A Life Without End

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  Romy was bored with being shut up in the clinic. I took her on a boat trip and we had dinner on a terrace on the far side of the lake. I hadn’t told her anything about my ongoing transmutation, how my simmering blood was increasing my strength tenfold. Romy ordered a Wiener schnitzel and I had grilled fish with no sauce. We sent selfies to Léonore from Geneva with the caption: We miss u! In Austria, gibt es keine meringue! She sent back videos of Lou and we watched them through gritted teeth, trying not to cry in front of the Austrians. Our blatant flouting of dietary regulations earned us no reproach from Claudia Schiffer. Maybe she was afraid I would atomize her with my laser blood. Or maybe she had already given up on saving this French father and his degenerate daughter? It was Pepper who provided the poetic conclusion to the day:

  “When I listen to you, my eyes are blue.”

  -

  IDEA FOR A TV talk show: “LOVE LIVE.” Guests are interviewed while making love, either with each other, with the presenter, or with actors of either gender. I’m picturing a “vibro interview” with a close-up of the guest’s genitalia (clitoris or glans) while it is being stimulated under the table by a super-fast Hitachi dildo (for women) or an artificial vagina (for men). Responses would be punctuated by sighs, moans, and orgasms. Massive audience ratings would be guaranteed for at least three seasons. In seasons four and five the concept could be spiced up by adding a little BDSM: the whip interview, the piercing interview, the branding interview, the tattoo interview, the nipple-clamp interview, and so on. With the money I make, I’ll buy my villa in Malibu and die peacefully in the year 2247 surrounded by my wife and daughters.

  The steep slopes of the mountains cleaved the air, and the snow glittered in the sun like whipped cream sprinkled with cocaine. This is the sort of landscape they broadcast on Zen TV. It’s also the sort of image that was broadcast to the humans being euthanized in Soylent Green, before they were turned into biscuits. Next to us, a Turkish family, who had all had their lips Botoxed, were chomping boiled potatoes with the blank expressions of a flock of inflatable ducks in a Jeff Koons installation. Deprived of their mobile phones, two Saudi businessmen still managed to look overworked. I was desperately missing Léonore and Lou. The cynical villain of the 1990s had become the maudlin old fogey of the 2010s. Each of the fifty guests having breakfast seemed to be thinking the same thing: “What am I doing here?” The morbidly obese had that same sad expression you see on former supermodels who now write diet books. Nearby, a married couple were silently contemplating divorce as they stared out at the still waters. With perfect grace, a heron alighted on the pontoon. After a long glide over the lake, it braked sharply with a flick of its wings, landed lightly on the teak platform, then gracefully pranced around like Fred Astaire in Top Hat. Are some herons more talented than others? This was something that had never occurred to me before. This particular heron had class, it deserved to be on the cover of avian Vogue. I wanted to take a selfie with it. The heron was the only guest not paying to stay at VIVAMAYR. Romy took a photograph and posted it to Instagram: the bird’s showbiz career had been launched. Here was a heron that deserved an Intravenous Laser Treatment to extend its life expectancy.

  Although I was starving, I took pride in the fact that I did not finish my bowl of goat’s cheese slop spiced with wasabi and herbs. In certain parts of the world, people were prepared to give anything for something to eat, while in other parts of the world, they spent fortunes to experience starvation.

  The black ducks with their white bills scattered as we approached. At the far end of the pontoon where we had gone to sit and dangle our feet in the water, Romy lay on her back and hung her head over the edge. She stared at the upside-down lake.

  “Papa, when you have a bowl of pistachios, why is there always one that won’t open?”

  “Where do you come up with these questions? I’ve no idea. They don’t all open when they’re roasted. It’s the same thing with mussels.”

  “But you can still eat a closed pistachio, can’t you?”

  “I suppose so, if you manage to open it without breaking a nail or a tooth, yeah, it’s probably edible. But most people are lazy and throw them away.”

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sometimes I feel like that closed pistachio is me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’m all curled up inside my shell.”

  “No, you’re not the closed pistachio, I am.”

  “No, I am.”

  “There can be more than one closed pistachio in the same bag.”

  “Do you think I’m inedible?”

  “Who’s been saying this nonsense to you?”

  “…”

  “You don’t have to worry, you’re my favourite pistachio; I’d never throw you away.”

  “Did you ever think the world might look pretty the other way round?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you put your head like this … the lake looks like the sky and the sky is the lake.”

  I lay on the deck and hung my head over the edge. Trees dropped from the liquid sky; birds were flying underground.

  “The sky would be a hovering expanse of water, while the lake would be a void.”

  “You’re right, it would be prettier.”

  The surrounding world was silent, the lake above, the sky below.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “You remember that church in Jerusalem? Well, in that church … (a long sigh) I saw Jesus Christ.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You’ll laugh at me …”

  “No, I won’t. Tell me.”

  “In the cellar, in the grotto where they buried Jesus, I saw him and he spoke to me.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the Virgin Mary?”

  “You see? I told you you’d make fun of me.”

  “No, I’m not, honestly … I believe you. Jerusalem is a special place, the shadows on the walls can conjure visions. So, what did Jesus say?”

  “He didn’t speak with words. He was quietly standing there, leaning against the stone. Then, suddenly, he poured all his love into me. Then he vanished. It didn’t last more than five seconds, but I can still feel it.”

  After another, longer, pause we sat up, because the blood rushing to our brains may have been responsible for this supernatural secret. I didn’t reassure Romy that ghosts don’t exist, I was no longer certain of anything. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I too had felt something. Like a clearing, a stillness, a burst of pure oxygen. An inexplicable peace.

  “You do realize that I’ve eaten our stash of food reserves,” Romy said, “and there’s no way I’m eating broccoli.”

  “I’ve had a word with the head chef: he’ll make you whatever you want. Steak, fish, chicken. I just need you to be discreet, otherwise there’ll be a terry-towel-bathrobe uprising.”

  “Can you imagine? It would be so cool if everyone here rioted. I don’t understand why it doesn’t happen more often. Are there a lot of places like this?”

  “There are new ones opening every day.”

  “You have to admit it’s pretty weird, people paying not to eat.”

  “It’s because they don’t have the willpower, the self-restraint. Advertising is more powerful than an individual’s ability to resist. Back in my day, it was cigarettes: throughout my childhood, advertising was constantly telling people to smoke, then the government started cracking down on smoking. With your generation, it’s sugar and salt: you spent your childhood being fed dreams of sweets and crisps and soft drinks; now you’re bombarded with advertising campaigns telling you to eat less salt and less sugar! Western civilization is a factory that churns out schizophrenics.”

  “What’s a schizophrenic?”

  “It’s someone who has been divided in two, someone who’s urged to eat, then
made to feel guilty. Like a meat-eater grilling a steak then watching footage of a slaughterhouse. Take you, for example: would you be able to give up Coke for mineral water, and chocolate bars for apples?”

  I had scored a point, and hurt her pride. Romy got to her feet.

  “I could do it if I tried! Tell the chef I’d like chicken and mashed potatoes with mineral water and an apple.”

  The force of laser blood! I was toying with my new superpowers. Steering Romy onto the path of Healthy Living was a superhuman feat, one beyond the powers of standard haemoglobin. Light had coursed into me like infrared blood. The colour of the clinic shifted according to the sky’s whims. Now, Heaven was within us.

  One thing was certain: our stay with these post-Nazi therapists had brought Romy and me closer together, forcing us to pool our solitudes. Heading back to my room, I passed a wizened old man and stared a little too long, thinking, “You won’t make it through the winter.” I thought I heard him whisper to me:

  “Denn die Todten reiten schnell …”

  (For the dead travel fast.)

  On the sixth day, after my laser therapy, we went strolling in the mountains. The forest was full of noises, the strange grunts of animals lurking in the undergrowth: hares, moles, frogs, hedgehogs, wild boars, foxes, deer? (There were probably wolves, but we hadn’t seen or heard them.) Enhanced by my laser blood (like Charlie Sheen with his “tiger-blood”), I heard the slightest sounds and walked with long, purposeful strides; Romy was struggling to keep up, so I waited for her. I snorted the fragrance of the conifers. The laser irradiation had awakened my blood stem cells and increased my physical strength tenfold. I had joined the race of Übermensch. The Führer had a fondness for the Austro-Hungarian mountains; the Berchtesgaden was only a few kilometres away, as the crow flies. We harkened to the song of the blackbirds, watched the antics of the squirrels in the pines and the birch trees. The light disappeared behind the trees like the white of the eternal snows, while all around, inside the dark tree trunks, hummed the sap of Old Unmodified Nature. The last scene of my most recent film took place in a cabin on stilts at the edge of a shore; we had filmed this scene by a lake near Budapest. I had a weakness for the horizontal lines of valleys ringed by mountains, the apparent calm of a forest where no one ventures. And the sun’s rays forming galaxies on the surface of the water.

  When we reached the summit, I read aloud a passage from the fantasy novel Romy was reading: “I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless.” Ever since Geneva, Romy was a fan of Frankenstein. An eagle glided above our heads. Suspicion: I told Romy the myth of Prometheus, who wanted to create life from clay and was condemned by the gods to be bound to a rock, where each day an eagle was sent to feed on his liver. Beneath the azure vault, in the clear air and the gradually reddening sky, we hurtled down the famous Pyramidenkogel slide—at 54 metres high, it is a 20-second plunge down a 120-metre tube at a 25-degree incline (“die höchste Gebäuderutsche Europas,” or “the highest slide in Europe”)—and arrived at the edge of the misty forest to the scent of freshly mown grass. Before heading back to the hotel, we went to kneel in the village church of Maria Wörth. Romy repeated “Yaysus Chrrristuuus” like a sanctimonious prig. If we were going to live like monks, we might as well attend vespers. I was beginning to think maybe Catholicism was not inimical to human progress; in fact, the older I got, the more religious I found myself becoming. The problem with being an atheist is not having to suffer Judeo-Christian guilt. What a glorious thing guilt is! I’ve always found that this fear of being worthless compounded with the shame of being pathetic is more wholesome than the death of God. To be honest, I no longer believed that God was dead: things were more complicated than that. He had been dead in the twentieth century, but had risen again in the twenty-first and replaced cocaine.

  At dusk, the mountain moved: a blood-red avalanche. Romy chatted with the Messiah in prayer; somewhere an owl hooted. It was the time when mosquitoes come forth to drink plasma. I took advantage of this moment of meditation to compose the first transhuman hymn (to be sung to the tune of “Gloria” from Bach’s Mass in B Minor).

  -

  TRANSHUMAN HYMN

  (Maria Wörth, Austria, July 2017)

  O Lord, for this, Thy Light Divine

  The Star that glows within my breast

  And for that Holy Spirit, blest

  That from the gloom doth make me shine.

  O, Jesus Christ, illumine my soul,

  As tongues of fire did descend

  On Thy apostles, wandering, lost,

  And made my daughter, whole.

  God has pierced my mortal skin

  And courses now within my veins

  A Luminous Splendour that contains

  A double dose of aspirin.

  I rise above life’s dreary strife

  From darkness to Thy Sun I creep

  Thy laser hath roused from sleep

  The stem cells of Eternal Life.

  From Thy beam I draw new breath

  From Thy blazing neon, peace,

  Thy blessings now shall never cease

  But bring Salvation, kill off Death.

  -

  THE MEDICAL STAFF at the clinic could be completely replaced by an automated system; the results of the genomics tests could be stored in the Cloud and cross-referenced with Big Data from the rest of humanity. The receptionist could be replaced with a silicone “love doll” featuring vibrating latex orifices to sate the urges of male guests. For female guests, android busboys with dildos and motion sensors could provide multiple orgasms. The receptionist would be animated by artificial intelligence:

  “Hello, I’m Sonia, your receptionist, and I look forward to you coming in my mouth. I am fitted with a pulsating anus. From your Google history, I see that you are a frequent visitor to Pornhub. Would you like to experience an uncanny valley orgasm?”

  I really was feeling so much better. “Hot-blooded,” “boiling inside,” “ardent”—these were no longer similes, they had to be taken literally. My blood was boiling so much I had trouble falling asleep. My daily laser-blood sessions increased all my abilities exponentially. I no longer needed sleep or food, I was becoming a machine. I raised this subject with Pepper.

  “Would you prefer to be a machine or to be human?”

  “I don’t think about it. I’m a machine, you are a human. This is the way things are.”

  “I’d quite like to be a machine. Look at these boys rowing across the lake. They’re sweating from the effort, they’re flushed and tired, whereas a Riva speedboat could make the same trip in seconds and much more elegantly.”

  “Maybe, but if I were human,” Pepper said, “I would know the pain of effort, the rewards of victory, the elation of new challenges … the concept of sacrifice, the simple joy of winning a race …”

  “Papa, I’m bored to death here,” Romy said.

  “Pepper, could you make her laugh please?”

  “I have a store of 8,432 funny jokes,” Pepper said.

  “Yeah, and they’re all crap.”

  “Why are carrots orange?”

  “So you can stick them up your arse?” I ventured.

  Romy fell about laughing.

  “Ah. I can hear laughter,” said Pepper. “Mission accomplished.”

  -

  WHEN WE WOKE the next morning, we were summoned to an urgent meeting with the director of the intestinal purification clinic. The therapist with the salt-and-pepper beard did his best not to scream so as not to alarm the other spa guests. Pepper was innocently rolling across the linoleum, holding Romy’s hand. He was permanently connected to the Cloud: he chose his answers based on the emotional adjustment of the 10,000 SoftBank Robots currently operational. Pepper was learning just as much as Romy wa
s; both had profited from their encounter. After only a week, she thought of him as a little brother.

  “I’m afraid we must ask you to leave the VIVAMAYR clinic. Jetzt.”

  “Aber warum?”

  “One of the cleaning staff found an empty Haribo wrapper in your wastepaper basket. Don’t even try to deny it! But that’s not the most serious issue. During your laser-therapy session, monsieur, your daughter and her friend on wheels … importuned two of the other spa guests.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The robot—he pinched the bottoms of two people using the swimming pool. Such behaviour is completely unacceptable. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the CCTV footage.”

  “Alright, show me.”

  Romy was staring down at her Converse trainers. Pepper protested.

  “I did not pinch anyone’s buttocks. Romy informed me it was a local custom to touch the buttocks of swimmers as they emerged from the water. Dubious gestures are proscribed by my internal software; I was merely carrying out non-violent commands.”

  “Snitch!” hissed Romy.

  On the black-and-white video, I saw Romy offer two overweight guests sweets from her bag of Haribo. This was followed by footage of Pepper sexually harassing Russian women in one-piece swimsuits and swimming caps as they climbed out of the pool. At first startled and outraged, the women looked terrified as they saw the little robot extend his telescopic limb towards their buttocks. Romy fell about laughing, both on screen and here in the manager’s office. Pepper simply extended his arms and turned the hand towards the nearest posterior. Then he made a fist and signalled to Romy.

  “Romy, that was extremely rude of you,” I said.

  “Whatevs. I just wanted to see whether he was up for it …”

  “I’m up for it,” said Pepper.

  “We specifically insisted that you confine this … machine of yours to your suite,” said the manager.

  “My operating system contained no explicit rule prohibiting buttock touching,” Pepper announced. “This behavioural lapse of judgement will immediately be transmitted to all similar models and such an inappropriate gesture will not occur again.”