Consumed

11

“IT WAS NASTY OF YOU to speak French to me. Cruel. Are you always so cruel? You’re a cruel person?”

“You told me you just forgot all your French. You never said the language traumatized you.”

“I thought you understood.”

“I thought I did too.”

Chase was wearing jeans, black stockings, loafers, and a formfitting stretchy black T-shirt with long sleeves sporting thumb holes. Her thumbs were in those holes, and her hands were half covered as a result. Nathan thought he recognized the style from something Naomi had bought at a store called COS in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He was normally oblivious of the details of clothing. It was like being tone deaf, he thought, a genetic thing, nothing you could do about it; only the general impression ever remained, never the details. When Naomi said, “What was she wearing?” he would fumble for an intelligible answer, and it became a major item in their large storehouse of self-directed jokes. But where Chase was concerned, fashion was evasion, literally a cover-up, and so he forced himself to mentally download the details and store them; and in some cases, like now, as they made their way up the carpeted stairway to the third floor of Roiphe’s house, he resorted to surreptitious technology in the form of his muted iPhone, recording her from behind when she wasn’t looking.

Chase had acknowledged the banning of the doctor from her domain upstairs—“father issues,” she said flatly—and had outlined the rules of engagement for Nathan: no photos up there, no note-taking or voice recording, no reports to Daddy. All those things might come later if she was comfortable with his presence after the first go-round. At the top of the stairway was a small landing overlooking the atrium formed by the spiraling staircase. It was gauzily lit by diffused daylight from the fussy art nouveau skylight above, and connected four doors, all of them closed and, he assumed, locked.

“Which door would you like me to open, Nathan?”

He had seen what was behind one of the doors—her bedroom—when Roiphe had taken him on his late-night excursion to Chase’s tea party, but of course he was not going to mention it; in any case, he was not sure which door it was, so disorienting had that night been. “Maybe you should decide that,” he said. “I’d just be guessing.”

“Yes, I suppose I should shape the narrative for you.” She turned to the door farthest left, pulled out a set of keys on a braided ring, and opened it. “I have a secret color code for these keys so I don’t get confused. See these little stickers? Okay. Come on in.”

Nathan followed her into a short room featuring a steeply sloped ceiling with a gabled dormer whose window looked out into the bristling, serrate leaves of a large chestnut tree that were showing the brown blotches of fungal blight, with crisping edges curled like the vegetable equivalent of Dupuytren’s contracture. Chase flicked on the overhead gimbaled halogen lights and gestured towards the device sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. It looked something like a European clothes dryer, but one with a very high-tech powder-coated steel chassis bathed in violet LED mood light.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Your 3D printer?”

“The FabrikantBot 2. This is the very rare floor model. It’s got a huge build volume. Most of them are desktop.”

“Looks good. What do you fabricate with it?”

On a night table next to the FabrikantBot was a twenty-seven-inch iMac which Chase now woke from its cozy electronic slumber. Once she had typed in her password, a window snapped up which depicted a congenial green landscape with shadowed mountains, clouds, and blue sky in the distant background; various chunky control icons dotted the landscape’s periphery. On the lawn-like foreground sat a mesh graphic of a cubic volume within which perched a stylized pink great horned owl. Chase kneeled before the computer and began to massage the wireless Magic Trackpad beside the keyboard. The owl responded by rotating in all directions with flawless three-dimensionality. “This is a file I downloaded from thingiverse.com. That’s a communal website where you can find thousands of 3D modeling designs uploaded by the community, all for free—bicycles, engine models, anything. It’s all STL files—I think that means stereo lithography, or something like that—and all the digital modeling programs understand those files. If I were to hit the Fabrik button here on the screen, the printer would start to make me this little owl.”

“That would be great,” said Nathan. “I’d love to see it in action.”

Chase nudged her cursor up to the cardboard-carton Dropbox icon in her menu bar and opened the Dropbox folder. “Well, okay. I’ve got a new design waiting right here for me. It’s something my friend in Paris has sent me. I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. It’s an STL file, so I drag it into the virtual build space of the FabrikWare program so that I can scale it up or down and play a bit with his design. Oh, gosh. I’m embarrassed!”

Gosh. The owl had disappeared, and there on the screen was an eccentric, unapologetically erect penis, presented in the same bland and cheery pink as the owl. Chase turned to Nathan, gray-green eyes vibrant, shining. “Are you okay with this, Nathan? Another man’s sexual organ?”

He had somehow missed the radiant power of her eyes until just now; probably, he mused, a function of too much looking through a lens. “Pretty much okay, as long as I don’t have to play with it.” She laughed a conspiratorial laugh. “And who is this other man? I mean, is it just a CAD/CAM design fantasy or what? I mean, what I’m seeing is not normal.”

“Oh, no. Hervé would never do that. He subscribes to the philosophy of the cinema verité filmmakers of the sixties.” Nathan noted that she pronounced the French words in a risibly Anglicized way.

“They wanted to document reality in an authentic way, right? Even when they were making fiction films. But how does that equate here?”

“Hervé uses a handheld laser scanner on real objects in the real world—his version of the shoulder-mounted Eclair NPR camera all those verité guys used. Incredibly expensive, but he got an arts grant from the Ministry of Culture and he has some sketchy patrons. He doesn’t design. He might combine, and so on, but the basis is always real-world scanning.”

“So he scanned someone’s penis with a laser scanner?”

“It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing. It’s done for movies all the time—actors’ faces get mapped onto the faces of stuntmen so that it looks like they’re doing really dangerous stuff.”

“Not sure someone would want that penis mapped onto their own.”

Chase blushed. “It’s Hervé’s penis, of course. He’s not shy about his condition, believe me. He’s managed to turn it into quite a popular tourist attraction. It wouldn’t curve that much if it weren’t erect. I’m sure he had a friend help him with that part of it. Maybe one of his patrons.”

“So now that it’s on your computer, what are you going to do with it?”

Chase went back to the trackpad. “So you’ve dropped your file into this virtual build space, and then the interface gives you the tools to rotate it, like this, turn it around, scale it up or down. I think I’ll make it bigger than it really is, just for fun. The software lets you know when you’ve exceeded the physical build volume in the machine, so you can’t make that mistake. Then you get the software’s slicing engine to julienne your virtual object before the machine creates the physical object, layer by layer. They used to call it ‘rapid prototyping’—a very nice term.”

“You know how big it really is? Your friend’s penis?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it many times. Now watch.” She hit the Fabrik button and the printer came to life, the print head beginning to surge back and forth with relentless energy on its steel rails. “You see this roll of pink filament back here, on this spool attached to the chassis, looks a bit like a big fishing reel? It could be any color, but I happen to have this intense pink. It’s made of PLA, polylactic acid, it’s a renewable bioplastic. So the print head pulls this filament spooled in the back up through this clear tube here, see? It’s pulled up into the extruder, which heats it up and squirts it out through a macro hole onto the build platform, which, as you can barely see, is slowly descending as the model is printed out layer by layer. You can find tons of videos on YouTube of stuff being printed with speeded-up motion. It’s mesmerizing. Really a lot of fun. The platform sinks down like an elevator and the object kind of mushrooms up on top of it. This thing is probably going to take two hours to build, it’s got so much detail.”

The print head had already laid down a pink disc—rather small and plaintive on the substantial translucent build platform—which represented a slice through the root of Hervé Blomqvist’s penis. Mesmerizing enough, but Nathan was primarily mesmerized by Chase, who had snapped compellingly into focus the moment she engaged him through the lens of the FabrikantBot 2. She was displaying an unexpected geeky passion that was even deeper than Naomi’s, and for Nathan that was pure, dangerous sex.

“And what exactly is the condition that your friend… Hervé…?”

“Yes, Hervé Blomqvist. We were students in Paris together.”

“Does he expect you to actually do something with that? The thing he sent?”

“Oh, he knows that I will, and he probably has a good idea what that’ll be.”

Nathan could only imagine her using the emerging device as an oversized dildo, and immediately got an erection that fused unpleasantly with the image on the computer. “What’s the condition that makes his penis take that extreme bend halfway down its shaft?”

“Three French doctors,” she said.

“What?”

“Hervé said he was plagued by three French doctors: Dr. Peyronie—that’s what the penis has; Dr. Dupuytren—contracture of the tendons and then the fingers so your hand goes like this”—Chase made a claw with her left hand—“and that often goes along with Peyronie’s; and Dr. Raynaud—his feet sometimes go purple from lack of blood circulation whenever it gets even just a tiny bit cold. Three French doctors. Sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?”

“You seem to know this guy fairly intimately.”

“We were a very tight group there, at the Sorbonne. It was exciting.” Sorbonne pronounced the way a Midwesterner who had never heard of French might have pronounced it, with the accent on the first syllable: sorbn. Nathan wondered if she would gradually evolve an elaborate meta-language which would annihilate any trace of French in her speech and thinking, the way le schizo Wolfson had done in transforming English into a compound of Hebrew, French, German, and Russian. It was, in a way, the inverse of Samuel Beckett writing some of his works in French in order to get away from his mother tongue and thus force himself to write, he said, with greater clarity and economy.

The printer was shuttling back and forth, laying down its strata of PLA on the build platform, which ratcheted lower and lower as the object, the renewable bioplastic penis, grew up like a stalagmite in a cave. It worked with measured enthusiasm, without irony, happy to be creating an extruded twisted erect penis, happy to be creating anything at all. Nathan felt weird to be identifying with the FabrikantBot, but he was. He could understand that feeling of being happy to create anything at all, to just be creative, and it suffused his trepidation about his Roiphe project, the phantom book called Consumed, which he thought maybe the FabrikantBot could print out for him. Why not? Renewable organic plastic books by the thousands.

“I would love to do the veins in blue or purple, and just the head in pink or red, but this version of FabrikantBot only does one color at a time, and you can’t combine them in one object. I’ve been doing a lot of painting, but it would be great to not have to. I’m trying to get my father to spring for the next iteration, but he’s resisting. The RepliKator 3 has dual heads and uses a hot build platform and I think you have the option of using ABS plastic and it’s more expensive. But it’s not just the money. He wants me to show him what I’ve been doing, and I don’t want to.”

“Well, he probably wouldn’t want to see Hervé’s penis, although we know he’s seen plenty of them before. Maybe just not in this context.”

“Oh, but Hervé doesn’t just send me penises.”

They left the FabrikantBot contentedly chugging away and stepped out onto the landing. Chase locked the door, then turned to the adjacent door. “That one’s my bedroom, and the next one is my bathroom, and that one”—she turned to the facing door—“the one we’re going to look at, is my art room.”

Chase flicked on the lights in a room that was a mirror image of the printing room, although this one’s dormer window was shuttered. There were two rough wooden trestle tables: a very long one the size of a picnic table, and a shorter, square table crowded with cans and tubes of paint, brushes, strips of cloth, rectangular plastic palettes with lids, painting knives, jars of water.

“See, there, I told you about the painting. You can paint directly on PLA with acrylic paint. You can sand it first too, if you want to create different textures. It would be perfect if I had a sink in here, you sometimes need water, but the bathroom’s right next door. It’s kinda messy right now.”

Chase turned away from the paints and stepped over to the big table, on which rested many large, lumpy objects covered by a bed-sized canvas sheet. Standing before it, she paused and took a deep breath—with odd reverence, thought Nathan—then leaned over and began to carefully fold back the sheet. Now gradually exposed were the thermoplastically replicated body parts of a mutilated and dismembered female human, distributed in no discernible order. They were painted crudely, but convincingly enough to induce revulsion in Nathan, reminding him of a horrifying butcher shop he had once come across in a small town in Spain. A single hacked-off breast, chunks of thigh and calf, fingers separated from one hand, a torso split into quarters, a startled head cut open and splayed with swollen tongue protruding. Almost every square inch of observable skin surface had been gouged, as though savaged by the mouths of a large school of piranhas, and each gouge had been lovingly detailed with necrotically dark-red acrylic paint.

“Hervé sent me these, piece by piece,” she said, tossing the neat bundle of the sheet under the table. “I’ve arranged them and finessed them with paint.” She turned to Nathan and leaned back against the edge of the table, hands behind her. “You know, I wanted to call this work Consumed, but my father beat me to it. Unless you can convince him to give your book another title.”

Nathan recognized the tortured body parts from the photos that Naomi had directed him to. In the aggregate, they were Célestine Arosteguy.

“YOU ACTUALLY DID IT, THEN. You cut off your wife’s breast with her consent.” Naomi was thinking journalistically and legalistically; it was an astringent approach she had to take in order to keep her balance in the thick liquid night of the late Tokyo summer. They were outside in the drab, desperate garden because the house had become too hot, too sultry, too intimate and airless. She was sitting on a lichen-stained concrete replica of a hand-cut stone bench pushed back against the far wall. The heavy-lidded orange lights built into that wall splashed her face with a medicinal glow like a disinfectant, sculpting her with deep, flushed shadows. Arosteguy paced around the garden in front of her, occasionally kicking at some piece of household garbage obscured by the darkness that rippled in cross-currents before him.

“You know, a colleague of mine—I won’t tell you who it was because you would look him up—we were at a strange karaoke event, in Paris, not here, and I was forced by circumstance to sing the song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” like Serge Gainsbourg, with the colleague singing the Jane Birkin part in falsetto. I only did it as an homage to Salvador Dalí, who is quoted in the song’s title referring to Picasso’s communism. Gainsbourg had asked Birkin to sing it so that she sounded like a little boy, and my colleague did that too, with no apparent effort. It was a moment of revelation about him that I could have lived without. And after that kitsch moment of bonding he told me that he had a savage dream, and the dream was that in a moment of passion he would cut a woman’s breast off. He was actively looking for a woman who would agree to let him do it for money, and also a doctor to guide him. He was a very fastidious and scrupulous man. I don’t know if he ever realized his desire.”

“Is that how it felt to you? Was it sexy? Was it passionate?”

“I enacted surgery. I committed surgery. And Célestine was right, as always. I wanted to keep the breast, preserve it somehow, take it to the taxidermy shop on Rue du Bac, something, even if grotesque. I couldn’t let it go. I really did feel that she was diminished by its loss, but even more selfishly, that we were diminished, our life together, our sexuality. I can’t imagine the complexity if we had had children that she had breastfed. And I said these things to her, but she wouldn’t let me keep it, and Molnár was on her side—for psychological reasons, he said, as well as health, as well as legal. Imagine being stopped on the train back to Paris… But for her it was simple: destroy it and everything inside it, like a wasp nest you’ve pulled down from the eaves with a fishing net and stuffed into a garbage bag. Burn it and the winged adults and the white grub larvae and the eggs. Burn it.”

Naomi had no doubt that Arosteguy was lying about everything (well, perhaps not some of the details of their personal life and habits), that his confession was a novel, an art project, and that he was making her his collaborator in its shaping and its dissemination. But this did not dishearten her or even challenge her sense of journalistic integrity, which, to be truthful, was always only a theoretical thing, a professional playing card, secondary to entertainment and the continuance of work, or even tertiary, with her own creative fulfillment, never spoken of, a surprising first place. If the lie was complex and enthralling—and it was, it was—then there might be a book in it, with the ever-present desire to dig for the chimeric truth driving it on, providing the suspense, and no need ever to certify that truth. She could lead her readers to wonder if the photos of Célestine’s body parts would reveal the presence of two severed breasts, thus refuting the mastectomy tale she was being told. She could press the prefect of police, M. Vernier, for this information without explaining its importance to him. She could try to examine the torso herself, the actual torso—this was an exciting thought; but had it been preserved as evidence or had it already been buried or cremated?—to see if the left breast had been surgically removed, stitched and healed, rather than brutally hacked off. The photos she had seen only revealed the torso’s left side, and a shadow obscured the wound. Was this deliberate on the part of the police? Were they even police photos? Had Arosteguy posted them himself ?

“But didn’t you enjoy it, the cutting?” she said. “On some level? Now that I know you…”

“You would like to inhabit my body as I approach Célestine lying on the table, inhabit me as in those sci-fi movies where a warrior climbs into a giant robot nine stories high and operates its immense arms and legs from inside the robot’s glass head.”

“Yes. Exactly like that.” Of course she was recording, and of course he knew it. The Nagra sat on the faux-stone beside her, blinking happily. He wouldn’t perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

“All right, then. I approach her body, and it is her body, because her face is hidden in a sterile cloth tent erected around her head. And it is not exactly Célestine, because her color is wrong, she’s blue and green, and so in a sense is not alive, not sensible.” The French often got that last word wrong in English, Naomi observed; in French it meant sensitive, responsive, sentient. “And her smell is wrong, a harsh disinfectant smell. And I swear to you, her breast is outlined and bisected with dotted purple Magic Marker dashes—cut here!—like some terrible nightmarish cartoon, a large teardrop shape with the nipple in its center.

“Molnár is hovering over my right shoulder, my scalpel side, whispering to me, his prize pupil, urging me on, sensing my reluctance and fear, but also sensing—you will not be surprised to hear—that I have an erection, and I am suddenly flooded by the emotions of my karaoke colleague, as though his words of that night have swarmed my brain and have become my words, my thoughts, and now I am about to fulfill both our dreams by cutting off the breast of my wife.

“I am about to make the first cut. Molnár has cautioned me not to think in terms of perfection, of making the perfect cut, because that leads to paralysis; it’s impossible with flesh in any case. ‘Look at that footage of Picasso making his drawings: no hesitation,’ he says. In a sense, no thought at all, just pure instinct and a desire for the reality of the drawn line, whatever it happened to end up being, a certainty that it would be right. But still I tremble when I first sink into her breast the hot needle of that terrible electronic scalpel, with its disposable blade for disposable flesh.”

Arosteguy had been pacing constantly as he spoke, and so now, when he suddenly stopped, it had the impact of a gunshot. “It’s too banal,” he said.

“What is?”

“This voice-over description. This talking-head interview.”

“Oh, no! What do we do?”

“I need you to bare your breast and then I reenact it. We collaborate.

How great for your article or even a book. How dangerous I am. How brave you are. How perverse and yet somehow sweet.”

“But can’t people see us here?”

“We’re gaijin. They don’t care what we do to each other, or even what Japanese citizens do to us. Remember Sagawa? And many other crimes against gaijin? Not worth worrying about. And sex surgery? This is Japan, my darling.” Arosteguy had been fumbling around in the pockets of his corduroys and now produced a short, thick, Japanese Magic Marker with a very thin tip, which he brandished like a cigar. “We will play doctor. You will be Célestine, the willing, excited patient. I will direct your performance. I will play two roles: the somewhat reprehensible but roguishly charming surgeon, Dr. Zoltán Molnár; and then the entirely reprehensible and ponderously unappealing French philosophe, Aristide Arosteguy. I will direct my own performance but will entertain any suggestions offered by my co-star regarding stagecraft. And we will cover the entire process of breast removal as far as I remember it.” The effect of their communal drinking was beginning to manifest itself in his slurred pronunciation and the general mistiming of his mouth and his body. Naomi had been matching him drink for drink—sake and then beer—primarily to keep his narrative rhythm from faltering, but she now regretted it, certain that her own timing must be deranged even though she couldn’t gauge it—a bad sign for her.

As she began to unzip her fleece hoodie, Naomi felt doubly whorish: she was going to expose her breasts in a Tokyo backyard; and she was doing it knowing that it was only for the article, for the book, for the perversity of the narrative and the commercial value of her Arosteguy project, taking it so far off the rails that it was probably irresistible to any publisher, paper or electronic. The feeling did not daunt her; she was enjoying the transgressive whorishness of it in the most childish way. A huge advertising blimp floated into view overhead, its flanks lit up by an animated slideshow featuring a line of Finnish fitness equipment. Naomi watched dreamily as a miniature collapsible treadmill, suitable for modest apartments, was demonstrated, and imagined Célestine and Ari treading side by side in Paris. As though induced by her fantasy, Arosteguy took two resolute steps towards Naomi, fell to his knees at her feet (groaning slightly as the bursitis swelling the tip of his right knee expressed itself), laid the Magic Marker on the bench, and took her hands in his before she had managed to completely unzip. “Let me unbox you,” he said.

“Do what?”

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism. I love them. You watch as an anonymous Vietnamese teenager lovingly opens the box he has just received which contains… One of those, possibly.” Arosteguy flicked his fingers towards the Nagra. “He is in ecstasy—we can ascertain this only from his voice and his boyish hands with the edgily bitten fingernails, the camera never wandering from the box and its contents—but he is a master of delayed gratification, as are his thousands of viewers. He will slit the tape holding the box shut with a special box-cutting knife. He will first take out the smallest inner box containing the charger and charging cords and the instruction manuals in several languages. He will fastidiously cut open the tiny heat-sealed plastic baggies holding the battery and the earphones and the adapters. And then finally, with a tremulous flourish, he will lift out the bubble-wrapped object of desire itself, the electronic device, saying, with feigned nonchalance, in lightly accented English, which is the language of consumerism, ‘And, well, okay, so here it is…’”

So here it was: Naomi’s left breast, unwrapped with a tremulous flourish by Arosteguy, though not without some difficulty, because she was by happenstance wearing her white compression sports bra—she had thought she might find time to go jogging around the neighborhood—and the sports bra’s slender metal front clasp had, with the familiar innate maliciousness of small mechanical things, seized, forcing Naomi to twist it open for him before allowing him to complete her unboxing. She was traveling with only two bras this time around, and she would have preferred to be wearing the lacy black Victoria’s Secret underwire with removable straps, but the whole procedure seemed to be occurring on an intellectual level, and he didn’t seem put off by the white bra’s unsexiness.

She sat braless, hoodieless, and mysteriously comfortable, her hands spread and resting palms up on the bench as Arosteguy dangled the bra from a finger, letting it rotate gently in the provocative light of the garden like an unexpected flounder. “Afterwards, we fitted Célestine with a special mastectomy bra. It had a pocket on the left side for a prosthetic breast. It was called Amoena, I think, a very beautiful, classical name. Actually two pockets, as though it were waiting for her to lose the other breast. The breast form called Energy Light, Size 4, seemed to match her remaining breast perfectly, though the missing one had been larger. All a question of balance and symmetry and weight and social acceptance. The inside of the prosthetic had a transparent bubbly surface, like bubble wrap, to allow breathing, but it still got hot and sweaty, though there was the promise of a NASA-developed material which could maintain normal breast temperature. The outside was flesh-colored and had a not very enthusiastic nipple at the tip, and its consistency was remarkably malleable and lifelike, though too homogeneous in feel to be a real breast. She wore it twice, I think, and then abandoned it. I used to find it perched on a bottle of liquid paracetamol in our laundry closet next to the washing machine, like a conical Chinese hat. In fact she stopped wearing bras altogether, and made a fetish of wearing tight sweaters and T-shirts that emphasized her amputation, saying that as a child she had a cat with one ear, and now she was one herself.”

“I don’t think I could be so brave.”

“You can’t know how you would react, which is why we must reenact. We shall become reenactors, like those guys who refight the Battle of Waterloo with those old muskets, with their anachronistic little blue earplugs securely in place.” Arosteguy began to manipulate her left breast in a dispassionate, utilitarian manner, lifting it with three fingers like a baker appraising a nascent pastry, pinching it gently above and below the nipple, then folding it to demonstrate where the scar would end up being. His face was very close to her, and she could feel his breath on her skin, hot from his mouth, slightly cooler from his nose. She gave herself over to the sense that she was channeling Célestine, that part of her body was not her and could easily be parted with; she found that thrilling. “Tina was completely awake and alert, and sitting, as you are now, when Molnár marked up her breast. I would be speaking Hungarian to you now if I could, as Molnár spoke to his staff members over his shoulder, in order to produce the authenticity and strange clinical magic of that moment. He told them to give me an Ativan, because I started to wilt, to faint like a small girl; I could not allay the anxiety that washed over me. The Ativan was very subtle and effective; I could feel everything except the anxiety. Célestine, on the other hand, was calm and solicitous; she smiled and petted me and pitied me as the great doctor began to draw a child’s treasure map on her breast. Like this.” The tip of the pen felt hot—Naomi was sure that it was the thought of the electrocautery needle that made it feel that way—as Arosteguy tracked out with confident dashes a large teardrop shape with its point near her armpit and its body angled towards her sternum, encircling her nipple. He then marked a line from end to end through the nipple. “This is the line of the scar.”

“The nipple would be gone?”

“There was discussion about sparing the nipple and also a possible reconstruction of the breast. Molnár launched into a very pompous meditation on the social significance of the breast and lactation, and on the evolutionary innovation that the mammal represented. Tina just laughed and said that she was intrigued by becoming half a boy, and that she would only be interested in a boy’s nipple for that side, not a woman’s. The doctor talked to her about the difficulty of imbalance. She said that it would be a duality, not an imbalance, and that she looked forward to it.”

Arosteguy drew back, marker in hand, to study his work. Naomi looked down and lifted her breast with her left hand to share the study. “It makes me think of those teardrop tattoos that prisoners have on their cheeks,” she said.

“I had a student with one of those. It was disturbing to look at. He often covered it with makeup.”

“It usually means that they’ve killed someone.” Arosteguy pondered this in silence; she had the impression that he hadn’t understood the import of the tattoos, and so some meanings and understandings were consequently shifting in his head; she could almost feel the blocks rearranging themselves, and thought of Tetris, her favorite childhood computer game. “I’m sure you could get someone here in Tokyo to give you one,” she added thoughtfully. “I would go with you and document it.”

He tilted his head up to face her again and laughed an openmouthed laugh. “Perhaps I’ll need two of them. Are you ready for me to cut you?”

IF ONLY SHE HAD BEEN able to trust Yukie. Naomi scrolled through the photos that Arosteguy had taken of her lying on the concrete bench in the garden, her eyes closed and mouth open in mock anesthesia, her marked-up breast looking pleasingly full, its nipple erect (would Célestine’s have been erect at the moment of cutting, pleading in its own way to be spared, or would it have retracted in fear, her bravado caving at the last moment?), her arms pressed against her sides so that they would not flop down from the narrow bench, her right breast demurely covered by her hoodie. But the badly focused, awkwardly framed images reminded her that handling a camera was not an innate human capability, and that even under the duress of alcohol and sexual weirdness, the media-savvy Yukie would have produced sharp, well-composed photos that she could use to accompany her long piece or book. They would have said so much about Naomi’s approach to the latest flavor of parajournalism, which involved an artistic collaboration between subject and journalist and by its own definition was self-limiting to very rare pairings of the same. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s “saturation reporting” was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos. She remembered studying the concept of parajournalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, journalism that mixed the factual with the invented without attribution; but in her work with Ari, as she was beginning to think of it, the fiction, the creative invention, was all his, and since he was her subject, his fiction was admissible.

Yukie’s photos would have been better technically, there was no doubt, but her presence would have completely altered the biochemistry of the project. And on closer scrutiny, she saw that Ari’s photos were expressive of something thrilling and terrifying: Naomi’s merging, in Ari’s mind, with Célestine. Of course, she looked nothing like his Tina, but in the intensity and macrophagic voyeurism that was evident in his shooting of her, Naomi felt a desperate attempt to re-create his lost wife. He had begged her for the macro lens so that he could get close, the lens she had borrowed from Nathan and still kept—undoubtedly for this moment—and he consumed her body with that lens (the awkwardly named Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED), and it was that lens that became his electrocautery needle. While shooting her, he had told Naomi that he had been able to smell Tina’s flesh burning as he cut her, that Molnár—spreading her breast open with a pair of stainless-steel rake retractors to provide a clear target—had told him to avoid breathing in what he called surgical smoke, because it was toxic. He had not recorded his surgical escapade in any way other than mentally but remembered acutely the Bovie knife, named after its inventor William Bovie, and he kept thinking of the Bowie knife, the huge, cleaver-like fighting knife named after Jim Bowie of Alamo fame. The trim cautery itself seemed innocuous, the flat-bladed metal tip, like a small screwdriver, fitted into its yellow housing, the playful blue plastic handle, yellow power button, blue power cord. It had emitted surprising little lightning flashes as it cut, like a miniature welding torch flickering inside the translucent tent of skin created by the rakes, the layers of breast tissue vaporizing into white smoke with no more than a whisper. “Her breast tissue looked like yellow custard. I felt like Sagawa even thinking such a thing.”

“And when you opened it up, did you find a bagful of insects?”

“Of course not,” Arosteguy had said. “Of course not. But afterwards, in recovery, Célestine was so happy, so satisfied, that the question was never asked, and the answer was never offered.”

After he cut her up with the camera, Arosteguy seemed to fall into a reverie, or perhaps a near stupor—he certainly outstripped her in drinking—and Naomi tried to bring him out of his elusive state by offering to draw one or two teardrops on his cheek, engaging him in a discussion about whether the teardrops should be filled in—indicating murder—or just outlined and empty—indicating attempted murder. It was an oblique lead-in to what she wanted to be a straightforward discussion of how Célestine went from being a euphorically happy mono-breasted apotemnophiliac to a mutilated corpse, but after accepting two solid teardrops—no explanation for the two murders they agreed they represented—which she drew on his damp right cheek in purple marker, he slumped and swooned, and she put him to bed like a child (he insisted it be her bed), after helping him stagger and lurch up the narrow staircase, feeling the full weight and heat and sweat of him.

In the morning, she realized that she must have fallen asleep beside him on the bed. Her laptop was still open and on the floor where she had been sitting last night, back against the bed, feet jammed against the wall, scrolling through his photos of Naomi performing Célestine on the operating table. Lying in bed, she had dreamed that she was Célestine, Tina being cut up, but not on the operating table. She was in the famous Paris apartment of the Arosteguys, and she was on an uncomfortably small marble slab being carved and eaten by a photorealistic Ari, a solicitous and appreciative one, who commented on and savored every morsel of her while she herself encouraged him in his efforts to disjoint her and, of course, to sever her breasts, and then finally her head, which never stopped being aware and never stopped smiling fondly, even when he began to eat her lips. When she rolled over towards the sleeping Arosteguy, so strong was the half-life of the dream that she worried that her head would fall off and bump off his shoulder and onto the floor like a soccer ball. But he was no longer in the bed. As she walked the few steps towards the bathroom, she felt as though she were floating on the forceful tide of oblivion which her dream had generated deep in the waters of unconsciousness, and in this floating, which was a cathartic and liberating sensation, she felt closer to Arosteguy, from whom it must have emanated, so strongly did his desire for obliteration radiate even in the most mundane moments. Jammed behind the sink’s Hot faucet she found a crumpled piece of Cute-brand facial tissue streaked with watery purple, and she assumed that he had wiped away his two tears. Had the tears represented Célestine and, figuratively, Naomi, and had he now absolved himself of those two murders?

He was not downstairs. The house was empty except for her. Three days later, it still was.

THE FRANTIC BANGING at the front doors terrified Naomi, who cowered for some minutes in Arosteguy’s bedroom before daring to creep down the stairs, flinching at every repetition of what she felt was a focused assault on her solitude. She was experiencing the odd doubling in memory of her own arrival at those doors, only now she was playing the role of the reclusive, neurotic philosophe—she felt haggard and unshaven, and her unwashed hair felt Arosteguy gray to her—and the unknown at the door was playing, unwittingly, the newly arrived Naomi. Her three days of burrowing into the life of Ari as incarnated by his house and everything in it was no doubt partially responsible for this shift in identities, but there was a willfulness about it on her part as well. She had not yet washed off the surgical guidelines on her breast the way Ari had washed off the murderer’s tattoos she had so lovingly applied to his cheek. (That had seemed callous to her, and even a rejection.) She had not changed her clothes from her garden surgery outfit; she had not left the house to forage for food; and, pathologically, she had not browsed the net, or even opened her laptop or turned on her tablet. She had not felt any sense of violation of Ari’s privacy when she went through every drawer and shelf and cupboard and cabinet in the house precisely because he had abandoned himself by leaving without a word and not returning, abandoned Arosteguy-in-his-Tokyo-house the way a hermit crab casts off its borrowed shell when it has outgrown it. Naomi gratefully crawled inside that shell and became its new tenant, a female Arosteguy, who was close to Célestine, but was not Célestine.

She had not been downstairs since it had gotten dark. When she switched on the same pallid, watery lights that had greeted her on her first arrival at the house, that sense of Naomi-at-the-door was heightened to the point that, on sliding the doors open, she expected to see herself. To her confusion, she did recognize the woman at the door, a woman in a crisp open-collared navy business suit who was teary-eyed and obviously emotionally stricken, and Naomi could not understand how that could be. The woman stared at Naomi, her fist frozen in mid-knock, her mouth slack with disappointment and shock at what she was seeing—namely, Naomi. “Qui êtes-vous?” she said, with an absurd, barely contained outrage.

“I’m Naomi. Who are you?”

The woman lowered her threatening fist in slow motion, seemingly unaware of its independent life. “Where is Ari? Does Ari live here? Does he live here with you?” The English into which she slipped in response to Naomi was confident, overly forceful, and shaped by a hybrid French-German accent.

“This is the house of Aristide Arosteguy. He is not here now. What is your name, please?”

“I’m a friend. I was waiting for him and he did not come to me…” Unexpectedly, she began to sob, and as her thin face crumpled and she turned away from Naomi in shame, thus exposing a comically protruding ear, Naomi realized that she was Arosteguy’s—and Romme Vertegaal’s—audiologist, Elke Jungebluth.

Once inside, sitting in the larval beanbag chair with a hot tea in her hand, Elke dealt crisply with her various errant fluids—the tears, the snot—using the Cute tissues Naomi had brought her from the bathroom. “It took me some time to connect with Professor Matsuda at Todai. This was the contact that Ari had given me. He did not want me to know his address directly. To protect me, he said. I am a French citizen, and his is a scandalous criminal case. And so on. But it was understood that I would come to Tokyo to meet with certain technicians of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I am an audiologist. Some of our hearing instruments are of North Korean origin. Perhaps Ari mentioned to you that he wears them?”

“He told me that they were German. Siemens, I think.”

A rueful smile from Elke. “They were what you would normally call Chinese knockoffs, except they weren’t Chinese. They were North Korean, and not just imitations, but of special North Korean design. It is true that they were stamped with Siemens markings, but it was in the nature of camouflage rather than commercial deception. We have a French electronics manufacturer standing by, very eager to get into the audiology market. The brand name will probably be Eternal President’s Voice.” A secret inner smile. “I have ambitions beyond my immediate métier, as you might have guessed. And so Ari had agreed to test them for us before we dared to expose them to the Western markets, and we arranged for him to report to me at my hotel here.” A catch in her voice. “But he never came. We texted, he was on his way, and he never reached me. I brought my mobile audiology station with me. We were going to finesse the software before my engineering contacts returned to Pyongyang. It’s a big problem for me now. I’m not really prepared to deal with the North Koreans without Ari’s feedback. They can be very harsh in the face of disappointment. Are you Ari’s new girlfriend? You seem to be an American.”

“I was born in Canada. I have dual citizenship.” Naomi was not sure why she thought this was an appropriate response, but there was something in the references to France, Germany, and North Korea that tasted of passports. She peripherally wondered if Canada had any sort of diplomatic relations with North Korea that France or the US did not. She might have to open up her Air and hit the net again, though it had been liberating to pretend the net didn’t exist for the last three days. “I’m a journalist. I’m covering the Arosteguys’ story for some magazines. I was surprised too when he didn’t show up.” This last deliberately ambiguous. She knew that her own bedraggled appearance belied her objectivity re Ari; she and Elke were quite a pair.

“Elke, did your North Korean colleagues know about Ari? That he was acting as a test subject for you?”

“Of course. It was his standing in the international community that made it interesting for them. That he would turn to North Korea for technology of such a personal nature. The emotion of hearing, of communication, of speech and language. Perhaps you’ve come across some of Ari’s children’s philosophy books? They’re all wonderfully illustrated by Célestine. So charming and wistful. They say that Kim Jong Un was given some of them to read as a child of ten years and absorbed them immediately, and that’s why the Arosteguys have such status in the DPRK. They are seen as being fervently anticapitalist and anti-consumerism. It’s possible, of course, that they have been somewhat misunderstood.” A wry pause followed, during which Naomi was able to flagellate herself for having read only the three Arosteguy airport primers, which probably left her as advanced in Arosteguyan political philosophy as the then ten-year-old inheritor of the Kim dynasty. “And there was a personal element involved as well.”

“Romme Vertegaal,” suggested Naomi.

It was not that her eyes were of different sizes, as Ari had described them, but that they were not aligned properly in her face, the left being substantially higher up than the right, giving her a permanently quizzical look, as though skeptically raising an eyebrow; and now that she was raising an eyebrow, the net effect was indeed comical, but also somewhat disturbing, smacking as it did of insanity and deformity. “I see that Ari has taken you deeply into his confidence,” said Elke, sweeping her hair back with both hands and plumping it up a bit at the back.

“He was anxious that I should have enough information to write… intelligently.”

“Well, some of that information is not for public consumption.” “Like Program Vertegaal?”

“Yes, like that. It has some dangerous edges to it—commercially, politically, neurologically, and, as Ari pointed out repeatedly, philosophically.”

“Elke, did your North Koreans, did Romme himself, know that you were to meet Ari at your hotel? Did they know when?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Was Ari planning to go to Pyongyang himself ? Perhaps with you?” Elke dropped her gaze and blushed. At that moment, it was obvious that at some point Elke and Ari had been lovers, his humorous description of her homeliness notwithstanding. “Not originally, no. But I did hear from Professor Matsuda that the Japanese government was thinking of deporting him, returning him to France—there is apparently a gray area or two in the treaties between France and Japan. And of course Ari is not a Japanese national. I imagine he might have been forced to consider going beyond Japan to North Korea.”

“He would have told you, wouldn’t he? He would have taken you with him.”

“I would have loved that, of course. But somebody had to stay in Paris to coordinate. And truly, there are enough of us in North Korea.”

“Enough? Who is there?”

“Romme, of course. And then there is Célestine Arosteguy.”

“In Pyongyang? Right now?”

“Yes.”

“How can that be? Célestine is dead.”

“No, she’s not. She is with Romme in Pyongyang. I Skyped with her this morning—she has a special internet connection that is only allowed for certain foreign celebrities. Closely monitored, of course. Her hair was cut in Approved Hairstyle Number 3, very short and tight.” Elke made emphatic chopping hand motions along her jaw to illustrate the cut, one of eighteen government-approved for women in the DPRK. “She looked very different, but adorable. Just adorable.” A pause with a faraway smile while she visualized Célestine’s new North Korean look, and a small shake of the head in wonderment over the infinite adaptability of this superb woman. Elke returned her gaze to Naomi, smile fading rapidly. “She didn’t mention to me that she expected Ari to join her.”

“But there is a criminal homicide investigation going on in Paris regarding her murder, her dismemberment. There are photos.”

“This is something orchestrated by Romme for Kim Jong Un. It is a virtual murder. Don’t ask me how it was done, but it’s a Vertegaal specialty. He would have had particular, shall we say technical, help from Paris.”

“What kind of help?”

“There was a brilliant student of the Arosteguys who became very enamored of Romme. And he is a wizard.”

“Hervé Blomqvist.”

Elke laughed a resigned laugh.

“Hervé, yes. So the French would rather have Célestine be dead than to think that she has, in a cultural, non-technical sense, defected to North Korea. It’s entirely possible that they know the truth and have decided to accept the cover-up presented to them: she is just dead, murdered by her husband, who has also proven to be a traitor to France—again, in a cultural sense, which is to the French a betrayal worse than political betrayal. I would not be surprised to read that Ari was kidnapped by North Korean agents and bundled off to Pyongyang to help the new young dictator polish his special North Korean philosophical social policy. It would be the kind of subversive fiction generated by the French to offset Ari’s genuine desire to cast off his old, deeply French life for a new, vibrant Asian one. But what a ménage they will be up there, if that’s in fact where he’s gone. The three of them.” Elke would obviously have loved to make it four of them.

“Could that have been what happened? The kidnapping of Ari? On his way to meet you. And they were waiting for him?”

“They probably could have just talked him into it. If Matsuda knew about the possible deportation, they did too. Maybe that was enough.”

“But if Célestine is alive as you say, then Ari has committed no crime. He could go back to France an innocent man.”

“There was more involved in that investigation than just the supposed murder of Madame Arosteguy. Many crypts were broken open. He did not want to go back.”

“Sex with students? Is that what you mean?”

“An approved learning tool for three thousand years, now considered an atrocity.”

Naomi had found all of Arosteguy’s electronic paraphernalia strewn around the house, including some thumb drives and SD cards that she had not had the heart to explore, and this suggested that he had expected to return to the house. He had left three European phones as well, including an ancient Nokia and a prehistoric two-toned Sagem, all of them chipped, dented, scraped, scratched, and generally disheveled, in keeping with the personal esthetic of their owner; you could feel them falling out of various pockets onto various hard and wet surfaces just looking at them, and she felt a pang of separation at the thought. He must, she concluded, have taken his pink Japanese LG DoCoMo flip phone with him. She decided that she could not trust Elke with the possibility of accessing Ari’s electronics.

“Elke, did you happen to record that Skyped conversation with Célestine? I’m surprised she left herself that vulnerable. And did she not care that people thought she was dead? Or was she even aware of that? If it were ever posted on YouTube…”

Elke stood up. “You have been very kind to me. I shall try to connect again with my DPRK technical affiliates, who seem to have disappeared along with Monsieur Arosteguy. If this continues, I shall return to Paris to lick my various wounds. I’m sure you understand.” And she stepped around the low table, bent down, and kissed Naomi on both cheeks. She smelled of sour caked makeup and anisette.

Once Elke had left, Naomi rumbled the house again from top to bottom, only this time it was not an expression of longing and abandonment, but a focused hunt for hard and possibly hidden information. She assembled all devices that could be considered information-bearing entities on the living room table, and she included her own arsenal of electronics just in case she needed to remind herself of critical words that Arosteguy had spoken which only now would reveal their true import. The appearance of the real Elke, who was absolutely as described by Ari during his long “confession,” which Naomi had comfortably, even happily, taken for lies, or at the very least, artful delusion, had snapped things into focus like a phase-detect DSLR camera.

The programming of the hearing aids, the connections with North Korea, all the most hallucinatory, paranoid imaginings, were real, and the consequences for her proposed article, now obviously needing to be a book, were that she was miles further from the totality of the story than she had ever thought. Could she go to Pyongyang herself as more than just a tourist under the strictly controlled jurisdiction of the state-owned Korea International Travel Company? She understood that journalists, particularly of the North American variety, were rarely granted visas. Would Romme Vertegaal give her an interview by Skype or, much preferably, travel to meet her somewhere? Would this put her in danger? And was Célestine really alive and in the capital of the Hermit Kingdom? Could Elke’s Skype event with Célestine have been faked? It would be easy to create a monologue for a virtual Célestine, animating the many images and voice recordings that she had trailed behind her over the years; or, given the stutterings and audio glitches expected when Skyping at such distances, adroit operators could create the semblance of a conversation, of specific responses to comments or questions. It would be a nuclear event if Naomi could track and confirm Célestine’s fate. Or was Elke just lying? Perhaps Naomi would pick up the thread of her nascent Elke relationship once she was back in Paris.

And then finally she found the coffin-shaped red plastic 64 GB Verbatim thumb drive wrapped in plastic film and sunken clumsily into the greasy cream contents of a white jar marked, in English, “Kanebo Moistage W-Cold”—it seemed to be an olive-oil-based cold cream, though Ari’s blotched and pebbly facial skin belied any use of such a balm—and the growing heap of electronica became irrelevant except for the MacBook Air, which she would use to scour the drive’s contents. She thumbed the slider to extend the USB connector and slipped it into the Air’s left-side USB port. It would be two more days before she found herself scrolling through images depicting the dismemberment and cannibalization of Célestine Arosteguy.