Consumed by David Cronenberg Page A

intentionally cruel unless attacked, but when she was browsing, her attention thinned out into dismissiveness. But Nathan was really pitching his story to Roiphe, not Naomi.
    â€œBut it’s a great hook. I mean, it’s about medical fame and all that comes with it. It’s about the politics of medical grant-giving, repression from the religious right, etcetera. It’s about becoming a household name that’s more feared than Creutzfeldt ever was. What kind of man would want that fame? Would he get depressed when they found a cure and his name disappeared from the front pages?”
    â€œIt’s workable. Will it get too sensational? Have you placed it?”
    â€œIt’s another spec piece. Self-financed. Feels like The New Yorker , though, doesn’t it? ‘Annals of Medicine’?”
    â€œEverything feels like that to you.”
    â€œThis is different.”
    â€œSomething about it is driving you.”
    â€œSomething. Must be.”
    Triggered by the Yukie text, Naomi had quickly left Roiphe to unearth new Arosteguy crime-scene pages, all of them murky and suggestive of viral infections and weird Russian and Chinese spoofed URLs. That the pages themselves should feel diseased and virulent seemed appropriate, even oddly comforting. As though tracing her thoughts directly through her fingertips into its touchscreen, her iPad (she named it Smudgy) disgorged a close-up of Célestine’s severed head in the small refrigerator of the Arosteguy apartment.
    â€œOh, god,” said Naomi. “Oh … I just got another Arosteguy atrocity hit. I think the killer must have taken these photos himself. I don’t see any crime-scene guys around in them. But who posted them? I’m sending you that URL too.”
    Nathan stood up and stretched. Something resembling a flight announcement was resonating through the lounge. It wasn’t his flight, but he held the phone out a bit to pick up the metallic garble for authenticity and then brought the phone back to his mouth. The disease dissonance was getting to him. “Well, maybe I’ll look at them in Toronto. Gotta go now. They’re calling my flight. Adore you. Don’t crumble.”
    â€œ Je t’adore aussi. ” Naomi touched the red End button, and was instantly back in the Arosteguy apartment.

4
    NATHAN GOT OUT OF A pumpkin-and-mint-green Beck cab in Toronto’s Forest Hill Village in front of the Coach Restaurant, a faded greasy spoon with the graphic of a silhouetted coach-and-four hanging over the door. Seniors leaning on walkers shuffled, a few girls in gray-and-burgundy uniforms from nearby Bishop Cornwall School drifted in and out. Carrying no camera, no visible recording device of any kind, he walked in through two sets of doors and stood by the vintage National cash register—embossed brass, color-coded glass keys, marble and wooden base.
    A man who could be one of his own senior customers came slowly up some back stairs and approached him. “Can I help you?” he said, dropping a pad of order forms behind the ornate machine and punching the orange No Sale key. The National’s cash drawer slid open and a bell chimed.
    â€œIs Dr. Roiphe here?”
    The man—manager? owner?—smiled a wry, snorty smile without looking up and lifted a hinged lead-weighted bill holder so that he could riffle through the banknotes in one of the drawer’s cubbies. “You think this is a doctor’s office?”
    Nathan played it straight. “I’m supposed to meet him here, but I don’t see him. Dr. Barry Roiphe.”
    â€œIf you don’t see him, then you’re blind,” said the man, not looking up but sticking an index finger into the air.
    â€œI think I see one finger,” said Nathan.
    The man lowered his finger and pointed to an obscure booth in the back. In it sat a gangly gray-haired man wearing big non-chic plastic glasses. Cardigan and flannels. Straw