The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  The main objective of the lecture was to set out the restrictions and constraints that the Elohimites imposed on sexuality. It was quite simple: there were none—between consenting adults, as they say.

  This time, there were questions. Most of them dealt with pedophilia, a subject on which Elohimites had had legal disputes—come to think of it, who hasn’t gone on trial for pedophilia nowadays? The position of the prophet, as Odile reminded us here, was crystal clear: there exists a moment in human life called puberty, when sexual desire appears—the age, varying according to the individual and the environment, was somewhere between eleven and fourteen. To make love with someone who was unwilling, or who was not able to formulate a clear consent, ergo a prepubescent, is evil; as for what might happen after puberty, that was evidently situated outside any moral judgment, and there was almost nothing else to say. The end of the afternoon became mired in common sense, and I was beginning to feel the need for an aperitif; they were, it must be said, a bit of a pain in the ass when it came to that. Fortunately, I had supplies in my suitcase, and as a VIP I had a single room, of course. Sinking after the meal into a mildly drunken state, alone between the immaculate sheets of my king-size bed, I drew up a sort of balance sheet for this first day. Surprisingly, many of the adherents had forgotten to be twats; and, even more surprisingly, many women had forgotten to be ugly. It’s true, also, that they didn’t miss any opportunity to do themselves up. On this subject, the teachings of the prophet were consistent: if man was to make an effort to repress his masculine side (machismo had shed too much blood in the world, he exclaimed with emotion in the different interviews I had seen on his Web site), woman could on the contrary give free rein to her femininity and the exhibitionism that is consubstantial with her, through all kinds of sparkling, transparent, or skintight clothing that the imagination of various couturiers and creators had put at her disposal: nothing could be more pleasant and excellent, in the eyes of the Elohim.

  That’s what the women did, then, and at the evening meal there was a certain erotic tension: it was light, but constant. I sensed that this was only going to grow stronger, as the week wore on; I also sensed that I was not really going to suffer from it, and that I would content myself with getting peacefully plastered while watching the banks of mist drift in the moonlight. The freshness of the pastures, the Milka cows, the snow on the summits: a very beautiful place for forgetting, or for dying.

  The next morning, the prophet himself made an appearance for the first lecture: dressed all in white, he leaped onto the stage, under the light of the projectors, amid enormous applause—immediately there was a standing ovation. Seen from afar, it struck me that he looked a bit like a monkey—undoubtedly owing to the relationship between the length of his front and back limbs, or his general posture, I don’t know, it was very difficult to pin down. That said, he didn’t look like an evil monkey: a monkey with a flat skull, a sensualist, nothing more.

  He also resembled, indisputably, a Frenchman: the ironic look, sparkling with malice and mocking, you could absolutely have imagined him in a Feydeau farce.

  He didn’t look his sixty-five years at all.

  “What will be the number of the Elect?” the prophet asked right away. “Will it be 1,729, the smallest number that can be broken down in two different ways to the sum of two cubes? Will it be 9,240, which possesses 64 dividers? Will it be 40,755, simultaneously triangular, pentagonal, and hexagonal? Will it be 144,000, as our friends the Jehovah’s Witnesses desire—a truly dangerous sect, I might add in passing?”

  As a professional, I have to admit it: he was very good onstage. I wasn’t completely awake, and the hotel coffee was awful; but he had grabbed me.

  “Will it be 698,896, a palindromic square?” he continued. “Will it be 12,960,000, the second geometrical number of Plato? Will it be 33,550,336, the fifth perfect number, written by an anonymous scribe in a medieval manuscript?”

  He held himself still exactly in the center of the spotlight, and took a long pause before speaking again: “The Elect will be whoever wishes for it in his or her heart”—a shorter pause—“and has behaved accordingly.”

  He went on, fairly logically, about the conditions for election, before turning to the building of the embassy—a subject which was, visibly, close to his heart. The lecture lasted a little over two hours, and frankly it was well done, a good job, and I was not the last to applaud. I was sitting next to Patrick, who whispered in my ear: “He’s truly in very good form this year…,”

  As we left the lecture hall to go to lunch, we were intercepted by Cop. “You are invited to the table of the prophet,” he told me gravely. “You too, Patrick…,” he added; Patrick blushed with pleasure, while I did a bit of hyperventilating to relax. Whatever Cop did, even when he was conveying good news, he did it in such a way that it made you shit your pants.

  An entire wing of the hotel was reserved for the prophet, where he had his own dining room. While waiting in front of the entrance, where a young girl was exchanging messages over her walkie-talkie, we were joined by Vincent, the Plastic Arts VIP, led by one of Cop’s subordinates.

  The prophet painted, and the whole of the wing was decorated with his works, which he had had brought over from California for the duration of the course. They represented exclusively women, nude or dressed in suggestive clothing, in the middle of various landscapes, from the Tyrol to the Bahamas; I understood then where all the Web site and brochure illustrations had come from. As I crossed the corridor I noticed that Vincent was averting his gaze from the canvases, and that he had difficulty repressing a spasm of disgust. I approached them in my turn before recoiling, nauseated: the word kitsch would have been too weak to describe these productions; close up, I think I had never seen anything quite as ugly.

  The highlight of the exhibition was situated in the dining room, an immense space lit by windows looking out onto the mountains: behind the prophet’s chair, a painting, eight meters by four, showed him surrounded by twelve young women dressed in see-through tunics, who stretched out toward him, some with expressions of adoration, others with clearly more suggestive ones. There were whites, blacks, an Oriental, and two Indians; at least the prophet wasn’t racist. He was, however, manifestly obsessed with big breasts, and he liked pretty thick pubic hair; in short, this man had simple tastes.

  While we waited for the prophet, Patrick introduced me to Gérard, the joker, and Number 4 in the organization. He owed this privilege to the fact that he was one of the first of the prophet’s companions. He had already been at his side when the sect was created, thirty-seven years before, and he had remained faithful to him, despite the latter’s sometimes surprising about-faces. Of the four “companions of the first hour,” one was dead, another an Adventist, and the third had left a few years earlier when the prophet had called on them to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen against Jacques Chirac in the second round of the presidential elections, with the aim of “accelerating the decomposition of France’s pseudo-democracy”—a little like the Maoists, in their heyday, calling for a vote for Giscard against Mitterrand in order to aggravate the contradictions of capitalism. So there remained only Gérard, and this seniority gave him certain privileges, like having lunch every day at the table of the prophet—which was not the case with Knowall or even Cop—or occasionally to make funny remarks about his physical characteristics—to talk, for example, about his “fat ass” or his “eyes like cock-slits.” It emerged in the course of the conversation that Gérard knew me well, that he had seen all my shows, that he had in fact been following me since the beginning of my career. Living in California, totally indifferent moreover to any production of a cultural order (the only actors he knew by name were Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis), the prophet had never heard of me; it was therefore to Gérard, and Gérard alone, that I owed my VIP status. It was also he who dealt with the press, and with media relations.

  Finally the prophet appeared, bouncing, freshly showered, dressed in jeans and a “Lick
my balls” T-shirt, and carrying a shoulder bag. Everyone stood up; I copied them. He came to me, holding out his hand, all smiles: “Well? How did you find me?” I was stunned for a few seconds before I realized that the question was not designed to trap me: he was addressing me exactly like one of the brothers. “Er…good. Frankly, very good…,” I replied. “I particularly appreciated the opening material about the number of the Elect, with all the figures.” “Ah, ha ha ha…” He took a book out of his bag, Funny Mathematics, by Jostein Gaarder. “It’s all in there!” He sat down rubbing his hands, and dug into his grated carrots first thing; we copied him.

  Probably in my honor, the conversation turned quickly to comedians. Joker knew a lot about the subject, but the prophet, too, had a few notions, he had even known Coluche in his early days. “We were in the lineup for the same show, one evening, in Clermont-Ferrand…,” he told me nostalgically. In fact, in the period when the record companies, traumatized by the arrival of rock music in France, had recorded anything, the prophet (he was not yet a prophet) had cut a 45 under the stage name of Travis Davis; he had toured a little in the central region, and things had been left at that. A little later, he had tried to break into racing cars—without much success there either. All in all, he had taken some time to find himself; the encounter with the Elohim had come at the right moment: without it, we might have had a second Bernard Tapie on our hands. Today, he hardly sang at all, but he had retained a real taste for fast cars, which had enabled the media to allege that he maintained, on his property in Beverly Hills, a veritable race-car stable at the expense of his followers. This was completely untrue, he told me. First, he didn’t live in Beverly Hills, but in Santa Monica; second, he possessed only a Ferrari Modena Stradale (a slightly souped-up version of the ordinary Modena, and made lighter by the use of carbon, titanium, and aluminum) and a Porsche 911 GT2; in short, rather fewer than a middling Hollywood actor. It’s true he planned to replace his Stradale with an Enzo, and his 911 GT2 with a Carrera GT; but he wasn’t sure he’d have the means.

  I was tempted to believe him: he gave me the impression of being a womanizer rather than a money man, and the two are compatible only up to a certain point—from a certain age, two passions are too much: happy are those, nevertheless, who manage to keep hold of one of them; I was twenty years younger than he, and it was evident that I was already close to zero. To feed the conversation, I mentioned the Bentley Continental GT that I had just traded in for a Mercedes 600 SL—which, I was conscious, could be read as a sign of gentrification. If there weren’t any cars, you have to really ask yourself what men could possibly talk about.

  In the course of the lunch, not one word was pronounced on the subject of the Elohim, and, as the week went on, I began to ask myself: Did they really believe in them? Nothing is more difficult to detect than a light cognitive schizophrenia, and with the majority of the followers I was unable to make a judgment. Patrick, clearly, believed in them, which, moreover, was a little worrying: here was a man who held an important post in his Luxembourg bank, through whom sums of money occasionally exceeding a billion euros passed, who believed in fictions that directly contradicted the most elementary Darwinian arguments.

  A case that intrigued me even more was that of Knowall, and I ended up asking him the question directly—with a man of such intelligence, I felt incapable of playing games. His reply, as I expected, was perfectly clear. One, it was completely possible, and even probable, that some living species, sufficiently intelligent to create or manipulate life, had appeared somewhere in the Universe. Two, man had well and truly come into being by means of evolution, and his creation by the Elohim was therefore to be taken only as a metaphor—however, he warned me against too blind a belief in the Darwinian vulgate, which was being abandoned more and more by serious researchers; the evolution of species in reality owed far less to natural selection than to genetic drift, that is to say pure chance, and to the appearance of geographical isolates and separate biotopes. Three, it was totally possible that the prophet had met, not an extraterrestrial, but a man from the future; some interpretations of quantum mechanics in no way excluded the possibility of the movement of information, if not material entities, in the opposite direction to time’s arrow—he promised to provide me with documentation on the subject, which he did not long after the end of the course.

  Emboldened, I then led him onto a subject that, since the beginning, had bothered me: the promise of immortality made to the Elohimites. I knew that a few cells had been taken from each follower, and that modern technology allowed their unlimited conservation; I had no doubts about the fact that the minor difficulties preventing human cloning at that current time would sooner or later be overcome; but personality? How would the new clone have the memory, however small, of his ancestor’s past? And to what extent, if his memory was not preserved, would he feel like the same being, reincarnated?

  For the first time I sensed something in his eyes besides the cold competence of a mind used to rational notions, for the first time I had the impression of an excitement, an enthusiasm. This was his subject, the one he had devoted his life to. He invited me to accompany him to the bar; he ordered a very creamy hot chocolate for himself, I took a whisky—he didn’t even seem to notice this violation of the sect’s rules. A few cows approached the bay windows, and stopped, as if observing us.

  “Some interesting results have been obtained from certain nemathelminth worms,” he began, “through simple centrifugation of the implicated neuron, and an injection of the proteic isolate into the brain of the new subject: you obtain a renewal of avoidance reactions, in particular those related to electric shocks, and even of routes followed in some simple mazes.”

  I had the impression, at that moment, that the cows were nodding their heads; but he didn’t notice the cows either.

  “Evidently, these results do not translate to vertebrates, and even less to evolved primates like man. I suppose you remember what I said, on the first day of the course, concerning the neuro-circuits. Well, the reproduction of such a mechanism is possible, not in computers as we know them, but in a certain type of Turing machine, which we can call fuzzy automata, on which I am working at the moment. Unlike classical calculators, fuzzy automata are capable of establishing variable, evolving connections between adjacent calculating units; they are therefore capable of memorization and apprenticeship. There is no a priori limit to the number of calculating units that can be linked, and therefore to the complexity of possible circuits. The difficulty at this stage, and it is considerable, consists of establishing a bijective relation between the neurons of a human brain, taken in the few minutes following its death, and the memory of a nonprogrammed automaton. The life span of the latter being almost limitless, the next step will be to reinject the information in the opposite direction, toward the brain of the new clone; this is the downloading phase which, I am convinced, will present no particular difficulty once the uploading has been perfected.”

  Night was falling; the cows gradually turned away, returning to their pastures, and I could not prevent myself from thinking that they were distancing themselves from his optimism. Before leaving, he gave me his card: Professor Slotan Miskiewicz, from the University of Toronto. It had been a pleasure to talk with me, he said, a real pleasure; if I wanted complementary information, I shouldn’t hesitate to send him an e-mail. His research was progressing apace at that moment, and he hoped to make significant progress in the year to come, he repeated with a conviction that seemed to me a little forced.

  A veritable delegation accompanied me to the Zwork airport on the day of my departure: in addition to the prophet there was Cop, Knowall, Joker, and other less heavyweight members, including Patrick, Fadiah, and Vincent, the Plastic Arts VIP, with whom I had got on pretty well—we exchanged addresses, and he invited me to come to see him when I was next in Paris. Of course, I was invited to the winter course, which would be held in March in Lanzarote and which would, the prophet warned me, take on
an extraordinary dimension: this time, members from across the entire globe were invited.

  I have certainly made only friends this week, I thought as I passed through the metal detector. No action, mind you; it’s true I didn’t exactly have the looks for that. Nor did I, needless to say, intend to join their movement; what had attracted me to it, at its core, was curiosity, that old curiosity that had been mine since childhood, and which, apparently, outlived desire.

  The plane had two propellers, and gave the impression of being about to blow up at any moment during the flight. As we flew over the pastures, I became conscious that during this course, people, not to mention me, hadn’t fucked much—as far as I knew, and I think I probably would have known, I was really good at that type of observation. Couples had stayed as couples—I hadn’t got wind of any orgy, nor even a banal threesome; and those who came alone (the great majority) remained alone. In theory it was all extremely open, all forms of sexuality were permitted, even encouraged, by the prophet; in practice, the women wore erotic clothing, there was a lot of rubbing, but things went no further. That’s what is curious, and would be interesting to delve into, I told myself before falling asleep on my meal tray.

  After three changes, and an extremely unpleasant journey overall, I landed at the Almería airport. It was about 45°C: that was thirty degrees more than in Zwork. It was good, but still not enough to stop the rise in anxiety. Crossing the tiled corridors of my house, I switched off the air conditioners one by one that the warden had switched on the day before my return—she was an old and ugly Romanian, her teeth in particular were very rotten, but she spoke excellent French; I had complete confidence in her, as they say, even if I had stopped giving her housework to do, because I couldn’t stand a human being looking at my personal objects—it was quite funny, I told myself occasionally while wiping the floor, to do the housework myself, with my forty million euros; but that was how it was, I could do nothing about it: the very idea that a human being, however insignificant, could contemplate the details of my existence, and its emptiness, had become unbearable to me. On passing in front of the mirror in the main living room (an immense mirror, which covered an entire wall; you could, with a woman you loved, have made love there while contemplating your reflections, etc.) I was shocked to see my face: I had become so thin I looked almost translucent. A ghost, that’s what I was becoming, a ghost of the sunny lands. Knowall was right: you had to move out, burn photos, and all the rest.