The Possibility of an Island (37 page)

This state of things gives me, as it did all my predecessors in the Daniel series, a particular responsibility; my commentary is not and cannot be just an ordinary commentary, since it touches so closely upon the circumstances of the creation of our species, and its system of values. Its central character is further increased by the fact that my distant ancestor was, in the mind of Vincent1 and no doubt in his own, a typical human being, representative of the species, a
human being among so many others.

According to the Supreme Sister, jealousy, desire, and the appetite for procreation share the same origin, which is the suffering of being. It is the suffering of being that makes us seek out the other, as a palliative; we must go beyond this stage to reach the state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy; where intermediation is nothing more than a game, freely undertaken, and not constitutive of being. We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity.

Daniel1, 23

IT WAS ON CHRISTMAS DAY
, midmorning, that I learned of Isabelle’s suicide. I wasn’t really surprised by it: I sensed, in the space of a few minutes, that a sort of emptiness was settling inside me; but this was a predictable, anticipated emptiness. I had known, since my departure from Biarritz, that she would end up killing herself; I had known it from a look we had exchanged, on that last morning, as I was going out of the door of her kitchen to get into the taxi that would take me to the railway station. I had also suspected that she would wait until the death of her mother in order to care for her right to the end, and not to cause her pain. I also knew that I too, sooner or later, was going to head toward the same kind of solution.

Her mother had died on December 13; Isabelle had bought a plot in the municipal cemetery of Biarritz, and dealt with the funeral; she had made her will and put her affairs in order; then, on the night of December 24, she had injected herself with a massive dose of morphine. Not only had she died painlessly, but she had also probably died joyfully; or, at least, in that state of euphoric relaxation that characterizes the product. That very morning, she had put Fox into a kennel; she hadn’t left any letter for me, thinking no doubt that it was useless, that I wouldn’t understand her well enough; but she had taken the necessary measures to ensure that the dog was passed on to me.

I left a few days later, she had already been cremated; on the morning of December 30, I went to the “quiet room” of the Biarritz cemetery. It was a large round room, with a ceiling made up of a window that bathed the room in soft gray light. The walls were pierced all over with little cavities into which you could slip parallelepipeds of metal containing the ashes of the deceased. Above each niche a label bore the first and second name of the dead person, engraved in slanted script. In the center, a marble table, also round, was surrounded by chairs that were made of glass, or rather transparent plastic. After leading me in, the janitor had placed the box containing Isabelle’s ashes on the table; then he had left me alone. No one else could enter while I was in the room; my presence was signaled by a little red lamp that lit up outside, like those used to indicate action on film sets. I remained in the quiet room, like most people do, for about ten minutes.

I spent a strange New Year’s Eve, alone in my bedroom at the Villa Eugénie, turning over simple, morbid, extremely uncontradictory thoughts. On the morning of January 2, I went to collect Fox. Unfortunately, before I left, I had to return to Isabelle’s apartment to fetch the papers necessary for settling the inheritance. From the moment we arrived at the entrance to the residence, I noticed that Fox was quivering with joyful impatience; he had put on even more weight, Corgis are a race with a tendency toward plumpness, but he ran up to Isabelle’s door, then, breathless, stopped to wait for me as I walked, much more slowly, up the alley of chestnut trees stripped bare by winter. He let out small impatient yaps as I looked for the keys; poor little fellow, I said to myself, poor little fellow. As soon as I opened the door he rushed inside the apartment, quickly made a tour of it, came back, and sent me an inquisitive look. As I looked through Isabelle’s desk, he left again, several times, exploring the rooms one by one, sniffing about everywhere then returning, stopping at the bedroom door and looking at me with a vexed expression. The end of any life amounts more or less to a
tidying up;
you no longer feel the urge to throw yourself into a new project, you are content just to dispatch day-to-day matters. All the things you have never done, as anodyne as preparing a mayonnaise or playing a game of chess, little by little become inaccessible, the desire for any new experience as for any new sensation disappears absolutely. Even so, things were
remarkably
tidy, and it took me only a few minutes to find Isabelle’s will and the deeds to the apartment; I didn’t intend to see the solicitor right away, I told myself I would return to Biarritz later, while knowing that it would be a difficult thing to do, that I would probably not have the courage for it, but that no longer seemed important, nothing seemed very important now. When I opened the envelope, I saw that it would be a futile step; she had left all her estate to the Elohimite Church, and I recognized the standard contract; the legal services would take care of it all.

Fox followed me without difficulty when I left the apartment, probably thinking we were simply going for a walk. In a pet shop near the station, I bought a plastic container in which to transport him during the journey; then I reserved a ticket for the express train from Irún.

The weather was clement in the region of Almería, a curtain of fine rain enveloped the short days, which gave the impression of never truly beginning, and this funereal peace could have suited me, we could have spent whole weeks like this, my old dog and me, lost in thoughts that were no longer really thoughts, but the circumstances unfortunately would not allow this. Work had begun next to my house on the building of new residences, spreading for kilometers around. There were cranes and cement mixers, it had become almost impossible to get to the sea without having to circumnavigate heaps of sand, piles of metal girders, in the midst of bulldozers and trucks that charged without slowing down through the middle of geysers of mud. Little by little I lost the habit of going out, apart from twice a day, to walk Fox, which was no longer really pleasant, he would howl and press against me, terrified by the noise of the trucks. I learned from the newsagent that Hildegarde had died, and that Harry had sold his property so he could end his days in Germany. Little by little I even lost the habit of leaving my bedroom, I spent most of my day in bed, in a state of great mental emptiness, which was nonetheless painful. Occasionally, I thought back to my arrival here, with Isabelle, a few years before; I remembered that she had taken pleasure in decorating, and especially in trying to grow flowers and create a garden; we had had, all things considered, a few moments of happiness. I thought back as well to our last moment of sexual union, the night on the dunes, after our visit to Harry’s; but the dunes were no longer there, bulldozers had leveled the area: it was now a muddy surface, surrounded by fences. I was going to sell as well, I had no reason to stay there; I made contact with a real estate agent, who informed me that this time the price of land had really increased, and that I could expect to make a considerable profit; I didn’t really know in what state I’d die, but in any case I’d die rich. I asked him to try and hurry the sale even if it meant not receiving as high an offer as he hoped, every day the place became a little more unbearable. I was under the impression that the workers not only had no sympathy for me, but that they were frankly hostile, and deliberately brushed passed me when driving their enormous trucks, spattering me with mud and terrorizing Fox. This impression was no doubt justified; I was a foreigner, a man from the North, and, what’s more, they knew I was richer, much richer, than they were; they felt a veiled, animal hatred toward me, made all the stronger because it was powerless, the social system was there to protect people like me, and the social system was solid, the Guardia Civil were only a few kilometers away and would patrol more and more often, Spain had just voted for a socialist government that was less open than others to corruption, less linked to the local mafias, and which firmly resolved to protect the cultivated, well-off class that made up most of its electorate. I had never felt much sympathy for the poor, and now that my life was fucked I had less than ever; the superiority my cash gave me over them might even have amounted to a slight consolation: I might have looked at them with contempt as they shoveled their heaps of gravel, backs bent with effort, while they unloaded their cargoes of beams and bricks; I might have considered with irony their lined hands, their muscles, the calendars of naked women that decorated their building-site vehicles. These minimal satisfactions, I knew, would not prevent me envying their untroubled, simplistic virility; their youth, also, the brutal evidence of their proletarian, animal youth.

Daniel25, 12

THIS MORNING, JUST BEFORE DAWN
, I received the following message from Marie23:

The burdened membranes

Of our waking dreams

Have the muffled charm

Of sunless days.

399, 2347, 3268, 3846. Displayed on the screen was the image of a vast living room with white walls, furnished with low white leather divans; the carpet, too, was white. Through the bay window, you could make out the tower of the Chrysler Building—I had had the chance to see it in an ancient reproduction before. After a few seconds, a relatively young female neohuman, twenty-five at most, entered the camera’s field to position herself in front of the lens. The hair of her head and pubis was curly, thick and black; her harmonious body, with its wide hips and round breasts, gave a strong impression of solidity and energy; physically, she looked like I had imagined. A message scrolled past rapidly, superimposed on the image:

And the sea that suffocates me, and the sand,

The procession of each successive moment

Like birds soaring gently over New York,

Like great birds in inexorable flight.

Let’s go! It’s high time we broke the shell

And went toward the sparkling sea

On new paths our feet will recognize,

That we take together, unsure of weakness.

The existence of defections among the neohumans is not absolutely a secret; even if the subject is not really mentioned, certain allusions and rumors have come to light here and there. No measures are taken against deserters, nothing is done to trace them; the station they occupied is simply and definitively closed down by a team from the Central City; the lineage they represented is declared defunct.

If Marie23 had decided to abandon her post to rejoin a community of savages, I knew that nothing I could say would make her change her mind. For a few minutes, she walked up and down the room; she seemed prey to a restless excitement, and several times almost moved out of the camera’s field of vision. “I don’t know exactly what awaits me,” she said finally, turning toward the lens, “but I know that I need to live more. I have taken some time to make my decision, I have tried to match up all the available information. I have spoken a lot about it with Esther31, who also lives in the ruins of New York; we have even met physically, on two occasions. It’s not impossible; there is a big mental strain at the beginning, it’s not easy to leave the limits of the station, you feel enormously worried and distressed; but it’s not impossible…”

I digested the information, and showed by a slight nod that I had understood. “She is, in fact, a descendant of the same Esther your ancestor knew,” she went on. “I had thought for a moment that she was going to agree to accompany me; finally, she gave up on the idea, at least for the moment, but I have the impression that she, too, isn’t satisfied with our way of life. We spoke about you, several times; I think that she would be happy to enter a phase of intermediation.”