Consumed

5

NAOMI WAS ON HER JAL flight from Charles de Gaulle to Tokyo Narita. Her laptop was on her seat tray, displaying a photo she took with her iPhone of the elegant first-class toilet in the Boeing 777. She especially appreciated the small orchid in the milky glass vase glued to the lav’s mirror, even though she suspected it was artificial. In her ear, Nathan was complaining. “You flew right over me and I never knew it. I’m crushed.”

Naomi spoke quietly into the airphone, resisting the temptation to talk louder to compensate for the airplane drone. She hated it when she could hear everything that everyone said. And she had a very large Dutch male seatmate—she had seen his burgundy Kingdom of Netherlands paspoort when it slid out of his computer bag onto her seat—who was sitting very close to her because she wasn’t in first class but what they called Premium Economy, which featured something called the Sky Shell Seat. “You fly east to Japan from Paris, not west.”

“Oh, god, that means you’re flying away from me,” said Nathan. He was sitting at the desk in his room in the Bloor-Yorkville Holiday Inn, trying not to be depressed, speaking into his laptop’s mic using a VoIP app. He was looking at one of the nude apotemnophilia photos he had taken of Naomi, talking to it; she had not managed to delete them all.

“Why the sudden romanticism? What’s going on there in Toronto? Should I worry?”

“Things are strange here and I miss you, that’s all,” said Nathan.

The Dutchman beside Naomi ordered a vodka martini. It was not his first. He was very tall, and Naomi could not be sure that he wasn’t actively eavesdropping. “Tell me about the strangeness.”

“Roiphe’s syndrome. A new thing, nothing to do with the old Roiphe’s disease. That’s the sole subject of his past year’s work. I don’t know if he’s inventing it or defining it. He doesn’t want to talk about anything else, and he won’t even give me a hint of what’s involved unless I agree to do this book deal.” Nathan had emailed details of the book-deal gambit to Naomi for vetting. She had thought it would be the perfect challenge to get Nathan out of his journo rut. A book—even if it ended up only being an e-book—how could it not be a good thing?

“And it’s really his daughter? She lives with him and he studies her? She’s his project?”

“Chase. That’s her name,” said Nathan, struck for the first time by the name’s comical appropriateness. “That’s what the situation seems to be.”

The Dutchman’s vodka martini arrived with a cup of nut-like lozengeshaped snacks. Earbuds plugged in, he was watching a bizarre Japanese game show on his seatback screen, and Naomi wondered idly if he could really understand what was being said. He did chuckle from time to time.

“That sounds just sick enough to be yummy,” said Naomi, now working her own screen through some general data regarding the University of Tokyo. She was trying to imagine Arosteguy’s life in exile, and was struggling. It wasn’t just the opaqueness of Japan that was the problem; it was the idea of a French-Greek intellectual murderer in Japan that was the problem. But of course also the source of excitement. She had stumbled across the case of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student at the Sorbonne who killed and ate his classmate, a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt. Judged unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, he had returned home to roam free in Japan, a minor celebrity who painted nudes, wrote restaurant reviews, and worked the talk-show circuit. Although it made Naomi extremely nervous to think about it, the idea of having Sagawa interview Arosteguy aroused her almost unbearably. It was just sick enough to be yummy.

“I wasn’t looking for that approach exactly.”

“Your pieces are as sensationalistic as mine are. They’re just dressed up a bit. Make sure you don’t sign anything,” said Naomi.

“He’s a cagey old codger. I can’t read him yet.”

“Tell him you need a taste to see if it’s going to be deep enough for a book. You can always go with the short piece if you have to.”

“It means holing up here in this hotel for weeks. Maybe longer. I’ll practically have to live with them. In fact, he’s already shown me his nanny suite. In the basement.”

“I’ll come visit you. After Arosteguy.”

“But listen, isn’t it too creepy? I mean, would you do it? Move into a subject’s house? Have a shower in the same shower as your subject?”

“You’d just be another embedded journalist. It’s all the rage.”

“You’ve arranged to meet Arosteguy? He really is in Tokyo and is willing?”

“I got the email address of an intermediary. He wants to tell his story. The boys at Notorious are excited. They said go for it. He agreed to meet me.”

“Hey, the guy could actually be a murderer. Where are you going to meet him?”

“Wherever he says, I guess. There’s speculation that he has a house in the city.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Well, he’s dangerous. But that’s the hook, isn’t it?”

An awkward pause. Nathan was flashing to a sex romp between Naomi and the French-Greek woman-killer in a spooky little Japanese house—did they actually have houses in Tokyo?—after which she confesses to Arosteguy that she’s infected with Nathan’s dose of Roiphe’s, so Arosteguy kills her in a rage and eats her.

“What?” said Nathan.

“I’ve developed some weird discharge,” said Naomi, reading his mind obliquely as usual. “It’s annoying.” The Dutchman turned his head slightly towards her. He must have heard. Well, let him.

“Maybe it’s just your routine yeast thing.”

“No. This smells different,” said Naomi, raising her voice ever so slightly for the Dutchman. She wondered if he knew about the Dutch connection with the Sagawa murder. Was it iconic in Holland in some way? That might be an interesting avenue to explore. “I’ll have to get it checked out. So boring.”

A pregnant pause and a sigh from Nathan. Naomi was on instant alert, fully in the airphone now, the screen pulled out of focus. “Naomi, the last time we were in bed together. In the Hilton. Schiphol.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I had a dose of Roiphe’s disease. You probably have it now too. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Fuck. You should get yourself checked out.”

“What? You incredible schmuck! I can’t believe this. You want me to get myself STD gynoed in Tokyo? By some weird Japanese gyno? Fuck!” At this, the Dutchman actually pulled his right earbud out, the one on Naomi’s side, in order, she was certain, to hear her better. When she glared at him, the Naomi Death Stare, he smiled shyly and turned away. But he left the earbud out.

“I know, I am, I—”

“Who the fuck did you get it from, you unbelievable asshole? Or do you even know?”

“I do know. It was that breast-cancer patient I covered in Budapest. Dunja Hočevar.”

“Oh, yeah, you really covered her but good! Talk about embedded journalists! Fuck!”

“It was a mercy fuck,” said Nathan. “I was into the story and I was vulnerable. I dunno. I mean, she was immune-suppressed and… I dunno.”

“Listen, I have a suggestion for you. Why don’t you mercy-fuck Barry Roiphe?”

Naomi slammed the phone back down into its cradle in the armrest, jarring the Dutchman’s vodka martini. He grabbed it just before it toppled over and smiled an oily smile.

“Sometimes I think these airplane phones are not such a good idea,” he said, but Naomi was already back in her screen, communing with images of Arosteguy.

“NAOMI! OVER HERE!” Yukie was waving wildly as Naomi pushed her baggage cart with its streamlined wheel covers out through the glass doors of the immigration area. “So wonderful to see you again, my honey!”

“Yukie, hi! Oh, thank you for coming to meet me. You’re such a doll.” Yukie was wearing a bizarre dark-brown faux-fur coat with mauve and purple highlights, magenta leather gloves, a pink-striped fluffy scarf, and thick, clear-plastic oval sunglasses—all normal for her. Her hair was still long and full down her back, and it gave Naomi comfort to see her looking the way she remembered her.

They took the Narita Sky Access bullet train to Nippori Station, and then they were in a cab nudging its way through the Tokyo streets to Yukie’s flat. In the cab, Naomi was slightly disappointed that their cab driver wasn’t wearing white cloth gloves, but at least the white-doily-draped seatbacks and headrests—so frilly and lacy they seemed Victorian—and the right-hand drive matched her internet-researched expectations. Yukie was taking photos of Naomi with her iPhone, and Naomi reciprocated by clacking away with her Nikon.

“Oh, it’s so good to look at you again,” said Yukie. “You know, you look so more mature now, not so little girl.”

“Does that mean old?” said Naomi, hiding behind her viewfinder. “No, of course not. I’ll show you photographic proof.” Yukie scrolled through her shots, chose one, and held it out for Naomi to see. Even front-lit by the phone’s LED flash, smiling sweetly as she peeked out from behind her camera, Naomi did look pretty good still, looked viable, she thought, whatever that meant.

“C’mon, I mean really,” said Yukie. “Look how glamorous and sexy. It must be the marriage thing. Nathan must be a terrific, sexy, supportive husband.”

“You know we’re not married, Yukie.”

“It’s a modern marriage,” she said. “It’s what marriage has turned into, and you’re it. You’re married. Cyber-married. Somehow, the internet is involved.”

Yukie’s place was in Shinsen, just west of Shibuya Station, on a small side street of slightly shabby concrete-and-tile buildings. Just outside her apartment door, Yukie turned to Naomi and put her hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to make all the usual single Japanese working-girl disclaimers. It’s small and ugly and crowded, and I’m embarrassed to have you see it, much less stay in it.”

Naomi gave Yukie a quick kiss. “All the more reason for me to thank you. It’s the best place in Tokyo for me, believe me.” Once inside, Naomi was disappointed to see a quite neat, clean, and modern little space that could have been a studio in Brooklyn or Queens. No tatami mats, no futons, no shoji screens. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she thought, since Yukie herself was neat, clean, and modern, though following Japanese tradition they both took off their footwear just inside the door.

“Are you needing to hide out, though, really?” said Yukie, as she hauled Naomi’s big duffel bag into the kitchen. Sheer white curtains closed off the kitchen from the bedroom, which was also the living room. “Even my friends can’t seem to find me here, so you should be pretty anonymous.”

“I’m not sure,” said Naomi, thinking about her Dutch seatmate and his continuing interest in her as they waited for their baggage. He kept smiling and nodding at her, trying to catch her eye as though they shared an intimate secret, and it creeped her out, induced paranoid fantasies. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the plane wanted to follow me.”

Yukie laughed dismissively and closed the substantial metal-clad door behind her. She took Naomi’s hand and led her to the bed, where she sat down and patted the sunflower-pattern bedspread. Naomi left her roller and shoulder bag on the pink carpet and sat beside her, Yukie still wearing her coat and gloves. “You can take the bed. I’m used to sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag.”

“That doesn’t feel right,” said Naomi. “We’ll work something out. Maybe I’ll sleep on your kitchen table.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” laughed Yukie. “It’s actually not even big enough.”

Naomi was feeling that deep, heavy jet lag, now that she could let go, could stop traveling. She was almost delirious enough to be serious about the kitchen table; she imagined lying on it on her back, her legs hanging over the edge, dangling slippers. Her eyes felt dead from the inside out, but Yukie’s eyes were luminous with excitement. “So, really? Is there a story for me in this? You know, a unique Japanese angle? Something you wouldn’t want but you can give me? My boss has been hating everything I bring him lately.”

Naomi was very comfortable with Yukie’s guilt trips—they were so gentle you could ignore them—but she did owe her, and she did need her. Yukie was a media relations agent at Monogatari PR, one of the most powerful public relations firms in Japan—their specialty was spin-doctoring celebrity catastrophes, particularly the political variety—and though she was a junior agent, she knew everybody in the highly incestuous and regimented Japanese media world. “I’m meeting a very dangerous man here in Tokyo. Nobody knows about it.”

“Not even Nathan?”

“He knows about it, the asshole.”

Yukie’s eyes went even wider. “Uh-oh.” She looked down and took Naomi’s hand again, and without looking up said quietly, “Maybe, Naomi, you should give me the name of some contact or something? Just in case? Maybe not just Nathan?”

“I’ll do that, Yukie. That’s a good idea. And meanwhile, I need a contact from you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Having said the fearful thing, she was able to look up into Naomi’s eyes again.

“Who’s your gynecologist?” said Naomi.

“WE HAD A WONDERFUL Portuguese housekeeper living down here for a while, but we lost her to a better offer,” said Roiphe.

“Oh?” said Nathan.

“Boyfriend married her. Swept her away.”

“She forgot to take her flag,” said Nathan, tipping his head towards the small plastic Portuguese flag on the wall. Next to it was a voluptuous poster depicting a Moorish castle in the Sintra Mountains near Estoril, the Vila de Sintra coat of arms prominent in the lower right corner, where the poster was slightly torn. At that point, stuffing his underwear into the light-birch veneer Ikea dresser which sat under the poster, Nathan was already feeling like a Portuguese housekeeper, desperate to create a window in her windowless basement bedroom with the windswept vista of the poster. He would keep that, but the flag had to come down. And why was there no mirror in the room?

“She disappeared overnight. Left a lot of her junk. Must have been pretty hot stuff,” said Roiphe, hunkered down and shamelessly poking through Nathan’s open camera bag on the furry floor. Shag. Visions of seventies carpet rakes danced in Nathan’s head. Or was shag carpeting really making a comeback? This variant was a muted dark slate, not what you’d consider a 1970s color. Was this insane? Was he really doing this? Would he actually be able to sleep down here, and then wake up, and then function?

Nathan decided to laugh. “Well, I could probably fill in a bit if things get slow. I’m particularly good with a feather duster.”

“Damned if I won’t take you up on that, things get hectic. Hey, you’ve got some crackerjack gear in here.” Roiphe held up Nathan’s wireless flash trigger. “Now what the heck is this gizmo? It says,” he began reading the label, “that it’s a Nikon Wireless Speedlight Commander SU-800. Sounds pretty impressive to me.”

Nathan decided to use his iPhone’s LTE personal hotspot to generate a private wireless signal. Roiphe had handed him his house Wi-Fi password—“Network Name: DoctoR; Password: inFeKt10n!!”—shakily hand-printed in silver Magic Marker on the back of a ten-dollar Pizza Pizza/Toys “R” Us savings card. “I’ll want that back once you’ve logged in,” he had said, obviously not fearing the revelation of his home’s Wi-Fi password to the administrators of the Pizza Pizza redemption program. The old codger protested his technological ignorance too much; he seemed absolutely clear and savvy about all things i and e, and Nathan was convinced that feeling paranoid in the Roiphe household was simply being realistic. He was sure that if he used the DoctoR network, every keystroke would be duly logged, every email kidnapped and archived, and every Skype conversation transcribed for later sinister use. Or did he just need this to be true to make his story more compelling than it threatened to be?

Certainly Roiphe, after his major song and dance about wanting a lawyer-certified, bulletproof contract binding them together in secrecy and artistic collaboration in such a way that liability and patient-abuse litigation and other such medically inspired legal chicanery would be made impossible, seemed quite nonchalant about dropping the whole matter once Nathan agreed to move in. He had even dropped, for the moment, his demand that they funnel their book deal through a credible literary agency—“I figure maybe Oliver Sacks’s own Wylie Agency”—before he allowed Nathan to record a word or take a photograph. He now seemed perfectly content with some vague understanding whereby they would magically fuse into an alternate-reality incarnation of Sacks, with a movie, an opera, some delicious parodies, and of course vicious attacks by colleagues fueled by jealousy following the release of their book, tentatively entitled Consumed: A Curious Case History. The doctor rehearsed defending himself against accusations of exploitation: “It’s in the hallowed tradition of the clinical anecdote, what we’re doing. Freud did it, Charcot did it, Luria did it. And we’re doing it! It’s an educational procedure, intended to provoke discussion, perfectly legit.” Nathan was happy to let Roiphe’s enthusiasm carry them as far as it might without the complication of paperwork, lawyers, book deals, agents. He needed to feel that he could walk away, literally, in the middle of the night, trundling his camera roller after him, with no goodbyes and no regrets.

To seal the deal, Roiphe had brought his home office’s Pixie—with two sleeves of gray-coded Roma capsules—down to Nathan’s subterranean domain after Nathan had confessed his addiction to Nespresso. He had never seen a Pixie in the flesh. This one was the adorable titanium-colored version, which spookily matched the shag carpeting. “It’s okay, don’t thank me, I have the big mother deluxe one in the kitchen. I won’t go caffeineless.” Nathan was drinking a Roma right now out of the supplied cup and saucer, both in elegant white ceramic with the swooping split-N logo embossed within a beveled square recess, green capped letters on the bottom of each proclaiming “Nespresso Collection, Made in Portugal,” which of course evoked the poster on the wall and the former housekeeper. Synchronicity? Nathan took it to mean that what he was doing there in Roiphe’s basement had cosmic support. There was an undeniable shape to it.

He had decided to keep the Pixie in the bedroom—on the dresser for now—instead of the tiny but workable nanny’s kitchen just around the corner from the slate-floored sitting room. He wanted it to feel like a European hotel-room adventure rather than a move-in-completely- and-hopelessly situation—move in with your recently widowed father, for instance. Nathan had done that, and it had been bitter and desperate in too many ways to bear experiencing it again, even analogically. Picking up on Naomi’s line of thought, Roiphe had joked that there was no separate entrance to the embedded reporter’s suite, the better to keep an eye on him, but everything worked, including the bathroom with shower.

It had to be admitted: he was down here because of Chase. He wanted to be in the same house with her. He was not sure why. She was certainly attractive, but immediately gave off those convulsive, anaphrodisiac waves of looniness that tell you not to bother fantasizing. But where in the house was she? Did she know yet he had moved in? Would he be able to hear her? Could she hear him? Would she visit him down here? After finishing the Roma, he tried several times to email, text, and phone Naomi, without success. Then he called Dunja’s Slovenian mobile number, also without success; her phone disconnected after nine rings without accepting any messages, and a disconsolate Nathan wondered if, overwhelmed by guilt at infecting him, she had committed suicide.

ON THE HONGO CAMPUS of the University of Tokyo, familiarly known as Todai, Naomi walked down the broad, tree-lined avenue leading to the fortress-like Yasuda Auditorium with its dark-red tiles and incongruous stone-arched entranceway, then turned right on the heavily wooded path that would take her to Sanshiro Pond. She could walk with confidence because, of course, she had Google Mapped and YouTubed her route to death before venturing outside Yukie’s flat, whose wireless signal was surprisingly robust. Yukie had insisted on covertly entering the flat’s wireless network password on Naomi’s various machines herself, not letting Naomi watch, a touch of paranoid strangeness that chilled Naomi’s feelings for her. She had to shrug it off. So, experiencing that comforting but oppressive net-preview déjà vu, down the curving series of stone steps she went, past a group of students sitting on large rocks in the pond feeding the carp and koi, past the tiny waterfall, and on to the simple wooden bench upon which sat Professor Hideki Matsuda of the Faculty of Law. In their email exchange brokered by Yukie, Matsuda had made it clear that he did not want to meet Naomi anywhere too public, but he also wanted to be respectful, and the ancient pond seemed a fitting compromise. In response to his wariness, Naomi carried only her iPad in its dedicated Crumpler shoulder bag, and a black nylon shopping bag from La Grande Epicerie in Paris for her mundane stuff and her Sony RX100 compact camera, just in case.

The professor rose from the bench as Naomi approached and bowed slightly, not extending his hand. “Naomi, so nice to meet you.”

“Thank you, Professor Matsuda. I’m very grateful for your help.”

An awkward beat of silence filled by the shouts of students talking to the fish and one another which rose from the other end of the pond. It was obvious to Naomi that there was considerable stress involved in their meeting for this neat, delicate man of about fifty, his suit and tie impeccable, his glasses of fine stainless steel. Eventually, he took a card from an inside jacket pocket and offered it to Naomi with both hands as though it were a business card. She took it similarly with two hands, but it was just a note card, and completely in Japanese—perhaps intended to convey to her that Matsuda did not want her to know anything about him beyond what she already knew. She would need Yukie’s help with the card. They sat down together opposite a tiny, lush island.

“The philosopher can be found at this address, at the time I have written on the card. It is his current home. He is interested to meet you.”

Naomi was sure that Matsuda would be happy to leave it at that, to say goodbye right then and there, or perhaps stroll around the pond a bit, elaborating on its creation in 1615, its special heart shape, and its informal renaming to reference the 1908 campus novel Sanshirō by Natsume

Sōseki—all safe topics, all charming and congenial. But Naomi was not charming and congenial.

“Professor, you are a personal friend of Aristide Arosteguy, is that correct?”

“I would not say personal friend, no. We are colleagues in philosophy; he, professionally, and I, well, philosophically, as an outgrowth of my interest in justice and international law. We have run into each other occasionally at various venues.”

In her face, which she felt sure was burning red, Naomi could feel the wet vegetable heat coming off the pond. Matsuda looked cool. “Have you seen him recently?”

“No, not recently. We correspond by email. He is a controversial figure on campus, as one might imagine.”

“As controversial as the cannibal Issei Sagawa?”

Matsuda flinched away from Naomi a few centimeters, as though the words had shoved him in the chest, but his expression did not change. “That is… not a valid comparison, Naomi.”

“Professor Matsuda, I will be seeing Monsieur Arosteguy alone. Completely alone.”

“Yes.”

“Should I be worried?”

Matsuda adjusted his glasses with both hands. “There are so many levels to that question.”

“The level that I’m concerned about is the physical safety level. Will I be in danger from the philosopher? I don’t mean philosophical danger, or emotional danger. I mean physical danger.” Matsuda seemed unable to answer. He just stared at Naomi, blinking as a small flock of birds swept over the pond. Naomi pushed. “Some French policemen consider him capable of murder.”

It was apparent now that Matsuda could not bear these words. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He stood up. “Please give the philosopher Monsieur Arosteguy my regards when you see him.” He bowed, turned, and strode off along the verge of the pond, a briefcase, which Naomi had somehow not noticed before, held stiffly at his side, not swinging.