Things could have stayed like this, and been considered a mere artistic convention, were it not for the intervention of Knowall, back from Lanzarote at the beginning of December to present the advances in his research. Even though I still lived at the Lutétia, I spent most of my days in Chevilly-Larue; I wasn’t a member of the governing committee, but I was one of the only direct witnesses of the events that had accompanied the death of the prophet, and everyone trusted me, Cop no longer kept any secrets from me. Of course, things were going on in Paris, there were current affairs, a cultural life; nevertheless I was certain that the important and significant things were happening in Chevilly-Larue. I had been persuaded of it for a long time, even if I hadn’t been able to translate this conviction into my films or sketches, owing to a lack of real contact with the phenomenon up until now: political or military events, economic transformations, aesthetic or cultural mutations can all play a role, sometimes a very big role, in the life of men; but nothing, ever, can have any historical importance compared to the development of a new religion, or to the collapse of an existing one. To the acquaintances I still sometimes came across at the bar of the Lutétia, I said that I was writing; they probably supposed I was writing a novel, and expressed some surprise, I had always had a reputation for being a comedian rather than a “literary figure”; if they had only known, I said to myself sometimes, if they had only known that this was not a simple work of fiction, but that I was trying to record one of the most important events in human history; if they had only known, I tell myself now, they would not even have been especially impressed. They were, for all their fame, used to a dreary and scarcely changing life, they were used to having little interest in real existence, preferring instead of the real, a commentary on it; I understood them, I had been in the same boat—and I was still there to some extent, maybe even more than they were. Not once, since the “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure” campaign had been launched had I thought of personally taking advantage of the sexual services of the prophet’s fiancées; nor had I begged a female member for the alms of a blow job or a simple hand job, which would have easily been accorded to me. I always had Esther in my head, in my body, everywhere. I said this one day to Vincent, it was late morning, a very beautiful early winter morning, through the office window I was looking at the trees in the public park: for me it was a “Your Woman Awaits You” campaign that might have saved me, but things were not turning out this way in the slightest. He looked at me with sadness, he felt sorry for me, he must have had no trouble understanding me, he must have remembered perfectly those still-recent moments when his love for Susan had appeared hopeless. I waved my hand wearily, singing: “Lala-la…” I pulled a grimace, which didn’t completely come off as humorous; then, like Zarathustra beginning his descent, I made my way to the staff canteen.
Whatever, I was present at the meeting when Knowall announced that, far from being a simple artist’s vision, Vincent’s drawings prefigured the man of the future. For a long time animal nutrition had seemed to him to be a primitive system, of mediocre energy efficiency, producing a clearly excessive quantity of waste, waste that not only had to be evacuated, but which in the process provoked a far from negligible wear and tear of the organism. For a long time he had been thinking of equipping the new human animal with that photosynthetic system that, by some curiosity of evolution, was the property of vegetables. The direct use of solar energy was obviously a more robust, efficient, and reliable system—as shown by the practically limitless life span of plants. What’s more, the addition of autotrophic functions to the human cell was far from being as complex an operation as some might imagine; his teams had already been working on the question for some time, and the number of genes involved proved to be astonishingly low. The human being thus transformed would subsist, solar energy aside, on water and a small quantity of mineral salts; the digestive system, just like the excretory system, could disappear—any excess minerals would be easily eliminated, with water, by means of sweat.
Vincent, used to only following Knowall’s explanations at some distance, nodded mechanically, and Cop was thinking of something else: it was therefore in this way, in a few minutes, and on the basis of a hasty artist’s sketch, that a decision was made on the Standard Genetic Rectification that would be applied, uniformly, to all the units of DNA destined to be called back to life, and to mark a definitive break between the neohumans and their ancestors. The rest of the genetic code remained unchanged; we were dealing with nothing less than a new species and even, strictly speaking, a new kingdom.
Daniel25, 11
IT IS IRONIC TO THINK that the SGR, conceived at the outset for reasons of purely aesthetic propriety, is what enabled the neohumans to survive, without any great difficulty, the climatic catastrophes that were to follow and that no one at the time could have predicted, while the humans of the former race would be almost completely decimated.
On this crucial point, the life story of Daniel1, once again, is totally corroborated by those of Vincent1, Slotan1, and Jérôme1, even if they attribute to the event unequal levels of importance. Whereas Vincent1 only alludes to it in a brief paragraph, and Jérôme1 almost completely passes over it, Slotan1, however, devotes tens of pages to the idea of the SGR and the research that would, a few months later, enable its operational realization. Generally speaking, the life story of Daniel1 is often considered by commentators to be central and canonical. While Vincent1 often places excessive emphasis on the aesthetic meaning of the rituals, while Slotan1 devotes himself almost exclusively to the evocation of his scientific research, and Jérôme1 to questions of discipline and material organization, Daniel1 is the only one who gives us a complete, if slightly detached, description of the birth of the Elohimite Church; while the others, caught up in everyday business, only thought of solutions to the practical problems they had to face, he often seems to be the only one to have taken a small step back, and to have really understood the importance of what was happening before his eyes.
This state of things gives me, as it did all my predecessors in the Daniel series, a particular responsibility; my commentary is not and cannot be just an ordinary commentary, since it touches so closely upon the circumstances of the creation of our species, and its system of values. Its central character is further increased by the fact that my distant ancestor was, in the mind of Vincent1 and no doubt in his own, a typical human being, representative of the species, a human being among so many others.
According to the Supreme Sister, jealousy, desire, and the appetite for procreation share the same origin, which is the suffering of being. It is the suffering of being that makes us seek out the other, as a palliative; we must go beyond this stage to reach the state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy; where intermediation is nothing more than a game, freely undertaken, and not constitutive of being. We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity.
Daniel1, 23
IT WAS ON CHRISTMAS DAY , midmorning, that I learned of Isabelle’s suicide. I wasn’t really surprised by it: I sensed, in the space of a few minutes, that a sort of emptiness was settling inside me; but this was a predictable, anticipated emptiness. I had known, since my departure from Biarritz, that she would end up killing herself; I had known it from a look we had exchanged, on that last morning, as I was going out of the door of her kitchen to get into the taxi that would take me to the railway station. I had also suspected that she would wait until the death of her mother in order to care for her right to the end, and not to cause her pain. I also knew that I too, sooner or later, was going to head toward the same kind of solution.
Her mother had died on December 13; Isabelle had bought a plot in the municipal cemetery of Biarritz, and dealt with the funeral; she had made her will and put her affairs in order; then, on the night of December 24, she had injected herself with a massive dose of morphine. Not only had she died painlessly, but she ha
d also probably died joyfully; or, at least, in that state of euphoric relaxation that characterizes the product. That very morning, she had put Fox into a kennel; she hadn’t left any letter for me, thinking no doubt that it was useless, that I wouldn’t understand her well enough; but she had taken the necessary measures to ensure that the dog was passed on to me.
I left a few days later, she had already been cremated; on the morning of December 30, I went to the “quiet room” of the Biarritz cemetery. It was a large round room, with a ceiling made up of a window that bathed the room in soft gray light. The walls were pierced all over with little cavities into which you could slip parallelepipeds of metal containing the ashes of the deceased. Above each niche a label bore the first and second name of the dead person, engraved in slanted script. In the center, a marble table, also round, was surrounded by chairs that were made of glass, or rather transparent plastic. After leading me in, the janitor had placed the box containing Isabelle’s ashes on the table; then he had left me alone. No one else could enter while I was in the room; my presence was signaled by a little red lamp that lit up outside, like those used to indicate action on film sets. I remained in the quiet room, like most people do, for about ten minutes.
I spent a strange New Year’s Eve, alone in my bedroom at the Villa Eugénie, turning over simple, morbid, extremely uncontradictory thoughts. On the morning of January 2, I went to collect Fox. Unfortunately, before I left, I had to return to Isabelle’s apartment to fetch the papers necessary for settling the inheritance. From the moment we arrived at the entrance to the residence, I noticed that Fox was quivering with joyful impatience; he had put on even more weight, Corgis are a race with a tendency toward plumpness, but he ran up to Isabelle’s door, then, breathless, stopped to wait for me as I walked, much more slowly, up the alley of chestnut trees stripped bare by winter. He let out small impatient yaps as I looked for the keys; poor little fellow, I said to myself, poor little fellow. As soon as I opened the door he rushed inside the apartment, quickly made a tour of it, came back, and sent me an inquisitive look. As I looked through Isabelle’s desk, he left again, several times, exploring the rooms one by one, sniffing about everywhere then returning, stopping at the bedroom door and looking at me with a vexed expression. The end of any life amounts more or less to a tidying up; you no longer feel the urge to throw yourself into a new project, you are content just to dispatch day-to-day matters. All the things you have never done, as anodyne as preparing a mayonnaise or playing a game of chess, little by little become inaccessible, the desire for any new experience as for any new sensation disappears absolutely. Even so, things were remarkably tidy, and it took me only a few minutes to find Isabelle’s will and the deeds to the apartment; I didn’t intend to see the solicitor right away, I told myself I would return to Biarritz later, while knowing that it would be a difficult thing to do, that I would probably not have the courage for it, but that no longer seemed important, nothing seemed very important now. When I opened the envelope, I saw that it would be a futile step; she had left all her estate to the Elohimite Church, and I recognized the standard contract; the legal services would take care of it all.
Fox followed me without difficulty when I left the apartment, probably thinking we were simply going for a walk. In a pet shop near the station, I bought a plastic container in which to transport him during the journey; then I reserved a ticket for the express train from Irún.
The weather was clement in the region of Almería, a curtain of fine rain enveloped the short days, which gave the impression of never truly beginning, and this funereal peace could have suited me, we could have spent whole weeks like this, my old dog and me, lost in thoughts that were no longer really thoughts, but the circumstances unfortunately would not allow this. Work had begun next to my house on the building of new residences, spreading for kilometers around. There were cranes and cement mixers, it had become almost impossible to get to the sea without having to circumnavigate heaps of sand, piles of metal girders, in the midst of bulldozers and trucks that charged without slowing down through the middle of geysers of mud. Little by little I lost the habit of going out, apart from twice a day, to walk Fox, which was no longer really pleasant, he would howl and press against me, terrified by the noise of the trucks. I learned from the newsagent that Hildegarde had died, and that Harry had sold his property so he could end his days in Germany. Little by little I even lost the habit of leaving my bedroom, I spent most of my day in bed, in a state of great mental emptiness, which was nonetheless painful. Occasionally, I thought back to my arrival here, with Isabelle, a few years before; I remembered that she had taken pleasure in decorating, and especially in trying to grow flowers and create a garden; we had had, all things considered, a few moments of happiness. I thought back as well to our last moment of sexual union, the night on the dunes, after our visit to Harry’s; but the dunes were no longer there, bulldozers had leveled the area: it was now a muddy surface, surrounded by fences. I was going to sell as well, I had no reason to stay there; I made contact with a real estate agent, who informed me that this time the price of land had really increased, and that I could expect to make a considerable profit; I didn’t really know in what state I’d die, but in any case I’d die rich. I asked him to try and hurry the sale even if it meant not receiving as high an offer as he hoped, every day the place became a little more unbearable. I was under the impression that the workers not only had no sympathy for me, but that they were frankly hostile, and deliberately brushed passed me when driving their enormous trucks, spattering me with mud and terrorizing Fox. This impression was no doubt justified; I was a foreigner, a man from the North, and, what’s more, they knew I was richer, much richer, than they were; they felt a veiled, animal hatred toward me, made all the stronger because it was powerless, the social system was there to protect people like me, and the social system was solid, the Guardia Civil were only a few kilometers away and would patrol more and more often, Spain had just voted for a socialist government that was less open than others to corruption, less linked to the local mafias, and which firmly resolved to protect the cultivated, well-off class that made up most of its electorate. I had never felt much sympathy for the poor, and now that my life was fucked I had less than ever; the superiority my cash gave me over them might even have amounted to a slight consolation: I might have looked at them with contempt as they shoveled their heaps of gravel, backs bent with effort, while they unloaded their cargoes of beams and bricks; I might have considered with irony their lined hands, their muscles, the calendars of naked women that decorated their building-site vehicles. These minimal satisfactions, I knew, would not prevent me envying their untroubled, simplistic virility; their youth, also, the brutal evidence of their proletarian, animal youth.
Daniel25, 12
THIS MORNING, JUST BEFORE DAWN , I received the following message from Marie23:
The burdened membranes
Of our waking dreams
Have the muffled charm
Of sunless days.
399, 2347, 3268, 3846. Displayed on the screen was the image of a vast living room with white walls, furnished with low white leather divans; the carpet, too, was white. Through the bay window, you could make out the tower of the Chrysler Building—I had had the chance to see it in an ancient reproduction before. After a few seconds, a relatively young female neohuman, twenty-five at most, entered the camera’s field to position herself in front of the lens. The hair of her head and pubis was curly, thick and black; her harmonious body, with its wide hips and round breasts, gave a strong impression of solidity and energy; physically, she looked like I had imagined. A message scrolled past rapidly, superimposed on the image:
And the sea that suffocates me, and the sand,
The procession of each successive moment
Like birds soaring gently over New York,
Like great birds in inexorable flight.
Let’s go! It’s high time we broke the shell
And went t
oward the sparkling sea
On new paths our feet will recognize,
That we take together, unsure of weakness.
The existence of defections among the neohumans is not absolutely a secret; even if the subject is not really mentioned, certain allusions and rumors have come to light here and there. No measures are taken against deserters, nothing is done to trace them; the station they occupied is simply and definitively closed down by a team from the Central City; the lineage they represented is declared defunct.
If Marie23 had decided to abandon her post to rejoin a community of savages, I knew that nothing I could say would make her change her mind. For a few minutes, she walked up and down the room; she seemed prey to a restless excitement, and several times almost moved out of the camera’s field of vision. “I don’t know exactly what awaits me,” she said finally, turning toward the lens, “but I know that I need to live more. I have taken some time to make my decision, I have tried to match up all the available information. I have spoken a lot about it with Esther31, who also lives in the ruins of New York; we have even met physically, on two occasions. It’s not impossible; there is a big mental strain at the beginning, it’s not easy to leave the limits of the station, you feel enormously worried and distressed; but it’s not impossible…”
The Possibility of an Island Page 28
