Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

And yet many people carry Neanderthal traces, he said. Two percent, four percent, this measure of ancient life was stunning, given that there have been no living communities of full Neanderthals actively contributing to the gene pool for forty thousand years. It’s as if our chromosomes cling to this old share, he said, as if it were a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.

It’s the same, whether you’re in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one. They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth.

I prefer to hear about the fixations of the oldest generation of European men, the ones whose youth involved encounters with war and killing and death, traitors and fascists and whores, collaboration and national shame: rites of passage into manhood, a true and real loss of innocence. Everyone has their type. And I’m okay with the generation just under them, the ones now in their sixties, because they at least know compulsory military service, or they know elective, extralegal refuge in the French Foreign Legion.

—He’ll show up, Lucien texted back. For you, he’ll show. He’s curious about you. He’s keen to work together. I talked to him about it. But I should warn you… he’s charismatic. Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.

Without having met him, I was certain that Pascal Balmy’s charisma, like anyone’s—Joan of Arc’s, let’s say—resided only in the will of other people to believe. Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.

The not-so-literate and the hyper-literate both love quotation marks, while most people use them only to indicate, in written form, when someone is speaking. In my life before this life, as a graduate student, there were know-it-all women in my department who held their hands up and curved their pointer and middle fingers to frame a word or phrase they were voicing with irony, as a critique. They were fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. They were getting PhDs in rhetoric at Berkeley, as I had planned to, before I abandoned that plan (and spared myself their fate, which was to subject themselves to academic job interviews in DoubleTree hotel rooms at a Modern Language Association conference). Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare-quoting women.

Lavender oils, for instance, always made at monasteries, as if the monks worshipped lavender instead of God.

This white Bordeaux was smooth as a silk garment

in a virgin’s trousseau.

Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.

The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.

And then he leaned in like billions before him have done, acting upon a desire to kiss some woman. In such a scene between new lovers, a moment repeated everywhere all the time with no originality to it—none—Lucien surely felt that something singular and novel was taking place.

But for now, I was the romantic partner of Lucien. I was from Priest Valley, California. I spoke French well, if not elegantly. I was a thirty-four-year-old American, with a sex appeal that, for Lucien, was mysterious and could not be reduced to my looks. (And neither could it be reduced to my notable breasts, even as the novelty of them had not yet worn off for him.)

Pascal was said to have Debord’s sex appeal, back when Debord had sex appeal. (Late Debord’s face had grown to resemble that of a dead goldfish clotted with scurf, and I am not being fanciful here, but forensic and precise, given the photos of Late Debord included in my dossier. At the end of his life, he looks like a dead goldfish floating in a dirty bowl.)

Pascal Balmy had no interest in fame, drank little, and played a cat-and-mouse game with French authorities. These factors were no small part of why my contacts had me watching him.

Later that day, I observed the boy deliver the fertilizer to Nancy, who lived in a warehouse in West Oakland. I had never met Nancy. She wore Coke-bottle glasses and answered the door of her Oakland warehouse in a too-short kimono, flaunting bare legs that were stubby and blunt as sawed-off shotguns.

I try to be respectful of other women’s shortcomings. The dumb luck of good looks is akin to the fact that it may very well rain on the sea in times of drought, and will not rain where it is needed, on a farmer’s crops: grace is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent, in giving to the one who already has rather a lot, and taking from the one who has been denied, who doesn’t have a pot to piss in.

If I witness an army of women in housedresses occupying town squares or breaking shopwindows with their rolling pins, I will know I was wrong, and I’ll be amused to have been wrong, but those are scenes I have yet to see. Which is not to say I sympathize with angry women breaking shopwindows. I do what I’m hired to. And yet, who knows, maybe I, too, could smash a big window with a rolling pin, were I a housewife tasked with using such kitchen equipment. But I’m not a housewife, or an Orthodox subordinate in industrial pantyhose and a communal wig. And if I’m going to smash something, I’ll use a sledgehammer, which, on account of its weight, does all the work for you.

Bruno replied that the depression suffered by Neanderthal man should be thought of as a spiritual mantle, and not all bad. Thal’s tendency to anhedonic brooding had likely been the engine of his abstract thinking, and his stupendous preternatural capacity for a dream life.

But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation. In

I get a feeling in woods, no matter how remote they are, that someone could be around. I was still on edge from that moment at the abandoned truck stop, flinching to think someone was approaching as I squatted in a vulnerable position, peeing next to women’s underpants discarded on a bush, a scene I’d come to think of as the Tomb of the Unknown Hooker.

Some kind of lunatic, a man who lived in a cave and ranted about cave frequencies, but his descriptions of the region were being confirmed one after the other.

We are social creatures. People don’t have a lot of tools to deal with rejection.

People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear

power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric—the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present—is to shore up their own identity. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities they present to the world as “themselves.” Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego, and what forms that ego, is strong.

What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.

Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.

I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth.

spent my afternoons on the hotel terrace, eating squid and drinking beer. But then I gave up the beer. Gave up drinking. Just stopped. That was it. No, it was not easy. But I did it. Few things worth doing are easy. Any habit that offers pleasure becomes a hassle if you need it to get from hour to hour.

stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it. I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea.