A Life Without End

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  “Are you implying that transhumanists are Nazis?”

  “I’m simply saying that if we change something in the human genome, we have no idea of the consequences. For example, ten years ago in India I encountered a large family of forty members, all of whom had six fingers and six toes. Every individual in the family had twenty-four phalanges. I thought, ‘These people have an evolutionary advantage if they ever decide to become pianists!’”

  I was watching as Romy hoisted herself onto a trapeze, thinking that Mary Shelley would have liked this affable Greek doctor. Behind the roguish charm lurked an audacious scientist. I was beginning to feel a dull ache in my stomach, but maybe I was simply having trouble digesting the fondue.

  “Did their six fingers all work properly?”

  “They had no trouble using them. It was simply an extra, perfectly articulated little finger. Imagine playing the harp!”

  “Yes, twenty-percent better technique. Pretty useful for cleaning your ear, too …”

  “At the time, I genuinely thought it would be a brilliant idea to introduce this genomic variation into humanity at large. So I took blood tests, thinking that I’d be improving the human condition. And I eventually tracked down the mutation to a specific gene. Like you and me, these people had two copies of the gene: one from their mother, one from their father, either of which might contain the mutation that produced twenty-four phalanges rather than twenty. But if a member of the family had two mutated copies of the gene—which occurred quite often—the foetus died at eight weeks’ gestation. One copy of the mutation was advantageous, but two was deleterious.”

  “Damn—so much for the harp concertos.”

  “The reason I’m telling you this story is to highlight the fact that if we meddle with our evolutionary genome, we have no idea what price we might pay as a species. Every time we introduce something into the genome, we have to watch to see what damage it causes. If we want to improve our species, that has to be a decision made by society as a whole.”

  “But it’s inarguable that human beings are imperfect …”

  “Exactly. The fruit fly has more powerful eyes than we do, bats have better hearing than we do. Our ribcage doesn’t protect our liver or our spleen, which means that, if we’re in an accident, we can die from a haemorrhage. We walk on two feet, something our ancestors didn’t do, and that causes lumbago. The internal plumbing of the human animal is too complicated, menopause could occur much later.”

  “And despite all these defects, we shouldn’t touch anything?”

  Doctor Antonarakis got up and went to the window to look out at the trees. Down in the gardens, the dark-haired research assistant was spinning Romy on a merry-go-round similar to the centrifuges used to separate liquids from solids we had seen in the lab. We could hear her laugh, at once liquid and solid, rising in the air and crashing against the picture windows like a reckless robin.

  “We’ve been talking now for about half an hour. During that half hour, thousands upon thousands of our cells have been replaced. A million in my bloodstream. Half a million in my intestines. Replacing cells requires copying the genome. Six billion letters of genetic code have been copied approximately two million times between us in the past thirty minutes. For cells to be renewed, the human body requires an extraordinary and remarkably precise copying system. In fact, the system is not always accurate. It makes mistakes. Every time cells are renewed there is an error rate of 1 in 108, meaning forty or fifty errors over every three billion nucleotides. It is those errors that make it possible for us all to be different from one another. We need them, because we need to carry on living if the environment changes. In the face of a virus, or of global warming, we need diversity in order to evolve. Certain mutations cause illnesses, but that’s the price we pay for our adaptability. A flagrant example of the evolution of our species is diabetes. It has become more and more common because food and especially sugars are more plentiful. A hundred years ago there was virtually no diabetes. Three hundred years ago, the same genes that these days cause Type II diabetes offered us protection when food was more scarce.”

  I scratched my head. Seeing that he had disappointed me, Doctor Antonarakis tried to console me.

  “You know, the people who produce clean water do more in terms of prolonging our life expectancy than all the scientists and geneticists put together.”

  “How can we go about postponing death, Professor?”

  “Our concern is the brain: the liver, the intestines, the blood, even the heart can be regenerated. We can inject cells into endocrine glands. But I don’t think we could create an artificial brain. That’s something we just have to accept. I encounter a lot of patients in their eighties or nineties, and they all say the same thing: it’s okay to end life. There comes a moment when you’re weary of it. You’ll see. There is a species, the mayfly, that lives for only one day. The whole lifecycle: birth, adulthood, old age, and death in a single day. And it’s possible that that species is happy.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair: it’s a tic of mine when I don’t know what to say. I had no particular admiration for the Buddhism of ephemeropteran insects. The sun was fast sinking behind the trees, and I didn’t want to abandon Romy for much longer. I thanked the kindly geneticist who did not save my life, and hurried to catch the lift. Romy was in the lobby with the pretty medical student. A twisted thought occurred to me: if Romy got along well with this young woman … maybe … we might … eventually … envisage …

  “Papa, this is Léonore, she wants a selfie with you. She’s a fan of your TV programmes.”

  “I owe you that at least, mademoiselle. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Léonore had already taken out her mobile phone.

  She had a dainty little chin

  And looked like Charlotte Le Bon’s twin.

  Click. In the fraction of a second I stood posing next to her, I inhaled everything. The brunette with the rounded forehead had just brushed her teeth, her skin had been soaped with cherry-scented shower gel, her hair smelled of orange blossom, she had a wholesome smile, she was the kind of person who has no sense of irony. The way she looked me straight in the eye, her lips parted, said: I know what I want in life, and you could be part of my schedule. I held her gaze, a challenge, until she turned away to look at the Alps. There was enough space behind her ear, between her hair and her neck, to reveal three square centimetres of bare, downy skin on which planting a kiss would probably be the best decision of the year. To cut a long story short, I instantly wanted to have a child with this beautiful intern. For a man, creating a life is much easier than postponing death. I swear it’s true: I didn’t just want to make love to her, I wanted to see her belly swell with my fecund seed. I felt like an alien in heat: I wanted to bury a tentacle inside this person. I had just fallen into a trap hatched by my daughter in collusion with the Greek professor. After so much talk about DNA, it was my penis that now took itself for Victor Frankenstein.

  “Your daughter is a sweetheart,” Léonore said as she looked at the selfie on her mobile, “and a talented sportswoman—a real expert on the swings and the seesaw.”

  “Can we invite her to dinner with us at La Réserve, Papa? Please …”

  “But I’ve booked a Better-Aging Signature body massage at the Nescens Spa …”

  “I already asked her and she said yes! Promise I won’t ask for anything else ever …”

  “That’ll be the day,” I said in the voice of John Wayne, as dubbed in French by Raymond Loyer, in The Searchers.

  I felt an immediate revulsion at my old man’s drawl. No one says “That’ll be the day” anymore, but I couldn’t help it, it just came out. There are some encounters in which you find yourself on autopilot. The conspiracy of women to make me happy was fomenting a new attack.

  So we went and bought meringues, double cream, and some raspberries. The three of us sat on
a jetty overlooking Lake Geneva. We listened to the water lapping against the boats as we dipped the meringues into the tub of thick cream. Léonore explained the principle of eternal snows to Romy.

  “You see the mountain peaks over there, it’s so cold that the snows never melt.”

  “Like the cream in Papa’s moustache?”

  “Exactly.”

  I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. On the glistening water, a duck quacked. The lake shimmered in the twilight, then grew dark: God had just turned out the light. Clouds had gathered and a summer storm burst directly over our heads. Léonore was even more ravishing with her hair wet, sensual as a photo by Jean-François Jonvelle (a dead friend).

  “What’s your blood group, Léonore?”

  “O+, why?”

  “Mine too. Have you had your DNA sequenced? Your eggs frozen? Do you have plans to have your stem cells preserved in a cryogenic biobank? Do you have ethical problems with brain uploading? What about self-regenerating blood shots? Will you marry me?”

  At this point, she assumed I was a lunatic, which says much about her perspicacity. Romy invited Léonore up to our suite so that she could dry her hair. We finished the meringues and watched Black Mirror until Romy fell asleep. Then CNN informed us that George Michael had just died at the age of fifty-three. They played the video of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” where he sang with Elton John. When the singer—of Greek extraction, like Doctor Antonarakis (George Michael’s real name was Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou)—sang the line “All my pictures seem to fade to black and white …” a tear fell from my right eye and Léonore watched as it trickled into my beard. I was crying selfishly about my own mortality, but she assumed I was altruistic. Embarrassed, she said, “Right, well, it was lovely to meet you, I’ve had a lovely time, but it’s getting late, I think I’ll let you get some rest.”

  … I didn’t let her let me get some rest.

  Sometimes my shyness turns into firmness. With my forefinger, I tucked a lock of her hair behind her right ear. My other hand had grasped her wrist. I pressed my cheek against hers in slow motion, turned my eyes to her, tilted my head toward her lips. Holding my breath, I smiled, then gently slipped my tongue into her mouth. It is at this point that the mission might have ended. All it would have taken was a sign of reluctance on her part. If she had hesitated, I wouldn’t have insisted: she could destroy my life with a single tweet. But she whetted her tongue, and nibbled at my lower lip as though it were her own. We both gave a sigh, perhaps of relief. I think we were both relieved that our porn-star kiss had not been ridiculous. I slid a hand over her breast and, lower down, a few fingers beneath the thin cotton. I was able to confirm that my attraction was reciprocated. Our epidermises longed to make contact. I was inheriting a new woman. It is rare to encounter such straightforward foreplay. As I peeled off her T-shirt, I took out my hard penis. This type of manoeuvre is generally complicated, even embarrassing (cock-blocked by boxer shorts, T-shirt stuck over the head, prick scratched by the zip: such minor incidents can spoil the fairy tale). No such problems here: our movements were as fluid and logical as in a wet dream. I think Léonore was surprised by my impatience; she didn’t know that I had spent centuries wanting to get her pregnant. Nothing now separated us, not even a condom. I loved Léonore as one might inhale the pure air of French-speaking Switzerland in the middle of a summer storm. I rapturously sullied her pristine clothes, and her two spheres, their nipples erect like my penis between them. We fucked standing to attention, our mingled sweat sweetening each other.

  She whispered in my ear, “It’s obvious you do this regularly.”

  I didn’t dare tell her she was the first woman I had touched in two years. She mistook my enthusiasm for wantonness and there was no question of me shattering her illusions. Her pleasure heightened mine, I spurted when she came. Every time she squealed in my ear, I put a hand over her mouth so that she didn’t wake Romy, and being gagged simply excited her more. The best sex occurs when two egotists stop being egotists.

  -

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Romy insisted we go and visit the Frankenstein exhibition at Colony. It was still raining, but not the fine summer drizzle I love: big, fat raindrops from this Swiss monsoon trickled down our necks like icy love bites. We dropped Léonore off at the hospital, having said little in the car; but it was not an awkward silence, quite the reverse, it was the silence of three people who aren’t afraid to say nothing and simply listen to the song of the windscreen wipers. When she had gone, Romy said, “She’s cool.”

  “You don’t mind that she stayed the night?”

  “No, I’m sad that she had to go now.”

  (joyful silence)

  “Right, shall we go see the monster exhibition?”

  The same taxi dropped us off at the Bodmer Foundation, outside an imposing building perched on a lush hill overlooking Lake Geneva. The private library has one of the most important collections of manuscripts in the world. The exhibition “Frankenstein, Creation of Darkness” paid homage to a source of national pride: it was in a neighbouring village that Mary Shelley wrote her great novel about artificial life. The city had even erected a statue of Frankenstein’s creature in its Plainpalais district. At the entrance to the exhibition, in gold letters, was a line from the novel: I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.

  “You see, darling, it was here that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, exactly two hundred years ago.”

  “Duh! I know that,” Romy said pointing to the wall, “I’m not stupid. It’s written right there!”

  Romy lingered for a long time in front of every painting, every manuscript, and read all of the explanatory notices in their entirety. I couldn’t understand how I, a shallow TV presenter, had managed to sire someone so meticulous. We were able to study a number of manuscript pages, and a first edition of Frankenstein (1818) signed by Mary Shelley: To Lord Byron, from the author. The engravings of the monster wandering the streets of Geneva did not frighten Romy, a fan of The Walking Dead. The illustrations in the grimoires on display showed dancing skeletons, rotting corpses, and the circles of hell—in short, the commonplace tragedy of the human condition. I pored over Mary Shelley’s private diary. The young novelist had lost her mother as a little girl. She had written Frankenstein at the age of twenty. Later, three of her children died (typhus, malaria, miscarriage), then her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank in the Ligurian Sea, all this before Mary turned twenty-five. This is what happens when you conjure up someone who triumphs over Death: you attract its attention.

  In the preface to the 1831 edition, on the subject of Frankenstein, she writes: “… it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” I looked up and saw the rain hammering on the windows and on the paved courtyard, a black torrential rain. “Frightful must it be,” she writes about her novel, “for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

  “What’cha doing?”

  “Argh!”

  Romy made me jump out of my skin. I was beginning to understand how the Swiss weather had scared the shit out of the young Mary Shelley, and, through her, the whole world.

  “There’s nothing but old books, it’s boring,” Romy said. “Can we go?”

  “Hang on, there’s just one more old book I want to show you.”

  In the room containing the permanent collection, we passed a first edition of Goethe’s Faust. It was open at an original illustration by Delacroix.

  “Who’s Faust?”

  “He’s a guy who wants to live forever. So he makes a deal with the devil.”

  “And it works?”

  “At first, yes: he gets his youth in exchange for his soul. But later, things get complicated.”

  “So it ends badly?”


  “Inevitably: he falls in love.”

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “No.”

  A few metres further on, the Egyptian Book of the Dead impressed with the solemnity of its mysterious hieroglyphs from beyond the sarcophagus. Five thousand years ago, a scribe had put stylus to papyrus to write this user’s manual to the afterlife. To broadly summarize, after death, the heart was weighed in a balance before the gods. The soul underwent a certain number of ordeals (notably, being forced to face snakes, crocodiles, and revolting beetles) before “emerging forth into the light,” or, in other words, sailing across the sky aboard the solar barque of the god Ra to Sekhet-Aaru, the heavenly city. Later, the three great monotheistic religions of the world simply plagiarized the concept.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “Nope.”

  I felt a wave of tenderness. Romy had an unruly tuft of hair that reminded me of photographs of myself at her age: do we love our children simply out of narcissism? Is a child a living selfie? In another room, we finally came to the Gutenberg Bible. The holy book glittered like a precious stone behind the thick bulletproof glass. The gilt and multicoloured illuminations and the letters printed on vellum 562 years earlier seemed to hover above the page like subtitles in some 3D blockbuster.

  “There: this is the first book ever printed. It’s important for you to see this book, to remember this moment. Soon, books won’t exist anymore.”

  “That way I can say I saw the beginning and the end of books.”

  She looked me up and down with those blue eyes that will never again know innocence. I never felt prouder than when Romy calmly said those words. It was one of the first times I had spent two days alone with her, without Clémentine (her nanny). It was high time I got to know my daughter.

  -

  LIFE IS A hecatomb. A mass murder that slaughters 59 million people a year. 1.9 deaths per second. 158,857 deaths a day. Twenty people have died around the world since the beginning of this paragraph—more if you’re a slow reader. I don’t understand why terrorists wear themselves out adding to the statistics: they will never manage to kill as many people as Mother Nature. Humanity is decimated into general indifference. We tolerate this daily genocide as though it were a normal process. Personally, I find death shocking. I used to think about it once a day. Since turning fifty, I think about it every minute.