A Life Without End

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  “You’re not happy?” I say to Romy.

  “Sure I am. The trip is to die for.”

  “No, no, it’s not to die for. It’s exactly the opposite.”

  At this point, in one of my films, there would be a three-second close-up of my enigmatic expression, to underscore the double meaning of this piece of banter.

  “You remember when I told you that we’re not going to die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you believe me?”

  “Um … You come out with a lot of stupid stuff.”

  “Don’t I know it, it’s how I make my living! Well, the thing is, if we’re planning to not die, we have to visit a bunch of doctors who can take care of us. You see what I’m saying? That’s why we’re going on this trip. But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re going to be the first. It has to be our secret, otherwise everyone will want to do it. And remember how much you hate queuing for the rides at Disneyland?”

  “I can’t even post on Instagram? #100% Jesus!”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are we going first?”

  “Jerusalem.”

  “LOL. You mean the place where Jesus came back from the dead?”

  “Rose.”

  “What?”

  “You say ‘Jesus rose from the dead.’ But, no, it’s nothing to do with him. It’s just a coincidence. Or … at least I think so.”

  Another close-up of my face, this time with an inscrutable expression, think Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon. Maybe with an aside to camera and tracking shot (and a surge of synths on the soundtrack).

  “I just need you to promise me one thing, Romy. Look me in the eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Promise you won’t go disappearing on me again.”

  “That wasn’t my fault!”

  “Whose fault was it, then?”

  “itwuzmamansfault …”

  “Sorry? I didn’t hear that. Enunciate your words.”

  “I said it was Maman’s fault.”

  “Skipping gym class and hiding in a fitting room at a branch of Brandy Melville didn’t bring your mother back. Maybe you can tell me how hiding in a changing room or in a sweet shop helps anyone.”

  “sbecuzklementinesedmamahadanuboyfrend.”

  “Please, try to speak a bit more clearly, you can be a real pain, sometimes!”

  “I said it’s because Clémentine told me Maman had a new boyfriend.”

  “Clémentine?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I skipped class. I couldn’t breathe, so I ran to Le Luco. I wasn’t thinking. And the lady in the sweet shop was really nice. When I told her my parents were divorced, she said I could have all the marshmallows I could fit in both hands. But after that, I wasn’t hiding, I was just sitting in the park, in the bandstand, everyone could see me. I knew you’d find me. You should be happy, it’s not like I ran away to Syria!”

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was about to go around the world with a gifted, ungrateful, cheeky little madame who I could have hired to present a talk show for paedophile fans of Kick-Ass. Now there’s a concept: talk shows hosted by kids—I need to file a copyright notice with the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers! I made a note on my laptop.

  “So?” I said, “It’s normal that your mother is moving on with her life.”

  “So what?”

  “So, do you promise not to disappear on me?”

  “I have a shell and I begin with an S.”

  “What?”

  “Hurry up … I have a shell and I begin with an S—what am I?”

  “Shrimp? Scallop?”

  “No, it’s only five letters. Come on, Papa, ten seconds left!”

  “Snail?”

  “Wow, you’re good!”

  “So, do you promise?”

  ‘Okay … You’re better than Maman at this game.”

  I got up from my daughter’s bed and shouted down the hallway: “Clémentine? Could you help Romy pack her suitcase? We’re going on a trip. Oh, and another thing—we won’t be requiring your services any longer. To quote the TV presenter who’s now President of the United States: You’re fired!”

  -

  4 NOBODY FUCKS WITH THE JESUS

  (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  H.P. LOVECRAFT

  -

  WHAT DO WE chiefly die from? In 2014, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study funded by the Bill Gates Foundation: 800 international researchers reviewed 240 causes of death spanning 188 countries around the world. The top four are not particularly surprising: the heart gives out (coronary heart disease accounted for eight million deaths in 2013), our brain fries (stroke accounted for six million deaths), our lungs collapse (three million deaths), and the fourth cause is Alzheimer’s disease (1.6 million deaths). Traffic accidents (1.3 million deaths) are tied with AIDS for seventh position.

  I wrote to the Israeli professor specializing in cell renewal whose email address my shrink had given me:

  Doctor Buganim, I am contacting you at the suggestion of a psychoanalyst you know, Doctor Enkidu in Paris—I hope you don’t find her recommendation unsettling. Would you be prepared to meet me in order to defer my death? I have a sizeable budget at my disposal. On that subject, could you tell me: how much is eternal life? I would be grateful if you could send me a detailed costing for immortality by return. All the best.

  When you send this kind of email to a bigshot in the biotech industry, either he marks it as JUNK MAIL, or he calls you back within the hour because chatting to fruit loops is always entertaining. Doctor Yossi Buganim got back to me within fifteen minutes. Worriedly, he enquired in what context Madame Enkidu had mentioned his name to me, and whether I could send him a confirmation email from the Head of External Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I suddenly had the strange impression that I was in a spy novel. The world of biological research is very paranoid these days: the quest for immortality is a race between the Chinese, the Swiss, the Americans, and the Israelis (the French are lagging behind: not enough money and too many ethics). In this scientific war, there is fraud, there are phoney press releases (such as the discovery of NgAgo—an enzyme that can be used as “genetic scissors” to modify genomes—by Han Chunyu of the University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang), risky publicity stunts, and a lot of disinformation and espionage. Genetics is worse for competition than the Oscars. In 2016, Doctor Yossi Buganim received the Boyalife Prize from Science: He is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells). So I sent an email to the comms director of his laboratory.

  Could you please inform the doctor that I’m not ill. I do not need him to cure me, but to prolong me. We’re working on a major documentary about immortality and I just want to know whether injecting stem cells would make it possible for me to slow the aging process. My daughter will be with me at the consultation: her cells are a lot fresher than mine. I would be grateful if you could suggest some convenient dates. We are available immediately.

  A little information about stem cells. Don’t worry: I’m not going to copy/paste the Wikipedia page, which is incomprehensible. In 1953, an American biologist in Maine named Leroy Stevens researching the effects of smoking on mice, notices that one of the subjects has an enlarged scrotum. He kills and dissects it. In fact there is a tumour on the mouse’s testicles. Well, first off, this confirms that smoking is bad for your health. But Stevens notices that the tumour itself is bizarre. Inside, it contains hair, and fragments of bone and tooth. What the actual fuck?! He forces more mice to inhale cigarette smoke, and dissects more tumours, which look more like embryos. It’
s Alien in miniature. He decides to graft these tumours onto younger mice to see what happens—and also because there is no Universal Declaration of Rodent Rights. He discovers that the tumours adapt to their new environment and develop into repulsive non-viable embryos, all hair and teeth. People really knew how to have fun in Bar Harbor (Maine) back in the day! Leroy Stevens had discovered stem cells. Put simply, humans are multicellular animals: huge mice comprising 75 trillion cells. At embryo stage, our cells replicate endlessly and are able to become anything: bone, liver, heart, eyes, skin, teeth, wavy hair, your pussy. (Apologies for that little ruse, just getting my readers’ attention.) If someone could control these stem cells, it could either save our lives (e.g., by recreating a malfunctioning organ), or turn us into giant slimy tumours. Warning: this is where things get complicated. Embryos contain an abundance of stem cells, but we’re not going to terminate thousands of foetuses to steal their stems cells: even if the idea sounds logical—as we’ll see later, there is something vampiric in the fight against aging—it would be deeply amoral and, besides, it was banned in France under the 2004 Bioethics Law. A decade ago, a theory was proposed that human cloning might be used to cultivate stem cells, but in 2006 two Japanese scientists found another solution. Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University managed to rejuvenate adult skin cells by “reprogramming” them such that they become iPS cells. Put simply, the Japanese scientists succeeded in genetically manipulating human dermal cells by introducing four factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4), making it possible to reprogramme mature cells into “all-terrain” embryonic cells capable of adapting anywhere inside the body and of self-renewing. In 2012 Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his achievement. And this is why, for the past five years, thousands of biologists around the world have been torturing millions of mice hoping to find the philosopher’s stone. Got it? End of information dump. Now I’m expecting the Nobel for scientific simplification.

  -

  THE BUSINESS CLASS cabin on our flight to Tel Aviv was full of businessmen reading The Discreet Charm of the Intestine. Many of them were wearing yarmulkes. I was surrounded by mortal creatures who were not afraid of death. Jews brush with death on every street corner; they seem to have grown accustomed to the Grim Reaper hanging around. They don’t seem to care about it one way or another. Unlike Romy, I don’t find the phrase “to die for” to be synonymous with “amazing.” In the same way, I hate it when she loses at some video game because she invariably says, “I’m done with my life.” To which I reply with pride, “I’ve got first dibs!”

  Romy stifles a yawn as I explain the prodigious scientific discoveries that have led us to this city; though she keeps her mouth shut, her flaring nostrils betray her. I have never before set foot in Jerusalem; I don’t have much interest in holy sites. For example, I never succumbed to the fashion for walking to Santiago de Compostela. Romy is watching Hunger Games—another survival story—on her computer. Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is forced to win a series of increasingly Sadean “games” as the plot progresses. If I’d seen the movie when I was her age, I’d have been traumatized, but Romy dozes off without a care in the world. Young people have become inured since every-man-for-himself became the dominant storytelling approach for our children.

  I sent this message to Léonore, who was back in Paris with our baby:

  Love of my life,

  Though I do my best to seem blasé, it is no mundane thing to land in the Promised Land. You fly over the Mediterranean and, all of a sudden, through the window, you see a straight line, white and shimmering: this is Israel, a country that, for three millennia, has been a utopia. The elderly couple in the seats next to us held hands as the plane touched down. I envied them, because your hand was not here for me to hold. I know you think my quest for immortality is futile. You’re probably right, but even before my appointment with your boss’s colleague, it has already been a success, since every kilometre that separates me from you and Lou spans an eternity. I’ll phone you when I’ve been filled with stem cells. Bite one of Lou’s toes for me: it’ll grow back. I’m not going to write a long email, because I’m afraid I might cry in front of Romy. I cannot bear to do anything but hold you in my arms.

  Your legally wed lover whose feelings are imperishable.

  PS: I’m not kidding—holding you in my arms is my definition of paradise.

  I should probably buy a yarmulke. I wore one to my producer’s wedding and it suited me, it gave me the gravitas I lack. After all, with my aquiline nose and pale eyes, I have the face of a good Ashkenazi. Even though I also possess a deeply Catholic foreskin, I appear on the list of “Jews who control the media” published on some neo-fascist website. I let them think what they like because I’m flattered. As long as someone, somewhere is talking about me.

  Romy woke up when we landed. I asked our taxi driver to drop us directly at the Centre for Genomic Technologies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is a one-hour drive from Tel Aviv, via a highly secure motorway flanked by barbed wire. Since I don’t believe in God, in Yahweh, or in Allah, I tried looking out the window, as though this was just another country, but this was not just another country. Groups of police officers surrounded bearded men dressed in black who wore black hats and long braided sideburns. Israel is like the Marais in Paris but bigger, with a wider sky. Even the light here is metaphysical. I realized I did not know a single word of Hebrew other than shalom. I didn’t even know how to say “yes” or “thank you”! Luckily Romy had 4G roaming: she told me the words I needed were ken and toda. The cab driver was driving like a lunatic, foot to the floor, with the air conditioning turned up to max: I was afraid Romy would catch a cold.

  “Put your seatbelt on and wear my scarf.”

  Fatherhood often requires the use of the imperative.

  Tall, dark, slender beauties strolled along the pavements, they had silken hair, green eyes, white teeth, and triumphant breasts, but I tried not to allow myself to be distracted from my scientific undertaking. What is the word for the hollow at the back of the knee, that soft, golden curve? If anyone knows, please email me. After all, I could hardly ask my daughter to Google it.

  “See those Israeli women, Romy? They adopt that sullen expression because they think it makes them look beautiful. Don’t ever do that, are you listening to me?”

  It looked as though young Israelis wanted to be Californians, to spend their lives wearing T-shirts and sandals: all Jews looked like Jesus in shorts. Like Paris, Rome, London, or New York, it was difficult to tell the Jews from the hipsters. Who was copying whom? Was the hipster just a hyper-cool Jew in disguise? Was the Jew just a hipster with a spiritual dimension? It looked to me as though a war was looming, and the Israelis had opted to side with the hipsters. By the time the cab dropped us off at the hospital cafeteria, Romy had the beginnings of a tummy ache.

  I felt relieved; nobody recognized me when we got out of the taxi; my face was on holiday. To live is wonderful; to live in voluntary rather than imposed anonymity is bliss. Especially when you know that anyone trying to phone you is getting the same posh robotic message: “The voicemail of the person you are trying to reach is full.” Which is a polite way of saying, “I’m more popular than you, so fuck off!” After the press release announcing my resignation, I had received not one single phone call from the hundreds of guests I’d invited onto my show. Though their ingratitude was unsurprising, it was no less upsetting: after twenty years in television, the number of celebs who had become friends was zero. I’d simply been an intermediary between the artists and their audience. Do I look like a go-between?

  Romy and I drank Coke and had a burping competition. Romy’s nose was sunburned where the taxi window had been open. After too many burps, she started throwing up her French toast. Thankfully, by that point, we had pulled up outside the hospital.

  The Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center is a
modern citadel perched atop a mountain. It comprises thirty buildings, including a shopping centre, a synagogue, several restaurants, and a university. I think it’s the largest hospital I have ever set foot in. Though not as modern as the Pompidou Hospital spaceship in Paris, it inspires more respect, as do all strictly monitored zones. This vast hive is guarded by armed soldiers. To gain admittance, you have to pass through security gates more fearsome than those at an airport, and those who do not have an appointment with an eminent doctor are escorted back to the perimeter.

  Doctor Yossi Buganim is a young research prodigy at the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The shaven-headed Israeli researcher looks as though he should have a part in a Jason Statham action movie. He has long, nervous, elegant hands; the hands of a pianist playing the four notes that make up DNA: A, T, G, C (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). Hands that would look perfect holding a cigarette, though, needless to say, given his profession, Doctor Yossi Buganim did not smoke. His laboratory is minimalist high-tech: highly sophisticated microscopes, 3D videos of multicoloured cells, biologists in lab goggles wielding pipettes … He showed us around his office and I found myself dreaming of a posthuman world in the very place where monotheistic religions were born.