David Cronenberg - Consumed

The programming of the hearing aids, the connections with North Korea, all the most hallucinatory, paranoid imaginings, were real, and the consequences for her proposed article, now obviously needing to be a book, were that she was miles further from the totality of the story than she had ever thought. Could she go to Pyongyang herself as more than just a tourist under the strictly controlled jurisdiction of the state-owned Korea International Travel Company? She understood that journalists, particularly of the North American variety, were rarely granted visas. Would Romme Vertegaal give her an interview by Skype or, much preferably, travel to meet her somewhere? Would this put her in danger? And was Célestine really alive and in the capital of the Hermit Kingdom? Could Elke’s Skype event with Célestine have been faked? It would be easy to create a monologue for a virtual Célestine, animating the many images and voice recordings that she had trailed behind her over the years; or, given the stutterings and audio glitches expected when Skyping at such distances, adroit operators could create the semblance of a conversation, of specific responses to comments or questions. It would be a nuclear event if Naomi could track and confirm Célestine’s fate. Or was Elke just lying? Perhaps Naomi would pick up the thread of her nascent Elke relationship once she was back in Paris.

And then finally she found the coffin-shaped red plastic 64 GB Verbatim thumb drive wrapped in plastic film and sunken clumsily into the greasy cream contents of a white jar marked, in English, “Kanebo Moistage W-Cold”—it seemed to be an olive-oil-based cold cream, though Ari’s blotched and pebbly facial skin belied any use of such a balm—and the growing heap of electronica became irrelevant except for the MacBook Air, which she would use to scour the drive’s contents. She thumbed the slider to extend the USB connector and slipped it into the Air’s left-side USB port. It would be two more days before she found herself scrolling through images depicting the dismemberment and cannibalization of Célestine Arosteguy.

THE FEAR MADE NAOMI feel closer to Ari, almost to the point of a destabilizing fusion. As her own fear of kidnapping by DPRK agents amplified (they would probably pose as entomologists or audiologists), she was certain that she was picking up that vibe from Arosteguy himself, and that he in turn picked up hers. This fusion, however, proved to have its own usefulness. Once she had found the Verbatim drive and discovered that it was encrypted, she felt she had to become Arosteguy to stumble upon the drive’s password. She spent the two days after Elke left crawling nanoscopically through Arosteguy’s electronics, none of which had even the simplest password to protect it. She combed through his Contacts app, his email, his desktop littered with disparate thumbnails of photos (some in 3D, though she never found the necessary 3D glasses), folders, magazines, technical PDFs, user manuals. She trolled the websites revealed in the History menu of his Safari browser, desperate for any clue that would unlock the thumb drive. She delved into arcana in his old MacBook Pro that she had never paid attention to before: Disk Utility encryption; FileVault; recovery keys; the Keychain Access app in Mac Utilities. She plunged deeply into security forums on the net and came up with a few passwords that Arosteguy had used for some political and philosophy websites that demanded them; but he had obviously been careless about, or more probably disdainful of, securing anything at all, apocalyptically inviting, she felt, the world’s swarms of viruses and scams to come and overwhelm him, to take his machines and his past life away, to leave him stripped and dripping, as she had herself seen him more than once.

She could not leave the house, of course. She could not risk being rendered to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to one of the undocumented gulags, concentration camps, apartment prisons, there to rot while the boy deity Kim Jong Un matured and hardened into a ripe old age, attended to by his court philosophes Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy, who would be unaware that she was so near. She knew that this scenario was ridiculous, and yet it stirred painfully in her viscera as a living and undeniable creature, and when she accidentally tripped onto the official, rather sumptuous English-language webpage of the DPR of K, as they called it (it was in Ari’s browser history, and finding that he had visited it many times chilled her to the bone), she jumped back from the screen of his laptop and immediately slammed it shut, terrified that the webpage could track her, could send her Tokyo coordinates directly to the deadly entomologists, who would kick down her door, muscle her into a waiting Audi, blindfold her, drug her, expunge her. She blamed her creative paranoia on a lack of protein; she had been reduced to eating nothing but plain instant ramen noodles for three of the four days since Ari’s disappearance, nothing else edible having been left except for a small bottle of soy sauce, which lasted just over one day.

She was in the bathroom when it occurred to her that the Verbatim stick might have been encrypted by someone other than Ari, and this thought depressed her and led her to consider flying to Paris to seek the help of Hervé Blomqvist, whom Elke had labelled an IT genius and who would have reasons to help her unravel the mystery of Célestine’s fate. Or would he? Tina might in fact be dead, and Hervé might be implicated in some way, either in the murder itself or in some aspect of covering up details. A perilous course to take, then. More depression. Naomi opened the jar of cold cream in which the thumb drive had been hastily (it seemed to her) concealed and began to smear some over her cheeks, which, like most of her skin, had become hot, dry, and stinging. When she used “kanebomoistagewcold” as a password, the Verbatim unceremoniously unlocked with that delicious metallic Mac padlock sound effect; when the drive appeared on her desktop, it called itself “La mort de Célestine.”

THE NAME WAS PROVOCATIVE ENOUGH. Was Ari being direct and Célestine was dead, or was Ari being ironic, given that Célestine was not dead, and her death had been faked? And was it Ari himself who had named the drive, or had it been someone else? Opening the drive, Naomi found two folders, “Vidéo” and “Photos.” She opened the video folder and there found one long QuickTime file called “PRIVATE.” It was not password protected, and so when she double-tapped her trackpad, the QuickTime Player opened on a mysterious frame, which, when she tapped the play triangle, revealed itself to be an extreme close-up of Célestine’s mastectomy scar, just a Rothko-like abstraction until the camera pulled away to expose a calm and thoughtful Célestine submitting herself to the camera clinically, without carnality, as though for a mammogram. The revelation of the scar triggered a shot of adrenaline in Naomi: first, because the mutilation of Célestine was shocking; second, because it meant that at least part of Ari’s confession was true, though the cause could still have been cancer rather than an apotemnophile’s hallucination about a buzzing horde of insects nesting in her breast. The camera moved over to Tina’s right side, prompting her to take her remaining breast in both hands and offer it to the lens, compressing it analytically and accentuating its engorged nipple. The camera was still very close to her, making it difficult to determine where she was lying, or even if she was lying; the force of gravity on her breast, which would have at least hinted at whether she was upright or flat on her back, was negated by Tina’s breast-holding, and the camera spent some time in extreme close-up mode, surveying Tina’s face and then body, tracking down her only slightly protruding belly until it arrived at her thinning bush of graying pubic hair, where it lingered as Tina rotated her hips gently towards the lens. Naomi estimated from the detail of the pubic hairs, especially as the camera moved, that the video bit rate was reasonable, probably the AVCHD high standard of twenty-four megabits per second. The color was very good; the room was apparently lit by muted daylight coming through a window somewhere to the right, the skin tone cool and accurate with no yellow contamination by incandescent lights.