Consumed (11 page)

“Hi,” said Nathan. “I'm Nathan Math.” The woman just looked at him, no affect whatsoever. An awkward pause. “I, uh, I have an appointment with Dr. Roiphe.” No reaction. “An appointment with the doctor?”

Her eyes were so large that they narrowed suspiciously without seeming to get smaller. “You don't have an appointment with the doctor.”

“I don't?”

“The doctor doesn't take new patients. You are new. You would be a new patient.”

“Oh, right, no,” said Nathan, exhaling in slightly exaggerated self-directed mirth. The woman had rattled him without actually doing anything. “I'm not a patient. I'm a journalist. I write on medical/social issues. I'm interviewing him. Dr. Roiphe. About his career.”

“What's wrong with me?” she said, brushing her blond hair back, her voice unaccountably hard.

“What?”

“Diagnose me. You do have some medical training, don't you? How could you write meaningfully about the doctor if you had no medical training?”

“Some medical training. Some. Is there something wrong with you?”

“Well, yes, of course. I wouldn't be a patient if there weren't something wrong with me.”

“You're a patient? Of Dr. Roiphe?”

It seemed to Nathan that the woman was on the verge of slamming the door in his face, and he was calculating his response to that when
a crusty voice reverberated from deep within the house. Nathan could practically hear all of the house's marble floors in the acoustics of that bellow. “Chase?” called Dr. Roiphe. “Is that our own private paparazzo? Bring him on in!”

“Welcome, Mr. Math. Please, do come right in,” said Chase, suddenly genial. She swung the door open wide and curtsied an ironic curtsy as he sidled by her, his tripod case thumping the door frame, his roller bumping and twisting over the raised granite sill. She bent towards him and whispered, “Consumption. That would be
my
guess.”

Her face was uncomfortably close to his. “Consumption? You mean tuberculosis?”

Still whispering, still too close. “No. I mean consumption.” She straightened up, smiled, and said, “Follow me!” in quite a different tone, too loud and too declamatory, then turned and marched off into the house leaving Nathan struggling to follow her. Center-hall plan, polished wood staircase, black-and-white-streaked marble floors everywhere. Chase veered off to the right and stood just inside the living room, waiting with exaggerated patience for Nathan to pull his roller up to her. The room was furnished in a very traditional way, as befitted a Victorian fantasy of a French chateau, and this was yet another level of fakery because it looked as though the house had been bought complete with the real-estate agent's staging furniture and never touched again. She gestured to a plump brocaded wingback chair. “That's where you'll be.”

“And where will you be?” said Nathan, fussing the tripod case off his shoulder, trying not to swipe the pottery animals off the side table by the sofa, which matched his assigned chair.

“I'll be in limbo, Nathan. Come see me there when you have the will.”

By the time Nathan could lift his eyes from the gear he'd just settled on the floor, Chase was gone, leaving him to imagine the set of her face, and to wonder whether she could possibly be coming on to him. As he sat
in the indicated chair, he felt rather upbeat about the demeanor of this young woman, whose strangeness immediately suggested that he was on to something with this Roiphe thing, this Roiphe who was not as interesting as Parkinson.

Roiphe entered through a set of French doors which led onto a small flagstone patio. He turned and closed the doors, a bit shaky with the latches, and met the rising Nathan with an outstretched hand. They shook and sat down, Roiphe on the matching sofa.

“Nathan.”

“Dr. Roiphe.”

“Please, please call me Barry. I've always found it bizarre that the Americans call their ex-presidents ‘Mr. President' for life. I am retired, you know.”

“Except for … Chase, was it?”

Roiphe looked puzzled. “Chase?”

“The young woman who assigned me this chair. She said she was your patient.”

Roiphe doubled over until his chest touched his knees. Nathan, startled, thought he was having a heart attack until the doctor straightened back up, his face crumpled with silent laughter. It took a moment or two for the sound to come, a good, hearty, roaring laugh flecked with phlegmy wheezes. “Well, yes,” he said, still heaving, “that's one way of looking at it.”

“She's not your patient.”

“Whatever she is, she's sure darn full of surprises. I haven't heard that one before. But no.” He leaned forward, pulling on his knees to enable him to slide his torso closer to Nathan. “She's my daughter, Nathan. Now, there's a sense in which all children are constantly being diagnosed by their parents, wouldn't you say? So, I guess that's fair of her to say, metaphorically, I guess. But like I say, never heard that one before.”

“Does she live here with you?” Nathan felt that the general strangeness of the situation allowed him to ask that question.

Roiphe let go of his knees and relaxed back into the pillows of the sofa. “I guess this is the beginning of the interview, is it? The new art form. The art of the interview.” He flicked a hand towards the roller. “And is that your camera? You said you were a photojournalist. I love that word.
Photojournalist
.”

Nathan tipped over his roller and unzipped it, revealing a tightly packed group of lenses, flashes, spiraled flash cords, and cleaning tools. He slid the big Nikon out of its padded cubicle, the rhino-like 24–70mm lens attached, and hefted it in his hand. “It's a digital SLR, if that means anything to you. Digital single-lens reflex camera. It means you can see exactly what the lens is seeing when you look through the viewfinder. They've been around for a long time, film first, of course, and now digital, but this is the latest incarnation. Well, almost the latest. It's hard to keep up with the technology when you're on a budget. It's heavy, and it's probably obsolete already. It just doesn't know it. Is this too much information?”

“Hell, no,” said Roiphe, holding out his hand, wanting the camera. “I was a passionate amateur nature photographer in my time. Haven't come to grips with the digital thing yet, though.” Nathan suppressed his urge to deny Roiphe his camera and handed it over. “Maybe this is something you can teach me. We'll be quid pro quo-ing all over the place here.” Nathan countered his equipment anxiety by busying himself setting up the Swiss Nagra Kudelski SD audio recorder on the glass coffee table in front of Roiphe. The insanely expensive radio-quality recorder was overkill for a print journalist—though these days there was no such thing in the purest sense—but Nathan had spotted it at an electronics booth in the Zurich Airport and couldn't resist. He and Naomi both used technology to enhance their credibility as professionals, and he knew that she would
never really give up her Nikons for an iPhone until it was an acknowledged cool-but-pro way to go. Too much insecurity involved, always the sense of being a poseur. While he was deciding which Nagra plug-on microphone to use—the stereo cardioid was good for ambiance plus voice, which could be interesting when Chase was around, but the mono was best for focused, undisturbed voice recording—Nathan watched Roiphe out of the corner of his eye as the doctor dug around clumsily in the sunshade of the zoom lens, trying to pry off the lens cap.

“Are you trying to get the lens cap off ? Just squeeze it in the center. It's spring-loaded.”

Roiphe chuckled and popped the cap off. Nathan slid the Automatic Gain Control switch on the side of the Nagra to On, figuring that manually riding the recording levels would be a distraction. Roiphe in turn managed, after a quick survey of the many buttons, dials, and switches on the Nikon, to turn the camera on, and in no time was snapping photos of Nathan, happily cranking the zoom in and out like a delirious child.

“Well,” said Roiphe, after the mirror had clacked up and down about thirty times, “that seems to work. I guess a camera is a camera. Oh, look at that. There's you, right there on that little TV in the back. Hmm. Somehow makes you look kinda sinister. See? Something in the eyes.” Roiphe handed the camera over to Nathan, who felt he had to assess his own image to be polite. Roiphe was right. Nathan looked nasty and untrustworthy—though in a darkly handsome way.

“Good shooting,” said Nathan. “Very good.”

The last photo Roiphe had taken was a zoomed-in close-up of the Nagra, and he now pointed to it with a twitching index finger. “You haven't turned that on yet, have you?”

“No. May I?”

“Not yet,” said Roiphe, and he held his knees and pulled himself forward to his confidential position. “We need to make our deal.”

“Our deal?”

“Yeah,” said Roiphe, drawing out the word to give it a slightly comical street feel. “Innarested?”

Nathan leaned forward to match the intimacy, clasping his hands like a choirboy. “I … sure.”

Roiphe laughed a small dry laugh. “You're not
too
sure, are you? But you will be. Listen. I've tried writing a book, you'll be surprised to hear. I'm no good at it. Not on my own, I'm not. Chase researched you on the internet—she's so clever, that kid. She's already read half of what you've written. And we came up with something, she and I. You know the work of Oliver Sacks?
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
?
Awakenings
? That was made into a great movie with De Niro.
An Anthropologist on Mars
?”

“I know his work and I've met him a few times.”

“Oh, really?” Roiphe's tangled eyebrows shot up in challenge.

Nathan had to respond, to authenticate. “Yeah. He's got this weird thermostat problem. He's always too hot. He's always leaving the restaurant to stand outside. That's why he loves to swim in those cold mountain lakes. I've got an interview with him in the works. And he wears weird shoes.” Nathan was immediately ashamed of throwing in the data about the thermostat. It was true, as far as he knew, but mentioning it smacked of desperation to impress.

Roiphe was very excited. “That's super! That's titanic! Oliver Sacks is a doctor, a neurologist, and also a brilliant writer. I'm a doctor, you're a writer. Math plus Roiphe equals Sacks. Get it? I was a neurologist first, you know, not a urologist the way people think. I specialized in genital pain, and ouch, there was Roiphe's waiting for me.”

“Things I didn't know.” Relieved, Nathan conjured up the enthusiasm to say, as though with enlightenment dawning, “So, we collaborate on a book!” but then was immediately uneasy as the possible implications sank in.

“Medical fame,” said Roiphe. “Your subject. You want to get to the marrow of it? This is your big chance.”

“But a book about your life? Your work? Your retirement years?”

Roiphe sank back heavily into the brocaded pillows. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“I'm being nervous. I'm worried about being co-opted by my subject. They warn you about that in journalism school.” Nathan released a pathetic chuckle which was meant to show that he knew he was being superficial and paranoid. “This could be a classic case.”

“Not a co-opting. A real collaboration. I don't censor you. You don't pass judgment on me.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. “Okay. This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's interesting. I'm loose, god knows. I'm flexible. But you have a subject in mind, don't you? Something very specific.”

“My experiments. My recent work. With my most recent subject.”

“Who is?”

“My daughter, of course,” said Roiphe. “Chase. But you. Good instincts. We're gonna need 'em for what comes next.”

5

NAOMI WAS ON HER
JAL flight from Charles de Gaulle to Tokyo Narita. Her laptop was on her seat tray, displaying a photo she took with her iPhone of the elegant first-class toilet in the Boeing 777. She especially appreciated the small orchid in the milky glass vase glued to the lav's mirror, even though she suspected it was artificial. In her ear, Nathan was complaining. “You flew right over me and I never knew it. I'm crushed.”

Naomi spoke quietly into the airphone, resisting the temptation to talk louder to compensate for the airplane drone. She hated it when she could hear everything that everyone said. And she had a very large Dutch male seatmate—she had seen his burgundy Kingdom of Netherlands
paspoort
when it slid out of his computer bag onto her seat—who was sitting very close to her because she wasn't in first class but what they called Premium Economy, which featured something called the Sky Shell Seat. “You fly east to Japan from Paris, not west.”

“Oh, god, that means you're flying away from me,” said Nathan. He was sitting at the desk in his room in the Bloor-Yorkville Holiday Inn, trying not to be depressed, speaking into his laptop's mic using a VoIP app. He
was looking at one of the nude apotemnophilia photos he had taken of Naomi, talking to it; she had not managed to delete them all.

“Why the sudden romanticism? What's going on there in Toronto? Should I worry?”

“Things are strange here and I miss you, that's all,” said Nathan.

The Dutchman beside Naomi ordered a vodka martini. It was not his first. He was very tall, and Naomi could not be sure that he wasn't actively eavesdropping. “Tell me about the strangeness.”

“Roiphe's syndrome. A new thing, nothing to do with the old Roiphe's disease. That's the sole subject of his past year's work. I don't know if he's inventing it or defining it. He doesn't want to talk about anything else, and he won't even give me a hint of what's involved unless I agree to do this book deal.” Nathan had emailed details of the book-deal gambit to Naomi for vetting. She had thought it would be the perfect challenge to get Nathan out of his journo rut. A book—even if it ended up only being an e-book—how could it not be a good thing?