Consumed (30 page)

As she began to unzip her fleece hoodie, Naomi felt doubly whorish: she was going to expose her breasts in a Tokyo backyard; and she was doing it knowing that it was only for the article, for the book, for the perversity of the narrative and the commercial value of her Arosteguy project, taking it so far off the rails that it was probably irresistible to any publisher, paper or electronic. The feeling did not daunt her; she was enjoying the transgressive whorishness of it in the most childish way. A huge advertising blimp floated into view overhead, its flanks lit up by an animated slideshow featuring a line of Finnish fitness equipment. Naomi watched dreamily as a miniature collapsible treadmill, suitable for modest apartments, was demonstrated, and imagined Célestine and Ari treading side by side in Paris. As though induced by her fantasy, Arosteguy took two resolute steps towards Naomi, fell to his knees at her feet (groaning slightly as the bursitis swelling the tip of his right knee expressed itself), laid the Magic Marker on the bench, and took her hands in his before she had managed to completely unzip. “Let me unbox you,” he said.

“Do what?”

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism. I love them. You watch as an anonymous Vietnamese teenager lovingly opens the box he has just received which contains … One of those, possibly.” Arosteguy flicked his fingers towards the Nagra. “He is in ecstasy—we can ascertain this only from his voice and his boyish hands with the edgily bitten fingernails, the camera never wandering from the box and its contents—but he is a master of delayed gratification, as are his thousands of viewers. He will slit the tape holding the box shut with a special box-cutting knife. He will first take out the smallest inner box containing the charger and charging cords and the instruction manuals in several languages. He will fastidiously cut open the tiny heat-sealed plastic baggies holding the battery and the earphones and the adapters. And then finally, with a tremulous flourish, he will lift out the bubble-wrapped object of desire itself, the electronic device, saying, with feigned nonchalance, in lightly accented English, which is the language of consumerism, ‘And, well, okay, so here it is …'”

So here it was: Naomi's left breast, unwrapped with a tremulous flourish by Arosteguy, though not without some difficulty, because she was by happenstance wearing her white compression sports bra—she had thought she might find time to go jogging around the neighborhood—and the sports bra's slender metal front clasp had, with the familiar innate maliciousness of small mechanical things, seized, forcing Naomi to twist it open for him before allowing him to complete her unboxing. She was traveling with only two bras this time around, and she would have preferred to be wearing the lacy black Victoria's Secret underwire with removable straps, but the whole procedure seemed to be occurring on an intellectual level, and he didn't seem put off by the white bra's unsexiness.

She sat braless, hoodieless, and mysteriously comfortable, her hands spread and resting palms up on the bench as Arosteguy dangled the bra from a finger, letting it rotate gently in the provocative light of the garden
like an unexpected flounder. “Afterwards, we fitted Célestine with a special mastectomy bra. It had a pocket on the left side for a prosthetic breast. It was called Amoena, I think, a very beautiful, classical name. Actually two pockets, as though it were waiting for her to lose the other breast. The breast form called Energy Light, Size 4, seemed to match her remaining breast perfectly, though the missing one had been larger. All a question of balance and symmetry and weight and social acceptance. The inside of the prosthetic had a transparent bubbly surface, like bubble wrap, to allow breathing, but it still got hot and sweaty, though there was the promise of a NASA-developed material which could maintain normal breast temperature. The outside was flesh-colored and had a not very enthusiastic nipple at the tip, and its consistency was remarkably malleable and lifelike, though too homogeneous in feel to be a real breast. She wore it twice, I think, and then abandoned it. I used to find it perched on a bottle of liquid paracetamol in our laundry closet next to the washing machine, like a conical Chinese hat. In fact she stopped wearing bras altogether, and made a fetish of wearing tight sweaters and T-shirts that emphasized her amputation, saying that as a child she had a cat with one ear, and now she was one herself.”

“I don't think I could be so brave.”

“You can't know how you would react, which is why we must reenact. We shall become reenactors, like those guys who refight the Battle of Waterloo with those old muskets, with their anachronistic little blue earplugs securely in place.” Arosteguy began to manipulate her left breast in a dispassionate, utilitarian manner, lifting it with three fingers like a baker appraising a nascent pastry, pinching it gently above and below the nipple, then folding it to demonstrate where the scar would end up being. His face was very close to her, and she could feel his breath on her skin, hot from his mouth, slightly cooler from his nose. She gave herself over to the sense that she was channeling Célestine, that part of her body was not her and could easily be
parted with; she found that thrilling. “Tina was completely awake and alert, and sitting, as you are now, when Molnár marked up her breast. I would be speaking Hungarian to you now if I could, as Molnár spoke to his staff members over his shoulder, in order to produce the authenticity and strange clinical magic of that moment. He told them to give me an Ativan, because I started to wilt, to faint like a small girl; I could not allay the anxiety that washed over me. The Ativan was very subtle and effective; I could feel everything except the anxiety. Célestine, on the other hand, was calm and solicitous; she smiled and petted me and pitied me as the great doctor began to draw a child's treasure map on her breast. Like this.” The tip of the pen felt hot—Naomi was sure that it was the thought of the electrocautery needle that made it feel that way—as Arosteguy tracked out with confident dashes a large teardrop shape with its point near her armpit and its body angled towards her sternum, encircling her nipple. He then marked a line from end to end through the nipple. “This is the line of the scar.”

“The nipple would be gone?”

“There was discussion about sparing the nipple and also a possible reconstruction of the breast. Molnár launched into a very pompous meditation on the social significance of the breast and lactation, and on the evolutionary innovation that the mammal represented. Tina just laughed and said that she was intrigued by becoming half a boy, and that she would only be interested in a boy's nipple for that side, not a woman's. The doctor talked to her about the difficulty of imbalance. She said that it would be a duality, not an imbalance, and that she looked forward to it.”

Arosteguy drew back, marker in hand, to study his work. Naomi looked down and lifted her breast with her left hand to share the study. “It makes me think of those teardrop tattoos that prisoners have on their cheeks,” she said.

“I had a student with one of those. It was disturbing to look at. He often covered it with makeup.”

“It usually means that they've killed someone.” Arosteguy pondered this in silence; she had the impression that he hadn't understood the import of the tattoos, and so some meanings and understandings were consequently shifting in his head; she could almost feel the blocks rearranging themselves, and thought of Tetris, her favorite childhood computer game. “I'm sure you could get someone here in Tokyo to give you one,” she added thoughtfully. “I would go with you and document it.”

He tilted his head up to face her again and laughed an openmouthed laugh. “Perhaps I'll need two of them. Are you ready for me to cut you?”

IF ONLY SHE HAD BEEN
able to trust Yukie. Naomi scrolled through the photos that Arosteguy had taken of her lying on the concrete bench in the garden, her eyes closed and mouth open in mock anesthesia, her marked-up breast looking pleasingly full, its nipple erect (would Célestine's have been erect at the moment of cutting, pleading in its own way to be spared, or would it have retracted in fear, her bravado caving at the last moment?), her arms pressed against her sides so that they would not flop down from the narrow bench, her right breast demurely covered by her hoodie. But the badly focused, awkwardly framed images reminded her that handling a camera was not an innate human capability, and that even under the duress of alcohol and sexual weirdness, the media-savvy Yukie would have produced sharp, well-composed photos that she could use to accompany her long piece or book. They would have said so much about Naomi's approach to the latest flavor of parajournalism, which involved an artistic collaboration between subject and journalist and by its own definition was self-limiting to very rare pairings of the same. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe's “saturation reporting” was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing
the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos. She remembered studying the concept of parajournalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, journalism that mixed the factual with the invented without attribution; but in her work with Ari, as she was beginning to think of it, the fiction, the creative invention, was all his, and since he was her subject, his fiction was admissible.

Yukie's photos would have been better technically, there was no doubt, but her presence would have completely altered the biochemistry of the project. And on closer scrutiny, she saw that Ari's photos were expressive of something thrilling and terrifying: Naomi's merging, in Ari's mind, with Célestine. Of course, she looked nothing like his Tina, but in the intensity and macrophagic voyeurism that was evident in his shooting of her, Naomi felt a desperate attempt to re-create his lost wife. He had begged her for the macro lens so that he could get close, the lens she had borrowed from Nathan and still kept—undoubtedly for this moment—and he consumed her body with that lens (the awkwardly named Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED), and it was that lens that became his electrocautery needle. While shooting her, he had told Naomi that he had been able to smell Tina's flesh burning as he cut her, that Molnár—spreading her breast open with a pair of stainless-steel rake retractors to provide a clear target—had told him to avoid breathing in what he called surgical smoke, because it was toxic. He had not recorded his surgical escapade in any way other than mentally but remembered acutely the Bovie knife, named after its inventor William Bovie, and he kept thinking of the Bowie knife, the huge, cleaver-like fighting knife named after Jim Bowie of Alamo fame. The trim cautery itself seemed innocuous, the flat-bladed metal tip, like a small screwdriver, fitted into its yellow housing, the playful blue plastic handle, yellow power button, blue power cord. It had emitted surprising little lightning flashes as it cut, like a miniature welding torch flickering inside the translucent tent of skin created by the rakes, the layers of breast tissue vaporizing into
white smoke with no more than a whisper. “Her breast tissue looked like yellow custard. I felt like Sagawa even thinking such a thing.”

“And when you opened it up, did you find a bagful of insects?”

“Of course not,” Arosteguy had said. “Of course not. But afterwards, in recovery, Célestine was so happy, so satisfied, that the question was never asked, and the answer was never offered.”

After he cut her up with the camera, Arosteguy seemed to fall into a reverie, or perhaps a near stupor—he certainly outstripped her in drinking—and Naomi tried to bring him out of his elusive state by offering to draw one or two teardrops on his cheek, engaging him in a discussion about whether the teardrops should be filled in—indicating murder—or just outlined and empty—indicating attempted murder. It was an oblique lead-in to what she wanted to be a straightforward discussion of how Célestine went from being a euphorically happy mono-breasted apotemnophiliac to a mutilated corpse, but after accepting two solid teardrops—no explanation for the two murders they agreed they represented—which she drew on his damp right cheek in purple marker, he slumped and swooned, and she put him to bed like a child (he insisted it be her bed), after helping him stagger and lurch up the narrow staircase, feeling the full weight and heat and sweat of him.

In the morning, she realized that she must have fallen asleep beside him on the bed. Her laptop was still open and on the floor where she had been sitting last night, back against the bed, feet jammed against the wall, scrolling through his photos of Naomi performing Célestine on the operating table. Lying in bed, she had dreamed that she was Célestine, Tina being cut up, but not on the operating table. She was in the famous Paris apartment of the Arosteguys, and she was on an uncomfortably small marble slab being carved and eaten by a photorealistic Ari, a solicitous and appreciative one, who commented on and savored every morsel of her while she herself encouraged him in his efforts to disjoint her and, of
course, to sever her breasts, and then finally her head, which never stopped being aware and never stopped smiling fondly, even when he began to eat her lips. When she rolled over towards the sleeping Arosteguy, so strong was the half-life of the dream that she worried that her head would fall off and bump off his shoulder and onto the floor like a soccer ball. But he was no longer in the bed. As she walked the few steps towards the bathroom, she felt as though she were floating on the forceful tide of oblivion which her dream had generated deep in the waters of unconsciousness, and in this floating, which was a cathartic and liberating sensation, she felt closer to Arosteguy, from whom it must have emanated, so strongly did his desire for obliteration radiate even in the most mundane moments. Jammed behind the sink's Hot faucet she found a crumpled piece of Cute-brand facial tissue streaked with watery purple, and she assumed that he had wiped away his two tears. Had the tears represented Célestine and, figuratively, Naomi, and had he now absolved himself of those two murders?