LITMIR.BIZ

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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 time was 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.

      “Did you enjoy that?” she asked. “It made it easier knowing that I had an appreciative audience.”

      “Molnár 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.”

      “Would it hurt for you to be more positive?”

      “Oh, Nathan. It hurts when you become sentimental and ordinary. Why would you ever do that?”

      “Ouch!”

      “Did 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?”

      “I get it, I get it,” said Nathan, still stung, unable to smile. If she did recover, what would they talk about? Her dream of going back to architecture school at the University of Ljubljana and building luxury houses on the banks of the Sava with her father? How ordinary and sentimental would that be? “I got some very good shots of your operation. I’m not sure that you’ll like them, but I’ll email them to you if you want me to.”

      Dunja took his hands in hers and pulled him towards the bed. He tried to lurch his chair forward, but it was too flimsy, bending and twisting until it popped out from under him, leaving him standing in a half-crouch like a jockey. She laughed again, and he took a step and settled on the bed, the lowered metal side rail digging into his thighs no matter how he shifted his weight. “Did it turn you on when Zoltán cut into my breasts? I almost convinced him to give me just a local anesthetic, but he copped out.” Nathan enjoyed Dunja’s sporadic sixties drug/rock lingo and wanted to ask her exactly who she learned her English from, but it never was the right moment.

      “Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up.” Dunja became quiet, still. What he had just said, his expression of sexual normality, was not what she wanted to hear; he knew she would take it as rejection. He spoke very gently, skating on perversely thin ice. “When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful.”

      Dunja’s elegant big hands covered Nathan’s, squeezed them gently and pulled at them, shook them in slow motion, as though trying to reason with him through them, hoping that unspoken arguments would travel up his arms and down to his heart. “Nathan, oh, Nathan. You are really so sweet and lovely. But I have markers in my genes that say my cancer was destined to metastasize; and it has, it’s everywhere in my body, in my lymph nodes, you’ve felt them and caressed them, and you know it’s true. I’m not going to get out of this one, I’m really not.”

      “But Molnár told me …”

      “Molnár is a very strange and flaky man. He is a surgeon, a mechanic. He doesn’t want to know about things he can’t attack with machinery. I was completely surprised to wake up and find that I still had tits at all. I was sure he’d get so excited that he’d cut them right off. I was almost disappointed to see them, and looking only a little battle scarred too. He’s referred me to another clinic, this one in Luxembourg. It sounds very sketchy to me, just like Molnár, but I have a marker in my brain that means I’m destined to go there too, to let them do things to me until I’m dead.”

      Nathan could only just manage to keep looking into her searching eyes, feeling at that moment very sentimental and ordinary, and therefore mute. Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? Could he make a case for her new, diseased self as the most avantgarde form of womanly beauty? He didn’t dare, but she did.

      “While I’m still alive, I’ll have nothing special left to seduce with except the scent of dying. That will be my lethal perfume. And I want it to be what seduced you, you see? Because that’s my future, and I don’t want to live it alone. So you might find me calling you to give advice to my next lover. I might want you to encourage him to go deep into me and not be afraid. Or I might call you one night and ask you to fly to me and then strangle me to death while you fuck me from behind. Why not? Why waste the situation?” Dunja paused, her eyes never stopping their desperate search of his eyes. She smiled a freakishly kind, loving smile. “Would you come to me, Nathan? Would you come to me then, if I called you?”

      Nathan headed for the sliding glass doors of the Malév Duna Club Lounge. As he walked in, he recalled Naomi saying, “Just kill me,” when he complained to her about something on his cell. Approaching the check-in counter, he thought about strangling Naomi to death while fucking her from behind. Her hands were tied behind her with a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe belt. His hands were powerful around her long throat. Her face was twisted into a beautiful, open-mouthed, terrifying expression of ecstasy, and the fantasy-Nathan knew that it was the end of sex, that there could be no more sex after this sex. At the desk, an extremely unattractive and excessively uniformed matron—that cloying red scarf printed with little multicolored stylized wings—explained to Nathan why the photocopied membership card and other obscure paperwork Molnár had given him was not valid, and that she therefore had to deny him entrance to the promised land of the Duna Club Lounge. As he rollered away from the lounge and headed towards his gate, Nathan could only marvel at the Molnáresque perfection of it all.

      CHARLES DE GAULLE was undergoing extensive renovations. After walking for miles past dormant moving sidewalks, Naomi had to lug her roller bag up a double set of stairs—the small glass elevator was absolument for disability use only—then over a platform randomly strewn with cafeteria chairs (but no tables) that were served by a huge, lonely, lopsided automatic drinks machine, then down another set of stairs which led her into a dense mass of travelers standing numbly in a corridor with no seats at some distance from a gate with no seats. The horror of it was exacerbated by the near impossibility of getting out her laptop and opening it without cracking someone in the head. Naomi dug her BlackBerry Q10 out of the roller’s side pocket. She preferred it to Nathan’s

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