A Life Without End

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  When she looked down at her plate, I thought Romy might strangle me. It was a tofu burger with stale spelt bread and stir-fried vegetables. I tried to explain: “Listen, your father needs to regenerate his liver. But don’t worry, I’ve hidden lots of snacks in our wardrobe.”

  “Whew, I was scared there for a minute. And why is there nothing to drink?”

  “Here, they believe that solids should not be mixed with liquids. I forget why; something to do with the intestines. They claim that our intestines control our bodies, our emotions, blah blah blah.”

  “I’m done with my life.”

  “I’ve got first dibs!”

  “Papa, you can be honest with me, we’re here because you take drugs, aren’t we, like the father of one of the Gossip Girls?”

  “That’s no way to speak to your father. And anyway, you’re wrong!”

  “Everyone at school watches your show. Don’t treat me like I’m dumb.”

  “Firstly, I’ve quit the show, and secondly … none of that was real, it was all fake. And thirdly … it was a long time ago.”

  “The last episode was two weeks ago, but it’s okay, Dad. It’s good for you to look after your health. And to stop drinking.”

  “It’s not what you think at all … We’re just here to rest ourselves before we go to America to become immortal.”

  I didn’t say any more. I felt that she needed to say, “I’m your daughter, I know you better than anyone.” And I was happy to let my mask slip. Obviously, she was right: this step (rehab) was a necessary stage on the road to immortality. And it was sweet of her to encourage me.

  The clouds were scattered like crumbs of meringue in a more humane restaurant. We watched the sun set behind the mountains, then went and dived into the warm bubbling waters of the Jacuzzi. It seems paradoxical that places intended to help you not to die make you want to kill yourself. When we got back to our suite, Romy teased me, savouring a pata negra ham sandwich washed down with Coke. But I held firm. I treated the diet like a challenge on a reality TV show, a version of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. We fell asleep watching the César awards, at which my second film had zero nominations. Romy slept in a bed while I slept in a relaxing bubble chair, surrounded by soft lighting and the sound of waves breaking. The chair warmed my back like the driver’s seat of my car back in Paris. VIVAMAYR offers simple pleasures within easy reach of anyone prepared to shell out a thousand euros a day.

  -

  MY OBSESSION WITH sanatoriums must be genetic; I come from a family of doctors who, in the early twentieth century, established a dozen health spas in Béarn. When I was a child, my grandfather told me that between the wars patients with tuberculosis—the men in black, the women in formal gowns—dined to the sound of a string quartet as they watched the sun set over the Pyrenees. These days, visitors of spa clinics lose weight in terry-towel bathrobes and pad from the sauna to the pool in disposable slippers. It’s a far cry from The Magic Mountain. I pity all these rarely used bodies prepared to go without food in the hope of ramping up their sex appeal. How can anyone be alluring in a bathrobe and flip-flops? Don’t they realize their sex life is over? The human species has many undeniable qualities, but its urges have led to its annihilation. It’s a little like my city: pre-war Paris was a global centre of art and culture; these days, it’s a museum plagued by pollution and increasingly abandoned by tourists put off by terrorist attacks.

  The human race has to transform or die out, both of which amount to the same thing: humanity, as we’ve known it since the era of Christ, is dying anyway. Paris will never again be Paris and Man will never again be as he was before Google. What is humiliating about the human condition is that its fate is inexorable. If someone were to discover a way to reverse time … they would be the greatest benefactor humanity has ever known.

  Reception phoned our room when the packages containing Pepper were delivered. There was a heated debate between the director and one of the nurses: Were robots permitted at VIVAMAYR? Eventually, special permission was granted for Pepper to be admitted, provided he remained in our room. Since he was not waterproof, he was not permitted to avail himself of the thalassotherapy on offer.

  “Where are we?” Pepper asked when Romy turned him on. (His GPS system wasn’t connected to the Wi-Fi.)

  “On the shores of the Wörthersee in Austria,” I said.

  “Eva Braun used to love crossing the Wörthersee in a rowing boat.” (Clearly, the Wi-Fi was working.)

  “You’re lucky you don’t have to eat,” Romy said. “The food here is disgusting.”

  “Please recharge my batteries by placing me on the docking station. Please recharge my batteries by placing me on the docking station. Please recharge my batteries by placing me on the docking station.”

  “He’s hungry,” Romy said.

  While Pepper recovered his energy after a long trip in the baggage hold, we headed out for some sightseeing. Our room looked out onto a small church on a hill overlooking the lake. To the west, the eternal snow glittered. On the shores of the lake, bulrushes bowed their heads as though to drink the limpid waters. The clinic had been built on an isthmus of land that extended into the lake. The scenery was achingly romantic, as though we had wandered into a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the first artist to paint men from behind, as intruders in the landscape. Our little stroll led us to the door of the village church of Maria Wörth, whose belfry, according to the sign, dated back to the year 875. Mass was being said; German hymns drifted through the open door. We stepped into the coolness. Before a congregation of thirty, a priest wearing a purple chasuble intoned, “Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?”

  “What’s he saying?”

  “It’s what Jesus said on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”

  As in fairy tales, the inside of the church seemed bigger than the outside. The priest giving the sermon rolled his Rs theatrically. Romy found it funny, the way he said “Yaysus Chrrrristus.” I leafed through a tourist brochure that said Gustav Mahler had composed his fifth symphony here, in a small cabin by the lake. The one with the depressing adagietto that features in Visconti’s Death in Venice. Our little trip was conjuring up images of death and the works of Thomas Mann. I dearly hoped I was not as doomed as the elderly Aschenbach, leering at young Tadzio.

  The rest of the day passed peacefully. Romy swam in the pool and had a foot massage. I was given a battery of allergy tests: a female doctor in Birkenstock sandals tipped various powders onto my tongue while testing my muscular reflexes. In an accent that made her sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger, she explained that I was allergic to histamine, a substance found in vintage wines and stinky cheese. Life is rough: I was allergic to my two favourite foods. After that, she had me place my feet in a salt bath fitted with electrodes. After five minutes of electrolysis, the water turned brown. In the Bible, Jesus washes people’s feet to cleanse them of sin. The detox clinic has simply brought his methods up to date. The process was supposed to rid me of toxins, but I felt sullied. The woman said “ja, ja” after every sentence. She played guessing games as she massaged my stomach: “Don’t tell me what is wrong with you, I will find out.”

  Once again, she sprinkled my tongue with various kinds of foul powder: dried egg yolk, goat’s cheese, lactose, fructose, flour … then she took my blood pressure.

  “Gut. You are suffering from fatty liver and hypertension. I will prescribe zinc, selenium, magnesium, and glutamine.”

  Either she was extremely lucky or kinesiology is an exact science. Three swans were sunning themselves on the lawn, watched by the towering fir trees. Clouds were gliding across the surface of the lake. I was starving to death and frequently racing to the toilet because of the Epsom salts (a sort of human drain cleaner, I’ll spare you the details), but, in spite of everything, I still had faith in my purified future.

  B
ack in our room, Pepper was asking Romy general knowledge questions.

  “What is the capital of Bermuda?”

  “Um …”

  “Who wrote Illusions perdues?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Where was Mozart born?”

  “Do you know you’re a pain in the bum?”

  “Austria,” I whispered to her. “Like Hitler.”

  In fact, what the robot was offering was a high-tech version of Trivial Pursuit. Romy had raided our secret stash of snacks. I never thought that I would one day gaze at an empty pack of Chipsters with such desperation. I was eating nothing but spinach for every meal. Dieting may increase life expectancy … but mostly it increases hunger. I stared longingly at Romy’s stash of snacks like Tantalus in the Odyssey gazes at the fruit that disappears as soon as he reaches for it. It was at this moment that the limpid, transparent waters of the lake ringed by pine forests were cleaved by a speedboat trailing a water-skiing fat man in an orange lifejacket in its wake. That was the last notable event of the day.

  -

  WHITE BOATS GLIDED over a lake as green as a nineteen-square-kilometre emerald. A lifeguard took Romy water-skiing. I carried on eating nothing but vegetables: on day three, it was courgettes and carrots. I chewed slowly, dreaming of the huge prime rib steak at Gandarias in San Sebastian, which, depending on the season, is served with porcini mushrooms sautéed with garlic and parsley. Despite these unwholesome thoughts, I have to admit that, after a time, hunger abates and stomach cramps become less painful; you feel weightless. When you are fasting, you glide. All religions make provisions for some annual form of fasting: Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur; even Gandhi, as a Hindu, used to go on hunger strike. Diet plan increases life span. At VIVAMAYR, they call it “Time-Restricted Feeding” (TRF). Intermittent starvation burns stores of carbohydrates and triggers autophagy (the burning of fat) and cell regeneration, the latter of which increases life expectancy. I was proud to be a fiftysomething willingly suffering from malnutrition.

  It is the last heroic feat available to someone in the West.

  The time for blood purification was fast approaching. I assumed that a pump sucked out the patient’s blood, ran it through a washing machine, and then reinjected it into the arteries. This is not exactly how Intravenous Laser Therapy works. Nor is it as simple as the ozone therapy at the Henri Chenot Health and Wellness Centre at the Palace Merano hotel—now that’s old school! The night before, they took blood samples to see whether I was deficient in antioxidants and minerals. Once they had the results, I was asked to lie on a chair-bed while hooked up to an IV vitamin drip intended to detoxify my liver. The process was not a blood transfusion, but a bolus of stuff fed into a vein through a needle in my arm. The feature of this particular therapy was that the Austrian doctors threaded a fibre-optic laser into the IV to inject light into my vein. The therapy is recognized as effective in Germany, Austria, and Russia, though not in France. Just let me remind you that a laser beam is capable of cutting through diamond or steel. Thankfully, the power of the laser being channelled into my arms was significantly weaker. According to the clinic’s “physicians,” this would boot both my red and white blood cell count while awakening stem cells via the glow of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. I felt confident, since this was not my first laser surgery. In 2003, a laser beam had cured my myopia by burning my retinas.

  I lay for forty minutes with this laser-needle in my right arm, my blood glowing from the red ray: it was pounding like disco night at Studio 54 in my ulnar vein. I imagined immunoglobulins disco-dancing inside my body while interferons and interleukins acted as sequins. I could see red light glowing through the skin of my forearm like a mirror ball. I prayed that this procedure would have some effect.

  “Lord Jesus, thank you for this light in my veins. This is my blood, which glimmers for You and for many for the remission of sins, do this in memory of me, give me the funk, the whole funk, and nothing but the funk, amen.”

  Since I couldn’t move my right arm, I used my left hand to take notes. The nurse laughed (in German) at my scrawling handwriting. Two patients with IV drips were telling each other their life stories in Russian, probably the wives of oligarchs eager to be made young, while their husbands, down in Courchevel, were cheating on them with prostitutes. The laser gave off a faint sci-fi hiss and my whole body was suffused with warmth. Through the window, I watched a stork with a contemptuous expression, a pair of swans like snow drifts on the lawn, and three ducks who bobbed their heads underwater when they saw me emitting light. These birds did not have “laser blood.” They belonged to Old Nature. They buried their heads beneath the surface like aquatic ostriches so as not to see the looming Apocalypse. As my platelets fed on photons, I was entering into New Nature.

  The ducks quacked and danced,

  My platelets were enhanced.

  If this was A Cure for Wellness, my eyes would have started bleeding and twin laser beams would have shot out of the sockets. But nothing happened. The nurse came to change the optical fibre in order to insert a different laser, this time yellow. The red laser promotes energy, whereas the yellow laser increases the production of vitamin D and serotonin. It’s like injecting sunshine directly into your arm; as powerful an antidepressant as a shot of pure opium. Actually, this kind of anti-aging treatment weans you off drugs by giving you other drugs that are more luminous. Seeing a yellow glow beneath my skin was even more surreal. At least the red laser matched the colour of my blood. My arm was now a halogen lamp that lit up the ceiling. To the west, the eternal snows seemed to float above the white cloud that blanketed the forest like a cotton-wool bandage. I don’t know whether it was exhaustion, starvation, or simply a placebo effect, but my blood-laser was filling me with a new energy. I was approaching the shores of recovery. Stepping into the dazzling fountain of youth. Before me, the iridescent lake began to pixelate. The shimmering light seemed to strobe; real life was being transformed into computer graphics. The real world was digital. The water was no longer water but a mass of black and blue pixels, the swan was no longer a white bird but a mathematically drawn semicircle. Light coursed through my arm to my fingertips. The answer is in the light that glows in thee. Shine, glisten, illuminate me this day, the letters of my DNA, ATCG, are the numbers that appear in the equation that describes the universe—O Laser, illumine my red blood cells, let them grow pink as a compass rose, let white blood cells blaze in the ventricles of my seething heart! My transubstantiation into a superman had begun.

  -

  LÉONORE EMAILED ME: “I completely disapprove of all these experiments, but I love you anyway.”

  I wrote back: “The experiment has been conclusive: I can’t survive without food, or without you.”

  Why did the atmosphere in the clinic have to be so utterly depressing? Surely, the measure of success with such treatments is when patients leave happy. When they leave the clinic they can’t stop smiling, their friends ask why they’re so happy, they recommend the clinic. QED. I was reminded of the thoughts of the hero of The Magic Mountain on the week he arrived in the Davos sanatorium: “This can’t go on.”

  At the table next to ours, three giggling Englishwomen were issued with a written rebuke: the staff placed a sign on their table that read BITTE UNTERHALTEN SIE SICH LEISE. This means “PLEASE DON’T TALK SO LOUDLY.” Guests were not there to amuse themselves. With nothing else to eat but turnips, courgettes, celery, and chickpeas, they dreamed, as they masticated, of the banquets of yesteryear. Outside the window, the swans, with their orange bills, looked like summer snowmen. Two rowboats lay drying beneath a willow tree. I read an article on sleep in Time magazine: people who sleep badly, too little, or not at all, have an increased risk of heart attack. According to a study conducted on American mice, sleep deprivation is more lethal than starvation. Scientists placed the small rodents on a brightly lit, unstable surface to prevent them from sleeping (a technique insp
ired by methods used at Guantanamo Bay); the sample of mice was decimated by heart attacks. Researchers really don’t like mice.

  To those who wilfully chose insomnia, insisting “I’ll rest when I’m dead,” it seemed apt to say, “Enjoy yourself, you’ll be resting soon enough.”

  While I was having my blood lasered and transfused with a cocktail of vitamins every morning, Romy sunned herself on the terrace of our room, using Pepper as a portable TV: he streamed her favourite shows on his abdominal monitor.

  The Monte Carlo of Austria inspired me to write this poem in English:

  The quiet beauty of Lake Wörth

  Is, in any case, the trip, worth.

  The rest of the world seems far worse

  Than the quiet beauty of Lake Wörth.

  In the lobby stood a piece of abstract art intended to inspire serenity in the guests. It was a large vertical stone with a hydraulic pump that trickled water day and night. The lapping sound made people want to pee. Similar constantly dripping stone sculptures were located in various rooms, the beauty salon, the spa, and the dining room. Whoever had designed this place clearly assumed that a regenerated human being needed to contemplate waterfalls. The design conveyed a subtle message: we should never have left our primeval caves. The posthuman was reconnected to the primate; the end of Darwinian evolution, literally and figuratively, was to be a return to the source.