David Cronenberg - Consumed

Eventually the camera backed away, floating languorously, so Naomi could see that Célestine was lying, not on a bed, but on a worktable set up on a mezzanine overlooked by massive wooden ceiling beams. The beams—pockmarked oak smeared with a white glaze—were of a now-extinct size and configuration that suggested they were medieval, and thus that the apartment was likely in the Jewish Marais section of Paris. It was not, then, the apartment of the Arosteguys. Célestine, somehow comfortable lying exposed on the rough butcher-block surface of the table, continued to intimidate Naomi, who was certain that if she had a mastectomy she would never allow herself to be photographed naked, much less reveal her wound publicly.

When a slim-hipped naked young man entered the frame, Naomi immediately knew it was Hervé, even before he walked around the side of the table to place his hooked penis in Célestine’s coolly accommodating mouth. He brought with him something metallic that looked like a ray gun from a 1950s sci-fi movie, pale blue and silver and trailing a black cable. The muscles of his forearm were taut from supporting the substantial weight of the mysterious device. The naked young woman who entered from frame right, however, she did not immediately recognize, even after the woman had knelt at the head of the table in order to kiss and lick Célestine’s mastectomy scar, her sinewy left arm stretching out so that her fingers could burrow into Tina’s pubic bush. It was not until the camera drifted into a low-angle close-up that Naomi could identify Chase Roiphe, the star of Nathan’s Toronto portfolio, and some of the pieces began to click into place.

But not all. After less than a minute of casual sex play among the three of them that seemed more like a social ritual than a hot orgy, Hervé stepped back from Célestine and became absorbed in the manipulation of a complex array of buttons on the body of the ray gun. Chase also detached from Célestine, who seemed to understand this as a signal to pose for what Naomi assumed was some kind of 3D capture. Tina swept back her long gray hair and draped it behind her so that it hung over the end of the table like a curtain. With a laugh, she then arranged herself into a grotesque, contorted pose, which Chase helped her to achieve by minutely adjusting the angles of her asymmetrically bent legs, splayed fingers, twisted arms, arched neck. It struck Naomi that she was playing the role of a tormented corpse in a 1960s Hammer horror film.

Chase stepped back to watch as Hervé squeezed the trigger on the pistol grip of his ray gun and began to sweep laser light over Célestine’s body; a grid of red crosshairs, emanating from the device’s twin spacepod-like nozzles, undulated like a ghostly manta ray over the contours of her flesh. Hervé brushed Célestine delicately, meticulously spray-painting every inch of her body with the light as she fought to hold the arranged position, her belly contracting with laughter as some unheard words were spoken and jokes were cracked. The camera floated gracefully around the trio, at times moving in to follow the sweep of the lasers and then tilting up to catch the expression on Chase’s face, so full of love, excitement, amusement, sensuality. The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent-shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed; if you looked only at their bodies, the two youngsters could have been siblings, Chase’s a female version of the bicycle-hardened physique of Hervé. Now Chase closed the eyes of Célestine, as one might close the eyes of a cadaver, in preparation for Hervé to work the scanner over her face, but abruptly, the video ended. Naomi could not be sure that the camera operator was Arosteguy (the framing and movement were so assured!), but she knew he was there somewhere, watching and guiding.

Ultimately, she was disappointed by the video, wondering if after the scanning, whatever it was intended to do, there was sex among the four of them, and wishing that somehow she could have seen that instead. The confirmation that Chase Roiphe was sexually intimate with Hervé and the Arosteguys was of course valuable, and established the luscious necessity of a focused visit to Toronto, to Nathan, and to the Roiphes. Naomi was now convinced that Chase’s bizarre trauma was connected with the death of Célestine Arosteguy; the mouth aspect, the French-language revulsion, the self-mutilation, the eating of her own flesh, were too perfect. She quit QuickTime Player and double-tapped the “Photos” folder, which popped open to reveal two sub-folders: “Célestine est morte” and “Des photos pour M. Vernier.”

THERE WERE 147 JPEGS in the “Célestine est morte” file, which Naomi immediately decided to import into Lightroom so that she could catalogue and organize them with all her other research photos. As the thumbnails of the images loaded into the Import screen, she saw that they were all black and white and had been deliberately degraded in quality to give them a vintage feel in the Hipstamatic style—very contrasty, heavy vignetting, digital grain added to mimic Kodak Professional Tri-X panchromatic 35mm film, the old high-speed standard for newspaper and documentary journalism. All were starkly lit by a harsh on-camera flash in the tradition of the 1940s Speed Graphic flashbulb crime-scene photos of Weegee, and it occurred to her that the subtle linking of these images to socially historical crime photos was an attempt to authenticate them, because now that the importing was concluded and Naomi could examine them full screen in Lightroom’s Library module, they struck her as quite obviously posed and theatrical and manipulative, qualities that disturbed her even more than the content of the images itself.

The setting was not the attic workroom of the video, but the now-familiar space of the Arosteguys’, not much changed from its configuration in the various interviews that Naomi had seen. The sequence of the photos told a little story. Célestine is dead and has been dismembered, as per the police photos, with her body parts strewn randomly around the apartment and her torso on the couch. Hervé, Chase, and Arosteguy himself, gradually revealed to be completely naked as the shots’ perspective widens and they emerge from behind various elements of furniture, take their turns biting small pieces from her thighs, her hips, her shoulders, her belly—but never all three in one frame, which suggests that one of them is always assigned camera duty. Blood is dripping from their mouths and from the bite-sized wounds they are creating, and there is a glazed, zombie-like affect to all their faces which somehow embraces primordial pleasure as well as toothy efficiency. Célestine’s severed head, hair swept back as in the video but now parted to display a crudely cracked-open and hollowed-out skull, sits on the small table next to the old Loewe TV, watching the ghoulish trio with half-closed eyes (her brain is eventually to be found on the kitchen drainboard). And most shockingly—in a way that Naomi felt only she could appreciate—Célestine’s torso begins the session with two full breasts, and when all the mouths have had their way with her left breast, violently ripping and tearing and seeming to eat it on camera, what is left is a raggedly circular bloody wound, not a clever mastectomy scar. Her right breast, though also savaged, remains attached to the torso.

The missing breast. Naomi obsessively scanned the face and body of Arosteguy in every photo in which he appeared, searching for a hint of mischief, of irony, of theater and performance. She wanted him to be sending her a message that said, “I was fantasizing for you about the mastectomy, the Hungarian surgery. It never happened. What you are seeing now is the reality. We three are cannibals and we ate that breast.” But she found nothing but ritualistic solemnity on the faces of all three. And it was bracing, in a distancing, Brechtian V-effekt fashion, for her to see Ari’s naked body in this context, from this perspective, so familiar in its powerful fullness, its slope-shouldered monumentality, that she could feel the weight of him on her, could feel his teeth in the meat of her shoulder, and yet also feel how separate she was from him, how alien he truly was. In the video, Célestine’s body had reminded Naomi of the famous sequence of photos of the nude Simone de Beauvoir taken by the American photographer Art Shay in a Chicago apartment’s bathroom. They both had the same good muscular rump, slightly heavy legs showing age-puckering behind the knees, and slim waist, though Célestine had fuller breasts, and Naomi had never seen a photo of Beauvoir with her long hair down (even primping in the Chicago bathroom after her shower, she wore high heels and her hair up in a tight chignon). Or perhaps Naomi was forcing a physical connection when it was really the seduction of students that linked them, a scandal even in those days before political correctness, and for which Beauvoir and her eternal president Jean-Paul Sartre were infamous. She had never discovered a nude photo of the tiny, toad-like Sartre.