The Elementary Particles (6 page)

“Griffiths’s consistent-history approach was introduced in 1984 to create coherent narratives from quantum information. A Griffiths’s history is constructed from a succession of more or less random quantum measurements taken at different moments. Each measurement defines a specific physical mass at a precise moment with reference to a specific set of values. As an example, in a time
t
₁
an electron moves at a certain speed approximately determined depending on the method of measurement. At a time
t
₂
it is situated at a certain point in space. At a time
t
₃
, it has a certain spin value. From this collection of measurements it is possible to construct a
history
which is logically consistent. It cannot be said to be
true;
simply that it can be sustained without contradiction. Under a given set of experimental conditions, a finite number of possible histories can be recreated using Griffiths’s method; these are called Griffiths’s Consistent Histories. In these, the world behaves as though composed of separate objects, each having fixed, intrinsic properties. However, the number of consistent histories that can be created from a single set of data is generally greater than one. As a being you are self-aware, and this consciousness allows you to hypothesize that the story you’ve created from a given set of memories is a
consistent history,
justified by a single narrative voice. As a unique individual, having existed for a particular period and been subjected to an ontology of objects and properties, you can assert this with absolute certainty, and so automatically assume that it is a Griffiths’s history. You make this hypothesis about real life, rather than about the domain of dreams.”

“I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion,” said Bruno quietly, “but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one.” Michel, who knew nothing about Buddhism, couldn’t answer. It was not an easy conversation; they saw each other twice a year at most. In September 1973 they had both started in the
première C,
and for two years they took the same math and physics classes. Michel was far ahead of the rest of his class. Human reality, he was beginning to realize, was a series of disappointments, bitterness and pain. He found in mathematics a happiness both serene and intense. Moving through the half-light, he would suddenly find a way through—with some formula, some audacious factorization—and be transported to a plane of luminous serenity. The first equation in any proof was the most poignant, because the truth fluttering in the distance was still precarious; the last was the most thrilling, the most joyful.

That same year Annabelle entered the
seconde
at the Lycée de Meaux. The three spent their afternoons together after class, before Bruno headed back to the school, Michel and Annabelle to the train station. Then events took a sad, strange turn. At the beginning of 1974 Michel wandered into Hilbert spaces; launched himself into the theory of measurements, discovered the integrals of Riemann, Lebesgue and Stieltjes. At the same time Bruno was reading Kafka and masturbating on the commuter train. One afternoon in May he had the pleasure of letting his towel fall open and flashing his cock at a couple of twelve-year-old girls at the new swimming pool at La Chapelle-sur-Crécy. The pleasure was heightened as he watched them elbow one another, clearly interested in the show. He caught the eye of one of them—a short brunette with glasses—and held it for a long time. Though he was too miserable and frustrated to be especially interested in the psychology of others, Bruno realized nonetheless that his half brother’s situation was worse than his own. They often went to the café together; Michel would wear anoraks and caps that made him look ridiculous, he was hopeless at table soccer, and Bruno did all the talking. Michel barely moved, barely said a word; he simply stared at Annabelle, his gaze attentive but lifeless. Annabelle did not give up; for her, Michel’s face was like a commentary from another world. At about that time she read
The Kreutzer Sonata
and, for a moment, thought she understood him. Twenty-five years later it was clear to Bruno that everything about their relationship had been lopsided, out-of-kilter, abnormal—there had never been a future in it. But the past always seems, perhaps wrongly, to be predestined.

12

A BALANCED DIET

In revolutionary times, those who accord themselves, with an extraordinary arrogance, the facile credit for having inflamed anarchy in their contemporaries fail to recognize that what appears to be a sad triumph is in fact due to a spontaneous disposition, determined by the social situation as a whole.

—A
UGUSTE
C
OMTE,

Cours de philosophie positive,
Leçon 48

France in the 1970s was marked by the controversy surrounding
Phantom of the Paradise, A Clockwork Orange
and
Les Valseuses —
three very different films whose success firmly established the commercial muscle of a “youth culture,” based principally on sex and violence, which would redefine the market in the decades that followed. Those who had made their fortunes in the 1960s, now in their thirties, found their lives mirrored in
Emmanuelle,
released in 1974. In the context of a Judeo-Christian culture, Just Jaeckin’s film, with its mixture of fantasy and exotic locations, appeared as a manifesto for the leisure class.

A number of other important events in 1974 further advanced the cause of moral relativism. The first Vitatop club opened in Paris on 20 March; it was to play a pioneering role in the cult of the body beautiful. The age of majority was lowered to eighteen on 5 July, and divorce by mutual consent was officially recognized on the eleventh, thus removing adultery from the penal code. Lastly, on 28 November, after a stormy debate described by commentators as “historic,” the Veil act legalizing abortion was adopted, largely thanks to lobbying by the left. Christian doctrine, which long had been the dominant moral force in Western civilization, accorded unconditional importance to every human life from conception to death. The significance was linked to the belief in the existence within the body of a
soul
— which was by definition immortal and would ultimately return to God. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, advances in biology gave rise to a more materialist anthropology, radically different in its assumptions and significantly more moderate in its ethical counsel. On the one hand, this change meant that the fetus, a small collection of steadily subdividing cells, was no longer acknowledged as a viable individual except by consensus (absence of genetic defects, parental consent). On the other hand, the new concept of
human dignity
meant that the elderly person, a collection of steadily failing organs, had the right to life only as long as it continued to function well enough. The ethical problems posed by the extremes of youth and age (abortion and, some decades later, euthanasia) would become the battleground for different and radically antagonistic worldviews.

The agnosticism at the heart of the French republic would facilitate the progressive, hypocritical and slightly sinister triumph of the materialist worldview. Though never overtly discussed, the question of the
value
of human life would nonetheless continue to preoccupy people’s minds. It would be true to say that in the last years of Western civilization it contributed to a general mood of depression bordering on masochism.

For Bruno, who had just recently turned eighteen, the summer of 1974 was a significant, possibly crucial period in his life. Years later it would recur in sessions with his psychiatrist, who seemed to enjoy the story immensely. Sometimes Bruno altered or refined the details, but this is his standard version:

“It was the end of July. I was staying on the coast with my mother for a week. The house was full of people coming and going. My mother was sleeping with some Canadian guy at the time — young, built like a lumberjack. The day I was supposed to leave, I got up early. It was already pretty hot. I went into her room. They were still asleep. I hesitated for a second or two and then I pulled the sheet off them. My mother moved and for a minute I thought she was going to open her eyes; her thighs parted slightly. I knelt down in front of her vagina. I brought my hand up close—a couple of centimeters away—but I didn’t dare touch her. Then I went outside and jerked off. There’d always been cats hanging around the house, mostly strays. A black cat lay sunning itself on a rock. The land around the house was stony and white, a merciless white. The cat looked over at me from time to time while I was whacking off, but closed its eyes just before I came.

“I bent down and picked up a rock. The cat’s skull shattered and some of its brains spurted out. I covered the body with a pile of stones and went back inside. There was still nobody awake. Later that morning, driving me back to my father’s house about fifty kilometers away, my mother talked to me about di Meola for the first time. Apparently, he’d left California four years earlier and had bought a big place on the hills of Ventoux near Avignon. In the summer he took in young people from all over Europe and America. She thought maybe I could go there one summer; she said it would broaden my horizons. According to her, di Meola’s commune wasn’t a cult, it simply passed on the teachings of the Brahman. Di Meola knew a lot about cybernetics and communication skills and used deprogramming techniques he’d developed at Esalen. It was all about liberating the individual’s innate potential—‘Because we only use ten percent of our brain, you know.’ ”

“Anyway,” said Jane as they drove through the pine forests, “there’d be kids your own age there. It would be good for you. We all thought you were pretty hung up about sex while you were here this summer.”

The Western concept of sexuality was perverse and unnatural, she went on. In many primitive societies, sexual initiation was a natural thing that took place early in adolescence under the supervision of the tribal elders. “I am your mother,” she stressed. She did not mention that she had initiated di Meola’s son David in 1963. David was thirteen at the time. In the first encounter, she had undressed in front of him and encouraged him to masturbate. The second afternoon, she had masturbated him and sucked him off. On the third and final afternoon, he had been able to penetrate her. Jane had pleasant memories of it; the young boy’s rock-hard cock never seemed to go down, even after he had come several times. It was probably this experience which converted her to young men. “Of course,” she went on, “the initiation should always take place outside of the immediate family—that’s very important. It opens the world up to the adolescent.”

Bruno jumped, afraid that his mother had been awake that morning as he was staring at her vagina. In fact, his mother’s remark was banal: the incest taboo is well documented in the animal kingdom, especially among mandrills and gray geese. The car sped toward Sainte-Maxime.

“When I got to my father’s house I realized that he wasn’t well,” Bruno would go on. “He had only taken a couple of weeks off that summer. I didn’t know it at the time, but for the first time the business was doing badly and he had money problems. He told me later that it was because he had completely missed out on the market for silicone breast implants. He thought it was a passing fad that would never catch on outside the U.S. Which was utterly stupid. Nothing has ever caught on in America that didn’t engulf Western Europe a couple of years later—nothing. One of his junior associates had left the clinic and set up on his own. He’d poached a lot of my father’s clients simply by offering silicone implants as his specialty.”

Bruno’s father was seventy when he made this confession. He would die shortly afterward of cirrhosis of the liver. “History repeats itself,” he told Bruno, tinkling the ice in his glass. “That idiot Poncet . . . [He was talking about the dynamic young surgeon who twenty years earlier had been his ruination.] That idiot Poncet just refused to diversify into penis enlargement—thinks it’s too much like butchery. He doesn’t think the men’s market will catch on in Europe. Moron. Almost as much of a moron as I was twenty years ago. If I was thirty years old now, I’d set myself up in prick enlargement.” Having said this, he usually slipped back into a daydream at the edge of consciousness. Conversation tended to stagnate at his age.

In July 1974 Bruno’s father was only at the beginning of a long, slow decline. He would spend the afternoons locked in his room with a pile of cigars and a bottle of bourbon. He would come downstairs at seven and heat up something, his hands shaking. It was not that he didn’t want to speak to his son, but that he couldn’t; he really couldn’t. After two days, the atmosphere had become oppressive. Bruno started to go out; he would spend whole afternoons at the beach.

The psychiatrist was less interested in the part of the story that followed, but Bruno thought it was important and had no intention of passing over it. After all, he was paying the bastard to listen to him, wasn’t he?

“She was alone,” Bruno went on. “She went to the beach every afternoon on her own. She was seventeen, a poor little rich girl—a bit like me. A chubby little thing, she was shy and very pale and had pimples. The fourth afternoon—it was the day before I left, in fact—I put down my towel and sat beside her. She was lying on her stomach and she’d unfastened her bikini top. I remember the only thing I could think to say was ‘You on vacation?’ She looked up. I’m sure she wasn’t expecting brilliant conversation, but maybe not something quite so moronic. Anyway, we introduced ourselves: her name was Annick. I knew she would have to sit up sooner or later and I wondered would she try to fasten her bikini top behind her? Would she sit up and show me her breasts? She did something midway between the two; she turned over, holding the ends of her top together. When she’d finished, the bra was a bit lopsided and only half covered her breasts. She had big tits, which were already sagging a bit and must have got a lot worse later. I thought she was very brave. I reached over and slipped my hand under her bra, feeling her breast as I did. She didn’t move, but she stiffened a little and closed her eyes. I went on stroking her tits; her nipples were hard. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

“Things got complicated after that. I took her back to my house and we went up to my room. I was scared my father would see her. He had been with a lot of beautiful women in his life, but he was asleep—actually, he was completely drunk, he didn’t wake up until ten o’clock that night. Strangely, she wouldn’t let me take off her panties. She told me she’d never done it before, in fact she’d never really done anything with a boy before. But she was quite happy to jerk me off, she was pretty enthusiastic; I remember she was smiling. Then I moved my cock up to her mouth; she sucked it a little bit but she didn’t really like it. I didn’t push it. I straddled her, and when I slipped my cock between her tits she moaned a bit and seemed happy. I was really turned on. I pushed down her underpants—she didn’t stop me this time, she even lifted herself up to help me. She wasn’t particularly pretty, but her pussy was as beautiful as any pussy in the world. Her eyes were closed. When I slipped my hands under her ass, she parted her thighs completely. I was so excited that I came right there before I could even put it in her. There was jism in her pubic hair. I was really upset, but she said that it didn’t matter, that she was happy.

“We didn’t really have much time to talk. It was nearly eight o’clock and she had to get back to her parents. I remember she told me she was an only child, I don’t know why. She seemed so happy, so proud to have a good reason to be late for dinner that I nearly cried. We kissed for a long time in the garden in front of the house. The next day I went back to Paris.”

When he finished his story, Bruno paused for a moment. The psychiatrist discreetly shifted in his chair and said, about nothing in particular, “Good.” Depending on how much of the hour had elapsed, he would prompt Bruno again, or simply say, “We’ll leave it there for today?” stressing the last word a little to make this a question. As he said this, his smile was polished and effortless.