The Possibility of an Island (36 page)

Just as he was beginning to explain his vision of the aesthetics of the ritual ceremonies to me, Cop entered the office, wearing an impeccable sea-blue blazer; he too looked in stunning shape, and energetically shook my hand. Undoubtedly, the sect seemed not to have suffered at all from the death of the prophet; on the contrary, even, things seemed to be going better and better. Nothing had happened, it was true, since the staged resurrection at the beginning of the summer on Lanzarote; but the event had had such a media impact that it had proved sufficient, requests for information were continually flooding in, many followed by applications for membership, the numbers of the faithful and of available funds were constantly increasing.

That same evening I was invited to dinner at Vincent’s, in the company of Cop and his wife—it was the first time I had met her, and she came across as a levelheaded, solid, rather warm person. Once again I was struck by the fact that one could easily have imagined Cop in the guise of a business executive—let’s say, a director of human resources—or a civil servant responsible, for example, for the distribution of agricultural subsidies in a high mountain region; nothing about him suggested mysticism or even simple religiosity. In fact, he actually seemed particularly unimpressionable, and it was without any apparent emotion that he informed Vincent of the emergence of a worrying tendency, which had been reported to him from certain zones recently touched by the sect—in particular Italy and Japan. Nothing in the dogma indicated the way that the ceremony of voluntary departure was to proceed; all the necessary information for the reconstruction of the body of the follower being preserved in his DNA, the body itself could be disintegrated or reduced to ashes without this having the slightest impact. An unhealthy theatrical tendency seemed to be gradually developing, in certain cells, around the dispersal of the constitutive elements of the body; particularly implicated were doctors, social workers, and nurses. Before taking his leave, Cop passed a file of twenty-odd pages to Vincent, as well as three DVDs—most of the ceremonies had been filmed. I stayed over, and accepted a cognac while Vincent began to read. We were in the living room that had belonged to his grandparents, and nothing had changed since my first visit: the armchairs and the green-velvet settee still had lace antimacassars, the photos of alpine landscapes were still in their frames; I even recognized the philodendron near the piano. Vincent’s face darkened rapidly as he went through the file; he gave Susan a summary in English, then quoted a few examples for my attention:

“In the Rimini cell, the body of a follower was entirely drained of its blood; the participants smeared themselves with the blood before eating his liver and sexual organs. In the Barcelona cell, the man had asked to be hung from a butcher’s hook in a cellar for a fortnight before being put at the disposal of everyone else: the participants served themselves, cutting off a slice that they consumed between them there and then. In Osaka, the follower had asked that his body be crushed and compacted by an industrial press, until it was reduced to a sphere twenty centimeters in diameter, which would then be covered with a film of transparent silicon, and could be used in a game of bowling; he was apparently a bowling fanatic in his lifetime.”

He stopped, his voice was quavering slightly; he was visibly shocked by the extent of the phenomenon.

“It’s a social trend…,” I said. “A general trend toward barbarism; there is no reason you should escape it…”

“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to put a stop to this. The problem is that we have never talked about morality, at no point…”

“There are not a lot of basic socioreligious emotions…,” Susan interjected in English. “If you have no sex, you need ferocity. That’s all…”

Vincent was quiet, he reflected and served himself another glass of cognac; it was at breakfast the following morning that he announced his decision to launch a global campaign: “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure.” In fact, after the first few weeks following the death of the prophet, the sexuality of the followers had rapidly diminished, stabilizing at a level roughly equal to the national average, i.e., very low. This decrease in sexuality was a universal phenomenon, common to all the social classes, to all developed nations, which did not spare teenagers or very young adults; homosexuals themselves, after a brief period of frenzy following the liberalization of their practices, had calmed down a lot, they now aspired to monogamy and a peaceful, settled life, as a couple, devoted to cultural tourism and the discovery of local wines. For Elohimism it was a worrying phenomenon, because, even if it bases itself fundamentally on a promise of eternal life, a religion considerably increases its attractiveness as soon as it is able to give the impression of offering in the here and now a life that is fuller, richer, more exalting, and more joyful. “With Christ, you live more”: this had more or less been the constant theme of the advertising campaigns organized by the Catholic Church immediately before its disappearance. Vincent, therefore, had come up with the idea, beyond the Fourierist reference, of reviving a practice of sacred prostitution, classically attested in Babylon, and in the first instance he would appeal to those among the former fiancées of the prophet who might be willing to organize a sort of orgiastic tour, with the aim of setting the followers the example of a permanent sexual gift, and of spreading throughout all the local branches of the Church a wave of lust and pleasure capable of hindering the development of necrophiliac and murderous practices. The idea seemed excellent to Susan: she knew the girls, she could phone them, she was sure that most of them would accept enthusiastically. During the night, Vincent had penciled a series of sketches intended to be reproduced on the Internet. Openly pornographic (they represented groups of two to ten people, men and women, using their hands, sexes, and mouths in almost all manners you could think of), they were nonetheless extremely stylized, with very pure lines, very different from the disgusting photographic realism that characterized the productions of the prophet.

After a few weeks, it became obvious that the campaign was a real success: the prophet’s fiancées’ tour was a triumph, and, in their cells, the followers strove to reproduce the erotic configurations thrown down on paper by Vincent; they took real pleasure in it, to such a point that, in most countries, the frequency of meetings had multiplied threefold; the ritual orgy therefore, unlike other sexual propositions of more profane and recent origin, such as swinging, would appear not to be an outdated formula. More significantly still, conversations between followers in everyday life, as soon as they had established a minimum of empathy, were accompanied more and more often by touching, intimate caresses, if not mutual masturbation; the resexualization of human relations, in short, seemed to have been achieved. It was then that we became conscious of a detail that, in the first moments of enthusiasm, had escaped everyone: in his desire for stylization, Vincent had strayed some way from a realistic representation of the human body. While the phallus still bore some resemblance (although more rectilinear, hairless, and devoid of any apparent network of veins), the vulva was reduced in his drawings to a long, narrow slit, devoid of hair, situated in the middle of the body, which prolonged the curve of the buttocks, and which was certainly able to open wide to welcome cocks, but was rather less appropriate for any excretory function. More generally, all the external organs had disappeared, and thus the beings imagined, while they were able to make love, were obviously incapable of feeding themselves.

Things could have stayed like this, and been considered a mere artistic convention, were it not for the intervention of Knowall, back from Lanzarote at the beginning of December to present the advances in his research. Even though I still lived at the Lutétia, I spent most of my days in Chevilly-Larue; I wasn’t a member of the governing committee, but I was one of the only direct witnesses of the events that had accompanied the death of the prophet, and everyone trusted me, Cop no longer kept any secrets from me. Of course, things were going on in Paris, there were current affairs, a cultural life; nevertheless I was certain that the important and significant things were happening in Chevilly-Larue. I had been persuaded of it for a long time, even if I hadn’t been able to translate this conviction into my films or sketches, owing to a lack of real contact with the phenomenon up until now: political or military events, economic transformations, aesthetic or cultural mutations can all play a role, sometimes a very big role, in the life of men; but nothing, ever, can have any historical importance compared to the development of a new religion, or to the collapse of an existing one. To the acquaintances I still sometimes came across at the bar of the Lutétia, I said that
I was writing;
they probably supposed I was writing a novel, and expressed some surprise, I had always had a reputation for being a comedian rather than a “literary figure”; if they had only known, I said to myself sometimes, if they had only known that this was not a simple work of fiction, but that I was trying to record one of the most important events in human history; if they had only known, I tell myself now, they would not even have been especially impressed. They were, for all their fame, used to a dreary and scarcely changing life, they were used to having little interest in real existence, preferring instead of the real, a commentary on it; I understood them, I had been in the same boat—and I was still there to some extent, maybe even more than they were. Not once, since the “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure” campaign had been launched had I thought of personally taking advantage of the sexual services of the prophet’s fiancées; nor had I begged a female member for the alms of a blow job or a simple hand job, which would have easily been accorded to me. I always had Esther in my head, in my body, everywhere. I said this one day to Vincent, it was late morning, a very beautiful early winter morning, through the office window I was looking at the trees in the public park: for me it was a “Your Woman Awaits You” campaign that might have saved me, but things were not turning out this way in the slightest. He looked at me with sadness, he felt sorry for me, he must have had no trouble understanding me, he must have remembered perfectly those still-recent moments when his love for Susan had appeared hopeless. I waved my hand wearily, singing: “Lala-la…” I pulled a grimace, which didn’t completely come off as humorous; then, like Zarathustra beginning his descent, I made my way to the staff canteen.

Whatever, I was present at the meeting when Knowall announced that, far from being a simple artist’s vision, Vincent’s drawings prefigured the man of the future. For a long time animal nutrition had seemed to him to be a primitive system, of mediocre energy efficiency, producing a clearly excessive quantity of waste, waste that not only had to be evacuated, but which in the process provoked a far from negligible wear and tear of the organism. For a long time he had been thinking of equipping the new human animal with that photosynthetic system that, by some curiosity of evolution, was the property of vegetables. The direct use of solar energy was obviously a more robust, efficient, and reliable system—as shown by the practically limitless life span of plants. What’s more, the addition of autotrophic functions to the human cell was far from being as complex an operation as some might imagine; his teams had already been working on the question for some time, and the number of genes involved proved to be astonishingly low. The human being thus transformed would subsist, solar energy aside, on water and a small quantity of mineral salts; the digestive system, just like the excretory system, could disappear—any excess minerals would be easily eliminated, with water, by means of sweat.

Vincent, used to only following Knowall’s explanations at some distance, nodded mechanically, and Cop was thinking of something else: it was therefore in this way, in a few minutes, and on the basis of a hasty artist’s sketch, that a decision was made on the Standard Genetic Rectification that would be applied, uniformly, to all the units of DNA destined to be called back to life, and to mark a definitive break between the neohumans and their ancestors. The rest of the genetic code remained unchanged; we were dealing with nothing less than a new species and even, strictly speaking, a new kingdom.

Daniel25, 11

IT IS IRONIC TO THINK
that the SGR, conceived at the outset for reasons of purely aesthetic propriety, is what enabled the neohumans to survive, without any great difficulty, the climatic catastrophes that were to follow and that no one at the time could have predicted, while the humans of the former race would be almost completely decimated.

On this crucial point, the life story of Daniel1, once again, is totally corroborated by those of Vincent1, Slotan1, and Jérôme1, even if they attribute to the event unequal levels of importance. Whereas Vincent1 only alludes to it in a brief paragraph, and Jérôme1 almost completely passes over it, Slotan1, however, devotes tens of pages to the idea of the SGR and the research that would, a few months later, enable its operational realization. Generally speaking, the life story of Daniel1 is often considered by commentators to be central and canonical. While Vincent1 often places excessive emphasis on the aesthetic meaning of the rituals, while Slotan1 devotes himself almost exclusively to the evocation of his scientific research, and Jérôme1 to questions of discipline and material organization, Daniel1 is the only one who gives us a complete, if slightly detached, description of the birth of the Elohimite Church; while the others, caught up in everyday business, only thought of solutions to the practical problems they had to face, he often seems to be the only one to have taken a small step back, and to have really understood the importance of what was happening before his eyes.