Consumed (37 page)

“Another victory for Kimunism,” said Hervé, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground; irony and satire were not correct modes of discourse in the DPRK, though that made them very useful for monitored conversations, because, through lack of exercise, they were also not at all comprehended. It had been Ari who proposed the term
Kimunism
for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals, and he did not exclude himself.

“There is another thread left hanging,” said Romme. “I hope you've been keeping up correspondence with your little friend Chase Roiphe.”

“Oh, yes. I sent her the same STL file that I sent you. It was just a few hours ago.”

There was a sudden, dangerous change in Romme's features, a subtle deadening of expression, accompanied by an intensity around the eyes, that subverted Romme's normal Skype look, which was a cheerful, enthusiastic, unquestioning perkiness, the kind demonstrated by North Korean news readers. Hervé hoped Romme's handlers could not decrypt it; it was a warning to Hervé. “I appreciate the playfulness, but perhaps that was not the most sage thing you could have done.”

Hervé was not used to reprimands from Romme; the game was that they were equals, young French technocrats with a future on the international techno-political stage, where cyberkampf was the name of the drama being played. But when it came to their strange liaison with North Korea and the young president, Kim Jong Un, they were not equal. It was Romme who had first traveled to the Hermit Kingdom on a technology visa, and Romme who had become involved in the burgeoning subterranean, quasilegal tech markets, almost as a foreign subversive at first, and then as the acknowledged leader of the revolutionary, hands-on, Juche technology sector. Romme had been an older student of the Arosteguys, and easily enlisted Hervé in his scheme to build a small empire within an empire in North Korea. With Hervé's collusion, the philosophy couple too were recruited, so beautifully did their musings on consumerism and politics mesh with the retro-radicalism of the Hermit Kingdom.

And now Hervé realized that he had indeed made a mistake, in fact more than one mistake. It caused him anguish to know that he was afraid to tell Romme about his art project with Chase, that he had sent her the STL files that had allowed the 3D printing of the alleged mutilated body parts of Célestine. Chase had, in her attic workroom in Toronto, evidence that could prove that Célestine Arosteguy was not dead, that the incriminating photos of those body parts were only photos of bioplastic replicas,
doctored by the SFX team to suggest the results of a hideous murder and subsequent butchering.

“I wanted to keep her close and to remind her of the lightness of our sexual play with the Arosteguys,” he said. “I thought she needed something radical to snap her out of the depressive state of mind she had fallen into. She told me that I should not have forced her to take bites out of Madame A.'s amputated breast, and that she was sure that some of her own DNA would be discovered eventually because of that. She has a point, unfortunately. When we discussed placing the remains of that breast in such a way that it would convince the Préfecture that a cannibalistic murder had been committed, we omitted to think about saliva as a source of DNA.”

“How unstable do you think she is?”

“It's a very volatile situation there in the Roiphe house in Toronto. The Canadian girl's journalist boyfriend is there, living in the house, looking for a story. I think he will soon find a story he didn't know existed. For instance, in her fugue state, as she calls it, she mutilates herself and eats tiny bits of her own flesh. She says she's aware of deliberately creating a kitschy drama but at the same time feels compelled to act it out. Her father has allowed this boyfriend, an American, to witness her behavior. His name is Nathan Math. He writes usually on medical subjects.”

A pause. “I believe you need to go to Toronto to visit Chase Roiphe. You need to assess the situation there. And then, if you need assistance, we do have assets there to do whatever is required.”

“Ah,” said Hervé. “That would be suitably cathartic. So, financing for the voyage at the usual source?” The disbursement of the Vertegaal development funds involved a complex set of interactions beginning with the issuing of money drafts in tugrik, the Mongolian currency, by the Golomt Bank in Ulan Bator, which then underwent a series of conversions and transfers resulting in the deposit of euros or dollars, as circumstances demanded, in a commercial account in the name of Hervé's corporation,
Trois Médecins Français, at the Quai du Président Paul Doumer branch of the Crédit Agricole bank (former sponsors of a Tour de France–winning cycling team), all this to disguise their origins as North Korean won.

The image of Romme in the Skype window opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing computer-graphics-creation kind of way, then disintegrated in a shower of sparkling pixel flakes. After a pregnant pause the Skype window itself crashed, leaving a momentary square black hole in the middle of the desktop's swirly cosmic image of the Andromeda Galaxy, the default Mac OS X (Lion iteration) wallpaper. (Lately, he avoided using personalized desktop wallpaper for security reasons; in the past, he would have featured Colnago beauty shots.) Staring blankly at that sinister new hole in the universe, his umbilical brutally cut, Hervé for one moment imagined that he might not have been communicating with the real Romme Vertegaal.

 

 

HAMISH HAMILTON

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Cronenberg, David, 1943–, author

Consumed / David Cronenberg.

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PS8555.R61117C65 2014 C813'.54 C2014-902684-6

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