The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  If I was acrimonious, she was sweet; and if I took, unreservedly, the side of the old, she did not take, to the same extent, the side of the young. A long conversation ensued, becoming more and more emotional and tender, first in the bar, then at a restaurant, then in another bar, and finally in the hotel bedroom; we even forgot, for one evening, to make love. It was our first real conversation, and it seemed to me to be the first real conversation I’d had with anyone for years, the last probably took place at some point at the start of my life with Isabelle, I had probably never had a real conversation with anyone other than a woman I loved, and essentially it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions. It was only now I learned that Esther had had a very serious kidney illness, at the age of thirteen, which had necessitated a long operation, and that one of her kidneys had remained definitively atrophied, which obliged her to drink at least two liters of water a day, while the second one, saved for the time being, could at any moment show signs of weakness; it seemed obvious to me that this was an essential detail, that it was even no doubt for this reason that she had not calmed down on the sexual level: she knew the price of life, and how short it was. I also learned, and this seemed even more important, that she had had a dog, found in the streets of Madrid, and that she had looked after it since the age of ten; it had died the previous year. A very pretty young girl, treated with constant regard and paid enormous attention by the whole of the male population, including those—the huge majority—who no longer have any hope of obtaining sexual favors from her, frankly especially by them, with an abject emulation that with some fifty-somethings borders on senility pure and simple, a very pretty young girl before whom all faces open, all difficulties are ironed out, greeted everywhere as if she were the queen of the world, naturally becomes a sort of monster of egoism and self-satisfied vanity. Physical beauty plays here exactly the same role as nobility of blood in the Ancien Régime, and the brief consciousness that they might have at adolescence of the purely accidental nature of their rank rapidly gives way among very pretty young girls to a sensation of innate, natural, and instinctive superiority, which places them completely outside, and far above, the rest of mankind. Everyone around her having as their objective to spare her all difficulties, and to satisfy the least of her desires, a very pretty young girl effortlessly comes to consider the rest of the world as made up of so many servants, herself having the sole task of maintaining her own erotic value—in the expectation of meeting a boy worthy of receiving her homage. The only thing that could save her on the moral level, is having a concrete responsibility for a weaker being, to be directly and personally responsible for the satisfaction of its physical needs, for its health and survival—this being could be a brother or a younger sister, a pet, whatever.

  Esther was certainly not well educated in the normal sense of the term, the thought never crossed her mind to empty an ashtray, or to clear away what was left on her plate, and she didn’t mind in the slightest about leaving the lights on behind her in the rooms she had just left (there had been occasions when I, following step by step her journey through my residence in San José, had had to flick off seventeen switches); there was also no question of asking her to think of doing the shopping, to bring anything back from a shop that was not intended for her own use, or more generally to do any kind of favor for anyone. Like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal, pampered and spoiled, protected from all cares as from any difficult or painful task so as to be better able to devote herself to her exclusively sexual service. But, nonetheless, she was very far from being that monster of arrogance, of absolute and cold egoism, or, to speak in more Baudelairean terms, that infernal little bitch that the majority of very pretty young girls are; there was in her the consciousness of illness, weakness, and death. Although beautiful, very beautiful, infinitely erotic, and desirable, Esther was no less sensitive to animal infirmities, because she knew them; it was that evening that I became conscious of it, and I began to truly love her. Physical desire, however violent, had, for me, never been enough to lead to love, it had never been able to reach that ultimate stage where it was accompanied, through a strange juxtaposition, by compassion for the one I desired; any living being, obviously, deserves compassion for the simple fact that it is alive, and therefore exposes itself to innumerable sufferings; but, when you’re talking about a being that is young and in perfect health, it is a consideration that appears very theoretical. Through her kidney illness, her physical weakness, which was above suspicion yet real, Esther could arouse an unaffected compassion in me, whenever I wanted to feel this way about her. Being herself compassionate, having the same occasional aspirations toward goodness, she could also arouse in me esteem, which completed the edifice, and even though I was able to desire someone completely contemptible, even though I had even found myself on several occasions fucking girls with the sole aim of confirming my power over them and, it’s true, to dominate them, if I had gone as far as using this unworthy feeling in some sketches, as far as displaying a troubling understanding of rapists who sacrifice their victim immediately after finishing with her body, I had, however, always needed to respect in order to love, never in my heart of hearts had I felt perfectly at ease in a sexual relationship based purely on erotic attraction and indifference to the other, I had always needed, to feel sexually happy, a minimum—for want of love—of sympathy, respect, and mutual understanding; no, I had not given up on mankind.

  Not only was Esther compassionate and gentle, but she was also intelligent and shrewd enough to put herself, when necessary, in my place. After this discussion in which I had defended with an impetuosity that was wearisome—and, moreover, stupid, since she hadn’t even dreamed of putting me in this category—the right to happiness for aging people, she concluded by saying that she would speak to her sister about me, and would get around to making the introductions very soon.

  During that week in Madrid, when I was almost always with Esther, and which remains one of the happiest periods of my life, I also realized that if she had other lovers their presence was unusually discreet, and if I wasn’t the only one—which was, after all, equally possible—I was no doubt the favorite. For the first time in my life I felt unrestrictedly happy to be a man, by this I mean a human being of the masculine sex, because for the first time I had found a woman who opened herself completely to me, who gave me totally, without limits, what a woman can give to a man. For the first time also, I felt moved in regard to others by charitable and friendly intentions: I would have liked everyone to be happy, like I was myself. I was no longer a clown, I had left the humorous attitude far behind me; in short I was living again, even if I knew that this would be for the last time. All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything; it is the same for men. When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence, “human existence resembles a theater performance which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes.” I didn’t want to become an automaton, and it was this, that real presence, that taste for living life, as Dostoyevsky would have said, that Esther had given back to me. What is the point of maintaining a body that no one touches? And why would you choose a nice hotel bedroom if you have to sleep there alone? I could only, like so many who had finally been defeated despite their sniggers and their grimaces, bow down: immense and admirable, undoubtedly, was the power of love. />
  Daniel25, 4

  DURING THE NIGHT that followed my first contact with Marie23, I had a strange dream. I was in the middle of a mountain landscape, the air was so clear that you could make out the slightest detail of the rocks and the ice crystals; the view extended far beyond the clouds, beyond the forests, as far as a line of steep summits, sparkling in their eternal snows. Near me, a few meters below, a small old man, dressed in furs, with a craggy face like that of a Kalmuk trapper, was digging patiently around a picket in the snow; then, armed only with his modest knife, he began to saw through a transparent cord, a meter in diameter, run through with optical fibers. I knew that this cord was one of those that led to the transparent room, the room in the midst of the snows where the leaders of the world gathered. The look on the face of the old man was wise and cruel. I knew that he was going to succeed, for he had time on his side, and that the foundations of the world were going to collapse; he was moved by no precise motivation, but by an animallike obstinacy; I attributed to him the intuitive knowledge and powers of a shaman.

  Like those of the humans, our dreams are almost always recombinations of various elements of reality that occurred in the waking state; this has led some to see in them a proof of the nonuniqueness of the real. According to them, our dreams could be insights into other branches of the universe, which exist in the sense described by Everett–de Witt, i.e., other bifurcations of observable phenomena that appeared at the same time as certain events in the day; they would thus not be in any way the expression of a desire or a fear, but rather the mental projection of substantial sequences of events, compatible with the global evolution of the wave function of the universe, but not directly provable. Nothing in this hypothesis explained what it was that allowed dreams to escape from the usual limitations of the cognitive function, denying a given observer any access to the nonprovable sequences of events in his own branch of the universe; besides, I had absolutely no idea what, in my existence, could have given birth to so divergent a branch.

  According to other interpretations, some of our dreams are of a different order from those experienced by mankind; of artificial origin, they are the spontaneous productions of mental half-forms engendered by the modifiable interweaving of the electronic elements of the network. A gigantic organism could have demanded to be born, to form a common electronic consciousness, but it could only, at that instant, manifest itself by the production of a series of oneiric waves generated by the progressive subsets of the network, and constrained to propagate themselves through the transmission channels opened by the neohumans; it consequently sought to exert control over the opening of these channels. We were ourselves incomplete beings, beings in transition, whose destiny was to prepare for the coming of a digital future. Whatever can be said about this paranoid hypothesis, it is certain that a software mutation had taken place, probably dating from the beginning of the Second Decrease, and that, after first attacking the encoding system, it had gradually extended to all of the software layers of the network; no one knew its extent exactly, but it had to be big, and the reliability of our transmission system had, even in the best of cases, become very uncertain.

  The danger of oneiric overproduction had been noted since the time of the Founders, and could also, more simply, be explained by the conditions of absolute physical isolation in which we were called upon to live. No effective treatment was known. The only suggested defense was to avoid sending and receiving messages, cutting off all contact with the neohuman community, and recentering oneself upon the elements of individual physiology. I forced myself to do this, and put in place the main devices for biochemical surveillance: it took several weeks for my oneiric production to return to its normal level, and for me to once again be able to concentrate on the life story of Daniel1, and on my commentary.

  Daniel1, 16

  In order to hijack netstat, you have to be injected into it; for that, you have no other choice than to hijack all userland.

  —kdm.fr.st

  I HAD RATHER FORGOTTEN the existence of the Elohimites when I received a phone call from Patrick, reminding me that the winter course began in two weeks, and asking me if I still intended to participate. I had received an invitation letter, a VIP letter, he made clear. I found it easily in my pile: the paper was adorned, as a watermark, with young naked girls dancing among flowers. His Holiness the prophet was inviting me, along with other friendly eminent personalities, to attend, as every year, the celebration of the anniversary of the “marvelous encounter”—the one with the Elohim, I imagined. It would be a special celebration, where previously unknown details concerning the construction of the embassy would be unveiled, in the presence of believers from across the globe, guided by their nine archbishops and their forty-nine bishops—these honorary distinctions had nothing to do with the real organizational structure; they had been dreamed up by Cop, who judged them indispensable for the good management of any human organization. “We’re going to have a hell of a ball!” the prophet had added, for my attention, in his own hand.

  As she had foreseen, Esther had exams at this time, and could not accompany me. Nor would she have had much time to see me, so I accepted without hesitation—after all, I was now retired, I could do a bit of tourism, sociological excursions, try and live some picturesque or funny moments. I had never dealt with sects in my sketches despite their being an authentically modern phenomenon; they were proliferating, regardless of all the rationalist campaigns and warnings, nothing seemed able to stop them. For some time I played, quite vainly, with the idea of an Elohimite sketch, then I bought my plane ticket.

  The flight stopped over at Gran Canaria, and while we circled waiting for our place in the landing path, I observed the dunes of Maspalomas with curiosity. The gigantic sand formations plunged into a bright blue ocean; we were flying at low altitude, and I could make out figures forming on the sand, caused by the movement of the wind, sometimes resembling letters, sometimes animals or human faces; you couldn’t help seeing signs there, and giving them a divinatory interpretation, and I began to feel oppressed, despite or because of the uniformity of the blueness.

  Almost everyone got off at the Las Palmas airport; then a few passengers who were shuttling between the islands got on. Most seemed to be long-distance travelers, in the manner of Australian backpackers armed with a Let’s Go Europe guide and location maps for McDonald’s. They behaved quietly, also looking at the landscape, and exchanging intelligent or poetic remarks in hushed voices. A little before landing we flew over a volcanic zone with tortured, dark red rocks.

  Patrick was waiting for me in the arrivals hall of the Arrecife airport, dressed in trousers, a white tunic embroidered with the multicolored star of the sect, and a wide smile on his lips—I had the impression that he had begun to smile five minutes before my arrival, and in fact he continued to, for no apparent reason, as we crossed the parking lot. He pointed out a white Toyota minibus to me, also adorned with the multicolored star. I sat down in the front seat: Patrick’s face was still lit up by an objectless smile; as he waited in the line to insert his exit ticket he began to drum his fingers on the steering wheel while shaking his head, as if he was possessed by an internal melody.

  We were driving across a plain that was intensely black, almost bluish, formed of angular, rough rocks, scarcely shaped by erosion, when he spoke again. “You’ll see, this course is superb…,” he said in a hushed tone, as if to himself, or as if he was telling me a secret. “There are special vibrations…It’s very spiritual, really.” I politely agreed. The remark only half surprised me: in New Age literature it is classically accepted that volcanic regions are moved by telluric currents, to which most mammals—and especially man—are sensitive; they are supposed to incite, among other things, sexual promiscuity. “That’s it, that’s it…,” said Patrick, still ecstatic. “We are sons of fire.” I abstained from reacting.

  Just before arriving we drove along a beach of black sand, scattered with little white pebbles; I must a
dmit that it was strange, and even disturbing. First I looked attentively, then I turned away; I felt a bit shocked by this brutal inversion of values. If the sea had been red, I would no doubt have been able to accept it; but it was still as desperately blue.

  The road suddenly branched off inland and five hundred meters further on we stopped before a solid metal barrier, three meters high, flanked with barbed wire, which extended as far as one could see. Two guards armed with machine guns were patrolling behind the gate, which was apparently the only way out. Patrick gestured to them, they unlocked the gate, approached, and looked at me carefully before letting us pass. “It’s necessary…,” Patrick told me in a voice as ethereal as ever. “Journalists…”

  The path, which was quite well tended, crossed a flat dusty zone, covered in small red pebbles. Just as I was able to make out, in the distance, a sort of village of white tents, Patrick turned left in the direction of a sheer rocky escarpment, eroded on one of its sides, made of the same black, probably volcanic rock that I had noticed a little earlier. After two or three bends, he stopped the vehicle on a terreplein and we had to continue on foot. Despite my protests he insisted on taking my suitcase, which was quite heavy. “No, no, please…You are a VIP guest…” He had adopted a bantering tone, but something told me that it was in fact much more serious. We passed in front of about a dozen caves dug into the rock, before reaching another terreplein, almost at the top of the hillock. An opening three meters wide and two meters high led to a much vaster grotto; there, too, two armed guards were posted at the entry.