Consumed (21 page)

“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.

9

THE TRIGGER WAS THE RELIGION
of the breast, of the fluid of the flesh which is there to nourish, to create more flesh. And then there was an actual breast, Célestine's wonderful left breast, which was full, not of milk and milk glands, but a buzzing, bristling hodgepodge of insects of every shape and configuration. Yes. “My left breast is a bag full of insects. I don't know why it's attached to me, and I would like very much to … disconnect it. You can have it afterwards, if you like. I know you're fond of it.”

We were on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, the only two members who were not moviemaking professionals. The year before, it had been an American opera singer and a computer-game designer. Sequestered in a deluxe villa in the hills overlooking Cannes, we were to discuss in the most leisurely and free-form manner all questions of cinema and society with our nine jury colleagues—including our president, the Serbian actor Dragan Štimac—while eating the most exquisite meals and wandering the most Arcadian gardens. Eventually, we would sit around the grand table in the impressive ballroom and vote for the various awards. There were
twenty-two films in the competition for the Palme d'Or and several other intensely anticipated and analyzed prizes.

The villa was said to belong to a ninety-three-year-old Russian countess, a former beauty who was actually lurking somewhere on the premises, hidden from view, not wanting to be seen but thrilling to the excitement of judgment on art that thronged her halls. It was in the grotesquely Russianate pool anteroom, in a changing room tiled like the Hermitage, that Célestine pulled my face to her naked left breast and said, in a voice shivering with horror, “Listen!”

I listened. I heard her heart, trip-hammering. “Your tachycardia,” I said. “Can you control it? Do you need your pills?” Her face was disfigured by fear; it was, I confess, a face I despised, a rare face. She squeezed her breast, jounced it like a bag of cherries. “Entomology,” she said. “Bag of bugs. Listen to them in there. They would like to come out. Especially the Hymenoptera. They tend to be claustrophobic. Which is strange, of course, because my breast is very much like a wasp nest, and you'd think they'd be comfortable in there.” She was really crushing and kneading her breast in her hands, and I gently pulled them away and held her wrists down on her thighs. She sighed, her face relaxed, and she laughed a small laugh.

I had never heard anything like this from her before. It shocked me and terrified me. It was as though she had had a stroke of some bizarre kind, and the strangeness of her face supported that thought. The pressure was also bizarre, because soon we would have to gather around that table with the jury and the chief of the festival and have solemn discussions and arguments and rancorous voting. I tried to turn it into a joke, a spontaneous piece of performance art. “This is your response to the North Korean film, isn't it? The North Korean film has burrowed into your breast, your left-wing breast, your Red breast.” I knew
the movie had affected her profoundly, and had already disturbed many sleeping Marxist dogs which never leave their French intellectual kennels. But she screamed at me, and moaned, and I was terrified that the jury would become a criminal jury and they would convict us and we would never be allowed to leave the czarist villa. No one came to monitor us, though. We had heard many shrieks and shouts and arguments and morbid moanings throughout the course of the evening before, then the night, then this Sunday morning, the Sunday of the
palmarès
. A passionate and creative group of cineastes.

And so the essay. It was really a letter to me, a confession she could make in no other way, published in the Paris magazine
Sartre
, though I had begged her not to. It was too intimate, I said. But she said, “Philosophy is intimate, the most intimate act of thinking.” And so: “The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion,” an essay by Célestine Arosteguy. Of course, those of us on the jury of that year would hear the resonance. The North Korean film was called
The Judicious Use of Insects
, and in her essay Célestine confesses that the movie triggered the “stroke”—of luck?—but reveals that the breast disconnect, the insect connection, had been building for years and so terrified her that she couldn't speak of it to anyone, not me, not her beloved physician. She describes the scene of the ultimate vote for the Palm. The president had asked the jury for the titles of all their proposed candidates for the Palm to be handwritten on a piece of festival paper—complete with golden embossed palm symbol—and passed to him. When he came across her paper, upon which she had written the title of the North Korean film, he took his cigar lighter out of his pocket and set fire to it, tossing it into the ashtray which he himself had brought every day to our meeting room in the Palais des Festivals and now brought to the villa in defiance of the non-smoking regulations. “I was not allowed to bring my nine-millimeter pistol,” he said, with his characteristic sarcasm-dripping smile, “so this will have to do.”
The festival's artistic delegate, who was there to certify the legitimacy of the voting procedure, was horrified at this barbarity and gently admonished the jury president. But he would not be cowed. “If this thing wins the vote for the Palm, or in fact for anything at all, I shall resign as president and I'll let everyone know why.” And his look to Célestine was hideous, mocking, malicious, and misogynistic. I was there too, of course. I did not intend to vote for the North Korean film, but I had not yet revealed my own choice.

There was on our jury an aged, angry, exiled North Korean director, Bak Myun Mok, who was obviously an enemy of the director of the North Korean film in competition. He was prepared to do anything to prevent his entrenched countryman from winning a prize, and so he was campaigning—none too subtly—against him. He turned specifically to me and spread his hands in helpless despair. His translator, Yolanda, was a shy young Spanish woman with short, straight black hair that suggested she was trying to look Korean. Even the way she held her mouth was somehow Korean. Yolanda was not comfortable with what he was saying. “You are a philosopher,” she said to me, beginning her translation, but then paused and looked at him apprehensively, almost begging him to say something other than what he was actually saying. In response to this insolence, the director picked up a pencil—we had all been provided with pencils and pads of paper, so charmingly retro—and prodded her viciously, twice, in her delicate, exposed clavicle. Though there was an eraser in the end of the pencil, it left an angry red mark almost immediately.

The translator turned back to me with wide apologetic eyes and continued. “You are a philosopher,” she said, “and that meat dog of a wife of yours is also a philosopher. Both of you professional philosophers, whatever that means. Can you not explain to the bitch that the movie, even the title,
The Judicious Use of Insects
, is not philosophy, and not art, but politics of the worst, most repressive kind. And to give this wretched,
sinister movie any prize would be to shackle the art of cinema to the wall of political expediency.”

“‘Meat dog of a wife'?” I said to Yolanda. “He really said that? And ‘the bitch'?”

“Under his breath, yes, he said those things.” Yolanda's voice shook with distress, and her eyes became shiny with tears. “I made sure that I did not misunderstand him. I asked him to reconsider what he was saying. And he said those words again, no longer under his breath.” Then, as a tremulous pedagogical afterthought—Yolanda was trying to acquire a French teaching certificate—she added, “In Korea, meat dogs are called
nureongi
or
hwangu
, meaning ‘yellow dog.' You don't let them into your house. ‘Bitch' is girl dog.”

He was not small, Bak Myun Mok, but he was arrogant and therefore slow and unprepared for my attack. Because we were not allowed to bring cameras and cell phones to our retreat, there are no photographs or videos of the expression of my rage, though the aftermath—Bak's broken cheekbone, his black eyes, his shredded lower lip—was duly recorded by the police photographer summoned to the villa. Through all of this, Célestine was profoundly absent and vacant-eyed, increasingly anesthetized by her own spiraling reactions to
The Judicious Use of Insects
. I won't go into the overall delicious scandal, which is well documented on the internet. Suffice it to say that the voting procedure was quite irregular, the
palmarès
was a satisfactory pandemonium, and the North Korean film won a Special Jury Prize—for “artistic subversion and visual elegance”—in consolation. Dragan, the president, voted against this, though he had clapped his hands in delight as Bak and I rolled around on the floor, exclaiming in several languages that this was real cinema and unsuccessfully encouraging the rest of the jury to join in. Bak also voted against the prize, his vote conveyed from a dentist's office in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he was having emergency treatment on an upper-left bicuspid which I had loosened when I smashed
his face into the replica Winter Palace Dutch tiles of the ballroom floor. When I grabbed his hair and dragged his head towards the solid ebony voting-table leg, the action had produced a satisfying smear of saliva, blood, and mucus on the tiles, mostly from that rocking tooth splitting the gum it was embedded in.