Consumed (35 page)

She turned away from the paint table and took a half step to the body-parts table, where about two dozen of Hervé's penile fellows protruded from Célestine's 3D-printed body parts like immense parasitic fly larvae. After a moment of deliberation, with one hand held under the current penis/larva to catch any glue drippings, Chase delicately planted the creature into a bloody, ragged hole just above the knee of the left leg, giving it a twist to settle it in like a lightbulb in a socket. Some of
the penis/larva units had been cut down to different lengths so that they presented a more varied diorama of parasitic emergence, although Nathan thought that their uniform ninety-degree signature Hervé bend worked against the illusion of randomly squirming maggots seeking the light. He thought as well that the entire effect of the piece would be enhanced if the body parts were arranged as a complete body instead of like prime cuts in a butcher's display fridge—the symbolism of the head between the legs, for example, striking him as too obvious, too desperately provocative—but he was reluctant to criticize her work for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the fear that she would ask him to donate an erect penis scan of his own in order to provide larval variety to the work. Collaboration with Nathan was in the air in the Roiphe household, but Nathan himself remained wary.

Light poured down over Chase like a shower of clarity from the angled skylights. She was wearing a schoolgirl uniform—short-sleeved white sailor blouse complete with stripe-edged antimacassar, unbuttoned at the throat; loosely knotted gray-and-burgundy-striped tie; and short box-pleated gray skirt—which he recognized as belonging to Bishop Cornwall School just down the street. But she was not wearing the requisite burgundy jacket, gray knee socks, or black oxford shoes; her feet were bare, as were her legs and her arms, and, raked by the light from above, the hundreds of tea-party scars stood out in relief so that she seemed to be swarming with ants the color of dried blood. It created a strange alliance between her and the worm-eaten Célestine, which, it was clear, was the desired effect. She knew he was studying her.

“I'm too shy to do this live onstage, putting my Célestine together, but maybe you could video me and we could project it. I could take her apart and put her back together again. I think your super camera does video too, doesn't it?”

“It does, sure,” Nathan lied. “They all do now.” Nathan could just see
a video with his name attached being presented to a French court; he could barely imagine the confusion it would cause. Well, it would be a unique vantage point for the writer of the definitive article on what was spiraling awkwardly into the Arosteguy/Roiphe/Blomqvist case. “The uniform is a nice touch. Were you a Bishop Cornwall girl?”

“I was, briefly. My mother kept the uniform. I was shocked that I could still fit into it. I found it in the basement by accident—only, I guess, not by accident. It was in a moldy cardboard box with the school logo on it. That kind of racy bishop's miter. You can still smell it, the mold.” Pause. “I had a wonderful art teacher there.”

Chase's luscious enunciation of the word
wonderful
, preceded by a telltale flick of the tongue over the lower lip, strongly suggested delicious, forbidden, teacher-student sex, probably involving that very uniform. “To be explored” was the mental note. “So the uniform is part of the performance?”

“Asians love schoolgirls in uniform. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings.
Burusera
shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that? I'm not talking about the moldy smell.
Sailor Moon.
Did you ever watch that? It was a manga series that became an anime.” She sang the first few bars of the
Sailor Moon
theme song in a husky, sweet voice, only slightly off-key:

NATHAN HAD HEARD IT BEFORE.
A young cousin from Newark named Leslie had been obsessed with the schoolgirl destined to become a magical warrior who fought to save the galaxy, all while wearing her—admittedly stylized—schoolgirl's sailor suit. “The Asian element surprises me. For the performance piece, I mean. Does that come from Tokyo?”

“There are many reasons Professor Arosteguy went to Tokyo. It had nothing to do with extradition treaties. He was always fascinated by the Asian version of consumerism, particularly Japanese, so complex. We keep texting. Kind of compulsive.”

Texting? Now? From the Tokyo morgue? Nathan tacked. “Maybe you need to dress Célestine Arosteguy's corpse like Sailor Moon. Just to tie things together.”

Chase allowed him a quick glance over her shoulder, then turned back to her paint table, where there were only two more larvae, pre-painted and waiting for installation. “You know, that's a really good idea, the Sailor Moon thing. She is a magical warrior, Tina is.”

“And your many insect bites? Also good for the performance?” Now that her mini-mutilations had been unceremoniously unveiled, he felt he had been invited to notice them, also without ceremony. He could easily see her onstage, clipping off bits of her flesh and eating them while the wide-eyed Célestine corpse looked on with affectionate approval.

“Wow. I hadn't thought of them that way. You probably don't realize how perfect that concept is.”

“I'd like to realize.”

“I'd have to totally poach you from my father for my own project. Are you still positive for Roiphe's?” So casual a throwaway line was this last that, for a beat, Nathan thought he must have mentioned his affliction to Chase, but then understood it could only have come from her father. Was that a betrayal? Did it indicate a more open relationship between father and daughter than the doctor had suggested? What context could there have
been for that discussion? It occurred to Nathan that he did not remotely have a handle on the Roiphes.

“Not sure. The symptoms have subsided. I have three weeks' worth of pills to go. Why?”

Mischievous smile. “I remember reading about Calvin Klein's daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover's pants, she was confronted by her father's name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer. I have to wonder what it would be like to be infected by my father's namesake disease.”

“Acquiring it is more pleasant than living with it. But … could be part of the performance.”

“Could be.”

“And could we say, then, what the meaning of the performance actually is?”

“We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”

“And will you ever get the rest of your French friend Hervé to perform with you?”

Chase laughed a surprisingly hearty laugh. She held the second-last of Hervé's replica penises up in the air and whirled it around a few times like a football pennant, then turned back to the Tina-thing, looking for the right socket to plug it into.

“Maybe not. This is the best part of him.”

“And speaking of parts.”

“Yes. You asked me a strange question when we were coming up the stairs: Where is Célestine's left breast?” Chase decided on a wound in the Célestine-head's cheek, but after holding the penis/larva in place, she seemed to feel that it was too long, overpowering. At the paint table, she began to trim it back from the root end with an X-Acto craft knife.

“That was the question.” From Roiphe's testimony, Nathan had expected to find a weepy, devastated Chase waiting for him in a darkened workroom. Instead, she was as luminous as the room itself, and patently playful. “Do you have the answer?”

Chase put down the knife, turned around, and crossed her arms, tapping the glans of the bioplastic penis against her lips. The maggot paint, long dried, left no marks. “It's not really
your
question, is it?”

“It's a question asked by a journalist in Tokyo who was working on a story about the Arosteguys. About Célestine's murder.” A journalist. Nathan had distanced himself from Naomi without thinking about it, but immediately felt guilty for never having outlined his relationship with her to Chase. Then again, that was not a short outline. He let that dog lie.

“A journalist you're in constant touch with? Trading stories?”

“Journalists are too paranoid to trade stories. Sometimes they help each other with details.”

With a spasm that seemed almost painful, Chase detached herself from the table and ambled towards Nathan, arms still folded, the abridged penis now lowered and hooked over her left biceps; its oval sensors seemed to be looking up at Nathan. “And so if you get an answer to the question, if you come up with the answer, you'll just email it to your journalist friend? You'll quote me? And then what I say will become evidence in a murder case? Something like that?”

“I would protect you. You'd be an unnamed source.”

Chase now stood in front of Nathan, combatively close. He was not at all sure that he could protect her. Would that be under French law? International law? Canadian law? He had no idea. But he wanted the answer to the question even more, now that he saw what was swimming around in her eyes.

“That would be so nice of you. To do that. Protect me,” she said. “What would you think if I told you there really wasn't a murder case?”

“You mean the French police don't have a case to make against your old professor?”

“No, I mean what if there was no murder to be a case?”

“Madame Arosteguy … Mrs. Arosteguy died accidentally?”

Chase had actually flinched at the word
madame
! This was exactly like the reaction
le schizo
, Louis Wolfson, would have had to hearing even one word spoken to him in English by his one-eyed mother or his stepfather, and it left Nathan unaccountably thrilled and distracted. It just emphasized how much the Chase story was interwoven with Paris, the Sorbonne, with language, the Arosteguys—in other words, the French story. Perhaps there was no other way to do the piece justice than to collaborate with Naomi just as she had proposed. But where was Naomi? The worry sank into his gut like that X-Acto knife. Maybe he needed to meet her in Paris and not wait for her to come to Toronto.

“Mrs. Arosteguy didn't die at all. Mrs. Arosteguy is still alive. That's what I'm suggesting.”

“Then what happened to Célestine's left breast?”

“You're closer to it than you could ever imagine.”

Nathan slid out from under Chase's gaze and walked over to the body-parts table. From close up it looked like a makeshift autopsy table strewn with the rotting detritus of a particularly confusing homicide. He turned back to Chase.

“Am I getting warmer?”

“No. You're cold. Very cold. You were warmer standing in front of me.”

Nathan returned to her.

“Okay. I don't get it.”

Chase took his hand and placed it over her own left breast. She was not wearing a bra; the cotton of the sailor shirt was unexpectedly rough. “Do you feel it?” Nathan could only shrug. He was out of the game, not comprehending. “I ate it, Nathan. I ate her breast, at least most of it. What
I could stand to eat. It's not something I think any other animal would eat, not the milk glands anyway. They were horrible. We left the rest of it in the apartment so that the cops would have some flesh to do their DNA thing on. That's why they think there was a murder.” He let his hand slip off her breast and onto her arm. The little scars felt like a bad heat rash. She twisted away from him, strolled over to the table, and leaned over the body parts. Using the penis as a comical viewfinder, she began making camera shutter noises by sucking air in past her teeth. Click, a leg, click, a hand, click, a foot. She swiveled back to Nathan. “That and the clever special effects photos.”

“It was actually hers? The breast? She was … alive when you ate it?”

“She had always wanted to amputate it. She was very passionate about that. She had some intense body dysmorphic disorder thing. I think Ari took her someplace where they helped him do it to her himself. A collaboration. They froze it and brought it back to the apartment. Left it in the fridge for the cops to find. There was still part of a nipple, a lot of skin, fatty tissue, not much gland.”

“If she's still alive, where is she?”

“We don't know. She's an enigma.”

Nathan nervously wiped the back of his hand across his lips. He knew it was a revealing gesture but was compelled to prepare his mouth for his next words. “You do know that Aristide Arosteguy is not alive.”

Chase's face lit up with the most radiant smile. “I looked at everything I could find on the net. Well, not the French reports, of course. And at first I was incredibly hurt and shocked and saddened. I wanted to vomit my heart out. Because he means so much to me. The professor. My philosopher. But then I realized.” Nathan thought her face would lift off her skull and float around the room with joy.

“And then you realized.”

“He's not-alive the way Célestine is not-alive. They are together
somewhere, and I will see them again. I don't mean in some lame afterlife. They'll call for me when they're ready, when their new lives are ready to be lived. And I'll go to them, wherever they are.” As if to begin that journey, Chase turned back once again to the paint table, where she dipped the larval root into the glue pot, then conveyed the thing to the wound in Célestine's cheek just below the cheekbone. After a moment's reflection, she gently eased it into the waiting socket, gave it its ceremonial twist, and took a step back to get a proper perspective. The new, shorter larva now competed directly for attention with the head's swollen and bruised protruding tongue. Chase gave a little “ha” of satisfaction.