Consumed (34 page)

A 35mm lens did not give you a very wide perspective—it was certainly not a lens for architecture—and so Yukie, wanting to document every cubic meter and to disturb nothing, began to combine shots in Panorama mode in order to deliver something of the cramped, stingy scale of the place, and alternated this with rotating the middle ring on the beautiful Carl Zeiss lens into its macro focusing position so that she could get very close to the details, which, she hoped, on study back home, would divulge some clues as to what had emptied the house of its two mysterious
gaijin
. There was no immediate evidence of the house having been professionally tossed or rumbled, though certainly it was a mess; random drawers had been left hanging open, tubes and jars left unsealed, books and papers strewn everywhere among empty bags of ramen noodles and chips. On the other hand, there were no electronic devices to be found anywhere, other than the modest TV set and its controller and set-top box. No computers, iPads, cell phones, hard drives, laptops, or chargers, cables, or peripherals for any
of the same, and this was beyond what could be construed as normal; you might take a couple of devices with you on leaving your house, but not your desktop, not your fax machine (still a force in Japan, unlike the West), not your printer.

As she made her way up the cabinet-like stairway, she could not keep her paranoia completely in check. Would it be Naomi who came streaming out of a second-floor doorway and down the stairs towards her, carving knife raised high, violins stabbing away with predatory beaks, or would it be Arosteguy himself, squeezed into one of Naomi's dresses, an old-lady wig insanely askew on his head? That was almost preferable to what there actually was: nothing and nobody. Once safely upstairs, Yukie could smell Naomi everywhere, and there were traces of her—underwear, makeup—in every corner, like the kind she had left in Yukie's apartment, sheddings of her skin that could not have been accidental, that were assertions of Naomi's existence, claims of territorial possession. She would come back someday, they said. Don't forget me.

Yukie was not familiar with the neighborhood surrounding Arosteguy's house, but the unlocked door might not indicate anything unusual; on the other hand, given Naomi's growing paranoia as expressed in her emails, it did seem strange that the door wasn't locked.

As Yukie walked away from the house, she turned one last time to photograph it from some distance down the street, which, like the house itself, displayed only provocative traces of people—bicycles with frontmounted wire-mesh baskets tilted on their kickstands, odd-sized wooden planks lashed together and leaning against a doorway, potted plants randomly placed on the roadway's narrow curb—but no people themselves.

Maybe the story was the story of the house, a house owned by Japanese insect scientists and rented to a fugitive French philosopher. Maybe that was the story.

“MEANT TO ASK YOU:
Where is Célestine's left breast? Omi.”

The text floated in a pale-green dialogue bubble amid a bead-chain of increasingly frantic gray-bubble texts from Nathan, wondering where exactly she was, and who belonged to the strange Japanese phone number being used. It was a cell number, something he recognized from earlier calls from Naomi, who had borrowed Arosteguy's phone (81 for Japan, 090 for a cell), and he suspected that this too was an Arosteguy phone, or possibly one belonging to Naomi's friend Yukie, but until he heard something specific from his texter, he could not be sure that the SMS was authentic. What did it mean? He had studied the crime-scene photos available on the net, and it was true that Célestine's left breast had been somehow amputated and was not seen in any of them, but given the grotesque cannibalistic elements of
l'affaire Arosteguy
and the paucity of photos, this was not an obvious question for anyone to ask. Particularly Naomi.

Nathan's iPhone lay unforthcoming on the plastic wood-grain surface of the table, right next to the simple white plate bearing two overcooked pork chops, a mound of corn, three tomato slices, and a pleated paper cup of apple sauce. The small steak knife had a gnawed handle worn streaky gray from a thousand machine washings. A glass bowl held his plain green salad. He had come back to the Coach with some unspoken symbolic intent, though he was not sitting as deeply into the room as he had first sat with Dr. Roiphe. He preferred to sit closer to the multiple windows at the front of the restaurant, where he could watch the low-key action on the street called Spadina Road. From this vantage point, the Village really felt like a village, like the two-story main street in some small town in Indiana. Across the street: an Edo-ko (a chain Japanese restaurant); a What A Bagel!; a midscale Italian restaurant called Primi; a One Hour MotoPhoto struggling to come to terms with the total annihilation of film technology. It was clear to Nathan that he was not really there, despite the clarity of the details of the restaurant, the food, and the street. His reality had been
displaced by Naomi's—no surprise, really, and not for the first time. Or perhaps it was just that her narrative was more compelling than his, and so Chase was now part of Naomi's adventure, not Nathan's. He knew that he had precipitated this by letting Naomi in on Chase's past history in Paris. But how could he not? She would have done the same for him. He didn't understand the significance of Célestine Arosteguy's missing left breast, but if the text proved to be authentic, he was sure he would soon be gently interrogating Chase on Naomi's behalf. Gloom settled in as he attacked the chops. What was he doing there, really?

The first forkful was barely in his mouth, the touch of it generating more thoughts of his first meeting with Roiphe, when the doctor himself materialized as if summoned by the mere mental imaging. He walked with a hunched urgency, adjusting his strange straw hat—not the Tilley this time—which seemed to need a bit of rotating to feel just right, gaze locked onto the pavement until he was at the restaurant's door, at which point he straightened up with a start, pivoted theatrically, and entered. Nathan kept eating, following Roiphe's progress with dreamlike interest, and it soon became evident that the doctor was looking for him. He veered right once inside, taking a few steps towards his own favorite booth at the back of the restaurant, squinting in the sallow light of the hokey glass carriage lamps on the wall, then turning back and methodically scanning the room through his big distorting glasses until he spotted his target. Nathan's single window seat—flaunting, like all the seats, a big floral pattern in pink, green, and black—forced Roiphe to sit sideways on the bench seat under the window and then to twist from the waist in order to face Nathan. Certain that Roiphe would think of their first meeting, Nathan expected an amused, caustic comment on what he was eating, and perhaps a meditation on Jews eating pork, but the doctor was all business, all worry.

“Chase is very, very upset,” he said. “I suppose you've heard about it.”

Nathan had to finish chewing before he could respond. He remembered observing Roiphe chewing his own pork chops, and how he seemed to be having trouble that was possibly caused by slipping dentures. Absorbing Roiphe on top of Naomi, Nathan felt as though he himself had dentures that were slipping. He found it difficult to speak. “Chase? Heard? No. Heard what?”

Roiphe took his hat off and started to play with the brim. He was backlit against the window, and his thinning hair looked particularly vulnerable and wispy. “That French professor of hers. Arosteguy. You haven't heard? It's all over the internet. Too soon to hit the papers.”

“What … what about him?” Nathan immediately felt sick. He didn't want to hear it, certain that whatever it was meant bad news regarding the mysteriously unresponsive Naomi, even though Roiphe would be oblivious of the Naomi aspect. Nathan had been careful not to let the doctor know about what was going on in Tokyo; he would be too interested in Naomi's Arosteguy project for comfort.

Roiphe shook his head at the incomprehensible weirdness of it all. “They finally found him. Found his body.”

Nathan put down his knife and fork. “His body? What does that mean?”

The air-conditioning wasn't working in the restaurant, and Roiphe began to fan his face with his hat, the backlight from the windows strobing through the straw and bringing Nathan to the point of migraine. “Well, he's dead. That's what that means. His body. Apparently he collapsed in the middle of some huge intersection in Tokyo. Some witnesses said blood came dribbling out of both of his ears. Sounds like a cerebral hemorrhage to me, although, well, you never know.”

“But you said something. They
found
his body? They had to find it?”

“Apparently, once some ambulance picked him up, they misplaced his body. Or the police took it to do an autopsy and didn't let the media know
about it for three or four days. Something. Some mystery about it. The witness stuff was suppressed until later. He was a fugitive. The French cops wanted him back in Paris. Maybe that was it. Delicate situation.”

“Jesus. Fuck.”

“What. You knew him.”

“No.
You
knew him.”

“Well, I met him once or twice. He had weight. He had substance. I didn't trust him with Chase, but there's a paranoid old father for you. And speaking of which, Chase wants to see you. Said she needs you for some solace, whatever that means. Obviously it has something to do with her professor. I dasn't think of it. I dasn't. Never seen her so depressed. Disturbing for a parent.” Roiphe used his hat to gesture towards Nathan's pork chops. “But you should just sit here and finish those first. I'm sure she'll be able to hang on.”

Nathan pushed his plate across the table. “I think I'll go now. Where is she?”

“Up in the workroom. Hey, if you're serious about not finishing those. I'm prohibited, I'm persona non grata up there, so I might as well stay here.”

Nathan slid out of his seat and stood up. “You go right ahead.”

Roiphe lifted the plate and floated it, wobbling, over to the table in front of him, which stretched the length of the windows. “I'll expect a full report, natch. For the book. Eventually. And could you tell them to bring me a fresh knife and fork on your way out?”

By the time Nathan hit the sidewalk, Roiphe was happily trimming off the edges of the pork chops where Nathan had made cuts, evidently contaminating them, and fastidiously lifting the trimmings with his new knife and fork onto the butter dish, where they were safely isolated. Nathan waited until he had walked half a block, well out of the doctor's view, before he stopped in front of the grandiosely named Village Market—
“Variety/Greeting Cards”—intending to open his phone's Safari web browser. He needed to know just what he was walking into. As giggling schoolgirls tumbled out of the Village Market's ancient green door and pushed by him clutching
Archie
comics and Kit Kat Minis, he found himself looking at blurry, tweeted photos of Arosteguy lying facedown on the square paving stones of a narrow, crowded pedestrian street in Akihabara, the games and electronics mecca near Tokyo Station. The handsome square head, the large staring eyes, the long, unruly gray hair matted with the blood which flowed from his ears and curled into the granite interstices. Taken at night under the many varieties of artificial light illuminating the street, the photos displayed surreal colors and vague focus, but Nathan thought he saw bits of organic material—brain? inner ear?—spattering the shoulder of Arosteguy's jacket and soaking in the pooling blood. The lack of good light and the jostling of the crowd made the one relevant video he could find on YouTube even more of a surrealist smear. It was shot handheld and walking from behind Arosteguy, with two or three shoppers between Arosteguy and the camera, which was framed to highlight the whirlpool of neon above the crowd. At the bottom of the frame, out of focus, you could see something that looked like smoke or a liquid spray, like a messy backlit sneeze, spurting from Arosteguy's ears, at which point his head jerked back and dropped out of frame, and the holder of the camera seemed to stumble before the image looped skyward and then cut out. It would have struck Nathan as farcical if he hadn't seen the Twitter photos first, the ones in which Arosteguy looked quite horridly dead.

The inevitable mutating variations were all over the net, but basically: fugitive cannibal French philosopher found dead in Tokyo street. There had been, as Roiphe had suggested, some mystery surrounding the interval between the loading of the body into a special small ambulance that was capable of threading its way through the backstreets, and the release by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department of the report concerning the
noted
gaijin
's collapse, which seemed to involve a catastrophic cerebral event. The president of France commented only that the death of M. Arosteguy was a mercilessly compounded national tragedy and that his body must of course be returned to France for burial in the Cimetière du Montparnasse where it belonged, in the company of Sartre and Baudrillard. The desire by Tokyo police to conduct an autopsy under their own control was deemed inappropriate by French authorities.

CHASE HELD HERVÉ'S
L-shaped penis in her hand and dipped its root into a glass pot of white glue. It had been painted to resemble a wormlike larva—a meaty translucent yellow with tobacco striations delineating its body segments, and two black-stippled ovals on the upper shield of the glans representing the chemo-sensory organs found on the larval head.

“I invented my own parasitoid infestation for her, for Célestine. I felt she deserved her own species, something that lovingly lays its eggs in her—we never see what the adult form looks like—and then the maggots hatch and start eating her from the inside out. They spend most of their lives burrowed into the bodies of their hosts, gently nibbling, so they don't really need eyes. And it's really magical and spooky when they finally emerge, poking through, waving around all together, synchronized like those weird women's Olympic swim teams.”