The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd Read Free Book Online

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,