to just invent?”
“Have you ever met this woman, this Tretikov?”
“I’ve seen an interview with her.”
“Yes, of course.” Dr. Trinh stood up, brushing the front of her suit with her tiny hands as she did so, as though Madame Tretikov had covered her with breadcrumbs. “Yes, she’s an ordinary person who has unconsciously used the power of the internet to create a new reality concerning Madame Arosteguy. And it has caused me and my medical colleagues a lot of anguish, I can tell you.” A contemptuous snicker. “She’s the kind of superstitious old woman who believes that thinking too much, or even thinking certain thoughts, can give you brain cancer. And I want you to correct that. That is why I agreed to talk to you.” Having made her statement, this figurine of a woman sat back down and resumed exactly her former position. “The media have now accused us of negligence in our treatment of a woman who was considered a national jewel. They talk of misdiagnosis, of carelessness, of political pressure on us that forced us to ignore her deadly condition, and so on.”
“And none of that is true?”
“None of it.”
“And Célestine didn’t tell her husband that she had brain cancer, and she didn’t ask him to kill her?”
At this, Dr. Trinh produced a sad smile, and it struck Naomi as a genuine smile at last, one which illuminated the doctor’s eyes and altered her breathing, which summoned the earthy presence of Célestine Arosteguy into her fussy, controlled office. “Célestine always used to say that she was doomed and that she had a terminal illness. She said that to her students, to me, to everyone. It was not a complaint, you see. It was almost a promise. But then, anyone who read her writings deeply would know she didn’t mean anything medical.”
The smile was still on Dr. Trinh’s face as she looked down at her doll-like hands, lost in secret memories of the doomed, womanly Célestine, and Naomi found herself wanting to destroy it, to punish her for it. In particular, Naomi was annoyed with herself for not having read even a précis of the Arosteguy oeuvre and could not therefore call the doctor on this evasion. The necessary weapons, however, were close at hand. “And would she ask just anyone to kill her?” It occurred to Naomi that she had very recently fallen back on the expression “just kill me” in a conversation with Nathan in which he had again carped about his missing macro/portrait lens—the lens on her camera right now, sitting in the bag at her feet—but she doubted it would be part of Célestine’s lexicon.
“Of course not.”
“But someone did kill her. Who do you think it was?”
“I have no idea. She had many friends.”
“That surprises me. You think a friend killed her?”
“She knew many people.”
“You don’t think a stranger killed her.”
“These are things I know nothing about.”
“She would say to you, her personal physician, that she had a terminal illness, and you felt that she was being philosophical? You didn’t take it seriously?”
Dr. Trinh had been talking to her hands, but now she raised her eyes to Naomi, searching as she spoke for verifying signs of Naomi’s stupidity, her profound American ignorance. “It was an existential statement,” said Dr. Trinh, “about the death sentence we all live under. She had an affection for Schopenhauer, which led her at times into a kind of fatalistic romanticism. I tried to get her to revisit Heidegger, not so different in some ways, the Germanic ways, but at least a shift away from that sickly Asian taste for cosmic despair.” As if summoned from the ether by that last phrase, a tiny silver crucifix hanging from a bracelet around the doctor’s left wrist caught the raw daylight bouncing onto the desk from a corner mirror and caught Naomi’s eye. Naomi’s friend Yukie was also a Christian, an anomaly that was somehow a disappointment to Naomi. Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, perhaps. So much more interesting. What bracelets would they wear then? Dr. Trinh continued: “But she couldn’t get past the man’s politics, the Nazi associations, the anti-Semitism. We disagreed on that point, that a man’s politics should negate the value of his philosophy. She could not see how a separation of that kind was possible. A perfectly French attitude, of course.”
Naomi met the doctor’s eyes and her inwardly directed smile with a smile of her own, but she had no confidence that she could disguise the evidence of her immediate downward spiraling, brought about by her intense regret that she had initiated talking to another human being, live. If she had been in front of her laptop, she could google these two Germanics, get a feel for them, but in a strictly oral context she had no idea how to even spell their names, much less respond intelligently to Dr. Trinh. It was one thing to toy with Hervé, bright though he was. Nathan was the one with the classical education, or whatever you called it. He was the reader. Where was he? Naomi was struggling to keep her head above water with the doctor. A street brawl was the only way out.
“Has anyone done an autopsy on Célestine’s brain to see if she had a tumor?”
“Based on the diagnosis of a cleaning lady? I doubt it.”
“Are you aware of the report that Célestine’s severed head was cut open and that her brain was removed by her murderer or murderers? Why do you think they did that?”
A smile was still there on Dr. Trinh’s face, but it was no longer the same smile. It had become a smile that said, “I knew you were my enemy when you walked in here, and now here is the proof, and it makes me happy to see how right I was.” Dr. Trinh stood up and with special force brushed some more crumbs from the front of her suit, this time very dirty, greasy, ugly crumbs that had been sprinkled by Naomi herself. The little silver crucifix—had Vietnam been converted by French Catholic missionaries?—bounced at the end of its chain like a freshly hanged man. And still Naomi couldn’t help herself. “Dr. Trinh, off the record, did Célestine ask you to kill her and then eat her? As a kind of womanly, compassionate sacrament, perhaps?”
Dr. Trinh came out from behind her desk for the first time and walked to the door. She opened it for Naomi without a word. Naomi noticed the doctor’s shoes. They were stilettos with an ankle-strapped bondage component, very severe in their stitching and their shape, but shockingly colorful—red, yellow, blue, green, black—like rare Australian parakeets. As Naomi left the office, she could not help thinking that Dr. Trinh’s shoes were somehow significant.
DR. MOLNÁR HAD ARRANGED for him to be upgraded to elite business class—the Duna Club Lounge!—on his Malév flight to Amsterdam. Even so, Nathan found himself wandering restlessly through the generic steel and glass of Terminal 2A at Ferihegy Airport. Unlike Naomi, who would immediately bury herself in her laptop the instant she arrived, Nathan considered airport downtime an opportunity for people-watching; but today, a drizzly, chilly summer day whose gloom seemed to have seeped into the airport, the only person Nathan was watching was Dunja, who was playing continuously on a screen in his mind. Trailing his roll-on camera bag behind him like a little red wagon, Nathan heard her say the terrifying, outrageous things she said she couldn’t help thinking but had no one to say them to until she met Nathan.
“What will I do when you leave me? Who will want me?”
“I’m not so special. If I want you … You’re gorgeous. You’ll have as many lovers as you want.”
“So many women have cancer now. Do you think a new esthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the esthetic of 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