Naomi’s thumbs began to fly. “I’m very disappointed to hear about the doctor’s reaction to me. Did she really talk about the Vietnam War?”
“Ha ha, got you there. No, I made that up. She did say that she didn’t trust you, though, and that you deliberately left some pin or something in her office as a kind of symbolic marker or presence. Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“Did you really ask her to pose nude for your book?”
“Yes. All that is true.”
“Does that mean that she was Célestine’s lover?”
“Yes. I was once in bed with both of them. One day I’ll tell you about that. It was very interesting. It made me think of Karl Marx.”
“Was there anyone in the Arosteguys’ life together that they didn’t …”
The corridor, which was lined with glass, had become unbearably hot as the sun edged over it, and the constant irritated nudging through the waiting crowd by passengers trying to get to their baggage or some other flight was ramping up the general hostility. Someone stubbed his foot on Naomi’s roll-on and rammed her with his shoulder so hard she could feel the density of his bone and muscle—it felt intentional, a punishment, and Naomi gasped—causing her to inadvertently hit the Send button on her phone. Now other people started to wedge their way through the gap that Naomi had left as she stepped forward under the blow, and she was separated from her camera bag. She rotated herself on the spot so she was confronting the surge and worked her way back to her roller. Facing that direction, she saw the marquee of an airport electronics chain, and with her bag safely back in hand, she plunged towards the oasis of the kiosk.
IN THE CORNER of the room between the minibar and the TV dresser unit crouched two sets of unopened bags: two camera rollers, two backpacks, two small black Samsonite four-wheel Cruisair Spinner suitcases with faux carbon-fiber-weave finish (Naomi and Nathan aspired to Rimowa Topas, the sexy German dentable aluminum stuff, but that was, for the moment, out of their range). It was not so much that they had the same taste in gear, but rather that they collaborated on their consumerism; it was a consumerist dialectic that led to the same commodity. That’s what Naomi was thinking in the floating part of her mind as she sucked Nathan’s cock—so delightfully, boringly, not curved much at all, not a mutant organ in any way, but a classic, modern circumcised penis—in room 511 of the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel. And she was surprised to find herself thinking in Marxist terms, because up until that moment at the electronics kiosk, in which she discovered three books by the Arosteguys—cheap-looking rushed editions in American English pumped out to take advantage of the philosophy-cannibalism scandal—she had barely heard of Karl Marx or Das Kapital. And yet those books, small, with large, inviting typefaces, and so easy to read, like owner’s manuals for hitherto undiscovered parts of the brain, made her feel as though she had been born a Marxist economist. Not that Marxism was the subject of the books, but that the lexicon of Marx somehow underpinned the Arosteguys’ evidently profound understanding of contemporary consumerism—and of Naomi herself, as it turned out.
The lack of an available direct flight, which would have been a short hour-plus hop from Paris to Amsterdam, meant a seven-hour ordeal involving a layover in Frankfurt. But the time dissolved in an odd way, because instead of wandering among the randomly strewn high-tech shops of that stainless-steel commercial kitchen of an airport, punctuated by intense bouts of Wi-Fi hotspotting, Naomi found herself settled into a lounge chair near her gate, submerged in the deep inner sea of the Arosteguys—a warm sea nurturing a coral reef inhabited by the most bizarre and engaging creatures—continuing a dive she had begun on the flight from Paris. By the time she came up for air, she had been transformed into a quiveringly, giddily passionate Arosteguyan.
And now those three books—Science-Fiction Money, Apocalyptic Consumerism: A User’s Manual, and Labor Gore: Marx and Horror—lay innocently on the glossy desk by the window as Nathan unexpectedly, and somewhat unsportingly, came in Naomi’s mouth, phlegmy and bitter. It was her breasts that did it, or rather, it was all four breasts—two of Naomi’s, two of Dunja’s, superimposed on each other, the image fermented in Nathan’s brain and downloaded through his penis into Naomi’s hot, distracted mouth. Or so it felt to Nathan, absorbing Naomi’s jet lag and distraction as his own, and confusing her breasts, beautifully wobbling as she sucked, with Dunja’s larger, mutilated ones, and somehow even adding Dunja’s swollen armpit glands—six breasts?—to the mix. He had his arms behind his head and wasn’t even touching Naomi’s breasts. It was the distance that made the hallucinatory laminating of breasts possible, and his usual come-control ineffective. Or had he even tried to exercise that control? Was he like a small dog who punishes his mistress for staying out too late and leaving him locked in the kitchen? Naomi never swallowed unless she was very drunk. Naturally, she had a rationale. It was more porn-like to just let it dribble out of her mouth, to let it form a stringy bridge to his penis and his pubic hair. She did it now, not startled, exactly, but maybe puzzled by his betrayal of their routine, which was that they would decide in advance of her mouth enclosing him whether this was foreplay or this was it for now. Naomi didn’t like sexual surprises. She was always willing to play, but she wanted structure.
And so it was a surprise to Nathan, then, that Naomi, abstractedly wiping her lips with the back of her hand, said, “What do you think about Marx and crime, Than?” No sexual reprimands, and a reversion to her infantile name for him, Than, suggesting a thumb-sucking, asexual state of mind.
“Well, I’m not sure, Omi. It’s a huge subject, I guess. You’ve been deep into it? Marx? That’s a first for you, isn’t it?”
Naomi rolled onto her back, flattened by the enormity. The ceiling was a stained plaster swirling. It matched her mental state. “I’ve been deep into the Arosteguys.”
“They’re Marxists?”
“I’ve been reading them. I realize I have no education. It’s intimidating and depressing. It hurts my head. I need the internet to read them. And exhilarating. I’m not sure what they are. Were. She’s very dead. And dismembered.” Naomi folded both arms over her eyes, shutting out the oppressive ceiling. “Omi, Than.” Nathan began the cursory wiping of his penis with an obscure corner of the bedsheets, a habit Naomi had forced herself to decide was endearing. Was it a passive-aggressive statement? Did he hold off doing that when she swallowed? She couldn’t remember.
“That’s us,” he said. “Omi Than. We sound like a Vietnamese gynecologist.”
Naomi shook her head under her arms. “So weird that you say that. So weird.”
“Because?”
“Because there is a Vietnamese gynecologist in my life. Or almost.” Naomi unfolded and rolled back over to face Nathan, lips still sticky. “Célestine’s GP. Dr. Phan Trinh. She definitely had an intimate knowledge of her patient’s vagina.”
“And a Marxist? A criminal?”
“Dr. Trinh? No, I was thinking about Aristide when I said that.”
“A Marxist and a criminal?”
Naomi rolled off her side of the bed and squatted beside her camera roller. She dripped a few drops of lazy viscous fluid into the carpeting as she unzipped the bag and groped its innards. “I was thinking more like a Marxist and therefore a criminal. I mean, the way he—they—wrote made me dizzy-crazy, made me feel intelligent and deep, and you know how seductive that is for me, you used it yourself to get me into bed that first time.” And now she flopped back onto the bed, a white-and-silver iPhone 5s in her hand. “Lemme take
