David Cronenberg - Consumed

Hervé had expected a coded email message appointing a time for a Skype session in return for his STL file, but almost immediately he heard the fishy Skype tone bubble up, and in no time was looking at the face of Romme Vertegaal in all its moody glory, Romme seeming fit and splendid in his many badges depicting members of the Kim dynasty. Hervé clicked the video-camera icon and a small window showing his own face popped up at the bottom right of the lower toolbar. He liked the way he looked, and thought that the two of them were very hot in an internationally subversive and dangerous way, definitely material for a big movie someday.

“ Salut , Romme. Are you in Pyongyang?”

“Hervé. Thank you for your funny file. Amusing memories. I need eventually to talk to you about the FabrikantBot deal. My colleagues are worried about US sanctions against the DPRK, as usual, and are concerned to hide the North Korean origin of the FabrikantBot machines. Would it make sense to set up a French plant somewhere rather than a German one? It would be similar to the pending Eternal President’s Voice hearing instruments gambit we have with the FrancoPhonics corporation. This and other considerations.

“But now, we need to discuss the geo-coordinates of Aristide Arosteguy. We have lost him. We don’t know where he is. You’ve read the reports about his death; you’ve seen the tweeted photos. We’re not convinced. The detail of the exploding hearing instruments has made us cautious. We feel that this is meant to be a message to us. Madame A. is extremely upset and has been disturbing the peace of the Korean Friendship Association. She was working on my next film script with the Juche Idea Study Group Film Unit, and they were eagerly awaiting the input of Monsieur Arosteguy. As you know, they are both still much revered for their support of The Judicious Use of Insects at the Cannes Film Festival.”

“I’m shocked to hear this,” said Hervé. “I had some nice desperate emails from the Canadian girl saying that the philosophe had disappeared after leaving the Tokyo house for unknown reasons. We know that he was on his way to meet our DPRK agents under the guise of a hearing-aid appointment brokered by Elke Jungebluth. Of course, it would have been appropriate for him to disappear after that meeting. I thought that he would be with you, that I might even see him in this window with you and have some words with him.”

“We have lost him. He never arrived at the woman audiologist’s hotel in Tokyo. Our agents were with her, as arranged with Arosteguy himself.”

“Could there have actually been an electronic intervention? Could the hearing instruments have been tampered with, or perhaps substituted at some point with lethal intent? We know that Seoul did not want Arosteguy to end up in Pyongyang.”

“We cannot rule it out. It is known that the Soviets used exploding headphones in the 1960s in Bulgaria to kill the defecting orchestra conductor Solovyov.”

“And the Canadian girl? Naomi Seberg?”

“We do have her, thanks to you. She is in transit. An inconvenience meant a slight change of plans involving a long journey by train. We expect her within a week. Madame A. is curious to meet her.”

“Her mental state? The girl?” Hervé needed concrete details; he deserved them. He did feel a giddy twinge of guilt for having put Naomi in play with Romme and the North Koreans, but he was sure she would be excited by the drama, would thank him later, as they say. And perversely, he himself was excited by the drama, by the fact that he had actually influenced international events in a quasi-criminal way. It was he who had pointed out to Romme the danger to their exploit represented by Naomi, even though he had been instrumental in connecting her with Arosteguy. His motives were, as usual, mostly opaque, even to himself, but definitely involved the deliciousness of mixing volatile and explosive elements and then standing back to watch the cataclysm.

“Subdued. Our team has been gentle with her, but of course the events have been stressful. They told her that she would be with the Arosteguys, and that seemed to mollify her, but of course now that’s not entirely true. It will be interesting to see how she reacts. I’ll have her Skype with you when I can.”

Hervé observed Romme with some sadness, feeling that he had not seen the real Romme, the wickedly funny, engaging, and intellectually seductive one, in any of the Skype sessions from the DPRK. He missed that Romme, and wondered if there was really any of that Romme left; he had spent so long there under surveillance, shaping himself to fit the requirements and the fantasies of the regime, that perhaps the new shape was irreversible. At some point, Hervé thought, he must surely travel to Pyongyang himself, even as a humble tourist, to see if his prince’s kiss could revive Princess Romme.

“But where did they pick her up? At the airport?”

“Strangely enough, they found her at the house rented by our operatives for Arosteguy in Tokyo. She had been living with him. She was sitting by the door with her suitcases all packed, ready to go somewhere but not sure where that should be. I’m reading the report right now.” Indeed, Romme’s eyes were not quite where one’s eyes normally were when Skyping. Few people actually looked into the camera, or even knew where it was on a Mac, so tiny and occult was it, sunken within the screen’s top bezel. Romme was looking far left of the Skype window, squinting with the effort of reading and translating the North’s very particular dialect. “Our people felt it was important that she had packed not only her own personal belongings but also all of Arosteguy’s, including electronics. There was barely any need for the team to strip the premises.”

“Another victory for Kimunism,” said Hervé, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground; irony and satire were not correct modes of discourse in the DPRK, though that made them very useful for monitored conversations, because, through lack of exercise, they were also not at all comprehended. It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals, and he did not exclude himself.

“There is another thread left hanging,” said Romme. “I hope you’ve been keeping up correspondence with your little friend Chase Roiphe.”

“Oh, yes. I sent her the same STL file that I sent you. It was just a few hours ago.”

There was a sudden, dangerous change in Romme’s features, a subtle deadening of expression, accompanied by an intensity around the eyes, that subverted Romme’s normal Skype look, which was a cheerful, enthusiastic, unquestioning perkiness, the kind demonstrated by North Korean news readers. Hervé hoped Romme’s handlers could not decrypt it; it was a warning to Hervé. “I appreciate the playfulness, but perhaps that was not the most sage thing you could have done.”

Hervé was not used to reprimands from Romme; the game was that they were equals, young French technocrats with a future on the international techno-political stage, where cyberkampf was the name of the drama being played. But when it came to their strange liaison with North Korea and the young president, Kim Jong Un, they were not equal. It was Romme who had first traveled to the Hermit Kingdom on a technology visa, and Romme who had become involved in the burgeoning subterranean, quasilegal tech markets, almost as a foreign subversive at first, and then as the acknowledged leader of the revolutionary, hands-on, Juche technology sector. Romme had been an older student of the Arosteguys, and easily enlisted Hervé in his scheme to build a small empire within an empire in North Korea. With Hervé’s collusion, the philosophy couple too were recruited, so beautifully did their musings on consumerism and politics mesh with the retro-radicalism of the Hermit Kingdom.