David Cronenberg - Consumed

SAMUEL BECKETT, apparently, had Dupuytren’s contracture in his right hand, which caused his outer fingers to curl inward and made shaking hands difficult and embarrassing. This pleased Hervé Blomqvist, who, while researching famous people who had Peyronie’s, looking particularly for those who rode bicycles, had discovered that many Peyronie’s victims also suffered from Baron Dupuytren’s, which suggested an immune system pathogenesis rather than a bicycle-riding problem. Hervé could now count himself one of that exclusive club, noticing a new ugly chevron-shaped swelling of tendon sheath in his left palm (he thought of shark gills) which would undoubtedly lead to an eventual contracting of his little and middle finger—a condition called “trigger finger”—to the point where he would no longer be able to straighten those fingers. He was willing to bet that Beckett had Peyronie’s too—he seemed to have had an appropriately contracted sex life—but doubted that there would ever be confirmation of that fact. He hefted the Creaform portable 3D scanner, which he had just used to scan his penis, still partially erect, and fantasized scanning Samuel Beckett’s penis as well as those of any number of other famous Peyronie’s sufferers. His current scan was more detailed than the one he had sent Chase Roiphe earlier in the day, but she probably didn’t need it. No, this one he was sending to Romme Vertegaal, somewhere in North Korea that was not Pyongyang.

The FabrikantBot 2 was chugging away downstairs, printing out the latest parts for the Juche Idea People’s Universal Folding Bicycle, meant to replace the flawed components of the bottom bracket internals which had caused Hervé so much grief as he rode the assembled prototype around the confines of his Rue Beaubourg flat in the 3rd arrondissement. The tight, acrobatic turns that were required had managed to lock up the pedals, and the pedals would not let go until they and their cranks had been completely disassembled and reassembled. A detailed Skyping of the photos and videos documenting the problem drew a quick response from Romme, who had somehow become the Universal Bicycle’s project manager. So positive and helpful, really, and definitely meriting the gift of a return printable scan.

Romme was intimately familiar with Hervé’s sex organ, of course, having helped guide it into various orifices during the wild days of the Arosteguys’ séminaires , which inevitably drew the obvious puns involving the words séminal and semence , and anything else related to sperm and semen. Hervé imagined that they must be very prudish in North Korea, as such repressive regimes always seem to be, and hoped that Romme would be alone in whatever ramshackle studio had been provided for him when Hervé’s gift penis began to print out, though there was a perverse tickle of pleasure at the thought that Romme might be caught holding an ABS replica of his Peyronie’s-twisted member by a strict cadre supervisor, and as a result be cast into the darkness of a reeducation camp like Jongori, Camp No. 12, about as far away from the capital and humanity as you could get.

But perhaps Romme would apply to the Peyronie’s scan the special effects makeup required to turn an ABS or possibly bioplastic penile replicant—muted and bland in uniform gray or powder blue—into a vibrant, living thing full of color and pores and texture. He doubted that Romme himself had such artistic skills, the kind that Chase had shown under the tutelage of the SFX team they had been assigned: Arthropoda Souterrain Effets Spéciaux, a French-Korean firm specializing in gargantuan arthropods for schools and scientific displays. It was a strange choice to say the least, given that arthropods did not bleed red blood, nor did they have skin, but Romme had been steadfast in using them because they could be counted on to be reasonably discreet; and, to be fair, they brought great gusto to creating fleshly things that no lobster or cricket ever incarnated—torn tendons, ruptured blood vessels, exposed hormone glands, splayed muscles—bringing to life Célestine’s tortured body parts, photos of which had convinced the préfet that a murder had in fact been committed.

It had ultimately been Chase who did the dog’s work, the Souterrain boys needing to be kept at arm’s length so that they would not be tempted to blow the whistle on Hervé when the crime-scene photos hit the net. Only Chase could have been entrusted with building the edible prosthetic left breast and the wound-FX application worn by Célestine that had covered the mastectomy scar in the cannibal series of photos. And it had been the original of that breast that was the clincher, the only body part actually found in the Arosteguys’ apartment: a pathetic, mutilated bowl of flesh bearing tooth marks and half a nipple found in the fridge, which was easily DNA certified as belonging to Célestine Arosteguy (her distraught sister Sophie, manager of a group of chalets in Chamonix, had been desperate to provide samples). He wondered if the préfet had had the presence of mind to have the breast teched out for cancer, but public momentum seemed to be demanding a cannibalistic murder. More thrilling that the breast had been ripped off and eaten than surgically removed. Complications were not yet welcome; they would be, eventually.

The breast-in-a-soup-bowl evidence had not been formally released to the press (the delicate, handmade Astier de Villatte earthenware bowl had been chosen specifically by Célestine for the purpose, and was not a customary luxury), but when Hervé had been interrogated by a quite cool young guy wearing an extremely narrow, double-breasted, six-button Costume National suit, striped in black and gray, with a zippered black sweater and no tie (Hervé couldn’t help but wonder if the suit was a rental calculated to make him feel at ease with this cop), and then later by the préfet himself, who wore something navy, subdued and conservative, which Hervé suspected was Gucci, it became obvious that what Aristide had called the cheese in the mousetrap had been taken, and the police were quite confident that they had a major homicide on their hands, despite the lack of an entire body.

The cannibal photos would be released around the world at what Romme called “the politically effective moment.” (Romme had promised to digitally alter the faces of Hervé and Chase, but Hervé was now thinking he would like to be at the center of the ensuing firestorm, whatever the consequences.) What this meant, Hervé could only guess. He could see that the coronation of Aristide as a refugee in Pyongyang would be a slap in the face of the French government, which was currently harassing the DPRK over their nuclear testing; that would be even better than the actor Gérard Depardieu’s giving up his French passport in disgust over his tax rate and receiving a hastily mocked-up Russian passport from President Putin himself. But the cannibal photos? The very staging of Célestine’s death itself ? Were they comic-book illustrations of the horrors of capitalism, of the insatiable, all-devouring Western consumerist ethos? The expected pronouncement by Aristide on his safe arrival in the capital would undoubtedly clarify everything.

Hervé tapped the trackpad of his MacBook Pro and dragged the STL file encoding his penis into a special Korean version of Dropbox. The sending of such a file, no matter what its actual content, was the signal developed by him and Romme indicating that a Skype session was wanted. Despite the regime’s apparent affection for M. Vertegaal, he was constantly monitored by a pleasant team of five or six young cadres of both sexes, and was officially restricted to a living range of thirty-five kilometers from the center of Pyongyang, though Romme said that he had been able to bicycle alone beyond the first military perimeter, where the adolescent soldiers seemed shocked and flustered at the sight of a Westerner but were nevertheless very polite. Lately, however, Romme had been escorted in an elite “2.16” car (Kim Jong Il had been born on February 16, and the luxury cars whose special white license plates began with those numbers did not have to stop at roadblocks and checkpoints) to a research facility of some kind far from the capital, so secret that he would not talk about it even to Hervé, who was used to functioning as Romme’s safety valve; in this case, the valve had been firmly shut off. Hervé could sometimes feel the presence of the cute monitoring team, and could even see them hovering anxiously in the background of Romme’s Skype window, at which times Hervé and Romme would speak elliptically, often in English, knowing that the team was more adept at French. Their excuse, only grudgingly accepted, was that for technology, English was the appropriate language. At times, Hervé feared that Romme had in fact been exiled from the capital, a form of punishment that fell short of doing time in a reeducation camp but was scary enough.