The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  On August 15, the day of the Virgin, Esther made love to me with even more lasciviousness than usual. We were in the Hotel Sanz, the bed faced a big mirror, and it was so hot that each movement made us sweat profusely; I had my arms and legs crossed, I no longer felt I had the strength to move, all my senses were concentrated in my sex. For more than an hour she straddled me, going up and down my cock, around which she contracted and relaxed her just-waxed little pussy. Throughout all this time she caressed her breasts (which gleamed with sweat) with one hand, while looking me in the eye, smiling and deep in concentration, attentive to all the variations of my pleasure. Her free hand was closed around my balls, which she sometimes pressed gently, sometimes hard, to the rhythm of the movement of her pussy. When she felt me coming she suddenly stopped and pressed sharply with two fingers to stop the ejaculation at its source; then, when the danger had passed, she began to move back and forth again. Thus I spent an hour, perhaps two, on the brink of exploding, at the heart of the greatest joy a man can know, and in the end it was me who asked for mercy, who wished to come in her mouth. She got up, placed a pillow under my backside, and asked if I could see the mirror okay; no, it was better to move a little. I moved to the edge of the bed. She knelt between my thighs, her face level with my sex, which she began to lick methodically, centimeter by centimeter, before closing her lips around my glans; then her hands went into action and she jerked me off slowly, forcefully, as if extracting each drop of sperm from the depths of me, while her tongue made rapid movements to and fro. My vision clouded by sweat, having lost all clear notion of space and time, I nevertheless managed to prolong this moment a little, and her tongue had enough time to effect three complete rotations before I came, and it was then as if my whole body, irradiated by pleasure, vanished, sucked in by nothingness, in a release of blessed energy. She kept me in her mouth, almost immobile, sucking my sex slowly, closing her eyes as if to hear more clearly my screams of happiness.

  Then she lay down and snuggled in my arms, as night fell rapidly on Madrid, and it was only after half an hour of tender immobility that she told me she had had, for a few weeks now, something to tell me—no one knew about it yet except her sister, she intended to announce it to her friends at the birthday party. She had been accepted by a prestigious piano academy in New York and intended to spend at least the academic year there. At the same time, she had been chosen for a small role in a big Hollywood production about the death of Socrates; she would play a servant of Aphrodite, the part of Socrates would be taken by Robert De Niro. It was only a small part, not more than a week’s filming, but it was Hollywood, and the fee was enough to pay for a year’s study and maintenance. She would leave at the beginning of September.

  It seems to me that I stayed totally silent. I was turned to stone, unable to react, I felt that if I uttered a word I would burst into sobs. “Bueno…It’s a big chance in my life…,” she concluded by saying plaintively, pressing her head against my shoulder. I almost suggested I go to the United States, to settle there with her, but the words died in me before I could utter them, I fully realized that she had not even imagined this possibility. Nor did she suggest that I visit her: this was a new period in her life, a new departure. I switched on the bedside lamp, and looked at her closely to see if I could make out any trace of fascination with America, with Hollywood, in her; no, there was none, she seemed lucid and calm, she was simply making the best, most rational decision given the circumstances. Surprised by my lengthy silence she turned to look at me, her long blond hair fell down on each side of her face, my eyes settled involuntarily on her breasts, I stretched out, switched off the lamp, breathed deeply, I didn’t want to make things more difficult, I didn’t want her to see me cry.

  She spent the next day preparing for the party; in a nearby beauty salon she had a clay mask and a facial scrub. I waited, smoking cigarettes in the hotel bedroom; the following day it was more or less the same thing, after her appointment at the hairdresser she stopped by a few shops, bought some earrings and a new belt. My mind felt strangely empty, rather, I imagined, like that of prisoners on death row: I have never believed that they spend their last hours, with the exception perhaps of those who believe in God, going back over their lives and drawing up a balance sheet; I believe that they simply try to spend the time in the most neutral manner possible; the most fortunate ones sleep, but I wasn’t one of those, I don’t think I closed my eyes during those two days.

  When she knocked on the door of my bedroom, on August 17, at about eight in the evening, and appeared in the doorway, I understood that I would not survive her leaving. She was wearing a small see-through top, tied beneath her breasts, letting you make out their curves; her golden stockings, held up by garters, stopped a centimeter below her skirt—an ultrashort miniskirt, almost a belt, made of golden vinyl. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, and when she leaned down to relace her high boots the movement revealed most of her ass; despite myself I stretched out my hand to caress it. She turned around, took me in her arms, and looked at me so compassionately, so tenderly, that I thought for an instant she was going to say she had changed her mind, that she was staying with me, now and forever, but this didn’t happen and we took a taxi to Pablo’s loft.

  The first guests arrived around eleven p.m., but the party only really got going after three in the morning. At the start I behaved quite properly, circulating half-nonchalantly around the guests, a glass in my hand; many knew me or had seen me at the cinema, which gave rise to a few simple conversations, the music was too loud anyway and very soon I contented myself with just nodding my head. There were almost two hundred people and I was undoubtedly the only one older than twenty-five, but even that did not manage to destabilize me, I was in a strangely calm state; it is true that, in a sense, the catastrophe had already happened. Esther was resplendent, and greeted the new arrivals with effusive kisses. Everybody now knew that she was leaving for New York in two weeks’ time, and I had been afraid at the start of feeling a bit ridiculous, after all I was in the position of the guy who gets dumped, but no one made me feel that way, people spoke to me as if my situation were unexceptional.

  Around ten in the morning, the house music gave way to trance, I had been regularly emptying and refilling my glass of punch, I began to feel a little tired, I told myself it would be wonderful if I could manage to get some sleep, but I didn’t really believe this, alcohol had helped to halt the rise in my anxiety but I could still feel that it was there, living inside me, ready to devour me at the slightest sign of weakness. A little earlier, a few people had formed into couples, I had observed movements in the direction of the bedrooms. I chose a corridor at random, and opened a door decorated with a poster depicting a close-up of spermatozoids. I had the impression of arriving at the end of a mini-orgy; some half-naked boys and girls were flopped across the bed. In the corner, a blond teenage girl, her T-shirt pulled up above her breasts, was giving blow jobs; I approached her, but she gestured for me to move away. I sat against the bed, not far from a brunette with dusky skin and magnificent breasts, whose skirt was hiked up around her waist. She seemed fast asleep and didn’t react when I parted her thighs, but when I introduced a finger into her pussy, she pushed my hand away mechanically, without fully waking up. Resigned, I sat back down at the foot of the bed, and I had been plunged for maybe half an hour into a morose state of exhaustion when I saw Esther come in. She was vivacious, in top form, and accompanied by a male friend—a small homosexual who was very blond and cute, with short hair, whom I knew by sight. She had bought two bags of coke, and knelt down to prepare lines, then put the bit of cardboard she had used on the floor; she had not noticed my presence. Her friend took the first line. When she took her turn to kneel on the floor, her skirt rose very high over her ass. She introduced the cardboard tube into her nostril, and at the moment when she rapidly snorted the white powder, with a well-practiced, precise gesture, I knew that I would keep engraved in my memory the image of this little animal, wh
o was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure. Suddenly I thought again of the way in which Knowall had described the Italian girl: a pretty arrangement of particles, a smooth surface, without individuality, whose disappearance would hold no importance…and it was this that I had been in love with, that had constituted my only reason for living—and, and this was the worst of it, still constituted it. She leaped up, opened the door—the music reached us, much louder—and set off in the direction of the party. I rose reluctantly to follow her; when I got to the main room, she had already started dancing again. I began to dance near her but she didn’t seem to see me, her hair twirled around her face, her blouse was soaked with sweat, her nipples were erect under the fabric, the beat became more and more rapid—at least 160 bpm—and I had more and more trouble following it, we were briefly separated by a group of three boys, then we were together again back to back, I stuck my ass against hers, and she began to move in response, our asses rubbed against one another harder and harder then she turned around and recognized me. “Hola, Daniel…,” she said smiling before starting to dance again, then we were separated by another group of boys and I suddenly felt extremely tired, about to fall down, I sat on a sofa before pouring myself a whisky but it wasn’t a good idea, I was immediately overcome with horrible nausea, the door of the bathroom was locked and I knocked loudly several times repeating: “I’m sick! I’m sick!” before a girl came to open it, she had wrapped a towel around her waist, and closed the door again behind me before going back into the bathtub where two guys were waiting for her, she knelt down and one of them penetrated her immediately while the other positioned himself to be sucked off, I rushed over to the basin and stuck a hand down my throat, I vomited long and painfully before I felt a bit better, then I went off to lie down in the bedroom, there was no one left except the brunette who had pushed me away earlier, she was still sleeping peacefully, her skirt hiked up to the waist, and despite myself I began to feel terribly sad, so I got up again, went after Esther and attached myself to her, literally and shamelessly, I grabbed her by the waist and begged her to speak to me, to speak to me again, to stay at my side, not to leave me alone, she disengaged with increasing impatience and tried to head toward her friends but I came back at her, took her in my arms, she pushed me away again, and I saw their faces close around me, no doubt they were speaking to me as well but I couldn’t make anything out, the din of the bass covered everything. I finally heard her saying: “Please, Daniel, please…It’s a party!” in an urgent voice, but it did no good, the feeling of being abandoned continued to rise within me, to submerge me, I laid my head back on her shoulder, and at this she pushed me away violently with both arms, shouting: “Stop that!,” now she looked really furious, I turned around and left for the bedroom again, I curled up on the floor, held my head in my hands, and for the first time in at least twenty years I began to cry.

  The party continued the whole day, at about five in the afternoon Pablo returned with some pains au chocolat and croissants, I accepted a croissant, which I dipped in a bowl of café au lait, the music was calmer, it was a kind of melodious and serene chill-out track, several girls were dancing, slowly moving their arms, like big wings. Esther was a few meters away but paid no attention to me when I sat down, she continued to chat with her friends, to evoke memories of other parties, and it was at that moment that I understood. She was leaving for the United States for a year, maybe forever; over there she would make new friends, and, of course, she would find a new boyfriend. I was abandoned, certainly, but in exactly the same way that they were, I had no special status. This feeling of exclusive attachment I had, which was going to torture me until it eventually annihilated me, found no correspondence at all in her, it had no justification, no raison d’être: our flesh was distinct, we were unable to experience either the same suffering or the same joy, we were obviously separate beings. Isabelle did not like sexual pleasure, but Esther did not like love, she did not want to be in love, she refused this feeling of exclusivity, of dependence, and her whole generation refused it with her. I was wandering among them like some kind of prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains. For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment; undoubtedly love, like pity, according to Nietzsche, had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity. Women had been weak, in particular at the moment of giving birth, early on they had needed to live under the guardianship of a powerful protector, and to this end they had invented love, but now they had become strong, they were independent and free, and they had given up inspiring or indeed feeling a sentiment that no longer had any concrete justification. The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. What I was feeling, these young people could not feel, nor even exactly understand, and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable, as if it were something ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times. They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.

  Around midnight, someone put some techno back on, and people started to dance again; the dealers had left, but there were still quite a lot of poppers and Ecstasy left. Inside my head I wandered around oppressive, claustrophobic zones, which were like a succession of dark rooms. For no precise reason I thought again of Gérard, the Elohimite comedian. “That has ass-hole-utely no importance…,” I said at one moment to a girl, a mindless Swede who only spoke English anyway; she looked at me strangely, then I noticed that several people were looking at me strangely, and that I had been speaking to myself, apparently for several minutes. I nodded my head, looked at my watch, then went to sit down on a deck chair by the pool; it was already two in the morning, but the heat was still stifling.

  Later I realized I hadn’t caught sight of Esther for some time, and I began vaguely to search for her. There weren’t many people left in the main room; I stepped over several bodies in the corridor and in the end I discovered her in one of the far bedrooms, stretched out in the middle of a group; she had taken off most of her clothes, and now wore only her gold miniskirt, hiked up around her waist. A boy lying behind her, tall with long curly brown hair, who could have been Pablo, was caressing her ass, and readying himself to penetrate her. She was speaking to another boy, also brown and very muscular, whom I didn’t recognize; at the same time, she was playing with his sex, tapping it against her nose and her cheeks and smiling all the while. I closed the door discreetly; I didn’t know it yet, but this was to be the last image I would keep of her.

  Later still, as dawn was breaking on Madrid, I masturbated quickly near the pool. A few meters away from me there was a girl dressed in black, with a vacant look in her eyes; I thought she wouldn’t even notice my presence, but she spat to one side when I ejaculated.

  I ended up falling asleep, and I probably slept for a long time, because when I awoke there was nobody left; even Pablo had gone. There was dried sperm on my trousers, and I must have spilled whisky on my shirt, it was reeking. I got up with difficulty, and crossed the terrace amid piles of food and empty bottles. I leaned against the balcony, and observed the street below. The sun had already begun its descent in the sky, night would not take long to fall, and I knew more or less what awaited me. I was evidently now on the home stretch.

&
nbsp; Daniel25, 9

  SPHERES OF SHINY METAL levitated in the atmosphere; they slowly turned around, emitting a lightly vibrant song. The local population’s behavior toward them was strange, a mixture of veneration and sarcasm. This population was undoubtedly composed of social primates—were we dealing here with savages, neohumans, or a third species? Their outfits, consisting of large black capes, black masks with holes pierced in them for the eyes, would not allow this to be determined. The collapsed scenery was made up of references to real landscapes—some views might have recalled the description Daniel1 gives of Lanzarote; I didn’t understand exactly where Marie23 was coming from, with this iconographic reconstruction.

  We bear witness to

  The apperceptive center,

  To the emotional IGUS