Consumed Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m not.”
    Hervé had taken off his tie, jacket, and shirt, and was working on his belt, a fussy alligator-patterned thing with a dual-pronged buckle and a double row of holes which seemed to be giving him trouble. He was hairless and thin through the chest, just as Naomi thought he would be. All those New Wave movies. “If you have sex with me, I will show you something special that Célestine liked very much. It’s unusual what she liked.”
    Naomi lifted her camera and casually began to snap away.
    â€œOh, I like your camera,” said Hervé. “It looks like it’s carbon fiber. Is it?”
    â€œNo. Magnesium body.” She stopped shooting, hefted her Nikon, juggled it from hand to hand. “I have a feeling carbon fiber is next, though. It would be nice if it were even lighter.” Then back up to her eye, shooting again. “And what about Aristide? Was there something special that he liked?”
    Hervé finally got his belt undone and his trousers down. He was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini briefs. She had hoped for something more exotic. “Yes, certainly,” he said, stepping out of the trousers. “It will be a little more difficult, but I can show you that too.”
    DUNJA LAY PROPPED UP in a bed in the Molnár Clinic’s basement recovery room. There were a dozen beds, skeletal and primitive, creepy, but she and Nathan were alone in the room. He sat in an unstable plastic chair beside her bed, his camera on his lap, his voice recorder still hanging from its lanyard around his neck, its jewel-like red power light staining Dunja’s sheet, so dark was the room. Dunja was still dreamy, but Nathan suspected it was emotional exhaustion more than the effect of the anesthetic. She nodded towards him. “I didn’t expect the camera. In the operating room. I thought you would just take notes on a notepad, like a proper journalist.”
    â€œWe’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write. We have to bring back images, sound, video. I hope you don’t mind.”
    Dunja stretched, and it was somehow voluptuous despite the depressing threadbare hospital gown and the shunt in her arm. “I don’t mind. Soon, that’ll be all that’s left, so the more the merrier. Something to remember me by.”
    â€œWhy do you say that? Don’t you have confidence in Dr. Molnár?”
    Dunja laughed. “Look at this place. This is my strategy of last resort. No one else in the world would commit this operation on me. Only Dr. Molnár was arrogant enough. And you can quote me.”
    â€œI will quote you.”
    â€œAnd you? You were so impressed by Dr. Molnár you came from New York to write about him?”
    Nathan’s turn to laugh. “I saw him in a documentary about illegal organ transplants. He was very defiant and very engaging. I came to talk to him about the international organ trade and then discovered he was a practicing breast surgeon. I’m not sure yet what the piece I’m writing is really about, but that’s not so unusual for me.” He lifted his camera. “May I take a picture?”
    â€œWhy not? Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”
    Nathan checked the light metering through the viewfinder, then cranked the camera’s ISO up to its maximum of 25,600. (The new D4s, the one he didn’t have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 409,600—it could see in the dark—but that didn’t bear thinking about.) The photos would be extremely noisy, grainy and splotchy, but would have a painterly quality, pointillist, perhaps, or impressionist. The camera somehow felt even more sensuous, more instrument-like, at that setting. He began to fire.
    Dunja sighed. “Of course, for all eternity I won’t look my best. Is there any pose you’d like from me? I’m not