Consumed (33 page)

The missing breast. Naomi obsessively scanned the face and body of Arosteguy in every photo in which he appeared, searching for a hint of mischief, of irony, of theater and performance. She wanted him to be sending her a message that said, “I was fantasizing for you about the mastectomy, the Hungarian surgery. It never happened. What you are seeing now is the reality. We three are cannibals and we ate that breast.” But she found nothing but ritualistic solemnity on the faces of all three. And it was bracing, in a distancing, Brechtian V-effekt fashion, for her to see Ari's naked body in this context, from this perspective, so familiar in its powerful fullness, its slope-shouldered monumentality, that she could feel the weight of him on her, could feel his teeth in the meat of her shoulder, and yet also feel how separate she was from him, how alien he truly was. In the video, Célestine's body had reminded Naomi of the famous sequence of photos of the nude Simone de Beauvoir taken by the American photographer Art Shay in a Chicago apartment's bathroom. They both had the same good muscular rump, slightly heavy legs showing age-puckering behind the knees, and slim waist, though Célestine had fuller breasts, and Naomi had never seen a photo of Beauvoir with her long hair down (even primping in the Chicago bathroom after her shower, she wore high heels and her hair up in a tight chignon). Or perhaps Naomi was forcing a physical connection when it was really the seduction of students that linked them, a scandal
even in those days before political correctness, and for which Beauvoir and her eternal president Jean-Paul Sartre were infamous. She had never discovered a nude photo of the tiny, toad-like Sartre.

The title of the third folder, “Des photos pour M. Vernier,” was ominous in its implications even without being opened: it suggested that Arosteguy at least, and possibly Hervé and Chase as well, had collaborated with the prefect of police, Auguste Vernier, by sending him photos of their crime, and this proved to be the case. In the nine JPEGs in the folder (these were in color and not archly Hipstamaticked), the apartment has been abandoned by the trio and left to Célestine's poor segmented corpse. When Naomi double-checked her video and photo crime files, she saw that these exact photos were all that had been presented by the police and by the press as evidence of the murder of Célestine Arosteguy; there were no photos generated by the police themselves, and this of course led Naomi to wonder if the police in fact had possession of the body parts, or only photos of them provided by the unknown criminal or criminals. Was it only the photos and Célestine's disappearance that launched the Préfecture's investigation, or did they also have some physical evidence of her murder? Did they have any of the “Célestine est morte” series of photos as well? The titling of the Vernier folder suggested that they did not. If they had, they would undoubtedly have picked up Hervé for interrogation and possibly tried to extradite Chase Roiphe as well. What, then, was the purpose of that series? Was it being held back for the purpose of blackmail? Who would be the blackmailer?

It was as she was considering how best to approach a face-to-face interview with M. Vernier, and how that might tie in with a trip to Toronto to conduct her own sly interrogation of Chase Roiphe, that her laptop pulsed with that spooky Skype outer-space-fish ringtone. She jerked mindlessly in surprised sync with that pulse, so disembodied had she become. Skype had been kept running just in case Ari tried to get in touch, but this call was
from Nathan. She slid the cursor over the green Answer button, tapped the Air's trackpad, and immediately was looking at the very worried face of Nathan in his basement bedroom in Toronto.

“I can't see you,” he said.

Skype's default was no video. Naomi slid the cursor over the video-camera icon with the red line running through it, but she couldn't pull the trigger. “I don't want you to see me right now,” she said, the words ragged, as if shredding on her teeth. She hadn't spoken for days. Nathan looked stressed and gaunt, although it could have been the connection, which was not good, and his voice being out of sync exacerbated the pangs of separation and loneliness that she immediately felt on seeing him. She was terrified to activate that little frame in the bottom right corner of the Skype window, which would show her not only to Nathan but to herself. She was sure she would see a female clone of Arosteguy at his most disheveled and confused, so mingled had they become in her head. Though she felt no guilt over her affair with Ari, given Nathan's Hungarian adventure, she could still smell the sex of her last few days—it had comforted her, trailing around like a cloud of perfume—and felt that Nathan would smell it too if he could see her. She did not want to inflict that on him, at least not now.

“Why not? Omi? Why not see you?”

Though his image was wrinkling and slip-sliding, she could read his tightly controlled concern and it pained her. “Will you allow me to come to Toronto? Cross-fertilization?”

Her voice was little and childlike, and her unheard-of submissiveness disturbed Nathan greatly. “What do you mean by ‘allow'? That doesn't sound like you at all. What's going on? Are you in trouble? Do you want me to come there? I will, you know. Just say it and I will.”

“I wouldn't want to step on your toes or anything. You've got your thing going with the Roiphes. You don't need me messing it up.”

“I'd love to see you here. It wouldn't be a problem. But ‘cross-fertilization'?
You mean Chase Roiphe's connection to your French philosophers?”

“Yeah. That's what I mean. She might know some stuff. I'm kinda at a dead end. I dunno. Maybe.”

“You sound really down. Is there something wrong with you? Physically? Let me see you.” Nathan was thinking that Arosteguy had beaten Naomi up, or that she had even gotten into a sick kind of dominant/submissive sex with him that had spilled over into her working life, and her little-girl voice was the expression of that. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, imagining that when he opened them he would see Naomi's face floating in his Skype window, battered and bruised and broken like one of those TMZ photos featuring celebrity abuse. The window remained dark.

“I'm just tired and dragged out. You don't need to see me like that. It's not a big deal.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Nathan knew not to push it. “So? You coming to Toronto? I'm sure I can set something up with the Roiphes. If it's interesting, maybe we collaborate on one big book. Who knows?” Nathan knew he was taking a chance suggesting such a thing; maintaining the separation of church and state was a big deal with Naomi; combining forces with anyone was always a stern test of her basic insecurity, her fear of fusion that would inexorably lead to annihilation, and she rarely allowed it to happen. But he was desperate to enfold her somehow, to draw them back together, and he couldn't think of any other way to do it, despite the risk of a major backfire. When she didn't flinch, however, Nathan realized he could not take it as a good sign.

“I might have to stop off in Paris first, but, yeah. I'm coming to Toronto.” She managed to hit Mute a beat before she burst into heavy tears which jetted out of her eyes and onto her keyboard and trackpad. When she swiped at the wetness with the sleeve of her hoodie, she disconnected Nathan.

PROFESSOR MATSUDA
had manifested fear, and that had made Yukie Oshima fearful herself. He would not meet her in a noodle shop or a restaurant or anything associated with eating, though that was not quite how he framed it. Yukie got the message anyway, so they agreed to meet as if by accident in a sleek, modern store in Shibuya which declared itself, in English, in white Comic Sans font on a red banner background, a “Comic Speciality Store and Cafe.” It was not a venue he would ever willingly enter on his own—Shibuya was listed on travel websites as “the fountain of teen trendiness”—but then neither would any of his colleagues. This was not a rendezvous to be noted.

He was as natty and proper and controlled as she had remembered him, and she, she was certain, was as loopy and dangerous as he had remembered her. During the student uprisings at Todai, the university had clandestinely sought Yukie's advice on how to present its conservative case to the youth of Japan—it would not have been seemly for an academic institution to have engaged spin doctors and PR hacks on its behalf, though that's what it was doing—and Matsuda had accepted the role of point man for Todai in that endeavor, though reluctantly; the shyness, propriety, humbleness, and obscurity of the man, all attributes which made him perfect for the job, also made it excruciating for him. Now he was shoulder to shoulder with his unlikely collaborator (he had earnestly wished never to see Yukie again, though of course would never express this) at a bookshelf fronted by trays teeming with graphic novels and the Japanese version of comic books, which were more like paperbacks than the classic comics of vintage America. He could not bring himself to flip through any of the colorful offerings, as Yukie was doing when he arrived, particularly because she had stationed herself in front of a collection of BBC books—the initials stood for Be-Boys Comics, which flaunted the Mars male symbol in black on a yellow square as its logo—and was leafing through an edition that featured on its cover two long-haired, windswept men with very feminine occidental
features who managed to embrace face to face while riding on a motorcycle. Typical of the woman, thought Matsuda. She would know he found this offensive.

On his approach, Yukie had turned to face him and bowed, eyes down, hands clasped before her, manga book still in hand but now firmly closed. “Professor Matsuda-san. I thank you for the meeting.”

Matsuda had nodded in return. “You have asked me for the French professor's address. I have tried to contact him to gain his permission, but he has not responded. He has also missed several classes and appointments, and that has caused some worry. I agreed to meet you because I fear that something tragic has happened to him and thought that you might perhaps have some information that could ease my worry.”

“My Canadian friend was staying at his house. She emailed me that the professor had left the house and not returned for days, but now she no longer answers my emails, my texts, my phone calls, and so I am worried about her as well. I try not to imagine all the things that I can imagine. I must go to that house and see what the reality there is.”

Matsuda picked up a book and nervously hefted it in his hand without looking at it. “You will not see any reality in that house,” he said. He turned to Yukie with a disturbed, clenched smile. “Strangely, the house is owned by the Japanese Collective of Medical Entomology. Why they would need such a house I have no idea, but it was provided to the philosopher as a courtesy, I understand, by the collective itself, as arranged by the Department of Philosophy at Todai.” He turned to go, momentarily forgetting that he had a book in his hand, then turned back. As he replaced the book, he muttered, “Of course, the philosopher was for some reason interested in the use of entomological warfare in China during World War Two.” He shook his head in dismay. “Airplanes spraying plague-infected fleas and flies onto an unsuspecting populace. He mentioned to me that the North Koreans still allege that during their war with the South, the
Americans and their new allies the Japanese conspired to bring Japanese entomological warfare to the Korean peninsula. A strange coincidence.”

Yukie was dazzled by the twists and turns, sensing a wonderful story with international weight but not at all certain she could connect the dots. “Professor-san, are you suggesting that there is a link between the renting of the house from the collective and the sudden absence of our colleagues? What could that possibly be?”

Matsuda did not smile. “And will you also be turning this affair into a publicity circus?”

It was uncharacteristic of Matsuda to be so blunt, not to mention vengeful, and Yukie took it as an indication that there was something complex and worrisome about Arosteguy's disappearance that went deeper even than the French domestic murder scandal. She immediately thought that Naomi was dead and that Arosteguy had killed her, but for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual passion or deviancy. She could not fathom what those reasons could be.

“I would just like to have my friend Naomi back,” she said.

AND SO YUKIE FOUND HERSELF
standing in front of the open gate of the Arosteguy house taking photos, like a tourist, she thought, at the Bates
Psycho
house on the Universal Studios back lot in Hollywood (as she had actually been at the time of Naomi's Santa Monica escapade)—a very unwelcome association. Though her new Sony RX1 camera was renowned for its low-light capability and she was eager to exploit this, she had waited until the morning after her “accidental” meeting with Matsuda to go to the Arosteguy house, wanting the fullest of full daylight surrounding her. Still, once she had documented the garbage-strewn front garden and slid open the unlocked front door, she found darkness waiting for her in the
house, and soon she was shooting at the widest aperture, f/2.0, with Auto ISO all the way up at times to 6400 at the camera's preferred shutter speed of 1/80 of a second. The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm—elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades—to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. But beyond that, she had learned so much about photography from her friend, and here she was, using that knowledge to document this house, which was filling her camera with its devastating atmosphere of Japanese urban despair reflecting her own; the camera was inhaling it through that lens aperture, and would exhale it into Yukie's flat from the screen of her computer when she got home again.