The Possibility of an Island (27 page)

I must have stayed like that for a while, in a state of great mental emptiness, because on my return the encampment was silent; everyone, apparently, was sleeping. I consulted my watch: it was just after three. A light was still on in Knowall’s cell; he was at his desk but he heard my footsteps and signaled for me to enter. The internal decor was less austere than I would have imagined: there was a divan with some quite pretty silk cushions, and rugs with abstract motifs covered the rocky floor; he offered me a glass of tea.

“You must have realized that there was some tension inside the leadership…,” he said before pausing. I was, obviously, in their view, a
heavyweight;
I couldn’t help thinking that they were exaggerating my importance. It’s true that I could say anything and the media would always be there to record my words; but to go from there to a point when people would listen to me, and change their point of view, was a rather giant leap: everyone had become used to
celebrities
expressing themselves in the media on the most varied subjects, saying things that were generally predictable, and no one paid them any real attention anymore; basically the system of the spectacle, obliged to produce a disgusting consensus, had long since collapsed under the weight of its own meaninglessness. But I did nothing to disabuse him; I acquiesced with that attitude of benevolent neutrality that had served me so well in life, that had enabled me to hear so many intimate confessions, in so many different milieus, which I then reused, crudely distorted out of recognition, in my sketches.

“I’m not really worried, the prophet trusts me…,” he continued. “But our image in the media is catastrophic. We’re seen as cranks, yet no laboratory in the world, at the moment, would be capable of producing results like ours…” He swept a hand around the room as if all the objects there, the biochemistry works in English from Elsevier Publications, the DVDs of data lined above his desk, the glowing computer screen, were there to bear witness to the seriousness of his research. “I ruined my career by coming here,” he went on bitterly, “I no longer have access to the top-ranking publications…” Society is an accumulation of layers, and I had never introduced scientists into my sketches, theirs was in my view a specific layer, motivated by ambitions and evaluative criteria that could not be transposed to mere mortals, there was no material in it for the general public; however, I listened, as I listened to everyone, motivated by an old habit—I was a sort of aging spy on mankind, a spy in retirement, but I could still do it, I still had good reflexes, I think I even nodded to encourage him to go on, but I sort of listened without hearing, his words just passed between my ears, I had established involuntarily a sort of filtering function in my brain. I was, however, conscious that Miskiewicz was an important man, perhaps one of the most important men in human history, he was going to change its destiny at the deepest biological level, he had at his disposal the know-how and the procedures, but maybe I was the one who was no longer really interested in human history, I too was a tired old man, and then, just as he was singing the praises of the rigor of his experimental protocols to me, of the seriousness he brought to the establishment and validation of his counterfactual propositions, I was suddenly seized by desire for Esther, for her nice supple vagina, I remembered the little movements of her vagina closing around my cock. I pleaded tiredness and was scarcely outside Knowall’s cave before dialing her cell phone number but there was no one there, just her voicemail, and I didn’t really feel like jerking off, the production of spermatozoids was slower at my age, the recovery period was getting longer, whatever sexual opportunities life had left to offer me were going to become rarer and rarer before they disappeared completely. I was, of course, in favor of immortality, Miskiewicz’s research undoubtedly constituted a hope, the only hope in fact, but it wouldn’t be for me, nor for anyone of my generation, on this subject I nurtured no illusion, the optimism he displayed with regard to imminent success was, moreover, probably not a lie but a necessary fiction, necessary not only for the Elohimites who financed his projects but also for himself; no human project has ever been undertaken without the hope of its accomplishment in a reasonable time, and more precisely with a maximum time frame delineated by the foreseeable life span of the one who conceived of the project, mankind has never operated according to a team spirit that spreads across generations, even though this is the way things actually happen at the end of the day: you work, you die, and future generations profit from it unless of course they prefer to destroy what you have done, but this thought has never been formulated by any of those who have committed themselves to a project, they have preferred to ignore it, for otherwise they would have simply ceased to act, they would have simply lain down and waited for death. It was for that reason that Knowall, however modern he was on an intellectual level, was still a romantic in my eyes, his life was guided by old illusions, and now I wondered what Esther could be up to, if her little vagina was contracting on other cocks, and I began to seriously want to rip out one or two of my organs, thankfully I had brought along a dozen boxes of Rohypnol—I had thought big—and I slept for more than fifteen hours.

When I awoke the sun was low in the sky, and I immediately sensed that something strange was going on. The weather was stormy, but I knew that it would not break, it never broke, the rainfall on the island was practically nil. A faint yellow light bathed the village of the followers; the openings of a few tents were lightly ruffled by the wind but apart from that the encampment was deserted, no one was on the pathways. In the absence of human activity, the silence was total. As I climbed the hill I passed in front of the bedrooms of Vincent, Knowall, and Cop, still without meeting anyone. The prophet’s residence was wide open, for the first time since I arrived there were no guards at the entrance. Despite myself, on entering the first room, I muffled the sound of my footsteps. While crossing the corridor that led to his private apartment I heard hushed voices, the sound of a piece of furniture being dragged across the floor, and something that resembled a sob.

All the lights were on in the main hall where the prophet had welcomed me on the day of my arrival, but here too there was no one. I walked around, pushed open a door that led to the office, then turned back. On the right-hand side, near the pool, I bumped into Gérard, who was standing in the doorway leading to the prophet’s bedroom. Joker was in a sorry state: his face was even more wan than usual, pitted with dark shadows under the eyes, I had the impression he had not slept all night. “Something terrible…something terrible…” His voice was weak and quavering, almost inaudible. “Something terrible has happened…,” he finally articulated. Cop joined him and stood in front of me, sizing me up. Joker finally made a kind of plaintive bleating noise. “Well, now we’ve reached this point, we might as well let him in…,” groaned Cop.

The interior of the bedroom was taken up by an immense round bed, three meters in diameter, covered with pink satin; pink-satin ottomans were placed here and there in the room, whose walls were covered on three sides with mirrors; the fourth side was a big bay window overlooking the stony plain and the volcanoes beyond, which were slightly menacing in the stormy light. The bay window had been smashed to pieces, and the corpse of the prophet lay in the middle of the bed, naked, his throat cut. He had lost an enormous amount of blood, the carotid had been cleanly severed. Knowall padded nervously around the room. Vincent, sitting on an ottoman, seemed rather absent, he scarcely looked up on hearing me approach. A young woman with long black hair, whom I recognized as Francesca, was prostrate in a corner of the room, dressed in a white nightdress stained with blood.

“It was the Italian…,” Cop said dryly.

It was the first time I had seen a corpse, and I wasn’t that impressed; I wasn’t particularly surprised either. At dinner two days before, when the prophet had set his heart on the Italian girl, I had had the fleeting impression, in the space of a few seconds, on seeing her boyfriend’s expression, that this time the prophet had gone too far, and that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as usual; and then, when Gianpaolo had finally appeared to submit, I had told myself that he would be crushed like all the others; manifestly, I had been mistaken. Out of curiosity I approached the bay window: the slope was very steep, almost vertical; you could make out a few footholds, and the rock was good, not at all flaky or crumbly, but it was still quite a climb. “Yes,” Cop commented darkly as he moved closer to me, “he must have taken it very badly…” Then he continued to walk up and down the room, taking care to stay away from Knowall, who was walking on the other side of the bed. Joker remained rooted near the door, opening and shutting his hands mechanically, looking completely haggard, on the edge of panic. I then became conscious for the first time that despite the hedonistic and libertine position assumed by the sect none of the close companions of the prophet actually had any kind of sexual life: in the case of Joker and Knowall this was obvious—one through incapacity, the other through a lack of motivation. Cop, for his part, was married to a woman his age, in her late fifties, which is to say that they could hardly indulge in a
frenzy of the senses
every day; and he took no advantage at all of his lofty position in the organization to seduce young female followers. The followers themselves, as I had noticed with increasing surprise, were at best monogamous, and for the most part zerogamous—with the exception of the young and pretty female followers on the occasions when the prophet invited them to share his intimacy for one night. Basically, when you thought about it, the prophet had behaved in his own sect like an absolutely dominant male, and he had succeeded in breaking the virility of his companions: not only did the latter no longer have a sexual life, but they did not seek to have one, they forbade themselves any approach to the females, and had integrated the idea that sexuality was the prerogative of the prophet; I then understood why, in his lectures, he indulged in superfluous praise of feminine values and pitiless attacks on machismo: his wish was, quite simply, to castrate his listeners. It’s a fact that, among most monkeys, the production of testosterone by the dominated males falls, and ends up stopping altogether.

The sky was clearing gradually and the clouds dispersed; a hopelessly clear sky was soon going to illuminate the plain before nightfall. We were right next to the Tropic of Cancer—we were there
grosso merdo,
as Joker might have said when he was still in a state to produce witty remarks. “That has
ass-hole-utely
no importance, I am
a-dick-ted
to muesli for breakfast…,” that was the witty wordplay with which he normally tried to brighten up our days. What was going to become of him, this poor little man, now that Monkey Number One was no more? He flashed terrified looks at Cop and Knowall, respectively Monkey Number 2 and Monkey Number 3, who continued to walk up and down the room, and were beginning to size each other up. When the dominant male is unable to exert his power, the secretion of testosterone resumes, among most monkeys. Cop could count on the loyalty of the military faction of the organization—he was the one who had recruited most of the guards, and trained them, they obeyed only his orders; while he was alive, the prophet relied totally on him for these matters. On the other hand, the lab assistants and all of the technicians responsible for the genetic project looked only to Knowall, to him alone. Basically, we were dealing with a classic conflict between brute force and intelligence, between a basic manifestation of testosterone and a more intellectualized one. Either way, I sensed that it was not going to be over quickly, and I sat on an ottoman near Vincent. He seemed to become aware again of my presence, smiled vaguely, and plunged back into his reverie.

About fifteen minutes of silence followed; Knowall and Cop continued to walk up and down the room, the rug muffled their footsteps. Given the circumstances, I felt quite calm; I was conscious that neither Vincent nor I, in the immediate future, had any role to play. In this story we were secondary, honorary monkeys; night was falling, the wind infiltrated the room—the Italian had literally exploded the bay window.

Suddenly, Joker took a digital camera out of his jacket pocket—a Sony DSC-F101 with three million pixels, I recognized the model, I had had the same one before opting for a Minolta DiMAGE A2, which had eight million pixels, a bridge semireflex zoom, and which proved to be more sensitive in fading light. Cop and Knowall stopped, mouth agape, looking at the poor clown zigzagging around the room taking photo after photo. “Are you okay, Gérard?” asked Cop. In my view, no, he wasn’t okay, he was clicking mechanically, without even aiming the camera, and when he approached the window I had the distinct impression that he was going to jump. “That’s enough!” shouted Cop. Joker stopped, his hands were trembling so much that he dropped the camera. Still prostrate in her corner, Francesca sniffed briefly. Knowall also stopped walking, turned to Cop, and looked him straight in the eye.

“Now, we are going to have to make a decision…,” he said in a neutral tone. “We are going to alert the police, it’s the only decision we can make.”

“If we alert the police, it’s the end of the organization. We won’t be able to survive the scandal, and you know it.”

“Do you have another idea?”

There was another, clearly more tense silence: the confrontation had begun and I sensed this time it would go on to the bitter end; I even had a quite clear intuition that I was going to witness a second violent death. The death of a charismatic leader is always an extremely difficult moment to manage in a movement of a religious type; when care has not been taken to designate unambiguously a successor, a schism is almost always inevitable.