Consumed

8

NAOMI SAT ON THE COUCH, Air opened on her lap, flickering Nagra and solemn camera (with soy-sauce-smeared LCD) restored to the tabletop, professionalism re-established. Arosteguy squatted on the other side of the table blotting up the spilled sake with a spice-plant-themed kitchen towel. “I need to tell what happened when Célestine was diagnosed. It destroyed the present tense for us, because it destroyed the future. It poisoned us. And it secretly destroyed our relationship with everyone we knew. Every laugh was a lie, every smile was a betrayal. Because we decided not to tell them. We knew it would destroy their present tense with us as well, and we couldn’t bear it. It drew us closer together, but in a melancholy, sick way, and it compressed our existing isolation almost to the point of madness.”

He balled up the wet towel, tossed it in the general direction of the kitchen, and segued into scraping up with a bamboo-handled spatula the remains of the meal he had scattered, carefully arranging the scraps of noodle, shrimp, seaweed, and tofu in a perforated red plastic shopping basket lined with newspaper. “We couldn’t take photos after the diagnosis. Every photo displayed the lie. Every photo was already a memento of a life that was gone, a photograph of death. Compared with those innocent early family photos, the pictures I finally took of Célestine… afterwards… they were honest, they contained no betrayals, no lies, no deceit. So they were horrible, but they were pure.”

“Ari, what doctor was it who did the diagnosing? You know that some people say there never was a diagnosis. That you invented it to justify the murder of your wife…”

He examined a shrimp on the blade of the spatula, then plucked it off and popped it into his mouth. “Who said this exactly? Dr. Trinh?”

“Dr. Trinh among others.”

“Others on the internet? The Twitterverse? There were blogs established to promote exactly that view.”

“Yes.”

“The internet is now a forum for public prosecution. But you ask me who diagnosed Célestine,” said Arosteguy. “The doctor who told her she had acute lymphocytic leukemia was Anatole Grünberg, a Nobel laureate for his work in hematological oncology. Who would doubt him?” A reflective pause. “They had been lovers when he was still in medical school at Paris Descartes, of course. They would meet, on and off. She liked to connect our work, so abstract, so interior, to the work of the human body. That is how she grounded our writing. Politics, the normal French mode of grounding, she found even more abstract and disconnected than philosophy. It never attracted her.”

Fingers flying, Naomi was already checking out Grünberg on Wikipedia. The featured portrait depicted a man with wild, protruding eyes, fleshy lips, and thinning, muddled hair. “Of course, I’ve heard of Grünberg from the boating accident scandal. But he was still practicing medicine? Like a regular doctor?” Grünberg had narrowly avoided conviction on charges of homicide involontaire—manslaughter—in a tragicomic drunken boating accident on the Marne River in which two of his three illegitimate children had been decapitated, after which had followed much sour public discussion of the value of genius in the real world.

“That was the basis of all his revolutionary research. Patients like Célestine.”

“You discussed that diagnosis with him?” asked Naomi.

“No. We knew each other socially, but he and I were cool to each other. Probably just primitive jealousy. We’re not immune. But Célestine reported everything back to me. Medical diagnoses, obscure medical websites, this was our daily bread.”

Naomi was incredulous. “He said nothing to you?”

“He was acting here as her doctor, her specialist. He had a professional rigor. He wouldn’t discuss it like café gossip.”

“You saw test results? Blood tests? Bone scans? CAT scans? MRIs? X-rays? Anything?”

Arosteguy shook his head at all of these—short, angry, contemptuous head shakes.

“Could Dr. Grünberg have been lying?” said Naomi. “Could Célestine have lied to you? Could she have not been sick?”

“I told you about the changes in her body. Those were real.”

“Maybe they were caused by something else.”

He snorted disdainfully. “A woman’s natural aging? It’s amazing what people will attribute to that. How they refuse to see things they are terrified to see.”

“Dr. Trinh told me that there was nothing medically wrong with Célestine.”

“Dr. Trinh was infatuated with Célestine. She adored her, worshiped her, could barely look at her without falling on her knees. It was embarrassing. She was pathetic. Célestine never went back to her after Anatole’s diagnosis. And why would Célestine lie to me, tell me she was dying when she wasn’t?”

“To induce you to kill her,” said Naomi triumphantly. “A mercy killing, but not for the reasons you thought.”

“A perversion beyond perversity! What a wonderful invention on your part. You are a dangerous writer after all.”

Soon Naomi was curled up on the couch with Arosteguy, who had his arms around her and was caressing her throat. For both of them, the resonances of philosophical wife-strangling that were undeniably in the air were comforting, not disturbing, offering a linkage to richly textured past dramas full of meaning. Her eyes were half closed and her voice was drowsy.

“But it was hideous, wasn’t it? The actual act itself—the eating, I mean? It was a horror show. Butchery. Those pictures. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. And Sagawa, he was eating a healthy young body. It’s sick of me to say this. I’m shocking myself for even thinking it. But somehow, because Célestine’s body was so ravaged by disease, it makes it more horrible. I can’t believe I said that.”

Arosteguy laughed a short laugh that quickly shaded into a husky whisper, a theatrical technique, thought Naomi, which was probably effective when he was lecturing; she liked it herself, and felt for the moment like a student with cozily limited responsibilities. “Healthy sick thoughts,” he said. “Honest ones. But you are able to say that because you didn’t know her. You didn’t know her body with the intimacy that I did. You see a corpse, a dead, mutilated, anonymous—yes, diseased—body. But not me. I lived in the landscape of that body for so many years. As that landscape changed, my living changed with it. She never stopped being my Célestine. Never.”

Arosteguy kissed Naomi with passion and hunger. She kissed him back with the same. Soon they were naked, half on the couch, half on the floor. “Are you going to bite me?” said Naomi. He did. And she bit him back, on the shoulder, the biceps, the neck. “And then, are you going to eat me?” And he did—breasts, thighs, and then down to her pussy. She stopped him, grabbing his head, holding on to his hair.

“Oh, no, Ari. I forgot. My old boyfriend…”

“Your boyfriend, yes?”

“No, it’s… he just told me that he has Roiphe’s disease. You know. That venereal disease. I mean, I might not have it, Roiphe’s, but I have something…”

Arosteguy snorted. “Do you know my age?”

“Wikipedia says you’re sixty-seven.”

“Wikipedia is correct. And what a force for global harmony that creation is!”

Naomi detected no irony. “What has your age got to do with my disease?”

“Well, we are both diseased, aren’t we? For example, I no longer spurt. I just ooze, in a sinister way, like a popped pustule. For me, those come shots in porn videos, like cake-icing guns going off, they’re pure sci-fi, they’re CGI VFX only.”

Naomi snorted back in deliberate imitation. “What else? Do I get the whole list now, or do I get a chance to make some exciting monstrous discoveries?”

“Over time, with these sexual disabilities emerging gradually, old couples gradually accommodate them, and they don’t embarrass each other, they become part of the domestic seniors comedy you promise to write together, but your memories are thankfully not too good and you forget to do it. But for a youngster to be thrown into the den of the aging lion… I’ve experienced some difficult moments.”

“With your students.”

“The youngsters with enthusiasm and defiance, yes, which protects them from revulsion for a little while, but then…”

“You’re lucky nobody’s blown the political correctness whistle on you. I think those days are long over, even in France.”

“There have been dramas behind the scenes. The French press has had a tendency to be a bit more discreet than the rest of the world, but with competition from Facebook and Twitter… All sexual adventurism is lethal now.”

“Didn’t some of your youngsters have sexual insecurities?”

“Oh, yes, all of them. Célestine and I took full advantage of them in the name of therapy and philosophy.”

“And me? I have a few of those myself. Do you want my list, or do you want to make your own discoveries?”

“Honestly, I think a list would be charming. We can exchange them, and then see if reality matches.”

“I’ll start working on mine right away. But meanwhile, I’m serious about having my own oozing down there. You might catch something nasty. Do you have a pack of cute Japanese condoms lying around somewhere? There must be Hello Kitty condoms. Translated as Hello Pussy.”

“I’m so tempted to say something that sounds like it came from a poorly translated Punjabi erotic tale, something like ‘A cook must have a taste for sauces, no?’ and then go down on you.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“And please don’t do that?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“BUT WHERE ARE YOU GOING? You booked a hotel? How can you afford that? And I thought you needed to hide out in Tokyo.”

“I’m going to hide out even more,” said Naomi, hustling her remaining gear and clothes into her bags.

Yukie watched her, shaking her head. “From me? You don’t trust me?” Naomi turned away from the bed—she had colonized it and the kitchen table and a few other surfaces to organize her packing—and held Yukie by the shoulders. Yukie rolled her eyes up to her, and Naomi was surprised by the emotion she could read in them.

“Yukie, no, no. It’s not like that at all. It’s not.” She hugged Yukie, who let her body stay limp, unresponsive, a full-body pout.

“Then what is it? I don’t like the look in your eyes. I remember how wild you got that time in Santa Monica…” and just her own mention of the Santa Monica incident, which was a cornerstone of their mutual history and mythology, triggered an understanding in Yukie, hit her physically so that she flinched in Naomi’s embrace and then pulled away, drifting to the end of the kitchen to get an objective look at her friend. “Not still that French guy,” she said, shaking her head again. “Not the professor cannibal killer guy.” Yukie started to pick nervously at one of her fingernails, each coated in pearlescent white and sporting a tiny black ceramic rose glued to it. One of the roses had partially broken off and Yukie was trying to scrape the rest of it away. Naomi had noted how delicate an operation it was for Yukie to pull on the tight gloves she was so fond of.

“A few days with him isn’t enough to get the whole story.”

“The whole intimate fucking story! You’re as insane as he is!”

Naomi had wanted Yukie to be emotionally invested in her project, needed her to be at first, but now she felt the blowback of that setup, how it gave Yukie the right to be judgmental even in her genuine fear for her friend, though as always with Yukie there was that competitive thing, that career jealousy that surged to the surface and took a quick bite before you realized what hit you.

Naomi turned away and continued packing. “He’s an incredible man. Very sweet, very sensitive.”

Yukie began pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Omigod. They won’t even be able to bring you back to me in a body bag. It’ll be two dozen freezer-quality Ziplocs.”

“Don’t get melodramatic on me, Yukie. He’s not some dark force. He’s just a man, a man who did something extreme, out of love and passion and obsession, did it once.”

Yukie stopped pacing. She felt she could read the whole story from Naomi’s body language, the whole story including the ending. “You fucked him already, didn’t you? Your first night with him, and you fucked him. I can’t believe it.”

Naomi didn’t turn around. “No, you can’t understand it. That’s what you can’t. And I don’t expect you to until you read what I write about it. That’s really what it’s all about, and you’ve lost sight of that. It’s the writing. It’s the story. It’s fantastic and it’s all mine.”

“Wow. I’m shocked,” said Yukie. “Does Nathan do this too? You compare notes? You torment each other’s interviewees? You have some laughs about it?”

Naomi did laugh, her back still towards Yukie. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. I’m going to give him a call.”

NATHAN WALKED IN THE LEAFY, lush streets of Forest Hill, talking, improbably, to Naomi. The sun was hot, the light dappled. “I’m walking in the streets. I needed to get out of that house.”

“I know the feeling,” said Naomi. “Problem with me is, when I do that, I’m in Tokyo.” She sounded relaxed—too relaxed for Nathan’s comfort. It was the kind of relaxed you sounded when you’d had a lot of sex. The thought was floating at a subliminal level, and Nathan wasn’t going to address it, but it was there, gnawing. Well, let it gnaw away, with its ferocious little yellow teeth. How could he address it? It was Naomi who had finally broken the airphone-call-debacle deadlock after Nathan had spent fruitless hours emailing, texting, SMSing, phoning, social-networking.

The shape of it was this: she hated his fucking pusillanimous guts and would never forgive him. He had mortally wounded and mutilated and deformed her love for him, not to mention the STD aspect. He was saved, she told him, only by the use to which she intended to put the whole sorry incident and, yes, their entire relationship. He should think of himself as about to embark on a particularly hideous hors catégorie mountain stage of the Tour de France, perhaps Mont Ventoux, or the Col du Tourmalet, jammed with scary, jeering, bizarrely costumed fans coming much too close, and he was going to suffer, suffer, and suffer more. Of course, she was thinking of Hervé and his carbon-fiber bicycle and his bib-style compression cycling shorts with their elaborate vented crotch pad and his Peyronie’s penis when she said it—she should have just fucked him, what a mistake—since all her understanding of bicycle racing came from him.

And there was that one final element, which was Nathan’s last email promising the revelation of a weird and unlikely connection between Roiphe and Arosteguy, which, Naomi had to admit to herself, might actually have tipped the thing over into reconciliation; there had to be something delicious and nutritious there, because Nathan just didn’t have the devious creativity required to invent something like that. And so she was talking to him again.

“The irony of the whole thing is, you tell me that your murderer cannibal guy, Arosteguy, is saner than you ever imagined,” said Nathan, “and now I have to tell you that my respectable old doctor guy is a complete fucking lunatic.”

“You’re kidding,” said Naomi, stretching languorously, with kittenish sexuality. Or so Nathan imagined. “That sounds fantastic. I was afraid for you.”

“Really? Afraid?”

“Afraid that your whole Roiphe thing would turn out to be boring. But no. Fantastic.”

“I’m not so sure. I think the man is delusional. I’m finding it hard to believe that he was ever a real doctor. Maybe he has Alzheimer’s.”

“What is it that he’s doing, exactly, that’s so loony?” said Naomi, and then she said some more words, but they were digitally garbled.

“You’re breaking up,” said Nathan. “Can you hear me? I’ll send you some photos. I’ll send you some photos.” But she was gone, Call Ended.

Nathan walked up to the front door of Roiphe’s house and rang the incongruously plain doorbell, just a cube of black plastic with a white button, hidden away on the faux-stone doorjamb. The button lit up when he pressed it, but Nathan could hear no sound from inside the sealed mausoleum of a house. Eventually, Chase opened the door.

“Hello, Nathan. Forgot your key?”

“Um, I don’t have a key.”

“If you’re going to live here, you should have a key.” As always, Chase had almost every part of her body covered: suede boots, flared silk pants, and a long-sleeved blouse with a mandarin collar. He wondered when she would start wearing gauntlets.

“That would be… that would be nice.” An awkward pause. Chase smiled but didn’t move, deliberately blocking the doorway. “To have my own key,” he said. Pause. “To your house.” No reaction. Was this Chase’s standard front-door mode? He decided to take a radical tack. “Want to go for a walk with me?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” she said airily. “I’m in quarantine.”

“Vraiment? Il s’agit d’une maladie sérieuse?”

Chase’s smile disappeared into zero affect and she slammed the door in Nathan’s face.

When some time later Roiphe drove up in his 1990s-vintage Cadillac Seville, parked in his driveway, and got out with tennis racket in hand, he found Nathan sitting on the steps of his house. “Lock yourself out, did you?” he said, crossing the lawn with a boisterous chuckle. His trim blue Puma tracksuit made the scrawny doctor look lithe and athletic.

“I was never in.”

Having mounted the portico, Roiphe showed off his backhand, the racket breezing cheekily close to Nathan’s face. “Lady of the house didn’t answer the doorbell?”

“I made the mistake of speaking French to her and she slammed the door on me.”

The doctor’s face clouded over for just an instant. “Well, that’s clever of you. Why would you do that, of all things?”

“She told me about studying at the Sorbonne. Said she had a complex about speaking French. Thought I’d take her by surprise, shake her up a bit. Guess I did. Was that a mistake?”

“Ah, well, French is part of her past, and at the moment the past is not part of her therapy. No Freudians allowed inside here!” Roiphe slapped Nathan on the back, swapping his Prince EXO3 to his left hand to do so.

Nathan stood up and shrugged. “Have I blown it? Am I banned from the ranch?”

“Far from it. We’re gonna get you your own key. Now, how’s that for a journalist’s wet dream? The keys to the kingdom! You wouldn’t abuse that privilege, would you? I know how you boys like to root around in the drawers and the underwear.”

NAOMI HAD FALLEN ASLEEP after her call with Nathan. She had used Arosteguy’s curiously long and slender Japanese LG flip phone to make things simpler; he had himself fallen asleep downstairs on the couch and she had gone up to her room to make the call. She had the sense that Nathan could smell Arosteguy on her voice, and that pleased her and helped ease her into a very creamy sleep space. But now her iPad chimed the receipt of some email, and she was acutely sensitized to that sound; she could not sleep through it or wrap a protective coating around it. The iPad was on the table and she could reach it without getting out of bed or even wriggling to the edge of the bed. She lay back and held the glowing screen over her head, a hovering, benign presence, reassuring in a way that she needed. She could see from the Notifications panel that it was the photos Nathan had promised to send, the subject line “Shocking Non-Reality Photos… and more!”

When she opened the photos in Preview, she was puzzled, and she sat up so she could cradle the device in her lap and manipulate the images. Who was this very pretty young woman caught naked on her knees in front of a child’s table strewn with child’s teaware? (All the teaware, Naomi couldn’t help noting, was very North American, or pseudo-British at best; her growing ease with restricted Japanese space, and the novel strangeness of non-Japanese teaware, pleased her; it felt like the stirrings of a profound cultural change à l’Arosteguyenne.) But what was the woman in the photos doing? Pretending to be a child? The photos came in three medium-resolution batches, and these were followed by a separate explanatory note: “This is Chase Roiphe, Dr. Roiphe’s daughter. She says she studied at the Sorbonne with the Arosteguys as recently as a year ago. She might have neat things to tell you. Wanna show some of these to your new pal? Maybe he’ll recognize her. I get the sense she would’ve made an impression. Otherwise, your beautiful eyes only!!”

The mechanism of vengeance and love being what it is, Naomi was immediately panicked and hurt by that penultimate line. Apparently Chase Roiphe had made an impression on Nathan, and, given her beauty and her nakedness and—she had to be honest—her freakishness, which Nathan had always been a sucker for, especially if it proved to be not too self-destructive, she doubted it was entirely intellectual. A biochemical impression, then, the worst kind. But what kind of freakishness was it?

All of Naomi’s sharpest analytical instruments immediately came into play, and the resulting dissections were unnerving. She could feel the camera in Nathan’s hands as if it were in her own hands, and she could feel his accumulating attraction to this woman, this Chase Roiphe, as the camera moved from short-lens wide-angle and distant, to wide-angle and close, to long-lens intimate close-up; these corresponded to documentary objectivity morphing into evidence of love, or at least sexual attraction, if not obsession. The angles themselves told their own story: I am interested in you in a perfunctory way, but now I’m kind of intrigued by you even as I begin to fear you, and now, though I’m nervous about getting close (my shooting is very messy and ill-framed), at least you’re letting me get close without reacting negatively, and now I feel that you’re inviting me into your face and your body, and now I’m confidently finding the optical perspectives that show off your fearsome beauty and your provocative weirdness to their best advantage. By the end of the hellish portfolio, he was crawling all over her face and body—that sensational athletic body covered with what? Eczema? Mosquito bites? Blackfly bites? Had she been swimming nude on the Canadian Shield? And what was that she was eating? Bizarre macroscopic grazing with Nathan wanting to follow her fingers into her mouth, she could just tell.

Naomi tossed the iPad onto the bed. She was sure that Nathan would be fucking Chase in no time, and maybe he’d call it another mercy fuck. Or maybe this time it represented the new standard: embedded research. To her own surprise, Naomi started to laugh. She was sure that Nathan knew she was fucking Arosteguy, and that meant they had emerged into a new and exciting level of game play, one which braided their new lovers into each other’s lives. And look how majestically it was playing out: for all she knew, Chase had fucked Arosteguy—and Célestine!—and what Nathan learned from Chase would illuminate the Arosteguy saga for her. He was obviously primed to share the Roiphes with her, and it could all lead to a tingling and dangerous place. She stretched out on the bed, arms and legs thrown wide, welcoming the vulnerability, the transparency, exquisitely aware of the old flimsy cotton happi coat she was now wearing, which Ari had found for her. It had a crazy-making indigo lattice pattern and was fraying around the edges, and, feeling the graze on her skin of its opaque history, she fantasized that it was something that Samuel Beckett would have worn in his last days in that depressing municipal old people’s refuge called Le Tiers Temps (the Third Stage)—he called it “an old crock’s home,” his breathing machine wheezing in the corner—something that said despair and poverty to her, which translated into Japanese became joy and freedom. It had come with the place, Ari had said, stuffed into a window frame to keep out the winter cold. The image of Beckett brought Naomi directly back to Nathan, who was her only conduit to the playwright. He had begged her to read his article called “Beckett’s Last Tape”—a meditation on Beckett’s last year on earth—after sitting with her through a DVD of the Gate Theatre’s production in Dublin of Krapp’s Last Tape starring John Hurt, and she had liked the interplay between the tape recorder and Krapp’s memory, linking it even then to her fascination with photography and its inexorable manipulation of memory. For her, Beckett was primarily that hair, that nose, those cheekbones, those brows—those ears!—a stunning photographic thing. She sat up and snatched the iPad, poised to reply to Nathan with everything she had just been thinking—let him feel the sinister electricity across an ocean and a continent, let him be jolted and insecure and frightened—but instead she found herself importing the photos into her Photosmith app for better image handling and then, once they had loaded, getting up and going downstairs in stealth mode, iPad in hand like a charged pistol.

The futon had been unfolded on its low wooden frame to form a platform specifically for sex, and Arosteguy, wearing only a French marine shirt, royal-blue-and-white stripes à la Picasso, was lying on his side, close enough to the fetal position that it choked Naomi with potent visions of her father in his last days in Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, shriveled and jaundiced and twitching towards death. At the same time, she was amused at how un-Japanese he looked in that compressed space, a big white spreading European man with thick hairy thighs and broad thick chest. He had shown her some Japanese porn on a fourteen-inch Sanyo tube TV playing through a chunky silver no-name VCR. It featured a seventy-three-year-old porn star named Shigeo Tokuda who had sweetly protruding teeth and a few wisps of hair, and a touchingly crumpled old body with a penis you could barely perceive through the pulsing, Mondrian-like censor’s blur effect which was quite hypnotizing when that penis was moving in and out of the mouth or vagina of a large-breasted twenty-something girl. The video was called Prohibited Elderly Care: Volume 17 and, as promised, presented sex in a nursing home for the elderly. He said that he had bought the video in order to segue gracefully into sex of the aged Japanese flavor, happily certain that he would never fuck a Caucasian woman again. The subtext of their CRT screening event was that Naomi was interfering with his desire to cast off as much of his Frenchness as possible in exchange for Asianness, and was meant as a compliment, but the sub-subtext was that old men were sexually viable, n’est-ce pas? Having found him overwhelmingly attractive from the first YouTube video she had seen of him, she really needed no convincing; Shigeo Tokuda, on the other hand, she found only comically congenial. She began to take photos with her iPad of Ari sleeping, the shutter sound effect turned off, worrying on some level that the very functioning of her brain would wake him in anger. She feared his anger. As she got close to him, she realized that he was gently snoring in a variegated and random way that was oddly expressive, as though he were talking through his nasal cavities. She briefly flirted with the idea of shooting video but didn’t dare, though the thought of a documentary rather than an article or a book did cross her mind. She could almost feel his nasal septum quivering like the reed of a clarinet or a heart valve during a bout of atrial fibrillation, another oblique connection with her father’s last days. She covered his entire body in loose frames and then tight ones. When she came around to the front of the futon to take a close-up of his face, she saw that his eyes were open and watching her.

He yawned and stretched and half sat up. “I suppose a photo of the deflated, semen-encrusted penis of the notorious French philosophy cannibal could be of interest, even if taken with an iPad.”

“Only five megapixels, but a nice documentary quality. Probably all you need for a book.” He pulled in his legs to make room for her and she sat next to him. “And speaking of documenting, there’s something on this”—she waggled the iPad—“I want to show you. Or do you want me to make you some tea first? I think I’ve mastered those two crummy little rusty burners.”

“I was endlessly fucking you in my sleep.”

“Your snoring was very sexy.”

“Snoring?”

She did her best to replicate his snoring, not sure if he simply didn’t know the English word or was surprised to hear that he had been snoring. It came off sounding a bit like one of the mocking green pigs from Angry Birds, a free HD copy of which she had on that very iPad.

Arosteguy laughed. “You must do sound effects for me more often. You have a great talent there. But show me what you want to show me. I usually wake up with clarity that rapidly fades, so maybe now is the best time.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close with a deep grunt in a way that she found disturbing, neither very French nor very Japanese, and perhaps quietly desperate; it didn’t feel like part of whatever their relationship was, felt more like the incestuous embrace of a father and daughter (was this what Nathan meant when he talked about “theme sex”?), Arosteguy sitting there with his exposed thighs and penis and balls, she naked under her skimpy, threadbare happi coat, and it gave what she was about to do—show him Nathan’s photos knowing that they had explosive potential (though she wasn’t sure what that would be)—an ultra-perverse sheen.

She unlocked the screen and angled it towards Arosteguy. “These are photos my friend Nathan took. He’s working on a piece in Toronto.”

“I know the city. Very nice. Friendly. I was there in 1996 for a Third World energy symposium. What are these photos? Who is that girl? Nice haunches. What is she doing?”

Naomi paged rhythmically through the photos, Arosteguy reacting with little grunts and exhales as though still asleep, until she paused at the first shot showing Chase in close-up. “Ari, do you recognize her?”

Arosteguy cantilevered his head forward and squinted at the screen. Naomi spread her fingers over the shot as though stretching out a membrane, enlarging it until Chase’s enraptured, openmouthed face filled the viewer window. Arosteguy jolted back as though struck in the head, his right hand violently clenching Naomi’s shoulder. He stood up, roughly raking his arm across Naomi’s shoulders as he pulled away from her, backing away from the futon, eyes blazing with anger. Naomi felt herself shriveling up like a spider touched by a lit cigarette, but still had the presence of mind to activate the iPad’s Voice Memos app, and this had a soothing, distancing effect, allowing her to float into that protected space which is professional observer, safely placing Arosteguy on that rotating specimen platform under the magnifying glass. He paced back and forth, muttering to himself, then snatched his tight-fitting navy corduroy pants off the floor and struggled his way into them without underpants, which he seemed never to wear. Thus armored, he sat back against the front windowsill, pushed his lips out into a flexing pout as though silently rehearsing his next sentence, and then said, “Who is your friend who sent these photographs?”

“His name is Nathan Math. He’s a journalist. Lives in New York.” Arosteguy nodded. “Boyfriend?”

Naomi, shrugging with an insouciance she did not feel, said, “Sometimes.”

“So, your boyfriend and you. A classic American journalistic conspiracy.”

“Ari—”

“Why have you done this? How do you know Chase? What are you two trying to do to me?” He pronounced her name “Shass,” which almost tilted the whole melodrama into farce for Naomi.

“I don’t know her. And I wasn’t sure that you did either. She’s back home in Toronto with her father, a doctor, Barry Roiphe. She’s in some kind of weird therapy with him, and Nathan is in their house to write a medical article about them. And she told him that she had studied at the Sorbonne with you and Célestine. That’s all. A coincidence, not a conspiracy.”

Arosteguy barked out a harsh, phlegmy laugh, and the phlegm seemed to remind him that he needed a cigarette. He roamed around the periphery of the room until he found the pale yellow flip-top pack with the bold red Japanese character crowning the letters RIN, and was soon inhaling deeply. Naomi was surprised that he smoked cigarettes with cork-tipped filters, her surprise a matter of style rather than smoking arcana (she had never smoked); she felt he should be a Gauloises man, just like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, Gauloises Caporal without filter in the classic soft French-blue pack with the machinelike winged-helmet logo; but of course he was resolutely turning Japanese. She had a very strong impulse to photograph his pack of cigarettes, could see even across the room that the same red Japanese character on the pack was printed on each cigarette just below the filter. Given the importance that consumerist impulse, passion, and identity had in the social philosophy of the Arosteguys, it seemed imperative that she eventually apply to the couple themselves their own approach to psychology: consumer choices and allegiances were the key to character and to all social interactions. She was sure Arosteguy was conscious of that as he struggled—how serious was he? was it merely ironic?—to become Japanese by consuming Japanese items. She could see the conundrum exemplified by Western versus traditional Japanese clothing; he was too proud, too aware, to allow himself to become a caricature of a Japanese man who clings to tradition—if he were to become Japanese, it would be a current and forward-looking variant of the same—and so it was left to minor items like cigarettes and food to carry the transformation.

“No, but really, I admire you and your boyfriend Nathan. A new and modern version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. A very compelling partnership for the Information Age. It should make for a very nice entertainment.”

“Ari, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The smoke in his lungs really did seem to relax him, modulate his rage into sarcasm, a relief for Naomi. “I know it seems ridiculous, but it really is a complete coincidence. Nathan is with the Roiphes because of Roiphe’s disease. I told you, he gave it to me and then decided to research it. That’s how it all happened.”

“An unexpected coincidence, then. Okay. And then some unexpected consequences?”

“What would those be?”

Arosteguy stubbed his cigarette out on the sill, folded his arms for a meditative moment, then walked back to the futon and sat down beside Naomi. He gently took the iPad from her lap and held it up in one hand. “May I play with these? The photos of Chase, taken by Naomi’s good friend Nathan?” Naomi gave a shuddering, terse little nod, eyes wide, nervous, excited. He hunched over and began to examine the images, scrolling through them and expanding them with forensic intensity.

“What are you seeing?” said Naomi.

Without looking up, he said, “I am seeing that Aristide Arosteguy will soon be caught in a lie, and so he might as well tell everything to his priestess confessor.”

“What was the lie?”

“That is exactly what a priestess would want to know. But isn’t she curious about the mechanism of revelation? The priest of my childhood, for example, Reverend Father Drossos, a terrifying man, was obsessively, perhaps unnaturally, concerned with the mechanism of revelation. Of course, there were sinister and familiar reasons for that.”

“Well, your former student Chase Roiphe will eventually tell Nathan some secrets about you, and Nathan will tell me, and I’ll tell the world.”

Arosteguy looked up at her now with an appreciative smile. “Very good, and no less than I would expect from Priestess Naomi.” He offered the iPad back with a slight bow, holding it with both hands flat underneath it, palms up, like a sacramental plate—or a Japanese business card. “But the secrets have already been told without a word being spoken, and they are all right in here.”

“GONNA HAVE KIDS someday, Nate?”

They sat side by side on the rough-cut stone patio overlooking the narrow lap pool and the fussy, overgrown rock pond harboring some very butch koi. Beyond that there was a slate-roofed coach house which looked original—that is, about a hundred years old—overlooked by a bland institutional apartment block. Nathan idly wondered how many tenants were watching them through binoculars and urban telescopes. He could hear the trickle of a small artificial stream or waterfall but couldn’t see it from where he was sitting under the vast canvas teak-strutted garden umbrella that sprouted from a gasketed hole in the center of their table, also vast, also teak. A small, anxious Asian woman had brought them coffee and nuts and berries in bowls.

“I have no idea, Barry.”

“You’ve probably got a steady girl somewhere, though, haven’t you?”

The sun was high and hot and Roiphe had polarized sunglass clip-ons over his glasses that were even bigger than the glasses themselves; the chromed lower edges of the clip-ons dug into the doctor’s flaccid cheeks.

“I sort of do, I guess.”

Roiphe was playing with a khaki mesh-vented Tilley hat, twisting the brim, crushing the crown and re-blocking it, putting it on and off his head. “Do I detect some sexual ambivalence there? You know, there was a big vogue a while back where GPs dabbled in sex therapy. I’m not sure how healthy that really was, but it was pretty darned common. You can see the psychopathology right there. I refused to get into it. A lot of my colleagues got into big trouble with it. Busted up a lot of marriages.”

“Ambivalence, I guess. I wouldn’t say sexual.” The blueberries were especially good, but the raspberries had gone soft, mushy, and sour. “Just the commitment problem, I would say. Not just committing to a particular woman, but committing to a particular future. Kinda banal and ordinary.” He rotated his Nagra so that he could be sure it was recording at a decent level given the heavy ambient noon traffic noise. “But speaking of psychopathology, I have to wonder about the deal here, you playing the role of shrink to your own daughter.”

Roiphe chuckled and poured himself more coffee with a shaky hand, spilling a bit onto the brim of the hat that now rested next to his cup. “Aren’t you the cheeky one. Well, to begin with, that’s how I always approached being a parent. I’m naturally analytical. I’m clinical. I can’t fight it. That doesn’t mean I’m cold, although maybe my poor dead wife would’ve disputed that. But goddammit, what would you be doing? We sent her off to France, Rose and I, with the best of intentions—as you can imagine, given the expense. She was such a bright girl, Chase, and kinda European in her outlook. She didn’t look to the States for excitement or inspiration.

Partially it was the language thing. Of course there’s a lot of Spanish going on in the US, but she wanted the whole deal, a country where English was basically not spoken, and the culture was based around that language. And then, of course, there was the Quebec thing. She told you about that?”

“She did, yes.”

“Okay, so anyways, we pack her off to France, she gradually stops phoning, then stops emailing, and then we just don’t hear from her. Not a word. And then Rose dies, a big fat horrible surprise. She was in great shape for an old babe—we can get into that sometime, if you think it’s relevant to the book, but it might not be, depending. So Rose dies, and I can’t find a way to let Chase know about it, and so I get in touch with this Arosteguy guy, and I get a really weird vibe from him. So I fly over to Paris looking for her, and eventually I find her with the help of this kid, a student, Hervé Blomqvist—what a name; I can barely get my mouth around it—a colleague of hers. It seems she was living with him. Something traumatic happened to her, and she left that great little apartment on the Left Bank that we found for her and moved in with this Blomqvist. I guess that’s a Norwegian or maybe Swedish name, but he seemed totally French to me. You know, kinda saucy and arrogant, but in the end really helpful and okay. You’d have to say that ultimately he was an okay kid. I think she would have been in terrible trouble without him. You might eventually want to look him up to get his take on the whole Sorbonne thing. For the book.”

“I might,” said Nathan, thumbing exactly that note into his iPhone’s Notes app. “How do you spell that name, exactly?”

“I’ll give you all the particulars when we get back inside. Never was much of a speller myself. I’ve got it lying around somewhere. And an address and a phone number. They’re a year old now, but you never know. And now, speaking of the French language, when I got Chase back she was a helluva basket case, and it all seemed to do with speaking, or not speaking, French, and that the Arosteguys—turns out there were two of them, a man and a woman, married professors—said such terrible things to her in French that she was traumatized. And when I asked her what they could possibly have said that could do that, she said she couldn’t recall it because they spoke the words in French, and French was gone from her brain—exiled was the word she used, exiled from her brain—as was French in general, and so she couldn’t remember anything. And then she started doing these weird ritualistic things and eating bits of her own skin, stuff that you’ve seen, all in a trance, and I can’t for the life of me see what that has to do with the terrible French words being spoken thing. And that’s basically where we are. The old mystery wrapped in an enigma, or whatever the hell that was. And so that’s having kids too. It’s rougher than you can imagine. That’s why I asked you.”

“Barry, you mentioned ‘experiments’ in connection with Chase’s condition. I wonder what you meant. What exactly is your course of therapy for her?”

“I’m attacking on all fronts, boy. And some of those fronts are weird, lemme tell you.”

“For instance.”

“For instance, up in that third-floor attic space that’s all hers. I bought this house for her, really, you know. Rose never lived here. We’ve only been here a year. I bought it with all the furniture and lights and stuff that they put in to show off the house—what do they call it, staging, home staging. I just wanted a big space of our own when I saw what shape she was in, and that condo downtown on the waterfront that Rose and I had was just too small, too introverted. They couldn’t believe I was serious, but I told them I had no taste and that everything they had done looked fine to me. The woman fought me on that, said the stuff was rented and it was deliberately bland so as not to distract from the house, the property, the space itself. Anyhow, I rolled right on over her and her bosses, and they made it work because it’d been sitting around unsold for over a year.” Roiphe stopped and took a tentative sip of his lukewarm coffee, lost in a sudden reverie. Nathan waited for him to continue but he seemed to think he had answered the question. “Barry, you were saying. Your weird course of therapy.”

“Oh, yeah, yes. So I collaborated in a way with Chase on a solution to her distress, which she never really admitted to, and she said, ‘There’s a thing called a 3D printer, and I want one to play with, I think it might relax me.’ That’s the term she used, relax me, and it became our code for cure me, or maybe heal me a little bit.”

“She mentioned the 3D printer to me. Said she’d show it to me.” “Really? Well, that would be rare. She’s sure never let me see her using it, I can tell you that. And hell, you should see the damned thing. Not cheap! She insisted on the best, and then, like I said, after setting up and outfitting the whole third-floor suite for her, three rooms and a bathroom, she won’t let me see what she’s actually doing with it in what she calls her workroom. Actually locks the door on me. I could break in, of course, but I’m scared to. Might set her back into that catatonia she was enveloped in when I brought her back from France. You should’ve seen her, stiff as a board and all bundled up with blankets even though it was as hot a summer as today. So she said she’d show you? Well, there you are, you’re a part of my course of therapy. We collaborate on Chase as well as the book, and that gets her over some of her father issues too.”

Nathan wasn’t ready to delve into the father issues, but he suspected that they would have deep and tormented roots. “Wow. That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? I’m just a journalist.”

“These are radical times, boy. Can’t you feel it? You need to stretch with the times, stretch to the breaking point. I sensed the second I saw you that you were ready for a life breakthrough, and this is it. No telling where it’ll lead.”

“I’m not sure how much she’ll want to collaborate after the door slam.”

“Just don’t speak French to her again. I’m sure it’ll be all right. She’s kinda intrigued by you. She’s been pretty reclusive since I brought her back.”

“Have you ever heard of the book Le Schizo et les langues? Written in French by an American, Louis Wolfson, a schizophrenic who couldn’t bear to speak English, or even to hear it spoken, and retreated completely into other languages, but mainly French. In his case, it was mother issues.”

“Well, there you are, you see? Destiny has called in a specialist for me, and it’s you, boy.”

“WE COULDN’T TAKE PHOTOS after the diagnosis. Every photo displayed the lie. Every photo was already a memento of a life that was gone, a photograph of death. Compared with those innocent early family photos, the pictures I finally took of Célestine… afterwards… they were honest, they contained no betrayals, no lies, no deceit. So they were horrible, but they were pure.”

The futon had been folded back into its couch configuration, and Naomi, now in yoga pants and gray fleece Roots zip-up hoodie, had taken possession of it, spreading all her electronic paraphernalia protectively around her: MacBook Air on lap with shield-like lid open, glowing Apple logo a talisman against Arosteguy, who sat on the other side of the low table, slumped in the segmented brown velveteen beanbag chair. She had originally recorded him using the Nagra’s uncompressed WAV files, which were huge but so beautifully detailed; the lossy MP3s would have been more than adequate for transcription, but she wanted the full quality of Arosteguy’s smoky voice, anticipating at least a radio program if not a video documentary. For the moment, though, she had been playing back a key passage of Arosteguy’s Célestine testimony through her Air’s tinny speakers—not resonant, but clear enough for condemnation. The Nagra sat on the table close to Arosteguy, its blue LED modulometer twitching in sync with the distant street sounds, waiting for him to speak. Naturally, he had tea and an RIN cigarette to play with while he generated a response, and he sipped and inhaled and exhaled with exquisite cogitation. Finally, he glanced up at her with calculated, sheepish charm and smiled.

“I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Célestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the ‘Living’ sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Célestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.”

He took an intense drag on his cigarette that was rich with unspoken, ironic drama, or at least Naomi interpreted it that way. She felt humiliated to have been deluded, suckered into a sympathy fuck, and at the same time triumphant and eager for a scoop that was beyond the internet’s reach. Undeniably, it was Nathan’s photos—their full meaning still cloudy—that had brought Arosteguy to heel, and it meant that she and Nathan were still some kind of team, perhaps not on the scale of the Arosteguys but pleasingly outlandish in its own way, and maybe she would encourage Nathan to fuck Chase Roiphe if he hadn’t already, just to sharpen the parallels. The thought made her giddy, and some juices began to flow.

Arosteguy seemed to be fading away into his own head now, and Naomi reflexively became the interrogator. “Ari, let’s start with the basics. Was Dr. Trinh telling the truth? Célestine did not have brain cancer or any other kind of cancer?”

Still pacing the inner landscape of his own skull, Arosteguy answered without looking up, as though Naomi were inside that skull with him. “Dr. Trinh, yes, she was telling the truth about that.”

“And so… why is she dead? What killed Célestine Arosteguy?”

“Célestine woke up in the middle of the night. She shook me to wake me up. When she could see the light swell back into my eyes, my consciousness, she said, with great, husky gravity, ‘We must destroy the insect religion.’” He raised his head and looked at Naomi, but she felt, with a deep visceral chill, that he was looking at Célestine. “That was a pulled trigger, it was a terrifying shot fired into my brain directly from her mouth.”

“I don’t understand the reference.”

Aristide laughed; he was now looking at Naomi. “No trigger for you, then. Because obviously you’ve never read the famous essay.”

For Naomi, this was the pulled trigger, the terrifying shot fired into her brain directly from his mouth: her ignorance, her lack of depth. Yukie was able to flaunt this thinness, could flip the veneer into the structure, the wood-grain paneling becoming the table itself, just like all her social contemporaries; if you knew too much, if you were too aware or too educated, you were vulnerable to special varieties of pain and anxiety, and, worse, you were not cool. But Naomi was not Yukie. It caused her anguish that she had not read the famous essay, had not known it existed. But strangely, given any kind of handle at all, she could imagine it, and this had always been her quick, saving grace: not knowledge, exactly, but intuitive invention. “I’m sure I can find it on the net. Title?”

Arosteguy stubbed out his dying RIN and quickly lit another one. “The essay was called ‘The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion.’”

Yes, thought Naomi as she netted madly, here it is: Weber. Capitalism. Vatican. Luther. Entomology. Sartre. Consumerism. Beckett. North Korea. Apocalypse. Oblivion.