Consumed

Consumed David Cronenberg Stylish and tech-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan are lovers and competitors. Nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity in the social media age, they encounter each other only in airport hotels and browser windows.Naomi is drawn to the headlines surrounding C?lestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. C?lestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment. Aristide, suspected of the killing, has disappeared. Her interest aroused, Naomi sets off in search of the truth about the disturbing mystery.Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the work of a controversial surgeon. But after sleeping with one of his subjects, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe’s. Determined to meet the doctor who identified the disease, Nathan comes across Roiphe’s daughter, a young woman whose bizarre behaviour masks a devastating secret.These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex. “Consumed” is an exuberant, provocative debut novel from one of the world’s leading film directors. Consumed DAVID CRONENBERG Copyright (#ud799ab35-e8e6-5798-9b93-21d06b757352) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014 First published in Canada by Hamish Hamilton in 2014 Copyright © David Cronenberg 2014 Cover by Jonathan Pelham David Cronenberg asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007299157 Ebook edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007375240 Version: 2015-09-19 Dedication (#ud799ab35-e8e6-5798-9b93-21d06b757352) For Carolyn Contents Title Page (#u44fa59ee-b4a2-56d3-9d93-0f77819f4375) Copyright Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 About the Author About the Publisher 1 (#ud799ab35-e8e6-5798-9b93-21d06b757352) NAOMI WAS IN THE SCREEN. Or, more exactly, she was in the apartment in the QuickTime window in the screen, the small, shabby, scholarly apartment of C?lestine and Aristide Arosteguy. She was there, sitting across from them as they sat side by side on an old couch—was it burgundy? was it corduroy?—talking to an off-camera interviewer. And with the white plastic earbuds in her ears, she was acoustically in the Arosteguy home as well. She felt the depth of the room and the three-dimensionality of the heads of this couple, sagacious heads with sensual faces, a matched pair, like brother and sister. She could smell the books jammed into the bookshelves behind them, feel the furious intellectual heat emanating from them. Everything in the frame was in focus—video did that, those small CCD or CMOS sensors; the nature of the medium, Naomi thought—and so the sense of depth into the room and into the books and the faces was intensified. C?lestine was talking, a Gauloise burning in her hand. Her fingernails were lacquered a purply red—or were they black? (the screen had a tendency to go magenta)—and her hair was up in an artfully messy bun with stray tendrils curling around her throat. “Well, yes, when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay.” A wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. “If the desire is real, of course.” A catlike exhale of smoke, and a giggle. A sixty-two-year-old woman, C?lestine, but the European intellectual version of sixty-two, not the Midwestern American mall version. Naomi was amazed at C?lestine’s lusciousness, her aura of style and drama, how her kinetic jewelry and her saucy slump on that couch seemed to blend together. She had never heard C?lestine speak before—only now had a few interviews begun to emerge on the net, and only, of course, because of the murder. C?lestine’s voice was husky and sensual, her English assured and playful, and lethally accurate. The dead woman intimidated Naomi. C?lestine turned languidly towards Aristide. Smoke tumbled from her mouth and nose and drifted over to him, like the passing of an evanescent baton. He took a breath to speak, inhaling the smoke, continuing her thought. “Even if you never get it, or, once having it, never use it. As long as you desire it. You can see this in the youngest babies. Their desire is fierce.” As he spoke these words, he began to stroke his tie, which was tucked into an elegant V-necked cashmere sweater. It was as though he were petting one of those fierce babies, and the gesture seemed to explain the blissful smile that suffused his face. C?lestine watched him for a moment, waited for the petting to stop, before she turned back to the unseen interviewer. “That’s why we say that the only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.” Stretching forward towards the lens, revealing voluptuously freckled cleavage, C?lestine fumbled for something off camera, then slumped back with a small, thick white booklet in her cigarette hand. She riffled through the pages, her face myopically close to the print—or was she smelling the paper, the ink?—until she found her page and began to read. “Auto-flash without red-eye reduction. Set this mode for taking pictures without people, or if you want to shoot right away without the red-eye function.” She laughed that rich, husky laugh, and repeated, this time with great drama, “Set this mode for taking pictures without people.” A shake of the head, eyes now closed to fully feel the richness of the words. “What author of the past century has produced more provocative and poignant writing than that?” The window containing the Arosteguys shrank back to thumbnail size and became the lower left corner of a newscast window. The now tiny Arosteguys were still very relaxed and chatty, each picking up the conversation from the other like experienced handball players, but Naomi no longer heard what they said. Instead, it was the words of the overly earnest newscaster in the primary window that she heard. “It was in this very apartment of C?lestine and Aristide Arosteguy, an apartment near the famous Sorbonne, of the University of Paris, that the grisly, butchered remains of a woman were found, a woman later identified as C?lestine Arosteguy.” In the small window, the camera zoomed in on the amiably chatting Aristide. “Her husband, the renowned French philosopher and author Aristide Arosteguy, could not be found for questioning.” In one brutal cut Aristide disappeared, to be replaced by handheld, starkly front-lit shots of the tiny apartment’s kitchen, apparently taken at night. These soon swelled to full size and the newscaster’s window retreated to the upper right corner. Forensic police wearing black surgical gloves were taking frosted plastic bags out of a fridge, photographing grimy pots and frying pans on the stove, sorting through dishes and cutlery. The miniature newscaster continued: “Sources wishing to remain unnamed have told us that there is evidence to suggest that parts of C?lestine Arosteguy’s body were cooked on her own stove and eaten.” Cut to a wide shot of an imposing municipal building subtitled “Pr?fecture de Police, Paris.” “Prefect of Police Auguste Vernier had this to say about the possible flight of Arosteguy from the country.” Cut to an interview with the strangely delicate, bespectacled prefect of police in what appeared to be a large hallway crammed with journalists. His French voice, emotionally intricate and intense, quickly faded to be replaced by a gravelly, less involved American one: “Mr. Arosteguy is a national treasure. So was Madame C?lestine Moreau. It was a French ideal, the two of them, the philosopher couple. Her death is a national disaster.” A cutaway to the rambunctious crowd of journalists shouting questions, cameras and voice recorders bristling, then a return to the prefect. “Aristide Arosteguy left the country on a lecture tour of Asia three days before the remains of his wife were found. We have no specific reason at the moment to consider him a suspect in this crime, but naturally there are questions. It is true that we do not know exactly where he is. We are looking for him.” The squawk of the carousel buzzer pulled Naomi out of the Pr?fecture de Police and back into the baggage claim arena of Charles de Gaulle Airport. As the conveyor belt lurched into action, the crowd of waiting passengers pressed forward. Somebody bumped Naomi’s laptop, sending it sliding down her shins, popping the earbuds out of her ears. She had been sitting on the edge of the carousel and had paid the price. Now she just managed to rescue her beloved MacBook Air by pivoting both feet up at the heels and catching the laptop with the toes of her sneakers. The Arosteguy report continued unperturbed in its window, but Naomi flipped the Air closed and put the Arosteguys to sleep for the time being. NATHAN’S IPHONE RANG and he knew it was Naomi from the ringtone, the trill of an African tree frog that she had found somehow erotic and had emailed him. He was squatting on the floor of a damp, gritty, concrete back hallway of the Moln?r Clinic, digging around in the camera bag in front of him, looking for something he suspected Naomi had taken, so it made sense that she would call him now, her extrasensory radar functioning in its usual freakish fashion. He kept digging with one hand, thumbing his phone on with the other. “Naomi, hey. Where are you?” “I’m finally in Paris. I’m in a taxi heading for the Crillon. Where are you?” “I’m in a slimy hallway at the Moln?r Clinic in Budapest, and I’m looking in my camera bag for that 105mm macro lens that I bought in Frankfurt at the airport.” The slightest pause, which, Nathan knew, did not have to do with Naomi’s possible guilt regarding the macro, but rather the fact that she was texting someone on her BlackBerry while talking to him. “Um … you won’t find it in your camera bag, because it’s on my camera. I borrowed it from you in Milan, remember? You were sure you weren’t going to need it.” Nathan took a deep breath and cursed the moment he had convinced Naomi to switch from Canon to Nikon so that they could pool their hardware; brand passion was emotional glue for hard-core nerd couples. What a mistake. He stopped digging around in the bag. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. I was just hoping I hallucinated the whole handoff thing. I have lots of dreams about giving you my stuff.” A snort from Naomi. “Is that really going to hang you up? You’ve suddenly discovered you need a macro?” “I’m about to shoot an operation. I never imagined they’d let me in there, but they’re deliriously happy to have me document everything. I wanted the macro for my backup body. I’m sure there’ll be great weird Hungarian medical stuff to shoot huge close-ups of. Maybe not for the piece itself, but for reference. For our archives.” Multitasking pause, a random interruption of conversational rhythm that drove Nathan crazy. But it was Naomi, so you ate it. “Sorry. Who knew?” “Never mind. I’m sure your need is greater than mine.” “My need is always greater than yours. I’m a very needy person. I wanted the macro to shoot portraits. I’ve set up some clandestine meetings with some French police types. I really want every pore in their faces.” Nathan slumped back against the corridor’s damp wall. So he was stuck now with the 24–70mm zoom on his primary camera body, the D3. How close could that thing focus? It would probably be good enough. And he could crop the D3’s image files if he really needed to be close. Life with Naomi taught you to be resourceful. “Hey, honey, I’m surprised you actually want to get your hands dirty with real humans. What happened to net-surfing sources? What happened to the coziness of virtual journalism, where you never had to get out of your jammies? You wouldn’t have to be in Paris. You could be anywhere.” “If I could be anywhere, I’d be in Paris.” “Hey, and did you say the Crillon? Are you staying there or meeting somebody there?” “Both.” “Isn’t that crazy expensive?” “I’ve got a secret contact. Won’t cost me un seul sou.” Nathan immediately fired up his internal jealousy suppressors in the old familiar fashion. Not that Naomi’s secret contacts were always men, but they were all sketchy in some threatening way, dangerous. If you wanted to track her constantly tendriling social network, you’d have to apply a particularly sophisticated fractals program to her, mapping every minute of her day. “Well, I guess that’s good,” he said, with a lack of enthusiasm meant to caution her. “Yeah, it’s great,” said Naomi, not noticing. A dimpled metal door at the far end of the hallway opened and the backlit figure of a man dressed for surgery beckoned to Nathan. “Come now to get dressed, mister. Dr. Moln?r waits for you.” Nathan nodded and lifted his hand in acknowledgment. The man flipped his own hand in a hurry-up gesture and disappeared, closing the door behind him. “Okay, well, cancer calls. Gotta go. Tell me what’s up in two seconds or less.” Another annoying multitasking pause—or was she just assembling her thoughts?—and then Naomi said, “On to some juicy French philosophical sex-killing murder-suicide cannibal thing. You?” “Still the controversial Hungarian breast-cancer radioactive seed implant treatment thing. I adore you.” “Je t’adore aussi. Call me. Bye.” “Bye.” Nathan touched his phone off and hung his head. Just seal me up in this dank corridor and never find me again. There it was. There was always that moment of ferocious inner resistance, that fear of carrying the thing through, the resentment that action had to be taken, that risk and failure had to be confronted. But cancer called, and its voice was compelling. IN HER SMALL BUT SUMPTUOUS attic room at the H?tel de Crillon, Naomi was stretched out on an ornate chaise longue beside a short, narrow pair of French doors leading to a door-mat-sized balcony. From that balcony, she had already photographed the courtyard, with its intricate web of pigeon-repelling wires overhead, paying particular attention to details of decay, comme d’habitude. No matter how deluxe the hotel in Paris, you could count on the imprint of time to surprise you with wonderful textures. Now, having made her habitual nest of BlackBerry, cameras, iPad, compact and SD flashcards, lenses, tissue boxes, bags, pens and markers, makeup gear (minimal), cups and glasses bearing traces of coffee and various juices, chargers of all shapes and sizes, two laptops, chunky brushed-aluminum Nagra Kudelski digital audio recorder, notebooks and calendars and magazines, all of these anchored by her duffel bag and her backpack, Naomi reviewed her latest photos using Adobe Lightroom while watching a new video concerning the Arosteguys that had just surfaced on YouTube. And in another screen window, next to a photo of the hotel window’s rot-chewed frame with its faded white-and-greenstriped awning, striped also with streaks of rust from its delicate metal skeleton, was another intriguing display: a 360-degree panorama of the Arosteguy apartment, which Naomi idly controlled with her laptop’s trackpad, zooming and scrolling, in essence walking through the cramped, chaotic academics’ home. There was the sofa shown in the earlier video, now patterned with blocks of sunlight streaming from a trio of small windows through which Naomi thought she could see a slice of the Sorbonne across the road. Behind the sofa were the densely populated bookshelves, but now swing around ninety degrees and more bookshelves, and piles of papers, letters, magazines, documents, littering every piece of furniture, including the kitchen sink, including the floor. Naomi smiled at the absence of cool electronics: a tape player, of all things; a small 4:3 tube TV set (could it actually be black and white?); and a phone with a cord. This pleased her, because it felt right for a hot French philosophy couple who were closer to Sartre and Beauvoir than Bernard-Henri L?vy and Arielle Dombasle. The Arosteguys seemed to belong to, at the latest, the 1950s. (She could see Simone Signoret, with her heavy sensuality, playing the role of C?lestine in a movie, but only if she managed to project the intellect of Beauvoir; she wasn’t sure who would play Aristide.) To drill into their lives was to drill into the past, and that’s where Naomi wanted to go. She wasn’t looking for a mirror, not this time. A paragraph below the panorama window confirmed that this was indeed the apartment before the murder, documented by a web-savvy student of Aristide’s—obviously using Panorama Tools and a fish-eye lens, Naomi noted—as part of a master’s thesis connecting the Evolutionary Consumerist philosophy of the Arosteguys with the couple’s own ascetic—relatively—lifestyle. The writer of that paragraph dryly noted that the wretched candidate, Herv? Blomqvist, had been denied his degree in the end. Naomi had come across an internet forum conducted by students of C?lestine that had the tone of a sixties French New Wave movie. Blomqvist was a frequent contributor who positioned himself as a classic French bad boy along the lines of the actor Jean-Pierre L?aud. He hinted that as an undergraduate he had been the cherished lover of both Aristide and C?lestine and was later punished for daring to use his place in the private lives of the Arosteguys to anchor what he confessed was “a pathetically thin and parasitical thesis.” Naomi emailed herself a note to connect with Blomqvist, a mnemonic technique that was the only one that seemed to work. Anything else got lost in the tangle of the Great Nest, as Nathan called the cloud of chaos that enveloped her. The third window on Naomi’s screen was an interview shot in the oddly shaped basement kitchen of the couple who were responsible for the daily maintenance of the Arosteguys’ entire apartment block. The room was dominated by an immense concrete cylinder which suggested that half the casing of an exterior spiral staircase was bulging into their space. It was against this pale-green stuccoed column that a short, stout French woman and her shy, mustachioed husband stood speaking to an off-camera interviewer. The sound of the woman’s surprisingly youthful voice was soon mixed down to allow the voice of a translator to float over it. The translator’s voice, more mature, more matronly, seemed a better match for the woman’s face. “Never,” said the translator. “No one could come between them, those two. Of course, they both had many affairs. They came here, the boys and girls, to their apartment just upstairs above us. We could sometimes hear them here behind us, laughing on the staircase, coming down as Mauricio and I had breakfast in the kitchen. He’s my husband.” A shy smile. “He’s Mexican.” With a sweet, excited embarrassment, Mauricio waved directly at the camera. “Hello, hello,” he said in English. The woman—only now, clumsily, identified as “Madame Tretikov, Maintenance” by a thick-fonted subtitle—continued. “They slept here. They lived here. Sometimes, yes, their lovers were students. But not always.” She shrugged. “For the students, it was a question of politics and philosophy, as always. The two together. They were in agreement. The Arosteguys explained it to me and Mauricio, and it seemed very correct, very nice.” Naomi maximized the video window. With the screen filled, she could feel herself inside that kitchen, standing beside the camera, looking at that couple, the chipped enameled stove, the cupboards of moisture-swollen chipboard, damp kitchen towels spilling out of open cutlery drawers. She could smell the grease and the under-the-staircase dankness. As if in response to the newly enlarged image, the cameraman zoomed slowly in to Madame’s face, zoomed because he saw moisture welling up in her eyes, like blood to a shark. Madame came through for her close-up, biting her quivering lip, tears spilling. Mercifully, the translator did not try to emulate the tremor in Madame’s voice. “They were so brilliant, so exciting,” said Madame. “There could be no jealousy, no anger between them. They were like one person. She was sick, don’t you see? She was dying. I could see it in her eyes. Probably a brain tumor. She thought so hard all the time. Always writing, writing. I think it was a mercy killing. She asked him to kill her and he did. And then, of course, yes, he ate her.” With these words, Madame took a deep, stumbling breath, wiped her eyes with the threadbare dish cloth she had been holding throughout the interview, and smiled. The effect was startling to Naomi, who immediately began to analyze it in the email window she had left open in the corner of the screen. “He could not just leave her there, upstairs,” Madame continued. Her smile was beatific; she had a revelation to deliver. “He wanted to take as much of her with him as he could. So he ate her, and then he ran away with her inside him.” THE MEDICAL GOGGLES were getting in the way. Nathan could barely see through the viewfinder of his ancient Nikon D3, the plastic lenses projecting too far from his eye, the goggles slewing and popping off his nose when he pressed the camera close, their elastic band pulling at his hair and crumpling his baby-blue paper surgical cap. “Everything changed after AIDS,” Dr. Moln?r had just explained to him. “From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit. We realized you can’t afford to get it into your eyes, your tear ducts. So, we put on ski goggles in the operating theater and we schuss”—here he made slightly fey hip- and arm-twisting motions—“over the moguls of our patients’ bodies.” Now Dr. Moln?r bent close to the Nagra SD voice recorder hanging around Nathan’s neck in its bondagestyle black-strapped leather case, and into its crustacean-like stereo cardioid microphone breathed, “Don’t be shy, Nathan. I’m notoriously vain. Get close. Fill your frame. That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?” “So they say,” said Nathan. “Of course, you wrote to me that you were a medical journalist who was forced by the ‘swelling tide of media technology’ also to become a photographer and a videographer and a sound recordist, so perhaps you are now somewhat overwhelmed. I will guide you.” Naomi had also, quite independently, bought one of the recorders, hers a now-discontinued ML model (it would kill her when she realized that), at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Electronics stores in airports had become their neighborhood hangouts, although more often than not they weren’t there at the same time. It got to the point that they could sense traces of each other among the boxes of electric plug adapters and microSD flashcards. They would trade notes about the changing stock of lenses and point-n-shoots at Ferihegy, Schiphol, Da Vinci. And they would leave shopping lists for each other in emails and text messages, quoting best prices spotted and bettered. “I’d really like to take the goggles off, Dr. Moln?r. They weren’t designed for photographer-journalists.” “Call me Zolt?n, please, Nathan. And of course, take them off. You’ll have your huge brick of a camera in front of your eyes to protect you anyway.” Dr. Moln?r laughed—rather a phlegmy, unhealthy laugh, Nathan thought—and swirled away to the other side of the operating table, past the array of screened and opened windows which let in the muted insect hum of the street below and a few splashes of early morning light that painted the room’s grimy and crumbling tiled walls. Nathan took some shots of Dr. Moln?r as he danced, and the good doctor’s body language conveyed his pleasure at being photographed. “Unusual to have open windows in an operating room,” Nathan couldn’t resist observing. “Ah, well, our infrastructure here at the hospital is in disarray, you know, and so the air-conditioning is not functioning. Fortunately, we have the window option. This building is very old.” The doctor took up his position at the side of the operating table, flanked by two male assistants, and waved his arms over the table as though invoking spirits. “But you can see that the equipment itself is beautiful. First-rate, state-of-the-art.” Nathan dutifully began to take detail shots of the equipment, gradually leading him to the face of the patient herself, hidden behind a frame draped with surgical cloth, also baby blue, which separated her head from the rest of her body. The autonomous head seemed to be slumbering rather than anesthetized, and it was very beautiful. Short black hair, Slavic cheekbones, wide mouth, chin delicately pointed and cleft. For the moment, Nathan resisted taking her photograph. “I notice you don’t seem to need to change lenses. The last photojournalist we had in here had a belt full of lenses. He made quite a lot of cinema twisting those lenses on and off his camera.” “You’re very observant,” said Nathan. It was obvious that you could not compliment Dr. Moln?r too much; it gave Nathan perverse satisfaction to find oblique ways to do it. “I sometimes do have a second camera body with a macrophotography lens. But these modern zooms have actually surpassed a lot of the old prime lenses in quality. Are you a student of photography?” Dr. Moln?r smiled behind his mask. “I have a half-interest in a little restaurant in a hotel downtown in Pest. You must come. You will be my special guest. The walls are covered with my photographs of nudes. I wouldn’t use that thing, though,” he said, pointing an oddly shaped forceps at the Nikon. “I’m strictly an analogue man. Medium-format film for me, and that’s that. It’s slow, it’s big and clumsy, and the details you see are exquisite. You can lick them. You can taste them.” The doctor’s mask bulged with the gestures his tongue was making to illustrate his approach to photography. He had already established in his first discussions with Nathan that it was the sensuality of surgery that had initially drawn him to the practice; sensuality was the guiding principle of every aspect of his life. He was making sure that Nathan wouldn’t forget it. And now, in a very smooth segue—which Nathan thought of as particularly Hungarian—Dr. Moln?r said, “Have you met our patient, Nathan? She’s from Slovenia. Une belle Slave.” Moln?r peeked over the cloth barrier and spoke to the disconnected head with disarmingly conversational brio. “Dunja? Have you met Nathan? You signed a release form for him, and now he’s here with us in the operating theater. Why don’t you say hello?” At first Nathan thought that the good doctor was teasing him; Moln?r had emphasized the element of playfulness in his unique brand of surgery, and chatting with an unconscious patient would certainly qualify as Moln?resque. But to Nathan’s surprise Dunja’s eyes began to stutter open, she began working her tongue and lips as though she were thirsty, she took a quick little breath that was almost a yawn. “Ah, there she is,” said Moln?r. “My precious one. Hello, darling.” Nathan took a step backward in his slippery paper booties in order not to impede the strange, intimate flow between patient and doctor. Could she and her surgeon be having an affair? Could this really be written off as Hungarian bedside manner? Moln?r touched his latex-bound fingertips to his masked mouth, then pressed the filtered kiss to Dunja’s lips. She giggled, then slipped away dreamily, then came back. “Talk to Nathan,” said Moln?r, withdrawing with a bow. He had things to do. Dunja struggled to focus on Nathan, a process so electromechanical that it seemed photographic. And then she said, “Oh, yes, take pictures of me like this. It’s cruel, but I want you to do that. Zolt?n is very naughty. A naughty doctor. He came to interview me, and we spent quite a bit of time together in my hometown, which is”—another druggy giggle—“somewhere in Slovenia. I can’t remember it.” “Ljubljana,” Moln?r called out from the foot of the table, where he was sorting through instruments with his colleagues. “Thank you, naughty doctor. You know, it’s your fault I can’t remember anything. You love to drug me.” Nathan began to photograph Dunja’s face. She turned towards the camera like a sunflower. He regretted that he had decided not to use a video camera on his assignments, a fussy rejection that had to do with worries about media storage, peripherals, and other arcane techie calculations. Of course, if he’d been able to afford the new D4s, which could also record decent video … but he couldn’t keep up with the inexorable hot lava flow of technology, even though he desperately wanted to. Naomi was never so prissy. She just wasn’t wary. She’d already bought a new high-def no-name Chinese camcorder at Heathrow and had downloaded an obscure Asian editing program to work with its difficult files. Even if she’d had to shoot with her BlackBerry, she’d have caught, in all its coarse grain, the weird banter he had just heard. Oh, well. He had the voice recorder cooking, and he could append a sound file to each photograph using the camera’s microphone if push came to shove. “Nathan? I think you are very beautiful,” said Dunja, just before she faded back into unconsciousness. Nathan began to line up a 24mm low-angle shot with Dunja’s face in the foreground and her anesthetist—beefy, hairy, silent—behind her. “Nathan, forget about the face. It’s the breasts you want to see. Come over here beside me.” Nathan took his shot, then stood up and joined Dr. Moln?r. Moln?r pulled back the surgical cloth—orange, for some reason—covering Dunja’s chest. Her breasts were very full, and very blue and surreal in the cold light pouring from the lamp cluster which towered over the table. Capturing the effect of that light was exactly the reason Nathan rarely used flash, which would overpower the ambient light. Each breast had a dozen clear plastic wire-like tubes running into it, making it look like an umbrella that had been popped inside out by a strong wind. “Take pictures of those, would be better. If they’re good, I’ll print them and hang them in my restaurant.” “You have medical photos hanging in your restaurant?” “No, no. Yours would be the first. You think it would derange the eating?” “It would derange my eating, I can guarantee you that.” Dr. Moln?r burst out laughing. His surgical mask pumped in and out with the pneumatics of his hilarity. He bent at the waist with laughter. Nathan thought the mask would pop a seam. He scanned the others in the room. One of them winked and shrugged. It was just Doc Moln?r. No worries. Moln?r straightened up and gained control with some effort. “Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It’s a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.” “Yes,” said Nathan, “so you’ve told me.” He put the camera up to his eye, regretting the absence of the macro lens. He would get as close as focus would allow and crop into the shot later. When you got close, the breasts became complete animals, possibly marine, attached, perhaps, to auto-feeding tubes. Nathan began to think that some anesthetic fumes were floating around the room, affecting his perception. He shook it off. “Do you want to shock me, Dr. Moln?r?” he said, moving gently over the woman’s multi-penetrated breasts, rolling his finger on the shutter with delicacy. His nose was mashed, as always, against the camera’s rear LCD screen—he used his stronger, left, eye—and he spoke out of the right side of his mouth, the way smokers swiveled their lips away from you while exhaling their smoke. “I have a feeling that you do.” “I want to be entertaining,” said Moln?r, picking up a small stainless-steel bowl. He fished around in it with his index finger, like a prospector panning for gold. “For your big New Yorker article. I’ve always wanted to be the subject of a piece in the ‘Annals of Medicine’ section. It’s good for business, good for my vanity.” Still shooting, Nathan laughed. “The New Yorker’s a long shot. I’m doing this on spec.” “A ‘long shot,’ yeah, sweet expression, but we must all live in hope. I hope for The New Yorker.” “Frankly, I have the same hope. Unfortunately, my credits aren’t quite up to snuff. I never did make it through medical school.” Moln?r stopped fishing and looked up into Nathan’s lens. “Well, neither did I. That hasn’t prevented an illustrious career. I’m sure it won’t stop you either.” Nathan couldn’t help glancing over at Dunja to see if she had heard. Her head was rolling dreamily from side to side, and her mouth kept morphing into various modes of smiles, but her eyes were closed. She was somewhere else. Moln?r picked this up immediately. “She knows all about me. I learned my medicine during a turbulent era in Eastern Europe. Things were … regularly irregular at that time. North Americans never understand. You want to see this? Would make a nice shot.” Moln?r held out his bowl so that Nathan could see the dozens of tiny metal pellets in it. He rocked the bowl back and forth and the pellets glittered and rattled. It was a nice shot—for the 105 macro that Naomi had. Nathan cranked his zoom out to 70mm, then back wide to 24mm, knowing that either way he couldn’t get close enough for the ideal portrait of whatever it was he was seeing. If Nathan stayed wide, though, Moln?r’s hands in the shot were interesting, especially as the doctor scooted the pellets around with his finger. Discernibly gnarled and arthritic even in their gloves, the grotesquely swollen knuckles and finger joints looked like goblins wearing translucent latex dresses. (Were there anesthetic fumes in the room?) Yes, the hands really were the subject of the shot now. How subtle could those stricken hands be during an operation? Nathan wondered if there was a Nikon dealer close to the hotel. Probably get screwed on the price, but when would he see Naomi again? He needed that macro lens. He found himself more and more drawn to the macroscopic level of medical endeavor, though he wasn’t sure what he could do with it. There were plenty of medical specialists in the field, their stuff mundane, workmanlike, ugly. They weren’t artists. But was Nathan? “It is pretty, but what is it I’m seeing, Zolt?n?” “I am preparing to perform a multiple lumpectomy. The patient has many discrete tumors in her breasts, but they are not very aggressive, and so, flying the pink flag of breast preservation, I shall remove only the tumors, thus sparing the breasts. Accordingly, I am about to inject one hundred and twenty radioactive pellets, which are radioactive iodine isotopes—iodine-125—encapsulated in these titanium seeds, into each breast, surrounding the tumors that are growing there.” Moln?r gestured expansively at the machines and monitors surrounding the table. “This is our three-dimensional ultrasound guidance system. We must locate each lump to within hundredths of a millimeter of exactitude within a chaotic inner space. I feel like I’m flying an airplane with only radar to guide me.” Nathan worked his way around behind Moln?r. He found a lovely angle which included Moln?r’s hands and the shimmering pan in the foreground and Dunja’s bewebbed breasts in the background. The light over the table combined with the D3’s exquisite low-light sensitivity gave him enough depth of field that he could just hold both the foreground and the breasts in focus. As he fired off his shots, the Kevlar/carbon-fiber composite shutter hammering echoes off the blasted tiles of the room, Moln?r shouted out for all to hear, “It’s a good thing you are not shooting film, I must admit to myself. Her breasts will soon be radioactive, and your film would be fogged as a result!” 2 (#ud799ab35-e8e6-5798-9b93-21d06b757352) NAOMI THOUGHT SHE WOULD end up meeting Herv? Blomqvist at a little brasserie somewhere near the Sorbonne, something appropriate to a Truffaut film, something with small marble-topped tables and in keeping with the L?aud French bad-boy image she had taken from Blomqvist’s various web manifestations. Instead, she found herself sitting in L’Ob?lisque, one of the restaurants of the Crillon, the only place the kid would meet her once he heard she was staying at the hotel. Fortunately, he did not seem to know about the hotel’s other restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs, which used to be the ballroom of the dukes of Crillon and was even more expensive. L’Ob?lisque was described as informal and bistro-like in the hotel’s brochures, but for Naomi its wood paneling and black-suited waiters with their gold Crillon pins—an art nouveau capital C topped by a crown—were intimidating and a bit of a strain, wardrobe-wise. She had unrolled her emergency no-name black cotton T-shirt dress and dug out her strappy, wedgy heels, the ones that weren’t stilettos and didn’t get trapped by Euro cobblestones and grates. And now she sat there, burning. Earlier that day, she had been standing just outside the ornately formal entrance of the hotel, leaning against what she thought was a green metal electrical junction box across the street from the American embassy compound, madly texting Blomqvist about their imminent meeting, when she felt her shoulder being nudged. She turned to find herself facing a French cop carrying a submachine gun. He had walked across the narrow road behind her from his post at the corner of the embassy and now stood, just off the curb, forbidding and incongruous in his sunglasses and his dark-blue uniform complete with bulletproof vest and lobster-like body armor covering his shoulders, legs, and feet. Lying against his collarbone were two looped plastic zip-tie handcuffs held by flaps on his shoulder plate, ready for instant action. All that was missing was a helmet, but instead he wore a soft canoeshaped garrison cap. “What are you doing, standing there playing with your cell phone?” he asked. He was very young and very handsome, and he smiled, but he was not friendly. A white-and-red shield-shaped emblem on his chest plate read “Police Nationale, CRS.” Their specialty was riot control, Naomi knew, but the street, which ran into the Place de la Concorde, was absolutely serene, and the square was thronged with oblivious tourists. There was even a farcical group of Americans balancing uncertainly on two-wheeled gyro-stabilized Segways, listening to a briefing from their Segway tour leader before setting off into the crazed traffic. “I’m waiting for a friend,” said Naomi, her French more hesitant than it would be in a week’s time. “I’m staying at the hotel, the Crillon, right here,” she added lamely, gesturing behind her, and then was immediately angry with herself for giving him anything for free. He took one hand off his weapon and made a flicking motion, shooing her away like a child. “Wait for your friend over there, on the other side of the hotel entrance. Away from this control box.” Naomi now realized that she had been leaning against the controller for a huge steel cylinder that would rise out of the tarmac at the swipe of a security card, blocking all traffic from the side street between the hotel and the embassy. The American embassy compound, ringed with metal barriers and tightly spaced concrete bollards topped with brass acorns, was a wasp nest. Agitate it at your peril. In silent revenge, Naomi had taken many long-lens photos of the windows of the embassy from a corridor window on her floor at the Crillon. Most of the embassy windows were opaqued, but she had a shiver that soon there’d be a kicking-down of her attic-room door and a brutal arrest, complete with those no-nonsense plastic handcuffs and perhaps a hood over her head. The incident had rattled her for some reason, but did it have to do with America in France, general outrage against authority, hot policemen, or just bondage/victim/humiliation fantasies? She resolved to research a piece on the eroticism of the Compagnies R?publicaines de S?curit?. There was a glossy Paris-based gay magazine that would die to have it—if they hadn’t done it already. The Jean-Pierre L?aud clone swept into her space and sat down. He smiled and—of course—swept back his unruly lock of straight dark-brown hair. To her shock, he was wearing a narrow-fitting suit and a skinny tie. And a white shirt. And he was carrying a conservative dark-brown valise, which he carefully placed on the floor, propping it against the table leg. He watched her closely for a moment, then stuck his hand out across the table, weaving it neatly through the red- and yellow-tinted water glasses and the candles to reach her. She was not surprised at the tentative, intellectual’s handshake. “Hello,” he said. “You are Naomi Seberg—that’s a nice moviestar name. I’m certain you have guessed that I’m Herv? Blomqvist.” They had agreed, in the text messaging that had followed their first, relatively public, contact on the C?lestine A. forum, that they would speak English. He needed the practice, he said, and would not speak French. “I didn’t have to guess,” Naomi said, “because I’ve seen videos of you. In fact, you sent me a couple.” He withdrew his hand, unweaving it carefully. His brow furrowed in mock intensity and his lips pouted. He knew how to work his cuteness. “I always had the illusion that I was impossible to capture on video. My essence, I mean.” He felt so young to her, even though she was only six years older than his twenty-five. He had had a precocious passage through French academia, but, as was often the case, maturity in other matters had not kept pace, had most likely been sacrificed. All this from the forum, delivered to him by well-wishing but critical friends and to any troll who cared to absorb it. Like Naomi. “I think you’re right about your essence,” said Naomi. “I have no insight into that. But your face … I recognize that. What I don’t recognize is the suit and tie. You’re always in jeans and a T-shirt on the net. Did you dress up for me?” “I’ve never even walked past the door of the Crillon before. I was afraid they would discover me and throw me out. I borrowed the suit from my brother. He’s an advocate. It’s unusual for a journalist to stay at the Crillon, isn’t it?” “It would be unusual for a journalist to pay for a stay at the Crillon, yes.” “You don’t pay?” “Not with money.” “With sex?” Naomi laughed. It was her best laugh, the one she always hoped would come out when she laughed. It was husky and genuinely mirthful, and it was like that because Herv? was so appallingly, boyishly hopeful. “No, not with sex. With photography.” “Ah, yes. Photography.” Herv? pressed fingers to his temples and closed his eyes. “Is that a coffee you’re drinking?” he asked. “Yes. Double espresso. Do you want one?” “I’d like just a sip of yours, if you don’t mind. I need something, but not too much.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “A touch of migraine.” He pronounced it “meegraine,” like the English. She shrugged and pushed her cup across the table. “Be my guest.” He picked up the cup and made a show of inhaling the fumes. “Mm. It’s dangerous. I get too hyper.” He did pronounce it “eepair,” but there was no way Naomi was going to comment, even though in his texting he had expressed enthusiasm for “ruthless linguistic corrections.” He sipped with exaggerated sensuality, his lips and tongue working overtime, looking her deeply in the eyes as he did it. Naomi closed her eyes and shook her head. She felt like his mother. When she looked up at him again, she affected a stern, flirtation-killing look. She pulled her voice recorder out of her bag, switched it on, and placed it on the table. “Herv?,” she said, “I’m recording you now, as we agreed, and my first question to you is: Is this how you were with C?lestine Arosteguy?” He froze for a beat, then put the cup down. “How I was? I was just me, as always. I don’t understand what you mean.” “You’re being very seductive with me. Did you seduce your professor, or did she seduce you?” “I see,” he said. “You want to play the role of C?lestine with me. You identify with her.” “No, I’m really not playing at all. I want to know how it was with them, with the Arosteguys. From someone who knows. From you.” “It was full of sex with them, but more than just sex. But you’re just interested in the sex, aren’t you? You want to make a sensational conversation. You want to hurt them, don’t you?” “Why do you think that?” Naomi was genuinely thrown by this, and Herv? could see it. “We went through all that on the net. I thought you understood me.” “I understood you,” said Herv?. “But I never believed you. How sympa you were, how you loved them, how their philosophy and their love story so inspired you.” “Then why are you here, drinking my espresso?” A compact Gallic shrug. “I wanted to see what a room in the H?tel de Crillon looked like.” THEY ENDED UP ordering room service. While they waited, Herv? agreed to pose for some stills, sitting on the chaise longue in the bedroom by the open balcony doors while Naomi squatted with the camera, shifting from side to side, trying to find the revealing angle. She was using the Nikon D300s, the cousin to Nathan’s D3. It was more compact and lighter, and she prized unobtrusiveness and mobility above all things. The muted light was soft, diffused by the pigeon netting and the trapped bounce of the courtyard, and it brought out the femininity of the boy’s face. He played the lens expertly, as Naomi expected he would, given his self-promotion on the Arosteguy forums, which involved endless videos and stills documenting the many moods and musings of Herv? Blomqvist. His general approach was coy/mysterioso, and Naomi knew just how to use the natural light and her angles, the brow, the dark, full eyebrows, the liquid brown eyes in the thin face, to make that pop. “So, Naomi, what are you going to use these photos of me for?” He spoke between shots, timing her rhythm so that he wouldn’t be caught in an ungainly mouth move. “Are you planning an Arosteguy picture book? Maybe for the coffee table?” “I don’t know what I’m doing, Herv?. Do you have any suggestions?” “I do have a suggestion. I think you will be afraid of it.” Naomi paused and rested her camera on her knees. She felt strange in her dress, but at least she was now in bare feet. She looked up at Herv?, who smiled down at her with benign, unfocused eyes, like a priest. Annoying. “Go,” said Naomi. “Let’s hear it.” Herv? stood up and began undoing his tie. “I propose a book that shows every lover that the Arosteguys ever had, starting with me. And they will all be in the nude. And they will say what their experience in fucking them was. And they will talk about the influence that C?lestine and Aristide had on their lives.” Naomi sat on the floor, her back against the foot of the bed. “Are you taking your clothes off?” she asked. “Yes,” said Herv?. “You want me to shoot pictures of you naked?” “Yes.” “I’m not going to have sex with you. Really. I’m not.” Herv? had taken off his tie, jacket, and shirt, and was working on his belt, a fussy alligator-patterned thing with a dual-pronged buckle and a double row of holes which seemed to be giving him trouble. He was hairless and thin through the chest, just as Naomi thought he would be. All those New Wave movies. “If you have sex with me, I will show you something special that C?lestine liked very much. It’s unusual what she liked.” Naomi lifted her camera and casually began to snap away. “Oh, I like your camera,” said Herv?. “It looks like it’s carbon fiber. Is it?” “No. Magnesium body.” She stopped shooting, hefted her Nikon, juggled it from hand to hand. “I have a feeling carbon fiber is next, though. It would be nice if it were even lighter.” Then back up to her eye, shooting again. “And what about Aristide? Was there something special that he liked?” Herv? finally got his belt undone and his trousers down. He was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini briefs. She had hoped for something more exotic. “Yes, certainly,” he said, stepping out of the trousers. “It will be a little more difficult, but I can show you that too.” DUNJA LAY PROPPED UP in a bed in the Moln?r Clinic’s basement recovery room. There were a dozen beds, skeletal and primitive, creepy, but she and Nathan were alone in the room. He sat in an unstable plastic chair beside her bed, his camera on his lap, his voice recorder still hanging from its lanyard around his neck, its jewel-like red power light staining Dunja’s sheet, so dark was the room. Dunja was still dreamy, but Nathan suspected it was emotional exhaustion more than the effect of the anesthetic. She nodded towards him. “I didn’t expect the camera. In the operating room. I thought you would just take notes on a notepad, like a proper journalist.” “We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write. We have to bring back images, sound, video. I hope you don’t mind.” Dunja stretched, and it was somehow voluptuous despite the depressing threadbare hospital gown and the shunt in her arm. “I don’t mind. Soon, that’ll be all that’s left, so the more the merrier. Something to remember me by.” “Why do you say that? Don’t you have confidence in Dr. Moln?r?” Dunja laughed. “Look at this place. This is my strategy of last resort. No one else in the world would commit this operation on me. Only Dr. Moln?r was arrogant enough. And you can quote me.” “I will quote you.” “And you? You were so impressed by Dr. Moln?r you came from New York to write about him?” Nathan’s turn to laugh. “I saw him in a documentary about illegal organ transplants. He was very defiant and very engaging. I came to talk to him about the international organ trade and then discovered he was a practicing breast surgeon. I’m not sure yet what the piece I’m writing is really about, but that’s not so unusual for me.” He lifted his camera. “May I take a picture?” “Why not? Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.” Nathan checked the light metering through the viewfinder, then cranked the camera’s ISO up to its maximum of 25,600. (The new D4s, the one he didn’t have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 409,600—it could see in the dark—but that didn’t bear thinking about.) The photos would be extremely noisy, grainy and splotchy, but would have a painterly quality, pointillist, perhaps, or impressionist. The camera somehow felt even more sensuous, more instrument-like, at that setting. He began to fire. Dunja sighed. “Of course, for all eternity I won’t look my best. Is there any pose you’d like from me? I’m not shy.” Nathan thought of what Naomi would say to that. She was a fashion photographer at heart, maybe even a celebrity shooter—a paparazza?—and wouldn’t be shy about directing a subject as pliant as Dunja. “I don’t really want you to pose. We’re pretending that you don’t know I’m here.” Nathan stood up and moved around her, shooting with the lens wide open, with little depth of field, the floating images of her face driving right into his brain. Her eyes had a creamy darkness, and she seemed able to look into the lens without actually noticing it. Stunning. Nathan paused and went back to his camera bag. He dug around in it for his flash. “Just to be on the safe side, I’ll take a few with some bounced flash. There’s not much light in here.” He slid the foot of the flash into the hot shoe and locked it. “We can just do the same thing you were doing.” He pulled up the flash’s little plastic bounce card for eye light and began to fire. “Oh, but now, with that flashing, I feel like a movie star,” she said. “And I want you to see the best part of me.” She pulled open her gown and presented her breasts, which were bruised and peppered with tiny swollen red dots. Nathan immediately stopped shooting. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Too ugly? Too horrible?” “No, on the contrary. It’s, um, too sexy. In a fetishistic way. Or something. Maybe too Helmut Newton. I don’t think I’d know how to use it for, you know, a medical article.” “Then just take some for yourself,” said Dunja. “So that you remember me afterwards in a nicer way.” She smiled the warmest smile at him, and then tears began to seep from her eyes. She did not wipe them away. “And can that camera function under water?” DUNJA SPLASHED WATER at Nathan, targeting his camera but missing it, soaking the knees of his jeans. Somehow she still managed to look voluptuous in her clinical gray one-piece cotton bathing suit, in part because it was thin and unstructured, clinging. A white medicinal rubber bathing cap hid her hair completely. “I was sure they wouldn’t allow you to take photos in here,” she laughed. “And you’re wearing jeans!” Nathan was squatting next to a stylized stone lion-head fountain that drooled complex mineral water into the pool. He stood up and followed her, warily snapping, as she waded along the edge of the shallow end of the pool. “I got Dr. Moln?r to pull some strings. Getting me in with jeans was the hardest part, apparently. But what about you? Every other woman here is wearing one of those blue plastic shower cap things. You’re not in regulation dress either.” “The matron in the locker room is very strict, but she’s also half Slovenian, from my father’s town of Jesenice. I told her why I needed a special hat to keep the water out of my ears. I made her cry. I think she’s in love with me now.” They were in the main swimming pool room of the Hotel Gell?rt, on the hilly Buda side of the Danube. The room was vast, more like an opulent art nouveau ballroom than a pool, and was bordered by a series of twinned, intricately tooled marble columns, arcades, and ornate balconies bearing potted ferns that projected from the spacious upper gallery. Thin morning light drifted in through its arched yellow glass roof. “And what about that bathing suit? Is that yours too?” asked Nathan. “You don’t like it? They rent them here. I think they were designed by Stalinists.” Somewhere deep inside the pool’s mosaic-tiled heart, motors fired up, and the entire pool became a frothing, sulfurous Jacuzzi. Dunja ducked under the effervescing water and disappeared, leaving Nathan to stalk along the edge of the pool, tracking her among the other swimmers as they churned out their slow, orderly laps or clung to one of the many pulsing jets on the pool’s floor. He dodged the columns and the fan-backed plastic chairs strewn randomly along the arcaded hall. When she surfaced, laughing, the bathing suit a sexy-astringent commie second skin, he started shooting again, the shutter rattling like a submachine gun, ignoring the wary looks of swimmers who got in the line of fire. Playing the camera all the way, Dunja pulled herself out of the pool and sat in one of the chairs—her chair, evidently, because she pulled around her the towel that had been draped over its back. Nathan pulled up another chair and sat close to her. “So, you’re actually staying here, at this hotel?” “Part of the Moln?r Clinic package,” she said. “It included business-class tickets on Mal?v. Flying me right from my hometown deep in the wilds of Slovenia. Where are you staying?” “Holiday Inn. My expense account is limited.” “Is it nice?” “Well,” said Nathan, “you can park a bus there. Great if you have a bus.” Dunja peeled the bathing cap off her head. She let it flop into her lap like a jellyfish and combed her fingers through her black crop. “You really should stay here. Would you like at least to see my room? For your writing? And of course you could take pictures. It’s very … proto-Hungarian.” “Aren’t you going to try the thermal baths? They’re supposed to be very healing.” “Oh, I did that when I first got here. I really don’t think they’d be very good for me right now. Besides, Dr. Moln?r forbids it. I think those little pellets will come popping out of my breasts like blackheads if I get all steamed up. He’s seeing me again tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to upset him. I won’t even tell him I went swimming.” DUNJA’S SUITE WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT. It was large and blandly comfortable, with a nice partial view of the historically strategic Gell?rt Hill and the sinister, sprawling stone Citadel that topped it, but Nathan had been hoping for something more exotic than just bourgeois familiarity. He had, he realized, hoped for the swimming pool, the florid thermal baths, converted into a hotel suite. But Dunja was not a disappointment. She was wearing a waffle-pattern bathrobe, looking at herself in the mirror over the writing table. The bathrobe was open, and she was holding her breasts, one in each hand, palpating them expertly, clinically, without sensuality. Nathan sat on the bed and took photos of her through the mirror. “So? My breasts are now officially radioactive. I’m not allowed to hug pregnant women for at least three months. What do you think of that? Journalistically.” “I don’t know. Can you hug non-pregnant men?” Still firing. The constant clucking of the camera had become part of their repartee, Nathan rolling his firing finger over the shutter release as exclamation, as rimshot, as query. Dunja turned to him, her bathrobe still fully open, hands still holding breasts. “Nathan, I’m a very sick woman. Does that turn you on?” Still firing. “Well, I told you, I’m a failed medical student. Now I’m a medical journalist. So, yes, I guess sickness does turn me on in a way.” She approached him and gently took the camera out of his hands and placed it behind her on the writing table. “What about death? I could be dying. Is that exciting to you?” She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they’ve been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower. Look. Look at all those needle marks. I’m like some weird junkie, crazy for titanium.” She laughed. “Don’t be shy. They feel better with some pressure on them.” He squeezed her breasts tentatively and kissed her. After a beat, she pulled her mouth away. “I’ve discovered that most men are repulsed by disease, especially when it starts to be visible.” She took up his hands again and placed them on her groin. “You feel those lymph nodes, how big they are? My shape is changing. It’s really starting to become a not-human shape. I had a boyfriend in Ljubljana, you know, for eight years. When he felt those, he told me it creeped him out, his exact words—well, the Slovenian equivalent. Then he noticed these.” She took his hands and placed them around her throat, then pushed them up under her jaw. “You feel those? They’re hard, aren’t they?” “Yes,” said Nathan. “I noticed them when you were swimming.” “They spoil my jawline, don’t they? It used to be very strong, very elegant. Now it’s lumpy and I look like an old toad. No, worse, because they’re not even symmetrical. A lopsided old toad. And so my boyfriend left me for a German tourist he was showing around the city. He worked as a guide in the summers. Now he lives with her in D?sseldorf. They go hiking. Marike’s a very healthy woman. He sent me a book of poetry by Heinrich Heine, who was born there. He says his German has gotten quite good, and he hopes I’m getting good medical treatment. That’s thoughtful of him, isn’t it?” Nathan slid his hands down around her throat and kissed her deeply. Once again, she pulled away, this time laughing. “Maybe you’re not normal. Or is this part of your research? Do you always have sex with your subjects?” “You’re not my subject. Dr. Moln?r is my subject, and I’m not going to have sex with him.” “Maybe you can ask him again why I have these swollen lymph nodes. He tells me it’s the cancer but that no one really knows what causes the swelling. I think he’s being evasive. I think I have cancer everywhere, not just my breasts. Look at these.” She twisted away from him, shrugged off the bathrobe, and held up her arms. “You see these? Near my armpits? They’re so big, they’re almost like two more breasts.” She dropped her arms and shrugged. “But maybe four tits is nice for you, who knows?” Dunja turned and strolled over to the bed. “If you make love to me, who will be shooting the photos?” She lay down on the bed languorously, head propped up on one hand. “There’s always a way, if you really want that. There’s a self-timer on the camera.” Beside the writing table stood a large armoire that held the TV aloft, flanked by miniature fluted wooden Greek columns, presenting the screen as though it were an oracle. Below that was a pair of doors, which Nathan now opened to reveal the scuffed, refrigerated minibar; sitting on it was a wooden tray that held snacks and sundries. Nathan slid out the tray and started rummaging through its chaotically scattered contents. He picked up a black cardboard box with red stripes and turned it over, looking for a label. “It would be tricky to get the best porn angles, though. We’d have to ask the concierge for help. Or maybe see what the doctor is doing right now. He seems to be a connoisseur of nude photography.” “What are you looking for?” she asked. “I think they have something here called a Pleasure Pak. Has gels and condoms and things.” Dunja sat up on the bed. “Nathan, forget that, please. I’ve had enough technology shoved into my body.” She spoke softly. “Really? But aren’t you …” “I’m not anything. In the last two years I’ve been irradiated from head to toe, inside and out. Nothing inside me has survived. Believe me. And besides, I don’t have much of a future to worry about, so if you have the clap, or even something worse, I don’t much care.” HERV? SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the chaise longue with Naomi’s old MacBook Pro on his lap. He was wearing his white shirt and loosened tie and his Calvins. On the bed, Naomi used her BlackBerry to email a certain Dr. Phan Trinh, C?lestine’s personal physician, whose address had just been given to her by Herv?. The boy was proving useful beyond her wildest imaginings. She was beginning to suspect that he was some kind of police asset at the Sorbonne, and that he had been informing on the Arosteguys, who were, along with everything else, contrarian political activists. “Dear Dr. Trinh,” she tapped. “I wonder if you would agree to speak to me in confidence about the medical condition of C?lestine Arosteguy. I believe that many destructive rumors have tended to damage the reputation of this wonderful woman, and I, a woman myself …” Herv? jumped up unexpectedly from the chaise and started fanning his crotch with a copy of Les Inrockuptibles, an amusingly unruly French movie/culture mag he had brought with him in his brother’s valise. He was very proud of a short movie review he had written for the magazine, his first ever published, and had read it out loud, very slowly, to Naomi, cracking up at every delicious instance of his own insolence. “Shit. Something in your computer just tried to grab my balls.” Without looking up from her screen, she—mother Naomi—said, “I told you not to sit that way. I always feel some weird magnetic-field hot tingling when I have it on my lap and the hard drive’s spinning, and I don’t even have balls. If you thought your Peyronie’s was bad, wait until you try testicular cancer.” “If it was good enough for Lance Armstrong, it’s good enough for me. A lot of people in France believe that his cancer treatment turned him into a sci-fi monster super-racer, even before the normal sports drugs.” “If you say so.” All Naomi could do was shake her head. Lance and cycling had loomed large in Herv?’s failed attempt to seduce her. It turned out that his secret sex weapon was Peyronie’s disease, which he believed he had acquired by riding his carbon-fiber Colnago bicycle along the entire arduous route of the Tour de France two summers ago. Certainly, for a skinny kid, he had amazing quad muscles; they were so out of proportion to the rest of him that they looked like implants, or maybe CGI sweetening. They were a pleasant shock to Naomi when his trousers came off, but really not enough of a novelty to get her into bed. Nor was his mildly bizarre penis. Herv? had already researched his condition, could at least name it—Fran?ois de Lapeyronie had been surgeon to King Louis XV (what resonance!)—but Naomi found him to be very selective in what he retained, more romantic than medically astute. She did her own quick web search, which revealed that Peyronie’s involved the mysterious growth of a hard, inelastic fibrous plaque along one side of the penis just under the skin, causing it to bend alarmingly when erect. Herv?’s particular version of the condition had his long, thin, uncircumcised organ making an almost full right turn of ninety degrees two-thirds of the way up from its root, its tip thus looking at his right hip. Was it scar tissue caused by trauma? The idea of a scarred penis, that it had been through the wars of sex, had its rough charm. Was it an autoimmune system assault? Not so appealing. Herv? felt it was a cycling problem. He had first asked to use her laptop because he wanted to show her his bicycle, whose photos were posted on one of his many websites. Still naked, he turned the screen towards her to show a loving shot of an ornately painted racing bicycle hanging from rubber-coated hooks screwed into the living room wall of his flat. “This is the machine that did it. It’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe it would do that to me.” He flicked through the detail close-ups. “You see that threeleaf-clover symbol, like in playing cards? That’s the Colnago logo. The seat isn’t original equipment. I had it fitted. It’s carbon fiber too. It’s not very merciful, but it’s incredibly light. I’m addicted to the carbon fiber.” He had described to her the evolution of his attitude to his new sex organ, whose altered form had apparently just appeared one morning, no warning, while he was showering and thinking erotic thoughts. At first, of course, he was appalled. His sex life was obviously over, laughable. “I kept getting these spam emails about lengthening your penis and making it harder and thicker. I used to mock of those. Then suddenly I found myself hoping to see one about straightening it out. I would have been tempted, even if I had to FedEx my cock to Nigeria.” That was the first laugh he had gotten intentionally from Naomi. He had been abstinent from that morning on, ashamed not only of his warped tool but also of the bourgeois embarrassment which gripped him. Even masturbation had become abhorrent. It was the Arosteguys who rescued him from sexual despair, though it was a side effect that came from their work with his more dangerous philosophical despair. At times, the Arosteguys gave a lecture together, normally in the modest Amphith??tre Turgot, with its steeply raked floor and simple wooden desks. But occasionally they would hold court in the magnificent sky-lit Grande Amphith??tre, its hundreds of green-baize-covered seats and benches jammed and bristling with students, and it was at one of these that Herv? first conceived the idea of attacking his new problem through the medium of a philosophical treatise concerning the body as commodity, a concept at the core of the Arosteguys’ politics. Inevitably, his huddle with the couple at the end of the lecture led to an invitation to a private tutorial at their flat, something for which they were deliciously notorious. They were genuinely excited by the boy’s use of his own physical reality to leap into the powerful waves of Arosteguyan speculation. They were also excited by his sex, which C?lestine called her “bat penis,” although further net-searching by Herv? did not come up with any validation of her pet name. The images he found revealed that bats, especially fruit bats, or flying foxes, had very humanoid, long, straight cocks that put his to shame with their fearful symmetry. The bats were also capable of licking their own glans to keep it clean while hanging upside down, and looked rather joyful doing it, too. This first sexual encounter, which announced the potent presence of Herv? in the lives of the Arosteguys, was sketched in some detail on the boy’s Facebook page, but the chiropteric element had been excised. Herv? now kneeled on the floor in front of the chaise, the malignant laptop safely at arm’s length in front of him. “Okay, Naomi. I now have something wonderful for you.” Naomi was finishing off her plea to Dr. Trinh, whose photograph she had just found. A posed office photo of the type meant to sell the compassionate competence of a private medical clinic presented a small, neat, perfect Vietnamese woman in an elegant tailored suit who smiled out of Naomi’s phone. “What would that be, Herv??” Herv? rolled sideways on the carpet so that he could lounge with studied cinematic insouciance against the sill of the balcony doors. “I’ve just told Aristide Arosteguy all about you. He wants to meet you in Tokyo.” THERE WERE SEVERAL IMMENSE, empty tourist buses in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. Nathan schlepped his way past them, camera bags over shoulders, iPhone in hand, having just been dropped off by the hotel’s shuttle. Naomi had texted him to call her ASAP, but for some reason the reception on the minibus had been poor. He had dialed her the second he stepped off. “How’s your beautiful, expensive hotel?” “Appropriate. How’s yours?” said Naomi. “I’m looking at it as we speak. Let’s just say … functional. More appropriate.” “More?” “Yeah. ’Cause I know that yours is too good for a journalist.” “It’s that darn rich-girl problem again. And speaking of girls, how was she? Your patient?” “Beautiful. She was really beautiful.” “In a doomed beautiful sort of way?” “In a Slavic sort of way.” “That sounds dangerous,” said Naomi. She meant it. “She was dangerous. Literally radioactive. The seductiveness of decay. What about Arosteguy? I’ve seen him in interviews. Pretty devastating. Gorgeous, in that irritating French intellectual way.” “I’ll let you know when I find him. Nobody seems to know where he is, including the prefect of police.” For some reason, Naomi wanted to hold back her new contact with Arosteguy, even though that was the reason she had called Nathan. Was it the Slavic-beauty comment? “I think C?lestine is really our September cover, though. She’s even more seductive. Beautiful but dead is always killer.” Killer was what they loved at Naomi’s primary magazine, Notorious, whose editor, Bob Barberien, was himself notorious for drunken office rants that somehow became sensational articles that you had to read; they generally involved unimaginable acts of murder. Notorious mimicked the 1950s scandal mag Confidential in its starkly aggressive cover graphics and even its retro typography. Naomi loved its recklessness and its ironic na?vet?; it provoked her own. “Yeah, and will he really have anything interesting to say? ‘I murdered my wife and then I ate her.’ How do you follow that up?” “Nobody seems to want that to be true,” said Naomi. “There’s a weird national protectiveness about that pair. It’s all denial, even from the police. From what I can see here, it’s possible that one of her student lovers killed her out of jealousy.” It had occurred to her that Herv? might know something about that. Or might even be the killer himself. “And students are notorious for not eating properly. I’m getting into the elevator now. If I lose you, I’ll call right back.” His room was on the third, and top, floor, and he did lose her, and waited until he was in his room to redial. “So I guess the only photos you’ve taken with my macro lens are shots of your laptop’s screen.” “Very funny. And what about you? Are you going to send me shots of your beautiful doomed patient?” Just the slightest pause from Nathan, but it hurt Naomi. “I only got a few during the operation. But basically, she wouldn’t let me. She felt diseased and ugly.” “You’ve never let that stop you before,” said Naomi, fishing. “I got stopped this time. Stopped in my tracks.” A big pause from Naomi before she said, “I can’t wait to see you. Amsterdam or Frankfurt?” “I need Amsterdam. My connecting flight to New York’s already been paid for. I land on the fourteenth. Work for you?” “The fourteenth works for me. Bye, darling.” “Bye, darling.” Nathan thumbed his phone off. That was life with Naomi—disembodied. Nathan realized he had almost no awareness of getting to his room other than the disconnect in the elevator. No smells, no sights, no sounds. He had been in his phone, Naomi a voice in his brain. On his laptop, he scrolled through the photos he had taken of Dunja—the operation, the spa, the sex they had together in her hotel room. It did not bother him that the photos aroused him in a weirdly objective way, as though he had stumbled upon a stash of celebrity sex photos that hadn’t hit the mainstream yet. Nathan was a connoisseur of his own sexuality, and its twists and turns amused and delighted him. And speaking of pictures, Dunja did look beautiful but doomed, and never more so, oddly, than in the snaps he had taken later in Moln?r’s restaurant on the Pest side of the river. It was perverse of her, he had thought, to want to go there, to a restaurant owned by her cancer doctor, where nude pictures of his patients covered the walls, and while she was in the middle of an intense cancer procedure. And worse, Dr. Moln?r himself had threatened to greet them there, to fuss over them and introduce to them in excruciating detail each dish, which he would personally serve them; perhaps, he hinted with a twisted twinkle, he would hover over their special corner table until they had each opened their mouths and, with exquisite care and sensuousness, tasted. Moln?r had not been there when they arrived. The ma?tre d’ could not give them the corner table and had no record of special treatment to be accorded them, no reservation in fact. It was a relief—even to be forced to leave for some other restaurant would have been better—but there was a table, or at least two chairs side by side along a run of small square tables pushed together. Dunja and Nathan were on the outside, facing a framed mirror and a pair of solitary eaters who paid no attention to each other. The mirror made it possible for them to eat and talk and watch each other’s responses as though they were characters in a charming Czechoslovakian movie from the sixties. The seating lottery also absolved them of any need to study Moln?r’s wretched and scandalous photographs—the opposite wall was blocked from view by a thick stuccoed pillar—which were all portraits of his patients shown in the most vulnerable, if not drugged, circumstances, with a clinically salacious eye for nakedness, both emotional and physical. Nathan had to reluctantly flash Dr. Moln?r’s card at the ma?tre d’ to get permission to use his camera in the dumpy restaurant, which was inexplicably called La Bretonne. His first attempts to document the good doctor’s artwork were intercepted by two waiters and a busboy, certain, no doubt, that the photographs were a rich treasure in danger of illicit duplication and dissemination. As he framed the Moln?r photos in his viewfinder, Nathan was disturbed to find himself responding to them with a profound and hopeless sadness. One or two of the shots he had taken of Dunja could have fit seamlessly among those of the women—all women—nailed to the rough-hewn dark wood of the walls, and it allied him with Dr. Moln?r in a way that made him queasy. The large black-and-white prints, Nathan had to admit, were gorgeous; the fine grain of medium-format film, with its deep contrast and subtle shadows conveyed by silver gelatin on rag paper, produced a startling hyperreal effect. Nathan made his way back to Dunja from the far end of the restaurant. She was cradling a glass of red wine in her beautiful long-fingered hands—bigger than his own, he had noted; he felt the oddness when they held hands. He immediately swung the Nikon around on its strap and fired off a few shots, the crack of the shutter easily swallowed by the surrounding boisterous murmur and cutlery clatter. But Dunja snapped her eyes up at him in anger, and it surprised him. Thus chastised, he sat beside her and stuffed the camera into its bag, which he jammed between his feet on the floor, not trusting the raucous flow of patrons and waiters behind him. And it would be those snaps, taken solely by the light of the candles on the table and the warm incandescent sconce lights on the wall in front of her, that revealed a pain and despair that Nathan had not seen in photos of her taken in much more vulnerable circumstances. She was going to die soon; she knew it in a profound way, and now that awareness had been reignited by the camera and was hot in her mind. “Nathan,” she said, “will this be the first time you’ve made love to a dead woman?” Nathan fumbled for his own glass, which he had not yet touched. “You mean you?” he said, taking a sip. The wine was very rough. Not good. “You’re not dead. I can personally confirm that.” “No, but I mean, after I die, you’ll have memories of sex with a woman who’s now dead.” She smiled a dangerously innocent smile. “Will that be a first for you?” “Except for my mother, yes. She died when I was fourteen.” “Different kind of sex, then. The Freudian kind. Doesn’t count.” She paused. He sipped again to fill in the gap—nervously, he was surprised to note. Weirdly giddy. “While I was waiting for you in my hotel room,” she said, “I watched a nature show. A young deer fell into a deep snowbank and couldn’t get out. A grizzly bear found it and jumped on it from behind. The deer tried to look around. Its eyes were wild and excited. The bear gently grabbed the deer’s muzzle in its mouth. It was so sexual. Sex from behind. The bear loved the deer, it was obvious. It ripped the deer’s throat out, and then licked the dying deer with the most passionate affection. I thought of you and me.” DR. TRINH KEPT BECOMING Japanese. It was Herv?’s fault, of course. The possibility of meeting Aristide Arosteguy in Tokyo had enormous gravitational density, enough to warp every nuance of Naomi’s day. And here, in Dr. Trinh’s perfectly elegant office on the medically chic Rue Jacob in the Sixi?me, this warping manifested itself in a subtle shifting of the doctor’s delicate Vietnamese features and her complexly accented English towards the rougher features and Japanese schoolgirl diction of Yukie Oshima, Naomi’s old Tokyo friend. Naomi had already calculated that Yukie would have to be a major ally in any Tokyo/Arosteguy initiative she might undertake and was finding it hard not to think of the constantly morphing Dr. Trinh as, well, Yukie in Paris. But Dr. Trinh was not an ally. “Please put away your camera,” she said, as Naomi set her Nikon on her lap. “I regret every moment that I allowed myself to be recorded or photographed. I am talking to you only to undo the damage which that demented cleaning lady has done by talking about C?lestine Arosteguy. I will probably regret this too.” Naomi gently caressed her camera as though demonstrating its innate harmlessness. “It’s really just proof that I actually spoke to you. You’d be surprised how many interviews are just patched together from things on the internet and presented as face-to-face conversations.” Naomi imagined Nathan chuckling and shaking his head over her shoulder as she said this. Somehow, Naomi was of another, newer, generation than Nathan, despite the fact that they were the same age. Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling and scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. She knew she was being disingenuous with Dr. Trinh as she talked to her about proof, but the only effect her awareness of this had on Naomi was to make her feel more completely professional. It was the way of the net, and it was liberating. Dr. Trinh was tougher than she looked. “Even photographs and recordings can be easily tricked these days, so what you say makes no sense here in my office. Put your camera and voice recording device away, that little thing hanging around your neck which I see advertised in all the chic fashion magazines, or you can leave right now.” Her face and tone were absolutely neutral as she said this, and Naomi could feel her own face start to burn, her skin telling her that she had been deeply, instantly unnerved before her brain or gut knew it. “Well, off the record is certainly one way to do it, if that’s what makes you feel comfortable,” said Naomi, unclipping her rarely used Olympus micro-recorder, glossy black like a little piano and reserved for stealth recording, and packing it and the camera into her camera bag with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She hated her own volatility, the cycling so easily between manic confidence and crushed, hopeless insecurity. Maybe drugs would help. Probably not. Naomi had a sudden suicidal urge to ask the doctor if she had any bipolar patients, but Dr. Trinh was not designed to be natively helpful, at least not to Naomi. “There’s nothing about this situation or about you that makes me feel comfortable. Let’s talk about that cleaning lady, that Madame Tretikov, the Russian.” “Yes, yes. That maintenance woman … she seemed certain that C?lestine Arosteguy had brain cancer.” And now Naomi could look up from fussing with her camera bag and jab back, however delicately. “Now, Dr. Trinh—I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly—Dr. Trinh, you’re not a cancer specialist, not an oncologist, for example, are you?” The doctor took a deep breath. “What’s that pin you’re wearing? What does that designate?” Naomi was completely thrown. Pin? Oh, yes. “This pin?” She unclipped the gold Crillon pin she had been given by her hotel contact and tossed it onto the leather writing pad on the doctor’s desk. “It’s the symbol of the H?tel de Crillon. I’ve been staying there. It’s held on by this big round magnet. You see? They’re very nice at that hotel. Not snobbish at all.” Dr. Trinh picked it up and examined it with weird intensity. The doctor’s paranoia was suddenly exciting to Naomi, comforting rather than insulting, helping her to cycle back up. It meant that the doctor had something to hide, or at least to protect. “Were you … were you thinking it might be a microphone?” Dr. Trinh tossed the pin back on the pad and immediately forgot it existed. “There was nothing medically wrong with C?lestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age. I was her personal physician. I was the one who sent her to specialists when she needed them. Something like cancer … I would have known.” Naomi desperately wanted to pull her notepad out of her bag, the one that was spiral-bound at the top, had a montage of newspaper pages decorating its cardboard cover and labelled itself “Reporter’s Notebook/Bloc de Journaliste”—naturally, Nathan had given it to her—but she could feel the fragility of the situation through her skin and didn’t dare. “What would you consider the normal complaints of a woman of her age?” Dr. Trinh actually smiled, though there seemed to be some pain involved in the act. “Perhaps you will simply look up menopause on the internet and your question will be answered.” A small, intimate explosion went off in Naomi’s brain, triggered by the unexpected mental juxtaposition of “menopause” and “crime,” two things she had never remotely linked before. She needed to remember this tiny epiphany somehow, and she needed to delve into the most heavy realities of menopause and womanness, a place she had never thought to go before. She generated a marker in her mind, one that would pop up whenever C?lestine’s age was mentioned. “Why do you think the Arosteguys’ landlady thought that C?lestine had a brain tumor? Isn’t that an odd thing for an ordinary person to just invent?” “Have you ever met this woman, this Tretikov?” “I’ve seen an interview with her.” “Yes, of course.” Dr. Trinh stood up, brushing the front of her suit with her tiny hands as she did so, as though Madame Tretikov had covered her with breadcrumbs. “Yes, she’s an ordinary person who has unconsciously used the power of the internet to create a new reality concerning Madame Arosteguy. And it has caused me and my medical colleagues a lot of anguish, I can tell you.” A contemptuous snicker. “She’s the kind of superstitious old woman who believes that thinking too much, or even thinking certain thoughts, can give you brain cancer. And I want you to correct that. That is why I agreed to talk to you.” Having made her statement, this figurine of a woman sat back down and resumed exactly her former position. “The media have now accused us of negligence in our treatment of a woman who was considered a national jewel. They talk of misdiagnosis, of carelessness, of political pressure on us that forced us to ignore her deadly condition, and so on.” “And none of that is true?” “None of it.” “And C?lestine didn’t tell her husband that she had brain cancer, and she didn’t ask him to kill her?” At this, Dr. Trinh produced a sad smile, and it struck Naomi as a genuine smile at last, one which illuminated the doctor’s eyes and altered her breathing, which summoned the earthy presence of C?lestine Arosteguy into her fussy, controlled office. “C?lestine always used to say that she was doomed and that she had a terminal illness. She said that to her students, to me, to everyone. It was not a complaint, you see. It was almost a promise. But then, anyone who read her writings deeply would know she didn’t mean anything medical.” The smile was still on Dr. Trinh’s face as she looked down at her doll-like hands, lost in secret memories of the doomed, womanly C?lestine, and Naomi found herself wanting to destroy it, to punish her for it. In particular, Naomi was annoyed with herself for not having read even a pr?cis of the Arosteguy oeuvre and could not therefore call the doctor on this evasion. The necessary weapons, however, were close at hand. “And would she ask just anyone to kill her?” It occurred to Naomi that she had very recently fallen back on the expression “just kill me” in a conversation with Nathan in which he had again carped about his missing macro/portrait lens—the lens on her camera right now, sitting in the bag at her feet—but she doubted it would be part of C?lestine’s lexicon. “Of course not.” “But someone did kill her. Who do you think it was?” “I have no idea. She had many friends.” “That surprises me. You think a friend killed her?” “She knew many people.” “You don’t think a stranger killed her.” “These are things I know nothing about.” “She would say to you, her personal physician, that she had a terminal illness, and you felt that she was being philosophical? You didn’t take it seriously?” Dr. Trinh had been talking to her hands, but now she raised her eyes to Naomi, searching as she spoke for verifying signs of Naomi’s stupidity, her profound American ignorance. “It was an existential statement,” said Dr. Trinh, “about the death sentence we all live under. She had an affection for Schopenhauer, which led her at times into a kind of fatalistic romanticism. I tried to get her to revisit Heidegger, not so different in some ways, the Germanic ways, but at least a shift away from that sickly Asian taste for cosmic despair.” As if summoned from the ether by that last phrase, a tiny silver crucifix hanging from a bracelet around the doctor’s left wrist caught the raw daylight bouncing onto the desk from a corner mirror and caught Naomi’s eye. Naomi’s friend Yukie was also a Christian, an anomaly that was somehow a disappointment to Naomi. Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, perhaps. So much more interesting. What bracelets would they wear then? Dr. Trinh continued: “But she couldn’t get past the man’s politics, the Nazi associations, the anti-Semitism. We disagreed on that point, that a man’s politics should negate the value of his philosophy. She could not see how a separation of that kind was possible. A perfectly French attitude, of course.” Naomi met the doctor’s eyes and her inwardly directed smile with a smile of her own, but she had no confidence that she could disguise the evidence of her immediate downward spiraling, brought about by her intense regret that she had initiated talking to another human being, live. If she had been in front of her laptop, she could google these two Germanics, get a feel for them, but in a strictly oral context she had no idea how to even spell their names, much less respond intelligently to Dr. Trinh. It was one thing to toy with Herv?, bright though he was. Nathan was the one with the classical education, or whatever you called it. He was the reader. Where was he? Naomi was struggling to keep her head above water with the doctor. A street brawl was the only way out. “Has anyone done an autopsy on C?lestine’s brain to see if she had a tumor?” “Based on the diagnosis of a cleaning lady? I doubt it.” “Are you aware of the report that C?lestine’s severed head was cut open and that her brain was removed by her murderer or murderers? Why do you think they did that?” A smile was still there on Dr. Trinh’s face, but it was no longer the same smile. It had become a smile that said, “I knew you were my enemy when you walked in here, and now here is the proof, and it makes me happy to see how right I was.” Dr. Trinh stood up and with special force brushed some more crumbs from the front of her suit, this time very dirty, greasy, ugly crumbs that had been sprinkled by Naomi herself. The little silver crucifix—had Vietnam been converted by French Catholic missionaries?—bounced at the end of its chain like a freshly hanged man. And still Naomi couldn’t help herself. “Dr. Trinh, off the record, did C?lestine ask you to kill her and then eat her? As a kind of womanly, compassionate sacrament, perhaps?” Dr. Trinh came out from behind her desk for the first time and walked to the door. She opened it for Naomi without a word. Naomi noticed the doctor’s shoes. They were stilettos with an ankle-strapped bondage component, very severe in their stitching and their shape, but shockingly colorful—red, yellow, blue, green, black—like rare Australian parakeets. As Naomi left the office, she could not help thinking that Dr. Trinh’s shoes were somehow significant. 3 (#ud799ab35-e8e6-5798-9b93-21d06b757352) DR. MOLN?R HAD ARRANGED for him to be upgraded to elite business class—the Duna Club Lounge!—on his Mal?v flight to Amsterdam. Even so, Nathan found himself wandering restlessly through the generic steel and glass of Terminal 2A at Ferihegy Airport. Unlike Naomi, who would immediately bury herself in her laptop the instant she arrived, Nathan considered airport downtime an opportunity for people-watching; but today, a drizzly, chilly summer day whose gloom seemed to have seeped into the airport, the only person Nathan was watching was Dunja, who was playing continuously on a screen in his mind. Trailing his roll-on camera bag behind him like a little red wagon, Nathan heard her say the terrifying, outrageous things she said she couldn’t help thinking but had no one to say them to until she met Nathan. “What will I do when you leave me? Who will want me?” “I’m not so special. If I want you … You’re gorgeous. You’ll have as many lovers as you want.” “So many women have cancer now. Do you think a new esthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the esthetic of the death-wishing drug addict? Will non-cancerous women be begging their cosmetic surgeons to give them fake node implants under their chins and around their necks? Under their arms? In their groins? So sexy, that fullness. And it works so well as an anti-aging technique, to fill out that sagging turkey neck. Who wouldn’t want it? And the jewelry, the titanium pellets piercing those tits. So S&M/bondage.” Dunja kept talking in Nathan’s head as he segued into a parallel inner dialogue with her about health and evolution, about the theory that concepts of beauty were not just concepts, but perceptions of indicators of reproductive potential and therefore of youth, about selfish genes using our bodies as vehicles only to perpetuate themselves, about how perhaps cancer genes could begin to make their own case for reproductive immortality as well, and so they too would put immense pressure on cultural acceptance of formerly taboo concepts of beauty, concepts which used to indicate disease and nearness to death but now mesmerized and seduced and mimicked youth and ripeness and health, and so her little fantasy of a culture forming around her own dire straits could theoretically … It wasn’t a conversation they actually had, but if he were Naomi, he’d probably be texting or emailing or instant-messaging Dunja right now using that Naomiesque stream-ofsemi-consciousness that had flowed over him so often in the four years they had been together. Naomi never let anybody go, and she used her unique, potent mixture of technology and witchiness to do it, whereas Nathan was only too happy to disconnect, to remove you from his Friends list and leave you dangling in the ether of cyberspace. Naomi thought that Nathan was ruthless with his friends; Nathan thought Naomi was compulsively, obsessively possessive. But what was Dunja? Despite the sex and the intimacy, she was the subject of a piece, and his subjects often tried to keep up a correspondence with him, sometimes clinging, with an unhealthy, creepy desperation, to that special moment in their lives; they couldn’t accept that their time was up, that the piece about their arcane, provocative medical condition had been published, and that Nathan was now permanently out of their lives. Naomi’s subjects usually ended up behind bars or executed, and that neatly limited flowback, as Nathan called it. Of course, Dunja was certain she would be dead in a few months, and that would neatly limit flowback as well. Their last conversation had taken place in the Moln?r Clinic’s horrid recovery room, after her breasts had been duly cut open and many small tumors had been removed under the cold blue surgery lights that transformed her flesh into silicone and her blood into magenta paste. He sat on the same plastic chair, although this time she was in the bed by the door and there were three other patients rustling and moaning in the room. “Did you enjoy that?” she asked. “It made it easier knowing that I had an appreciative audience.” “Moln?r seemed confident of success. I enjoyed that part of it,” said Nathan. Dunja laughed. “Moln?r is just talking about the mechanics of tumor removal. That’s his success. He knows I’m not going to last long, but he doesn’t really consider it to be his problem.” “Would it hurt for you to be more positive?” “Oh, Nathan. It hurts when you become sentimental and ordinary. Why would you ever do that?” “Ouch!” “Did you get good pictures? Were they shocking? Will Moln?r put them up on his wall to excite his customers eating their goulash? Should I make a pun about ghoulash? Ghoul lash?” “I get it, I get it,” said Nathan, still stung, unable to smile. If she did recover, what would they talk about? Her dream of going back to architecture school at the University of Ljubljana and building luxury houses on the banks of the Sava with her father? How ordinary and sentimental would that be? “I got some very good shots of your operation. I’m not sure that you’ll like them, but I’ll email them to you if you want me to.” Dunja took his hands in hers and pulled him towards the bed. He tried to lurch his chair forward, but it was too flimsy, bending and twisting until it popped out from under him, leaving him standing in a half-crouch like a jockey. She laughed again, and he took a step and settled on the bed, the lowered metal side rail digging into his thighs no matter how he shifted his weight. “Did it turn you on when Zolt?n cut into my breasts? I almost convinced him to give me just a local anesthetic, but he copped out.” Nathan enjoyed Dunja’s sporadic sixties drug/rock lingo and wanted to ask her exactly who she learned her English from, but it never was the right moment. “Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up.” Dunja became quiet, still. What he had just said, his expression of sexual normality, was not what she wanted to hear; he knew she would take it as rejection. He spoke very gently, skating on perversely thin ice. “When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful.” Dunja’s elegant big hands covered Nathan’s, squeezed them gently and pulled at them, shook them in slow motion, as though trying to reason with him through them, hoping that unspoken arguments would travel up his arms and down to his heart. “Nathan, oh, Nathan. You are really so sweet and lovely. But I have markers in my genes that say my cancer was destined to metastasize; and it has, it’s everywhere in my body, in my lymph nodes, you’ve felt them and caressed them, and you know it’s true. I’m not going to get out of this one, I’m really not.” “But Moln?r told me …” “Moln?r is a very strange and flaky man. He is a surgeon, a mechanic. He doesn’t want to know about things he can’t attack with machinery. I was completely surprised to wake up and find that I still had tits at all. I was sure he’d get so excited that he’d cut them right off. I was almost disappointed to see them, and looking only a little battle scarred too. He’s referred me to another clinic, this one in Luxembourg. It sounds very sketchy to me, just like Moln?r, but I have a marker in my brain that means I’m destined to go there too, to let them do things to me until I’m dead.” Nathan could only just manage to keep looking into her searching eyes, feeling at that moment very sentimental and ordinary, and therefore mute. Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? Could he make a case for her new, diseased self as the most avantgarde form of womanly beauty? He didn’t dare, but she did. “While I’m still alive, I’ll have nothing special left to seduce with except the scent of dying. That will be my lethal perfume. And I want it to be what seduced you, you see? Because that’s my future, and I don’t want to live it alone. So you might find me calling you to give advice to my next lover. I might want you to encourage him to go deep into me and not be afraid. Or I might call you one night and ask you to fly to me and then strangle me to death while you fuck me from behind. Why not? Why waste the situation?” Dunja paused, her eyes never stopping their desperate search of his eyes. She smiled a freakishly kind, loving smile. “Would you come to me, Nathan? Would you come to me then, if I called you?” Nathan headed for the sliding glass doors of the Mal?v Duna Club Lounge. As he walked in, he recalled Naomi saying, “Just kill me,” when he complained to her about something on his cell. Approaching the check-in counter, he thought about strangling Naomi to death while fucking her from behind. Her hands were tied behind her with a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe belt. His hands were powerful around her long throat. Her face was twisted into a beautiful, open-mouthed, terrifying expression of ecstasy, and the fantasy-Nathan knew that it was the end of sex, that there could be no more sex after this sex. At the desk, an extremely unattractive and excessively uniformed matron—that cloying red scarf printed with little multicolored stylized wings—explained to Nathan why the photocopied membership card and other obscure paperwork Moln?r had given him was not valid, and that she therefore had to deny him entrance to the promised land of the Duna Club Lounge. As he rollered away from the lounge and headed towards his gate, Nathan could only marvel at the Moln?resque perfection of it all. CHARLES DE GAULLE was undergoing extensive renovations. After walking for miles past dormant moving sidewalks, Naomi had to lug her roller bag up a double set of stairs—the small glass elevator was absolument for disability use only—then over a platform randomly strewn with cafeteria chairs (but no tables) that were served by a huge, lonely, lopsided automatic drinks machine, then down another set of stairs which led her into a dense mass of travelers standing numbly in a corridor with no seats at some distance from a gate with no seats. The horror of it was exacerbated by the near impossibility of getting out her laptop and opening it without cracking someone in the head. Naomi dug her BlackBerry Q10 out of the roller’s side pocket. She preferred it to Nathan’s iPhone in any text-intensive context like the ones she usually found herself in; she needed real, physical buttons (you couldn’t type on an iPhone when you had decent fingernails) and was dreading the possible imminent collapse of the BlackBerry empire. Such was the perilous life of the ardent tech consumer. As she fired up the Q10, she remembered with a pointy shot of adrenaline that she had left her Crillon pin on Dr. Trinh’s desk, so rattled had she been when she left her office. This was especially annoying because the entire day and a half in Paris after that had been tainted—a strange metallic taste in the mouth and a general warping of colors, like a migraine aura—by the Dr. Trinh debacle. Not only had she not gleaned anything useful from C?lestine’s doctor, she had unexpectedly bumped into the limits of her intellect, or at least her education, and felt bruised by the collision. Or was she selling herself short? The Crillon pin, for example. She could imagine Dr. Trinh picking it up from her desk with ancient silver North Vietnamese surgical tongs and sending it out to her favorite counter-surveillance lab for analysis. But it was a perfect excuse for further contact with the doctor, if Naomi could devise a more efficient tactic for dealing with her. She could send Herv? to pick it up, primed with some innocent French bad-boy questions which, coming from him, the doctor would feel safe in answering. How close a collaborator could she afford to make Herv?? As if in answer to that question, her Q10 began flashing its email alert light. It was him. “You did not get a very good review from Dr. Trinh,” he wrote. “She was very quick to contact me and to let me know that I should stay away from you because you obviously wanted to do damage to the memory of our dearest C?lestine. She also said that she did not feel that you were very intelligent, or maybe you were just American, she’s not sure, and that you used shock tactics that reminded her of American military policies in Vietnam. I asked her if she would pose nude for me, for my book that you liked the idea of. She said that her culture forbids it. We had a nice discussion about cultural assimilation and the sensuality of the East. I do not think she will do it.” Naomi’s thumbs began to fly. “I’m very disappointed to hear about the doctor’s reaction to me. Did she really talk about the Vietnam War?” “Ha ha, got you there. No, I made that up. She did say that she didn’t trust you, though, and that you deliberately left some pin or something in her office as a kind of symbolic marker or presence. Do you know what she’s talking about?” “Did you really ask her to pose nude for your book?” “Yes. All that is true.” “Does that mean that she was C?lestine’s lover?” “Yes. I was once in bed with both of them. One day I’ll tell you about that. It was very interesting. It made me think of Karl Marx.” “Was there anyone in the Arosteguys’ life together that they didn’t …” The corridor, which was lined with glass, had become unbearably hot as the sun edged over it, and the constant irritated nudging through the waiting crowd by passengers trying to get to their baggage or some other flight was ramping up the general hostility. Someone stubbed his foot on Naomi’s roll-on and rammed her with his shoulder so hard she could feel the density of his bone and muscle—it felt intentional, a punishment, and Naomi gasped—causing her to inadvertently hit the Send button on her phone. Now other people started to wedge their way through the gap that Naomi had left as she stepped forward under the blow, and she was separated from her camera bag. She rotated herself on the spot so she was confronting the surge and worked her way back to her roller. Facing that direction, she saw the marquee of an airport electronics chain, and with her bag safely back in hand, she plunged towards the oasis of the kiosk. IN THE CORNER of the room between the minibar and the TV dresser unit crouched two sets of unopened bags: two camera rollers, two backpacks, two small black Samsonite four-wheel Cruisair Spinner suitcases with faux carbon-fiber-weave finish (Naomi and Nathan aspired to Rimowa Topas, the sexy German dentable aluminum stuff, but that was, for the moment, out of their range). It was not so much that they had the same taste in gear, but rather that they collaborated on their consumerism; it was a consumerist dialectic that led to the same commodity. That’s what Naomi was thinking in the floating part of her mind as she sucked Nathan’s cock—so delightfully, boringly, not curved much at all, not a mutant organ in any way, but a classic, modern circumcised penis—in room 511 of the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel. And she was surprised to find herself thinking in Marxist terms, because up until that moment at the electronics kiosk, in which she discovered three books by the Arosteguys—cheap-looking rushed editions in American English pumped out to take advantage of the philosophy-cannibalism scandal—she had barely heard of Karl Marx or Das Kapital. And yet those books, small, with large, inviting typefaces, and so easy to read, like owner’s manuals for hitherto undiscovered parts of the brain, made her feel as though she had been born a Marxist economist. Not that Marxism was the subject of the books, but that the lexicon of Marx somehow underpinned the Arosteguys’ evidently profound understanding of contemporary consumerism—and of Naomi herself, as it turned out. The lack of an available direct flight, which would have been a short hour-plus hop from Paris to Amsterdam, meant a seven-hour ordeal involving a layover in Frankfurt. But the time dissolved in an odd way, because instead of wandering among the randomly strewn high-tech shops of that stainless-steel commercial kitchen of an airport, punctuated by intense bouts of Wi-Fi hotspotting, Naomi found herself settled into a lounge chair near her gate, submerged in the deep inner sea of the Arosteguys—a warm sea nurturing a coral reef inhabited by the most bizarre and engaging creatures—continuing a dive she had begun on the flight from Paris. By the time she came up for air, she had been transformed into a quiveringly, giddily passionate Arosteguyan. And now those three books—Science-Fiction Money, Apocalyptic Consumerism: A User’s Manual, and Labor Gore: Marx and Horror—lay innocently on the glossy desk by the window as Nathan unexpectedly, and somewhat unsportingly, came in Naomi’s mouth, phlegmy and bitter. It was her breasts that did it, or rather, it was all four breasts—two of Naomi’s, two of Dunja’s, superimposed on each other, the image fermented in Nathan’s brain and downloaded through his penis into Naomi’s hot, distracted mouth. Or so it felt to Nathan, absorbing Naomi’s jet lag and distraction as his own, and confusing her breasts, beautifully wobbling as she sucked, with Dunja’s larger, mutilated ones, and somehow even adding Dunja’s swollen armpit glands—six breasts?—to the mix. He had his arms behind his head and wasn’t even touching Naomi’s breasts. It was the distance that made the hallucinatory laminating of breasts possible, and his usual come-control ineffective. Or had he even tried to exercise that control? Was he like a small dog who punishes his mistress for staying out too late and leaving him locked in the kitchen? Naomi never swallowed unless she was very drunk. Naturally, she had a rationale. It was more porn-like to just let it dribble out of her mouth, to let it form a stringy bridge to his penis and his pubic hair. She did it now, not startled, exactly, but maybe puzzled by his betrayal of their routine, which was that they would decide in advance of her mouth enclosing him whether this was foreplay or this was it for now. Naomi didn’t like sexual surprises. She was always willing to play, but she wanted structure. And so it was a surprise to Nathan, then, that Naomi, abstractedly wiping her lips with the back of her hand, said, “What do you think about Marx and crime, Than?” No sexual reprimands, and a reversion to her infantile name for him, Than, suggesting a thumb-sucking, asexual state of mind. “Well, I’m not sure, Omi. It’s a huge subject, I guess. You’ve been deep into it? Marx? That’s a first for you, isn’t it?” Naomi rolled onto her back, flattened by the enormity. The ceiling was a stained plaster swirling. It matched her mental state. “I’ve been deep into the Arosteguys.” “They’re Marxists?” “I’ve been reading them. I realize I have no education. It’s intimidating and depressing. It hurts my head. I need the internet to read them. And exhilarating. I’m not sure what they are. Were. She’s very dead. And dismembered.” Naomi folded both arms over her eyes, shutting out the oppressive ceiling. “Omi, Than.” Nathan began the cursory wiping of his penis with an obscure corner of the bedsheets, a habit Naomi had forced herself to decide was endearing. Was it a passive-aggressive statement? Did he hold off doing that when she swallowed? She couldn’t remember. “That’s us,” he said. “Omi Than. We sound like a Vietnamese gynecologist.” Naomi shook her head under her arms. “So weird that you say that. So weird.” “Because?” “Because there is a Vietnamese gynecologist in my life. Or almost.” Naomi unfolded and rolled back over to face Nathan, lips still sticky. “C?lestine’s GP. Dr. Phan Trinh. She definitely had an intimate knowledge of her patient’s vagina.” “And a Marxist? A criminal?” “Dr. Trinh? No, I was thinking about Aristide when I said that.” “A Marxist and a criminal?” Naomi rolled off her side of the bed and squatted beside her camera roller. She dripped a few drops of lazy viscous fluid into the carpeting as she unzipped the bag and groped its innards. “I was thinking more like a Marxist and therefore a criminal. I mean, the way he—they—wrote made me dizzy-crazy, made me feel intelligent and deep, and you know how seductive that is for me, you used it yourself to get me into bed that first time.” And now she flopped back onto the bed, a white-and-silver iPhone 5s in her hand. “Lemme take a shot of you cleaning your cock.” Nathan stared at her in disbelief. “You have a bag full of the highest of high-tech photographic shit that you’ve lugged all over the globe, and you’re shooting my manhood with a cell phone? And since when do you have an iPhone?” “Since Charles de Gaulle. It’s a natural segue from my well-documented-by-you desire for disembodiment. I want to junk the camera roller bag and travel with only this, this implement. It shoots HD video too. And you can edit it on the phone, while flying. Touch focus. Dual LED flash. Fingerprint security. Great macro. Look.” And she swooped down to within centimeters of his cock-head and started snapping, the phone making an absolutely delectable shutter sound, reminding Nathan of the Australian lyrebird that would replicate the shutter sounds of forest paparazzi to seduce a mate. Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it? “And now mit Blitzlicht.” The LEDs embedded in the glass back of the phone blasted the tip of his cock with 5,400 Kelvin degrees of cool-blue daylight. He thought he could feel it. She held the phone up to his face. “You see how the flash throttles down for the macro shot. Perfectly exposed, matches ambient color temperature, doesn’t blow out your cock, as it were.” She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest. Nathan rolled over on top of her and looked over her shoulder at the photo. He thought fleetingly of that shot of Galapagos lizards mating on a sun-drenched rock. Naomi flicked Camera Roll back and forth with her index finger, nail strangely not clacking, sorting through the varieties of flash and flashless, macro and micro, a shockingly quick dozen of them, some mit scrotal views as well. “This is making me very nervous, Omi. Kind of existentially unstable.” She began to edit the photos in a cute retro app, making his cock look like it was shot with an Instamatic in the sixties, and then a Polaroid in the eighties. “You talk pretty, Nathan. But what do you mean? It’s all good. I’m going to give you back your big mother macro lens. I won’t need it anymore.” “Those are the most terrifying words you’ve ever uttered.” He buried his head in her neck under her hair, nuzzling in a pathetic and desperate way. He spoke to the pungent nape of her neck. “You’re giving me back my big mother cock. You won’t need it anymore.” Naomi tossed her phone onto a pillow and twisted around under him until they were belly to belly. He thought fleetingly of that fifties French movie featuring Saint-Trop?ziens mating on the beach. “You’re very anxious. You don’t have to be anxious.” “You just spoke German. Since when?” “The Arosteguys. Reading them.” “Why not French?” “Marx was German. Das Kapital. They quote him. They translate.” “Marx talked about Blitzlicht? He was into flash photography?” “He was an all-rounder. A lateral thinker.” “So Marx. The guy who forced your French guy to murder and eat his wife.” “Maybe not forced. Induced. Inspired. That’s the way I read it.” “That’s the other thing. You’re the one who doesn’t read. Not books.” Naomi tried to shrug him off, but he let his muscles go limp, made himself as heavy as that iguana. She had to breathe when he breathed. “Where’s your BlackBerry?” “I’m suffocating.” “Me too. Where?” Naomi grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and he spun off her. “Because—and I’ll tell you before you ask me—because you’ve abandoned your faithful BlackBerry, your old friend and lover, the one that was cool with long fingernails, left him, now that you’ve got a new exotic toy to play with.” Nathan pounced on Naomi’s left hand and splayed her fingers, stroking their tips along the edges of her fingernails. “Yeah, right, and you’ve cut your fingernails for the first time since we’ve been together, and it’s not for Last Tango in Schiphol reasons either. It’s for iPhone touchscreen sex.” He dropped her hand and she protectively hid it under her hip. “And I know you’re serious about the Nikon withdrawal too. Nikon, that was our defiant consumerist thing, no Sony, no Canon, our badge of professionalism, our shared sex-tech. So now you’ll go with cool eight-megapixel Jello-cam rolling shutter no-bounce-flash iPhone hipness. And you’ll leave me, you’ll fly to Tokyo to have an affair with the French-Greek philosopher guy, who will then kill you and eat your breasts. And photograph your corpse with your iPhone.” “That’s really fucking horrible, to say all that. Wow.” Naomi kicked at him with both feet in unison, like a cat on its back. “That’s probably the meanest you’ve ever been to me.” She jumped off the bed, grabbed the iPhone from the pillow, and began to delete the Nathan’s cock portrait photos, one by one, with violent, short-nailed jabs at the trash-can icon while singsonging, “Nathan’s penis: delete, delete, delete …” BUT OF COURSE a penis is not so easy to delete, and before long, Nathan’s was happily ensconced inside Naomi. It had amused Nathan the first time he noticed it—what he later thought of as “theme sex.” It was dizzy and dreamlike, like a Las Vegas sex room (or at least his imagining of that chimeric thing), and it had come after watching Mutiny on the Bounty, the Brando version, and his sex partner was Sheila Dahms, who was just dark enough of eye and hair to support the Tahitian-themed rec room sex, the drums, the waves, the grass-covered thighs and musky breasts. He felt he was underwater with her, it was so hot and humid, and there was a breeze, the drums, the first sigh of the East on his naked buttocks … And afterwards, after she had jumped up and gone to the bathroom to pee and maybe douche out, as they then did, she came back luminous and said, for a second there I thought you were Brando, and you were still wearing those white breeches and those shoes with the buckles, and we were underwater. It was never like that with Naomi. She didn’t seem to have theme sex, ever. She admitted to distracted sex, thinking about arguments she’d had with her mother or her sister, even ratcheting up the anger and intensity to the point of orgasm. Nathan could not imagine that such a thing could be true, but she swore it was. Was she covering up her own version of theme sex? Maybe it was fantasy/celebrity sex and she was fucking some prepubescent rock star, male or female, and wouldn’t cop to it. Once in a while she’d play and try to guess his theme of the moment, but mostly he stopped mentioning it, holding it back, keeping it private the way she felt that some of her sex things were too private, though he hated that, he wanted to violate every part of her, dirty it up and make it part of him too. And this time, of course, since the theme was Dunja, Dunja and surgery and sexual mutilation, he was not going to play thematic, especially since the doubling up had actually disturbed him, so specific had it been. He became the Hungarian surgeon, inserting the radioactive pellets into Naomi’s breasts with his mouth, holding them between his teeth and pushing them, nuzzling them, into her flesh. And then they became Dunja’s breasts, and Naomi became an amalgam of Naomi and Dunja and someone else—was it Sheila, was she making her comeback bid from the distant past?—and he became Arosteguy, terrifying himself, his conception of the man filtered through Naomi and the internet and those photos he had found with the safe filter off, photos you didn’t want to see because they adhered to the inside of your skull and lacerated your brain. And that website called poundofflesh.com (http://poundofflesh.com) devoted to the eating of breasts. Nathan/Arosteguy ate her breasts right off her chest, ripped them off with his teeth, and then he came again so voluptuously that it terrified him. Naomi pushed him off. “What the fuck was that? You actually bit me!” She pulled at her left breast, looking for bite marks on its underside. “I can’t fucking believe it.” “It wasn’t me. It was Arosteguy.” Naomi’s dismissive shrug. “Sex theme. I know you think they don’t exist.” “They don’t for me. I don’t have sex fantasies.” “A sex theme isn’t exactly a fantasy …” Soon Nathan had her D300s in his hands and was shooting a series of posed pictures. She was still naked, but he had wrapped the sheets around her lower legs so that only her thighs were visible. “Okay, now, can you guess?” said Nathan, hiding behind the camera. “I’m working on a pitch and you’re one of my subjects. What’s my article about?” “Hmm. You’ve covered my legs with a sheet.” “Not just covered.” “You’ve … hidden them.” “Not just hidden.” Nathan squeezed off some clattery shots as punctuation. Naomi’s eyes went wide. “You’ve amputated them.” “Ah,” said Nathan. Naomi squirmed a bit, then readjusted the sheet. “It’s that one where people want to amputate parts of their bodies because they just don’t feel that they’re the shape they’re supposed to be?” “They roam the earth looking for a doctor who will cut off a perfectly good arm or leg. An arm and a leg.” “Or else they do it themselves with a chainsaw or a shotgun. Yeah. What’s it called?” “Apotemnophilia.” “Yeah. Body dysmorphic disorder, on the street.” “Psychotherapeutic amputation.” “Amputee identity disorder, with a twist of bioethics. It sounds juicy.” “Speaking of ethics,” said Nathan, getting very close to her with the camera, “I believe I might be experiencing a touch of acrotomophilia. What should I do about it?” “Hmm,” said Naomi uneasily, “I got the philia part.” “A sexual attraction to amputees.” Nathan started to nuzzle her thighs. Naomi whipped off the sheet and sat up. “I think you just managed to creep me out.” She held out her hand. “Gimme my camera back.” “Aw.” “I don’t do medical. You do medical, remember? I do crime. It’s cleaner.” “Sometimes hard to separate them. But I thought you were giving me your camera. You were going iPhone solo, remember? I could use a backup.” Naomi snapped her extended hand at him and Nathan gave her the camera. She immediately started to delete the photos. “I think you’ve just rejected my pitch, and that is a crime,” said Nathan. Naomi swung off the bed and started fretting the Nikon back into its roller. She spoke into the wall with her back to him. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be going to Geneva for that … what was it? Worldwide Genital Mutilation Conference? Honestly, I think that’s more interesting than the amputation thing. There were so many articles about it for a while, then it tanked into hotness oblivion. It’s interesting about diseases, how they peak and tank. The politics of genital mutilation, now, that’s endlessly hot.” “Thanks for the encouragement. I was thinking that my apotemnophilia piece would segue into that exact meditation. But never mind. The Geneva mutilation piece is off. No, I stay here in this hotel and finish the Hungarian thing, just in case there’s something in Europe I missed and have to pick up. I email it to my agent, shamelessly begging him to get me The New Yorker—” “That’s still Lance, isn’t it?” “It is the same old Lance. Then maybe I just go home to NYC. To where you aren’t.” “I hate that part.” “The New Yorker part?” “The part where we say goodbye,” said Naomi, now sitting on the floor and playing with her new iPhone, still not looking at him. Nathan stood up and leaned against the windowsill. “And you leave me alone in yet another hotel room,” he said. Naomi looked up and flinched, almost startled to see him, as though she had just discovered an exotic bird at the window. Using the High Dynamic Range option, she took his flashless backlit picture with the phone. “I leave you desolate and alone. And I go back to Paris.” NATHAN WAS FINISHING UP his solitary room-service meal. On a website called mediascandals.com (http://mediascandals.com) was a page devoted to Dr. Zolt?n Moln?r. His iPhone quavered and he answered it. “Hi, it’s Nathan.” A very little female voice: “Nathan?” “Yes?” “It’s me. It’s Dunja.” “Dunja? Where are you?” “I’m at home. You know. Somewhere in Slovenia.” “Yeah.” An awkward pause. Her voice was too little for comfort. “How are you?” Dunja inhaled raggedly, suggesting to Nathan that she had been crying just before she called him. “Nathan, I think I gave you a disease. I’m so sorry.” “A disease? You mean, literally?” “Roiphe’s, Nathan. Roiphe’s disease. Dr. Moln?r just phoned to tell me. It showed up by accident in some tests …” Her little voice hung there, suspended, weightless. Almost without thought, or rather exactly like thought involving memory and information, Nathan was googling Roiphe’s disease and within seconds was downloading data into the conversation. Fingers flying and swiping. “Roiphe’s?” said Nathan, net-borrowed argument tinting his tone. “Nobody’s had Roiphe’s since 1968.” Dunja’s tone was the flattened tone of unassailable logic. “I’ve been immune-suppressed for a long time, and I have it. And so do you, now, I think. Probably.” “The Roiphe’s survived all that radiation?” “Radiation is not a treatment for Roiphe’s.” “No,” said Nathan, “I see that.” “You … you see that? On your computer? On the internet?” A photo of Dr. Barry Roiphe on the cover of Time magazine, May 1968. He looked lanky and shy, a bespectacled Jimmy Stewart. The caption, in screaming yellow, read, “Dr. Barry Roiphe: Sex and Disease.” Dunja began to sob huge, liquid, globular sobs. For a moment, Nathan thought the sobs were coming from Dr. Roiphe himself, his apologetic, twisted grin now morphing into a rictus of grief and shame. “I wonder whatever happened to him?” said Nathan. “Who?” said Dunja, amid shudders. “Roiphe. Dr. Barry Roiphe.” NATHAN WAS HAVING A PEE, and it hurt. He talked to the pain: “Ow, fuck, ow, shit, that really hurts! Barry, Barry, what did I do to you?” The pee dribbled to an uncertain halt, then dripped morosely. Nathan shook his penis angrily and reached over to his shaving-kit bag. He took out a large magnifying glass with a ring of battery-operated LEDs, swiveled around to the sink, flicked on the LEDs, flopped his penis over the edge of the basin, and examined its tip. The word suppurating came to mind. “Fuck,” said Nathan. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Back in the Schiphol Airport Lounge, despondent, he sat with laptop closed while others browsed with professional intensity. He hadn’t finished his Hungarian piece, his Slovenian, Dunja piece. The hotel room had started to feel like a disease ward, a holding compound for infectious disaster. His phone released the frog trill that said Naomi. He would have to consider changing her ringtone. The endangered frog species thing. Spooky, symbolic, something not good. Slide to answer. “Yeah, hi. Nathan.” “I hear airport. Are you in an airport?” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/david-cronenberg/consumed/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.