Consumed (16 page)

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.”