The Elementary Particles (10 page)

On 14 December 1967 the government passed the Neuwirth Act on contraception at its first reading. Although not yet paid for by social security, the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this which offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professionals, artists and senior management—and some small businessmen. It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.

The steering committee of the Lieu du Changement regularly held dinner dances. For a place open to new spiritual ideas, this might seem surprising, but it only confirmed the dinner dance as the inevitable means of sexual selection in noncommunist societies. As Frédéric Le Dantec pointed out, primitive societies also centered their feasts on dancing and the pursuit of collective trance.

A bar and a sound system were installed on the lawn, and people gyrated in the moonlight into the small hours. For Bruno, this was a second chance. Actually, the teenagers at the camp rarely attended these occasions, preferring to go to local clubs (Bilboquet, Dynasty, 2001 and, maybe, Pirates) which hosted theme nights with foam parties, male strip shows and porn stars. A handful of needle-dick dreamers stayed behind, spending their evenings in a tent gently strumming an out-of-tune guitar while their peers despised them. Bruno felt a keen sympathy for these young men. But in the absence of girls he could never hope to attract, he would happily—to quote a reader of
Newlook
he’d met in a café in Angers—“stick his knob in any available hole.” It was in this hope that he left his tent at eleven, wearing white trousers and a blue polo shirt, and headed down to the source of the commotion.

Glancing around the mass of dancers, he spotted Karim, who had abandoned the Catholic in favor of a ravishing Rosicrucian. She and her husband, both tall, staid and slim, had arrived that afternoon; they seemed to be from Alsace. The husband had taken four hours to work out the arrangement of the numerous flaps and guylines of their convoluted tent. Earlier, he had taken Bruno aside and initiated him into the hidden mysteries of the Rosy Cross. Eyes glittering behind his small, round glasses, he looked every inch a zealot; Bruno listened without hearing. According to him, the fellowship of the Rosy Cross had been founded in Germany, inspired by the work of the alchemists, but was intrinsically linked to Rhenish mysticism. It was obviously a cabal of queers and Nazis. You can stick your cross up your ass, Bruno thought, distractedly watching that of the man’s beautiful wife out of the corner of his eye as she kneeled by the gas stove—not to mention the rose, he added as she stood up, flashing her breasts, and called to her husband to come change the baby.

In any case, now she was dancing with Karim. They made a strange couple: the stocky, cunning little man a good fifteen centimeters shorter than this big Germanic beanpole. He chatted and smiled as they danced, as though he had forgotten why he had picked her up in the first place. Nevertheless, things seemed to be progressing. She smiled back and stared at him, clearly fascinated; once she even laughed out loud. On the far side of the lawn, her husband was explaining the origins of the Rosicrucian fellowship in Lower Saxony in 1530 to another potential convert. At regular intervals his three-year-old son, a blonde-haired, snot-nosed brat, screamed that he wanted to be put to bed. Once again Bruno was faced with a slice of
real life
. He overheard two skinny, priestly individuals commenting on the rake’s progress. “He’s very expressive, very emotional, you see . . .” said one. “On paper, he’s out of his league: he’s not good-looking, he’s got a beer belly and he’s a lot shorter than she is. But he’s a charming bastard, and that makes all the difference.” The other nodded, seeming to toy mournfully with an imaginary rosary. As he finished his vodka and orange juice, Bruno noticed that Karim had managed to inveigle the Rosicrucian onto a grass bank. One arm around her shoulders, talking all the while, he slipped his other hand up her dress. She’s opened her legs for him, the Nazi slut, Bruno thought as he walked away from the dancers. Just as he stepped out of the circle of light, he had a vision of the Catholic girl having her ass felt up by someone who looked like a ski instructor. He still had some cans of ravioli in his tent.

Before heading back, in an act of pure desperation he phoned to check his answering machine. There was one message: “You’re probably on vacation,” said Michel’s voice calmly. “Call me when you get back. I’m on vacation, too—indefinitely.”

4

Walking, he reaches the border. A flock of vultures circle over something—probably a corpse. The muscles in his thighs respond to the irregularities of the path. The hills are shrouded in dry grass, stretching out east to the horizon. He has not eaten since the night before; he is no longer afraid.

He wakes, fully dressed, lying across his bed. A truck is unloading a shipment outside the delivery entrance of Monoprix. It is a little after seven o’clock.

For years, Michel had lived a purely intellectual existence. The world of human emotions was not his field; he knows little about it. Nowadays life can be organized with minute precision; supermarket cashiers respond to an imperceptible nod. There has been much coming and going in the ten years he has lived here; from time to time, a couple formed and he watched as the new lover moved in. Friends carrying boxes and lamps up the stairs. They were young and sometimes he heard them laugh. Often (but not always), when they split up the ex-lovers moved out at the same time, leaving an empty apartment. What conclusions could he draw from such things? How should he interpret these comings and goings? It was puzzling.

He himself wanted nothing more than to love. He asked for nothing; nothing in particular, anyway. Life should be simple, Michel thought, something that could be lived as a collection of small, endlessly repeated rituals. Perhaps somewhat empty rituals, but they gave you something to believe in. A life without risk, without drama. But life was not like that. Sometimes he went out and watched the teenagers and the buildings. One thing seemed clear to him: no one knew how to live anymore. Perhaps that was an exaggeration: some people seemed motivated, passionate about some cause, and their lives seemed to have more weight. Hence ACT UP activists thought it was important to run ads which others thought pornographic, depicting homosexual practices in close-up. Their lives seemed busier and more fulfilled, full of exciting incident. They had multiple partners, fucked each other in back rooms; sometimes the condom split or slipped off and they died of AIDS. Even then their deaths seemed radical, dignified. Television gave lessons in dignity, especially TF1. As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.

Despite the constant and pure pleasures of television, he thought it best to go out. In any case, he had to do his shopping. The only conclusion he could draw was that without points of reference, a man melts away.

On the morning of 9 July (the Feast of Saint Amandine) he noticed that ring binders, exercise books and pencil cases were already on display in Monoprix. He found the advertising slogan—“Back to school—no headaches!”—less than persuasive. What was education, what was knowledge, after all, if not one long headache?

The following morning he found the autumn/winter catalogue from 3 Suisses in his mailbox. The massive hardcover was not addressed—had it been hand delivered? As a long-standing subscriber to mail-order catalogues, he was used to the little extras that came with being a loyal customer. Time rolled on. Despite the glorious summer weather, marketing campaigns were already looking to the autumn, though July had barely begun.

As a young man, Michel had read some absurdist literature, focusing on existentialist despair and the motionless emptiness of days; he found such extremes of opinion only half-convincing. At the time he was seeing a lot of Bruno, who dreamed about becoming a writer, covering pages and pages with ink and masturbating continually; he introduced Michel to Samuel Beckett. Presumably he was what they called a
great writer,
though Michel had never managed to finish a single one of his books. That was in the late 1970s; he and Bruno were in their twenties and already felt old. As time went on they would feel older still, and be ashamed by the fact. Their generation was about to make a dramatic shift—substituting the tragedy of death with the more general humiliation of old age. Twenty years later, Bruno had never seriously thought about death and was beginning to wonder if he ever would. He wanted to live to the end, to be a part of life, to fight against physical infirmity and petty everyday misfortunes. With his last breath he would still plead for a postponement, to live a little longer. In particular, he would continue his quest for the ultimate pleasure to the end; one last indulgence. However transitory, a good blow-job was a real pleasure and that—Michel thought as he flicked through the lingerie section (“Sensual Garters!”) of his catalogue—was something no one could deny.

He himself masturbated rarely; his fantasies as a young research student, whether inspired by the Minitel or by actual women (usually reps from large pharmaceutical companies), had gradually faded. Now he calmly managed the slow decline of his virility by occasionally jerking off, for which his 3 Suisses catalogue, supplemented now and then by a risqué CD-ROM (79FF), proved more than sufficient. Michel knew that Bruno, by contrast, was frittering away his prime chasing neurotic Lolitas with big breasts, round buttocks and eager mouths; thank God he was a civil servant. It was not absurd, Bruno’s world; it was a melodrama where the characters were babes and dogs, cool guys and losers. Michel, on the other hand, lived in a world where everything was precisely regulated, a world without history where all the seasons were commercial ones: the French Open, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, the semiannual arrival of the 3 Suisses catalogue. If he were homosexual, he would be able to take part in the AIDS walk or Gay Pride. If he were a libertine, he could look forward to the Salon de l’Érotisme. If he were a sportsman, he would be in the Pyrenees right now, watching a leg in the Tour de France. Though an undiscriminating shopper, he was delighted when his local Monoprix had an “Italian Fortnight.” This life was so well organized, on such a human scale; happiness could be found in this; had he wanted for more, he wouldn’t have known where to find it.

On the morning of 15 July he took a Christian tract out of the trash can in the hall. It included several life stories, each converging toward an identical happy ending: an encounter with the risen Christ. For some time he had followed the story of a young woman (“Isabelle was in a state of shock—her university career was on the line”), though he had to admit that Pavel’s experience was closer to his own (“As an officer in the Czech army, commanding an antiaircraft station was the pinnacle of Pavel’s military career”). He had no difficulty identifying with Pavel in the next paragraph: “As a technical expert, who had studied at a distinguished academy, Pavel should have been in love with life. Instead, he was depressed, constantly searching for a reason to live.”

The 3 Suisses catalogue, on the other hand, offered a more thoughtful, historically informed insight into Europe’s current malaise. The impression of a coming mutation in society in its opening pages is finally given precise formulation on page 17. Michel considered for hours the lines that summed up the theme of the collection: “Optimism, generosity, complicity and harmony make the world go round. THE FUTURE IS FEMALE.”

On the eight o’clock news, Bruno Masure announced that an American study had detected signs of fossil life on Mars. The fossils were of bacterial organisms, probably methane-based archaea. It seemed that biological macromolecules had succeeded in forming on earth’s closest neighbor, giving rise to nebulous self-replicating life-forms consisting of a nucleus and an ill-defined membrane. It had all ended there, however, presumably the result of climatic changes that made reproduction increasingly difficult to sustain, until eventually it ceased entirely. The story of life on Mars was a modest one. However (and Bruno Masure did not seem to understand this), this brief, feeble misfire brutally refuted all the mythological and religious constructs in which the human race delights. There had been no unique, wondrous act of creation; no chosen people; no chosen species or planet; simply a series of tentative attempts, flawed for the most part, scattered across the universe. It was all so distressingly banal. The DNA of the Martian bacteria seemed identical to that of terrestrial bacteria. More than anything this saddened him, in itself a sign of depression. In normal circumstances a scientist, any scientist in good form, would be excited by the similarities, and see in them the promise of a unifying synthesis. If DNA was everywhere the same, there must be reasons—profound reasons—linked to the molecular structure of peptides, or perhaps to the topological conditions of asexual reproduction. And it must be possible to discover these reasons. Had he been younger, such a prospect would have filled him with enthusiasm.

When he first met Desplechin in 1982, Djerzinski was finishing his doctoral thesis at the University of Orsay. As part of his studies he took part in Alain Aspect’s groundbreaking experiments, which showed that the behavior of photons emitted in succession from a single calcium atom was inseparable from the others. Michel was the youngest researcher on the team.

Aspect’s experiments—precise, rigorous and perfectly documented—were to have profound repercussions in the scientific community. The results, it was acknowledged, were the first clear-cut refutation of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen’s objections when they claimed in 1935 that “quantum theory is incomplete.” Here was a clear violation of Bell’s inequalities—derived from Einstein’s hypotheses—since the results tallied perfectly with quantum predictions. This meant that only two hypotheses were possible. Either the hidden properties which governed the behavior of subatomic particles were nonlocal—meaning they could instantaneously influence one another at an arbitrary distance—or else the very notion of particles having intrinsic properties in the absence of observation had to be abandoned. The latter opened up a deep ontological void—unless one adopted a radical positivism and contented oneself with developing a mathematical formalism which predicted the observable and gave up on any idea of an underlying reality. Naturally, it was this last option which won over the majority of researchers.

The first paper on Aspect’s experiments—“Experimental Realization of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen
Gedankexperiment
: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities”—was published in issue 48 of the
Physical Review
. Djerzinski was credited as cowriter of the article. A few days later he had a visit from Desplechin. At forty-three, he was director of the Institute of Molecular Biology at Gif-sur-Yvette. He was increasingly aware that something fundamental was missing in their analysis of gene mutations; and that this was probably related to phenomena at the atomic level.

Their first interview took place in Michel’s dorm room. Desplechin was unsurprised by the dreary austerity of the surroundings: they were more or less what he expected. Their conversation continued late into the night. Desplechin pointed out that it was the existence of a finite list of chemical elements which had prompted Niels Bohr’s first thoughts on the subject in the 1910s. A planetary theory of the atom based on gravitational and electromagnetic fields should, in principle, led to an infinite number of solutions, and an infinite number of possible chemical elements. The universe, however, was made up of about a hundred elements; a list which was fixed and stable. It was this situation, profoundly anomalous according to Maxwell’s equations and the classical laws of electromagnetics, that led to the development of quantum mechanics. In Desplechin’s opinion, contemporary biology was now in a similar position. The existence of identical macromolecules and immutable cellular ultrastructures, which had remained consistent throughout evolutionary history, could not be explained by the laws of classical chemistry. In some way as yet impossible to determine, quantum theory must directly impact on biological events. This would create an entirely new field of research.

That first evening, Desplechin was struck by his young interlocutor’s calm open-mindedness. He invited Djerzinski to dinner at his home on the rue de l’École-Polytechnique the following Saturday, where one of his colleagues—a biochemist who had published extensively on RNA transcriptases—would join them.

When he arrived at Desplechin’s apartment, Michel felt as though he had walked onto a film set. Before this he had scarcely imagined such a milieu: leisure, cultivated with a refined and confident sense of taste. Walnut furniture, Spanish tile, kilims, Afghan rugs, reproductions of Matisse . . . Now he could imagine the rest—the house in Brittany, maybe a small farm in the Luberon. And a boxed set of Bartók quintets, I bet, he thought fleetingly as he began to eat. They had champagne with dinner; dessert was a charlotte of red fruits accompanied by an exceptional semi-dry rosé. It was at this point that Desplechin outlined his project. He could arrange for a post to be created in his department at Gif on a contractual basis. Michel would need to acquire the basic concepts of biochemistry to complement his studies, but that was easily done. Meanwhile, Desplechin would supervise his dissertation personally. Once that was completed, Michel could apply for a permanent post.

Michel glanced at the small Khmer statue on the mantelpiece; the clean lines of the figure of the Buddha touching the ground, asking Nature to witness his resolve to reach enlightenment. Michel cleared his throat and accepted.

In the decade that followed, remarkable technical advances and the use of radioactive markers made it possible to amass a substantial number of results. Though as far as the theoretical questions Desplechin had raised at their first meeting were concerned, thought Djerzinski, there had been zero progress.

In the early hours of the morning, he found himself preoccupied with the Martian bacteria. He found a dozen messages on the Internet, mostly from American universities. Proportions of adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine had been found to be typical. Randomly, he clicked on the Ann Arbor site where he found a message about aging. Alicia Marcia-Coelho had found evidence to suggest that DNA coding sequences were lost during the repeated subdivision of fibroblasts from nonstriated muscles; this was hardly a surprise. Michel knew Alicia—in fact it was she who had relieved him of his virginity ten years before, after a particularly drunken dinner at a genetics seminar in Baltimore. She had been so drunk that she couldn’t help him take off her bra. It had been a difficult moment, painful even. She had just split up with her husband, she confided as Michel struggled with the clasps. After that, everything went normally; he was surprised to discover that he could get a hard-on and even ejaculate inside the researcher’s vagina without feeling the slightest pleasure.