Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  He staggered slightly as he walked towards his gun cabinet, which was three sliding doors in the hall, and behind them about twenty weapons – rifles, carbines and a few handguns – as well as dozens of piles of boxes of cartridges. The Steyr Mannlicher surprised me: it didn’t look like a carbine at all but like a simple dark grey steel cylinder, totally abstract. ‘There’s everything else, of course, and you have to reassemble it … But the machining of the barrel, I assure you, is the most important thing…’ He held the barrel in the light for a moment to let me admire it; I was prepared to agree that yes, it was a cylinder, probably a perfect cylinder. ‘Fine, I’ll look into it…’ he concluded without pressing the point. ‘I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Sure enough, at eight o’clock the next morning he parked his pick-up outside the bungalow, and really was in an unusual state of excitement. We took a quick look at the Smith & Wesson – they are disconcertingly user-friendly. The Steyr Mannlicher was something else. From the boot he took a rigid polycarbonate protective case, which he set down carefully on the table. Inside, positioned precisely in their foam-rubber housings, lay four dark grey steel parts, machined with extreme precision, none of them immediately suggesting a weapon, which he got me to strip and reassemble several times: apart from the barrel there was a mount, a cartridge clip and a tripod stand; once the whole thing had been assembled it still didn’t look like a carbine in the usual sense of the word, but more like a kind of metal spider, a deadly spider in which no aesthetic flourish was permitted, not a gramme of metal was wasted, and I began to understand his enthusiasm: I don’t think I’d ever seen a technological object that created such an impression of perfection. At last he added a scope on top of the metal assemblage. ‘It’s a Swarovski DS5,’ he explained. ‘It’s frowned upon in sport-shooting circles, and even frankly forbidden in competition; what you have to realise is that the trajectory of a bullet isn’t a straight line, it’s always a parabola, and sport-shooting authorities see that as part of the test, so it’s normal for competitors to get used to aiming a bit above the centre to take the parabolic deviation into account. The Swarovski has a built-in laser telemeter, meaning it gauges your distance from the target and automatically corrects it so you don’t have to think about it; you just aim at the centre, precisely at the centre. They’re quite traditional in sport-shooting circles – they like to add pointless little complications and that’s why I gave up competitions pretty quickly. So I had the travel case made to measure, with room for the Swarovski. But the essential thing is still the gun. Let’s take it out and try it…’

  He grabbed a blanket from a box. ‘We’ll start straight away with the prone firing position – that’s the queen of positions, the one that allows you to shoot with the greatest possible precision. But you have to be lying comfortably on the ground, you have to protect yourself against cold and damp, or it could cause trembling.’

  We stopped at the top of the slope that fell towards the sea, and he spread the blanket on the grassy ground and pointed to a boat buried in the sand, about a hundred metres away. ‘You see the registration painted on the side, BOZ-43? Try and get a bullet in the middle of the O. It’s about twenty centimetres in diameter; with a Steyr Mannlicher, a good shooter could probably do it from fifteen hundred metres; but OK, let’s try like that.’

  I lay down on the blanket. ‘Find your position, take your time … You must have no reason to move; no other reason but your own breathing.’

  I succeeded without great difficulty; the stock was a smooth, curved surface, easy to position in the hollow of my shoulder.

  ‘You’ll find these Zen-type guys who will tell you that the important thing is to become one with your target. I don’t believe it, it’s nonsense, and besides the Japanese are rubbish at sport shooting; they’ve never won a single international competition. On the other hand, it’s true that precision shooting has a lot in common with yoga: you try to be one with your own breathing. So you’re going to breathe slowly, more and more slowly, as slowly and deeply as you can. And, when you’re ready, you aim your sights at the centre of your target.’

  I set about doing as he said: ‘Right, have you got it?’ I nodded. ‘So now what you have to know is that you mustn’t try for absolute motionlessness, that’s simply impossible. You’re inevitably going to be moving, because you’re breathing. But what you’ve got to achieve is a very slow movement, a regular swinging motion, guided by your breathing, that passes through the target. Once you’ve got it, once you’ve got the movement, you just have to pull the trigger as you pass the centre. Just a very small motion, nothing more than that; it’s on a hypersensitive setting. The HS50 is a single-shot model. If you want to fire again you have to reload; that’s why snipers don’t use it so much in real wars, because what they want above all is effectiveness, they’re there to kill; for me personally, I think it’s good to have only one chance.’

  I closed my eyes briefly to avoid having to think about the personal implications of that choice, then opened them again; it was going well, as he had told me it would, and the letters BOZ passed slowly back and forth in my sights; I pulled the trigger at what I thought was the right moment, and there was a very faint sound, a faint plop. In fact it was an extraordinary experience; I had just spent a few minutes outside time, in a pure, ballistic space. Standing up again, I saw that Aymeric had trained his binoculars on the boat.

  ‘That’s not bad, not bad at all…’ he said, turning towards me. ‘You didn’t hit the centre, but you got your bullet in the paint of the O, so you were ten centimetres away from your target. For a first shot, at a distance of a hundred metres, I would even say it’s very good.’

  As we got ready to leave, he advised me to train for a long time on fixed targets, before progressing on to ‘moving targets’. Registration letters were perfect as they allowed you to find your bearings precisely. There was no problem about my damaging the boat, he said in response to my objection, he knew the owner (who, in parentheses, was a real idiot), and it would probably never go out to sea again. He left me ten boxes of fifty cartridges.

  During the few weeks that followed, I trained for at least two hours every morning. I can’t say I ‘forgot all my worries’, that would be going too far, but it’s true that I passed through a period of calm and relative peace every morning. The Captorix also helped, that was undeniable, and my daily doses of alcohol remained moderate; it was also comforting to note that I was on a dose of 15 mg, slightly below the maximum dosage. Stripped of desires and of reasons to live (were those two terms equivalent? That was a difficult topic on which I didn’t have a well-formed opinion), I kept my despair at an acceptable level. You can live and be despairing – most people live like that in fact, although sometimes they wonder whether they can allow themselves a whiff of hope; well, at least they ask themselves the question before answering in the negative. And yet they persist, and it’s a touching sight.

  My shooting was making rapid progress, at a rate that impressed even me; in less than two weeks I managed to get my shots not only in the centre of the O, but also inside the two closed loops of the B and the triangle of the 5; it was then that I started thinking about ‘moving targets’. There was no shortage of them on the beach, the most obvious ones being the seabirds.

  I had never killed an animal in my life – it wasn’t something that had ever presented itself – but in principle I wasn’t hostile to the idea. As repelled as I was by industrial animal breeding, I had never had any principled objection to hunting, which lets animals live in their natural environment, and leaves them free to run and fly until they are killed by a predator higher up the food chain. The Steyr Mannlicher HS50 turned me into a predator very high up the food chain, there was no doubt about that; still, I had never had an animal at the other end of my rifle.

  * * *

  I made my mind up one morning, just after ten o’clock. I was very comfortable on my blanket at the top of the slope, the weath
er was cool and agreeable, and there was no shortage of targets.

  I held a bird in the centre of my sights for a long time; it wasn’t a seagull or a tern, nothing so famous, just an undistinguished little bird with long legs which I had seen many times on these beaches, a proletarian of the beaches in some sense; in fact a stupid bird, with a mean staring eye, a little killing machine that moved on its long legs, only interrupting its mechanical and predictable motion when it had spotted its prey. By blowing its head off I could save the lives of numerous gastropods, numerous cephalopods too; well, I was introducing a little variation into the food chain without any personal interest as this baleful little avian was probably inedible. I just had to remember that I was a man, a lord and master, and that the universe had been created for my convenience by a just God.

  The confrontation lasted a few minutes, at least three, more probably five or ten, then my hands started trembling and I realised that I was incapable of pulling the trigger, I was nothing but a pussy, a sad and insignificant pussy, and an ageing one at that. ‘Anyone without the courage to kill lacks the courage to live’: the phrase revolved in my head on a loop without creating anything other than a groove of pain. I went back towards the bungalow to get a dozen empty bottles which I placed at random on the edge of the slope before blowing them to pieces in less than two minutes.

  Once all the bottles were shattered, I realised that I had reached the end of my supply of cartridges. I hadn’t seen Aymeric for almost two weeks, but I had noticed that since the start of the year he had received various visits – often 4x4s or pick-ups parked in the courtyard of the château, and I had seen him walking back to the vehicles with men of his age, dressed in work clothes like him – other local farmers, probably.

  Just as I reached the château he was coming out with a man in his fifties whom I had already seen two days previously – a man with a pale, intelligent, sad face; they were both wearing dark suits, with navy blue ties that clashed with the suits; I was immediately certain that he must have lent the other man a tie. He introduced me as ‘a friend, renting a bungalow’, without mentioning the fact that I had previously worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, for which I was grateful to him. Frank was ‘the union representative for La Manche’, he added. I waited a few seconds before he explained: ‘The Farmers’ Federation.’ He nodded, doubtfully, then added: ‘Every now and again I wonder if we shouldn’t join Rural Cooperation. I don’t know, I’m not sure, I’m not sure of anything right now…’

  ‘We’re on our way to a funeral…’ Aymeric added. ‘We have a colleague in Carteret who shot himself two days ago.’

  ‘That’s the third one since the start of the year…’ Frank added. He had planned to organise a union meeting in two days’ time, on Sunday afternoon, in Carteret; I was welcome to come along if I wanted.

  ‘We have to do something either way; we can’t accept the new lowering of the milk price – if we let that one through we’re all fucked, every last one of us, and we might as well give up on the spot.’ Before getting into Frank’s pick-up, Aymeric gave me an apologetic look; I hadn’t talked to him at all about my own emotional life – I realised at that moment that I hadn’t said a word about Camille, but as a rule there’s no point in saying much; things are self-explanatory, and he must have suspected that they weren’t much better for me right now and that the fate of milk-producers would struggle to arouse my compassion.

  * * *

  I returned at about seven in the evening and Aymeric had already had time to get through half a bottle of vodka. The funeral had been as one might imagine; the man who had killed himself had left family, he had never met the right woman, his father was dead and his mother more or less senile, and she had done nothing but sob, saying over and over again that times had changed. ‘And I had to explain a few things to Frank…’ he apologised. ‘I had to confess to him that you knew a bit about agricultural matters; but he won’t hold it against you, you mustn’t think that, he knows that civil servants don’t have much room to manoeuvre…’

  I wasn’t a civil servant, which still, incidentally, didn’t give me much room to manoeuvre, and I was tempted to move on to vodka myself; why suffer more than you need to? But something held me back, and I asked Aymeric to open a bottle of white wine. He agreed, and sniffed the beverage with surprise before pouring me a glass, as if remembering happier times. ‘Are you coming on Sunday?’ he asked me almost lightly, as if talking about a pleasant gathering of friends. I didn’t know, I said, yes, probably, but was anything going to come out of this meeting? Had an action been decided upon? In his opinion yes, probably yes; the producers were really furious, at the very least they were going to stop delivering milk to cooperatives and factories. Except when milk tankers arrived two or three days later, from Poland or Ireland, what were they going to do? Block the road with rifles? And even if it came to that, what would they do when the tankers came back protected by CRS units? Open fire?

  The notion of ‘symbolic actions’ sprang to mind, but I was paralysed with shame before even finishing my sentence. ‘Pour hectolitres of milk on to the forecourt of police headquarters in Caen…’ Aymeric added. ‘Obviously we could do that but it would get us a day of media coverage, nothing more, and I don’t think I want that. I was one of the ones who emptied milk tankers into the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel in 2009; I have a bad memory of that. Milking like you do every morning, filling the tankers, and then chucking it all away as if it’s worthless … I think I’d rather get the rifles out.’

  Before I set off again, I took some more boxes of cartridges from his cupboard; I didn’t imagine that things would develop into an armed confrontation, well, I didn’t imagine anything at all, but there was something disturbing about their state of mind; generally nothing happens but sometimes something happens and you’re never really prepared for it. A bit of extra shooting practice couldn’t hurt anyway.

  The union meeting was held at Le Carteret, a huge brasserie on Place du Terminus, which referred, I think, to the old station just opposite, abandoned and already partly invaded by weeds. In terms of catering, Le Carteret mostly offered pizza. I arrived quite late, I’d missed the speeches, but there were still about a hundred farmers sitting around the tables, most of them drinking beers or glasses of white wine. They weren’t talking much – there was nothing cheerful about the atmosphere of the meeting – and gave me suspicious looks when I went towards the table where Aymeric was sitting with Frank and three other men who, like him, had sad and reasonable faces, and gave the impression of having studied at least at an agricultural college; well, they were probably other union members but they didn’t talk much either. I have to say that the reduction in the price of dairy (I’d done some research in La Manche Libre in the meantime) had been very dramatic around this time, a crushing blow, and I failed to see how they could even imagine a basis for possible negotiations.

  ‘Sorry for bothering you…’ I said, trying to adopt a light tone. Aymeric looked at me uneasily.

  ‘Not at all, not at all…’ said Frank, who looked even wearier, even more crestfallen than last time.

  ‘Have you decided on a course of action?’ I don’t know what led me to ask the question – I didn’t want to know the answer.

  ‘We’re working on it, we’re working on it…’ Then Frank gave me a strange look from below, a little hostile but above all incredibly sad, even desperate; he was talking to me as if from the other side of an abyss, and I started to feel properly embarrassed; I had no business among them, I wasn’t one of them, I couldn’t be, I didn’t lead the same life as they did – my life was hardly brilliant but it wasn’t the same – and that was that. I quickly took my leave, I’d stayed for no more than five minutes, but I think when I left I had already understood that this time things could turn really ugly.

  * * *

  During the two days that followed, I remained cloistered in my bungalow, getting through the last of my supplies and trying out various different chan
nels; I tried to masturbate twice. On Wednesday morning, the landscape was drowning in a huge lake of fog that stretched as far as the eye could see; you couldn’t see a thing ten metres away from the bungalow but I needed to go out to get more supplies, or at least go to the Carrefour Market in Barneville-Carteret. It took me about half an hour of driving very cautiously, without going over 40 kilometres an hour; every now and again, vague, yellowish halos indicated the presence of another car. Carteret usually had the look of an elegant little seaside resort, with its marina, its shops selling sailing equipment, its gastronomic restaurant offering lobsters from the bay; it now looked like a ghost town, filled with fog, and I didn’t encounter a single car on my way to the supermarket, or even a pedestrian; the Carrefour Market, with its almost deserted aisles, looked like the last vestige of civilisation or human occupation; I supplied myself with cheese, charcuterie and red wine, with a deranged but persistent impression that I was going to have to withstand a siege.

  I spent the rest of the day walking along the coast road, in a total and muffled silence, passing from one bank of fog to another, without being able to make out the sea below at any point; my life seemed to me to be as shapeless and uncertain as the landscape.

  The next morning, passing in front of the door of the château, I saw Aymeric distributing guns to a small group – there were about ten of them – wearing parkas and hunting jackets. Then they got into their vehicles before setting off towards Valognes.

  Passing by again at about five o’clock, I saw that Aymeric’s pick-up was parked in the courtyard, and I went straight to the dining room: he was sitting with Frank and a third man, a red-haired giant, uneasy-looking, who was introduced to me as Barnabé. Apparently they had just arrived; they had kept their guns within reach and poured themselves some vodka, but hadn’t yet taken off their coats – I noticed then that it was terribly cold in the room as Aymeric seemed to have given up heating the place and I wasn’t sure that he got undressed to go to bed either – he seemed to be giving up a fair number of things.