Consumed

12

THE FEAR MADE NAOMI feel closer to Ari, almost to the point of a destabilizing fusion. As her own fear of kidnapping by DPRK agents amplified (they would probably pose as entomologists or audiologists), she was certain that she was picking up that vibe from Arosteguy himself, and that he in turn picked up hers. This fusion, however, proved to have its own usefulness. Once she had found the Verbatim drive and discovered that it was encrypted, she felt she had to become Arosteguy to stumble upon the drive’s password. She spent the two days after Elke left crawling nanoscopically through Arosteguy’s electronics, none of which had even the simplest password to protect it. She combed through his Contacts app, his email, his desktop littered with disparate thumbnails of photos (some in 3D, though she never found the necessary 3D glasses), folders, magazines, technical PDFs, user manuals. She trolled the websites revealed in the History menu of his Safari browser, desperate for any clue that would unlock the thumb drive. She delved into arcana in his old MacBook Pro that she had never paid attention to before: Disk Utility encryption; FileVault; recovery keys; the Keychain Access app in Mac Utilities. She plunged deeply into security forums on the net and came up with a few passwords that Arosteguy had used for some political and philosophy websites that demanded them; but he had obviously been careless about, or more probably disdainful of, securing anything at all, apocalyptically inviting, she felt, the world’s swarms of viruses and scams to come and overwhelm him, to take his machines and his past life away, to leave him stripped and dripping, as she had herself seen him more than once.

She could not leave the house, of course. She could not risk being rendered to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to one of the undocumented gulags, concentration camps, apartment prisons, there to rot while the boy deity Kim Jong Un matured and hardened into a ripe old age, attended to by his court philosophes Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy, who would be unaware that she was so near. She knew that this scenario was ridiculous, and yet it stirred painfully in her viscera as a living and undeniable creature, and when she accidentally tripped onto the official, rather sumptuous English-language webpage of the DPR of K, as they called it (it was in Ari’s browser history, and finding that he had visited it many times chilled her to the bone), she jumped back from the screen of his laptop and immediately slammed it shut, terrified that the webpage could track her, could send her Tokyo coordinates directly to the deadly entomologists, who would kick down her door, muscle her into a waiting Audi, blindfold her, drug her, expunge her. She blamed her creative paranoia on a lack of protein; she had been reduced to eating nothing but plain instant ramen noodles for three of the four days since Ari’s disappearance, nothing else edible having been left except for a small bottle of soy sauce, which lasted just over one day.

She was in the bathroom when it occurred to her that the Verbatim stick might have been encrypted by someone other than Ari, and this thought depressed her and led her to consider flying to Paris to seek the help of Hervé Blomqvist, whom Elke had labelled an IT genius and who would have reasons to help her unravel the mystery of Célestine’s fate. Or would he? Tina might in fact be dead, and Hervé might be implicated in some way, either in the murder itself or in some aspect of covering up details. A perilous course to take, then. More depression. Naomi opened the jar of cold cream in which the thumb drive had been hastily (it seemed to her) concealed and began to smear some over her cheeks, which, like most of her skin, had become hot, dry, and stinging. When she used “kanebomoistagewcold” as a password, the Verbatim unceremoniously unlocked with that delicious metallic Mac padlock sound effect; when the drive appeared on her desktop, it called itself “La mort de Célestine.”

THE NAME WAS PROVOCATIVE ENOUGH. Was Ari being direct and Célestine was dead, or was Ari being ironic, given that Célestine was not dead, and her death had been faked? And was it Ari himself who had named the drive, or had it been someone else? Opening the drive, Naomi found two folders, “Vidéo” and “Photos.” She opened the video folder and there found one long QuickTime file called “PRIVATE.” It was not password protected, and so when she double-tapped her trackpad, the QuickTime Player opened on a mysterious frame, which, when she tapped the play triangle, revealed itself to be an extreme close-up of Célestine’s mastectomy scar, just a Rothko-like abstraction until the camera pulled away to expose a calm and thoughtful Célestine submitting herself to the camera clinically, without carnality, as though for a mammogram. The revelation of the scar triggered a shot of adrenaline in Naomi: first, because the mutilation of Célestine was shocking; second, because it meant that at least part of Ari’s confession was true, though the cause could still have been cancer rather than an apotemnophile’s hallucination about a buzzing horde of insects nesting in her breast. The camera moved over to Tina’s right side, prompting her to take her remaining breast in both hands and offer it to the lens, compressing it analytically and accentuating its engorged nipple. The camera was still very close to her, making it difficult to determine where she was lying, or even if she was lying; the force of gravity on her breast, which would have at least hinted at whether she was upright or flat on her back, was negated by Tina’s breast-holding, and the camera spent some time in extreme close-up mode, surveying Tina’s face and then body, tracking down her only slightly protruding belly until it arrived at her thinning bush of graying pubic hair, where it lingered as Tina rotated her hips gently towards the lens. Naomi estimated from the detail of the pubic hairs, especially as the camera moved, that the video bit rate was reasonable, probably the AVCHD high standard of twenty-four megabits per second. The color was very good; the room was apparently lit by muted daylight coming through a window somewhere to the right, the skin tone cool and accurate with no yellow contamination by incandescent lights.

Eventually the camera backed away, floating languorously, so Naomi could see that Célestine was lying, not on a bed, but on a worktable set up on a mezzanine overlooked by massive wooden ceiling beams. The beams—pockmarked oak smeared with a white glaze—were of a now-extinct size and configuration that suggested they were medieval, and thus that the apartment was likely in the Jewish Marais section of Paris. It was not, then, the apartment of the Arosteguys. Célestine, somehow comfortable lying exposed on the rough butcher-block surface of the table, continued to intimidate Naomi, who was certain that if she had a mastectomy she would never allow herself to be photographed naked, much less reveal her wound publicly.

When a slim-hipped naked young man entered the frame, Naomi immediately knew it was Hervé, even before he walked around the side of the table to place his hooked penis in Célestine’s coolly accommodating mouth. He brought with him something metallic that looked like a ray gun from a 1950s sci-fi movie, pale blue and silver and trailing a black cable. The muscles of his forearm were taut from supporting the substantial weight of the mysterious device. The naked young woman who entered from frame right, however, she did not immediately recognize, even after the woman had knelt at the head of the table in order to kiss and lick Célestine’s mastectomy scar, her sinewy left arm stretching out so that her fingers could burrow into Tina’s pubic bush. It was not until the camera drifted into a low-angle close-up that Naomi could identify Chase Roiphe, the star of Nathan’s Toronto portfolio, and some of the pieces began to click into place.

But not all. After less than a minute of casual sex play among the three of them that seemed more like a social ritual than a hot orgy, Hervé stepped back from Célestine and became absorbed in the manipulation of a complex array of buttons on the body of the ray gun. Chase also detached from Célestine, who seemed to understand this as a signal to pose for what Naomi assumed was some kind of 3D capture. Tina swept back her long gray hair and draped it behind her so that it hung over the end of the table like a curtain. With a laugh, she then arranged herself into a grotesque, contorted pose, which Chase helped her to achieve by minutely adjusting the angles of her asymmetrically bent legs, splayed fingers, twisted arms, arched neck. It struck Naomi that she was playing the role of a tormented corpse in a 1960s Hammer horror film.

Chase stepped back to watch as Hervé squeezed the trigger on the pistol grip of his ray gun and began to sweep laser light over Célestine’s body; a grid of red crosshairs, emanating from the device’s twin spacepod-like nozzles, undulated like a ghostly manta ray over the contours of her flesh. Hervé brushed Célestine delicately, meticulously spray-painting every inch of her body with the light as she fought to hold the arranged position, her belly contracting with laughter as some unheard words were spoken and jokes were cracked. The camera floated gracefully around the trio, at times moving in to follow the sweep of the lasers and then tilting up to catch the expression on Chase’s face, so full of love, excitement, amusement, sensuality. The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent-shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed; if you looked only at their bodies, the two youngsters could have been siblings, Chase’s a female version of the bicycle-hardened physique of Hervé. Now Chase closed the eyes of Célestine, as one might close the eyes of a cadaver, in preparation for Hervé to work the scanner over her face, but abruptly, the video ended. Naomi could not be sure that the camera operator was Arosteguy (the framing and movement were so assured!), but she knew he was there somewhere, watching and guiding.

Ultimately, she was disappointed by the video, wondering if after the scanning, whatever it was intended to do, there was sex among the four of them, and wishing that somehow she could have seen that instead. The confirmation that Chase Roiphe was sexually intimate with Hervé and the Arosteguys was of course valuable, and established the luscious necessity of a focused visit to Toronto, to Nathan, and to the Roiphes. Naomi was now convinced that Chase’s bizarre trauma was connected with the death of Célestine Arosteguy; the mouth aspect, the French-language revulsion, the self-mutilation, the eating of her own flesh, were too perfect. She quit QuickTime Player and double-tapped the “Photos” folder, which popped open to reveal two sub-folders: “Célestine est morte” and “Des photos pour M. Vernier.”

THERE WERE 147 JPEGS in the “Célestine est morte” file, which Naomi immediately decided to import into Lightroom so that she could catalogue and organize them with all her other research photos. As the thumbnails of the images loaded into the Import screen, she saw that they were all black and white and had been deliberately degraded in quality to give them a vintage feel in the Hipstamatic style—very contrasty, heavy vignetting, digital grain added to mimic Kodak Professional Tri-X panchromatic 35mm film, the old high-speed standard for newspaper and documentary journalism. All were starkly lit by a harsh on-camera flash in the tradition of the 1940s Speed Graphic flashbulb crime-scene photos of Weegee, and it occurred to her that the subtle linking of these images to socially historical crime photos was an attempt to authenticate them, because now that the importing was concluded and Naomi could examine them full screen in Lightroom’s Library module, they struck her as quite obviously posed and theatrical and manipulative, qualities that disturbed her even more than the content of the images itself.

The setting was not the attic workroom of the video, but the now-familiar space of the Arosteguys’, not much changed from its configuration in the various interviews that Naomi had seen. The sequence of the photos told a little story. Célestine is dead and has been dismembered, as per the police photos, with her body parts strewn randomly around the apartment and her torso on the couch. Hervé, Chase, and Arosteguy himself, gradually revealed to be completely naked as the shots’ perspective widens and they emerge from behind various elements of furniture, take their turns biting small pieces from her thighs, her hips, her shoulders, her belly—but never all three in one frame, which suggests that one of them is always assigned camera duty. Blood is dripping from their mouths and from the bite-sized wounds they are creating, and there is a glazed, zombie-like affect to all their faces which somehow embraces primordial pleasure as well as toothy efficiency. Célestine’s severed head, hair swept back as in the video but now parted to display a crudely cracked-open and hollowed-out skull, sits on the small table next to the old Loewe TV, watching the ghoulish trio with half-closed eyes (her brain is eventually to be found on the kitchen drainboard). And most shockingly—in a way that Naomi felt only she could appreciate—Célestine’s torso begins the session with two full breasts, and when all the mouths have had their way with her left breast, violently ripping and tearing and seeming to eat it on camera, what is left is a raggedly circular bloody wound, not a clever mastectomy scar. Her right breast, though also savaged, remains attached to the torso.

The missing breast. Naomi obsessively scanned the face and body of Arosteguy in every photo in which he appeared, searching for a hint of mischief, of irony, of theater and performance. She wanted him to be sending her a message that said, “I was fantasizing for you about the mastectomy, the Hungarian surgery. It never happened. What you are seeing now is the reality. We three are cannibals and we ate that breast.” But she found nothing but ritualistic solemnity on the faces of all three. And it was bracing, in a distancing, Brechtian V-effekt fashion, for her to see Ari’s naked body in this context, from this perspective, so familiar in its powerful fullness, its slope-shouldered monumentality, that she could feel the weight of him on her, could feel his teeth in the meat of her shoulder, and yet also feel how separate she was from him, how alien he truly was. In the video, Célestine’s body had reminded Naomi of the famous sequence of photos of the nude Simone de Beauvoir taken by the American photographer Art Shay in a Chicago apartment’s bathroom. They both had the same good muscular rump, slightly heavy legs showing age-puckering behind the knees, and slim waist, though Célestine had fuller breasts, and Naomi had never seen a photo of Beauvoir with her long hair down (even primping in the Chicago bathroom after her shower, she wore high heels and her hair up in a tight chignon). Or perhaps Naomi was forcing a physical connection when it was really the seduction of students that linked them, a scandal even in those days before political correctness, and for which Beauvoir and her eternal president Jean-Paul Sartre were infamous. She had never discovered a nude photo of the tiny, toad-like Sartre.

The title of the third folder, “Des photos pour M. Vernier,” was ominous in its implications even without being opened: it suggested that Arosteguy at least, and possibly Hervé and Chase as well, had collaborated with the prefect of police, Auguste Vernier, by sending him photos of their crime, and this proved to be the case. In the nine JPEGs in the folder (these were in color and not archly Hipstamaticked), the apartment has been abandoned by the trio and left to Célestine’s poor segmented corpse. When Naomi double-checked her video and photo crime files, she saw that these exact photos were all that had been presented by the police and by the press as evidence of the murder of Célestine Arosteguy; there were no photos generated by the police themselves, and this of course led Naomi to wonder if the police in fact had possession of the body parts, or only photos of them provided by the unknown criminal or criminals. Was it only the photos and Célestine’s disappearance that launched the Préfecture’s investigation, or did they also have some physical evidence of her murder? Did they have any of the “Célestine est morte” series of photos as well? The titling of the Vernier folder suggested that they did not. If they had, they would undoubtedly have picked up Hervé for interrogation and possibly tried to extradite Chase Roiphe as well. What, then, was the purpose of that series? Was it being held back for the purpose of blackmail? Who would be the blackmailer?

It was as she was considering how best to approach a face-to-face interview with M. Vernier, and how that might tie in with a trip to Toronto to conduct her own sly interrogation of Chase Roiphe, that her laptop pulsed with that spooky Skype outer-space-fish ringtone. She jerked mindlessly in surprised sync with that pulse, so disembodied had she become. Skype had been kept running just in case Ari tried to get in touch, but this call was from Nathan. She slid the cursor over the green Answer button, tapped the Air’s trackpad, and immediately was looking at the very worried face of Nathan in his basement bedroom in Toronto.

“I can’t see you,” he said.

Skype’s default was no video. Naomi slid the cursor over the video-camera icon with the red line running through it, but she couldn’t pull the trigger. “I don’t want you to see me right now,” she said, the words ragged, as if shredding on her teeth. She hadn’t spoken for days. Nathan looked stressed and gaunt, although it could have been the connection, which was not good, and his voice being out of sync exacerbated the pangs of separation and loneliness that she immediately felt on seeing him. She was terrified to activate that little frame in the bottom right corner of the Skype window, which would show her not only to Nathan but to herself. She was sure she would see a female clone of Arosteguy at his most disheveled and confused, so mingled had they become in her head. Though she felt no guilt over her affair with Ari, given Nathan’s Hungarian adventure, she could still smell the sex of her last few days—it had comforted her, trailing around like a cloud of perfume—and felt that Nathan would smell it too if he could see her. She did not want to inflict that on him, at least not now.

“Why not? Omi? Why not see you?”

Though his image was wrinkling and slip-sliding, she could read his tightly controlled concern and it pained her. “Will you allow me to come to Toronto? Cross-fertilization?”

Her voice was little and childlike, and her unheard-of submissiveness disturbed Nathan greatly. “What do you mean by ‘allow’? That doesn’t sound like you at all. What’s going on? Are you in trouble? Do you want me to come there? I will, you know. Just say it and I will.”

“I wouldn’t want to step on your toes or anything. You’ve got your thing going with the Roiphes. You don’t need me messing it up.”

“I’d love to see you here. It wouldn’t be a problem. But ‘cross-fertilization’? You mean Chase Roiphe’s connection to your French philosophers?”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean. She might know some stuff. I’m kinda at a dead end. I dunno. Maybe.”

“You sound really down. Is there something wrong with you? Physically? Let me see you.” Nathan was thinking that Arosteguy had beaten Naomi up, or that she had even gotten into a sick kind of dominant/submissive sex with him that had spilled over into her working life, and her little-girl voice was the expression of that. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, imagining that when he opened them he would see Naomi’s face floating in his Skype window, battered and bruised and broken like one of those TMZ photos featuring celebrity abuse. The window remained dark.

“I’m just tired and dragged out. You don’t need to see me like that. It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Nathan knew not to push it. “So? You coming to Toronto? I’m sure I can set something up with the Roiphes. If it’s interesting, maybe we collaborate on one big book. Who knows?” Nathan knew he was taking a chance suggesting such a thing; maintaining the separation of church and state was a big deal with Naomi; combining forces with anyone was always a stern test of her basic insecurity, her fear of fusion that would inexorably lead to annihilation, and she rarely allowed it to happen. But he was desperate to enfold her somehow, to draw them back together, and he couldn’t think of any other way to do it, despite the risk of a major backfire. When she didn’t flinch, however, Nathan realized he could not take it as a good sign.

“I might have to stop off in Paris first, but, yeah. I’m coming to Toronto.” She managed to hit Mute a beat before she burst into heavy tears which jetted out of her eyes and onto her keyboard and trackpad. When she swiped at the wetness with the sleeve of her hoodie, she disconnected Nathan.

PROFESSOR MATSUDA had manifested fear, and that had made Yukie Oshima fearful herself. He would not meet her in a noodle shop or a restaurant or anything associated with eating, though that was not quite how he framed it. Yukie got the message anyway, so they agreed to meet as if by accident in a sleek, modern store in Shibuya which declared itself, in English, in white Comic Sans font on a red banner background, a “Comic Speciality Store and Cafe.” It was not a venue he would ever willingly enter on his own—Shibuya was listed on travel websites as “the fountain of teen trendiness”—but then neither would any of his colleagues. This was not a rendezvous to be noted.

He was as natty and proper and controlled as she had remembered him, and she, she was certain, was as loopy and dangerous as he had remembered her. During the student uprisings at Todai, the university had clandestinely sought Yukie’s advice on how to present its conservative case to the youth of Japan—it would not have been seemly for an academic institution to have engaged spin doctors and PR hacks on its behalf, though that’s what it was doing—and Matsuda had accepted the role of point man for Todai in that endeavor, though reluctantly; the shyness, propriety, humbleness, and obscurity of the man, all attributes which made him perfect for the job, also made it excruciating for him. Now he was shoulder to shoulder with his unlikely collaborator (he had earnestly wished never to see Yukie again, though of course would never express this) at a bookshelf fronted by trays teeming with graphic novels and the Japanese version of comic books, which were more like paperbacks than the classic comics of vintage America. He could not bring himself to flip through any of the colorful offerings, as Yukie was doing when he arrived, particularly because she had stationed herself in front of a collection of BBC books—the initials stood for Be-Boys Comics, which flaunted the Mars male symbol in black on a yellow square as its logo—and was leafing through an edition that featured on its cover two long-haired, windswept men with very feminine occidental features who managed to embrace face to face while riding on a motorcycle. Typical of the woman, thought Matsuda. She would know he found this offensive.

On his approach, Yukie had turned to face him and bowed, eyes down, hands clasped before her, manga book still in hand but now firmly closed. “Professor Matsuda-san. I thank you for the meeting.”

Matsuda had nodded in return. “You have asked me for the French professor’s address. I have tried to contact him to gain his permission, but he has not responded. He has also missed several classes and appointments, and that has caused some worry. I agreed to meet you because I fear that something tragic has happened to him and thought that you might perhaps have some information that could ease my worry.”

“My Canadian friend was staying at his house. She emailed me that the professor had left the house and not returned for days, but now she no longer answers my emails, my texts, my phone calls, and so I am worried about her as well. I try not to imagine all the things that I can imagine. I must go to that house and see what the reality there is.”

Matsuda picked up a book and nervously hefted it in his hand without looking at it. “You will not see any reality in that house,” he said. He turned to Yukie with a disturbed, clenched smile. “Strangely, the house is owned by the Japanese Collective of Medical Entomology. Why they would need such a house I have no idea, but it was provided to the philosopher as a courtesy, I understand, by the collective itself, as arranged by the Department of Philosophy at Todai.” He turned to go, momentarily forgetting that he had a book in his hand, then turned back. As he replaced the book, he muttered, “Of course, the philosopher was for some reason interested in the use of entomological warfare in China during World War Two.” He shook his head in dismay. “Airplanes spraying plague-infected fleas and flies onto an unsuspecting populace. He mentioned to me that the North Koreans still allege that during their war with the South, the Americans and their new allies the Japanese conspired to bring Japanese entomological warfare to the Korean peninsula. A strange coincidence.”

Yukie was dazzled by the twists and turns, sensing a wonderful story with international weight but not at all certain she could connect the dots. “Professor-san, are you suggesting that there is a link between the renting of the house from the collective and the sudden absence of our colleagues? What could that possibly be?”

Matsuda did not smile. “And will you also be turning this affair into a publicity circus?”

It was uncharacteristic of Matsuda to be so blunt, not to mention vengeful, and Yukie took it as an indication that there was something complex and worrisome about Arosteguy’s disappearance that went deeper even than the French domestic murder scandal. She immediately thought that Naomi was dead and that Arosteguy had killed her, but for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual passion or deviancy. She could not fathom what those reasons could be.

“I would just like to have my friend Naomi back,” she said.

AND SO YUKIE FOUND HERSELF standing in front of the open gate of the Arosteguy house taking photos, like a tourist, she thought, at the Bates Psycho house on the Universal Studios back lot in Hollywood (as she had actually been at the time of Naomi’s Santa Monica escapade)—a very unwelcome association. Though her new Sony RX1 camera was renowned for its low-light capability and she was eager to exploit this, she had waited until the morning after her “accidental” meeting with Matsuda to go to the Arosteguy house, wanting the fullest of full daylight surrounding her. Still, once she had documented the garbage-strewn front garden and slid open the unlocked front door, she found darkness waiting for her in the house, and soon she was shooting at the widest aperture, f/2.0, with Auto ISO all the way up at times to 6400 at the camera’s preferred shutter speed of 1/80 of a second. The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman’s monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens’s diaphragm—elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades—to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. But beyond that, she had learned so much about photography from her friend, and here she was, using that knowledge to document this house, which was filling her camera with its devastating atmosphere of Japanese urban despair reflecting her own; the camera was inhaling it through that lens aperture, and would exhale it into Yukie’s flat from the screen of her computer when she got home again.

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.”

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.

SAMUEL BECKETT, apparently, had Dupuytren’s contracture in his right hand, which caused his outer fingers to curl inward and made shaking hands difficult and embarrassing. This pleased Hervé Blomqvist, who, while researching famous people who had Peyronie’s, looking particularly for those who rode bicycles, had discovered that many Peyronie’s victims also suffered from Baron Dupuytren’s, which suggested an immune system pathogenesis rather than a bicycle-riding problem. Hervé could now count himself one of that exclusive club, noticing a new ugly chevron-shaped swelling of tendon sheath in his left palm (he thought of shark gills) which would undoubtedly lead to an eventual contracting of his little and middle finger—a condition called “trigger finger”—to the point where he would no longer be able to straighten those fingers. He was willing to bet that Beckett had Peyronie’s too—he seemed to have had an appropriately contracted sex life—but doubted that there would ever be confirmation of that fact. He hefted the Creaform portable 3D scanner, which he had just used to scan his penis, still partially erect, and fantasized scanning Samuel Beckett’s penis as well as those of any number of other famous Peyronie’s sufferers. His current scan was more detailed than the one he had sent Chase Roiphe earlier in the day, but she probably didn’t need it. No, this one he was sending to Romme Vertegaal, somewhere in North Korea that was not Pyongyang.

The FabrikantBot 2 was chugging away downstairs, printing out the latest parts for the Juche Idea People’s Universal Folding Bicycle, meant to replace the flawed components of the bottom bracket internals which had caused Hervé so much grief as he rode the assembled prototype around the confines of his Rue Beaubourg flat in the 3rd arrondissement. The tight, acrobatic turns that were required had managed to lock up the pedals, and the pedals would not let go until they and their cranks had been completely disassembled and reassembled. A detailed Skyping of the photos and videos documenting the problem drew a quick response from Romme, who had somehow become the Universal Bicycle’s project manager. So positive and helpful, really, and definitely meriting the gift of a return printable scan.

Romme was intimately familiar with Hervé’s sex organ, of course, having helped guide it into various orifices during the wild days of the Arosteguys’ séminaires, which inevitably drew the obvious puns involving the words séminal and semence, and anything else related to sperm and semen. Hervé imagined that they must be very prudish in North Korea, as such repressive regimes always seem to be, and hoped that Romme would be alone in whatever ramshackle studio had been provided for him when Hervé’s gift penis began to print out, though there was a perverse tickle of pleasure at the thought that Romme might be caught holding an ABS replica of his Peyronie’s-twisted member by a strict cadre supervisor, and as a result be cast into the darkness of a reeducation camp like Jongori, Camp No. 12, about as far away from the capital and humanity as you could get.

But perhaps Romme would apply to the Peyronie’s scan the special effects makeup required to turn an ABS or possibly bioplastic penile replicant—muted and bland in uniform gray or powder blue—into a vibrant, living thing full of color and pores and texture. He doubted that Romme himself had such artistic skills, the kind that Chase had shown under the tutelage of the SFX team they had been assigned: Arthropoda Souterrain Effets Spéciaux, a French-Korean firm specializing in gargantuan arthropods for schools and scientific displays. It was a strange choice to say the least, given that arthropods did not bleed red blood, nor did they have skin, but Romme had been steadfast in using them because they could be counted on to be reasonably discreet; and, to be fair, they brought great gusto to creating fleshly things that no lobster or cricket ever incarnated—torn tendons, ruptured blood vessels, exposed hormone glands, splayed muscles—bringing to life Célestine’s tortured body parts, photos of which had convinced the préfet that a murder had in fact been committed.

It had ultimately been Chase who did the dog’s work, the Souterrain boys needing to be kept at arm’s length so that they would not be tempted to blow the whistle on Hervé when the crime-scene photos hit the net. Only Chase could have been entrusted with building the edible prosthetic left breast and the wound-FX application worn by Célestine that had covered the mastectomy scar in the cannibal series of photos. And it had been the original of that breast that was the clincher, the only body part actually found in the Arosteguys’ apartment: a pathetic, mutilated bowl of flesh bearing tooth marks and half a nipple found in the fridge, which was easily DNA certified as belonging to Célestine Arosteguy (her distraught sister Sophie, manager of a group of chalets in Chamonix, had been desperate to provide samples). He wondered if the préfet had had the presence of mind to have the breast teched out for cancer, but public momentum seemed to be demanding a cannibalistic murder. More thrilling that the breast had been ripped off and eaten than surgically removed. Complications were not yet welcome; they would be, eventually.

The breast-in-a-soup-bowl evidence had not been formally released to the press (the delicate, handmade Astier de Villatte earthenware bowl had been chosen specifically by Célestine for the purpose, and was not a customary luxury), but when Hervé had been interrogated by a quite cool young guy wearing an extremely narrow, double-breasted, six-button Costume National suit, striped in black and gray, with a zippered black sweater and no tie (Hervé couldn’t help but wonder if the suit was a rental calculated to make him feel at ease with this cop), and then later by the préfet himself, who wore something navy, subdued and conservative, which Hervé suspected was Gucci, it became obvious that what Aristide had called the cheese in the mousetrap had been taken, and the police were quite confident that they had a major homicide on their hands, despite the lack of an entire body.

The cannibal photos would be released around the world at what Romme called “the politically effective moment.” (Romme had promised to digitally alter the faces of Hervé and Chase, but Hervé was now thinking he would like to be at the center of the ensuing firestorm, whatever the consequences.) What this meant, Hervé could only guess. He could see that the coronation of Aristide as a refugee in Pyongyang would be a slap in the face of the French government, which was currently harassing the DPRK over their nuclear testing; that would be even better than the actor Gérard Depardieu’s giving up his French passport in disgust over his tax rate and receiving a hastily mocked-up Russian passport from President Putin himself. But the cannibal photos? The very staging of Célestine’s death itself ? Were they comic-book illustrations of the horrors of capitalism, of the insatiable, all-devouring Western consumerist ethos? The expected pronouncement by Aristide on his safe arrival in the capital would undoubtedly clarify everything.

Hervé tapped the trackpad of his MacBook Pro and dragged the STL file encoding his penis into a special Korean version of Dropbox. The sending of such a file, no matter what its actual content, was the signal developed by him and Romme indicating that a Skype session was wanted. Despite the regime’s apparent affection for M. Vertegaal, he was constantly monitored by a pleasant team of five or six young cadres of both sexes, and was officially restricted to a living range of thirty-five kilometers from the center of Pyongyang, though Romme said that he had been able to bicycle alone beyond the first military perimeter, where the adolescent soldiers seemed shocked and flustered at the sight of a Westerner but were nevertheless very polite. Lately, however, Romme had been escorted in an elite “2.16” car (Kim Jong Il had been born on February 16, and the luxury cars whose special white license plates began with those numbers did not have to stop at roadblocks and checkpoints) to a research facility of some kind far from the capital, so secret that he would not talk about it even to Hervé, who was used to functioning as Romme’s safety valve; in this case, the valve had been firmly shut off. Hervé could sometimes feel the presence of the cute monitoring team, and could even see them hovering anxiously in the background of Romme’s Skype window, at which times Hervé and Romme would speak elliptically, often in English, knowing that the team was more adept at French. Their excuse, only grudgingly accepted, was that for technology, English was the appropriate language. At times, Hervé feared that Romme had in fact been exiled from the capital, a form of punishment that fell short of doing time in a reeducation camp but was scary enough.

Hervé had expected a coded email message appointing a time for a Skype session in return for his STL file, but almost immediately he heard the fishy Skype tone bubble up, and in no time was looking at the face of Romme Vertegaal in all its moody glory, Romme seeming fit and splendid in his many badges depicting members of the Kim dynasty. Hervé clicked the video-camera icon and a small window showing his own face popped up at the bottom right of the lower toolbar. He liked the way he looked, and thought that the two of them were very hot in an internationally subversive and dangerous way, definitely material for a big movie someday.

“Salut, Romme. Are you in Pyongyang?”

“Hervé. Thank you for your funny file. Amusing memories. I need eventually to talk to you about the FabrikantBot deal. My colleagues are worried about US sanctions against the DPRK, as usual, and are concerned to hide the North Korean origin of the FabrikantBot machines. Would it make sense to set up a French plant somewhere rather than a German one? It would be similar to the pending Eternal President’s Voice hearing instruments gambit we have with the FrancoPhonics corporation. This and other considerations.

“But now, we need to discuss the geo-coordinates of Aristide Arosteguy. We have lost him. We don’t know where he is. You’ve read the reports about his death; you’ve seen the tweeted photos. We’re not convinced. The detail of the exploding hearing instruments has made us cautious. We feel that this is meant to be a message to us. Madame A. is extremely upset and has been disturbing the peace of the Korean Friendship Association. She was working on my next film script with the Juche Idea Study Group Film Unit, and they were eagerly awaiting the input of Monsieur Arosteguy. As you know, they are both still much revered for their support of The Judicious Use of Insects at the Cannes Film Festival.”

“I’m shocked to hear this,” said Hervé. “I had some nice desperate emails from the Canadian girl saying that the philosophe had disappeared after leaving the Tokyo house for unknown reasons. We know that he was on his way to meet our DPRK agents under the guise of a hearing-aid appointment brokered by Elke Jungebluth. Of course, it would have been appropriate for him to disappear after that meeting. I thought that he would be with you, that I might even see him in this window with you and have some words with him.”

“We have lost him. He never arrived at the woman audiologist’s hotel in Tokyo. Our agents were with her, as arranged with Arosteguy himself.”

“Could there have actually been an electronic intervention? Could the hearing instruments have been tampered with, or perhaps substituted at some point with lethal intent? We know that Seoul did not want Arosteguy to end up in Pyongyang.”

“We cannot rule it out. It is known that the Soviets used exploding headphones in the 1960s in Bulgaria to kill the defecting orchestra conductor Solovyov.”

“And the Canadian girl? Naomi Seberg?”

“We do have her, thanks to you. She is in transit. An inconvenience meant a slight change of plans involving a long journey by train. We expect her within a week. Madame A. is curious to meet her.”

“Her mental state? The girl?” Hervé needed concrete details; he deserved them. He did feel a giddy twinge of guilt for having put Naomi in play with Romme and the North Koreans, but he was sure she would be excited by the drama, would thank him later, as they say. And perversely, he himself was excited by the drama, by the fact that he had actually influenced international events in a quasi-criminal way. It was he who had pointed out to Romme the danger to their exploit represented by Naomi, even though he had been instrumental in connecting her with Arosteguy. His motives were, as usual, mostly opaque, even to himself, but definitely involved the deliciousness of mixing volatile and explosive elements and then standing back to watch the cataclysm.

“Subdued. Our team has been gentle with her, but of course the events have been stressful. They told her that she would be with the Arosteguys, and that seemed to mollify her, but of course now that’s not entirely true. It will be interesting to see how she reacts. I’ll have her Skype with you when I can.”

Hervé observed Romme with some sadness, feeling that he had not seen the real Romme, the wickedly funny, engaging, and intellectually seductive one, in any of the Skype sessions from the DPRK. He missed that Romme, and wondered if there was really any of that Romme left; he had spent so long there under surveillance, shaping himself to fit the requirements and the fantasies of the regime, that perhaps the new shape was irreversible. At some point, Hervé thought, he must surely travel to Pyongyang himself, even as a humble tourist, to see if his prince’s kiss could revive Princess Romme.

“But where did they pick her up? At the airport?”

“Strangely enough, they found her at the house rented by our operatives for Arosteguy in Tokyo. She had been living with him. She was sitting by the door with her suitcases all packed, ready to go somewhere but not sure where that should be. I’m reading the report right now.” Indeed, Romme’s eyes were not quite where one’s eyes normally were when Skyping. Few people actually looked into the camera, or even knew where it was on a Mac, so tiny and occult was it, sunken within the screen’s top bezel. Romme was looking far left of the Skype window, squinting with the effort of reading and translating the North’s very particular dialect. “Our people felt it was important that she had packed not only her own personal belongings but also all of Arosteguy’s, including electronics. There was barely any need for the team to strip the premises.”

“Another victory for Kimunism,” said Hervé, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground; irony and satire were not correct modes of discourse in the DPRK, though that made them very useful for monitored conversations, because, through lack of exercise, they were also not at all comprehended. It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals, and he did not exclude himself.

“There is another thread left hanging,” said Romme. “I hope you’ve been keeping up correspondence with your little friend Chase Roiphe.”

“Oh, yes. I sent her the same STL file that I sent you. It was just a few hours ago.”

There was a sudden, dangerous change in Romme’s features, a subtle deadening of expression, accompanied by an intensity around the eyes, that subverted Romme’s normal Skype look, which was a cheerful, enthusiastic, unquestioning perkiness, the kind demonstrated by North Korean news readers. Hervé hoped Romme’s handlers could not decrypt it; it was a warning to Hervé. “I appreciate the playfulness, but perhaps that was not the most sage thing you could have done.”

Hervé was not used to reprimands from Romme; the game was that they were equals, young French technocrats with a future on the international techno-political stage, where cyberkampf was the name of the drama being played. But when it came to their strange liaison with North Korea and the young president, Kim Jong Un, they were not equal. It was Romme who had first traveled to the Hermit Kingdom on a technology visa, and Romme who had become involved in the burgeoning subterranean, quasilegal tech markets, almost as a foreign subversive at first, and then as the acknowledged leader of the revolutionary, hands-on, Juche technology sector. Romme had been an older student of the Arosteguys, and easily enlisted Hervé in his scheme to build a small empire within an empire in North Korea. With Hervé’s collusion, the philosophy couple too were recruited, so beautifully did their musings on consumerism and politics mesh with the retro-radicalism of the Hermit Kingdom.

And now Hervé realized that he had indeed made a mistake, in fact more than one mistake. It caused him anguish to know that he was afraid to tell Romme about his art project with Chase, that he had sent her the STL files that had allowed the 3D printing of the alleged mutilated body parts of Célestine. Chase had, in her attic workroom in Toronto, evidence that could prove that Célestine Arosteguy was not dead, that the incriminating photos of those body parts were only photos of bioplastic replicas, doctored by the SFX team to suggest the results of a hideous murder and subsequent butchering.

“I wanted to keep her close and to remind her of the lightness of our sexual play with the Arosteguys,” he said. “I thought she needed something radical to snap her out of the depressive state of mind she had fallen into. She told me that I should not have forced her to take bites out of Madame A.’s amputated breast, and that she was sure that some of her own DNA would be discovered eventually because of that. She has a point, unfortunately. When we discussed placing the remains of that breast in such a way that it would convince the Préfecture that a cannibalistic murder had been committed, we omitted to think about saliva as a source of DNA.”

“How unstable do you think she is?”

“It’s a very volatile situation there in the Roiphe house in Toronto. The Canadian girl’s journalist boyfriend is there, living in the house, looking for a story. I think he will soon find a story he didn’t know existed. For instance, in her fugue state, as she calls it, she mutilates herself and eats tiny bits of her own flesh. She says she’s aware of deliberately creating a kitschy drama but at the same time feels compelled to act it out. Her father has allowed this boyfriend, an American, to witness her behavior. His name is Nathan Math. He writes usually on medical subjects.”

A pause. “I believe you need to go to Toronto to visit Chase Roiphe. You need to assess the situation there. And then, if you need assistance, we do have assets there to do whatever is required.”

“Ah,” said Hervé. “That would be suitably cathartic. So, financing for the voyage at the usual source?” The disbursement of the Vertegaal development funds involved a complex set of interactions beginning with the issuing of money drafts in tugrik, the Mongolian currency, by the Golomt Bank in Ulan Bator, which then underwent a series of conversions and transfers resulting in the deposit of euros or dollars, as circumstances demanded, in a commercial account in the name of Hervé’s corporation, Trois Médecins Français, at the Quai du Président Paul Doumer branch of the Crédit Agricole bank (former sponsors of a Tour de France–winning cycling team), all this to disguise their origins as North Korean won.

The image of Romme in the Skype window opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing computer-graphics-creation kind of way, then disintegrated in a shower of sparkling pixel flakes. After a pregnant pause the Skype window itself crashed, leaving a momentary square black hole in the middle of the desktop’s swirly cosmic image of the Andromeda Galaxy, the default Mac OS X (Lion iteration) wallpaper. (Lately, he avoided using personalized desktop wallpaper for security reasons; in the past, he would have featured Colnago beauty shots.) Staring blankly at that sinister new hole in the universe, his umbilical brutally cut, Hervé for one moment imagined that he might not have been communicating with the real Romme Vertegaal.