Consumed

6

NAOMI STOOD IN A residential street in Western Tokyo that looked more like an alleyway than a street. Yukie had assured her that, yes, there were houses in Tokyo and they were much more common than, say, houses in Paris, some of them very large and luxurious, some of them miniature modernist jewels. But as her cab left her, picking its way gingerly past the bicycles, potted plants, baby strollers, plastic garbage cans, and random furniture lining the street, she could see that Arosteguy’s house was neither luxurious nor jewel-like.

It was after 8 P.M. and the light was fading fast. Naomi pulled out her camera—the compact Sony RX100 again; better to look like a tourist for now—and began snapping off shots in all directions. She steadied the camera against whatever wall or pole was handy to compensate for the low light levels and the resulting slow shutter speeds. The gathering twilight combined with the mercury-vapor street lamps and the incandescent light spilling from house windows made for pleasingly surreal 3D-feeling images. She could almost hear the little camera’s computers buzzing madly in their attempt to balance the color temperatures of the varied light sources.

After documenting the shop across the narrow street, its steamed-up windows displaying mysterious aluminum, ceramic, and glass containers, Naomi turned her attention to Arosteguy’s gray-stuccoed two-story house with its sad garden just inside the entrance. It was streaked with dirt and crumbling, its ironwork gate pocked with rust and its garden a rotting, garbage-strewn mess. There was some thin light showing through the second-floor windows, but the first floor was dark. After exhausting every imaging possibility she could think of, scrolling through her shots to see if anything jumped out at her, Naomi put the camera in her bag and crossed the street, trailing her roller behind her.

On the outer wall, just beside the open gate, a stainless-steel mailbox featured stenciled white numbers—“13-23”—on a blue rectangle. Another blue rectangle contained impenetrable white Japanese characters. Walking through the gate and into the courtyard, which was fitfully lit by stained orange garden lights built into its raw concrete walls, Naomi was tempted to take out her camera and start snapping again—so many wonderful depressing details expressing the decay of this man’s life (as the accompanying copy would have it)—but she resisted. There would be time.

Facing the sliding wooden doors, Naomi vainly tried to see through their narrow, full-length vertical panes of pebbled glass. She thought she saw a security camera in a hat-like galvanized steel housing above and to the right of the doors, but it proved to be an electricity meter. Electrical wiring crawled haphazardly all over the building’s stucco, many of the corroded screws and clamps barely hanging on. She looked for a buzzer or a doorbell, but there wasn’t one, so she knocked on the glass, which rattled at her touch. After a moment, a dim, watery light came on somewhere deep in the room beyond, there was a scuffle of locks, and the door slid open.

Arosteguy stood in the doorway, his face hidden in shadow, a large, imposing, shaggy presence. This surprised Naomi; from her YouTube experience of the philosopher, he was small and fastidious about his appearance. She wondered for a moment if this man at the door was someone else, or even if she had the wrong address, but after warily looking her up and down, he spoke, and the voice and the accent were Arosteguy’s.

“You’ve brought your suitcase. That is good.”

Naomi glanced down at her camera roller, nervous. “Oh, this? It’s my equipment roller. I keep my camera and flashes and things in it. I thought it’d be okay to bring it. We talked about photo shoots, documenting your life here…”

Arosteguy reached down and picked the roller up by its top handle. “Heavy. Heavy equipment.” He hunched his shoulder to move the roller out of Naomi’s way and slid the door open wider with his knee for her to enter ahead of him. “Take your shoes off and come in,” he said, assuming she would be oblivious of that protocol despite his stockinged feet and the presence of his own oxblood brogues sitting in the genkan just before the step up into the house.

Arosteguy served green tea to Naomi, who sat floor level in a dumpy beanbag chair in a generally dumpy small living room. The light remained as sickly as it had looked through the front-door panes, adding to Naomi’s tightening unease. Greasy sliding glass back doors opened out into darkness. Naomi could now see that he was haggard and unshaven, his long hair—gray with some black streaks still—unwashed and wild, his clothes rumpled and slept in. It all somehow made him even more attractive, and Naomi was aware that this, not fear, was the source of her unease.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the tea.

Arosteguy sat opposite her on a futon folded into a couch and sipped his own tea, cradling the cup as if for warmth. A fragrance, vaguely Japanese in character and not unpleasant, seemed to emanate from him. “And so, yes, you brought your camera. That’s good. You’ll want photos. I’ve taken some photos myself. Very strong photos.”

It was the last phrase that added intimidation, and perhaps now at last fear, to the established substratum of unease. Naomi had to work hard not to imagine this man, still trailing a fragrant effluvium, meticulously photographing his wife’s half-eaten head. Were some of those photos she found on the net posted by him, posted in defiance, perhaps, or perversity?

She had to hasten to fill the lapsed moment, almost stuttering. “Have you? Photos? Um, were they journalistic photos or art photos?”

Arosteguy laughed a ropey laugh. He lit a Japanese cigarette that he had some trouble shaking out of a pack beside him on the couch, then laughed some more, emitting short snorts of smoke towards her.

“I only smoke Japanese now. I want to become Japanese. I’ll never speak French again. Never. They say that Tolstoy learned classical Greek very quickly once he put his mind to it. I’m learning Japanese very quickly. Until then, I speak English or German. For philosophy, at least, you have to speak German. Perhaps I will make Japanese essential for contemporary Western philosophy. If I live long enough.”

Naomi was groping. “Photography has no language. Is that why you’re so interested in it?”

“I think you’ve seen some of my photographic work,” said Arosteguy. “You can tell me whether it’s journalistic or artistic. I myself think that it’s both.”

“I’ve seen your work?”

“On the internet. Those famous photos of my wife. I posted them from Todai, from the university.” Another small laugh, a phlegmless one this time. “They don’t know it yet.”

“Your wife?” said Naomi. She wanted it to sound lame, and it did, but she was positioning herself for the moment as the naïve and easily shockable North American—familiar journalistic role-playing.

“Before, and after. Mostly after. Those are the ones everybody’s interested in. I’m sure you’ve found them. On the arosteguyatrocity dot com website.”

Arosteguy rose and leaned over Naomi to pour her more tea. Her teacup was still almost full. Was it a threatening, a challenging move? Reflexively, she shrank back ever so slightly. “Maybe you’d like to take some pictures of me now? Our first meeting? Historic. You said you brought your flash units. I don’t like bright light in my house. I can’t think in bright light. But a flash of inspiration is always good.”

NAOMI HAD SET UP her three wireless Speedlight flash units with the chunky black wireless SU-800 Commander, which controlled and triggered the flashes using infrared pulses, locked in her D300s’s hot shoe, and was snapping away as Arosteguy sat and posed, drinking tea and smoking, effortlessly playing the role of rumpled sage. The lighting setup, for now, was simple and unadventurous: one flash lighting the background, splashing the walls and the narrow wooden staircase behind the couch; one above right, sitting on the radio’s speaker—there seemed to be only one—giving her the key light on Arosteguy’s face; and one directly off to the left, sitting on a pile of books, which provided the fill light. Naomi’s Nagra recorder—a model ML, one generation behind Nathan’s Nagra SD—was working on the side table next to Arosteguy’s couch. So smooth was the philosopher that he timed his sentences to her flashes, never once being caught with his mouth half open or his eyes half closed. In this, he reminded her of Hervé. Had one of them schooled the other?

“That’s a very big camera you have. Very professional. Of course, that’s to be expected. I myself also use a digital camera, but a small one, a ‘consumer camera,’ they call them. I would like very much for you to teach me professional photographic methods. That’s one of the reasons I insisted that you live here with me for the few days that you do your interview. At least I will gain something.”

Naomi constantly checked her shots as they popped up on the camera’s rear LCD screen, something the pros derided as “chimping” but all did obsessively anyway. So accurate had the screens become in terms of both resolution and color that you really knew exactly what you were getting. She knew nobody who was nostalgic enough for the days of film to actually shoot with it other than as a masochistic retro-gesture. “Monsieur Arosteguy, you know I haven’t agreed to stay here. But do you really think photo tutorials are all you have to gain? I thought you wanted to tell your story. I thought it had never been told.”

“Ari. You must call me Ari if you are to stay with me. But I am working on a book that will tell my story. I don’t expect you to be that objective, or rather that subjective.”

“In my experience, a good journalist can tell a subject things about himself that he never knew.”

“Really?” said Arosteguy. “That would be interesting. Very interesting.”

NOT TOO MANY HOURS LATER, Naomi took over Yukie’s spindly metal kitchen table to assemble all her electronics in preparation for taking them to Arosteguy’s house. Yukie leaned against the front door, watching Naomi while of course texting, Facebooking, Twittering, Instagramming, playing video games, and watching cartoons using a massive clamshell phone of a type unknown to Naomi which was covered with cute/sinister anime/ manga stickers.

“You know, I think you’re crazy,” said Yukie. “Maybe suicidal.”

Naomi liked all her cables, connectors, and adapters packed away in old padded mailing envelopes, and each time she packed, she was presented with a new puzzle: which things went where. She stood over the table, hands on hips, watching the spread-out tangle of devices and envelopes, waiting for clarity. At random moments, she would attack one or another set of devices, like a cormorant diving into the sea for eels, and stuff it into its mysteriously appropriate sleeve, then pull back and wait for the next illumination.

“It’s just an overnighter. I’m leaving most of my stuff here, if that’s okay. He says he wants me to teach him photography.”

“Honey, it’s either sex or murder he wants. Probably both. At the same time.”

“Nice,” said Naomi, diving in once more. “I’ll make sure to send you photos.”

“And speaking of sex, you haven’t told me how it went at the Ladies Clinic. Did you find the English-speaking gyno?”

“I ended up with a French-speaking gyno. At first he wanted to give me the Blue Lotus Course.”

“Sure. That’s for women who work. I mean, in offices and stuff. Was he okay? I should have gone with you.”

“He was okay. I found the career-women thing kinda odd. I had to convince him I was only interested in STDs. I think I shocked him a bit.”

“The Germanium Course. I know it well.”

“Do you? Really? Yukie?”

“I’ve had some bad boyfriends. Nothing at the level of your philosopher, though.”

“Please. Don’t gross me out. But why Germanium? Why is a Japanese examination for sexually transmitted diseases named after a weird metalloid discovered by a German? Blue Lotus is a lot sexier.”

“Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic. You should have just asked the doctor.”

“I didn’t want to distract him. He correctly diagnosed Roiphe’s—with a bit of help—and gave me this script.” Naomi dug the prescription form out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Yukie, who barely glanced at it.

“Sasagaki. I didn’t know he spoke French. Garden-variety antibiotic. We can get this filled for you at the pharmacy down the street. You’ll have to come with me. It looks like about two months’ worth. Are you planning to have sex with Monsieur Arosteguy? You might have to wait a bit. Or do condoms work well enough with this STD?”

“Thanks for the lovely stream of consciousness, Yukie. It really clarifies things for me.”

“No problem.”

AROSTEGUY HAD TO MAKE two trips to carry Naomi’s camera roller and her duffel up the cramped stairs of his house. There wasn’t really much of a hall upstairs, just two bedrooms and a bathroom jammed together. Arosteguy opened the door to one of the rooms, so small he could drop the duffel on the narrow wooden bed from the doorway, and turned to Naomi as she followed him. “I decided to give you the room right next to mine. You’ll want to know my every move, of course. From here, you’ll know each time I get up to urinate in the night. I do that very often now. Man’s fate.”

Naomi squeezed past him—he actually inhaled his belly so that she could get past—and unslung her bag onto a small table near a window that looked out over a metal-strip balcony. There seemed to be no way to get onto that balcony except by crawling through the aluminum-framed sliding window. “Thank you. This is great.”

“There’s power there, see, just on the wall there, and also a telephone jack. I do not yet have a wireless network in this house. I assume you have a laptop and chargers for your camera batteries.”

“Yes, I do. Thank you.”

“I have learned the password of two of my neighbors’ wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like. I’m not worried.” Arosteguy ran his hand through his hair, which had flopped over his right eye when he was dealing with her luggage. He smiled a tight, wincing smile, as though something had just hurt him. “And also, please keep in mind that sex between us is very possible, if you like it.” Naomi let her face register exactly nothing. Had he been talking to Yukie? For a moment she thought it was plausible and was overwhelmed by dark, sticky paranoia. Let’s see: she had first contacted Arosteguy through Hervé Blomqvist, who was able to give her only the name of Professor Matsuda, but then Yukie had actually ferreted out Professor Matsuda, who had given her Arosteguy’s address… Naomi had wanted to avoid giving Arosteguy’s address or any other contact data to Yukie because Yukie was a public relations flack with a journalist’s instincts. Naomi hated to admit it, but on a certain level she didn’t trust Yukie. Yukie was trying too hard to hide her excitement at the Arosteguyscandal connection—she was playing it a little too cool—and though Arosteguy was a gaijin, it would be a stunning coup for her to bring him in to her demanding boss at Monogatari PR as a client looking for a public Tokyo makeover.

The Japanese vegetable scent—water lilies? ginkgo leaves?—that Naomi had caught her first day with Arosteguy now flooded over her as he called back on his way down the staircase. “Perhaps you would like to go out for a late dinner. Perhaps not. Let me know. We can eat here as well. I cook.” Later, Naomi had her laptop and cameras set up on the bedroom table and was sitting on the bed—there was no room for a chair—working over her first Arosteguy photos, cropping and color grading them in Adobe Lightroom, then Dropboxing them to her editor at Notorious. The photos she had created were very moody and dramatic, and showed that beneath the current shabbiness, Arosteguy was a refined and handsome man.

She dabbed at the trackpad, hitting the Upload button as though the Air might explode in her face, but it all seemed to work smoothly. She’d had to let Arosteguy mess with her computer, switching the keyboard to Japanese in order to type in the neighbor’s network password, and it felt like a violation, not the less disturbing because it was a consensual one. As the photos churned away into the ether, her email chime went off. It was from Nathan, and it said, “Naomi, I need to talk to you about Arosteguy and Roiphe. Odd things, funny parallels. You told me your cell phone wouldn’t work in Japan and it doesn’t. You must have gotten a Japanese phone by now. Call me. Nathan.” Naomi immediately replied, “Send me pictures of you and Roiphe fucking each other. I’ll call you to comment.” She was surprised by the spontaneous depths of her own vindictiveness, but rather pleased by them as well.

In the bathroom, she checked herself out in the plastic-framed mirror, leaning close to finesse the subtle eye makeup, the just-perceptible lipstick. She had put on the sexiest outfit she had that you could still do physical work in—formfitting beige light wool sweater, tight black cotton pants—without allowing herself to wonder why she bothered. She had started her course of antibiotics.

NAOMI HAD HER SPEEDLIGHTS and her Nagra set up in Arosteguy’s tiny galley kitchen and was shooting him as he cooked. She had made a fetish of culinary ignorance, part of her integrity as a media professional somehow, and so she could only see that he was manipulating a lot of tiny shrimp and clumps of what looked like seaweed with a delicate knife. A small jug of warm sake and two mismatched cylindrical ceramic cups sat beside the sink. They both drank randomly.

Arosteguy too had cleaned up a bit: he was shaven now, and had washed, or at least brushed, his hair, though she hadn’t heard him in the bathroom. He had also changed his clothes, looking very professorial in a thick sweater and corduroy pants. Zooming in on her D300s’s LCD screen to check her focus, Naomi could see thin, transparent wires trailing from his hairline down into his ears. “Are those hearing aids in your ears,” she asked, “or are you listening to music?”

“Bionic enhancements. And through them, I am in constant contact with certain satellites.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I have no sense of humor. But my Greek father, a violinist, and my French mother, a pianist, were both quite deaf before the age of fifty, and they both wore hearing aids. Of course, they were analogue then, and very primitive, but now they’re digital. I like the French word, numérique, better. It’s more descriptive, and it doesn’t confuse with the reference to human fingers, to the digits.” He turned and waggled his fingers at Naomi. They were short and powerful, and with them he pulled a hearing aid from his left ear and let it dangle in front of his face so that she could shoot it. A rather shapely silver capsule—to match his hair—fitted behind his ear, and a transparent plastic lead containing the thinnest of wires fed into a translucent twin-domed bud—it looked like a tiny jellyfish—that plugged into his earhole. “It’s made by Siemens. German, of course. They’re not as good as real ears, but they’re good.” He gently coaxed it back into his ear and turned again to his cooking. “This moment reminds me of a famous family moment in Paris when my mother was cooking and somehow, adjusting the clip that held her hair back from her face, she popped her hearing aid out of her ear and into her bouillabaisse without realizing it. And I was the one who ate it.” Arosteguy began to heave with laughter at the memory. “The toxicity of the battery was of some concern, as you can imagine. They were much bigger then. But they couldn’t imagine how to get it out of me at that time in French medical history without the possibility of doing terrible damage to my young stomach and intestines, so we just waited for the inevitable. My mother found it quite annoying to be unbalanced in her hearing for all that time, and ultimately they gave her a new pair, even better than what she had.”

Naomi was zoomed in on a shot she had just taken of his cheekbone, which was very shapely but smeared with a light discoloration that reminded her of her grandfather, a dermatologist, who had told her that the skin became a garden of weird life-forms when you aged. “Cover it with makeup when it happens,” he had said. “You can’t fight ’em. Too damn many of ’em.”

“Do you always shave at night?” said Naomi. She asked questions partly to get Arosteguy to turn towards her so that she could find new angles on his face, which was beginning to seem endlessly interesting to her.

“I hadn’t spoken to anyone for a week before you. I realized with a shock that I did not look very civilized.”

“You look like a three-star French chef at home now.”

“That alarms me. I don’t cook French anymore. I cook Japanese. Well, I’m trying. My friend Matsuda-san is actually a wonderful cook. He’s teaching me. I can only do the simplest things. So subtle, so subtle and complex what he can do.”

“Professor Matsuda? I got the feeling that he wanted to distance himself from you.”

“In public, yes, of course. Not in private.”

“Well, his teaching must be good. Even your posture is starting to become more Japanese. And you look like you know what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” said Arosteguy. “You too.”

“Yeah?”

“Photos of the cannibal Arosteguy cooking a meal. Later, photos of the cannibal eating the meal. I’m sure you will be able to sell these around the world.”

“What about video?” Naomi hefted the D300s in her right hand. “This thing shoots decent video. And I have a microphone and earphones to go with it.”

“Maybe. When we get to know each other better. And I have some lawyers I need to consult with. They are already angry with me for the event of you. The event of Naomi. They are basing everything on the lack of an extradition treaty between Japan and France, but there are delicate circumstances which complicate things, and public outcry and opinion are dangerously involved.”

“Well, you’re not wrong about the cannibal thing. It’s pretty potent stuff. But you don’t object? You don’t mind?”

Arosteguy turned to her and pulled his mouth open to one side with his index finger. The effect was grotesque. Startled, Naomi lowered the camera. Arosteguy let go of his mouth. “Into the very mouth of the cannibal. Don’t you want that picture?”

“Are you sure you want me to take it?”

“Take it,” said Arosteguy.

He pulled his mouth open again. Naomi began shooting. She changed lenses quickly—an extreme wide-angle lens now—and continued snapping, getting very close, optically spreading his face and his mouth, distorting them. Arosteguy played it seriously and intensely, his gums and teeth—quite good, really, with only slight tobacco discoloration—completely exposed on one side and somehow perversely naked. Naomi lowered her camera and checked the LCD screen. The photos were very disturbing.

“Enough for now,” said Naomi. She reached for her sake.

“Call me Ari,” said Arosteguy.

“Enough for now, Ari.” She drained the cup and poured herself more.