Consumed. David Cronenberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ laughed. “Molnár is just talking about the mechanics of tumor removal. That’s his success. He knows I’m not going to last long, but he doesn’t really consider it to be his problem.”

      “Would it hurt for you to be more positive?”

      “Oh, Nathan. It hurts when you become sentimental and ordinary. Why would you ever do that?”

      “Ouch!”

      “Did you get good pictures? Were they shocking? Will Molnár put them up on his wall to excite his customers eating their goulash? Should I make a pun about ghoulash? Ghoul lash?”

      “I get it, I get it,” said Nathan, still stung, unable to smile. If she did recover, what would they talk about? Her dream of going back to architecture school at the University of Ljubljana and building luxury houses on the banks of the Sava with her father? How ordinary and sentimental would that be? “I got some very good shots of your operation. I’m not sure that you’ll like them, but I’ll email them to you if you want me to.”

      Dunja took his hands in hers and pulled him towards the bed. He tried to lurch his chair forward, but it was too flimsy, bending and twisting until it popped out from under him, leaving him standing in a half-crouch like a jockey. She laughed again, and he took a step and settled on the bed, the lowered metal side rail digging into his thighs no matter how he shifted his weight. “Did it turn you on when Zoltán cut into my breasts? I almost convinced him to give me just a local anesthetic, but he copped out.” Nathan enjoyed Dunja’s sporadic sixties drug/rock lingo and wanted to ask her exactly who she learned her English from, but it never was the right moment.

      “Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up.” Dunja became quiet, still. What he had just said, his expression of sexual normality, was not what she wanted to hear; he knew she would take it as rejection. He spoke very gently, skating on perversely thin ice. “When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful.”

      Dunja’s elegant big hands covered Nathan’s, squeezed them gently and pulled at them, shook them in slow motion, as though trying to reason with him through them, hoping that unspoken arguments would travel up his arms and down to his heart. “Nathan, oh, Nathan. You are really so sweet and lovely. But I have markers in my genes that say my cancer was destined to metastasize; and it has, it’s everywhere in my body, in my lymph nodes, you’ve felt them and caressed them, and you know it’s true. I’m not going to get out of this one, I’m really not.”

      “But Molnár told me …”

      “Molnár is a very strange and flaky man. He is a surgeon, a mechanic. He doesn’t want to know about things he can’t attack with machinery. I was completely surprised to wake up and find that I still had tits at all. I was sure he’d get so excited that he’d cut them right off. I was almost disappointed to see them, and looking only a little battle scarred too. He’s referred me to another clinic, this one in Luxembourg. It sounds very sketchy to me, just like Molnár, but I have a marker in my brain that means I’m destined to go there too, to let them do things to me until I’m dead.”

      Nathan could only just manage to keep looking into her searching eyes, feeling at that moment very sentimental and ordinary, and therefore mute. Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? Could he make a case for her new, diseased self as the most avantgarde form of womanly beauty? He didn’t dare, but she did.

      “While I’m still alive, I’ll have nothing special left to seduce with except the scent of dying. That will be my lethal perfume. And I want it to be what seduced you, you see? Because that’s my future, and I don’t want to live it alone. So you might find me calling you to give advice to my next lover. I might want you to encourage him to go deep into me and not be afraid. Or I might call you one night and ask you to fly to me and then strangle me to death while you fuck me from behind. Why not? Why waste the situation?” Dunja paused, her eyes never stopping their desperate search of his eyes. She smiled a freakishly kind, loving smile. “Would you come to me, Nathan? Would you come to me then, if I called you?”

      Nathan headed for the sliding glass doors of the Malév Duna Club Lounge. As he walked in, he recalled Naomi saying, “Just kill me,” when he complained to her about something on his cell. Approaching the check-in counter, he thought about strangling Naomi to death while fucking her from behind. Her hands were tied behind her with a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe belt. His hands were powerful around her long throat. Her face was twisted into a beautiful, open-mouthed, terrifying expression of ecstasy, and the fantasy-Nathan knew that it was the end of sex, that there could be no more sex after this sex. At the desk, an extremely unattractive and excessively uniformed matron—that cloying red scarf printed with little multicolored stylized wings—explained to Nathan why the photocopied membership card and other obscure paperwork Molnár had given him was not valid, and that she therefore had to deny him entrance to the promised land of the Duna Club Lounge. As he rollered away from the lounge and headed towards his gate, Nathan could only marvel at the Molnáresque perfection of it all.

      CHARLES DE GAULLE was undergoing extensive renovations. After walking for miles past dormant moving sidewalks, Naomi had to lug her roller bag up a double set of stairs—the small glass elevator was absolument for disability use only—then over a platform randomly strewn with cafeteria chairs (but no tables) that were served by a huge, lonely, lopsided automatic drinks machine, then down another set of stairs which led her into a dense mass of travelers standing numbly in a corridor with no seats at some distance from a gate with no seats. The horror of it was exacerbated by the near impossibility of getting out her laptop and opening it without cracking someone in the head. Naomi dug her BlackBerry Q10 out of the roller’s side pocket. She preferred it to Nathan’s iPhone in any text-intensive context like the ones she usually found herself in; she needed real, physical buttons (you couldn’t type on an iPhone when you had decent fingernails) and was dreading the possible imminent collapse of the BlackBerry empire. Such was the perilous life of the ardent tech consumer.

      As she fired up the Q10, she remembered with a pointy shot of adrenaline that she had left her Crillon pin on Dr. Trinh’s desk, so rattled had she been when she left her office. This was especially annoying because the entire day and a half in Paris after that had been tainted—a strange metallic taste in the mouth and a general warping of colors, like a migraine aura—by the Dr. Trinh debacle. Not only had she not gleaned anything useful from Célestine’s doctor, she had unexpectedly bumped into the limits of her intellect, or at least her education, and felt bruised by the collision.

      Or was she selling herself short? The Crillon pin, for example. She could imagine Dr. Trinh picking it up from her desk with ancient silver North Vietnamese surgical tongs and sending it out to her favorite counter-surveillance lab for analysis. But it was a perfect excuse for further contact with the doctor, if Naomi could devise a more efficient tactic for dealing with her. She could send Hervé to pick it up, primed with some innocent French bad-boy questions which, coming from him, the doctor would feel safe in answering. How close a collaborator could she afford to make Hervé? As if in answer to that question, her Q10 began flashing its email alert light. It was him.

      “You did not get a very good review from Dr. Trinh,” he wrote. “She was very quick to contact me and to let me know that I should stay away from you because you obviously wanted to do damage to the memory of our dearest Célestine. She also said that she did not feel that you were very intelligent, or maybe you were just American, she’s not sure, and that you used shock tactics that reminded her of American military policies in Vietnam. I asked her if she would pose nude СКАЧАТЬ