The Possibility of an Island (23 page)

The prophet took his place in his reclining chair; we sat on ottomans down below. At a sign from him, the young girls scattered and returned, carrying stoneware dishes filled with almonds and dried fruit; others carried amphora filled with what turned out to be pineapple juice. So he was dwelling in the Greek style; the stage production, however, left something to be desired, it was a bit annoying to see, on a sideboard table, the wrappings for the Nicenuts television mix. “Susan…,” said the prophet softly to a very blond girl, with blue eyes and a ravishing candid face, who had remained seated at his feet. Obeying without a word, she knelt between his thighs, opened the dressing gown, and began to suck him off; his sex was short and thick. He wanted, apparently, to establish from the outset a clear position of dominance; I wondered in passing if he did it uniquely for pleasure, or if that was part of a plan to impress me. I was in fact completely unimpressed, though I noticed that Patrick seemed bothered, and looked embarrassedly at his feet; he was blushing a little, despite the fact that this was, in principle, absolutely in accordance with the theories he professed. The conversation ranged first over the international situation—characterized, according to the prophet, by grave threats to democracy; the danger represented by Muslim fundamentalism was, he argued, in no way exaggerated, he had heard worrying information from his African followers. I didn’t have much to say on the issue, which was no bad thing, as it enabled me to preserve on my face an expression of respectful interest. From time to time he placed his hand on the girl’s head, she interrupted her movement; then at another sign, she started sucking him off again. After having monologued for a few minutes, the prophet wanted to know if I wished to rest before the meal, which would be taken in the company of the main leaders; I had the impression that the correct answer was: “Yes.”

“That went well! That went very well!” Patrick slipped into my ear, quivering with excitement, as we went back up the corridor. His display of submission left me a bit perplexed: I tried to recall what I knew about primitive tribes, hierarchical rituals, but I had difficulty remembering, I had read about it in my youth, at the same time as I took acting lessons; I had convinced myself then that the same mechanisms could be found, scarcely modified, in modern societies, and that knowledge of them could help me write sketches—the hypothesis had more or less proved accurate, Lévi-Strauss having helped me in particular. On emerging onto the terreplein I stopped, struck by the vision of the canvas camp where the followers dwelled, about fifty meters below: there must have been a good thousand igloo tents, very close together, all identical, immaculately white, and laid out so as to form that curved pointed star that was the emblem of the sect. You could make out the design only from above—or from the sky, Patrick suggested. Once built, the embassy would have the same form, the prophet himself had designed the plans, he would certainly want to show them to me.

I had expected a more or less sumptuous meal, punctuated by sybaritic delights; I was quickly disillusioned. When it came to food, the prophet was a devotee of the greatest frugality: tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, couscous—all served in small quantities; a bit of goat cheese, accompanied by one glass of red wine. Not only was he a Cretan Diet fanatic, he did an hour of gymnastics every day, along the lines of movements precisely designed to tone the cardiovascular system, and took tablets of Pantestone and MDMA, as well as other medication, available only in the USA. He was literally obsessed by physical aging, and the conversation was almost uniquely about the proliferation of free radicals, the bypass of collagen, the fragmentation of elastin, and the accumulation of lipofuscin inside liver cells. He seemed to know his subject from top to bottom, and Knowall intervened only from time to time to clarify a point of detail. The other guests were Joker, Cop, and Vincent—whom I saw for the first time since my arrival, and who seemed even more detached than usual: he wasn’t listening at all, and appeared to be thinking about private and inexpressible things, his face seemed to quiver with nervous twitches, especially each time Susan appeared—we were served by the fiancées of the prophet, who had put on for the occasion long white tunics slit down the sides.

The prophet didn’t take any coffee, and the meal ended with a sort of green-colored infusion, which was particularly bitter—but which was, he claimed, a remedy for accumulations of lipofuscin. Knowall confirmed the information. We left each other early, the prophet insisting on the necessity of a long and reparatory sleep. Vincent hurried along behind me in the corridor on the way out, I had the impression he was clinging to me, and wanted to talk. The cave that had been allocated to me was slightly more vast than his, it had a terrace that overlooked the canvas camp. It was only eleven in the evening but everything was perfectly calm, no music could be heard, and there were few comings and goings between the tents. I served Vincent a glass of Glenfiddich that I had bought at the duty-free in the Madrid airport.

I more or less expected him to start the conversation, but he did nothing and contented himself with refilling his glass and turning the liquid around in it. To my questions about his work, he replied only in discouraged monosyllables; he had lost even more weight. In despair, I ended up speaking about myself, in other words about Esther, it was about the only thing in my life recently that seemed worthy of mention; I had bought a new sprinkler system, as well, but I didn’t feel able to talk about that subject for long. He asked me to speak again about Esther, which I did with great pleasure; his face brightened up little by little, he said he was happy for me, and I felt he was sincere. Affection between men is a difficult thing, because it cannot materialize into anything, it’s something unreal and soft, but always a bit painful, too; he left ten minutes later without revealing anything to me about his life. I stretched out in the darkness and meditated on the psychological strategy of the prophet, which seemed to me obscure. Was he going to make me the offering of a female follower intended to entertain me sexually? He was probably hesitating, he can’t have had much experience in the treatment of VIPs. I contemplated the prospect calmly: I had made love with Esther that very morning, it had been even longer and more delightful than usual; I had no desire for another woman, I wasn’t even certain, if the case arose, that I’d manage to be interested. Men are generally considered to be cocks on legs, capable of fucking any girl so long as she is sufficiently arousing, without any consideration of feelings coming into the picture; the portrait is more or less accurate, but still a bit forced. Granted, Susan was ravishing, but on seeing her suck the cock of the prophet I had felt no adrenaline rush, no rise in apelike rivalry, on me the effect had been wasted, and in general I felt myself to be unusually calm.

I woke up at about five in the morning, just before dawn, and had an energetic wash that I concluded with a freezing shower; I had the impression, which was quite difficult to justify and which moreover was going to turn out to be false, that I was preparing to live a decisive day. I made myself a black coffee, and drank it on the terrace while observing the canvas camp as it began to wake up; a few followers were making their way toward the communal toilets. In the rising sun, the stony plain looked dark red. Far toward the east you could see metal protection barriers; the land demarcated by the sect must have been at least ten square kilometers. I suddenly made out Vincent, accompanied by Susan, walking down the winding path, a few meters below. They stopped on the terreplein where we had left the minibus the previous day. Vincent was waving his hands, seemed to be pleading his cause, but speaking softly, I was too far away to understand him; she looked at him calmly, but her expression remained inflexible. Turning her head she saw me looking at them, and put a hand on Vincent’s arm to make him shut up; I turned back inside my grotto, pensive. Vincent didn’t look like he’d get lucky: with her limpid gaze, untroubled it seemed by anything, her athletic and healthy body of a young Protestant sportswoman, this girl had all the basic elements of a fanatic: you could just as easily have imagined her in a radical evangelical movement, or a small band of serious ecologists; as it turned out she was devoted body and soul to the prophet, and nothing could persuade her to break her vow of exclusive sexual service. I understood then why I had never introduced sects into my sketches: it is easy to make jokes about human beings, to consider them as burlesque mechanisms when they are, banally, moved by cupidity or desire; but when they give the impression of being animated by a deep faith, by something that goes beyond the survival instinct, the mechanism breaks down, and laughter in principle is stopped.

One by one, the followers, dressed in white tunics, came out of their tents, and made their way toward the opening hewn into the base of the rocky peak, which led to an immense natural cave where the teachings took place. Many of the tents looked empty to me; in fact, I was to learn, in a conversation I had a few minutes later with Cop, that the winter course had attracted only three hundred people this year; for a movement that claimed to have eighty thousand members throughout the world, it wasn’t much. He attributed this lack of success to the excessively high intellectual level of Miskiewicz’s lectures. “It goes completely over people’s heads…In a course intended for everyone, it is best to put the emphasis on simpler, more galvanizing emotions. But the prophet is completely fascinated by the sciences…,” he concluded bitterly. I was surprised that he spoke to me with such frankness; the distrust he felt toward me during the course at Zwork seemed to have vanished. Unless he was seeking an ally in me, of course; he must have made inquiries, understood that I was a VIP of the first order, perhaps destined to play a role in the organization, if not to influence the prophet’s decisions. His relations with Knowall were not good, that was obvious, the latter considered him to be some sort of junior officer, only good for maintaining order or organizing supplies for the meals. During their sometimes caustic exchanges, Joker would be elusive, make gags, avoid taking sides, relying entirely on his personal relationship with the prophet.

The first lecture of the day started at eight o’clock, and it was, of course, a lecture by Miskiewicz, entitled “The Human Being: Matter and Information.” On seeing him take the podium, emaciated and serious, a bundle of papers in his hand, I told myself that he would, in fact, have been perfectly at home in a seminar of doctoral students, but that here he wasn’t quite as comfortable. He quickly greeted the audience before beginning his presentation: no wink to the public nor any trace of humor, not even an attempt to produce a collective, sentimental, or religious emotion; nothing except raw, brutal knowledge.

After half an hour devoted to the genetic code—very well explored at the time of speaking—and of the—still little known—modalities of its expression in the synthesis of proteins, there was, nevertheless, a little bit of theater. Two assistants brought to the table in front of him, with some difficulty, a container about the size of a bag of cement, made up of plastic pouches which were transparent, juxtaposed, of unequal size, and containing various chemical products—the largest, by far, was filled with water.

“This is a human being!” exclaimed Knowall, almost with emphasis—I learned later that the prophet, taking account of Cop’s remarks, had asked him to put a little bit of drama into his presentation, and had even signed him up for an accelerated oratory course, with video training and participation by professional actors. “The container placed on this table,” he continued, “has exactly the same chemical composition as an adult human being weighing seventy kilos. As you will notice, we are composed primarily of water…” He seized a slender probe and pierced the transparent pouch; there was a little jet of water.

“Of course, there are big differences…” The show was over, he gradually became his serious self again; the water pouch was becoming flaccid and slowly grew flat. “These differences, however big they may be, can be summed up in one word: information. The human being is matter plus information. The composition of this matter is now known to us, to the nearest gram: it involves simple chemical elements, found widely in inanimate nature. The information is also known to us, at least in principle: it is based entirely on DNA, that of the nucleus and that of the mitochondria. The DNA contains not only the information necessary for the construction of the whole, for embryo-genesis, but also that which pilots and subsequently commands the functioning of the organism. That being the case, why should we limit ourselves to passing through embryo-genesis? Why not directly manufacture an adult human being, from the necessary chemical elements and the schema provided by the DNA? This is, very obviously, the path of research that we will take in the future. The men of the future will be born directly into an adult body, a body aged eighteen, and this is the model that will be subsequently reproduced, it is in this ideal form that they will reach, that you and I will reach, if my research advances as quickly as I hope, immortality. Cloning is only a primitive method, directly copied from the natural mode of reproduction; the development of the embryo gives us nothing but the possibility of deformations and errors; once we have the construction plan, and the necessary materials, it becomes a useless stage.

“This is not the case,” he continued, “and this is a point I want to draw your attention to, for the human brain. There is, indeed, some crude prewiring: a few basic elements of aptitudes and character traits are already inscribed in the genetic code; but essentially the human personality, which constitutes our individuality and our memory, forms gradually, throughout our lives, by the activation and chemical reinforcement of neuronal subnetworks and dedicated synapses; individual history, in a word, creates the individual.”