Serotonin

by Michel Houellebecq

  If I managed to pass beyond those limits, the rewards would of course not be immediate. Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously; I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact. And then I would come back, and she would love me again because she had never stopped loving me – it was as simple as that – and she would simply want another child, would want it very quickly; and that’s what would happen. A big swerve had occurred some years before and we had deviated atrociously from our normal destinies; I had made the first mistake, but Camille had done her bit to make things worse; now it was time to make things better, it was exactly the right time – now was our last chance, and I was the only one who could do it, I was the only one with the cards in my hand, and the solution was at the end of my Steyr Mannlicher.

  An opportunity arose the following Saturday, mid-morning. It was the beginning of March and there was already a spring-like mildness in the air, and when I opened one of the windows overlooking the lake by a few centimetres to slide out the barrel of my gun, I didn’t feel a cold breath, or anything that could compromise the stability of my aim. The child was sitting at the table on the terrace, in front of a big cardboard box containing the pieces of a Disney jigsaw puzzle – Snow White, my binoculars told me, but only the face and torso of the heroine had been reconstructed so far. I adjusted the scope to maximum before positioning my gun, my breathing becoming regular and slow. The child’s head, in profile, occupied the whole of my sights; he wasn’t moving at all, he was concentrating entirely on his jigsaw puzzle – it’s an exercise, it’s true, that requires great concentration. A few minutes before, I had seen the babysitter disappearing towards the upstairs bedrooms – I had noticed that when the child immersed himself in a book or a game, she took advantage of the fact to go and surf the Internet after putting on headphones; she would probably do that for a few hours so I didn’t think she would come down before the child’s lunch.

  He remained completely motionless for ten minutes, apart from slow movements of his hands as they rummaged through the pile of cardboard pieces – Snow White’s neckline was gradually being completed. His motionlessness was matched only by my own – never had I breathed so slowly, never had my hands trembled so little, never had I had such total mastery of my gun; I felt I was about to accomplish the perfect liberating and unique shot, the most important shot in my life, the only goal underlying my months of training.

  * * *

  What felt like ten motionless minutes passed like that, though more likely fifteen or twenty, before my fingers began to tremble and I collapsed on the ground, my cheeks scraped the carpet and I understood that it was over, that I wouldn’t shoot, that I wouldn’t manage to alter the course of things, that the mechanism of unhappiness was the strongest of all, that I would never regain Camille and that we would both die alone, unhappy and alone, each in our own way. I was trembling violently when I got to my feet, my vision blurred with tears, and I pulled the trigger at random making the picture window of the panoramic room explode into hundreds of fragments of glass; the noise was so loud that I thought somebody might have heard it in the house opposite. I trained my binoculars on the child: no, he hadn’t moved, he was still concentrating on his puzzle; Snow White’s dress was gradually taking shape.

  * * *

  Slowly, very slowly, funereally slowly, I unscrewed the pieces of the Steyr Mannlicher, which fit neatly into their foam rubber holdings. When the polycarbonate case was closed again, I had for a moment the idea of throwing it in the lake, then that demonstration of ostentatious failure struck me as useless; I had failed anyway and to emphasise it any further would have been unfair to this trusty carbine, which for its part had asked only to serve its user, to accomplish his purposes with precision and excellence.

  Then, in a second phase it occurred to me to cross the bridge and introduce myself to the child. I juggled the plan in my head for two or three minutes, then finished a bottle of Guignolet kirsch, and it was the return of reason or at least a normal form of reason; in any case, I could only have been a father or a substitute figure, and what would the child have done with a father? What need could he have had of any kind of father? No need at all: I had a sense of turning over in my head the parameters of an equation that had already been resolved, and resolved to my disadvantage; it was him or me, as I’ve said, and in the end it was him.

  More reasonably, in the third phase, I stowed the gun in the boot of my G 350 and set off without turning back in the direction of Saint-Aubert. In a bit less than a month people would come and open the restaurant again, would note the traces of human occupation, probably blame a homeless man, decide to install an extra alarm below to protect the delivery entrance – the police wouldn’t necessarily even open an inquiry or go looking for prints.

  * * *

  As far as I was concerned, there seemed to be nothing now that could halt my path towards annihilation. But I didn’t leave the house in Saint-Aubert-sur-Orne – at least not immediately, something which struck me as hard to explain in retrospect. I had no hopes and I was fully aware that I had nothing to hope for. My analysis of the situation seemed complete and certain. There are areas of the human psyche that remain little-known because they haven’t been much explored, because luckily few people have found themselves in a situation of needing to explore them, and those who have done so have, as a general rule, preserved too little of their reason to produce an acceptable description of them. Those areas can hardly be approached except by the use of paradoxical and even absurd formulas, of which the phrase hope beyond all hope is the only one that really comes to mind. It’s not like night, it’s worse than that; and without having personally known that experience I have a sense that even when you plunge into true night, polar night – the one that lasts for six months in a row – the concept or the memory of the sun remains. I had entered an endless night, and yet there remained, deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again, even when one has never at any moment in one’s life sensed the intervention or even the presence of any kind of deity, even when one is aware of not especially deserving the intervention of a favourable deity, and even when one realises, bearing in mind the accumulation of mistakes and errors that constitute one’s life, that one deserves it less than anyone.

  There was still a three-month lease to go on the house, which at least had the advantage of imposing a concrete limit on my insanity – even if it was rather unlikely that I would remain in that situation for more than a few days. In any case there was one immediate necessity: a return trip to Paris to raise my dose of Captorix to 20 mg, an elementary survival precaution which I couldn’t ignore. I made an appointment with Dr Azote for the day after next, for shortly after my train got in to Saint-Lazare, leaving just enough time to cover any possible delay.

  Strangely, the journey did me good in a way, allowing my thoughts to drift towards reflections which, while they might have been negative, were also impersonal. The train got in to Saint-Lazare thirty-five minutes late, which was more or less what I had anticipated. The ancestral pride of the railway workers, the ancestral pride of respect for the timetable, so powerful and so rooted in the early twentieth century that villagers in the fields used to set their clocks by the running of the trains, had disappeared once and for all. SNCF was one of the companies whose complete failure and degeneracy I had witnessed in my lifetime. Not only had the indicative timetable become a big joke in the present day, but also any notion of catering seemed to have vanished from intercity trains, together with any plan to maintain materials – the slashed seats spewed opaque fluff, and the toilets – at least the ones that weren’t locked and which had probably been forgotten – were in such a filthy condition that I didn’
t dare enter them, and preferred to relieve myself on the platform between two carriages.

  An atmosphere of general catastrophe always alleviates individual catastrophe – that’s probably why suicides are so rare in wartime – and I headed towards Rue d’Athènes almost with a spring in my step. Having said that, Dr Azote’s first glance quickly disillusioned me. It contained a mixture of unease, compassion and pure professional concern. ‘It doesn’t really seem to be working…’ he observed briefly. I couldn’t contradict him because he hadn’t seen me for several months, so he inevitably had a point of reference that I lacked.

  ‘Obviously I’ll move you up to 20 mg,’ he went on, ‘but OK, 15 mg or 20 … Antidepressants can’t do everything; I imagine you’re aware of that.’ I was aware of that. ‘And besides, 20 mg you must understand is still the maximum dose on the market. Obviously you could take two pills, you could move on to 25, 30 and then 35, and then where do you stop? Frankly, I would advise against it. The truth is that it’s been tested at 20, nothing beyond that, and I don’t really want to take the risk. How are things where sex is concerned?’

  The question left me flummoxed. But it wasn’t a bad one, I had to agree, it had a connection with my situation, a connection that seemed remote and vague, but was still a connection. I didn’t reply, but I probably spread my hands, I opened my mouth a little: well, my face must quite eloquently have conveyed an idea of the void because he said: ‘OK, OK, I see …

  ‘You’re still going to have to give me a blood sample to check your testosterone level. I’d expect it to be very low: unlike natural serotonin, serotonin produced through the medium of Captorix inhibits the synthesis of testosterone, don’t ask me why, nobody has a clue. Normally speaking – I’m saying normally speaking – the effect should be completely reversible; as soon as you stop the Captorix it’ll kick in again; well, that’s what studies have shown but you can never be a hundred per cent certain – if they had to wait to have absolute scientific certainty they’d never have put out a single drug on the market, you understand all that?’ I nodded.

  ‘However, however…’ he went on, ‘we’re not just going to check testosterone; I’m going to give you an overall hormonal check-up. It’s just that I’m not an endocrinologist – there may be things that are beyond me – wouldn’t you rather see a specialist? I know one who’s not bad.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘You’d rather not … Well, I suppose I have to take that as a sign of trust. Well, fine then, we’ll try and carry on. Basically hormones aren’t as complicated as all that, just ten or so and you’ve pretty much covered the lot. Also I enjoyed endocrinology when I was a student; it was one of my favourite subjects, I’d like to do a bit more of that again…’ He seemed to fall into a vaguely nostalgic reverie, as is probably inevitable after a certain age when you think about your student years; I understood that all the better since I’d liked biochemistry a lot and had felt a strange pleasure studying the properties of complex molecules; the difference is that I was more interested in vegetable molecules such as chlorophyll or anthocyanins, but in the end they were broadly the same – I had a good idea what he was getting at.

  * * *

  So I left with two prescriptions and picked up the 20 mg of Captorix from a chemist’s close to Gare Saint-Lazare; the hormonal analysis would have to wait till I came back to Paris and it was inevitable that I would be coming back to Paris; it was inevitable, perfect solitude is even more normal there, more appropriate to the environment.

  But I did return to the shores of Lake Rabodanges one last time. I had chosen a Sunday morning; a time when I was sure that Camille wouldn’t be there, that she would be having lunch with her parents in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne. I think it would have been almost impossible if Camille had been there to say my final farewells. Final farewells? Did I really believe that? Yes, I really believed it – after all I had seen people die and I was going to die shortly myself – we constantly encounter final farewells, all through our lives unless our lives are fortunately brief; we encounter them practically every day. The weather was absurdly fine; a bright, warm sun lit the water of the lake, making the woods sparkle. The wind didn’t moan, the waves didn’t murmur either – nature demonstrated an almost impossible lack of empathy. Everything was peaceful, majestic and calm. Could I have lived for years alone with Camille, in this isolated house in the middle of the woods, and been happy?

  Yes, I knew I could. My need for social relationships (if by that we mean relationships other than romantic relationships), which started very weak, had declined to nothing over the years. Was that normal? It’s true that humanity’s unpalatable ancestors lived in tribes of a few dozen individuals, about the size of a hamlet, and that that formula pertained for a long time – both among hunter-gatherers and among the first farming populations. But time had moved on since then; there had been the invention of the city and its natural corollary – loneliness – to which only the couple could offer an alternative; we would never return to the tribal stage – though some unintelligent sociologists claim to be able to distinguish new tribes in ‘reconstructed families’, that was possible – but for my part I had never seen reconstructed families, deconstructed yes; in fact those were the only ones I’d ever seen at close quarters, apart of course from the many cases in which the deconstructing process had already begun at the couple stage, before the production of children. As to the reconstructing process, I had never had the opportunity to see it in action. ‘Once our heart has harvested its grapes/To live is torment’, Baudelaire wrote more accurately; this business of reconstructed families was, in my eyes, nothing but revolting hot air – although it wasn’t a piece of pure propaganda, optimistic and postmodern, unworldly and dedicated to the ABC+ and the ABC++ economic groups, already inaudible beyond the Porte de Charenton. So, yes, I could have lived alone with Camille, in that isolated house in the middle of the woods, and I would have seen the sun rise over the lake every morning, and I think that, in so far as such a thing had been granted to me, I could have been happy. But life, as they say, had decided otherwise: my bags were packed and I could be in Paris by early afternoon.

  I easily recognised the receptionist at the Hôtel Mercure, and she recognised me too. ‘So you’re back?’ she asked, and I agreed that I was, with a hint of emotion, because I had heard – I had definitely heard – that she had been about to say: ‘You’re back among us?’, but a qualm had held her back at the last minute; she must have had very precise notions of the level of familiarity that could acceptably be used with a customer, even a loyal customer. The next thing she said, ‘You’re our guest for a week?’, seemed to me to be exactly the same phrase that she had uttered several months before, the first time I had stayed there.

  I returned with childish and even pathetic satisfaction to my tiny hotel room, with its functional and ingenious furnishings, and the following day I resumed my daily circuits which took me from Brasserie O’Jules to Carrefour City, via Rue Abel-Hovelacque which I followed with a quick stroll up Avenue des Gobelins, turning off at the end towards Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie. But something had changed in the general atmosphere; we were a year, or nearly a year, on and it was the beginning of May, an exceptionally mild May, a true prefiguration of the summer. I should normally have felt something along the lines of lust, or at least of simple desire, in finding myself side by side with those girls in short skirts or tight leggings, sitting at tables not far from me in Brasserie O’Jules, ordering coffees and maybe swapping stories about their love lives; more probably they were comparing their respective life insurance policies. But I felt nothing, radically nothing, even though we theoretically belonged to the same species; I had to address that business of my hormone levels and Dr Azote had asked me to ensure he was sent a copy of the results.

  * * *

  I called him three days later; he seemed embarrassed. ‘Listen, this is weird … If you don’t mind I’d like to consult a colleague. Shall we meet up again in a week
?’ I noted the appointment in my diary without comment. When a doctor tells you he’s spotted something strange in your results, you should at least feel slightly worried; not so in my case. Immediately after hanging up, I said to myself that I could at least have pretended to be worried – well, taken a bit of an interest – that was probably what he expected of me. Unless perhaps – I went on to reflect – he hadn’t really understood what point I had reached; that was an awkward idea.

  * * *

  My appointment was at 7.30 the following Monday evening; I imagine it was his last appointment of the day, and wonder whether he hadn’t even stayed on a bit late. He looked exhausted, and lit a Camel before offering me one – I felt a bit like a condemned man. I saw that he had scribbled some numbers on my results. ‘Right…’ he said, ‘the testosterone level is clearly low, I expected that, it’s the Captorix. But there is also a very high level of cortisol – the quantities of cortisol that you’re secreting are incredible. In fact … can I speak frankly?’ I said he could, that had been more or less the tone of our exchanges until now – frankness. ‘Well, in fact…’ He hesitated even so, his lips trembled slightly before he said: ‘I have the sense that you are, very simply, dying of sorrow.’

  ‘Is there such a thing as dying of sorrow; does that mean anything?’ was the only answer that came to mind.