The Elementary Particles Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Lost Kingdom

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART TWO: Strange Moments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART THREE: Emotional Infinity

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Also by Michel Houellebecq

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.

  At the time of his disappearance, Michel Djerzinski was unanimously considered to be a first-rate biologist and a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize. His true significance, however, would not become apparent for some time.

  In Djerzinski’s time, philosophy was generally considered to be of no practical significance, to have been stripped of its purpose. Nevertheless, the values to which a majority subscribe at any given time determine society’s economic and political structures and social mores.

  Metaphysical mutations—that is to say radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe—are rare in the history of humanity. The rise of Christianity might be cited as an example.

  Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably toward its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress—nothing except another metaphysical mutation.

  It is a fallacy that such metaphysical mutations gain ground only in weakened or declining societies. When Christianity appeared, the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers: supremely organized, it dominated the known world; its technical and military prowess had no rival. Nonetheless, it had no chance. When modern science appeared, medieval Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained both man and the universe; it was the basis for government, the inspiration for knowledge and art, the arbiter of war as of peace and the power behind the production and distribution of wealth—none of which was sufficient to prevent its downfall.

  Michel Djerzinski was not the first nor even the principal architect of the third—and in many respects the most radical—paradigm shift, which opened up a new era in world history. But, as a result of certain extraordinary circumstances in his life, he was one of its most clear-sighted and deliberate engineers.

  We live today under a new world order,

  The web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies,

  Bathes our limbs,

  In a halo of joy.

  A state to which men of old sometimes acceded through music

  Greets us each morning as a commonplace.

  What men considered a dream, perfect but remote,

  We take for granted as the simplest of things.

  But we are not contemptuous of these men;

  We know how much we owe to their dreaming,

  We know that without the web of suffering and joy which was their history, we would be nothing,

  We know that they kept within them an image of us, through their fear and in their pain, as they collided in the darkness,

  As little by little, they wrote their history.

  We know that they would not have survived, that they could not have survived, without that hope somewhere deep within,

  They could not have survived without their dream.

  Now that we live in the light,

  Now that we live in the presence of the light

  Which bathes our bodies,

  Envelops our bodies,

  In a halo of joy,

  Now that we have settled by the water’s edge,

  And here live in perpetual afternoon

  Now that the light which surrounds our bodies is palpable,

  Now that we have come at last to our destination

  Leaving behind a world of division,

  The way of thinking which divided us,

  To bathe in a serene, fertile joy

  Of a new law,

  Today,

  For the first time,

  We can revisit the end of the old order.

  PART ONE

  The Lost Kingdom

  1

  The first of July 1998 fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organized his farewell party for Tuesday evening. Bottles of champagne nestled among containers of frozen embryos in the large Brandt refrigerator usually filled with chemicals.

  Four bottles for fifteen people was a little miserly, but the whole party was a sham. The motivations that brought them together were superficial; one careless word, one false glance, would break it up and send his colleagues scurrying for their cars. They stood around drinking in the white-tiled basement decorated only with a poster of the Lakes of Germany. Nobody had offered to take photos. A research student who had arrived earlier that year—a young man with a beard and a vapid expression—left after a few minutes, explaining that he had to pick up his car from the garage. A palpable sense of unease spread through the group. Soon the term would be over; some of them were going home to visit family, others on vacation. The sound of their voices snapped like twigs in the air. Shortly afterward, the party broke up.

  By seven-thirty it was all over. Djerzinski walked across the parking lot with one of his colleagues. She had long black hair, very white skin and large breasts. Older than he was, she would inevitably take his position as head of the department. Most of her published papers were on the DAF3 gene in the fruit fly. She was unmarried.

  When they reached his Toyota he offered his hand, smiling. (He had been preparing himself mentally for this for several seconds, remembering to smile.) Their palms brushed and they shook hands gently. Later, he decided the handshake lacked warmth; under the circumstances, they could have kissed each other on both cheeks like visiting dignitaries or people in show business.

  After they said their goodbyes, he sat in his car for what seemed to him an unusually long five minutes. Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms? Perhaps she was thinking about her career, her new responsibilities: if so, was
she happy? At last her Golf pulled out of the lot; he was alone again. The weather had been magnificent all day, and it was still warm now. In the early weeks of summer everything seemed fixed, motionless, radiant, though already the days were getting shorter.

  He felt privileged to have worked here, he thought as he pulled out into the street. When asked “Do you feel privileged to live in an area like Palaiseau?” sixty-three percent of respondents answered “Yes.” This was hardly surprising: the buildings were low, interspersed with lawns. Several supermarkets were conveniently nearby. The phrase “quality of life” hardly seemed excessive for such a place.

  The expressway back into Paris was deserted, and Djerzinski felt like a character in a science fiction film he’d seen at the university: the last man on earth after every other living thing had been wiped out. Something in the air evoked a dry apocalypse.

  Djerzinski had lived on the rue Frémicourt for ten years, during which he had grown accustomed to the quiet. In 1993 he had felt the need for a companion, something to welcome him home in the evening. He settled on a white canary. A fearful animal, it sang in the mornings though it never seemed happy. Could a canary be happy? Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of joyous fulfillment akin to inebriation, rapture or ecstasy. The first time he took the canary out of its cage, the frightened creature shit on the sofa before flying back to the bars, desperate to find a way back in. He tried again a month later. This time the poor bird fell from an open window. Barely remembering to flutter its wings, it landed on a balcony five floors below on the building opposite. All Michel could do was wait for the woman who lived there to come home, and fervently hope that she didn’t have a cat. It turned out that she was an editor at Vingt Ans and worked late; she lived alone. She didn’t have a cat.

  Michel recovered the bird after dark; it was trembling with cold and fear, huddled against the concrete wall. He occasionally saw the woman again when he took out the garbage. She would nod in greeting, and he would nod back. Something good had come of the accident—he had met one of his neighbors.

  From his window he could see a dozen buildings—some three hundred apartments. When he came home in the evening, the canary would whistle and chirp for five or ten minutes. Michel would feed the bird and change the gravel in its cage. Tonight, however, silence greeted him. He crossed the room to the cage. The canary was dead, its cold white body lying on the gravel.

  He ate a Monoprix TV dinner—monkfish in parsley sauce, from their Gourmet line—washed down with a mediocre Valdepeñas. After some hesitation, he put the bird’s body into a plastic bag, which he topped off with a beer bottle and dumped in the trash chute. What was he supposed to do—say mass?

  He didn’t know what was at the end of the chute. The opening was narrow (though large enough to take the canary). He dreamed that the chute opened onto vast garbage cans filled with old coffee filters, ravioli in tomato sauce and mangled genitalia. Huge worms, as big as the canary and armed with terrible beaks, would attack the body, tear off its feet, rip out its intestines, burst its eyeballs. He woke up trembling; it was only one o’clock. He swallowed three Xanax. So ended his first night of freedom.

  2

  On 14 December 1900, in a paper to the Berlin Academy entitled “Zur Theorie des Gesetzes der Energieverteilung in Normalspektrum,” Max Planck introduced the idea of quantum energy. It was a concept that would play a decisive role in the evolution of physics. Between 1900 and 1920, Einstein, Bohr and their contemporaries developed a number of ingenious models which attempted to reconcile this idea with previous theories. Not until the 1920s did it become apparent that such attempts were futile.

  Niels Bohr’s claim to be the true founder of quantum mechanics rests less on his own discoveries than on the extraordinary atmosphere of creativity, intellectual effervescence, openness and friendship he fostered around him. The Institute of Physics, which Bohr founded in Copenhagen in 1919, welcomed the cream of young European physicists. Heisenberg, Pauli and Born served their apprenticeships there. Though some years their senior, Bohr would spend hours talking through their hypotheses in detail. He was perceptive and good humored but extremely rigorous. However, if Bohr tolerated no laxity in his students’ experiments, he did not think any new idea foolish a priori; no concept was so established that it could not be challenged. He liked to invite his students to his country house in Tisvilde, where he also welcomed politicians, artists and scientists from other fields. Their conversations ranged easily from philosophy to physics, history to art, from religion to everyday life. Nothing comparable had happened since the days of the Greek philosophers. It was in this extraordinary environment, between 1925 and 1927, that the basic premises of the Copenhagen Interpretation—which called into question established concepts of space, time and causality—were developed.

  Djerzinski had singularly failed to foster such an environment around him. The atmosphere in his research facility was like an office, no better, no worse. Far from the popular image of molecular biologists as Rimbauds with microscopes, research scientists were not great thinkers but simple technicians who read Le Nouvel Observateur and dreamed of going on vacation to Greenland. Molecular biology was routine. It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic second-rate intellect. Researchers wrote theses and studied for Ph.D.’s when a baccalauréat and a couple of years in college would have been more than enough for them to handle the equipment. “There’s no mystery to decoding the genome,” Desplechin, the director of the biology department, liked to say. “Discovering the principle of protein synthesis, now that takes some real work. It’s hardly surprising that Gamow, the first person to figure it out, was a physicist. But decoding DNA, pfff . . . You decode one molecule, then another and another, feed the results into a computer and let it work out the subsequences. You send a fax to Colorado—they’re working on gene B27, we’re working on C33. It’s like following a recipe. From time to time someone comes up with an inconsequential improvement in equipment and they give him the Nobel Prize. It’s a joke.”

  The first of July was oppressively hot. In the afternoon a storm was forecast, which would send the sunbathers scattering. Desplechin’s office on the quai Anatole-France looked out onto the river. Opposite, on the quai des Tuileries, homosexuals, many of them wearing thongs, walked around in the sunshine. They chatted in pairs and groups, and shared towels. Suntan lotion glistened on their biceps; their buttocks were rounded and sleek. While they talked, some massaged their genitals through nylon briefs, or slipped a finger under their waistbands, revealing pubic hair or the root of the penis. Desplechin had set up a telescope beside the bay window. Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.

  On one such afternoon he had twice tried to masturbate, his eye glued to the eyepiece, staring at an adolescent who had taken off his thong and whose cock had begun to rise. Desplechin’s penis fell, wrinkled and flaccid; he abandoned the attempt.

  Djerzinski arrived punctually at four o’clock, when Desplechin had summoned him. The case was intriguing. Certainly, it was common for a researcher to take a year’s sabbatical to work in Norway or Japan, or another of those sinister countries where middle-aged people commit suicide en masse. Others—especially in the Mitterrand years, when greed reached its dizziest heights—went to venture capitalists and set up companies to exploit some molecule or another commercially. Many of them had succeeded in basely profiting from the knowledge they had acquired during their years of pure research to amass considerable fortunes. But for Djerzinski to take a sabbatical with no plan, no goal nor the merest hint of an excuse, was incomprehensible. At forty, he was already head of the department, with fifteen researchers working under him. He reported directly to Desplechin—in theory at least. His team was widely considered to be one of the best in Europe, and their results excellent. What was wrong with the man?

  Desplechin forced himself to be upbeat: “So, any idea what you’re going t
o do with yourself?” There was a long silence before Djerzinski answered soberly, “Think.” This was hardly a promising start, but Desplechin kept up his cheerful façade. “Any personal projects?” He stared into the thin face, his sad, serious eyes, and suddenly felt intensely embarrassed. What personal life? He had plucked Djerzinski from the University of Orsay fifteen years ago. It had proved to be an excellent choice: Djerzinski was a disciplined, inventive and rigorous researcher who had built up an impressive body of work in the intervening years. The reputation of the faculty as a leader in molecular biology was due in no small part to his work. He had kept his side of the bargain.

  “Well,” Desplechin concluded, “we’ll keep your log-in to the faculty server active indefinitely, of course. You’ll have access to the results and the Intranet and so forth. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.”

  After Djerzinski left, Desplechin went back to the bay window. He was sweating slightly. On the far bank, a young, dark-haired Arab boy was taking off his shorts. Fundamental questions remained to be answered in biology. Biologists acted as though molecules were separate and distinct entities linked solely by electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. Not one of them, he was sure, had even heard of the EPR paradox or the Aspect experiments, nor taken the trouble to study developments in physics since the beginning of the century. Their view of the atom had evolved little from that of Democritus. They accumulated reams of repetitive statistics in the hope of finding some immediate industrial application, never realizing that their very methods were now threatened. He and Djerzinski were probably the only members of the National Scientific Research Center who had studied physics and who understood that once biologists were forced to confront the atomic basis of life, the very foundations of modern biology would be blown away.

  Desplechin thought about this as night fell over the Seine. He could not begin to imagine where Djerzinski’s thinking might lead; he did not even feel able to discuss it with him. He was almost sixty years old and, intellectually, he felt that he was over the hill. The homosexuals had left now, and the bank was deserted. Desplechin couldn’t remember when he last had an erection. He waited for the storm.