Consumed

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.

“I hear nothing,” I said, but to no one, because Elke had left the booth, closing the double doors with a whoosh of expelled atmosphere and leaving me in a vacuum. I could just see her through one of the two triple-glazed portholes in the wall, starting to work the Connexx program almost before she had fully settled into the Aeron. I had come to the Jungebluth (there were partner audiologists I never got to meet) to derail my complicity in Célestine’s delusions about Romme, about the insects in her breast, about Pyongyang, assuming that my inquiries there would deliver some proof that Romme was living in Paris or Rome and that he had not been kidnapped by any of the Kims, and that he was not the director of Judicious. This would naturally have encouraged a gentle easing of Célestine out of her compelling body narrative, perhaps with the shock treatment of a meeting with Romme in our apartment once I had contacted him. Would there arise some sort of Capgras syndrome response from her, a denial that the Romme I presented her with was the real Romme? Would she claim that he was an imposter surgically created by the Kims in order to delude the world and, specifically, delude Célestine? These, then, were my own fantasies, which were summarily crushed by Elke’s evidence that Romme had spent time in Pyongyang functioning as a technical consultant, that “some kind of filmmaking” was involved, and that he had been “kidnapped”—Elke used the word innocently, unbidden by me—“by the depth and passion of the culture there, mesmerized and delighted to the extent that he wished to live there for an indeterminate length of time.”

I was the one who was delusional, not Célestine; or at least I was haughtily and unjustifiably dismissive of her instincts and her sensitivity to some aberrant realities that neither of us had been capable of conjuring up before. Had her left breast become a bagful of dangerous insects? Was that any less conceivable than the invasion of breast tissue by rampaging rogue milk-duct epithelial cells? Well, yes, of course it was, but what if the “insects” were Célestine’s metaphor for something more medically plausible? What if that was the only way she could express her very real awareness of a unique pathology?

The acrylic platter of the Spotheim-Koreneef device was spinning hypnotically, its corona of glittering weights, like stacks of coins, shimmering with nano-crustacean avidity. And now, through my portholes, I could see the Connexx program reduced to a window on Elke’s monitor, streamers indicating that it was feeding its settings and parameters—everything controlling my Siemens Pure micon receiver-in-the-canal instruments—to another, larger window, which displayed a mixture of Korean syllabic blocks and English words. This was the fitting program devised by Romme and his nameless North Korean Juche comrades which was designed to be used in conjunction with the Crickets album and the neo record player, and to which I had agreed to submit my entire auditory existence for realignment. According to the booth’s Swiss Federal Railways station–style clock, the process took one hour and seventeen minutes, during which time I was projected into a mildly sinister audio landscape of threatening hums, chirps, and stuttering clicks, as well as raspy, non-human breathing (through valved insect spiracles?) and a variety of pulsing, fluid ripplings which suggested the movement of non-human blood through minute, multi-chambered tubular hearts. My interpretation of this auditory world was obviously much shaped by my experience of the Judicious film, Célestine’s inventive pathology, and the album cover, and this interpretation could well have been recorded and analyzed somewhere in the internet ether, because apparently the response of my eardrums and the associated organic machinery inside my head to this soundscape being fed back to the North Korean program (it was called, innocuously, “In Tune with Nature,” I later learned) was tantamount to a reading of my brain’s electrical activity that was much deeper and more meaningful than a normal EEG. I idly wondered if the increasing stress on my shrunken bladder could affect the results and derange my programming; I really had to pee. We had agreed that most of the changes would be funneled to Program 5, my former Music program (which attempted to balance the sounds of all musical instruments and voices as per normal hearing), and that Program 1, Universal, would be left completely untouched for reference. A rocker switch on my left instrument allowed me to cycle through the six programs, which included TV (Program 2), Noisy Environment (Program 3), Outdoor/Sports (Program 4), and Telecoil (Program 6, for special telephone use). I asked Elke to name Program 5 Vertegaal, and that’s how it showed up on the LCD display of my Tek wireless controller.

I walked out of the Jungebluth Clinic with my ears tuned to my safe, unaltered Program 1, unaccountably fearful of walking on the streets of Vanves while on Program 5—what could happen?—and having forgotten where the Smart Fortwo was parked, as was increasingly usual for me. Fortunately, my iPhone, which was now propping up my failing brain, had the GPS coordinates ready at hand, and its Maps turn-by-turn guidance system got me around the three corners to the little vehicle, which looked so dapper in its Matte Anthracite replaceable body panels. I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily. Once I was in the car, I thought, I would switch to Program 5, the Vertegaal, and allow the new settings to flow sounds never before perceived through my brain; but then I didn’t. My rationale was that the electric car was too quiet, too well insulated—against temperature changes, in order to save the battery, but effectively damping sounds as well—to really deliver anything spectacular, and then I would be disappointed, and then I would get depressed. That was the rationale. But was the whole exercise not really about one thing: the left breast of Célestine? Why play with toys?

I arrived back at our apartment with my head buzzing as though it were the vessel full of truculent insects; perhaps it was my head that needed to be removed. Célestine was not there. I could not possibly read. I switched on the TV and began to watch the MotoGP world championship motorcycle race from Aragón, broadcast on delay. I knew nothing about MotoGP, but was immediately entranced by the machinery, the strange, padded, hunchbacked leather riding suits bearing ceramic sliding pucks Velcroed to their knees, the futuristic helmets, and the ferocity of the racing. The commentators discussed the increasing sophistication of the electronic controls on even these elemental machines, a worrisome thing, they said, because it took so much control of throttle, traction, braking, pitch control and even lean angle away from the riders that one wondered whether riders would soon be rendered obsolete. Needless to say, the questions of technology raised by the racing stimulated me and happily distracted me, especially since the technologies of MotoGP and Siemens hearing instruments were seeping into each other so that I was soon feeling traction control, anti-lock braking, g-force sensor, and electronic-control-unit elements beginning to operate in my ears. It occurred to me that the speakers of our poor old Loewe, only banal stereo, not 5.1 or 6.1 or beyond, were still quite good, and I was tempted to switch to Program 5 just to see what it would do to the unearthly sound of those multi-cylindered motorcycles. Would it create a brilliant form of Grand Prix motorcycle-empowered hearing? My index finger was actually hovering over the rocker of the left behindthe-ear module when I heard Célestine’s keys jingling as she approached the narrow landing outside our door. Mild claustrophobia normally kept her from using the compact elevator, so she could be heard from quite some distance down the spiraling stairs. I switched off the TV as two Spanish riders started their final lap in the lead, to the wild delight of the Aragón crowd, but the half-life decay, the aftertaste of blended MotoGP/hearing-instrument engineering, remained for quite some time.

WE WERE IN THE HABIT of having our most intense, most abstract and intellectual conversations in bed, usually fully clothed but not always. Even if it began as something mundane, something merely functional, in the kitchen or in front of the Loewe, once it drifted into that territory that we subliminally recognized, we ourselves drifted, as if randomly, into our small bedroom and would lie down together without having missed a beat in the rhythm of our talking (the pillows occasionally making my Pures squeal petulantly with feedback), and with the conversation sometimes ending with a profound nap, or profound sex, both the nap and the sex infused with the thematics of our talk. There were pens and stubs of pencils strewn everywhere in the bedroom, evidence of our habit of scribbling notes for future papers, articles, letters to editors, at any moment of the day or night, during or following our bed sessions. We made sporadic forays into the world of voice-recognition spoken-note-taking using iPad or iPhone, but inevitably reverted to the handwritten word. We both had appalling handwriting that required considerable decipherment even by the writer, but the very act of decipherment was comforting, the contortions of the scrawls conveying emotion and nuance that no perfect pixels could embody. Speaking the words seemed to release them into a void in which they could evaporate unexpectedly; writing them seemed to encase them safely within our skulls, where they could leisurely ripen.

Célestine headed for the bedroom first, tossing her keys into the wooden Chinese bowl we left on the glass half-moon table by the door, kicking off her shoes and flopping down on the bed with a long, slow sigh. As usual, I followed her, half-sitting rather than stretching full out, my shoes already off.

It was apparent to both of us that we were going to talk about Romme Vertegaal, with no preliminaries, no banter about parking difficulties or what was missing in the refrigerator. Earlier in the day, she had been to the Entomological Society’s office again, hoping that her contacts there had some news of Romme’s whereabouts or latest projects. She had turned to them in desperation after our colleagues at the Cannes Film Festival were unable to provide any enlightenment. Judicious had been handled entirely by a North Korean government film and media agency, and they never had any interaction with the director of the movie himself. It had been hinted that he had somehow disgraced himself in Pyongyang and was lucky not to find himself in prison. There had never been any chance that he could accompany his movie to Cannes as most directors do; the festival had decided to accept this onerous condition in the hope that it would at least open the door to more interchange with North Korean artists. The executives of the festival would not accept Célestine’s contention that Jo Woon Gyu was not Korean, not Asian at all, but was a French national born in Holland. Disbelief and dismissal soon turned to irritation, and Célestine’s entreaties—phone calls, emails, street interventions outside the Paris offices of the festival—quickly became moments of embarrassment for everyone that were best forgotten. The pair of us were used to becoming embarrassments in political and social causes of all stripes—it was a badge of honor; you could not worry about dignity or reputation when it came to hot-button issues—so this in itself was not hard to take, but the emotional stakes in this instance were very high, and Célestine in bed next to me was enervated, dispirited.

“Look at this,” I said, handing her my iPhone.

She covered her eyes with her arm, flexing her fingers so that her forearm muscles bunched rhythmically, exuding anguish and aggravation. “I can’t look at your ironic little pictures right now. Please.” I was in the habit of bringing back cell-phone photos of things I encountered during the day, just like a dog with an amusing stick in its mouth. I believed I took these photos in innocent amazement at the richness of mundane reality, but Célestine, on the contrary, detected revulsion and existential dismay skulking under every shot. I no longer contradicted her on this point.

I slid down on the bed until we were side by side. “This picture has a very special irony that you’ll want to experience. I promise.” She rolled over abruptly and grabbed me by the hair with both hands, inducing my Pures to complain bitterly. I used to pull them out of my ears and toss them onto the night table at such moments, fearing an interruption of intimacy, but we had gotten so used to their companionship that it never occurred to me to do that now. “A promise like that is a dangerous thing,” she said. “I’m in a perilous, slippery state of mind. One of your shots of inane parking signs could push me right over the edge. And I’d never come back.” She kissed me a full, openmouthed kiss, then pulled away as though shocked by what she had done, her own little act of irony. “Well, let’s see it. I’m not going to be easy to impress.”

I recovered my iPhone from where it had hidden itself in the folds of the duvet and again conjured up the photo I had taken of the Listen to the Crickets album. With a flourish, I gave the iPhone to Célestine.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIND Crisco in Paris, but not impossible. As well, friends visiting from America got in the habit of bringing us Crisco—not in the spray cans, but the preferred cardboard box containing the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-gram wax-paper-wrapped white block of vegetable shortening. Once we discovered the use of Crisco as a sexual lubricant and an antidote to vaginal atrophy, I could never again see the Crisco logo (the red letters over a white ellipse with a golden drop of oil serving as the dot over the letter i) without getting a melancholy erection. At the age of sixty-two, Célestine was still voluptuous and sensual, but of course well advanced in her postmenopausal life. It was typical of her to search for a metaphor, or perhaps an analogy, to help her absorb a change as fundamental as the transformation brought about by her menopause, particularly where sex was concerned. She found it when we participated in a panel, part of the Festival Lumière at the Grand Lyon Film Festival, whose subject was “Sex and the Disabled in the Cinema.” Our postmenopausal sex was immediately illuminated by the testimony of our fellow panelists, who were not specialists, but merely six aficionados of cinema who incarnated a spectrum of human disability from relatively minor (a non-functioning right arm owing to a childhood stroke) to major (motor neuron disease at the advanced Stephen Hawking level). A strong sense of invention, leavened by an even stronger sense of humor, and the suppression of embarrassment at the sometimes grotesque acrobatics required, seemed to be the key, spiced by the exhilaration of being forced to understand and, more, to graphically discuss, precisely what the purpose of the sex really was—a woefully ignored aspect of sex for most of the enabled.

Secretly, I lusted after Célestine as I always had—secretly, because it was not allowed that I could somehow evade our synchronized aging by lusting now as I had always lusted. I was allowed to express my desire to her, but it was necessary for her to laugh it off in disbelief, the delusions of an old man, possibly the first signs of senility, if not dementia, in her own private senex. It was as though my unabated, youthful lust was by its very existence a reproach to her for her own brutally truncated lust, now feebly supported by the stratagems I’ve just described. I could not tell her how our past sex blended smoothly into our present sex for me, how her past body modified the reality of her present body. Even as anal sex was not possible for her now, still the old, vividly recalled anal sex was vitally alive and present for me, happening somehow concurrently with vaginal sex. And of course, my body was changing too, as I’m sure you’ve guessed even without reference to internet photos and videos, and I felt that her menopause was also mine. The transformation of our bodies was locked in a rigorous synchrony, and perhaps beyond synchrony: we were too close in all ways not to have affected each other causally. As her body changed (and that change, of course, is invisibly gradual until one of those startling moments of revelation, when the light slanting in from an oddly placed skylight rakes cruelly across the skin, the veins, the toenails, and changes forever your perception of what your lover is) I at first willed my esthetic for womanly beauty to change in order to accommodate her transformation, so that she remained as beautiful and as desirable as ever before, though she was different. And the difference itself became provocative and exciting, as though sex with her was also sex with a new, exotic person who demanded new sexual protocols and new perversities, until I didn’t have to will that change anymore because that esthetic had permanently changed; I was no longer attracted to the same women, and it was a blessing and a relief, and a curious thing. An unexpected corollary was the realignment of the esthetic concerning my own body, which could now absorb the stringy musculature, the mottled skin, the haggard cheekbones, the reptilian wrinkles, into its category of acceptable male beauty. Yes, we were both still wonderful.

After I described my adventure in Vanves to Célestine in obsessive detail, all in explanation of the album cover photo, we made desperate, triumphant, celebratory love, inevitably embracing the theme of Romme Vertegaal and his odyssey as we imagined it. While we were on a trip to Mexico, whose purpose was an exploration of leftist politics and philosophy à la mexicaine, we discovered that our sex had independently segued into a meditation on Frida and Diego, with a flavoring of Trotsky (Célestine was always Frida, but I occasionally was Trotsky in that delirious country of sexual self-annihilation; later on, when we revisited the theme, I was sometimes Frida, Célestine sometimes Diego), and had distinctly Mexican surrealist folk-art overtones. From that point on, we would often consciously choose the themes of our sexual sessions as though collaborating on a collage or sculpture project, and would afterwards discuss their textures and sensory effects. We wrote a joint piece about it for the “Annals of Sexuality” section of The New Yorker, which caused some small controversy. Now, just post-Vanves, there emerged a new layer in our constantly evolving, composited sexual structure (which always reminded me of the use of layers in Photoshop): Célestine’s uncharacteristically desperate longing for Romme. I could be Romme in our fantasy—I certainly knew him better than I knew Diego Rivera—but the jealousy was there even though we allowed each other lacunate lovers, and the jealousy was dissolving the layers and producing a disharmonious mess. Is there anyone who has not felt jealousy over a lover’s past lovers, a jealousy made all the more ferocious the more it is unjustified, the more it is secured in the past, mockingly protected by the vault of memory? So yes, triumphant, celebratory, but anguished in its emotional complexity, at least for me, and made more agonizingly poignant by Célestine’s apparent serenity, her ease even with the by-now-inevitable pain that came with penetration. I hated allowing Célestine to fuck Romme using me as a Romme surrogate.

We were both subdued by the end of it, Célestine holding my hand over her left breast and squeezing it with distracted cruelty. But then she startled me with a sudden, whimpered exhalation, followed by a terrified gasp. A shot of adrenaline projected brainward and flushed me with a familiar, unmoored anger. When I first got my hearing aids, which were primarily tuned to augment those higher frequencies which are usually the first to disappear with age, it is true that the world instantly became louder and more harsh; it was difficult for someone whose aural landscape had so gradually become more and more muted and dulled to believe that this was hearing as experienced by most people, that this harshness was just the restoration of higher sound frequencies that had been lost. But the most disorienting aspect of this new soundscape was that sounds now carried too much emotion, too much meaning, so that a single sneeze was an expression of rage, the closing of a bedroom door was a pointed separation that would need healing, the smacking of a pillow to reshape it in the middle of the night was an explosive assault that caused my heart to pound with reflexive anger. A recalibration of my reaction to the intensity of sounds was urgently demanded, and though I was constantly recalibrating, those unexpected shots of adrenaline still persisted and confused me. I wanted to jerk out of bed and slam the bedroom door and go for a petulant walk in the wet, dark streets, muttering to myself about spousal insult and betrayal. But I recalibrated.

“Tina.”

“You feel them, don’t you?” she said. “They’re going crazy in there. It’s not possible you can’t feel them.”

“The insects.”

An exhaled “yes!” like the report of a high-powered rifle. “Do you think it’s the Romme Vertegaal gestalt that’s animating them? The entomology, the North Korean connection…?”

She twisted around to face me. On her face was a terrible, frantic joy. “Program 5,” she said. “Switch to that and you can hear them. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? It’s obvious! Romme knew this moment would come!”

“I don’t know what Program 5 is for. Even Elke couldn’t tell me precisely what it was for. I let her create it because of you, because of your North Korean obsession, and of course because I was curious, even about my hearing, what its potential might really be. We know that Romme was brilliant, so let his brilliance open up my head if it can. That’s what I was thinking. But honestly, I’ve been afraid to switch to it, partly because I think it’ll be disappointing, be just a bland expression of harmonic filtering, who knows what. Elke was very proud of her work with that difficult analoguevinyl-to-digital routine, and I hated to frustrate her by being so timid, but she let me go when I promised her that I would report back in detail after I’d had the courage to experiment with Program Vertegaal.”

I could not tell Célestine that I had another motivation in letting Elke Jungebluth manipulate me: I had become terrified that Célestine would make good on her promise to travel to North Korea in order to seek out Romme, to reconnect with him and to give her insect problem to him, all within the context of a farcical political rapprochement with the North Korean dictatorship. On one level her stratagem was complete madness, a fantasy, and on another it confirmed—I felt this with crushing pain—that she still loved him, loved him in a way that she did not love me, and that I was trapped in a wretched telenovela I would never escape.

Célestine cupped her left breast in both hands and offered it to me. “Switch it on and listen,” she said, with a breathless intensity whose hopefulness utterly deranged me. What husband has not avidly played the role of voyeur in his own house, watching the reflection of his wife in a window as she examines her vagina or anus with his chromed shaving mirror, one leg propped up on the white metal bathroom chair, searching for some real or feared lesion, polyp, secretion, or telltale discoloration? I would often catch Célestine examining her left breast in the most unconventional way: for sound, rather than sight. She would pull it up towards her left ear, her head cocked, manipulating it ruthlessly, as though it truly did not belong to her but was a ludicrously wrongheaded transplant or recent pathological growth, prodding it in order to provoke the insects into an aural frenzy loud enough to be recordable by the iPhone that sat propped up against a Kleenex box, the VU-meter of its Voice Memos app twitching with every rustle. Now it was my turn.

I hesitated, paralyzed. Her hair was wet from our exertions, glistening black and gray strands striping her cheeks. One strand was caught in the corner of her mouth, and I hallucinated that it was the leg of an enormous black-and-gray spider inadvertently exposed, patiently waiting inside her mouth for the insects to emerge. I forced myself to gently pull the leg from between her lips, which parted slightly to aid me, and swept it back over her ear. “You know, you’ve always been able to hear things that I’ve never heard, even with my very sophisticated bionics,” I said. “And you’ve never been able to successfully record the sounds of your insects. You’ve admitted that.”

“But this is Romme. This is Romme’s gift to both of us. It’s been created by his brilliance and by his understanding. This is a new thing.” She glowed as she said this, and the glow tormented me. She reached up with one hand, the other now palpating her breast, and touched the Pure module behind my ear. (I had chosen dark silver for its color, vain enough still to want it to disappear in my unruly nest of silver hair, which one of my students described as “confrontational philosophy hair, though not as intimidating as Schopenhauer’s hair.”) I took Célestine’s hand away from my ear, leaving it to hover uncertainly, and I reached up for the program switch behind my left ear and pressed it, methodically cycling through the programs from 1 to 5. Each cycle was accompanied by a unique sequence of musical tones cleverly designed to indicate which program one was entering, and because Célestine could hear those tones, when I arrived at Vertegaal her eyebrows immediately rose in bright, girlish expectation.

“The oven fan has been left on. I can hear it now,” I said.

Célestine laughed and pulled my head towards her breast with exaggerated nonchalance.

And then I heard them. The insects. They were there inside her breast, and I could hear them.

THERE ARE APPARENTLY BIOMARKERS present in exhaled breath which can be analyzed by a mass spectrometer for indications of many kinds of cancers and other diseases. Could there be an equivalent in exhaled or otherwise emitted sounds? Could Romme Vertegaal and his North Korean colleagues be in the vanguard defining a revolutionary new medical diagnostic system? Could my innocent, pragmatic Pure hearing aids have been transformed into an audio analogue of the mass spectrometer by the Listen to the Crickets program? In the light of day, none of this would stand up to scrutiny. But there, in the bed with Célestine, it was darkest night, and I could hear the insects in her left breast, and they sounded alive and present and real. I had always suspected that insects have what I think of as “species personalities”; that is to say, not personalities as individuals, but as individual species, so that certain of the nymphaline butterflies—the admirals, commas, anglewings, tortoiseshells—all have a habit of landing on your head when you are trying to catch them, and when you move abruptly, they fly off, only to circle and return to the top of your head—behavior you would never see in a monarch or a tiger swallowtail. In Célestine’s bunched breast, now covered with the liquid sheen of excitement, there were eight species of insects I could discern, all by the sounds they made, sounds which generated an image in my mind of the organs—legs or wings stridulating, tymbals vibrating—which produced those sounds. As part of my life’s philosophical enterprise I had—naturally, it seemed to me—been drawn to entomological studies, because I could not see how a philosopher could avoid engagement with the existence and meaning of such forceful yet utterly non-human life-forms. It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable. But as a student of insect life I could not become more than a dabbler, so immeasurably deep is the subject. The lecture I delivered at the Club Immédiat, which I titled “Entomology Is a Humanism”—a playful, though pointed, reference to Sartre’s famous lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”—incorporated most of the substance of my entomological learning, and is there for all to see in all its shallowness. I could not, in other words, accurately name the species of every insect represented in Célestine’s breast. And how many of them could there be? Was there only one specimen of each species, so that the answer would be eight? Or, following the paradigm of Noah’s ark, was there a male and female of each animal? A cicada, certainly. A mud-daubing wasp. A robber fly. An assassin bug. Several species of ant. My mind swelled with odd, comically disorienting images that seemed to bring along their own sound tracks: the savage swarming of the marabunta, the billion-strong soldier-ant army in the 1954 Charlton Heston movie The Naked Jungle; a show on the Discovery Channel examining insect parasites that turned their hosts into zombies serving the needs of the parasites; a YouTube parody of The Green Hornet in which the masked hero is actually a hornet that is fatally swatted by his Japanese sidekick, Kato, whose sound track was “Flight of the Bumblebee,” complete with theremin hornet-buzz effect as per the old radio show. (I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen this Hornet video or hallucinated it.)

I pulled away from Célestine in horror and confusion, and she laughed a small, sympathetic laugh and released her breast, which seemed for one hallucinatory moment to ripple with inner turmoil before finding its innocuously normal position of gravitational repose. It was, as I’ve said, my favorite breast, the larger and more accommodating one (the left one is usually larger, apparently because of the way the heart pumps blood), but now this breast was overwhelmed by waves of meaning and symbolism even beyond the metaphorical freight which those long-suffering organs are accustomed to bear. It dissolved almost cinematically before my eyes into a rapidly cycling series of objects—a bag, a nest, an egg, a yurt, a hive—each one of which provoked an excruciating emotional response which left me trembling and drained.

“You know now, don’t you? You know now,” she said, studying my every tremor with involved curiosity.

But I didn’t know. For obvious reasons, I could not believe my ears—in the most literal sense. It occurred to me that the insect sounds I thought I heard were actually being generated by my hearing instruments themselves, and not being passively received by them. Could they not have been programmed to fabricate those sounds, their creative computing power barely stressed by what they were ordinarily required to do? Could Romme, in concert with Elke, have constructed this unlikely elaborate scheme in order to drive me insane or, even more perversely, to seduce me into collaborating with Célestine in the deepening of her own insanity?

The look on Célestine’s face was so benign—no, more, benevolent, even saintly—effortlessly overflowing with compassion and understanding and kindness, that I could not bring myself to voice these cavils at what was obviously a near-religious cathexis for her. And then again, I could still hear them, and I had the sense they were speaking to me, though I could not understand what they were saying.

I could understand what Célestine was saying. “Now you see why we have to cut this off. We have to do it before they spread everywhere. We don’t have much time.” She said this sweetly, gently, without apprehension. It disturbed me that she said “we,” though her desire to have my approbation and support was normal for us; but in this context, it discharged a sinister undertaste which must have altered my expression. “I want you to do it,” she said. “Why would you leave it to anyone else? It’s something we’ve talked about, and now it’s here.”

I imagine it’s incomprehensible to a young couple that they might one day be talking in many modalities—sometimes joking, sometimes despairing, sometimes brutalizing—about killing each other or mutilating each other. It’s common enough to find articles about the ethics of euthanasia and pulling the plug on your spouse under dire medical circumstances, or the logistics of accompanying your wife to the Dignitas clinic in Zürich to end her life, but Célestine and I often found ourselves proposing hypothetical acts of violence which only peripherally had to do with aging, senility, and easeful death. She would castrate me; I would cut off her breasts—both surgeries committed with kitchen utensils ready at hand. She would strangle me with an old bathrobe belt; I would stab her with the twin-horned, sharp-pointed titanium sculpture I was awarded for my pamphlet “Consumerist Cinema”; we would take an overdose of barbiturates and lie down in our bed together, holding hands, in the manner of The World of Yesterday’s author, Stefan Zweig, and his young wife, in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis. We offhandedly devised many imaginary scenarios during the course of any given day, a habit that began as acerbic banter between two hypersharp intelligences, whose function seemed to be to absorb the venom of normal mundane tensions, anxieties, jealousies, resentments, and nano-betrayals, but gradually transformed into a daily hedge against death, an acknowledgment of our painful ephemerality, and a bid to take the kitchen utensils of mortality out of the hands of happenstance and put them back into our own drawer.

You can begin to understand, then, the accumulation of circumstances that created our gestalt. I went from humoring Célestine, not certain whether she was beginning to suffer from dementia or was, rather, deliberately developing a fantasy, a willed hallucination involving a unique form of apotemnophilia, to inhabiting this complex psychosis completely. It’s too bad you never got to sit in a room with Célestine. You would have felt her power to seduce and hypnotize.

THE NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH left Paris Est at 20:05 and was the first leg of our journey to Budapest. We had chosen the City Night Line Schlafwagen Cassiopeia, operated by Deutsche Bahn, to be followed by Austrian Railways’ Railjet high-speed train into Budapest’s Keleti station, in order to accommodate Célestine’s newly emerged fear of flying, or rather her fear of cabin pressure change, which might aggravate her own small passengers. It can’t be denied that the sense of occasion promoted by many hours of rail travel was also part of the transit stratagem, meant to validate the purpose of our trip and to lend the whole enterprise some of the credibility which it was lacking. For one must ask, as I’m sure you are, just how insane was Célestine, and how irresponsible was I to be complicit in that insanity. She was so convincing in the invention of the details of her malady and the conspiracy surrounding it that it took on a compelling substantiality, like being swept into the reality of a brilliantly written novel or charismatic movie: it’s not that you believe in its literalness, but that there is a compelling truth in its organic life that envelops you and is absorbed by you almost on a physiological level. I remember experiencing a small earthquake in Los Angeles—only a four-point-six, I think—when I was there as a guest of the Academy the year they decided to develop a special Oscar for Philosophy in Cinema. A small earthquake, and yet the forced awareness that the earth beneath your feet was volatile, not stable, was terrifying, and for days afterwards I was sure I could feel the earth trembling and threatening. I live with it still; it is ready to strike me at any moment, a special vertigo which is now part of my very physiology.

Célestine was like that earthquake. Célestine was also like that first LSD trip, the one you perhaps took in a deli in Brooklyn, where suddenly the colors all shifted towards the green end of the spectrum and your eyes became fish-eye lenses, distorting your total visual field, and the sounds became plastic, and time became infinitely variable, and you realized that reality is neurology, and is not absolute. Célestine was a personal hotspot, emitting her own special Wi-Fi signal which connected you to the Célestine web, and only the Célestine web. There was of course an element of unconditional support, a solidarity with one’s primary partner in the world adventure no matter where it took you both. I was now shoulder to shoulder with Célestine at the barricades, just as she had been with me during my shortlived lunatic political career (which almost landed us both in prison and taught us the old lesson about philosopher-princes).

We took a deluxe two-berth Comfortline compartment with an en suite toilet and even a shower, complete with toiletries, which we never used. Unusually, Célestine wanted the upper berth, which she normally said made her feel like a piece of carry-on luggage stowed in the overhead bin, but now made her feel as though she were flying over the green canopy of a Caribbean island rain forest. She clambered up the white metal ladder, hooked to the upper berth by our resolutely cheerful sleeping-car attendant, like an eight-year-old girl on her first trip away from home. I must confess that the perforated plastic card-key lock system and security dead bolt inside the compartment completely killed that old Orient Express sense of exotic bonhomie, and replaced it with the feeling that one had been admitted to a rolling minimum-security prison for white-collar criminals heading, possibly, to the grotesquely ornate St. Gilles lock-up in Brussels. (For some reason, I flashed that the criminal/philosopher/artist Jean Genet was also riding on this prison train and was feeling quite at home.)

Before she ascended, Célestine sat on my bed and kissed me with as much passion and sensuality as she could while keeping her mouth shut tight, as was her new habit, the unspoken fear being the migration of insects from one body to another. I missed the mouth that fell wide open at the first touch of my lips, fell open with the evaporation of social will and any hint of reservation or resistance, the mouth that mindlessly invited—no, begged for—complete invasion and possession. I wondered if that mouth would ever return, perhaps immediately on our return trip from Budapest. And after the kiss, the by-now-ritual hearing-aid stethoscopic examination of the breasts and abdominal cavity, Célestine pulling open the top of her pinstriped cotton pajamas (they looked like the New York Yankees’ home uniform, though she never wore them at home) and giving her breasts to me, now not her lover but her diagnosing physician. I could hear the vibrations of the rails in her flesh, and I could hear the insects too, clamoring for my attention and creating little capsules of sound that, in the overheated compartment, began to say rhythmical, nonsensical things to me, the way you might hear voices in the motor of a treadmill you were jogging on, or in the gnawing of an electric pencil sharpener. But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, it seems, that we construct meanings where there are none.

So too, the insect voices speaking to me from deep within Célestine, for by the time she left my bed for her own flight deck, the nonsensical, rhythmical things had become sensical, sequential, gnomic things that were full of meaning. I could still hear them through the upper bunk, shifting in tone and clarity as Célestine shifted from back to side. The insects knew why we were going to Budapest, and they were feeling persecuted. I turned off my Pures and put them into their puck-like container, which sported separate niches for each instrument, both receivers, and extra batteries, but as I placed the container on the fold-out table crammed tight to my berth and turned out the light, the insect-voice residue was still strong in my ears, like a bubbling, chittering excrescence of wax.

And so we rocked and rolled our way through a dreamy nighttime landscape towards Munich, and then wrapped ourselves in the modernist, leather-clad luxury of the Railjet, which left Munich at 09:27 and arrived in Budapest at 16:49, after pauses in Salzburg and Vienna.

YOU KNOW HERVÉ BLOMQVIST, of course. He sent you to me, and that was very much in accordance with his assumed role of social enabler and political provocateur, with a special emphasis on combining the two. He met Zoltán Molnár when Molnár, a notorious Hungarian surgeon who at times had been sought by Interpol for his involvement in the illegal international trading of human organs for transplants, and who was in the habit of materializing as if by magic as the proprietor of pop-up transplant clinics in places like Kosovo and Moldova, slipped surreptitiously into Paris to conduct clandestine seminars on the politicization of the human body and the response of the international medical establishment to that politicization. According to Hervé, who was, as you know, an intimate member of our intellectual family even as a student, Dr. Molnár flaunted his vested interest in subverting the establishment of government regulation of the organ trade, while at the same time making an inflammatory case for the humanistic benefit of that regulation. Let poor people in impoverished countries sell their kidneys to the rich, he said. It’s organic capitalism of the best kind, and is good for everybody, and should be monetized and industrialized to the maximum degree.

Naturally we googled the good doctor to the maximum degree before we made an appointment for Célestine’s mastectomy at the Molnár Clinic on Rákóczi út in Budapest. We eschewed the offer relayed by his office of a package deal which included a Malév flight and a room at the Gellért; we wanted some distance between ourselves and the very enthusiastic doctor, and the all-inclusive deal, which involved meals at a restaurant called La Bretonne, felt like an entrapment, an intimacy urged with such intensity that it bordered on the salacious. And yet, what we were seeking was intimate, was perversely salacious, and we were aware that our diffidence was an emotional paradox which would not stand up to rational scrutiny. Only Dr. Molnár, Hervé assured us, of all his many subterranean contacts in the medical world garnered during his sub-rosa gamboling, would agree to allow me to perform Célestine’s mastectomy under his supervision. Only Dr. Molnár, said Hervé, with that disarming boyish sweetness that lightly masked a rather ruthless intelligence, only the good doctor would see that the removal of Célestine’s insect-infested breast was a neurological imperative and not a psychiatric one. Molnár was of the school that believed apotemnophilia arose from a congenital cerebral dysfunction and that its symptoms could be relieved only by complying with the patient’s wish for amputation. Needless to say, it pleased both Molnár’s and Hervé’s sense of anarchy and social subversion to support this view, and it didn’t take much for Molnár to absorb Célestine’s case into his already edgy caseload. He had presided over only one other apo event: a male twenty-eight-year-old sex worker in Cologne who wanted to remove his left leg below the knee and who, frustrated by the reluctance of any doctor to amputate when there was no apparent physical reason to do so, tried on several occasions to jam his leg under a moving tram, causing great consternation in the city’s Stadtbahn offices, not to mention the streets themselves. After the man visited the Molnár Clinic (according to the colorful emailed brochure originating in Romania), the patient’s life improved on every level, including the professional, for he found a thriving specialized clientele in his new incarnation which he had never known existed.

And so we encountered the flamboyant doctor in his lair in a dense industrial suburb of Budapest which housed, among countless other international corporations, the Israeli Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. This proximity to legitimate medical businesses gave some comfort to me and Célestine, although the clinic itself was undeniably shady, located, as it was, totally underground in the poured-concrete entrails of an enormous, deteriorating complex. We found ourselves in the windowless Executive Director’s Consulting Room, slumped in red-and-yellow butterfly chairs that had somehow survived the sixties, waiting for our preliminary tranche of instruction from the chef himself. On the walls were posters in several languages, which seemed to be extolling the virtues of medical tourism in several countries—Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, India—none of which was Hungary.

“My luminaries!” he sang out. “I am thrilled to have you here. I have been rereading both your works in preparation for our glorious collaboration.”

“Collaboration?”

“You will forgive my enthusiasm and my presumption. But you must accept that what we are here today to do with each other cannot be subsumed under the mantle of medical procedure alone. For me to put the scalpel into your hand, my dearest Monsieur Arosteguy, is basically a crime, you understand. Though I fully comprehend the emotional ownership of the breast involved with the husband and the wife. In the light of that ownership, the alien surgeon is an intruder, a rapist, a violator. Why should he be allowed to sever that most beautiful organ from that beloved body? Who the fuck is he anyway? No, only the husband should have the right to do that intimate severing with all its resonances of personal history. And so on. But legally it’s a crime. So what’s the solution in our heads? In my head, the solution is that we are not committing surgery, but are creating an art/philosophy/crime/surgery project. The three of us. A collective. The Arosteguy Collective Project. Do you agree?”

Célestine and I glanced at each other and could see that we were immediately in sync. We were overwhelmed, horrified, and also delighted. After all, the normal terror in the face of life-altering surgery did not exist for Célestine. Like that poor boy in Cologne, she was ready to throw her breast under the steel wheels of the tram if there was to be no surgery. So focused was she on the removal of the insect-sac, as she had taken to calling it (myself, I found this repugnant, but I could say nothing), that she had lost all fear of clinical misadventure, of death on the operating table. In this context, the pretentious rhapsodies of our good doctor leavened a potentially somber occasion with a dose of playful metaphysics, however suspect, that we found surprising and welcome.

Even more surprising, perhaps, was the seriousness with which he conducted his tutelage over the next few days. He had arranged our “gathering” to overlap a colleague’s procedure—only a lumpectomy, unfortunately, but still it was the breast, and of course still illuminating for one who had never been in an operating room—and insisted that we both “audit the performance.” I will spare you the details, but not my reactions: it was sensational and exhilarating to the point that I began to question my sanity, or more accurately my mental health. After that audition I could not wait to take up the scalpel, which Molnár first had me do in a bizarre fashion: he had commissioned a Molnár Clinic app for the iPad and designed an electronic scalpel which allowed one to perform several kinds of virtual breast surgery on the iPad itself. It reminded me of the early days of frog dissection over the internet, but of course was immeasurably more sophisticated—freakishly so, even incorporating (the perfect word) breasts of different sizes, races, and nipple/areola configurations.

Célestine was eager to try out the app, and she became particularly adept at the radical mastectomy, in which not only the breast tissue is taken but also the axillary lymph nodes and even the chest muscles. She seemed drawn to the Asian breast model, and I attributed this to her complex relationship with her Vietnamese general practitioner, Dr. Trinh. Célestine was amused by this idea but didn’t accept it as valid. In any case, she and Molnár had many intense discussions about the need, or lack of need, for a radical mastectomy in her case. Ultimately, she felt that it was not indicated, given that her insects were not analogous to a metastasizing cancer which might invade her lymph nodes; a simple mastectomy would suffice. We agreed that the three of us would write a paper on the collaboration of the patient with the disease, and then, as a consequence, the patient’s collaboration with the physician on the nature of the treatment of the disease.

Molnár tried his best to maintain professional decorum throughout our clinical education, but he got quite drunk at what seemed to be his own restaurant, La Bretonne, and we actually had to endure his sobbing and wailing in happiness as we toasted each other with a particularly medicinal apricot pálinka. “I have so much respect and love for you. I have resisted documenting everything, so much respect is invoked. But I am proud to be interpeded within your long-standing love affair. I feel that I am a lover to you both, in the way that I have read that you have taken on some students as lovers in the past. And yet, and yet I am also your teacher in this enterprise, and you are my students. This is something so delicious and tart, it forces tears to spring from my eyes.” This is not something you want to see in your surgeon, and it did rattle us. It caused us an anxious night in our suite—they had upgraded us spontaneously—at the Corinthia Hotel. But the next morning our doctor presided over our iPad surgery session with full, dispassionate propriety, responding perhaps to the distancing effect that working on an anonymous African breast, delivered by the iPad’s HD Retina display, had for all of us. Molnár assured me that when I began to cut into Célestine’s flesh, the effect of the cool light of the surgical lamps and the masking-off of my wife’s face would have the same effect, and I would have the detachment to be an excellent surgeon. “See how steady your hands are? Beautiful. Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy. You are a natural. You have been rehearsing this your entire life.”

It would not be until after the surgery, later in the hotel, when I could, all by myself, remove the surprisingly large and clumsy surgical staples with the disposable white-plastic-handled staple remover, no more sophisticated than something you’d buy at an office-supply store, that the emotion would kick in, that the vast and deep reservoirs of our personal history together would overflow, and we would be overwhelmed by what we had done.

But here, at the turning point of both our lives, mine and Célestine’s, and in a sense yours as well, dear Naomi, is where I have to end the narrative which has submerged me, and to surface again, and come back to you.