David Cronenberg - Consumed

The text floated in a pale-green dialogue bubble amid a bead-chain of increasingly frantic gray-bubble texts from Nathan, wondering where exactly she was, and who belonged to the strange Japanese phone number being used. It was a cell number, something he recognized from earlier calls from Naomi, who had borrowed Arosteguy’s phone (81 for Japan, 090 for a cell), and he suspected that this too was an Arosteguy phone, or possibly one belonging to Naomi’s friend Yukie, but until he heard something specific from his texter, he could not be sure that the SMS was authentic. What did it mean? He had studied the crime-scene photos available on the net, and it was true that Célestine’s left breast had been somehow amputated and was not seen in any of them, but given the grotesque cannibalistic elements of l’affaire Arosteguy and the paucity of photos, this was not an obvious question for anyone to ask. Particularly Naomi.

Nathan’s iPhone lay unforthcoming on the plastic wood-grain surface of the table, right next to the simple white plate bearing two overcooked pork chops, a mound of corn, three tomato slices, and a pleated paper cup of apple sauce. The small steak knife had a gnawed handle worn streaky gray from a thousand machine washings. A glass bowl held his plain green salad. He had come back to the Coach with some unspoken symbolic intent, though he was not sitting as deeply into the room as he had first sat with Dr. Roiphe. He preferred to sit closer to the multiple windows at the front of the restaurant, where he could watch the low-key action on the street called Spadina Road. From this vantage point, the Village really felt like a village, like the two-story main street in some small town in Indiana. Across the street: an Edo-ko (a chain Japanese restaurant); a What A Bagel!; a midscale Italian restaurant called Primi; a One Hour MotoPhoto struggling to come to terms with the total annihilation of film technology. It was clear to Nathan that he was not really there, despite the clarity of the details of the restaurant, the food, and the street. His reality had been displaced by Naomi’s—no surprise, really, and not for the first time. Or perhaps it was just that her narrative was more compelling than his, and so Chase was now part of Naomi’s adventure, not Nathan’s. He knew that he had precipitated this by letting Naomi in on Chase’s past history in Paris. But how could he not? She would have done the same for him. He didn’t understand the significance of Célestine Arosteguy’s missing left breast, but if the text proved to be authentic, he was sure he would soon be gently interrogating Chase on Naomi’s behalf. Gloom settled in as he attacked the chops. What was he doing there, really?

The first forkful was barely in his mouth, the touch of it generating more thoughts of his first meeting with Roiphe, when the doctor himself materialized as if summoned by the mere mental imaging. He walked with a hunched urgency, adjusting his strange straw hat—not the Tilley this time—which seemed to need a bit of rotating to feel just right, gaze locked onto the pavement until he was at the restaurant’s door, at which point he straightened up with a start, pivoted theatrically, and entered. Nathan kept eating, following Roiphe’s progress with dreamlike interest, and it soon became evident that the doctor was looking for him. He veered right once inside, taking a few steps towards his own favorite booth at the back of the restaurant, squinting in the sallow light of the hokey glass carriage lamps on the wall, then turning back and methodically scanning the room through his big distorting glasses until he spotted his target. Nathan’s single window seat—flaunting, like all the seats, a big floral pattern in pink, green, and black—forced Roiphe to sit sideways on the bench seat under the window and then to twist from the waist in order to face Nathan. Certain that Roiphe would think of their first meeting, Nathan expected an amused, caustic comment on what he was eating, and perhaps a meditation on Jews eating pork, but the doctor was all business, all worry.

“Chase is very, very upset,” he said. “I suppose you’ve heard about it.”

Nathan had to finish chewing before he could respond. He remembered observing Roiphe chewing his own pork chops, and how he seemed to be having trouble that was possibly caused by slipping dentures. Absorbing Roiphe on top of Naomi, Nathan felt as though he himself had dentures that were slipping. He found it difficult to speak. “Chase? Heard? No. Heard what?”

Roiphe took his hat off and started to play with the brim. He was backlit against the window, and his thinning hair looked particularly vulnerable and wispy. “That French professor of hers. Arosteguy. You haven’t heard? It’s all over the internet. Too soon to hit the papers.”

“What… what about him?” Nathan immediately felt sick. He didn’t want to hear it, certain that whatever it was meant bad news regarding the mysteriously unresponsive Naomi, even though Roiphe would be oblivious of the Naomi aspect. Nathan had been careful not to let the doctor know about what was going on in Tokyo; he would be too interested in Naomi’s Arosteguy project for comfort.

Roiphe shook his head at the incomprehensible weirdness of it all. “They finally found him. Found his body.”

Nathan put down his knife and fork. “His body? What does that mean?”

The air-conditioning wasn’t working in the restaurant, and Roiphe began to fan his face with his hat, the backlight from the windows strobing through the straw and bringing Nathan to the point of migraine. “Well, he’s dead. That’s what that means. His body. Apparently he collapsed in the middle of some huge intersection in Tokyo. Some witnesses said blood came dribbling out of both of his ears. Sounds like a cerebral hemorrhage to me, although, well, you never know.”

“But you said something. They found his body? They had to find it?”

“Apparently, once some ambulance picked him up, they misplaced his body. Or the police took it to do an autopsy and didn’t let the media know about it for three or four days. Something. Some mystery about it. The witness stuff was suppressed until later. He was a fugitive. The French cops wanted him back in Paris. Maybe that was it. Delicate situation.”

“Jesus. Fuck.”

“What. You knew him.”

“No. You knew him.”

“Well, I met him once or twice. He had weight. He had substance. I didn’t trust him with Chase, but there’s a paranoid old father for you. And speaking of which, Chase wants to see you. Said she needs you for some solace, whatever that means. Obviously it has something to do with her professor. I dasn’t think of it. I dasn’t. Never seen her so depressed. Disturbing for a parent.” Roiphe used his hat to gesture towards Nathan’s pork chops. “But you should just sit here and finish those first. I’m sure she’ll be able to hang on.”

Nathan pushed his plate across the table. “I think I’ll go now. Where is she?”

“Up in the workroom. Hey, if you’re serious about not finishing those. I’m prohibited, I’m persona non grata up there, so I might as well stay here.”

Nathan slid out of his seat and stood up. “You go right ahead.”

Roiphe lifted the plate and floated it, wobbling, over to the table in front of him, which stretched the length of the windows. “I’ll expect a full report, natch. For the book. Eventually. And could you tell them to bring me a fresh knife and fork on your way out?”

By the time Nathan hit the sidewalk, Roiphe was happily trimming off the edges of the pork chops where Nathan had made cuts, evidently contaminating them, and fastidiously lifting the trimmings with his new knife and fork onto the butter dish, where they were safely isolated. Nathan waited until he had walked half a block, well out of the doctor’s view, before he stopped in front of the grandiosely named Village Market—“Variety/Greeting Cards”—intending to open his phone’s Safari web browser. He needed to know just what he was walking into. As giggling schoolgirls tumbled out of the Village Market’s ancient green door and pushed by him clutching Archie comics and Kit Kat Minis, he found himself looking at blurry, tweeted photos of Arosteguy lying facedown on the square paving stones of a narrow, crowded pedestrian street in Akihabara, the games and electronics mecca near Tokyo Station. The handsome square head, the large staring eyes, the long, unruly gray hair matted with the blood which flowed from his ears and curled into the granite interstices. Taken at night under the many varieties of artificial light illuminating the street, the photos displayed surreal colors and vague focus, but Nathan thought he saw bits of organic material—brain? inner ear?—spattering the shoulder of Arosteguy’s jacket and soaking in the pooling blood. The lack of good light and the jostling of the crowd made the one relevant video he could find on YouTube even more of a surrealist smear. It was shot handheld and walking from behind Arosteguy, with two or three shoppers between Arosteguy and the camera, which was framed to highlight the whirlpool of neon above the crowd. At the bottom of the frame, out of focus, you could see something that looked like smoke or a liquid spray, like a messy backlit sneeze, spurting from Arosteguy’s ears, at which point his head jerked back and dropped out of frame, and the holder of the camera seemed to stumble before the image looped skyward and then cut out. It would have struck Nathan as farcical if he hadn’t seen the Twitter photos first, the ones in which Arosteguy looked quite horridly dead.