Consumed (26 page)

Secretly, I lusted after Célestine as I always had—secretly, because it was not allowed that I could somehow evade our synchronized aging by lusting now as I had always lusted. I was allowed to express my desire to her, but it was necessary for her to laugh it off in disbelief, the delusions of an old man, possibly the first signs of senility, if not dementia, in her own private
senex. It was as though my unabated, youthful lust was by its very existence a reproach to her for her own brutally truncated lust, now feebly supported by the stratagems I've just described. I could not tell her how our past sex blended smoothly into our present sex for me, how her past body modified the reality of her present body. Even as anal sex was not possible for her now, still the old, vividly recalled anal sex was vitally alive and present for me, happening somehow concurrently with vaginal sex. And of course, my body was changing too, as I'm sure you've guessed even without reference to internet photos and videos, and I felt that her menopause was also mine. The transformation of our bodies was locked in a rigorous synchrony, and perhaps beyond synchrony: we were too close in all ways not to have affected each other causally. As her body changed (and that change, of course, is invisibly gradual until one of those startling moments of revelation, when the light slanting in from an oddly placed skylight rakes cruelly across the skin, the veins, the toenails, and changes forever your perception of what your lover is) I at first willed my esthetic for womanly beauty to change in order to accommodate her transformation, so that she remained as beautiful and as desirable as ever before, though she was different. And the difference itself became provocative and exciting, as though sex with her was also sex with a new, exotic person who demanded new sexual protocols and new perversities, until I didn't have to will that change anymore because that esthetic had permanently changed; I was no longer attracted to the same women, and it was a blessing and a relief, and a curious thing. An unexpected corollary was the realignment of the esthetic concerning my own body, which could now absorb the stringy musculature, the mottled skin, the haggard cheekbones, the reptilian wrinkles, into its category of acceptable male beauty. Yes, we were both still wonderful.

After I described my adventure in Vanves to Célestine in obsessive detail, all in explanation of the album cover photo, we made desperate, triumphant, celebratory love, inevitably embracing the theme of Romme Vertegaal and
his odyssey as we imagined it. While we were on a trip to Mexico, whose purpose was an exploration of leftist politics and philosophy
à la mexicaine
, we discovered that our sex had independently segued into a meditation on Frida and Diego, with a flavoring of Trotsky (Célestine was always Frida, but I occasionally was Trotsky in that delirious country of sexual self-annihilation; later on, when we revisited the theme, I was sometimes Frida, Célestine sometimes Diego), and had distinctly Mexican surrealist folk-art overtones. From that point on, we would often consciously choose the themes of our sexual sessions as though collaborating on a collage or sculpture project, and would afterwards discuss their textures and sensory effects. We wrote a joint piece about it for the “Annals of Sexuality” section of
The New Yorker
, which caused some small controversy. Now, just post-Vanves, there emerged a new layer in our constantly evolving, composited sexual structure (which always reminded me of the use of layers in Photoshop): Célestine's uncharacteristically desperate longing for Romme. I could be Romme in our fantasy—I certainly knew him better than I knew Diego Rivera—but the jealousy was there even though we allowed each other lacunate lovers, and the jealousy was dissolving the layers and producing a disharmonious mess. Is there anyone who has not felt jealousy over a lover's past lovers, a jealousy made all the more ferocious the more it is unjustified, the more it is secured in the past, mockingly protected by the vault of memory? So yes, triumphant, celebratory, but anguished in its emotional complexity, at least for me, and made more agonizingly poignant by Célestine's apparent serenity, her ease even with the by-now-inevitable pain that came with penetration. I hated allowing Célestine to fuck Romme using me as a Romme surrogate.

We were both subdued by the end of it, Célestine holding my hand over her left breast and squeezing it with distracted cruelty. But then she startled me with a sudden, whimpered exhalation, followed by a terrified gasp. A shot of adrenaline projected brainward and flushed me with a
familiar, unmoored anger. When I first got my hearing aids, which were primarily tuned to augment those higher frequencies which are usually the first to disappear with age, it is true that the world instantly became louder and more harsh; it was difficult for someone whose aural landscape had so gradually become more and more muted and dulled to believe that this was hearing as experienced by most people, that this harshness was just the restoration of higher sound frequencies that had been lost. But the most disorienting aspect of this new soundscape was that sounds now carried too much emotion, too much meaning, so that a single sneeze was an expression of rage, the closing of a bedroom door was a pointed separation that would need healing, the smacking of a pillow to reshape it in the middle of the night was an explosive assault that caused my heart to pound with reflexive anger. A recalibration of my reaction to the intensity of sounds was urgently demanded, and though I was constantly recalibrating, those unexpected shots of adrenaline still persisted and confused me. I wanted to jerk out of bed and slam the bedroom door and go for a petulant walk in the wet, dark streets, muttering to myself about spousal insult and betrayal. But I recalibrated.

“Tina.”

“You feel them, don't you?” she said. “They're going crazy in there. It's not possible you can't feel them.”

“The insects.”

An exhaled “yes!” like the report of a high-powered rifle. “Do you think it's the Romme Vertegaal gestalt that's animating them? The entomology, the North Korean connection …?”

She twisted around to face me. On her face was a terrible, frantic joy. “Program 5,” she said. “Switch to that and you can hear them. That's what it's for, isn't it? It's obvious! Romme knew this moment would come!”

“I don't know what Program 5 is for. Even Elke couldn't tell me precisely what it was for. I let her create it because of you, because of your
North Korean obsession, and of course because I was curious, even about my hearing, what its potential might really be. We know that Romme was brilliant, so let his brilliance open up my head if it can. That's what I was thinking. But honestly, I've been afraid to switch to it, partly because I think it'll be disappointing, be just a bland expression of harmonic filtering, who knows what. Elke was very proud of her work with that difficult analoguevinyl-to-digital routine, and I hated to frustrate her by being so timid, but she let me go when I promised her that I would report back in detail after I'd had the courage to experiment with Program Vertegaal.”

I could not tell Célestine that I had another motivation in letting Elke Jungebluth manipulate me: I had become terrified that Célestine would make good on her promise to travel to North Korea in order to seek out Romme, to reconnect with him and to give her insect problem to him, all within the context of a farcical political rapprochement with the North Korean dictatorship. On one level her stratagem was complete madness, a fantasy, and on another it confirmed—I felt this with crushing pain—that she still loved him, loved him in a way that she did not love me, and that I was trapped in a wretched telenovela I would never escape.

Célestine cupped her left breast in both hands and offered it to me. “Switch it on and listen,” she said, with a breathless intensity whose hopefulness utterly deranged me. What husband has not avidly played the role of voyeur in his own house, watching the reflection of his wife in a window as she examines her vagina or anus with his chromed shaving mirror, one leg propped up on the white metal bathroom chair, searching for some real or feared lesion, polyp, secretion, or telltale discoloration? I would often catch Célestine examining her left breast in the most unconventional way: for sound, rather than sight. She would pull it up towards her left ear, her head cocked, manipulating it ruthlessly, as though it truly did not belong to her but was a ludicrously wrongheaded transplant or recent pathological growth, prodding it in order to provoke the insects into an aural frenzy
loud enough to be recordable by the iPhone that sat propped up against a Kleenex box, the VU-meter of its Voice Memos app twitching with every rustle. Now it was my turn.

I hesitated, paralyzed. Her hair was wet from our exertions, glistening black and gray strands striping her cheeks. One strand was caught in the corner of her mouth, and I hallucinated that it was the leg of an enormous black-and-gray spider inadvertently exposed, patiently waiting inside her mouth for the insects to emerge. I forced myself to gently pull the leg from between her lips, which parted slightly to aid me, and swept it back over her ear. “You know, you've always been able to hear things that I've never heard, even with my very sophisticated bionics,” I said. “And you've never been able to successfully record the sounds of your insects. You've admitted that.”

“But this is Romme. This is Romme's gift to both of us. It's been created by his brilliance and by his understanding. This is a new thing.” She glowed as she said this, and the glow tormented me. She reached up with one hand, the other now palpating her breast, and touched the Pure module behind my ear. (I had chosen dark silver for its color, vain enough still to want it to disappear in my unruly nest of silver hair, which one of my students described as “confrontational philosophy hair, though not as intimidating as Schopenhauer's hair.”) I took Célestine's hand away from my ear, leaving it to hover uncertainly, and I reached up for the program switch behind my left ear and pressed it, methodically cycling through the programs from 1 to 5. Each cycle was accompanied by a unique sequence of musical tones cleverly designed to indicate which program one was entering, and because Célestine could hear those tones, when I arrived at Vertegaal her eyebrows immediately rose in bright, girlish expectation.

“The oven fan has been left on. I can hear it now,” I said.

Célestine laughed and pulled my head towards her breast with exaggerated nonchalance.

And then I heard them. The insects. They were there inside her breast, and I could hear them.

THERE ARE APPARENTLY BIOMARKERS
present in exhaled breath which can be analyzed by a mass spectrometer for indications of many kinds of cancers and other diseases. Could there be an equivalent in exhaled or otherwise emitted sounds? Could Romme Vertegaal and his North Korean colleagues be in the vanguard defining a revolutionary new medical diagnostic system? Could my innocent, pragmatic Pure hearing aids have been transformed into an audio analogue of the mass spectrometer by the
Listen to the Crickets
program? In the light of day, none of this would stand up to scrutiny. But there, in the bed with Célestine, it was darkest night, and I could hear the insects in her left breast, and they sounded alive and present and real. I had always suspected that insects have what I think of as “species personalities”; that is to say, not personalities as individuals, but as individual species, so that certain of the nymphaline butterflies—the admirals, commas, anglewings, tortoiseshells—all have a habit of landing on your head when you are trying to catch them, and when you move abruptly, they fly off, only to circle and return to the top of your head—behavior you would never see in a monarch or a tiger swallowtail. In Célestine's bunched breast, now covered with the liquid sheen of excitement, there were eight species of insects I could discern, all by the sounds they made, sounds which generated an image in my mind of the organs—legs or wings stridulating, tymbals vibrating—which produced those sounds. As part of my life's philosophical enterprise I had—naturally, it seemed to me—been drawn to entomological studies, because I could not see how a philosopher could avoid engagement with the existence and meaning of such forceful yet utterly non-human life-forms. It always amused me
to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable. But as a student of insect life I could not become more than a dabbler, so immeasurably deep is the subject. The lecture I delivered at the Club Immédiat, which I titled “Entomology Is a Humanism”—a playful, though pointed, reference to Sartre's famous lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”—incorporated most of the substance of my entomological learning, and is there for all to see in all its shallowness. I could not, in other words, accurately name the species of every insect represented in Célestine's breast. And how many of them could there be? Was there only one specimen of each species, so that the answer would be eight? Or, following the paradigm of Noah's ark, was there a male and female of each animal? A cicada, certainly. A mud-daubing wasp. A robber fly. An assassin bug. Several species of ant. My mind swelled with odd, comically disorienting images that seemed to bring along their own sound tracks: the savage swarming of the
marabunta
, the billion-strong soldier-ant army in the 1954 Charlton Heston movie
The Naked Jungle
; a show on the Discovery Channel examining insect parasites that turned their hosts into zombies serving the needs of the parasites; a YouTube parody of
The Green Hornet
in which the masked hero is actually a hornet that is fatally swatted by his Japanese sidekick, Kato, whose sound track was “Flight of the Bumblebee,” complete with theremin hornet-buzz effect as per the old radio show. (I wasn't sure whether I had actually seen this
Hornet
video or hallucinated it.)