Consumed

7

THE DOOR TO NATHAN’S basement bedroom opened a crack, letting in a slash of light that cut across his face, waking him, befuddled, still dreaming himself a child with his white underpants on his head to keep his wet hair from soaking the pillow, something he had worked out with his mother, who tended to remember he needed a bath just before bedtime. When he awoke, the underpants—worn and frayed, the elastic popping out everywhere around the waistband—were always miraculously gone and his hair was dry, just as it was now. And the unutterable sweetness of that dream suffused, in a bizarre, wholly inappropriate way, the sinister shadow that appeared at the entrance to the room, hesitated, then slid elastically over the door frame and the dressing table. When the shadow reached Nathan, it liquidly merged with a silhouette that was Roiphe, tiptoeing in comic fashion.

“Nathan? Are you awake?” The sweetness quickly leached away at the touch of Roiphe’s nasal voice, leaving a sourness tinged with anxiety, which, Nathan understood, was his default reaction to Roiphe.

“Not really,” said Nathan. “Do I have to be?”

“Well, get awake and grab your camera,” said Roiphe. “I was going to wait till we had some major prep time, but it’s happening now, so let’s take it at the flood.”

“Flood?”

Roiphe shook his head in mild exasperation. “It’s time to observe the nocturnal habits of an odd creature. Get up, boy.”

Nathan’s sense of being a boy in his childhood bed was palpably enhanced by his pajamas and slippers, which as an adult he never wore. The slippers were white Crillon hotel slippers bearing the elegant golden, foliate, and crowned letter C logo, given to him by Naomi, of course, who knew he’d be staying in places that did not hand out free slippers; the garden-variety striped flannel pajamas with the big white plastic buttons he had bought at the Hudson’s Bay department store, anticipating that he’d toss them once he was no longer a resident at the Roiphe Hostel. Just the thought of sleeping naked in that basement under that thin, clumped-up acrylic duvet provoked revulsion. And yet it was the pajamas and the slippers, the protective apparel, that transported him to a strange and unexpected place as he followed Roiphe through the darkened house, which sported sly, unexpected nightlights everywhere. Slithering in the sloppily fitting backless Crillon slippers up the teakwood staircase, clinging to the handrail of the wrought-iron balustrade—also foliate in a pseudo art nouveau style—Nathan listened to Roiphe whispering that the series of rooms on the third floor, which they were approaching, had been built “against code.” The trick had been to leave it unwalled and unfinished until after the final building-code inspections had been carried out, and then to have the rooms miraculously appear to the first buyers of the house in all their beautifully executed, dormered glory as “architectural workspace.” Said space now occupied solely by Chase Roiphe. But Nathan was also slithering in his childhood moccasin slippers, slithering downstairs by the light of the potent chromed-aluminum Eveready flashlights that he and his fragile, thin-limbed sister, Shelley, held, making their way before dawn to their living room, which was all but filled by an upright piano and a Christmas tree decorated with everything commercial and nothing Christian—candy canes, reindeer, elves, tinsel, cotton-batting snow, edible stars. There were presents of every size and shape under the tree, of course—the point of the whole exercise. Nathan had sent a SantaGram to the North Pole, and Santa had come through in the most satisfying way.

LATER, THEY SAT DOWNSTAIRS, with what Nathan thought was perverse appropriateness, in the kitchen. The granite-topped island, whose vast and immaculate surface was interrupted only by a stainless-steel offset double-bowl sink, provided a clinical workspace for what Roiphe, rocking pelvically, rhapsodically, on his spidery wrought-iron breakfast stool, called “our first strategic debrief.” Nathan sat beside him on a sister stool, not rocking, his laptop on the granite in front of them, scrolling through the photos he had taken over the last hour. The fourteen embedded digital clocks strewn around the room, from the MacBook Pro to the ice-maker in the Sub-Zero fridge, the Wolf stove, the Jenn-Air warming drawers, Nathan’s camera (which sat just beyond the laptop), to Roiphe’s own odd cheap plastic wristwatch, all indicated that the time was somewhere between 4:06 and 4:09 A.M.

“So you see what we’re up against here, son. What we’re working with.”

“Not really,” said Nathan. “Honestly, I’m kind of in shock. That’s really what I’m working with.”

Roiphe managed to work some rhythmical sympathetic nodding into his rocking. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I can understand that. And that’s what we’re doing here, right now. Want some ice water? Maybe coffee? Anything?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

“‘I’m good’ is funny. Sounds funny to me. We never used to say that. We’d say ‘I’m fine. I’m all right.’ But they do say ‘I’m good’ these days. So what are we looking at here? What happened? What did you see? What did you shoot?”

“I’m having trouble believing what I’m looking at right now,” said Nathan, squirming a bit on the stool. Its floral-print plastic cushion was coming loose at the rear left edge, and he was half-consciously trying to slide it back into place with his buttocks.

“I think maybe you should just verbalize. Keep it simple and direct and we’ll get somewhere fast.” Roiphe was still nodding and rocking, but now with a fierce-eyed intensity that was unmistakably masturbatory, urging Nathan on towards some obscure epiphanic orgasm that he felt was completely beyond him. He decided to keep it simple and direct.

“Your daughter, Chase, was cutting bits of her flesh off with a nail clipper, putting those bits onto little children’s plastic toy plates, and then eating those bits of flesh using little children’s toy utensils.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And what do you think her state of mind was while she was doing this? Was she hurting herself ? Was she in pain? Was she punishing herself ?”

Nathan wondered if Roiphe was aware that he was recording their conversation through GarageBand on his MacBook. He had it running on Desktop 2, so the app was not visible (though only a three-finger swipe away), and it thus perhaps counted as semiconscious surreptitiousness. Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother? He was not yet sure how much he wanted Nathan Math the character to feature in Consumed: The Collaboration, but at the very least his side of every exchange with the Roiphes—and who knew who else?—would provide context which might ultimately even have legal consequences, given the weirdness that was emerging from Roiphe’s life and practice.

Nathan was running his photos within Lightroom, which allowed him to easily manipulate their quality as he and Roiphe reviewed them. He could pull down seemingly burned-out highlights to reveal startling details of expression, and open up clogged shadows to reveal tormented gestures; later, he could play with them as photographic art, tweak them towards meaning that was not yet obvious, though he could not imagine including them in their chimerical book. The “Annals of Medicine” piece had more future reality to it, though it too was unstable, shimmering, flickering—morphing perhaps into a piece for “Annals of Psychopathology,” no pictures allowed. And in playing with the photos, he experienced once again the phenomenon of non-presence, the photographer’s non-authentic existence during the act of photographing; only in reviewing the photos did the event photographed emerge in experience, like the flowering precipitate caused when a crystal of sodium acetate was dropped into its supersaturated solution. But then the experience was moderated by the photo, the lens, the camera, the camera-eye’s response to the light—and that was what Nathan was reacting to now. He was not sure he had actually seen any of these events with his real eyes, a feeling sharpened by the clattering of the big camera’s shutter and mirror, which he could hear as he looked at the photos; the sound became part of his interpretation, even though Chase herself never seemed to react to it or notice it at all.

Nathan was acutely aware that he was looking at photos of a naked woman with her father sitting beside him, also looking. True, Roiphe was proving to be an unusual father, but some of the photos were, quite by accident, perversely erotic, and Nathan felt that no matter how elaborate and subtly graduated Roiphe’s emotional filters were, he could not fail to see that. Not that there had been a hint of incest in their past that he could sense—at least, not yet—but disturbingly, Nathan felt as though his undeniably surging lust for Chase counted as incest because her father, almost shoulder to shoulder with him, breathing with ragged old-man intensity into the side of Nathan’s face as he searched the screen for signs of something obscure, possibly something sublime, must surely be inhaling it. Once again, it was that paradigm of the retroactive experience: Nathan had not felt anything like this while taking the photos, so caught up was he in the mechanics of getting the shot, but now, looking at them with Roiphe guiding the zooming and the scrolling with surgical insistence, Chase’s muscular nakedness, which revealed the massive scale of her macroscopic self-mutilation (almost every reachable square centimeter of her skin had been attacked as though by swarms of blackflies, the wounds puckered and weeping or scabbing), provoked unsettling reveries in Nathan. Did Chase’s body remind Roiphe of his dead wife’s body? (The former Rose Blickstein, as per the doctor’s Wikipedia entry.) Did it fill him with a bittersweet sexual nostalgia, an incestuous melancholia?

“She does seem to feel it, feel the pain,” said Nathan. “I see it there, for instance, in this shot. She’s feeling the pain, and feeling the grain of her skin as the metal of the cutting edges separates the cells of her skin, bites through the layers of her skin and the tissue underneath it. But the pain makes her laugh, a weird silent laugh—see there, it’s not subtle, really. So she feels the pain, but she wants the pain, looks for it, like a bodybuilder wants the pain and searches for it.”

“Happy to be punished? Looking for punishment?”

“The bodybuilder?”

“Fuck the bodybuilder. The girl.”

Nathan zoomed into the photo in front of them. That was ecstasy on her face as she cut herself, not self-pity, not masochistic pleasure. But why ecstasy? The ritualistic elements of her trance—a classic fugue?—were complex and narrative; they were telling a consoling story to Chase, yes. Nathan was shaping the article as he reacted. He would have liked to record these thoughts, just say them to GarageBand so that he wouldn’t forget them, but he was not yet comfortable enough with Roiphe to collaborate in that intimate way, to leave himself vulnerable to the old man’s sarcasm and irony.

He scrolled to the eating shots, still zoomed. There were other people there with her, somehow, sharing the tiny bits of her flesh that she had doled out onto five little plates with butterfly and bunny patterns. She seemed to be taking on the roles of different characters, rotating through the plates, delicately eating from one, coarsely from the second, ravenously from the third. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling and the walls, he had gotten close to the plates and the teapot and cups, the plastic cupcakes with switchable toppings of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry (each of these crowned by a convincing dimpled red cherry), and the shiny forks and knives in primary colors. The bounce absorbed the warmth of the terracotta walls and raked the covert tea party’s flatware and hollowware with soft red-clay light, instilling sinister drama into the innocent child’s set piece with its transient shadows and throwing into high relief the slivers of flesh and their smears of blood, which might otherwise have disappeared into the bright colors of the Fisher-Price plastic.

But it was the hands that were mesmerizing, Chase’s hands, with their long, sinewy fingers and paradoxically perfect fingernails, hands that were out of proportion with the child-sized tea things and so seemed, especially when top-lit, to be monstrous as they delicately picked at the flesh bits and lifted them to her open mouth, her tongue extended and waiting. Very close to her now, he had been nervous about swiveling away from the child’s table to follow the trajectory of the hands—she alternated left and right, as though picking berries in a deliriously fecund patch—but the graphic momentum soon carried him to Chase’s face, which seemed swollen with contained excitement. When Nathan half-pressed the shutter release, a cross-hatched red laser pattern sprang from the base of the flash unit, allowing the camera to focus in low light. Caged by those red stripes she looked feral, like a wolverine caught by a self-triggered animal-cam in a remote boreal forest. She barely blinked at the brutal flashing that followed focusing, the harsh light, direct now, revealing scabbed notches taken out of the cartilage at the very tops of her ears, normally hidden by her hair, which was now swept back and held by a plastic tortoiseshell clip, its long, curving, interlocking teeth reminding Nathan of a sprung Venus flytrap. She was conscious enough of what she was doing, thought Nathan, even calculating enough, to avoid cutting her face and her hands—how could she cover up?—so where exactly was her mind now? The face in close-up currently on the screen, terrible, beautiful, used ecstasy as a mask and a shield. What was behind it? And she was talking, speaking for the invisible characters who sat around the chunky green-and-white circular plastic child’s table, talking soundlessly, shuffling around the table on her knees, shifting the chairs about so that she could play each point of view with varying mien but consistent intensity.

“Okay. Here’s where I do my healing thing. Keep shooting,” Roiphe had said. In the photos that scrolled by now, Roiphe was partially lit by the Hello Kitty lamp on the night table in the corner, which he had flipped on so that he could unpack the beige corduroy Air Canada business-class toiletries bag he had stuffed into the pocket of his navy velour bathrobe. Roiphe was kneeling beside the oblivious Chase, intrepidly tracking down every fresh wound so that he could disinfect it with alcohol and Polysporin, dabbing with a rough precision.

“For her, we’re not even here, boy. You see that,” Roiphe had said as he worked. “You see how she manages to move around me without acknowledging my presence. Nice little modern dance.” Nathan had caught some of that with his camera, and looking at the photos of Chase evading her father in sinuous slow motion, as though practicing an exotic variant of t’ai chi, he regretted not having been able to shoot video.

“She’s very consistent in the pattern of her little spaceout. She’s finished cutting and serving and eating, and now comes the funny social part where she talks to her party guests without saying anything.”

“And how does it end?” Nathan had asked, still snapping, still finding the evocative angle, at times forcing Chase to weave herself around him as well. (Her arm brushed his hand at one point, and it was ice cold, though the room and the house were fairly warm.) It ended with Chase getting up from her knees and walking over to the metal-tube-and-canvas child’s bed at the other end of the room, where she lay down with a blank face and pulled her covers—teddy-bear sheets and two Hudson’s Bay blankets—over her. The images of her walking away from Nathan—again light bounced off the earthy walls—highlighted her long waist, muscular, low-slung buttocks, and short, athletic legs, a combination which Nathan had always found compelling, though the opposite of Naomi’s short waist and long, slim legs.

“I don’t think punishment is involved, Barry. I think she’s reliving something, something that was communal. And she’s playing all the roles.” Nathan was leaning on his elbows, speaking to his screen more than to the actual Roiphe, but now he sat up straight and turned to the man himself. “I wonder what that something communal could have been?”

Roiphe snorted and fastidiously lifted his glasses off his nose with both hands, unleashing his turquoise eyes with deliberate dramatic effect. “Why don’t you just ask her?” he said.

NAOMI AND AROSTEGUY ate the meal he had prepared. The dinnerware was spartan and shabby, but the meal itself looked good. A lot of warm sake, which they both poured freely. They used chopsticks and sat on the floor at the low table. Naomi’s camera sat beside her tray, muscular and matte black, like a brooding cat. Her voice recorder sat beside the camera, its blue VU-meter LEDs rippling in response to words spoken, its microphone like the beak of a hummingbird straining skyward. Her cat and her bird watching over her, thought Naomi, and, thinking that, became aware that she was drinking too much.

“Please forgive the decor. Nothing in the house belongs to me. It sat empty for a long time. Tokyo is very expensive.” Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. “I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature.” He shook his head. “The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese ‘the little people,’ I’ve been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study.”

“Why do you need to become Japanese?” said Naomi, cross-jamming her chopsticks and dropping them into her plate. She fumbled them back into her hand and managed to pick up a shrimp.

“I cannot be French anymore, and I was never Greek, except with philosophical and familial nostalgia. So what can I be? I am a fugitive. It satisfies my sense of self-drama, but it racks my nerves.”

“You must be lonely here.”

“I was lonely in Paris.”

“Même avec Célestine? Sorry. Even with Célestine?”

“That was the basis of our love. Our loneliness. Our isolation.”

“But now that she’s gone? There’s no change?”

“Now I’m… alone. It is different.”

Naomi began to see their mutual drunkenness as an agreement, a contract, with clauses allowing almost everything, at least as far as words were concerned. She felt giddily unafraid. “Monsieur Vernier, le préfet de police, seems to believe that you’re innocent, that you didn’t commit murder.” She seemed compelled to throw French words into the mix; she wasn’t sure why. She really had no wish to provoke him, though he seemed to have no problem with the language at the moment.

“Oh?” Arosteguy snorted a tight little laugh which could have been an expression of self-pity. He had seemed immune to that up until now. “I’ve lost touch with the case, I’m afraid. To my surprise. It seems to belong to many others, but not me. To you, for example. It belongs more to you.”

“He called it a mercy killing. Is that interesting?”

“A mercy killing followed by some elegant cuisine, possibly? The French love their cinema. I expect soon to feel the Hannibal Lecter resonances, and maybe then to pose for photographs with Sir Anthony Hopkins, perhaps in the small restaurant of the Hôtel Montalembert.”

“You don’t want his help?”

Arosteguy gave a particularly dismissive shrug. “He’s a policeman. And not just for the city of Paris. The police of Paris are national police. Imagine the world he lives in.”

Naomi rolled out of her sitting position and half-slid towards her camera bag. In it she found her iPad and, returning to her place at the table, began to scroll through the Notes app until she found the words and photos of M. Vernier and the Préfecture de Police on the Île de la Cité.

“He gave me a message for you.”

“Really? He knew you would come to see me? He spoke to you and his words went into your ear, knowing that? It makes me feel that he’s here himself. So strange. We’ve discussed Schopenhauer on three occasions, Auguste and I, once on the TV show Des mots de minuit. He seems to be obsessed with Schopenhauer.”

Naomi read from her notes: “Tell him that I am conducting a philosophical investigation provoked by his case and I want him to help me with it as a good professional and an academic. To do this, he must return to France.”

Arosteguy popped some noodles and shrimp into his mouth with a theatrical flourish. “You see me eating—look, see?—and of course that seems normal. But for me, to eat anything is not the same now as it was before. Afterwards, I could not eat for a week. I could barely drink water. I almost died here in Japan, such an alien country in any case. But in a way it was that very alien quality which allowed me to disconnect from Europe, from France, from the net of the so-called crime.”

Naomi put her iPad on the floor beside her and picked at her food, very conscious now of the process of how the lips and tongue worked, the jaws, the teeth, the swallowing, but trying to return to normal unconsciousness.

“So you recovered fully.”

“Yes. I hope you have seen that already. There’s a basic life force that expresses itself even in me. It’s crude and merciless, and very hard to overcome.”

“Why do you say ‘even in me’?”

“The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.”

Naomi made an effort to eat the largest shrimp on her plate before responding. “So, Ari, are you admitting to me that you ate the flesh of your wife, Célestine?” She almost gagged on the word flesh, but managed to turn it into a dramatic pause that involved catching some slipping noodles before they fell to the plate. “Monsieur le préfet made it clear to me that nothing, not that, not the fact of murder, had really been established.”

Arosteguy drew a deep breath, then exhaled deeply, preparing for something special. “Let us say that the question of spousal cannibalism expanded in the media to the point where it took on a potent reality that was not really connected to my life or to Célestine. I was enveloped in that reality, enshrouded, until it became my own, until my own thoughts and emotions were displaced by those thousands that came from television, newspapers, the multiple internet sources, the YouTubes and Twitters, yes, even the car radio and the talk shows, and of course the people on the street, buses, the Métro. I lost possession of my recent past, and my long past, my history. I was colonized, appropriated. I had to leave my dead husk to shrivel and wither in Paris and become someone else, somewhere else. Become Japanese, or failing that—and I am failing that—to become an exile, an isolate, a disconnect. And I have been succeeding at that.”

“You haven’t really answered my question. Will you answer it in the book that you’re writing?”

Arosteguy laughed. “That book seems to be a meditation on the philosophy of consumerism. As you might expect, I have a new take on it, though in a sense that’s all I’ve ever written about. Consumerism…” He shook his head, chuckling, then looked at Naomi with an intensity that shook her. “You know, everything that has to do with the mouth, the lips, with biting, with chewing, with swallowing, with digesting, with farting, with shitting, everything is transformed once you have had the experience of eating someone you were obsessed with for forty years.” He smiled. “Of course, every one of those things also becomes a joke in the popular imagination, which is quickly becoming the only imagination that exists—the media imagination. I’ve seen the jokes on the internet. Some of them are very sophisticated, very amusing. Sometimes there are cartoons, even animated ones.”

“Is that why you posted those photos of your wife’s half-eaten corpse?” Naomi said, holding her breath. “To destroy the jokes? To bring the discourse back to human reality?”

Arosteguy put down his chopsticks and crawled around the table on all fours. He kneeled close to Naomi. He put his lips close to her left ear and whispered. His voice was somehow even more textured and forceful as a whisper. “If you want to understand, you must experience this mouth, the mouth of the cannibal, the mouth of a thousand bites, a thousand human atrocities.” He didn’t touch her, and he didn’t bite her, and after many long, frozen seconds, Naomi forced herself to turn to him, her own mouth half open, an unformed word lingering. Arosteguy placed his open mouth forcefully over hers. It was not really a kiss—more like a cap being placed over a jar. Naomi was suddenly terrified. She didn’t dare move. Arosteguy began to breathe air in and out of her lungs through his mouth. She had no choice but to breathe in sync with him. She was waiting for his tongue, not knowing how she would react when it came, but it didn’t come. He took his mouth from hers and slumped down beside her.

“So pathetic,” he said, with a grunt. “So sad. Such a cliché. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don’t feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel… pathetic.”

Naomi wanted to ask him what work of cinema or literature he felt was being replayed at that moment, but she was afraid to speak, and so there was silence, and she could only hear his heavy breathing and not any breathing of her own. Then he spoke as though they were in the midst of a discussion she had somehow missed.

“There are other photographs which you have not seen. I’ll show them to you if you fuck me. I’ll give them to you. Nice thick digital files. They are powerful and they will shock you and you’ll be a star. But I need you to be my lover for a while, my Tokyo mistress.”

“I… Professor, I…”

“Ari. That’s my name to you. Aristide becomes Ari. We didn’t establish this? No, you’ve barely said my name. Does it taste disgusting in your mouth? You know, Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal, who still lives right here in Tokyo, said that the Dutch girl’s ass tasted like tuna prepared for sushi. That’s enough to make it dangerous for any Dutch woman to visit Japan. He’s considered a tragic hero here, a media celebrity. An artist. I can envision lineups of Japanese men waiting for the Netherlands tourist buses to unload, each with his Suisin maguro bōchō sharpened and ready.” He drank some sake and muttered under his breath, an afterthought. “Of course, she was a Dutch girl. That made it somehow not so criminal. Maybe even praiseworthy.”

The mention of Sagawa, whom Naomi had initially thought might be a clever stepping-off platform for her piece, now filled her with horror. It was obvious and vulgar and revolting, and it was making it hard for her to physically see Arosteguy. The way he held his face, he was starting to actually look Japanese. “Ari, I… I can’t do that, what you ask,” she said quietly, projecting, she hoped, thoughtful consideration, though there was nothing to consider. “I can’t.”

Arosteguy launched himself unsteadily upwards and stood over her, towering over the low table and filling the room with his anger. He screamed at her. “Then get out! Get out, get out!” He kicked at the table, lifting it a foot or so before it came crashing back down, scattering the food, the camera, the dishes, then stormed up the stairs, leaving Naomi shaking, her eyes wide and swelling with tears.

She flew out of the house dragging her roller with her, its contents hastily stashed, its exterior compartments bulging pathologically, cables hanging and jouncing out of the improperly zipped pocket mouths. Her momentum carried her into the middle of the street, which was dark, dingy, and completely deserted. Scared, stalled, and now acutely alerted to her drunken state by her inability to perceive depth, she pivoted on the spot like a pinball flipper, looking for a cab. There was nothing except Arosteguy, strolling casually out of the house and walking up to her, coming very close to her as though nothing had happened, speaking as though continuing an understood subliminal conversation that had to be finished. He took her arm gently, just holding it, not pulling her.

“We made love frantically, desperately, as though I could possess her and keep her from death,” he said quietly. “But I couldn’t, of course. She was going to die. Her body was changing. She had swellings and nodes and lumps and rashes. I had to forcibly change my sense of sexual esthetics to accommodate her new body. I needed it to still be beautiful for me, though it was changing every day, every hour. And finally, when the changes were all coming to an end, we wanted her to die while making love to me, not fucked by a dozen plastic tubes in a hospital. So we devised a plan, and we carried it out.”

He bent down and picked up the roller, still holding her arm, and led her back towards his house, its door wide open, the pale fluid of its light washing the plant rags of the garden. She let him take her with him. “I strangled her while we made love. The swollen lymph nodes in her neck made it difficult, but more exotic. You know that in French an orgasm is la petite mort, the small death. And for the English metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘to die’ meant ‘to come,’ to have an orgasm. It was the most intense, exquisite moment in my life. It was a moment you never recover from. I kissed her while she died. Her eyes were full of love and gratitude. Her last breath came into my lungs like a hot tropical breeze.”

Naomi stopped just outside the door, shrugging off Arosteguy’s hand. Her voice was quiet and small. “I’m afraid of you, Ari. I thought I wouldn’t be, but I am.”

“And now she was dead, and I was alone. And what was I to do? Wave goodbye like a good bourgeois and soldier on with my life? Plead madness like the good Marxist professor Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife of thirty years in their special permanent apartment in the infirmary of the École Normale Supérieure, no less, and claimed he thought he was just massaging her neck? A few years in the asylum and then a comfortable exile to the provinces?”

He took her by the arm again and began to walk her into the house. He was giving her things, terrible, precious things. She didn’t resist. “No.

I wanted to embody her, to incorporate her. I would have had to commit suicide if I had not been able to do that terrible, monstrous, beautiful thing.”

He slid the door closed behind them.

“THEY SENT ME TO PARIS. I was afraid to go.”

“Why afraid?”

“French.”

“French the people or French the language?”

“The language of the French.”

They were sitting in the living room replaying Nathan’s first conversation with Roiphe there, Chase sitting on the sofa, Nathan in the wingback chair with the Nagra running on the glass coffee table. He was extremely uncomfortable, but it was an exciting discomfort; there was so much strangeness about the situation. If she really had been in some kind of trance, a fugue state, she would not know that Nathan could see right through her soft dress and sweater and striped knee socks to her ravaged skin. But did she really not know? Would she care if she did know? How could he find out? How direct could he be? Could her trance really be some species of bizarre performance art? If it was, was it designed for her father alone, or was Nathan’s presence part of what induced it? And the project, the pretense for their current interview? Chase had suggested a half-truth: Nathan was there to do a book about her father, and that book would include a bit of family history as background—nothing too deep, nothing sensational, and all subject to review by the subjects. No photos, she had said. She didn’t accept Nathan’s line about using the photos only as a memory aid, to make sure he got his descriptions right; it wasn’t going to be a picture book. She would perhaps do a photo shoot with him under controlled circumstances some other time, but she couldn’t talk while being photographed. Something had happened in Paris that had changed her attitude to being photographed, and it was no longer something to be taken lightly, girlishly, playfully; too bad, but things changed, didn’t they?

“What was it about the French language that scared you?”

“I learned my French in Quebec, while I was at McGill University in Montreal. I was passionate to learn the Quebec language, to acquire that strange, wonderful, ancient accent that got trapped in Quebec after the French Revolution. But McGill is an English-language university, and I learned my Quebec in the streets. Actually, worse than the streets, because I spent my summers in small towns where they spoke hard-core Quebec worse than anywhere in Montreal. I wanted my French to be rough, and it was.”

“Why did you want that? I wonder.”

Chase giggled and then, to Nathan’s astonishment, dug into the green leather pouch tucked in beside her, pulled out a high-tech nail clipper, and began to trim her fingernails. The clipper had a matte titanium finish, a dimpled and contoured lever, and a pivoting plastic clippings catcher that reminded him of an old steam locomotive’s cowcatcher apron. He was fairly certain it was the same clipper he had seen her using in her bedroom, though he had never gotten a clear shot of it. She worked the clipper at eye level and glanced mischievously over it. “Youthful rebellion expressed through the politics of language, mostly directed at my father. And then he twisted it back on me by suggesting that I use my hard-earned French to study at the Sorbonne. He used to joke that the Quebec language was not really French at all, and that I could prove he was wrong by speaking it in Paris. I would be studying with the most sophisticated writers of French you could imagine, and I was afraid. I would be Anglo Jewish from Toronto speaking bad street Quebec.”

“What would you be studying? Who were those writers?”

“The Philosophy of Consumerism. The kids called it PhiloCon, which, I think I recall, can sound a bit naughty in French if you want it to. Do you speak French?”

“Not really. I can read a bit. If we took a second language it was usually Spanish. And those writers who were supposed to teach your PhiloCon course?”

“Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy. You’ve heard of them? A married couple. They were kind of controversial in the academic world. Ow!” Chase flapped her hand and then sucked a finger. “That hurt.”

“What happened?”

“Nipped a bit of finger. I suppose it’ll be trapped in this little clipping-catcher thing. See? You just flip it down when you want to toss the nail clippings. It stops it from popping the clippings all over the place, the way the old clippers do. It’s a Sally Hansen. Stainless steel. Oh, there’s some blood…” There was some blood, winding its way down her ring finger. She smeared it against her middle finger then sucked them both, watching him.

It had to be an elaborate construct by Chase, if not by Chase and Roiphe. They must have researched him on the net, somehow linking him with Naomi and her Arosteguy project. Naomi could be so cavalier about the net when she was in that mood, even though she knew all about lawsuits against Tweeters and mob actions against Facebookers. And the clippers, the blood… it was a brilliant miniature piece of theater and almost unthinkable that it was really an unconscious acknowledgment of a psychopathological state. But did he have a role in this drama, or was he just a recruited audience?

“Did you go, then? Did you do it? Study with the Arosteguys at the Sorbonne?”

“Oh, yes, I did. I spent two years there with them. I took a lot of other courses as well, but mainly it was them. The Arosteguys.”

“And your French? Were you humiliated? Can you speak Parisian French now?”

Chase let her hands drop into her lap with an expressive exhalation, and then, in counterpoint, a giggle. “I can’t speak any French now. Either brand of. None.”

“Really? How come?”

“I guess I just forgot it all. It’s been a whole year since Paris.” Chase stood up, brushed at her dress, then sank gracefully to the floor and began picking at the carpet as though grooming it for lice. “I dropped some nail bits when I showed you how the catcher works. My father notices those things. I call him Laser Eye. He doesn’t miss a trick. Gotta watch it with Dad.” By the end of her little speech she was doing a good comic impression of Roiphe, verbally and physically, mimicking exactly his loose-limbed unsteadiness and affected vulgarity. She crawled to her feet using the coffee table for support and stood over him, cradling the invisible clippings in her hand and bouncing them gently up and down as if testing their weight.

“Did you get them all?” said Nathan. He could think of no other strategy than to play the Roiphe game as it unfolded.

“I think so,” said Chase, with exaggerated musicality. “I do think so.”

“Chase, have you been following the story about the Arosteguys?” “How would I do that?”

“Well, probably on the internet.”

“I’ve found the internet to be a very dangerous place. Especially for children. I don’t go there anymore.”

“But you’re not a child.”

She laughed. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re an adult. Hey, have you heard of 3D printing?”

“I have, yes. Why?”

“Have you heard of 3D philosophical tissue printing?”

“No, that I haven’t heard of.”

“It’s not even on the internet. Know why?”

“Why?”

She was still in jaunty Dr. Roiphe street mode. “Because some friends and me invented it, and we don’t talk. Someday I’ll maybe let you play with it.” She turned away from him and disappeared up the stairs.