Consumed

But Dunja was not a disappointment. She was wearing a waffle-pattern bathrobe, looking at herself in the mirror over the writing table. The bathrobe was open, and she was holding her breasts, one in each hand, palpating them expertly, clinically, without sensuality. Nathan sat on the bed and took photos of her through the mirror.

“So? My breasts are now officially radioactive. I’m not allowed to hug pregnant women for at least three months. What do you think of that? Journalistically.”

“I don’t know. Can you hug non-pregnant men?” Still firing. The constant clucking of the camera had become part of their repartee, Nathan rolling his firing finger over the shutter release as exclamation, as rimshot, as query.

Dunja turned to him, her bathrobe still fully open, hands still holding breasts. “Nathan, I’m a very sick woman. Does that turn you on?”

Still firing. “Well, I told you, I’m a failed medical student. Now I’m a medical journalist. So, yes, I guess sickness does turn me on in a way.”

She approached him and gently took the camera out of his hands and placed it behind her on the writing table. “What about death? I could be dying. Is that exciting to you?” She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they’ve been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower. Look. Look at all those needle marks. I’m like some weird junkie, crazy for titanium.” She laughed. “Don’t be shy. They feel better with some pressure on them.” He squeezed her breasts tentatively and kissed her.

After a beat, she pulled her mouth away. “I’ve discovered that most men are repulsed by disease, especially when it starts to be visible.” She took up his hands again and placed them on her groin. “You feel those lymph nodes, how big they are? My shape is changing. It’s really starting to become a not-human shape. I had a boyfriend in Ljubljana, you know, for eight years. When he felt those, he told me it creeped him out, his exact words—well, the Slovenian equivalent. Then he noticed these.” She took his hands and placed them around her throat, then pushed them up under her jaw. “You feel those? They’re hard, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” said Nathan. “I noticed them when you were swimming.”

“They spoil my jawline, don’t they? It used to be very strong, very elegant. Now it’s lumpy and I look like an old toad. No, worse, because they’re not even symmetrical. A lopsided old toad. And so my boyfriend left me for a German tourist he was showing around the city. He worked as a guide in the summers. Now he lives with her in Düsseldorf. They go hiking. Marike’s a very healthy woman. He sent me a book of poetry by Heinrich Heine, who was born there. He says his German has gotten quite good, and he hopes I’m getting good medical treatment. That’s thoughtful of him, isn’t it?”

Nathan slid his hands down around her throat and kissed her deeply. Once again, she pulled away, this time laughing. “Maybe you’re not normal. Or is this part of your research? Do you always have sex with your subjects?”

“You’re not my subject. Dr. Molnár is my subject, and I’m not going to have sex with him.”

“Maybe you can ask him again why I have these swollen lymph nodes. He tells me it’s the cancer but that no one really knows what causes the swelling. I think he’s being evasive. I think I have cancer everywhere, not just my breasts. Look at these.” She twisted away from him, shrugged off the bathrobe, and held up her arms. “You see these? Near my armpits? They’re so big, they’re almost like two more breasts.” She dropped her arms and shrugged. “But maybe four tits is nice for you, who knows?”

Dunja turned and strolled over to the bed. “If you make love to me, who will be shooting the photos?” She lay down on the bed languorously, head propped up on one hand.

“There’s always a way, if you really want that. There’s a self-timer on the camera.” Beside the writing table stood a large armoire that held the TV aloft, flanked by miniature fluted wooden Greek columns, presenting the screen as though it were an oracle. Below that was a pair of doors, which Nathan now opened to reveal the scuffed, refrigerated minibar; sitting on it was a wooden tray that held snacks and sundries. Nathan slid out the tray and started rummaging through its chaotically scattered contents. He picked up a black cardboard box with red stripes and turned it over, looking for a label. “It would be tricky to get the best porn angles, though. We’d have to ask the concierge for help. Or maybe see what the doctor is doing right now. He seems to be a connoisseur of nude photography.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“I think they have something here called a Pleasure Pak. Has gels and condoms and things.”

Dunja sat up on the bed. “Nathan, forget that, please. I’ve had enough technology shoved into my body.” She spoke softly.

“Really? But aren’t you …”

“I’m not anything. In the last two years I’ve been irradiated from head to toe, inside and out. Nothing inside me has survived. Believe me. And besides, I don’t have much of a future to worry about, so if you have the clap, or even something worse, I don’t much care.”

HERVÉ SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the chaise longue with Naomi’s old MacBook Pro on his lap. He was wearing his white shirt and loosened tie and his Calvins. On the bed, Naomi used her BlackBerry to email a certain Dr. Phan Trinh, Célestine’s personal physician, whose address had just been given to her by Hervé. The boy was proving useful beyond her wildest imaginings. She was beginning to suspect that he was some kind of police asset at the Sorbonne, and that he had been informing on the Arosteguys, who were, along with everything else, contrarian political activists. “Dear Dr. Trinh,” she tapped. “I wonder if you would agree to speak to me in confidence about the medical condition of Célestine Arosteguy. I believe that many destructive rumors have tended to damage the reputation of this wonderful woman, and I, a woman myself …”

Hervé jumped up unexpectedly from the chaise and started fanning his crotch with a copy of Les Inrockuptibles, an amusingly unruly French movie/culture mag he had brought with him in his brother’s valise. He was very proud of a short movie review he had written for the magazine, his first ever published, and had read it out loud, very slowly, to Naomi, cracking up at every delicious instance of his own insolence. “Shit. Something in your computer just tried to grab my balls.”

Without looking up from her screen, she—mother Naomi—said, “I told you not to sit that way. I always feel some weird magnetic-field hot tingling when I have it on my lap and the hard drive’s spinning, and I don’t even have balls. If you thought your Peyronie’s was bad, wait until you try testicular cancer.”

“If it was good enough for Lance Armstrong, it’s good enough for me. A lot of people in France believe that his cancer treatment turned him into a sci-fi monster super-racer, even before the normal sports drugs.”

“If you say so.” All Naomi could do was shake her head. Lance and cycling had loomed large in Hervé’s failed attempt to seduce her. It turned out that his secret sex weapon was Peyronie’s disease, which he believed he had acquired by riding his carbon-fiber Colnago bicycle along the entire arduous route of the Tour de France two summers ago. Certainly, for a skinny kid, he had amazing quad muscles; they were so out of proportion to the rest of him that they looked like implants, or maybe CGI sweetening. They were a pleasant shock to Naomi when his trousers came off, but really not enough of a novelty to get her into bed. Nor was his mildly bizarre penis.

Hervé had already researched his condition, could at least name it—François de Lapeyronie had been surgeon to King Louis XV (what resonance!)—but Naomi found him to be very selective in what he retained, more romantic than medically astute. She did her own quick web search, which revealed that Peyronie’s involved the mysterious growth of a hard, inelastic fibrous plaque along one side of the penis just under the skin, causing it to bend alarmingly when erect. Hervé’s particular version of the condition had his long, thin, uncircumcised organ making an almost full right turn of ninety degrees two-thirds of the way up from its root, its tip thus looking at his right hip. Was it scar tissue caused by trauma? The idea of a scarred penis, that it had been through the wars of sex, had its rough charm. Was it an autoimmune system assault? Not so appealing.

Hervé felt it was a cycling problem. He had first asked to use her laptop because he wanted to show her his bicycle, whose photos were posted on one of his many websites. Still naked, he turned the screen towards her to show a loving shot of an ornately painted racing bicycle hanging from rubber-coated hooks screwed into the living room wall of his flat. “This is the machine that did it. It’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe it would do that to me.” He flicked through the detail close-ups. “You see that threeleaf-clover symbol, like in playing cards? That’s the Colnago logo. The seat isn’t original equipment. I had it fitted. It’s carbon fiber too. It’s not very merciful, but it’s incredibly light. I’m addicted to the carbon fiber.”

He had described to her the evolution of his attitude to his new sex organ, whose altered form had apparently just appeared one morning, no warning, while he was showering and thinking erotic thoughts. At first, of course, he was appalled. His sex life was obviously over, laughable. “I kept getting these spam emails about lengthening your penis and making it harder and thicker. I used to mock of those. Then suddenly I found myself hoping to see one about straightening it out. I would have been tempted, even if I had to FedEx my cock to Nigeria.” That was the first laugh he had gotten intentionally from Naomi.

He had been abstinent from that morning on, ashamed not only of his warped tool but also of the bourgeois embarrassment which gripped him. Even masturbation had become abhorrent. It was the Arosteguys who rescued him from sexual despair, though it was a side effect that came from their work with his more dangerous philosophical despair. At times, the Arosteguys gave a lecture together, normally in the modest Amphithéâtre Turgot, with its steeply raked floor and simple wooden desks. But occasionally they would hold court in the magnificent sky-lit Grande Amphithéâtre, its hundreds of green-baize-covered seats and benches jammed and bristling with students, and it was at one of these that Hervé first conceived the idea of attacking his new problem through the medium of a philosophical treatise concerning the body as commodity, a concept at the core of the Arosteguys’ politics.

Inevitably, his huddle with the couple at the end of the lecture led to an invitation to a private tutorial at their flat, something for which they were deliciously notorious. They were genuinely excited by the boy’s use of his own physical reality to leap into the powerful waves of Arosteguyan speculation. They were also excited by his sex, which Célestine called her “bat penis,” although further net-searching by Hervé did not come up with any validation of her pet name. The images he found revealed that bats, especially fruit bats, or flying foxes, had very humanoid, long, straight cocks that put his to shame with their fearful symmetry. The bats were also capable of licking their own glans to keep it clean while hanging upside down, and looked rather joyful doing it, too. This first sexual encounter, which announced the potent presence of Hervé in the lives of the Arosteguys, was sketched in some detail on the boy’s Facebook page, but the chiropteric element had been excised.

Hervé now kneeled on the floor in front of the chaise, the malignant laptop safely at arm’s length in front of him. “Okay, Naomi. I now have something wonderful for you.”

Naomi was finishing off her plea to Dr. Trinh, whose photograph she had just found. A posed office photo of the type meant to sell the compassionate competence of a private medical clinic presented a small, neat, perfect Vietnamese woman in an elegant tailored suit who smiled out of Naomi’s phone. “What would that be, Hervé?”

Hervé rolled sideways on the carpet so that he could lounge with studied cinematic insouciance against the sill of the balcony doors. “I’ve just told Aristide Arosteguy all about you. He wants to meet you in Tokyo.”

THERE WERE SEVERAL IMMENSE, empty tourist buses in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. Nathan schlepped his way past them, camera bags over shoulders, iPhone in hand, having just been dropped off by the hotel’s shuttle. Naomi had texted him to call her ASAP, but for some reason the reception on the minibus had been poor. He had dialed her the second he stepped off. “How’s your beautiful, expensive hotel?”

“Appropriate. How’s yours?” said Naomi.

“I’m looking at it as we speak. Let’s just say … functional. More appropriate.”

“More?”

“Yeah. ’Cause I know that yours is too good for a journalist.”

“It’s that darn rich-girl problem again. And speaking of girls, how was she? Your patient?”

“Beautiful. She was really beautiful.”

“In a doomed beautiful sort of way?”

“In a Slavic sort of way.”

“That sounds dangerous,” said Naomi. She meant it.

“She was dangerous. Literally radioactive. The seductiveness of decay. What about Arosteguy? I’ve seen him in interviews. Pretty devastating. Gorgeous, in that irritating French intellectual way.”

“I’ll let you know when I find him. Nobody seems to know where he is, including the prefect of police.” For some reason, Naomi wanted to hold back her new contact with Arosteguy, even though that was the reason she had called Nathan. Was it the Slavic-beauty comment? “I think Célestine is really our September cover, though. She’s even more seductive. Beautiful but dead is always killer.” Killer was what they loved at Naomi’s primary magazine, Notorious, whose editor, Bob Barberien, was himself notorious for drunken office rants that somehow became sensational articles that you had to read; they generally involved unimaginable acts of murder. Notorious mimicked the 1950s scandal mag Confidential in its starkly aggressive cover graphics and even its retro typography. Naomi loved its recklessness and its ironic naïveté; it provoked her own.

“Yeah, and will he really have anything interesting to say? ‘I murdered my wife and then I ate her.’ How do you follow that up?”

“Nobody seems to want that to be true,” said Naomi. “There’s a weird national protectiveness about that pair. It’s all denial, even from the police. From what I can see here, it’s possible that one of her student lovers killed her out of jealousy.” It had occurred to her that Hervé might know something about that. Or might even be the killer himself.

“And students are notorious for not eating properly. I’m getting into the elevator now. If I lose you, I’ll call right back.” His room was on the third, and top, floor, and he did lose her, and waited until he was in his room to redial. “So I guess the only photos you’ve taken with my macro lens are shots of your laptop’s screen.”

“Very funny. And what about you? Are you going to send me shots of your beautiful doomed patient?”

Just the slightest pause from Nathan, but it hurt Naomi. “I only got a few during the operation. But basically, she wouldn’t let me. She felt diseased and ugly.”

“You’ve never let that stop you before,” said Naomi, fishing.