Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Bruno’s emails to Pascal covered a lot of ground but I had encountered nothing incriminating beyond Bruno’s assertion that water belongs in the water table, and not in industrial holding bays. Bruno lamented that the state had decided it would be a good idea to siphon groundwater from subterranean caverns and lakes and rivers, and to capture this water in huge plastic-lined “megabasins,” where it would absorb leached toxins and be evaporated by the sun. This was a tragic idea, he said, with a destructive power that perhaps only someone who had spent considerable time underground might understand. Water, Bruno said, was already captured, in nature’s own ingenious filtration and storage facilities inside the earth.

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. With Lucien and boys like him—who will forever remain mere boys—there is no war nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation.

I found a Pécharmant from the oldest vintner in Bergerac at the L’Arche Cafeteria on the autoroute A7, a wine that was woody with notes of ambergris and laurel and maybe dried apricot. I enjoyed a white Bordeaux of Médoc provenance en plein air at a roadside fuel stop where a trucker farted loudly while paying for his diesel at the automatic pump, the loose valves of his truck, like his own loose valves, clattering away. This white Bordeaux was smooth as a silk garment in a virgin’s trousseau. I could have been a little buzzed by this point, five hours into my drive. This cold, dry white wine sent me dreaming about a world where all my clothes were white and I slept on white sheets and would never be traded for a dowry or violated by rough and unworthy men or forced to drink anything less than the finest French wines of the smallest and oldest and most esteemed appellations, and in a way I could say that I was living that life, right here at this gas station. At least in spirit I was.

stole two jars of it from one of these travel centers, the weight of the jars giving a new tug to the leather straps of my handbag as I purchased my wine. It wasn’t that I believed the wine I bought was payment enough for my jars of human cat food. 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. You’re in a highway travel center, people in a great flux and flow, coming and going and milling and choosing, the cashiers in a fugue state of next and next and next. And in order to locate the precise moment when you can take unseen, you slow it all down. You make time stop. You insert into reality what composers call a “fermata,” and while time is stopped, you put something in your bag. In this way, I test my fitness. I test my ability to see. I gauge what other people see, and also, what they fail to see.

I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level. This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping and excited by the promise of the cookies, the ritual reward of a Saturday’s outing with their mother. That is a conception of Europe cherished by certain Parisians and as imaginary as the pastoral scenes in the frescoes on the walls of the posh café. The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.”

“I will name for you who did this,” he said. The perpetrators he named were trade, industrial farming, highways, tourists, commercial air travel, trucking, and shipping. “Sir, we hoe a row,” he told the police. “We plant potatoes. We don’t use pesticides. We nurture pollinators. But here is how the state does things: They have a deer population that’s getting out of control, so what do they do? They bring in lynx. When farmers get upset about the lynx, the government reintroduces wolves. The wolves kill livestock, so the state makes it legal to shoot them. Hunting accidents increase, so they build a new clinic, whose medical staff creates a housing shortage, necessitating new developments. The expanding population attracts rodents, and so they introduce snakes. And so far, no one knows what to do about the snakes.”

While lurking around Orthodox Williamsburg, I saw large groups of Hasidic men or Hasidic boys. I would see one woman, on the street or on a subway platform, in her shapeless long skirt and her orthopedic shoes, and I wondered if the reason I saw her at all was because she had dibs on the wig that morning. The shared use of both the housedress by old French matrons and the wig by young Hasidic women keeps the riot potential down, making it so that these women have to emerge single file, or rather, one at a time. 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.

Bruno’s son had pointed out to him that the French government had more than clouded the waters of the communal washbasins. They had desecrated the entire subterranean world of southern France with tunnels for their high-speed trains. I can hear the Paris–Toulouse from down there, Bruno said. I sense its vibrations. I feel the faintest touch of its wind. Bruno’s son was of the opinion that the state’s mad plan to leach out all the groundwater and shunt it into industrial bays would wreck the ecological balance of the Guyenne.

I had cross-checked some of what Bruno had written about these people, and it seemed they were real. They had different names, Cagot or Caqueaux or Gahet, Gotz or Quagotz or Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz. In most versions of the story, it was believed they were afflicted with an “internal leprosy,” an invisible taint, in addition to “maladies of brain,” deliriums precipitated by full moons and other celestial turns. What Bruno had described regarding the lenient conditions of their worship in Vantôme, groovy priests who offered Communion to the wretched through a little door, was reiterated in various histories.

I am linked, he said, to ancient people not as a vague and baggy “idea” but as little pieces of string examined under an electron microscope. We have material proof, Bruno said, of transmigration, of the way in which everyone who came before us left a mark on our genome, adding to the story of our ancestry and evolution. Spirit travels, he said, from the dead for centuries, for millennia, into the living. Each of us inherits code, blueprints, a set of instructions—call it what you want—from those who came before us, all the way back into the deepest sediments of time. These codes, Bruno said, are genetic lice, which crawl from ancestors to descendent; they travel from the many to the one, right on through human history. How do they make their way? They take a transmigrational highway, he said. The lice had helped him understand this.

Behind the kitchen was an outdoor area with a sandpit and a crooked old metal swing set. A little girl in nothing but loose underpants was pumping away on a swing like she was training for something, or trying to get someplace by swinging there, back and forth, back and forth.

With their plain and preppy look and their soft serious voices, these people were different from the West Coast eco-warriors with their piercings and their food-coloring hair dye, T-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro-split in movement ideology. Nor did these boys resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized, among people who wore all black. (Then again, Pascal didn’t look like that either.) But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics, or they cultivate, instead, a strait-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are (who they consider themselves to be).

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.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. 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.

The salt of Cardona had been mined for thousands of years, but now it was a tourist attraction. It came up from deep inside the earth. This mountain of it would somehow replenish forever, according to the brochure in my room. It would keep emerging as if by magic. In Roman times, salt was so precious it served as money. It is the source of the word “salary.” I stood at the window at four a.m. and told myself: You, too, have a core of precious salt. The human core of inner salt, like this salt of Cardona, comes from the deepest part. Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete. In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness.

In the darkest region of his cave, in absolute blindness, Bruno had pictured a blind person apprehending beauty by smell and by touch. To Bruno, the meaning of this paradox was self-evident: to not be physically blind, as he was not, was to be blind to what it means not to see. He put this another way for them, in an attempt to clarify: He could not abandon his own capacity for sight, he wrote. Even if he wanted to. I see in the light, he said. I see in the half-light. I see in the dark. And it is imperative that I embrace this capacity. That I give in to it. That I insistently see.

The good and the bad of this counter-reality, he told them, our “inner seeing,” was that it sometimes lifted debased fragments from the commodified world. We are all sieves, he said, and we catch and hold on to all sorts of things, and not just the images we want to return to. Take an inner trip, and it will not be just the beautiful and the sacred that you find. From the depths of my own mind might come a jingle I heard on the radio as a child, advertising tooth-whitening powder, or I might see Tintin’s dog, Milou. We pick up things along the way that are of no use at all. The trick, he said, is to acknowledge these images, and to let them float past.

These people were always repeating a maxim about the end of the world, that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than it was to imagine the end of capitalism.” The point of this maxim was that bringing down capitalism would require a more robust imagination. But just because something is harder to imagine does not mean it’s correct. In terms of which of these two will end first, capitalism might be more insidious and durable than the blue-green miracle of planet earth and its swaddling of life-giving ether.

And it just so happens, Pascal said, that the huge corporate operations have the scale and the capital to easily make the changes that the man in Brussels is demanding, while the small farmers will no longer be able to survive, and so they will have to give up farming, give up everything they are. “We are talking about environmental policies that only faceless agro-business can implement. Does that seem right or fair to you?”

In Switzerland, I attended an ag fair with a group that was there to protest John Deere’s contracts with the Israeli government.

The activist group I was infiltrating had come to Schaffhausen in hopes of sabotaging John Deere equipment, to express their anger that Israel was using the company’s machines to illegally bulldoze Palestinian lands and homes and sometimes people.