Consumed (23 page)

“And the food? You ate?”

“Oh, yes, we ate. Fish and soup—I think it was dog, honestly—fried dumplings, fritters, and kimchi, and a lot of things I couldn't identify. The music seemed somehow to mix in with the food. It made it humorous to eat, even ironic. My friends assured me that it was authentically North Korean, not South, but that only the elite there would experience the high quality we were presented with.”

“Your friends were Korean?”

It was here that Célestine looked at me for the first time since she got in the car, almost surprised to discover that she'd been talking to another person and not to herself. “Oh, yes. They were Korean. South Korean, but very helpful.”

“
But
very helpful? You mean you would have preferred North Koreans?”

“For my research, yes. That would have been better. More direct. But these were two lovely, helpful men.” Célestine patted my thigh in an attempt to be comforting, but it only irritated me and made me more suspicious.

“They're film people?”

“No. They're insect people. I mean, they're from the Entomological Society of Korea. I was curious about the accuracy of that film, the
Judicious
film, its approach to insect life in Korea. I want to write a piece on it for
Sartre
magazine. Jean-Louis Korinth there is extravagantly enthusiastic. Of course he always is, and then he kills it when he actually sees it. He has an idea in his head immediately, and then what you write never matches what he has in his head …”

She was rambling now, wandering off into the deep woods of the Korean Peninsula, her head turned away from me, not seeing the streets slip by. I wondered if she had drunk too much. Alcohol had really been deranging her brain these days, her short-term memory, her emotional responses. I tried to bring her back.

“And so they were able to illuminate some things for you? Insect life in North Korea as portrayed in the
Judicious
film?”

She turned back to me, and her face opened and blossomed and became joyous once again, this time without distraction. “Oh, they did more than that,” she said, and she dug around in her coat pocket and brought out the manila envelope, which I had not dared to mention. “They gave me the movie. They gave me a DVD of
The Judicious Use of Insects
.”

WE SAT WATCHING THE DVD
as soon as we got home. Dinner for me was coffee and cigarettes, something that Tina would normally never allow, but I and my ragged metabolism did not at the moment exist for her. She stopped and started the movie as she made notes on her spiral-bound
bloc de journaliste
, her focus intense, her gaze transcendent. Our copy of
Judicious
had French and English subtitles and had obviously come from the Cannes Film Festival, where it had probably been used as a screener for potential distributors. Célestine had found, above a Korean travel agency on the
Rue de Rivoli, the minuscule Paris office of the Entomological Society of Korea—an outpost of shadowy purpose, one might imagine, for how useful could it really be?

But apparently the fraternity of entomologists and insect enthusiasts of all stripes was well established and seemed to be somewhat free of the usual politics. As I mentioned, she had gone there to verify the facts of village life as they pertained to the insect-eating depicted in
Judicious
. She had assumed that she would have to educate her new entomologist friends about the very existence of the movie, but to her surprise they had copies of the film and were very proud of their connection to it: the society had gotten a consulting credit which was very prominent in the end-credits roll. The two men she had met in the office offered to take her to the Eternal President for dinner after pointing out that credit to her, promising to discuss their involvement with the movie in detail, and then surprised her with the supreme gift of the rare movie itself. They also promised to send her a copy of the newly revised edition of
Korea Insect Names
when it became available, as well as enrolling her as a subscriber to their journal
Entomological Research
, which she said she preferred to see in Korean rather than in English, and assured them that she was already beginning her Korean language studies. They assured her in turn that to have the searchlight of the mind of a genuine philosopher illuminating the subject of Korean insect life was an excitement beyond imagining for them, and would surely be for their colleagues as well. They would eagerly await her
Sartre
piece on
Judicious
and would definitely consider it for publication in their official journal, as destabilizing as such a piece would be, nestled between “Evaluation of Larvicidal Potential of Certain Insect Pathogenic Fungi Extracts Against
Anopheles stephensi
and
Culex quinquefasciatus
” and “Electroantennogram and Flight Orientation Response of
Cotesia plutellae
to Hexane Extract of Cruciferous Host Plants and Larvae of
Plutella xylostella
.”

Célestine believed they were just being fastidiously polite, but she would submit it eventually nonetheless. Her ineluctable attraction to hard science was not uncommon among professional philosophers, who often found themselves adrift in abstraction and politics and longed for what seemed at a distance to be gloriously earthbound and thus substantial and undebatable. It seemed to me now that she was playing entomologist in front of our sad, outdated, cathode-ray-tube Loewe TV (at one time the crème de la crème), whose blurry image frustrated her constantly, so that she sometimes fell forward on her knees to squint up at the screen, hunting for details, studying the world of the movie as though it were a tropical rain forest in Papua New Guinea and she were living inside it. I anticipated an eight-hundred-page monograph called
The Judicious Consumption of Korean Insects
, perhaps in the Korean language, perhaps in fifteen years. She had that look as she worked, that look into the far distance, the future, a ferocious look that always terrified and thrilled me.

Watching the movie with Célestine controlling it, rolling it backward and forward, freezing frames of obscure interest and providing a rambling, improvised narration, was to witness the creation of a new movie related only vaguely to the one the Cannes jury had judged some weeks ago. In the new movie, the one co-directed by Célestine in our humid, cramped living room, the enlightened elders of the fictional North Korean village of Chosun (an ironic reference to the ancient Hermit Kingdom of that name, immediately positioning the village as primitive and isolationist and floating in time) have decreed that insects of all kinds shall be bred and harvested as the main source of nutrition, and that the traditional crops of rice, maize, and cabbage shall be used only to feed those insects. In this version there was some bizarrely deformed—not to mention anachronistic—Atkins nutritional dogma about vital insect protein replacing woefully deficient and health-destroying grain carbohydrates which fostered dependency on the West and its stooges.

Babies are, of course, exempted from the new insect diet, and so there were seen in profusion the peasant breasts of the village women, always presented in connection with the breastfeeding of infants and never sex, or at least overt sex (some of us on the jury found the breastfeeding sequences extremely erotic; others did not). Though we of the jury had been assured that the version we saw was the official one approved by the Workers' Party of Korea, and that this version would be shown everywhere in the country with no excisions, there was great skepticism among us as we were wary about this possibly being a ringer tailored specifically for our decadent Western tastes. Would there really be bare breasts and engorged nipples on screens in puritanical Pyongyang, never mind Kaesong or Chongjin? Undoubtedly, these questions hurt the film during our voting, but of course they were irrelevant to Célestine, for whom
Judicious
was a love letter from Romme Vertegaal.

And the occult (in the medical sense) key to the message from the kidnapped film director seemed to be the sequences in which the now happy, radiant, nutritionally enhanced village is raided by a fierce mountain tribe of warrior priests who violently subdue the men and rip innocent babies away from their blissfully nursing mothers, not incidentally exposing those aforementioned engorged nipples. The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality; thus even infants are not to eat anything but the sinister black insect mush which forms the priests' diet. After the initial conquest of Chosun, there are occasional winklings-out of brave, clandestinely nursing mothers who have fled to the mountain forests, followed by their execution by strangulation.

Célestine was horrified and transfixed by these scenes, even as she was, in a sense, creating them; she clutched her left breast as she watched them (her larger breast, and my favorite, even though it was less perfectly shaped than her right; it was not just the size, it was the nipple, the areola, the
elastic softness, the birthmark like the one on Elizabeth Taylor's cheek). For her, the message from Romme, the love letter's message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don't, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body, including, and especially, your brain. And then you will be done as a philosopher, and you will be of no use to Romme Vertegaal.

I soon saw this as Célestine's version of what we called apo, for apotemnophilia, though I was aware that it seemed not really to conform to the template of the syndrome. That template involved the desire for an amputation of one or more limbs as a correction to a body whose structure was not yet correct. My right leg does not belong to me, it is an extraneous appendage. I need it to be gone; I cannot be whole, I cannot realize myself, until it is gone. At my insistence, Célestine and I studied apo assiduously, because I could not accept her certainty that she had received a diagnosis from an old lover through the medium of a movie which mysteriously conveyed both a prognosis and a drastic course of treatment, all of which seemed accurate and acceptable to her.

Célestine indulged me in my desire to convince her that she was suffering from apotemnophilia, which, though exotic enough, was at least an acknowledged psychic construct supported by a body of technical medical literature and many websites of the afflicted. Research was ongoing. Discoveries involving skin conductance response experiments followed up by magnetoencephalography seemed to confirm the neurological basis of the syndrome; it could be argued that it was not in her neurotic imagining but was corporeal, a brain problem, and therefore “real.” But the Célestine version of apo was perhaps too exotic even for this structure. She gently pointed out to me, as in a casual, sweet discussion (the devastating technique she used with her students which made them love her), that she had had no breasts in childhood and therefore had not as a child wanted them amputated; that a desire for breast reduction or even
mastectomy was not a recognized part of the apo syndrome, but related more to gender change/confusion and other psychic states, and that it was not so much that her left breast felt as though it were not part of her body as that it was full of insects that were a danger to her, like ductal carcinoma in situ or full-blown breast cancer, and therefore the removal of that breast was calmly, rationally indicated.

And the element of religion was also far from a classic apo concern. Célestine's book
The Nipple and the Mouth
, about the universal religion of the nourishing breast, was of course the critical text here. It delineated how a pure, rigorous atheism required the rejection of some religions that were not recognized as religions but functioned as religions and thus needed to be exposed and dismantled—like the insect religion of
Judicious
as communicated to Célestine by her former Dutch-born French lover, Romme, now transmuted by the alchemy of kidnapping into a North Korean movie director. You see, then, what I was faced with on that waking from a dream, the dream that had been our life together up until that moment in the early morning in that villa high above Cannes. And so my unspoken struggle with Célestine was to be conducted on two fronts: her desire to amputate her left breast, and her desire to reconnect with the phantasm of Romme Vertegaal, aka Jo Woon Gyu.

Had she actually had a stroke, a cerebrovascular accident, while we watched
Judicious
in the jury box in Cannes? Had the stroke clouded her brain with cosmic portent while the images of peasants, warrior priests, and insect harvests flowed over us? (I thought of Philip K. Dick's post-stroke religious novel
The Divine Invasion.
) By the time we had got back to Paris, she was joking about our experience during the festival and suggesting that her little “philosospasm” had been caused by the overheated and overly critical public atmosphere of the festival itself. And did she have another stroke during the night which reanimated the power of the movie over her after it had lain dormant for several months? Could a stroke regenerate
the effects of a prior stroke, effects which had flared and then shriveled away to nothing? I urged her to book a CT scan. I scanned her face myself, looking for telltale weakness, a slumping mouth, a drooping eye. I found nothing, and she felt nothing, and refused to see a doctor of any kind. It was a simple series of epiphanies, she said, the kind we often suffered together—
suffered
because they struck us as revelations that demanded action, that upset comfort, turned it over and dumped it on the polished hardwood floor. She was talking about philosophical and social awarenesses, breakthroughs of cognition which were inextricably mixed with potent emotional mandates. We would often force these moments into being while traveling when exhausted, or when writing while under extreme political duress. I could not deny the reality of these intangible and cryptogenic events; we had shared so many. Intellectually, for a nanosecond, it all seemed reasonable, and then it all seemed patently foolish and insane: amputate a perfectly healthy breast because, against all plausibility, its owner disowned it and feared its contents?