Consumed (24 page)

I insisted that Célestine let me study the results of her last mammogram. She did not resist. Its affirmed normality (with the usual technicians' disclaimers regarding the unusual density of her fibroglandular tissue seen bilaterally, which decreased the sensitivity of the mammography and thus possibly compromised an accurate assessment) did not faze Célestine. It was three years old, and so it contained the seeds of its own inadequacy; it represented a flawed and circumspect medical worldview which could not and did not address the plane of existence upon which human life is conducted. There had been ultrasounds, pictures of the inside of her breasts. We strolled through them as though they were old family photos. There were no insects in evidence. Of course not, she said. The onset of the insects is abrupt, barbaric, and absolute. It is a colonization, as per the village in
Judicious
, a first staging, to be followed by a total metastasis and subsequent subjugation. How did they get in there, into that beautifully
sealed liquid dome? “They can burrow. They can tunnel. They can inject eggs. I'll be meeting with my entomologist Korean friends about it,” she said. “We've already made a date to discuss global insect strategies.”

“I'd like to be at that meeting. I'd like to document this … adventure.”

“You can, of course you can. And you can do more than that. You can meet with your audiologist and see if she'll tell you where Romme is living right now. She will have been in contact with him, I'm sure. They had a special relationship, very complex and subtle, and his hearing—and so also his career as a filmmaker—in some ways depended on her. He won't have abandoned her, even at the distance between Pyongyang and Paris. I think now they can even reprogram your hearing aids for you over the internet. After all, they're just tiny Bluetooth-and-Wi-Fi-enabled little computers. I think you've even done it yourself, haven't you?”

I hadn't, but I had no doubt that it was possible. And I had no doubt that if anyone was programming the Dear Respected Leader's favorite movie director's hearing aids over the internet from an office in Paris, it would be Elke Jungebluth.

10

MY JOURNEY TO THE
Jungebluth Audiology Clinic was more than just a short trip in an electric Smart Car, though on the most mundane level that is what I thought it was going to be. We allowed each other a number of “philosospasms” per year; these were episodes of obsessive/compulsive behavior, often involving sexual affairs with students, or periods of deep, intricate despair, or occasionally intense political adventures which made us very vulnerable to the media and the public and caused us great discomfort. But our agreement was that we would support each other during these spasms, and would treat that momentary reality as though it were the only true reality, which, of course, in so doing, it was. And so I trundled along the Périphérique, searching for the off-ramp to the Rue de Vaugirard, Porte de Vanves, which would take me to the Jungebluth Clinic, and soon, there I was, in the sleek, technichrome waiting room with my audiology records being studied by a very serious Sciences Po student who was working in the office part-time and pretended not to know who I was.

My initial foray into the world of hearing instruments spilled me out into a dismal series of suicide-inducing offices located in seniors' homes or
clandestine impromptu workshops in basement apartments which resembled discount do-it-yourself furniture outlets. Though the technology was often sophisticated, the retailing was sleazy and amateurish. And every time you came back to plug your ears into the aud's computer, it was a different aud, and often a different program in the computer. The audiologists, in my experience, were all women, or rather, in most cases, girls, and girls who were not very comfortable with intense and demanding old men like me. They wanted to condescend, to help you insert your in-the-canal receiver with your trembling, gnarled, insensitive fingers; they wanted to simplify the technology of the devices (which were created by vast electronics industries incorporating computing power six thousand times that which launched the Apollo 11 moon shot) and hide from you the six separate programs that you could shape in infinitely variable ways, leaving you just a button that switched the things on and off. They did not want to confuse you.

It was only when I stumbled across Elke at Romme Vertegaal's insistence that I felt that the world of sound could flower for me in a serious, exciting way after years of muted, dulled, oblivious non-interactions. And now here we were again in Vanves, in consultation, which for her was a commitment involving the intertwining of two lives in a creative project of substantial magnitude.

Elke was the homely daughter of two German psychoanalysts from Cologne, her father a Freudian, her mother a Jungian, both hearing impaired. Her older brother was a musicologist who specialized in Elizabethan dance and had moved to Boston to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music; he was also hearing impaired. We see here, then, what Freud would have called a neat cathexis ultimately generating the Jungebluth phenomenon. As the only normal-hearing member of the family, and the youngest, Elke absorbed responsibility for the entire familial soundscape; to shape and enhance the aural world for them, and then for everyone she could
reach, soon became the focus of her life. Though it's obvious that a psychoanalyst must be able to hear to function professionally, and a musicologist must as well, Elke found herself dealing with the familiar problems of denial of impairment, as she put it, her brother even going so far as to ask her to listen to recordings that he himself could barely hear, urging her to fill in the aural details with her descriptions. At times, her parents would surreptitiously record sessions of analysis with their patients and then play them for Elke, asking her to transcribe what was said and to offer comments on the nuances of the patients' modes of expression. Thus there was an immense life pressure placed on Elke as well as an intense sense of duty and responsibility, a potent and not uncommon mixture. And I was the beneficiary of it all.

As always, we sat in Elke's rigorously sleek consulting room. I've said she was homely, and she was: an impossibly thin and long face; dull, opaque, muddy-brown eyes of noticeably different sizes; lank and unhealthy-looking hair which was graying prematurely in awkward patches; protruding, comically alert ears; a dumpy, uncertainly shaped body which seemed to constantly be causing her distress of some indeterminate kind. But it was an intellectual homeliness, by which I mean her physical presence asked you to discount it and concentrate instead on her penetrating and holistic intelligence, on the immediate and effortless gestalt she created which enveloped you and nourished and even exhilarated you. The subject was Romme Vertegaal.

“Can you talk to me about him?” I said. “He referred me to you. Does physician-patient privilege operate in audiology? I know that audiologists are not physicians …”

“Listen to the crickets,” she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.

“Listen to the what? To the crickets? You mean the insects?” I had immediately thought of Buddy Holly and the Crickets (once even named
the Chirping Crickets) and the wonderful naïve music of my youth—“That'll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!” “Not Fade Away,” “Maybe Baby”—which seemed at that time to flow seamlessly into my studies in Hegel, in Heidegger, in Kant, in Schopenhauer, informing them and infusing them with contemporary sexuality and emotional relevance. My head started to fill with that music, such potent wrappers for the emotions of my youth and the attendant wave of the passage of time, of mortality, that I had a pathetic and juvenile need to confirm that she was not referring to the band, knowing all the while that she could not be.

Imagine, then, my confusion when Elke lifted herself with cheerfully endured suffering out of her Aeron chair—the contortions of her body conveyed in detail through the austere fabric of her tightly tailored Jungebluth Clinic coat—crossed the room to crouch down before a low-slung stainless-steel cabinet, slid open its opaque glass door, and returned to me with a record album of the classic vinyl format in her hand. Had she in fact been referring to the Crickets, and was this an obscure rendering of one of their original albums? The title
Listen to the Crickets
unraveled on the cardboard sleeve in a loose, artisanal handwritten font in white across a dark-blue background. Below the title was a high-contrast black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged man with glasses who was not Buddy Holly but was Romme Vertegaal. Below the portrait were letter characters stacked into syllabic blocks which I could just recognize as Hangul, or Korean script. Was it simply the album's title translated into Korean? You can imagine my shock at seeing the image of Romme connected in any way with Korean words, not to mention insects. My avowed project—undeniably condescending at its core, but induced by forty years of love and intellectual intertwining with Célestine—of forcing reality into Célestine's absurd
Judicious
/ Korean fantasy of the kidnapped Romme Vertegaal, was now shriveled into irrelevance by this unexpected validation—at least in part—of what anyone would have assumed was a pathological chimera.

“That's Romme” was all I could bring myself to say.

“Yes,” said Elke. “Isn't it stunning?”

“I'm not sure. Are those Korean letters?”

Elke sat back heavily in her chair, carefully cradling the album on her lap but thoughtfully tilting it towards me so that I could revel in its splendor. It now caught the overhead light in a way that revealed its artful metallic treatment of the subtle shadows of the cover art, which I had not at first noticed. What I had thought was a solid dark blue was now a field of blue-green grass: we were down in the grass with the crickets.

“Romme has had business dealings with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for some time, and this vinyl record album is the result of some of that work. Not just business, of course. Heavy North Korean technology is made manifest here. The Korean characters translate as ‘The sagacious'—or possibly ‘The discerning'—‘use of insects in hearing technology.' Romme's North Korean partners are not quite as whimsical or poetic as he is.” She slipped on a pair of delicate white cloth gloves that she took from her pocket and slowly, dramatically pulled the thirty-threeand-a-third licorice-colored vinyl disc from its sleeve. “This is the very first iteration of
Listen to the Crickets
in Europe. It might well be the only one at the moment. More will ineluctably follow.”

“But what is it? Is it a compendium of insect sounds? Is it connected with the Entomological Society of Korea?”

“No,” said Elke. “It's a tool created for programming hearing instruments in ways that their designers never imagined.”

A completely retro vinyl recording interfacing with sophisticated digital hearing aids and their proprietary digital fitting platforms—I couldn't imagine it either. But then, I didn't have to, because five minutes later I was hooked up to Romme Vertegaal's North Korean venture and in the process of being … tuned.

“THERE ARE NOW
laser turntables that do away entirely with mechanical tonearms and diamond needles and cartridges,” said Elke, as she looped the lanyard of the Connexx wireless controller around my neck. “Using one of those would certainly make life easier for us humble audiologists who simply want to use the Vertegaal tuning method. But Romme won't have it. Each of us was forced to invest in one of these exotic monstrosities. They're hideously expensive and difficult to maintain, and that's why there are not many of us who do what I'm about to do for you. This one is over twenty years old. They were all created by an Israeli woman named Judith Spotheim-Koreneef who worked out of Eindhoven, Holland. Romme optimized
Crickets
to the audio parameters of her machines using the only sample in Asia at the time. There are a few more there now.”

We were enclosed in Audio Booth 4, basically an audio recording cabinet floating on foam and designed to be sound-neutral. Words spoken in Booth 4 sounded unnaturally deadened, like inanimate objects. The walls of the booth, the floor, the ceiling, none of it added any energy or shape by reflectance or geometry to the sounds that came out of our mouths, and this had a mysterious effect on the meaning and the impact of the words themselves that was hard to calculate. It made me realize that total neutrality in human communication is destabilizing; there is a paper to be written there.

In front of me sat an enormous and complex device which could be called, simply, a record player, but whose presence was more like that of an impossibly gigantic specimen of zooplankton. Its use of translucent acrylic for its massive platter and various blocks and cylinders; stainless steel for the weights embedded around the periphery of that platter; titanium for its delicate, multi-counterweighted pickup arm; and threadlike drive belts and electrical filaments, culminated in a coruscating, predatory structure that seemed best fitted for frenetic submarine life. Once Elke switched on the controller resting on my sternum, I was apparently linked wirelessly to this
thing, and both of us to Elke's desktop computer and the Siemens Connexx Trainable-Hearing-Instrument Fitting Programming Interface. She now washed the vinyl disc in a Spin-Clean Record Washer—a yellow plastic trough with rollers and brushes filled with distilled water and one capful of vinyl-washing fluid—lovingly turning the disc on the rollers with gloved fingers, three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise, then removing and drying it with delicate pats of a pristine white, lint-free cotton cloth drawn from a drawer with rubber seals meant to keep dust out. Clamp the disc to the platter with the acrylic puck, flick up the retro toggle power-switch in its steel housing, gently lower the tiny coffin-like myrtlewood cartridge into the vinyl groove, and … nothing. I heard nothing.