The Possibility of an Island
Page 36
I walked all day, then the following night, guiding myself by the constellations. It was three days later, in the early hours, that I saw the clouds. Their silky surface appeared to be just a modulation of the horizon, a trembling of light, and I first thought of a mirage, but on closer approach I made out more clearly cumulus clouds of beautiful matte white, separated by supernaturally still, thin curls of vapor. Around midday I passed through the layer of cloud, and found myself facing the sea. I had reached the end of my journey.
This landscape, it must be said, hardly resembled the ocean as man had known it; it was a string of puddles and ponds of almost still water, separated by sand banks; everything was bathed in an opal, even light. I no longer had the strength to run, and it was with wavering steps that I made for the source of life. The mineral content of the first shallow pools was very weak; the whole of my body, however, greeted the salty bath with gratitude, I had the impression of being swept by a nutritive, benevolent wave. I understood and almost managed to feel the phenomena that were taking place inside me: the osmotic pressure returning to normal, the metabolic chains beginning to turn again, producing the ATP necessary for the operation of the muscles, the proteins and fatty acids required for cellular regeneration. It was like the continuation of a dream after a moment of anxious awakening, like a machine’s sigh of satisfaction.
Two hours later I got up, my strength already quite reconstituted; the temperature of the air and the water were equal, and must have been close to 37ºC, for I could feel no sensation of cold, nor of heat; the luminosity was bright without being dazzling. Between the pools, the sand was pitted with shallow excavations that resembled little graves. I lay down in one of them; the sand was tepid and silky. Then I realized that I was going to live here, and that my days would be many. The diurnal and nocturnal periods had an equal duration of twelve hours, and I could sense that it would be the same all the year round, that the astronomical modifications that occurred at the time of the Great Drying Up had created here a zone that did not experience any seasons, where there reigned the conditions of an endless early summer.
Quite quickly I lost the habit of having regular hours of sleep; I slept for periods of one or two hours, during the day as well as the night, but, without knowing why, I felt each time the need to huddle in one of the crevices. There was no trace of animal or vegetable life. Any kind of landmark in general in the landscape was rare: sandbanks, ponds, and lakes of variable size stretched out as far as I could see. The layer of cloud, which was very dense, most of the time prevented me from making out the sky; it was not, however, completely immobile, but its movements were extremely slow. Occasionally, a small space opened between two cloud masses, through which I caught sight of the sun, or the constellations; it was the only event, the only modification in the passing of the days, the universe was enclosed in a sort of cocoon or stasis, fairly close to the archetypal image of eternity. I was, like all neohumans, immune to boredom; some limited memories, some pointless daydreams occupied my detached, floating consciousness. I was, however, a long way away from joy, and even from real peace; the sole fact of existing is already a misfortune. Departing from, at my own free will, the cycle of rebirths and deaths, I was making my way toward a simple nothingness, a pure absence of content. Only the Future Ones would perhaps succeed in joining the realm of countless potentialities.
In the course of the following weeks, I ventured further into my new domain. I noticed that the size of the ponds and lakes increased as I headed south, until I could, in some of them, observe a slight tidal phenomenon; they remained, however, very shallow, and I could swim out as far as their centers, with the certainty of rejoining a sand bank, without any difficulty. There was still no trace of life. I thought I remembered that life had appeared on Earth under very particular conditions, in an atmosphere saturated with ammonia and methane, due to the intense volcanic activity of the first ages, and that it was implausible that the process could be reproduced on the same planet. Organic life, anyway, a prisoner of the limited conditions imposed by the laws of thermodynamics, could not, even if it managed to be reborn, do other than repeat the same patterns: constitution of isolated individuals, predation, selective transmission of the genetic code; nothing new could be expected from it. According to certain hypotheses, carbon biology had had its day, and the Future Ones would be beings made of silicon, whose civilization would be built through the progressive interconnection of cognitive and memory processors; the work of Pierce, basing itself solely at the level of formal logic, enabled us neither to confirm nor refute this hypothesis.
If the zone where I found myself was inhabited, it could in any case only be by neohumans; the organism of a savage could never have stood up to the journey I had made. I now anticipated without joy, and even with a certain annoyance, an encounter with one of my fellow creatures. The death of Fox, then the crossing of the Great Gray Space, had desiccated me inside; I no longer felt any desire, and certainly not the one, described by Spinoza, of persevering in my being; I regretted, however, that the world would survive me. The inanity of the world, evident in the life story of Daniel, had ceased to appear acceptable to me; I saw in it only a dull place, devoid of potentialities, from which light was absent.
One morning, immediately after waking, I felt for no perceptible reason less oppressed. After walking for a few minutes I arrived in front of a lake that was much bigger than the others, where, for the first time, I could not make out the other bank. Its water, too, was slightly saltier.
So this was what men had called the sea, what they had considered the great consoler, the great destroyer as well, the one that erodes, that gently puts an end to things. I was impressed, and the last elements missing from my comprehension of the species fell finally into place. I understood better, now, how the idea of the infinite had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the idea of an infinity that was accessible through slow transitions that had their origins in the finite; I understood, also, how a first theory of love had been able to form in the brain of Plato. I thought again of Daniel, of his residence in Almería, which had been mine, of the young women on the beach, of his destruction by Esther; and, for the first time, I was tempted to pity him, without, however, respecting him. Of two selfish and rational animals, the most selfish and rational of the two had ended up surviving, as was always the case among human beings. I then understood why the Supreme Sister insisted upon the study of the life story of our human predecessors. I understood the goal she was trying to reach: I understood, also, why this goal would never be reached.
I had not found deliverance.
Later I walked, making my feet follow the movement of the waves. I walked for whole days, without feeling any fatigue, and at night I was rocked by a gentle surf. On the third day I discerned alleys of black stone that sank into the sea and disappeared into the distance. Were they a passage, a human or neohuman construction? It was of little importance to me now, the idea of going down them left me very quickly.
At the same instant, without anything that could have allowed me to predict it, two masses of cloud parted, and a ray of light sparkled on the surface of the water. Fleetingly, I thought of the great sun of the moral law, which, according to the Word, would finally shine on the surface of the world; but it would be a world from which I would be absent, and of which I did not even have the ability to imagine the essence. No neohuman, I now knew, would be able to find a solution for the constituent aporia; those who had tried to, if indeed there were any, had probably already died. As for me, I would continue, as much as was possible, my obscure existence as an improved monkey, and my last regret would be of having caused the death of Fox, the only being worthy of survival I had had the chance to encounter; for his gaze had already contained, occasionally, the spark announcing the coming of the Future Ones.
I had perhaps sixty years left to live; more than twenty thousand days that would be identical. I would avoid thought in the same way I would avoid su
ffering. The pitfalls of life were far behind me; I had now entered a peaceful space from which only the lethal process would separate me.
I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation. Happiness was not a possible horizon. The world had betrayed. My body belonged to me for only a brief lapse of time; I would never reach the goal I had been set. The future was empty; it was the mountain. My dreams were populated with emotional presences. I was, I was no longer. Life was real.
Also by Michel Houellebecq
FICTION
Platform
The Elementary Particles
Whatever
NONFICTION
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2005 by Gavin Bowd
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in France as La Possibilité d’une île by Fayard, Paris, in 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Michel Houellebecq and La Librarie Arthéme Fayard. English translation originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, in 2005. Translation copyright © 2005 by Gavin Bowd.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
An excerpt previously appeared in Playboy.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Houellebecq, Michel.
[Possibilité d’une île. English]
The possibility of an island / Michel Houellebecq ; translated from the French by Gavin Bowd.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-0-307-26532-6
eISBN-10: 0-307-26532-3
I. Bowd, Gavin, 1966–II. Title.
PQ2668.077P6713 2006
843'.914—dc22 2005054527
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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