The Possibility of an Island (6 page)

In the public arena, success was a little slower to arrive, until, that is, Bernard Kouchner declared himself “personally sickened” by the show, which enabled me to sell out the remaining weeks. On Isabelle’s advice, I wrote a little response to him in the “Right to Reply” section of
Libération,
which I entitled “Thanks, Bernard.” So things were going well, really well, which put me in a state that was all the more curious, because I was sick of it all, and, truth be told, only a hairsbreadth away from giving up; if things had turned bad, I believe I would have taken off without a word. My attraction to film as a medium—i.e., a dead medium, as opposed to what they pompously called at the time a
living spectacle
—had undoubtedly been the first sign in me of a disinterest in, even a disgust for, the general public—and probably for mankind in general. I was working at that time on my sketches with a small video camera, fixed on a tripod and linked to a monitor on which I could control in real time my intonations, funny expressions, and gestures. I had always had a simple principle: if I burst out laughing at a given moment, it was this moment that had a good chance of making the audience laugh as well. Little by little, as I watched the cassettes, I became aware that I was suffering from a deeper and deeper malaise, sometimes bordering on nausea. Two weeks before the premiere, the reason for this malaise became clear to me: what I found more and more unbearable wasn’t even my face, nor was it the repetitive and predictable nature of certain standard impersonations that I was obliged to do: what I could no longer stand was
laughter,
laughter in itself, that sudden and violent distortion of the features that deforms the human face and strips it instantly of all dignity. If man laughs, if he is the only one, in the animal kingdom, to exhibit this atrocious facial deformation, it is also the case that he is the only one, if you disregard the natural self-centeredness of animals, to have attained the supreme and infernal stage of
cruelty.

The three-week run was a permanent calvary; for the first time, I truly experienced those notorious, atrocious
tears of the clown;
for the first time, I truly understood mankind. I had dismantled the cogs in the machine, and I knew how to make it work, whenever I wanted. Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire sheet of Xanax. Every time the audience laughed (and I could predict it, I knew how to dose my effects, I was a consummate professional), I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those
hideous
faces those, hundreds of faces moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.

Daniel24, 4

THIS PASSAGE
from the narration by Daniel1 is undoubtedly, for us, one of the most difficult to understand. The videocassettes he alludes to have been retranscribed and annexed to his life story. I have had the opportunity to consult these documents. Being genetically descended from Daniel1, I have, of course, the same features, the same face: most of our gestures and expressions, even, are similar (although my own, living as I do in a nonsocial environment, are naturally more limited); but that sudden expressive distortion, accompanied by the characteristic chuckles, which he called
laughter,
is impossible for me to imitate; I cannot even imagine its mechanism.

The notes made by my predecessors from Daniel2 to Daniel23 generally indicate the same incomprehension. Daniel2 and Daniel3 assert that they are still able to reproduce the phenomenon, under the influence of certain liqueurs; but for Daniel4, already, it is an inaccessible reality. Several studies have been done on the disappearance of laughter among the neohumans; all concur that it happened quickly.

A similar, though slower, evolution can be observed for
tears,
another characteristic trait of the human species. Daniel9 notes that he cried, on a very precise occasion (the accidental death of his dog Fox, electrocuted by the protective fence); but from Daniel10 onward there is no more mention of it. Just as laughter is rightly considered by Daniel1 to be symptomatic of human cruelty, tears seem in this species to be associated with compassion. “We never cry for ourselves alone,” notes an anonymous human author somewhere. These two emotions, cruelty and compassion, evidently no longer hold much meaning in the conditions of absolute solitude in which we lead our lives. Some of my predecessors, like Daniel13, display in their commentary a strange nostalgia for this double loss; then this nostalgia itself disappears, giving way to a more and more fleeting curiosity; one can now, as all my contacts on the network corroborate, consider it practically extinct.

Daniel1, 5

I relaxed by doing a bit of hyperventilation; and yet, Barnaby, I could never stop dreaming of the great mercury lakes on Saturn.

—Captain Clark

ISABELLE WORKED OUT
her three months’ notice, and her last issue of
Lolita
appeared in December. A small cocktail party was organized in the magazine offices. The atmosphere was a little tense, insofar as all the guests were asking themselves the same question without being able to say it out loud: Who was going to replace her as editor-in-chief? Lajoinie appeared for a quarter of an hour, ate three blinis, and gave out no useful information.

We left for Andalusia on Christmas Eve; then followed three strange months, spent in almost complete solitude. Our new residence was sited just south of San José, near Playa de Monsul. My agent thought this period of isolation was a good thing; it was good, he said, that I step back a little, in order to stoke up the curiosity of the public; I didn’t know how to confess to him that I intended to drop it all.

He was about the only one who knew my telephone number; I couldn’t say that I had made many friends during my years of success; I had, on the other hand, lost a lot of them. The only thing that can rid you of your last illusions about mankind is to earn a large sum of money very quickly; then you see them emerge, the hypocritical vultures. For your eyes to be opened thus, it is essential to
earn
this sum of money: the truly rich, those who are born rich, and have never breathed any atmosphere other than wealth, seem inoculated against the phenomenon, as if they have inherited with their wealth a sort of unconscious, unthinking cynicism, which makes them aware from the outset that they will have to encounter people whose only aim is to wrest their money from them, by any conceivable means; they behave, therefore, with prudence, and generally keep their capital intact. For those who are born poor, the situation is much more dangerous; speaking for myself, I was enough of a cynical bastard to understand the situation, I had succeeded in avoiding most of the traps; but as for friends, no, I no longer had any. The people I associated with in my youth were for the most part actors: future failed actors; but I don’t think the situation would have been different in another milieu. Isabelle didn’t have friends either, and, especially in the final years, she had been surrounded only by people who dreamed of taking her place. Thus we never had anyone to invite round to our sumptuous residence; no one with whom to share a glass of rioja while watching the stars.

What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It’s precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said. Isabelle was something of a hypochondriac, and she’d just turned forty; but prenatal examinations had made a lot of progress, and I felt that the problem wasn’t one of age; the problem was me. There was not only in me that legitimate disgust that seizes any normal man at the sight of a
baby;
there was not only that solid conviction that a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, who combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance. There was also, more deeply, a horror, an authentic horror at the unending calvary that is man’s existence. If the human infant, alone in the animal kingdom, immediately manifests its presence in the world through incessant screams of pain, it is, of course, because it suffers, and suffers intolerably. Perhaps it’s the loss of fur, which makes the skin so sensitive to variations in temperature, without really guarding against attacks by parasites; perhaps it’s an abnormal sensitivity of the nervous system, some kind of design flaw. To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual
cannot
be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people’s existence as intolerable as his own—his first victims generally being his parents.

Armed with these scarcely humanist convictions, I laid down the foundations of a script, with the working title “The Social Security Deficit,” which addressed the main elements of the issue. The first fifteen minutes of the film consisted of the unremitting explosion of babies’ skulls under the impact of shots from a high-caliber revolver—I had envisaged it in slow motion, then with slight accelerations—anyway, a whole choreography of brains, in the style of John Woo; then, things calmed down a little. The investigation, led by a police inspector with a good sense of humor, but rather conventional methods—I was thinking of Jamel Debbouze again—unearthed the existence of a network of child killers, brilliantly organized and inspired by ideas rooted in Deep Ecology. The MED (Movement for the Extermination of Dwarves) called for the disappearance of the human race, which it judged irredeemably harmful to the balance of the biosphere, and its replacement by a species of bears of superior intelligence—research had been done in the meantime to develop the intelligence of bears, and notably to enable them to speak (I thought of Gérard Depardieu in the role of the chief of the bears).

Despite the convincing casting, and despite also my notoriety, the project never saw the light of day; a Korean producer declared an interest, but proved incapable of securing the necessary finances. This uncommon failure could have awoken the sleeping moralist in me (peacefully asleep, in general): if there was a failure, and the project was rejected, it was because there still existed
taboos
(in this case the killing of children), and perhaps, for this reason, all was not lost forever. The thinking man, however, was not slow to take over from the moralist: if there was a taboo, that meant there was, in fact, a
problem;
it was during those same years that there appeared in Florida the first “child-free zones,” high-quality residences for guiltless thirtysomethings who confessed frankly that they could no longer stand the screams, dribbles, excrement, and other environmental inconveniences that usually accompany
little brats.
Entry to the residences was therefore, quite simply, forbidden to children younger than thirteen; hatches were installed, like those in fast-food restaurants, to enable contact with families.

An important breakthrough had been made: for several decades, the depopulation of the West (which in fact was not specific to the West; the same phenomenon could be seen in any country or culture once a certain level of economic development was reached) had been the subject of vaguely hypocritical and suspiciously unanimous lamentation. For the first time, young, educated people, in a good position on the socioeconomic scale, declared publicly that they
did not want
children, that they felt no desire to put up with the bother and expense associated with bringing up offspring. Such a casual attitude, obviously, could only inspire imitation.

Daniel24, 5

FAMILIAR WITH THE SUFFERING
of man, I contribute to the decoupling, I accomplish the return to calm. When I kill a savage who, more audacious than the others, lingers too long at the protective fence—it is usually a female, with prematurely sagging breasts, brandishing her baby like a supplication—I have the sensation of accomplishing a necessary and legitimate act. The similarity of our faces—all the more striking as the majority of those who wander in the region are of Spanish or North African origin—is for me the sure sign of their death sentence. The human species will disappear, it must disappear so that the words of the Supreme Sister can be accomplished.

The climate is mild in the north of Almería, the great predators are rare; it is no doubt for these reasons that the density of savages remains high, albeit in constant decline—a few years ago I even saw, not without horror, a herd of some hundred individuals. My correspondents note the contrary, almost everywhere across the globe: in very general terms, the savages are on the road to extinction; in numerous sites, their presence has not been signaled for several centuries; some of us have even come to consider their existence a myth.

There is no strict limit to the domain of the intermediaries, but there are some certainties. I am The Door. I am The Door, and The Guardian of The Door. The successor will come; he must come. I maintain the presence, to make possible the coming of the Future Ones.

Daniel1, 6

There are excellent toys for dogs.

—Patricia Dürst-Benning

LIVING TOGETHER ALONE
is hell between consenting adults. In the life of a couple, most often there will be at the beginning certain details, certain discordances about which it is decided to say nothing, in the enthusiastic certainty that love will end up solving all problems. These problems grow little by little, silently, before exploding a few years later and destroying all possibility of living together. From the beginning, Isabelle had preferred that I take her from behind; every time I tried another approach she went along with it at first, then turned around, as if in spite of herself, with an uneasy half-laugh. During all those years I had attributed this preference to a peculiarity of her anatomy, an inclination of the vagina or something along those lines, one of those things that men can never, despite all their goodwill, be exactly conscious of. Six weeks after our arrival, while I was making love to her (I usually penetrated her from behind, but there was a big mirror in our bedroom), I noticed that as she approached her climax she closed her eyes, and only reopened them a long time afterward, once the act was finished.