David Cronenberg - Consumed

And now Hervé realized that he had indeed made a mistake, in fact more than one mistake. It caused him anguish to know that he was afraid to tell Romme about his art project with Chase, that he had sent her the STL files that had allowed the 3D printing of the alleged mutilated body parts of Célestine. Chase had, in her attic workroom in Toronto, evidence that could prove that Célestine Arosteguy was not dead, that the incriminating photos of those body parts were only photos of bioplastic replicas, doctored by the SFX team to suggest the results of a hideous murder and subsequent butchering.

“I wanted to keep her close and to remind her of the lightness of our sexual play with the Arosteguys,” he said. “I thought she needed something radical to snap her out of the depressive state of mind she had fallen into. She told me that I should not have forced her to take bites out of Madame A.’s amputated breast, and that she was sure that some of her own DNA would be discovered eventually because of that. She has a point, unfortunately. When we discussed placing the remains of that breast in such a way that it would convince the Préfecture that a cannibalistic murder had been committed, we omitted to think about saliva as a source of DNA.”

“How unstable do you think she is?”

“It’s a very volatile situation there in the Roiphe house in Toronto. The Canadian girl’s journalist boyfriend is there, living in the house, looking for a story. I think he will soon find a story he didn’t know existed. For instance, in her fugue state, as she calls it, she mutilates herself and eats tiny bits of her own flesh. She says she’s aware of deliberately creating a kitschy drama but at the same time feels compelled to act it out. Her father has allowed this boyfriend, an American, to witness her behavior. His name is Nathan Math. He writes usually on medical subjects.”

A pause. “I believe you need to go to Toronto to visit Chase Roiphe. You need to assess the situation there. And then, if you need assistance, we do have assets there to do whatever is required.”

“Ah,” said Hervé. “That would be suitably cathartic. So, financing for the voyage at the usual source?” The disbursement of the Vertegaal development funds involved a complex set of interactions beginning with the issuing of money drafts in tugrik, the Mongolian currency, by the Golomt Bank in Ulan Bator, which then underwent a series of conversions and transfers resulting in the deposit of euros or dollars, as circumstances demanded, in a commercial account in the name of Hervé’s corporation, Trois Médecins Français, at the Quai du Président Paul Doumer branch of the Crédit Agricole bank (former sponsors of a Tour de France–winning cycling team), all this to disguise their origins as North Korean won.

The image of Romme in the Skype window opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing computer-graphics-creation kind of way, then disintegrated in a shower of sparkling pixel flakes. After a pregnant pause the Skype window itself crashed, leaving a momentary square black hole in the middle of the desktop’s swirly cosmic image of the Andromeda Galaxy, the default Mac OS X (Lion iteration) wallpaper. (Lately, he avoided using personalized desktop wallpaper for security reasons; in the past, he would have featured Colnago beauty shots.) Staring blankly at that sinister new hole in the universe, his umbilical brutally cut, Hervé for one moment imagined that he might not have been communicating with the real Romme Vertegaal.

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First published 2014

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Copyright © David Cronenberg, 2014

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Cronenberg, David, 1943–, author

Consumed / David Cronenberg.

ISBN 978-0-670-06900-2 (bound)

I. Title.

PS8555.R61117C65 2014 C813’.54 C2014-902684-6

eBook ISBN 978-0-14-319270-1

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