The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  The other ads dwelled once again, with the same strength of conviction, on the main elements of the Elohimite choice of life—sexuality, aging, death, in short the usual human questions—but the name of the Church itself was not mentioned, except only at the end, in a very brief, almost subliminal insert that simply said: “Elohimite Church” and a contact telephone number.

  “I have found positive ads to be much harder…,” Lucas told me in a hushed tone. “However, I have made one, I think you will recognize the actor…” In fact I recognized Cop in the first few seconds, wearing blue jeans, and busy, in a boat shed by a river, with a manual task that apparently consisted of repairing a canoe. The lighting was superb, shimmering, the pools of water behind him gleamed in a warm mist, it was a bit Jack Daniels–like, but fresher, more joyful, yet without excessive liveliness, like a spring that had acquired the serenity of autumn. He was working calmly, in no hurry, giving the impression of finding pleasure in it and having all the time in the world ahead of him; then he turned toward the camera and smiled broadly as the message “Eternity, Tranquilly” was superimposed on the screen.

  I then understood the uneasiness they had all, to a greater or lesser extent, been displaying: my discovery about happiness being the exclusive preserve of youth, and about the sacrifice of generations, was not actually a discovery at all; everyone here already understood it perfectly; Vincent had understood it, Lucas had understood it, and so too had most of the followers. No doubt Isabelle had also been conscious of it for a long time, and she had committed suicide emotionlessly, under the influence of a rational decision, almost like someone asking to be dealt a second hand when the game of cards has started badly—in those rare games that allow it. Was I more stupid than the average person? I asked Vincent that very evening when I was having an aperitif at his place. No, he replied without emotion, on the intellectual level I was in reality slightly above average, and on the moral level I was the same as everyone else: a bit sentimental, a bit cynical, like most men. I was just very honest, and therein lay my distinction; I was, in relation to the current norms of mankind, almost unbelievably honest. I wasn’t to take offense at these remarks, he added, this could all be deduced from the huge success I had had with the public; and it was also what made my life story priceless. Whatever I said to my fellow men would be seen by them as authentic, as true; and wherever I went, everyone else, in exchange for a little effort, could follow. If I had converted, it meant that all men, following my example, could convert. He told me all this very calmly, looking me straight in the eye, with an expression of absolute sincerity; and what’s more I knew he liked me. It was then I understood, exactly, what he wanted to do; it was then I also understood that he was going to succeed.

  “How many members do you have?”

  “Seven hundred thousand,” he replied in a second, without thinking. Then I understood a third thing, which was that Vincent had become the true head of the Church, its effective leader. Knowall, as he had always wished, devoted himself exclusively to scientific research; and Cop had lined up behind Vincent, obeyed his orders, and put his practical intelligence and impressive work rate entirely at his disposal. It was Vincent, without a shadow of doubt, who had recruited Lucas; he was the one who had launched the “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure” campaign; similarly he was the one who had put a stop to it, once the goal had been reached; this time he had well and truly taken the place of the prophet. I then recalled my first visit to the house in Chevilly-Larue, and how he had appeared to me to be on the brink of suicide, or a nervous breakdown. “The stone that the builders had rejected…,” I said to myself. “Oh, subtle priests…,” I said to myself a little later, in an automatic parody of Nietzschean linguistic quirks that I sensed, however, was actually inappropriate—Vincent’s success owed nothing to the Will, in the rather silly sense that Nietzsche gives to this term by crudely reducing the ideas of Schopenhauer. I still felt neither jealous nor envious of Vincent; his was of a different essence from mine; I would have been incapable of doing what he did; he had achieved a lot, but he had also gambled a lot, he had gambled his entire being, thrown everything into the balance, and for a long time, indeed since the very beginning, he would have been incapable of proceeding otherwise, there had never been any room at all in him for strategy or calculation. I then asked him if he was still working on the embassy project. He lowered his eyes with unexpected modesty, and told me yes, that he even thought he would finish it soon, that if I stayed on another month or two he could show me; that in fact he wanted me to stay a lot longer, and that I would be the first visitor—immediately after Susan, for it concerned Susan very directly.

  Naturally, I stayed; nothing was particularly pressing me to return to San José; on the beach there would probably be a bit more breast, a bit more bush, I would be obliged to cope with the situation. I had received a fax from the real estate agent, he had had an interesting offer from an Englishman, a rock singer apparently, but I couldn’t feel any sense of urgency about that, either, since the death of Fox, I might just as well die there, and be buried beside him. I was at the bar of the Lutétia, and after my third Alexandra this seemed an excellent idea: no I was not going to sell, I was going to allow the property to fall into decay, and I was even going to forbid its sale in my will, I was going to put some money aside for its upkeep, I was going to make this house into a sort of mausoleum, a mausoleum to shitty things, but a mausoleum nonetheless. “Mausoleum of shittiness…”: I repeated the phrase to myself in a low voice, feeling inside me, growing with the warmth of the alcohol, an evil jubilation. In the meantime, to sweeten my final moments, I would invite some whores over. No, not whores, I told myself after a moment’s reflection, their performances would undoubtedly be too robotic, too mediocre. I could alternatively proposition the teenage girls who sunbathed on the beach; the majority would refuse, but some might accept, I was certain in any case that they would not be shocked. Obviously, there were a few risks, they might have delinquent boyfriends; there were housemaids I could also try, some were perfectly screwable and perhaps wouldn’t say no to the idea of making some extra money. I ordered a fourth cocktail and slowly weighed the different possibilities as I turned the alcohol in my glass, before realizing that I would very probably do nothing, that I would not resort to prostitution now Esther had left me, any more than I had after Isabelle left, and I also understood, with a mixture of terror and disgust, that I would continue (in, I must say, a purely theoretical fashion, because I knew very well that in my case it was all over, that I’d blown my last chance, that I was now ready to depart, that it was necessary to put an end to things, that it was necessary to finish), but that I continued all the same, in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love.

  Daniel25, 14

  MY FIRST CONTACT WITH ESTHER 31 surprised me; probably influenced by the life story of my human predecessor, I had expected a young person. Alerted by my request for intermediation, she switched into visual mode: I found myself confronted by a woman with a calm, serious face who must have been just over fifty; she was standing in front of her screen in a tidy little room that must have served as her office, and was wearing glasses. The fact that she was number 31 was already, in itself, slightly surprising; she explained to me that the line of Esthers had inherited the renal malformation of its founder, and was consequently characterized by shortened life spans. Of course, she was aware of Marie23’s departure: it seemed almost certain to her as well that a community of evolved primates had settled in the place where Lanzarote had once been; that zone of the North Atlantic, she informed me, had suffered a tormented geological fate: after having been completely engulfed at the time of the First Decrease, the island had reemerged as a result of new volcanic eruptions; at the time of the Great Drying Up it had become an isthmus, and, according to the last surveys, a narrow strip of land still linked it to the African coast.

  Unlike Marie23, Esther31 thought that the community that h
ad settled in the zone was not made up of savages, but of neohumans who had rejected the teachings of the Supreme Sister. The satellite images, it’s true, left room for doubt: they might, or might not, be beings transformed by SGR; but how could heterotrophs, she pointed out, have survived in a place that supported no trace of vegetation? She was convinced that Marie23, although expecting to meet humans of the previous race, was in fact going to find neohumans who had undertaken the same journey as her.

  “Maybe that was, fundamentally, what she was looking for…,” I said. She reflected for a long time before replying, in a neutral tone: “That is possible.”

  Daniel1, 26

  IN ORDER TO WORK, Vincent had moved into a windowless hangar, about fifty meters long on either side, situated right next to the Church’s offices, and linked to them by a covered passageway. As I passed through the offices, where despite the early hour secretaries, archivists, and accountants were busy behind their computer screens, I was struck again by the fact that this powerful spiritual organization, which was thriving, which already claimed to have, in the countries of Northern Europe, a number of followers equivalent to that of the main Christian denominations, was, in many other respects, organized exactly like an SME. Cop was very comfortable, I could tell, in this hardworking, humble atmosphere that corresponded to his values; the strutting, show-off side of the prophet had always, in reality, deeply displeased him. At ease in his new existence, he behaved like a socially minded employer, listening to his employees, always ready to give them a half-day off or an advance on their salary. The organization worked wonderfully, the members’ legacies came in, after their deaths, and enriched a capital already valued at twice that of the Moonies; their DNA, replicated in five samples, was preserved at low temperature in underground rooms impermeable to most known radiation, which could withstand a thermonuclear attack. The laboratories run by Knowall constituted not only the ne plus ultra of current technology; in fact nothing, in the private sector as well as the public, could compare with them, he and his team had acquired, in the field of genetic engineering as well as in that of fuzzy neural networks, an unassailable lead, all done with absolute respect to the legislation that was currently in force, and the most promising students at most of the American and European technological universities now applied to work alongside them.

  Once the dogma, ritual, and regime had been established, and any dangerous deviations liquidated, Vincent made only brief media appearances, during which he could afford himself the luxury of tolerance, agreeing with representatives of the monotheistic religions on the existence of common spiritual aspirations—without disguising, however, the fact that their objectives were radically different. This strategy of appeasement had paid off; and the two bomb attacks against offices of the Church—one, in Istanbul, was claimed by an Islamic group; the other, in Tucson, Arizona, was attributed to a fundamentalist Protestant sect—had aroused universal indignation, and had backfired on their perpetrators. The innovative aspects of the Elohimite proposals for life were now essentially taken on by Lucas, whose incisive communication of them, straightforwardly ridiculing paternity, playing—with a controlled audacity—on the sexual ambiguity of very young girls, and devaluing the ancient taboo of incest without explicitly attacking it, ensured every one of his press campaigns an impact out of all proportion to the investment made, while still maintaining the establishment of a broad consensus, through unreserved praise for the dominant hedonistic values and emphatic homage to Oriental sexual techniques, all dressed up visually in a manner that was both aesthetic and very direct, which went on to become seminal (the ad “Eternity, Tranquilly” had thus been joined by “Eternity, Sensually,” then “Eternity, Lovingly,” which, without a shadow of doubt, innovated the sphere of religious advertising). Without offering any resistance, and without even imagining the possibility of a counterattack, the established churches saw most of their followers, in the space of a few years, disappear into thin air, and their stars wane in favor of the new cult—which, moreover, recruited the majority of its followers from atheistic, well-off, modern milieus—As and B1s, to use Lucas’s terminology—to whom they had long since had no access.

  Conscious that things were going well, that he was surrounded by the best possible colleagues, Vincent had devoted himself more and more exclusively, over the last few weeks, to his great project, and it was with surprise that I saw again, beneath the mask of the business leader, a man who was fragile, timid, and uncertain in speech, slightly vacant, but at the same time weighed down by a secret preoccupation. He hesitated for a long time, that morning, before letting me discover his life’s work. We had one coffee, then another, at the automatic dispenser. Turning the empty cup in his fingers, he finally said to me: “I think this will be my last work…” before looking at the floor. “Susan agrees…,” he added. “When the moment is right…I mean, the moment for leaving this world and beginning the wait for the next incarnation, we will enter this room together; we will go into the center of it and there we will take the lethal mixture together. Other rooms will be built, along the same model, so that all the followers can have access to it. It seemed to me…it seemed to me that it was useful to formalize this moment.” He stopped talking, and looked me straight in the eye. “It was difficult work…,” he said. “I have thought a lot of ‘The Death of the Poor,’ by Baudelaire; that helped me enormously.”

  The sublime verses came back to me immediately, as if they had always been present in a corner of my consciousness, as if my whole life had only been a more or less explicit commentary on them:

  Death, alas! consoles and brings to life;

  The end of it all, the solitary hope;

  We, drunk on death’s elixir, face the strife,

  Take heart, and climb till dusk the weary slope.

  All through the storm, the frost, and the snow,

  Death on our black horizon pulses clear;

  Death is the famous inn that we all know,

  Where we can rest and sleep and have good cheer.

  I nodded my head; what else could I do? Then I went into the corridor leading to the hangar. As soon as I opened the hermetically sealed, reinforced door, which led inside, I was dazzled by a blinding light, and for half a minute I couldn’t make anything out; the door closed behind me with a dull thud.

  Gradually my eyes became accustomed, and I recognized forms and contours; it looked a little like the computer simulation I had seen on Lanzarote, but the luminosity of it all was even more enhanced, he really had worked on the whiteness, and there was no longer any music, just a few light, quavering sounds, a little like vague atmospheric vibrations. I had the impression of moving inside a milky, isotropic space, which sometimes condensed, suddenly, into granular microformations—on moving closer I could make out mountains, valleys, and whole landscapes, which became rapidly more complex, then disappeared almost immediately, and the decor fell back into a vague homogeneity, crisscrossed by oscillating potentialities. Strangely, I could no longer see my hands, nor any other part of my body. I quickly lost all sense of direction, and I then had the impression of hearing footsteps echoing mine: when I stopped, the steps stopped as well, but slightly afterward. Looking right I caught sight of a silhouette that replicated every one of my movements, and that was only distinguished from the dazzling whiteness of the atmosphere by being a slightly duller white. I felt rather worried: the silhouette disappeared immediately. I stopped worrying: the silhouette rematerialized, looming out of nothingness. Gradually I became used to its presence, and continued my exploration; it became increasingly obvious to me that Vincent had used fractal structures, I recognized Sierpinski Triangles, Mandelbrot sets, and the installation itself seemed to evolve as I became conscious of it. Just as I had the impression that the space around me was fragmenting into Cantor’s triadic sets, the silhouette disappeared, and there was total silence. I could no longer even hear my own breath, and I then understood that I had become the space; I was the universe and
I was phenomenal existence, the sparkling microstructures that appeared, froze, then dissolved in space were part of me, and I felt them to be mine, producing themselves inside my body, both every one of their apparitions and every one of their cessations. I was then seized by an intense desire to disappear, to melt into a luminous, active nothingness, vibrating with perpetual potentialities; the luminosity became blinding, the space around me seemed to explode and diffract into shards of light, but it was not a space in the usual sense of the term, it included many dimensions, and any other form of perception had disappeared—this space contained, in the conventional sense of the word, nothing. I remained like this, among the formless potentialities—beyond even form and absence of form—for a period of time that I couldn’t define; then something arose in me, at first almost imperceptibly, like the memory or dream of the sensation of gravity; then I became conscious again of my breathing, and of the three dimensions of the space, which gradually became still; objects reappeared around me, like discrete emanations from the whiteness, and I was able to leave the room.