The world of today feels to me like a speeded-up traffic jam. As if we were stuck in a tailback but, rather than drive slowly, bumper to bumper, we’re hurtling into the abyss at 200 kph, like the scene in Fast & Furious 7 when Vin Diesel’s Lykan Hypersport crashes through the window of a skyscraper in Abu Dhabi and completely destroys the 74th floor of a second Abu Dhabi skyscraper, before landing in a third Abu Dhabi skyscraper. It’s a spectacular stunt, but how many of us want to live like stuntmen? We age faster these days: by thirty, we find the younger generation incomprehensible, their slang unintelligible, their way of life impenetrable, and they are only too eager to push us out. In the Middle Ages, we were all dead by fifty. Today, we sign up for the Club Med Gym and wave our arms on a yoga mat while watching Bloomberg TV, with share prices scrolling every which way. I’m pretty sure that if I opened a gym called “Death Row,” people would be fighting to sign up for it.
If you think I’m crazy, close this book. But I know you won’t. Because you’re like me, an “autonomous individual,” to use the term coined by the sociologist Alain Touraine, meaning free, modern individuals with no ties to the land or to religion. According to a market-research study conducted by my own production company, my show only appeals to urban singles, rootless people, mavericks, AB consumers, high-earning atheists; nobody else watches my shows. In his report, the market researcher who questioned the panel about my image, quoted the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who talks about modern man as a “self-generated citizen,” a “bastard with no ancestry.” I very nearly took this badly; as I left the presentation, I looked at my reflection in the mirror in the lift and realized I looked like a “creature of dis-continuum.” I am part of the first human generation raised with no sense of patriotism, no family pride, no deep roots, no sense of belonging, no particular beliefs, beyond catechism lessons at the Catholic school when I was very young. This is a fact about which I have no reactionary lament: I only see a historical reality. I am the product of the obsolete utopia of the seventies, of an era when citizens of the Western world tried to shrug off the chains of previous centuries. I’m the first man with no ball and chain. Or I’m the last ball and chain of the next generation.
No one, except depressives and suicide bombers, actually wants to die. If there is even one chance in eight billion that I might succeed in prolonging my life for two or three centuries, you’ll want to do likewise. Bear in mind this one fact: you’re going to die because you’ll let yourself. You’re dying and I’m not. Humankind has mastered everything: the deepest oceans, the most inaccessible mountains, the moon, even Mars. It’s time for medicine to put an end to death. Once that’s done, we’ll work out how to find space to deal with the overcrowding. In twenty years’ time, there’ll be no Social Security. Faced with a rapidly aging population and a massive deficit in tax revenues, it will be every man for himself: the rich will stop paying to subsidize the poor. Short of postponing the retirement age to 280 … As for health insurance and life insurance companies, DNA sequencing will let them know the precise level of our health risk, and an algorithm will rapidly calculate the corresponding premiums. Extending life span will have a positive financial impact: everyone (except those with faulty genomes) will be able to buy eye-wateringly expensive houses on mortgages repayable over several centuries. Example: a €10,000,000 mortgage repayable over three hundred years with monthly payments of €2,700. You’ve always wanted a yacht? No problem if you’ve got centuries ahead of you.
I’ll spare you the religious spiel about life after death. I’ve never been a fan of casinos or horse racing: don’t count on me to endorse Pascal’s wager. I don’t give a shit about life after death, what I want is to indefinitely extend my life before I meet the Grim Reaper. Catholics pray for eternal life; me, I want eternal life without all the praying. The problem with God is that if you don’t believe in Him, you come across as a complete loser. Especially at fifty, when your body starts to malfunction; something that we know—despite all our anti-aging creams, Botox injections, hair transplants, and Ayurvedic massage—will only get worse until the final humiliation. This is why the congregation at mass are all over fifty. The Church as health spa for the soul.
Have I lost the taste for danger?
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2 GONZO CHECK-UP
(Georges Pompidou European Hospital, Paris)
“But exactly how were they to live? How?”
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, The White Guard (1926)
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ROMY AND LOU had much more of a future than I did: I respected their longevity. They were posthuman from birth. Children are wonderful multicellular organisms that run around the living room and reward our attention.
The birth of Lou somewhat complicated the writing of this book. When your baby is chanting “papa, papa, papa,” writing becomes a superhuman effort in resisting a smile waiting to be seen. I typed this paragraph on my computer while Lou was hiding behind the curtains waiting for me to find her, before erupting into peals of laughter beneath her flaxen hair when I tickled her. How can anyone be expected to write War and Peace in such conditions? Dickens apparently managed to write Oliver Twist while surrounded by his brood, but it was the story of children being abused: he was getting his revenge. My revenge is to nibble Lou’s ears and toes until she begs for mercy: “Stop Papa! Stop Papa!” She has the softest skin of anyone in the world. And the gap-toothed grin of Vanessa Paradis, only forty-five years younger. The face of a goddess, a domed forehead, plump cheeks, an impish nose, and a generous mouth stuffed with apricots. It’s impossible to imagine anything more joyful than her dimples. How can anyone be creative when their most glorious creation is prancing around them? Sorry, I’ve got a nappy that needs changing. I’ll get back to work tomorrow. Literature will have to wait: the tiny hand in my big hand is stopping me from writing.
I don’t want Lou to grow up, and I’m dreading the day when Romy leaves. When I see Lou playing with the shower, discovering that a car horn goes beep-beep, biting into a cherry, or playfully knocking over all my obsessively catalogued DVDs despite my protestations, allowing me to finally find the copy of Cukor’s Adam’s Rib I thought I’d lost, I remember Romy performing those same miracles at that age, and then I see myself, knocking over tables in Neuilly, and I relive my childhood for a third time, again and again, getting younger each time. With each new birth, I am reborn.
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I ALLOW ROMY to do all the things her mother forbids—to eat peanut butter and Mi-cho-ko before dinner, to watch TV until midnight, to make phone calls in bed, to FaceTime her classmates … As for Lou, no one can say no to her, especially not me. My TV shows come second to finger painting. My daughters have taught me how not to waste time. My priorities have significantly changed over the course of the 2000s: making a plasticine seahorse has become more important than a threesome with a couple of Slovak girls. A good day is Lou watching Peter Rabbit and me watching Lou and drinking beer (I’ve realized that alcohol puts me on her level; a drunk is just like a baby, but flabbier).
Yesterday, I dreamed that my parents were cremated. Lou was in the living room playing with their urns. She was spilling my mother’s ashes onto the carpet. A heap of grey dust on the floor. Then I realized she had also tipped out my father’s ashes. It was impossible to separate the piles: my parents were a single heap of dust in the middle of the living room. As my Dyson 360 Eye Robot Vacuum started to hoover up my mother and father, I woke up.
There are numerous ways to overcome death, but they are the preserve of a handful of Chinese or Californian billionaires. Better to be a living posthuman than a human reduced to ashes. I realized I didn’t care for my humanity as much as I’d thought, otherwise I’d have chosen to be something other than a TV presenter. I’m not a traditionalist when it comes to the physical body. If, to carry on living, I have to become a machine, I’ll give up my already approximate humanity without a second thought. I don’t owe murderous Mothe
r Nature anything. Besides, I’ve fucked up everything in this life. I need a second chance: I’m not asking for much, just another century. A life to spend playing catch-up.
Lou looks me straight in the eye and demands butterfly kisses. I blink rapidly, fluttering my eyelashes against her cheeks. Then she demands I play Incy Wincy Spider. So I do. “Again!” She giggles as my fingers tickle her neck. “Again!” I love this glorious time of the morning when Lou still prefers me to SpongeBob.
I make the most of these beginnings that enliven my death pangs.
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THE FIRST STEP in my quest for eternal life was to get a check-up from the doctor favoured by A-list celebs at the Department for Functional Testing and Predictive Medicine at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, near the former head office of Canal+, designed by Richard Meier, the studios where my TV show and Yann Barthes’s Quotidien are filmed.
Frédéric Saldmann is a famous cardiologist and nutritionist whose first book, You Are Your Own Best Medicine, has sold 550,000 copies. In theory, there’s a two-year waiting list to get a consultation, but I’m a celebrity and the system we live in isn’t totally democratic. I was predisposed to trust Saldmann. A doctor who is so well known in the media has to be more careful than his colleagues: he knows that if I die, it will ruin his reputation.
The imposing glass and steel building resembled a gigantic spacecraft bristling with tubular structures that looked like Terminal 2E at Charles de Gaulle Airport. In the centre, two soaring palm trees provided a touch of environmental exoticism. It would be the perfect setting to shoot a U2 video or house a contemporary art institute. The architecture was part of the utopian atmosphere, it had to offer a dazzling spectacle, otherwise no one would believe: medicine has changed very little since the plays of Molière. It was at the Pompidou Hospital that “Carmat,” the world’s first artificial heart, was implanted. Although the patient who received the transplant died three months later, it was a noble attempt. The newspaper Les Échos even namechecked the futuristic establishment in their October 2016 issue: “The wildest hopes for tissue regeneration were revived earlier this year when Professor Philippe Menasche of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital announced that a patient who had suffered a heart attack had been successfully treated using cardiac cells derived from human embryonic stem cells.” I know where to bring Maman if her dicky heart starts to act up again.
On the second floor of Building C, I passed the Department of Pharmacology/Toxicology. I took the name as a personal warning. As I walked through the reception area, I met several stooped, doddery old men; they didn’t seem to realize that they didn’t need to check in at reception anymore. Around me, interns were scurrying towards electron microscopes, but the star of the department was standing motionless in front of me. At sixty-four, Doctor Saldmann looked ten years younger. Svelte and cheerful, the doctor who had treated Alain Delon, Sophie Marceau, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Isabelle Adjani, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Roman Polanski shook my hand and ushered me into his consulting room. This was not a place where they washed the grubby sheets of bedridden patients; this was a place dedicated to extending humanity by means other than TENA incontinence pants. Saldmann was wearing a white coat, and glasses with chrome steel frames. He reminded me of Michael York in Logan’s Run. Eternal life favours the crisp sci-fi look. I prefer “crisp” to “clean,” which sounds more like “clinical.” He took my blood pressure: high. My electrocardiogram: predictable.
Then he took a cold, sticky transducer and performed an ultrasound of my abdomen. Saldmann’s only problem is that he’s balding: his scalp was visible through his hair. On the other hand, his smile looked devilish, probably because of the gaps between his incisors. For a doctor promising longevity, having gap teeth—which, in France, we call “lucky teeth”—is a guarantee of integrity. He peered at the monitor, studying my stomach, my gall bladder, my pancreas, and my prostate (black and white scudding clouds, like a painting by Soulages). All my organs were functioning correctly, he told me, except one, which was giving off a strange gurgling sound.
“You have fatty liver.”
“I eat foie gras all the time.”
“Fat in a duck’s liver is a lot better than fat in your own. The liver is what filters waste from your system. Yours looks like a clogged sieve.”
He showed me an image of a greenish yellow piece of rotting meat. It reminded me of the diseased organs they put on packs of cigarettes to terrify those following in the footsteps of Humphrey Bogart (an allusion for the oldsters).
“That’s what your liver looks like. You look pretty weird on the outside, but you look even weirder inside.”
At this point, I started to sulk. One of the most frustrating consequences of working as a boorish TV presenter is that even casual acquaintances think they can be boorish with me.
“Don’t play the martyr,” he said. “It takes five hundred days for your liver to regenerate. You just have to change your eating habits. If you do what I tell you, you’ll soon have the liver of a twenty-year-old who’s only ever drunk Evian from crystal bottles. Come on, let’s do a stress test.”
He made me get on a cross-trainer. After pedalling for one minute, my heart was racing at 180 bpm. He pleaded with me to get off the machine.
“Help, he’s about to do a René Goscinny impersonation!”
“But that’s not surprising, I don’t do any running.”
“Well don’t go having a heart attack in my office.”
René Goscinny is every cardiologist’s nightmare, ever since the author of the Asterix comics died of a heart attack during a routine stress test in 1977. He was fifty-one: precisely my age.
“Come on, we’ll do a full check-up. Including a cardiac MRI. I’d like to take a close look at your coronary arteries.”
I left the consultation depressed. I fasted overnight, and the following morning I went to a medical clinic to provide blood, urine, and a stool sample. After a few days I began to find something sensual about the young lab assistant to whom, every day, I had to hand the little pot labelled with my name that contained my faeces. The humiliation commonly known as “old age” was like some particularly twisted sexual fetish—I never imagined that I’d ever come to find shitting in a plastic tub every morning to see how long I was going to live sexy. Although we never broached the subject, I felt a sort of scatological complicity developing between her and me.
I also went for a CT coronary angiogram at the Labrouste Institute. An iodine-based dye was injected into my bloodstream to make it possible to see my ribcage in 3D. As I lay holding my breath in a tunnel filled with radioactive rays, I noticed a sign warning against looking directly at the laser. Predictably, I looked around for Darth Vader’s lightsaber. Fifteen minutes later, I was looking at my heart, my aorta, and my arteries on a series of LCD screens. It looked like a knuckle of veal.
I said to the radiographer studying the images, “I’ve often wondered what death looks like. I’m guessing he looks like you.”
“Disappointed?”
My life depended on this cross-section that looked like a three-dimensional turnip from a horror movie. It would be a great idea for a talk show: “Show Me Your Guts!” Shot at the Labrouste Institute, viewers would be able to watch the beating hearts and clogged arteries of the guests. There would be live ultrasounds. The tear-jerking section would be when the guests are told their prognosis in front of the cameras. Something to think about for next year.
The following week, the glass surfaces of the Pompidou Hospital reminded me not of a spaceship, but of the pyramid at the Louvre. I began to understand where I was: in a steel and glass mausoleum similar to the sarcophagus built by François Mitterrand. My mood had changed; I wasn’t swaggering anymore. Check-ups take a toll on your self-esteem. Doctor Saldmann had called me in to give me the results. He reviewed my test results with the sadistic slowness of
a judge waiting for silence in court before delivering his verdict. This is my heart, for you to contemplate.
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HOW MANY NOVELISTS do you know who are prepared to reveal the inner workings of their body? Louis-Ferdinand Céline said that a writer had to “put his skin on the table.” My CT coronary angiograph is a decisive step in the history of literature.
(Note from an author prepared to do anything.)
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“YOU’RE SUFFERING FROM hepatic steatosis and hypertension. It’s just about within normal limits, given everything you’ve been putting into your body. But your heart is sound and your arteries are clear. It’s amazing! You have zero risk of a myocardial infarction. Did you make a pilgrimage to Lourdes or something? Your coronary calcium level is zero; it’s like you’ve just been born! Your stomach, your lungs, your balls, are all functioning normally. You don’t even have an enlarged prostate. Much more of this and I’m going to start taking Class A drugs!”
I thanked God for giving me a second chance. Saldmann seemed as relieved as I was. He had been expecting to find a ruined body.
“The thing I find surprising,” I said, after the long sigh of a death row inmate who has just been pardoned, “is that it’s taken fifty years for my liver to protest. Is there any way you can prolong it indefinitely?”
“What?”
“I’d like to postpone my death to such an extent that death will die before I do. My goal is to live for four hundred years, with my fatty liver.”
A Life Without End Page 6