David Cronenberg - Consumed

“I don’t think I could be so brave.”

“You can’t know how you would react, which is why we must reenact. We shall become reenactors, like those guys who refight the Battle of Waterloo with those old muskets, with their anachronistic little blue earplugs securely in place.” Arosteguy began to manipulate her left breast in a dispassionate, utilitarian manner, lifting it with three fingers like a baker appraising a nascent pastry, pinching it gently above and below the nipple, then folding it to demonstrate where the scar would end up being. His face was very close to her, and she could feel his breath on her skin, hot from his mouth, slightly cooler from his nose. She gave herself over to the sense that she was channeling Célestine, that part of her body was not her and could easily be parted with; she found that thrilling. “Tina was completely awake and alert, and sitting, as you are now, when Molnár marked up her breast. I would be speaking Hungarian to you now if I could, as Molnár spoke to his staff members over his shoulder, in order to produce the authenticity and strange clinical magic of that moment. He told them to give me an Ativan, because I started to wilt, to faint like a small girl; I could not allay the anxiety that washed over me. The Ativan was very subtle and effective; I could feel everything except the anxiety. Célestine, on the other hand, was calm and solicitous; she smiled and petted me and pitied me as the great doctor began to draw a child’s treasure map on her breast. Like this.” The tip of the pen felt hot—Naomi was sure that it was the thought of the electrocautery needle that made it feel that way—as Arosteguy tracked out with confident dashes a large teardrop shape with its point near her armpit and its body angled towards her sternum, encircling her nipple. He then marked a line from end to end through the nipple. “This is the line of the scar.”

“The nipple would be gone?”

“There was discussion about sparing the nipple and also a possible reconstruction of the breast. Molnár launched into a very pompous meditation on the social significance of the breast and lactation, and on the evolutionary innovation that the mammal represented. Tina just laughed and said that she was intrigued by becoming half a boy, and that she would only be interested in a boy’s nipple for that side, not a woman’s. The doctor talked to her about the difficulty of imbalance. She said that it would be a duality, not an imbalance, and that she looked forward to it.”

Arosteguy drew back, marker in hand, to study his work. Naomi looked down and lifted her breast with her left hand to share the study. “It makes me think of those teardrop tattoos that prisoners have on their cheeks,” she said.

“I had a student with one of those. It was disturbing to look at. He often covered it with makeup.”

“It usually means that they’ve killed someone.” Arosteguy pondered this in silence; she had the impression that he hadn’t understood the import of the tattoos, and so some meanings and understandings were consequently shifting in his head; she could almost feel the blocks rearranging themselves, and thought of Tetris, her favorite childhood computer game. “I’m sure you could get someone here in Tokyo to give you one,” she added thoughtfully. “I would go with you and document it.”

He tilted his head up to face her again and laughed an openmouthed laugh. “Perhaps I’ll need two of them. Are you ready for me to cut you?”

IF ONLY SHE HAD BEEN able to trust Yukie. Naomi scrolled through the photos that Arosteguy had taken of her lying on the concrete bench in the garden, her eyes closed and mouth open in mock anesthesia, her marked-up breast looking pleasingly full, its nipple erect (would Célestine’s have been erect at the moment of cutting, pleading in its own way to be spared, or would it have retracted in fear, her bravado caving at the last moment?), her arms pressed against her sides so that they would not flop down from the narrow bench, her right breast demurely covered by her hoodie. But the badly focused, awkwardly framed images reminded her that handling a camera was not an innate human capability, and that even under the duress of alcohol and sexual weirdness, the media-savvy Yukie would have produced sharp, well-composed photos that she could use to accompany her long piece or book. They would have said so much about Naomi’s approach to the latest flavor of parajournalism, which involved an artistic collaboration between subject and journalist and by its own definition was self-limiting to very rare pairings of the same. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s “saturation reporting” was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos. She remembered studying the concept of parajournalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, journalism that mixed the factual with the invented without attribution; but in her work with Ari, as she was beginning to think of it, the fiction, the creative invention, was all his, and since he was her subject, his fiction was admissible.

Yukie’s photos would have been better technically, there was no doubt, but her presence would have completely altered the biochemistry of the project. And on closer scrutiny, she saw that Ari’s photos were expressive of something thrilling and terrifying: Naomi’s merging, in Ari’s mind, with Célestine. Of course, she looked nothing like his Tina, but in the intensity and macrophagic voyeurism that was evident in his shooting of her, Naomi felt a desperate attempt to re-create his lost wife. He had begged her for the macro lens so that he could get close, the lens she had borrowed from Nathan and still kept—undoubtedly for this moment—and he consumed her body with that lens (the awkwardly named Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED), and it was that lens that became his electrocautery needle. While shooting her, he had told Naomi that he had been able to smell Tina’s flesh burning as he cut her, that Molnár—spreading her breast open with a pair of stainless-steel rake retractors to provide a clear target—had told him to avoid breathing in what he called surgical smoke, because it was toxic. He had not recorded his surgical escapade in any way other than mentally but remembered acutely the Bovie knife, named after its inventor William Bovie, and he kept thinking of the Bowie knife, the huge, cleaver-like fighting knife named after Jim Bowie of Alamo fame. The trim cautery itself seemed innocuous, the flat-bladed metal tip, like a small screwdriver, fitted into its yellow housing, the playful blue plastic handle, yellow power button, blue power cord. It had emitted surprising little lightning flashes as it cut, like a miniature welding torch flickering inside the translucent tent of skin created by the rakes, the layers of breast tissue vaporizing into white smoke with no more than a whisper. “Her breast tissue looked like yellow custard. I felt like Sagawa even thinking such a thing.”

“And when you opened it up, did you find a bagful of insects?”

“Of course not,” Arosteguy had said. “Of course not. But afterwards, in recovery, Célestine was so happy, so satisfied, that the question was never asked, and the answer was never offered.”

After he cut her up with the camera, Arosteguy seemed to fall into a reverie, or perhaps a near stupor—he certainly outstripped her in drinking—and Naomi tried to bring him out of his elusive state by offering to draw one or two teardrops on his cheek, engaging him in a discussion about whether the teardrops should be filled in—indicating murder—or just outlined and empty—indicating attempted murder. It was an oblique lead-in to what she wanted to be a straightforward discussion of how Célestine went from being a euphorically happy mono-breasted apotemnophiliac to a mutilated corpse, but after accepting two solid teardrops—no explanation for the two murders they agreed they represented—which she drew on his damp right cheek in purple marker, he slumped and swooned, and she put him to bed like a child (he insisted it be her bed), after helping him stagger and lurch up the narrow staircase, feeling the full weight and heat and sweat of him.