David Cronenberg - Consumed

In the morning, she realized that she must have fallen asleep beside him on the bed. Her laptop was still open and on the floor where she had been sitting last night, back against the bed, feet jammed against the wall, scrolling through his photos of Naomi performing Célestine on the operating table. Lying in bed, she had dreamed that she was Célestine, Tina being cut up, but not on the operating table. She was in the famous Paris apartment of the Arosteguys, and she was on an uncomfortably small marble slab being carved and eaten by a photorealistic Ari, a solicitous and appreciative one, who commented on and savored every morsel of her while she herself encouraged him in his efforts to disjoint her and, of course, to sever her breasts, and then finally her head, which never stopped being aware and never stopped smiling fondly, even when he began to eat her lips. When she rolled over towards the sleeping Arosteguy, so strong was the half-life of the dream that she worried that her head would fall off and bump off his shoulder and onto the floor like a soccer ball. But he was no longer in the bed. As she walked the few steps towards the bathroom, she felt as though she were floating on the forceful tide of oblivion which her dream had generated deep in the waters of unconsciousness, and in this floating, which was a cathartic and liberating sensation, she felt closer to Arosteguy, from whom it must have emanated, so strongly did his desire for obliteration radiate even in the most mundane moments. Jammed behind the sink’s Hot faucet she found a crumpled piece of Cute-brand facial tissue streaked with watery purple, and she assumed that he had wiped away his two tears. Had the tears represented Célestine and, figuratively, Naomi, and had he now absolved himself of those two murders?

He was not downstairs. The house was empty except for her. Three days later, it still was.

THE FRANTIC BANGING at the front doors terrified Naomi, who cowered for some minutes in Arosteguy’s bedroom before daring to creep down the stairs, flinching at every repetition of what she felt was a focused assault on her solitude. She was experiencing the odd doubling in memory of her own arrival at those doors, only now she was playing the role of the reclusive, neurotic philosophe —she felt haggard and unshaven, and her unwashed hair felt Arosteguy gray to her—and the unknown at the door was playing, unwittingly, the newly arrived Naomi. Her three days of burrowing into the life of Ari as incarnated by his house and everything in it was no doubt partially responsible for this shift in identities, but there was a willfulness about it on her part as well. She had not yet washed off the surgical guidelines on her breast the way Ari had washed off the murderer’s tattoos she had so lovingly applied to his cheek. (That had seemed callous to her, and even a rejection.) She had not changed her clothes from her garden surgery outfit; she had not left the house to forage for food; and, pathologically, she had not browsed the net, or even opened her laptop or turned on her tablet. She had not felt any sense of violation of Ari’s privacy when she went through every drawer and shelf and cupboard and cabinet in the house precisely because he had abandoned himself by leaving without a word and not returning, abandoned Arosteguy-in-his-Tokyo-house the way a hermit crab casts off its borrowed shell when it has outgrown it. Naomi gratefully crawled inside that shell and became its new tenant, a female Arosteguy, who was close to Célestine, but was not Célestine.

She had not been downstairs since it had gotten dark. When she switched on the same pallid, watery lights that had greeted her on her first arrival at the house, that sense of Naomi-at-the-door was heightened to the point that, on sliding the doors open, she expected to see herself. To her confusion, she did recognize the woman at the door, a woman in a crisp open-collared navy business suit who was teary-eyed and obviously emotionally stricken, and Naomi could not understand how that could be. The woman stared at Naomi, her fist frozen in mid-knock, her mouth slack with disappointment and shock at what she was seeing—namely, Naomi. “Qui êtes-vous?” she said, with an absurd, barely contained outrage.

“I’m Naomi. Who are you?”

The woman lowered her threatening fist in slow motion, seemingly unaware of its independent life. “Where is Ari? Does Ari live here? Does he live here with you?” The English into which she slipped in response to Naomi was confident, overly forceful, and shaped by a hybrid French-German accent.

“This is the house of Aristide Arosteguy. He is not here now. What is your name, please?”

“I’m a friend. I was waiting for him and he did not come to me…” Unexpectedly, she began to sob, and as her thin face crumpled and she turned away from Naomi in shame, thus exposing a comically protruding ear, Naomi realized that she was Arosteguy’s—and Romme Vertegaal’s—audiologist, Elke Jungebluth.

Once inside, sitting in the larval beanbag chair with a hot tea in her hand, Elke dealt crisply with her various errant fluids—the tears, the snot—using the Cute tissues Naomi had brought her from the bathroom. “It took me some time to connect with Professor Matsuda at Todai. This was the contact that Ari had given me. He did not want me to know his address directly. To protect me, he said. I am a French citizen, and his is a scandalous criminal case. And so on. But it was understood that I would come to Tokyo to meet with certain technicians of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I am an audiologist. Some of our hearing instruments are of North Korean origin. Perhaps Ari mentioned to you that he wears them?”

“He told me that they were German. Siemens, I think.”

A rueful smile from Elke. “They were what you would normally call Chinese knockoffs, except they weren’t Chinese. They were North Korean, and not just imitations, but of special North Korean design. It is true that they were stamped with Siemens markings, but it was in the nature of camouflage rather than commercial deception. We have a French electronics manufacturer standing by, very eager to get into the audiology market. The brand name will probably be Eternal President’s Voice.” A secret inner smile. “I have ambitions beyond my immediate métier, as you might have guessed. And so Ari had agreed to test them for us before we dared to expose them to the Western markets, and we arranged for him to report to me at my hotel here.” A catch in her voice. “But he never came. We texted, he was on his way, and he never reached me. I brought my mobile audiology station with me. We were going to finesse the software before my engineering contacts returned to Pyongyang. It’s a big problem for me now. I’m not really prepared to deal with the North Koreans without Ari’s feedback. They can be very harsh in the face of disappointment. Are you Ari’s new girlfriend? You seem to be an American.”

“I was born in Canada. I have dual citizenship.” Naomi was not sure why she thought this was an appropriate response, but there was something in the references to France, Germany, and North Korea that tasted of passports. She peripherally wondered if Canada had any sort of diplomatic relations with North Korea that France or the US did not. She might have to open up her Air and hit the net again, though it had been liberating to pretend the net didn’t exist for the last three days. “I’m a journalist. I’m covering the Arosteguys’ story for some magazines. I was surprised too when he didn’t show up.” This last deliberately ambiguous. She knew that her own bedraggled appearance belied her objectivity re Ari; she and Elke were quite a pair.

“Elke, did your North Korean colleagues know about Ari? That he was acting as a test subject for you?”