Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

I was painfully aware that I hadn’t even suggested Myriam come live with me, that we move in together, but I knew that wasn’t the real problem. Her parents were prepared to rent her an apartment, and mine was just a one-bedroom—a big one-bedroom, but still. Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple.

In the old days, people lived as families, that is to say, they reproduced, slogged through a few more years, long enough to see their children reach adulthood, then went to meet their Maker. The reasonable thing nowadays was for people to wait until they were closer to fifty or sixty and then move in together, when the one thing their aging, aching bodies craved was a familiar touch, reassuring and chaste, and when the delights of regional cuisine, as celebrated every Sunday on Les escapades de Petitrenaud, took precedence over all other pleasures.

In the end, the only one who kept his cool was Ben Abbes: he defended the right of free assembly and challenged Le Pen to a debate on secularism—which the pundits generally agreed was a clever move, since it was nearly impossible for her to say yes. So he emerged, at no special cost to himself, as the voice of moderation and dialogue.

An immense banner stretched across the avenue, bearing the inscription “We Are the People of France.” Many of the demonstrators had been given small placards that read, more simply, “This Is Our Home.” That was the slogan they’d started using at extremist rallies—explicit, yet restrained in its hostility.

Microwave dinners were reliably bland, but their colorful, happy packaging represented real progress compared with the heavy tribulations of Huysmans’s heroes. There was no malice in them, and one’s sense of participating in a collective experience, disappointing but egalitarian, smoothed the way to a partial acceptance.

I had no plan, no exact destination, just a very vague sense that I ought to head southwest—that if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the southwest. I knew next to nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. Though, of course, I could be wrong. I didn’t actually know much about France. After spending my childhood and adolescence in Maisons-Lafitte, a bourgeois suburb par excellence, I moved to Paris and never left. I had never really visited this country of which I was, somewhat theoretically, a citizen.

I was content to spend my Sundays browsing the rare book market in Parc Georges Brassens. And sometimes, I’m happy to say, I had spent my Sundays fucking—Myriam, mainly. My life would have been truly tedious and dreary if I hadn’t, every now and then, fucked Myriam.

Turnout, as far as anyone could tell this early in the day, was high, higher than in the last two presidential runoffs. Some pundits argued that a high turnout favored the “ruling party” against the challengers. Others, just as well regarded, thought the opposite. For the moment, in other words, nobody had any idea what the high turnout meant, and it was a little early for listening to the radio.

I turned the radio back on, but now it wasn’t working: all my preprogrammed stations, from France Info to Europe 1, including Radio Monte-Carlo and RTL, were full of static. Something was happening in France, I knew it, and here I was, still driving along the hexagonal highway system at two hundred kilometers per hour—and maybe that was the solution. Everything in the country seemed to be broken, for all I knew the traffic radar was down, too. At the speed I was going, I’d reach the border at Jonquet by four. Things would be different in Spain, civil war slightly less imminent. It was worth a try. Except I was out of gas; yes, gas was at the top of the agenda. I kept my eye out for the next service station.

The parking lot was deserted, and right away I could tell something wasn’t right. I slowed to a crawl before I pulled up, very carefully, to the service station. Someone had shattered the window, the asphalt was covered with shards of glass. I got out of the car and walked inside. Someone had also smashed the door of the refrigerated case where they kept the cold drinks and knocked over the newspaper dispensers. I discovered the cashier lying on the floor in a pool of blood, her arms clasped over her chest in a pathetic gesture of self-defense. The silence was total. I walked over to the gas pumps, but they were turned off. Thinking I might be able to find some way of turning them on behind the register, I went back into the shop and stepped reluctantly over the body, but I didn’t see anything that looked like an ON switch. After a moment’s hesitation, I helped myself to a tuna-vegetable sandwich from the sandwich shelf, a nonalcoholic beer, and a Michelin guide.

Fifteen minutes later I’d reached Martel without incident. The road wound through a cheerful, wooded landscape. I didn’t pass a single car, and I started to think I was going crazy, then I decided that everyone was staying home for exactly the same reason I’d left Paris: a premonition of imminent catastrophe.

I started to wonder what I was doing there. This very basic question can occur to anyone, anywhere, at any moment in his life, but there’s no denying that the solitary traveler is especially vulnerable. If Myriam had been with me, I’d still have had no good reason for being in Martel, yet the question simply wouldn’t have arisen. A couple is a world, autonomous and enclosed, that moves through the larger world essentially untouched; on my own, I was full of chips and cracks, and it took a certain amount of courage for me to slip the information sheet into my jacket pocket and go out into the village.

I’ve always hated making kissing sounds on the phone. Even when I was young, I dreaded it, and forty years later it struck me as plainly ridiculous. I did it anyway. As soon as we hung up, I felt overwhelmed by a terrible loneliness, and I knew that I’d never have the courage to call Myriam again. The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.