A limited calendar, punctuated by sufficient episodes of mini-grace (such as are offered by the sun slipping across the shutters, or the sudden retreat, under the influence of violent wind from the north, of a threatening cloud formation) organizes my existence, the precise duration of which is an indifferent parameter. Identical to Daniel24, I know that I will have, in Daniel26, an equivalent successor; the limited, respectable memories we keep of existences that have identical contours do not have any of the pregnancy that would be necessary for an individual fiction to take hold. The life of each man, in its broad brushstrokes, is similar, and this secret truth, hidden throughout the historical periods, was able to find expression only in the neohumans. Rejecting the incomplete paradigm of form, we aspire to rejoin the universe of countless potentialities. Closing the brackets on becoming, we are from now on in unlimited, indefinite stasis.
Daniel1, 28
WE ARE IN SEPTEMBER , the last vacationers are about to leave; with them the last breasts, the last bushes; the last accessible microworlds. An endless autumn awaits me, followed by a sidereal winter; and this time I really have finished my task, I am well past the very last minutes, there is no more justification for my presence here, no more human contact, no more assignable objective. There is, however, something else, something terrible, which floats in space, and seems to want to approach me. Before any sadness, any sorrow, or any clearly definable loss, there is something else, which might be called the pure terror of space. Was this the last stage? What had I done to deserve such a fate? And what had men, in general, done? I no longer feel any hate in me, nothing to cling to anymore, no more landmarks or clues; only fear is out there, the truth of all things, the only physical horizon, indistinguishable from the observable world. There is no longer any real world, no world, no human world, I am outside time, I no longer have any past or future, I have no more sadness, plans, nostalgia, loss, or hope; there is only fear.
The space is coming, it approaches and seeks to devour me. The ghosts are there, they constitute the space, they surround me. They feed upon the gouged-out eyes of men.
Daniel25, 17
THUS ENDED THE LIFE STORY of Daniel1; I regretted, for my part, this abrupt ending. His final predictions on the psychology of the species destined to replace mankind were quite curious; if he had developed them, we could, it seems to me, have drawn useful information from them.
This feeling is not shared by my predecessors. An individual who was certainly honest but limited, blinkered, quite representative of the limitations and contradictions that were to drive the species to ruin; such was, on the whole, the harsh judgment that they, following Vincent1, have passed on our common ancestor. If he had lived, they claim, he would, given the aporias that constituted his nature, only have continued in his mood swings between discouragement and hope, while evolving in general toward a state of increasing decrepitude linked to the aging process and the loss of vital energy; his last poem, written on the plane from Almería to Paris, is, they observe, symptomatic of the state of mind of the humans of the period to such an extent that it could serve as an epigraph to the classic book by Tatchett and Rawlins, Decrepitude, Senioritude.
I was aware of the strength of their arguments, and it was, to be honest, a slight, almost impalpable intuition that pushed me to try and find out a little more about it. Esther31 blankly and abruptly refused my requests. Of course, she had read the life story of Esther1, she had even finished her commentary; but she did not think it was appropriate for me to learn about it.
“You know…,” I wrote to her (we had for a long time been back in nonvisual mode), “I still feel very far from my ancestor…”
“You are never as far as you think,” she snapped.
I did not understand what made her think that this two-millennia-old story, concerning humans of the former race, could still have an impact today. “It did have an impact, however, and a powerfully negative one…,” she replied, enigmatically.
At my insistence, however, she finally gave in, and recounted what she knew of the last moments of the relationship between Daniel1 and Esther1. On September 23, two weeks after he finished his life story, he had phoned her. In the end they had never seen each other again, but he had called back several times, she had responded, gently at first, then in an irrevocable way, saying that she did not want to see him again. Realizing that this method had failed, he tried text-messaging, then e-mails, in fact he had gone step by step through the bleak stages of the disappearance of real contact. As the possibility of receiving a reply evaporated he became more and more audacious, he accepted, frankly, Esther’s sexual freedom, and went as far as congratulating her on it, multiplying the licentious allusions, recalling the most erotic moments of their liaison, suggesting that they could frequent swingers’ clubs together, make naughty videos, live new experiences; it was pathetic, and a little repugnant. He wrote her many letters, to which he received no reply. “He humiliated himself…,” commented Esther31. “He wallowed in humiliation, and in the most abject manner possible. He went as far as offering her money, lots of money, just to spend a last night with her; it was all the more absurd as she herself was beginning to earn quite a lot as an actress. At the end, he started hanging around her home in Madrid—she spotted him several times in bars, and began to be afraid. She had a new boyfriend at the time, with whom things were going well—she felt a lot of pleasure when making love with him, which had not always been the case with your predecessor. She had even thought of contacting the police, but he just hung around the area, without ever trying to make contact with her, and finally he disappeared.”
I wasn’t completely surprised, all this corresponded more or less with what I had been able to learn about the personality of Daniel1. I asked Esther31 what had happened next—while conscious, in this too, that I already knew the answer.
“He committed suicide. He committed suicide after having seen her in a film, Una mujer desnuda, where she played the lead—it was a film taken from the novel by a young Italian woman, that had had a certain success at the time, in which the latter recounted how she had had multiple sexual experiences without ever feeling the slightest emotion. Before committing suicide, he wrote a last letter—in which he didn’t speak at all about his suicide, she only learned about it through the press; on the contrary, it was a letter written in an extremely joyful, almost euphoric tone, in which he declared himself confident in their love, and in the superficial nature of the difficulties they had been going through for a year or two. It is this letter that has had a catastrophic effect on Marie23, and drove her to leave, to imagine that a social community—of humans and neohumans, basically she didn’t really know—had formed somewhere, and that she had discovered a new mode of relational organization; that the radical individual separation we now know could be abolished immediately, without waiting for the coming of the Future Ones. I tried to talk her out of it, to explain to her that this letter simply bore witness to an alteration in the mental capacities of your predecessor, a last and pathetic attempt to deny reality, that this love without end that he speaks of existed only in his imagination, that Esther in reality had never loved him. It had no effect: Marie23 attributed to this letter, in particular to the poem that ends it, an enormous importance.”
“Are you not of this view?”
“I must acknowledge that it is a curious text, as devoid of irony as it is of sarcasm, not at all in his usual manner; I find it even quite moving. But to go from there to giving it such importance…No, I don’t agree. Marie23 herself was probably not very balanced, it is the only reason that can explain why she gave the final verse the meaning of a concrete, practical piece of information.”
Esther31 was no doubt expecting my following request, and I had to wait only two minutes, the time it took for her to tap on her keyboard, to discover the last poem that Daniel had addressed to Esther before taking his life; the very one that had driven Marie23 to abandon her home, her habits, her life, and leave in s
earch of a hypothetical neohuman community:
My life, my life, my very old one
My first badly healed desire,
My first crippled love,
You had to return.
It was necessary to know
What is best in our lives,
When two bodies play at happiness,
Unite, reborn without end.
Entered into complete dependency,
I know the trembling of being,
The hesitation to disappear,
Sunlight upon the forest’s edge
And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.
“What was outside the world?”
At this period of the beginning of the month of May, the sun began to appear at four o’clock, despite the rather low latitude; the modification of the axis of the Earth had had, in addition to the Great Drying Up, several consequences of this nature.
Like all dogs, Fox did not have any precise sleeping pattern: he slept with me, and woke likewise. He followed me with curiosity when I went through the rooms preparing a light backpack, which I attached to my shoulders, and wagged his tail joyfully when I left the residence to walk up to the protective fence; our first walk of the day was normally later.
When I activated the unlocking mechanism, he looked at me in surprise. The metal wheels turned slowly on their axis, making an opening of three meters; I took a few steps and found myself outside. Fox again sent me a hesitant, interrogative look: nothing in the memories of his previous life, nor in his genetic memory, had prepared him for an event of this nature; nothing had prepared me for it either, it is true. He still hesitated for a few seconds, then trotted gently up to my feet.
I had first to cross a flat space, devoid of vegetation, for about ten kilometers; then there was the start of a very gentle wooded slope that extended to the horizon. I had no other plan than to make for the west, preferably west-southwest; a neohuman, human, or indeterminate community might have settled on the site of Lanzarote, or in a nearby area; I would perhaps manage to find it; that is what my intentions boiled down to. The population of the regions I had to cross was scarcely known; their topography, on the other hand, had been the object of recent and precise surveys.
I walked for almost two hours, over stony but easy terrain, before returning once again to the cover of the trees; Fox trotted at my side, visibly happy with this prolonged walk, and exercising the muscles of his little paws. During all this time I remained conscious that my departure was a failure, and probably a suicide. I had filled my backpack with capsules of mineral salts, I could hold out for several months, for I would certainly not lack drinking water, nor solar light, during my journey; of course, my reserves would eventually run out, but the very immediate problem was feeding Fox; I could hunt, I had taken a pistol and several boxes of lead cartridges, but I had never shot a gun before, and knew absolutely nothing about what types of animals I would be likely to meet in the regions I was about to cross.
Around the end of the afternoon the forest began to thin out, then I reached a patch of short grass that marked the top of the slope I had been following since the start of the day. To the west the slope descended, clearly more steeply, then I made out a succession of hills and steep valleys, still covered with dense forest, as far as I could see. Since my departure I had seen no trace of a human presence, nor of animal life in general. I decided to stop for the night near a pond where a stream bubbled up before descending southward. Fox drank for a long time and then stretched out at my feet. I took the three daily pills necessary for my metabolism, then unfolded the light survival blanket I had brought; it would no doubt be sufficient, I knew that I could expect to cross no high-altitude area.
Toward the middle of the night, the temperature became slightly cooler; Fox huddled against me, breathing regularly. His sleep was occasionally disturbed by dreams; at those moments, he twitched his paws, as if getting over an obstacle. I slept very badly; my enterprise seemed to me more and more starkly unreasonable, and destined for certain failure. I had, however, no regrets; I could have easily turned back. No control was exerted by the Central City; defections were, in general, only noticed by accident, after a delivery or a necessary repair, and sometimes only several years later. I could return, but I had no intention of it: that solitary routine, intercut solely by intellectual exchanges, which had constituted my life, which should have constituted it until the end, now seemed unbearable. Happiness should have come, the happiness felt by good children, guaranteed by the respect of small procedures, by the security that flowed from them, by the absence of pain and risk; but happiness had not come, and equanimity had led to torpor. Among the feeble joys of the neohumans, the most constant revolved around organization and classification, the constitution of small ordered sets, the meticulous and rational displacement of small objects; these had proved insufficient. Planning the extinction of desire in Buddhist-like terms, the Supreme Sister had banked on the maintenance of a weakened, nontragic, energy, purely conservative in nature, which would have continued to enable the functioning of thought—a thought less quick but more exact because more lucid, a thought that knew deliverance. This phenomenon had only been produced in insignificant proportions, and it was, on the contrary, sadness, melancholy, languid, and finally mortal apathy that had submerged our disincarnated generations. The most patent indicator of failure was that I had ended up envying the destiny of Daniel1, his violent and contradictory journey, the amorous passions that had shaken him—whatever his suffering and tragic end.
Every morning for years, following the Supreme Sister’s recommendations, I had practiced, on waking, the exercises defined by the Buddha in his sermon on the establishment of attention. “Thus he stays, observing the body from within; he stays, observing the body from outside; he stays, observing the body from inside and outside. He stays, observing the appearance of the body; he stays, observing the disappearance of the body; he stays, observing the appearance and disappearance of the body. ‘This is the body’: this introspection is present to him, only for knowledge, only for reflection, thus he stays free, and is attached to nothing in the world.” At every minute of my life, since its beginning, I had remained conscious of my breathing, of the kinesthetic equilibrium of my organism, of its fluctuating central state. That immense joy, that transfiguration of his physical being by which Daniel1 was submerged at the moment of the fulfillment of his desires, that impression in particular of being transported to another universe that he knew at the moment of his carnal penetrations, I had never known, I hadn’t even any notion of them at all, it seemed to me now that, under these conditions, I could not go on living.
The dawn broke, humid, over the forest landscape, there came with it dreams of gentleness, which I was unable to comprehend. Tears came as well, and their salty contact seemed very strange to me. Then the sun appeared, and with it the insects; I began, then, to understand what the life of men had been. The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were covered with hundreds of little blisters; the itching was terrible, and I scratched myself furiously, for about ten minutes, until I was covered in blood.
Later, when we started out across a dense prairie, Fox managed to capture a rabbit; in a clean motion, he broke its cervical vertebrae, then brought the little animal to my feet, dripping with blood. I turned away when he began to devour its internal organs; thus was the natural world.
During the following week, we crossed over a steep area, which, according to my map, corresponded to the Gador sierra; my itching decreased, or rather I ended up getting used to the constant pain, which was stronger at the end of the day, just as I got used to the layer of filth that covered my skin, and a more pronounced body odor.
One morning, just after dawn, I woke up without feeling the heat of Fox’s body. I leaped up, terrified. He was a few meters away, and was rubbing against a tree
, sneezing furiously; the source of pain was apparently situated behind his ears, at the base of the neck. I approached and gently took his head in my hands. By smoothing his fur I quickly discovered a small, gray, bumpy surface, a few millimeters wide: it was a tick. I recognized it from the descriptions in books I had read on animal biology. The extraction of this parasite was, I knew, delicate; I returned to my backpack, and took out some tweezers and a compress soaked in alcohol. Fox moaned softly, but remained still as I operated: slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I managed to extract the animal from his flesh; it was a gray, fat cylinder, a quite repugnant sight, which had grown fat on his blood. Thus was the natural world.
On the first day of the second week, in the middle of the morning, I found myself in front of an immense fault line, which blocked my path westward. I knew of its existence through satellite surveys, but I had imagined that it would be possible to cross it to continue my journey. The cliffs of bluish basalt, absolutely vertical, plunged down for several hundreds of meters to an indistinct, slightly uneven surface, the soil of which appeared to be a juxtaposition of black stones and lakes of mud. In the limpid air, I could make out the smallest details on the cliff face opposite, which must have been about ten kilometers away: it too was just as vertical.
If the maps drawn from the surveys did not allow you to foresee at all the uncrossable nature of this unevenness in the ground, they did on the other hand give you a precise idea of its route: beginning in a zone that corresponded to the former site of Madrid (the city had been destroyed by a succession of nuclear explosions, during the last phases of the interhuman conflicts), the fault crossed the whole of the south of Spain, then the marshy zone corresponding to what had been the Mediterranean, before plunging deep into the heart of the African continent; that meant a detour of a thousand kilometers. I sat down for a few minutes, discouraged, my feet dangling in the void, while the sun climbed up the summits; Fox sat down at my side, looking at me inquisitively. The problem of his food, at least, was resolved: the rabbits, which were very numerous in the region, let themselves be approached and killed without displaying the slightest suspicion; no doubt their natural predators had disappeared many generations ago. I was surprised by the speed with which Fox rediscovered the instincts of his wild ancestors; surprised also by the manifest joy he exhibited, he who had only known the mildness of an apartment, sniffing the mountain air and gambolling across the mountain prairies.
The Possibility of an Island Page 32
