Read Online Consumed by David Cronenberg - Free Book Online Page B

have cancer now. Do you think a new esthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the estheticof the death-wishing drug addict? Will non-cancerous women be begging their cosmetic surgeons to give them fake node implants under their chins and around their necks? Under their arms? In their groins? So sexy, that fullness. And it works so well as an anti-aging technique, to fill out that sagging turkey neck. Who wouldn’t want it? And the jewelry, the titanium pellets piercing those tits. So S&M/bondage.” Dunja kept talking in Nathan’s head as he segued into a parallel inner dialogue with her about health and evolution, about the theory that concepts of beauty were not just concepts, but perceptions of indicators of reproductive potential and therefore of youth, about selfish genes using our bodies as vehicles only to perpetuate themselves, about how perhaps cancer genes could begin to make their own case for reproductive immortality as well, and so they too would put immense pressure on cultural acceptance of formerly taboo concepts of beauty, concepts which used to indicate disease and nearness to death but now mesmerized and seduced and mimicked youth and ripeness and health, and so her little fantasy of a culture forming around her own dire straits could theoretically … It wasn’t a conversation they actually had, but if he were Naomi, he’d probably be texting or emailing or instant-messaging Dunja right now using that Naomiesque stream-ofsemi-consciousness that had flowed over him so often in the four years they had been together.
    Naomi never let anybody go, and she used her unique, potent mixture of technology and witchiness to do it, whereas Nathan was only too happy to disconnect, to remove you from his Friends list and leave you dangling in the ether of cyberspace. Naomi thought that Nathan was ruthless with his friends; Nathan thought Naomi was compulsively, obsessively possessive. But what was Dunja? Despite the sex and the intimacy, she was the subject of a piece, and his subjects often tried to keep up a correspondence with him, sometimes clinging, with an unhealthy, creepy desperation, to that special moment in their lives; they couldn’t accept that their timewas up, that the piece about their arcane, provocative medical condition had been published, and that Nathan was now permanently out of their lives. Naomi’s subjects usually ended up behind bars or executed, and that neatly limited flowback, as Nathan called it. Of course, Dunja was certain she would be dead in a few months, and that would neatly limit flowback as well.
    Their last conversation had taken place in the Molnár Clinic’s horrid recovery room, after her breasts had been duly cut open and many small tumors had been removed under the cold blue surgery lights that transformed her flesh into silicone and her blood into magenta paste. He sat on the same plastic chair, although this time she was in the bed by the door and there were three other patients rustling and moaning in the room.
    â€œDid you enjoy that?” she asked. “It made it easier knowing that I had an appreciative audience.”
    â€œMolnár seemed confident of success. I enjoyed that part of it,” said Nathan.
    Dunja 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.”
    â€œWould it hurt for you to be more positive?”
    â€œOh, Nathan. It hurts when you become sentimental and ordinary. Why would you ever do that?”
    â€œOuch!”
    â€œDid 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?”
    â€œI get it, I get it,” said Nathan, still stung, unable to smile. If she did recover, what would they