knife. He will first take out the smallest inner box containing the charger and charging cords and the instruction manuals in several languages. He will fastidiously cut open the tiny heat-sealed plastic baggies holding the battery and the earphones and the adapters. And then finally, with a tremulous flourish, he will lift out the bubble-wrapped object of desire itself, the electronic device, saying, with feigned nonchalance, in lightly accented English, which is the language of consumerism, ‘And, well, okay, so here it is…’”

So here it was: Naomi’s left breast, unwrapped with a tremulous flourish by Arosteguy, though not without some difficulty, because she was by happenstance wearing her white compression sports bra—she had thought she might find time to go jogging around the neighborhood—and the sports bra’s slender metal front clasp had, with the familiar innate maliciousness of small mechanical things, seized, forcing Naomi to twist it open for him before allowing him to complete her unboxing. She was traveling with only two bras this time around, and she would have preferred to be wearing the lacy black Victoria’s Secret underwire with removable straps, but the whole procedure seemed to be occurring on an intellectual level, and he didn’t seem put off by the white bra’s unsexiness.

She sat braless, hoodieless, and mysteriously comfortable, her hands spread and resting palms up on the bench as Arosteguy dangled the bra from a finger, letting it rotate gently in the provocative light of the garden like an unexpected flounder. “Afterwards, we fitted Célestine with a special mastectomy bra. It had a pocket on the left side for a prosthetic breast. It was called Amoena, I think, a very beautiful, classical name. Actually two pockets, as though it were waiting for her to lose the other breast. The breast form called Energy Light, Size 4, seemed to match her remaining breast perfectly, though the missing one had been larger. All a question of balance and symmetry and weight and social acceptance. The inside of the prosthetic had a transparent bubbly surface, like bubble wrap, to allow breathing, but it still got hot and sweaty, though there was the promise of a NASA-developed material which could maintain normal breast temperature. The outside was flesh-colored and had a not very enthusiastic nipple at the tip, and its consistency was remarkably malleable and lifelike, though too homogeneous in feel to be a real breast. She wore it twice, I think, and then abandoned it. I used to find it perched on a bottle of liquid paracetamol in our laundry closet next to the washing machine, like a conical Chinese hat. In fact she stopped wearing bras altogether, and made a fetish of wearing tight sweaters and T-shirts that emphasized her amputation, saying that as a child she had a cat with one ear, and now she was one herself.”