The Possibility of an Island (48 page)

I had not found deliverance.

Later I walked, making my feet follow the movement of the waves. I walked for whole days, without feeling any fatigue, and at night I was rocked by a gentle surf. On the third day I discerned alleys of black stone that sank into the sea and disappeared into the distance. Were they a passage, a human or neohuman construction? It was of little importance to me now, the idea of going down them left me very quickly.

At the same instant, without anything that could have allowed me to predict it, two masses of cloud parted, and a ray of light sparkled on the surface of the water. Fleetingly, I thought of the great sun of the moral law, which, according to the Word, would finally shine on the surface of the world; but it would be a world from which I would be absent, and of which I did not even have the ability to imagine the essence. No neohuman, I now knew, would be able to find a solution for the constituent aporia; those who had tried to, if indeed there were any, had probably already died. As for me, I would continue, as much as was possible, my obscure existence as an improved monkey, and my last regret would be of having caused the death of Fox, the only being worthy of survival I had had the chance to encounter; for his gaze had already contained, occasionally, the spark announcing the coming of the Future Ones.

I had perhaps sixty years left to live; more than twenty thousand days that would be identical. I would avoid thought in the same way I would avoid suffering. The pitfalls of life were far behind me; I had now entered a peaceful space from which only the lethal process would separate me.

I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation. Happiness was not a possible horizon. The world had betrayed. My body belonged to me for only a brief lapse of time; I would never reach the goal I had been set. The future was empty; it was the mountain. My dreams were populated with emotional presences. I was, I was no longer. Life was real.

Also by Michel Houellebecq

FICTION

Platform

The Elementary Particles

Whatever

NONFICTION

H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Translation copyright © 2005 by Gavin Bowd

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in France as
La Possibilité d’une île
by Fayard, Paris, in 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Michel Houellebecq and La Librarie Arthéme Fayard. English translation originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, in 2005. Translation copyright © 2005 by Gavin Bowd.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

An excerpt previously appeared in
Playboy.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Houellebecq, Michel.

[Possibilité d’une île. English]

The possibility of an island / Michel Houellebecq ; translated from the French by Gavin Bowd.—1st American ed.

    p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-307-26532-6

eISBN-10: 0-307-26532-3

I. Bowd, Gavin, 1966–II. Title.

PQ2668.077P6713 2006

843'.914—dc22                    2005054527

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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