Financially, moving would have been an interesting operation: the price of land had almost tripled since my arrival. I still had to find a buyer; but rich people were plentiful, and Marbella was beginning to become rather saturated—the rich certainly like the company of the rich, no doubt it calms them, it’s nice for them to meet beings subject to the same torments as they are, and who seem to form a relationship with them that is not totally about money; it’s nice for them to convince themselves that the human species is not uniquely made up of predators and parasites; when you reach a certain density, however, there is a saturation point. For the moment, the density of rich people in the province of Almería was rather too low; one needed to find a rich person who was quite young, pioneering, and intellectual, possibly with ecological sympathies, a rich person who could take pleasure in observing pebbles, someone who had made a fortune in information technology, for example. In the worst-case scenario, Marbella was only 150 kilometers away, and the plans for a new highway were progressing quickly. No one, in any case, would miss me around here. But where would I go? And to do what? The truth is, I felt ashamed—ashamed of confessing to the estate agent that I had separated from my partner, that I didn’t have any mistresses, either, who could have put a bit of life into this immense house, and ashamed finally of confessing that I was alone.
Burning photos, however, was feasible. I devoted an entire day to gathering them together, there were thousands of snaps, I had always had a thing about souvenir photos; I only made a rapid selection, it is possible that some incidental mistress disappeared on this occasion. At sunset, I took all of them, in a wheelbarrow, out to a sandy area next to the terrace, poured a jerry can of gas over them, and lit a match. It was a splendid fire, several meters high, which must have been visible kilometers away, perhaps even on the Algerian coast. The pleasure was strong, but incredibly fleeting: around four in the morning I woke up again, with the impression that thousands of worms were swarming under my skin, and the almost irresistible desire to tear at myself until I bled. I telephoned Isabelle, who picked up the phone after the second ring—so she was not sleeping either. We agreed that I would stop by to take Fox in the following days, and that he would remain with me until the end of September.
As with all Mercedes above a certain power, with the exception of the SLR McLaren, the speed of the 600 SL is electronically limited to 250 km/h. I don’t think I dipped particularly below this speed between Murcia and Albacete. There were a few long and very open bends; I had an abstract sense of power—that, no doubt, of a man indifferent to death. A trajectory remains perfect, even one that concludes in death: there can be a truck, an overturned car, an imponderable; this takes nothing away from the beauty of the trajectory. A little after Tarancon, I slowed down somewhat to turn onto the R3, then the M45, without really going below 180 km/h. I went back up to maximum speed on the R2, which was completely deserted, and which bypassed Madrid at a distance of around thirty kilometers. I crossed Castilla along the N1 and I kept at 220 km/h until Vitoria-Gasteiz, before embarking on the more sinuous roads of the Basque country. I arrived in Biarritz at eleven in the evening, and took a room at the Sofitel Miramar. I met Isabelle the following morning at ten in the Silver Surfer. To my great surprise she had grown thinner, and I even had the impression she had shed all her excess kilos. Her face was slim, a little wrinkled, ravaged by sadness too, but she had become elegant and beautiful again.
“What have you done to stop drinking?” I asked.
“Morphine.”
“You haven’t had problems getting supplies?”
“No, no, on the contrary, it’s very easy here; there’s a network in all the tearooms.”
So all the old biddies of Biarritz were shooting up with morphine; it was a scoop.
“It’s a question of generation…,” she told me. “Now it’s posh, rock-’n’-roll old biddies; inevitably they have other needs. That said,” she added, “don’t be under any illusions: my face has returned more or less to normal, but the body has completely collapsed, I don’t even dare show you what’s underneath my tracksuit”—she pointed to a sea-blue item, with white stripes, chosen three sizes too big—“I don’t do any dance, no more sport, nothing; I don’t even go swimming anymore. I do an injection in the morning, one in the evening, and in between I look at the sea, that’s all. I don’t even miss you, at least not often. I want for nothing, Fox plays a lot, he’s very happy here…”
I nodded, finished my hot chocolate, and left to settle my hotel bill. An hour later, I was overlooking Bilbao.
A month’s holiday with my dog: throwing the ball down the stairs, running together on the beach. Living.
On September 30, at five in the afternoon, Isabelle parked in front of the residence. She had chosen a Mitsubishi Space Star, a vehicle classed by L’Auto-Journal in the category of “ludospaces.” Following the advice of her mother, she had opted for the “Box Office” model. She stayed about forty minutes before driving back to Biarritz. “Ah yes, I’m turning into a little old woman…,” she said, putting Fox in the backseat. “A nice little old lady in her Mitsubishi Box Office.”
Daniel24, 10
FOR A FEW WEEKS NOW, Vincent27 has been seeking to establish contact. I had had only brief relations with Vincent26; he hadn’t informed me of the proximity of his death, nor of his passing to the intermediary stage. Between neohumans, the phases of intermediation are often brief. Each can, if he likes, change digital address, and make himself undetectable; for my part I have developed so few relationships that I have never considered it necessary. Sometimes entire weeks pass without me connecting myself, which exasperates Marie22, my most assiduous interlocutor. As Smith has already acknowledged, the subject-object separation is triggered, in the course of cognitive processes, by a convergent mesh of failures. Nagel notes that the same applies to separation between subjects (except that failure is not this time of an empirical order, but rather an affective one). It is in failure, and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself, and the passage of humans to neohumans, with the disappearance of all physical contact that is its correlative, has in no way modified this basic ontological given. We, like humans, have not been delivered from our status as individuals, and the dull dereliction that accompanies it; but unlike them, we know that this status is only the consequence of a failure in perception, another name for nothingness, the absence of the Word. Penetrated by death and formatted by it, we no longer have the strength to enter into the Presence. Solitude could, for certain human beings, have represented a joyful escape from the group; but as such, it involved, for each of these solitary beings, abandoning their original sense of belonging in order to discover other laws, and another group. Now that all the groups have disappeared, and every tribe has dispersed, we know ourselves isolated but similar to each other, and we have lost the desire to unite.
For three consecutive days, I received no message from Marie22: this was unusual. After having turned it over in my mind, I sent her a coding sequence that linked into the video surveillance camera of the unit Proyecciones XXI, 13; she replied within a minute, with the following message:
Beneath the sun of the dead bird,
Spreads infinitely the plain;
There is no death more serene:
Show me some of your body.
4262164, 51026, 21113247, 6323235. At the address indicated there was nothing, not even an error message; a completely blank screen. So she wanted to pass into noncoding mode. I hesitated as, very slowly, on the blank screen, the following message formed: “As you have probably guessed, I am an intermediary.” The letters disappeared, and a new message appeared: “I am going to die tomorrow.”
With a sigh, I plugged in the video mechanism and zoomed in on my naked body. “Lower, please,” she wrote. I suggested we pass into vocal mode. After a minute, she replied: “I am an old intermediary, nearing the end; I don’t know if my voice will be pleasant. But, if you prefer, yes…” I then understood that she
would not want to show me any part of her anatomy; degradation, at the intermediary stage, is often very sudden.
In fact, her voice was almost entirely synthetic; there remained, however, some neohuman intonations, especially in the vowels, some strange slips toward softness. I took a slow panoramic shot down to my belly. “Lower still…,” she said in an almost inaudible voice. “Show me your sex, please.” I obeyed; I masturbated my virile member, following the rules taught by the Supreme Sister; certain intermediary women feel a nostalgia at the end of their days for the virile member, and they like to contemplate it during the final minutes of actual life; Marie22 was apparently one of these women—this did not really surprise me, given the exchanges we had had in the past.
For three minutes, nothing happened; then I received a final message—she had returned to nonvocal mode: “Thank you, Daniel. I am now going to disconnect myself, put the last pages of my commentary in order, and prepare for the end. In a few days Marie23 will move in here. She will receive her IP address from me, and an invitation to stay in contact. Some things have happened, through our partial incarnations, in the period following on from the Second Decrease; other things will happen, through our future incarnations. Our separation does not have the character of a farewell; I can sense that.”
Daniel1, 11
We’re like all artists, we believe in our product.
—Début de soirée, THE GROUP
IN THE FIRST DAYS OF OCTOBER, under the influence of an attack of resigned sadness, I went back to work—since, undoubtedly, that was all I was good for. Well, the word work is perhaps a bit strong for my project—a rap record entitled Fuck the Bedouins, with “Tribute to Ariel Sharon” as the subtitle. It was a big critical success (I was again on the cover of Radikal Hip-Hop, this time without my car), but the sales were average. Once again, in the press, I found myself portrayed as a paradoxical paladin of the free world; but even so, the scandal was less intense than during the days of We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts—this time, I told myself with a vague nostalgia, the radical Islamists had truly lost it.
The relative lack of success in sales terms was doubtless attributable to the mediocrity of the music; you could hardly call it rap, I had settled for sampling my sketches over some drum and bass, adding a few vocals here and there—Jamel Debbouze took part in one of the choruses. I had, however, written an original track, “Let’s Fuck da Niggahs’ Anus,” that I was quite pleased with: “anus” rhymed with “cunnilingus,” “fuck” with “suck,” “niggah” with “mafia”; pretty lyrics that could be read on all sorts of levels—the journalist from Radikal Hip-Hop, who himself rapped in his spare time, without daring to tell the editor, was visibly impressed; in his article he even compared me to the sixteenth-century poet Maurice Scève. At last, potentially, I had a hit, and what’s more, there was a good buzz about me; it really was a shame that the music wasn’t up to it. I had heard lots of good things about a sort of independent producer, Bertrand Batasuna, who fiddled around on cult records, because they were no longer available on the market, for an obscure label; I was bitterly disappointed. Not only was this guy totally sterile creatively—he spent all his time, during the recording sessions, snoring on the carpet and farting every quarter of an hour—but he was, in private, very unpleasant, a real Nazi—I later learned that he had in fact been a member of the National and European Federation for Action. Thank God, we weren’t paying him much; but if this was the best “new French talent” Virgin could come up with, they rightly deserved to be gobbled up by BMG. “If we had used Goldman or Obispo, like everyone else, we wouldn’t be in this situation…,” I ended up saying to Virgin’s artistic director, who let out a long sigh; basically, he agreed. Besides, his last project with Batasuna, a chorus of Pyrenean ewes sampled with hardcore techno, had been a dismal commercial failure. It was just that he had his budget, he couldn’t take the responsibility of exceeding it, it was necessary to consult the group’s headquarters in New Jersey, in short I dropped it. One does not travel second class.
That said, my time in Paris during the recording was almost pleasant. I was staying in the Lutétia, which reminded me of Francis Blanche, the German High Command, my best years, in fact, when I was ardent, hateful, with a future ahead of me. Every evening, to send myself to sleep, I reread Agatha Christie, especially the early works, the last ones were too overwhelming for me. Don’t even mention Endless Night, which plunged me into stupors of unhappiness, but I had also not once managed to prevent myself from crying at the end of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, whenever I read the farewell letter from Poirot to Hastings.
But now I am very humble and I say like a little child, “I do not know…”
Goodbye, cher ami. I have moved the amyl nitrate ampoules away from beside my bed. I prefer to leave myself in the hands of the bon Dieu. May his punishment, or his mercy, be swift!
We shall not hunt together again, my friend. Our first hunt was here—and our last…
They were good days.
Yes, they have been good days…
With the exception of the Kyrie Eleison from the Mass in C, and perhaps Barber’s Adagio, I couldn’t imagine very much else that could put me in such a state. Infirmity, sickness, forgetting, that was good; that was real. No one before Agatha Christie had been able to portray in such a heartrending way the sadness of physical decrepitude, of the gradual loss of all that gave life meaning and joy; and no one since has succeeded in equaling her. For a few days I almost felt like returning to a real career, doing serious things. It was in this state of mind that I telephoned Vincent Greilsamer, the Elohimite artist; he seemed happy to hear from me, and we agreed to go for a drink that very evening.
I arrived ten minutes late at the brasserie of the Porte de Versailles, where we had arranged to meet. He got up and waved to me. Antisect associations encourage you to resist the favorable impression that forms after a first meeting or an initiation course, during which the sinister aspects of the doctrine may well have been silently diffused. In fact, so far, I couldn’t see where the trap might be; this guy, for example, seemed normal. A bit introverted, granted, doubtless a bit isolated, but no more than I. He expressed himself directly, straightforwardly.
“I don’t know much about contemporary art,” I said apologetically. “I’ve heard of Marcel Duchamp, and that’s all.”
“He is certainly the one who’s had the greatest influence on twentieth-century art, yes. One thinks less frequently of Yves Klein; yet all the people who do performance art and ‘happenings,’ who work on their own bodies, refer more or less consciously back to him.”
He was silent. Aware that I had offered no reply, and that I didn’t even look like I understood what he was talking about, he spoke again:
“Roughly speaking, you have three big trends. The first, and most important one, the one that gets eighty percent of the subsidies, whose pieces go for the most money, is gore in general: amputations, cannibalism, enucleation, etc. All the collaboration work done with serial killers, for example. The second is the one that uses humor: there’s irony directed at the art market, à la Ben; or at finer things, à la Broodthaers, where it’s all about provoking uneasiness and shame in the spectator, the artist, or in both, by presenting a pitiful, mediocre spectacle that leaves you constantly doubting whether it has the slightest artistic value; then there’s all the work on kitsch, which draws you in, which you come close to, and can empathize with, on the condition that you signal by means of a meta-narration that you’re not fooled by it. Finally, there is a third trend, this is the virtual: it’s usually young artists, influenced by manga and by heroic fantasies; many of them start like that, then fall back to the first trend once they realize they can’t make their living on the Internet.”
“I suppose you don’t belong to any of the three trends.”
“I like kitsch sometimes; I don’t particularly feel the desire to mock it.”
“The Elohimites go a bit far in that direction, don’
t they?”
He smiled. “But the prophet does that with complete innocence, there’s no irony in him, it’s much healthier…” I noticed in passing that he’d said “the prophet” absolutely naturally, without any particular inflection in his voice. Did he really believe in the Elohim? His disgust for the pictorial productions of the prophet must have sometimes bothered him, all the same; there was something in this boy that eluded me, I was going to need to pay particular attention if I wanted not to get his back up; I ordered another beer.
“Basically, it is a question of degree,” he said. “Everything is kitsch, if you like. Music as a whole is kitsch; art is kitsch, literature itself is kitsch. Any emotion is kitsch, practically by definition; but any reflection also, and even in a sense any action, the only thing that is not absolutely kitsch is nothingness.”
The Possibility of an Island Page 10
