The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

A true pessimist knows that it is already too late to be one. —The anomaly, VICTØR MIESEL

There is something admirable that always surpasses knowledge, intelligence, and even genius, and that is incomprehension. —The anomaly, Victør Miesel

For William Blake, whom he read after having seen the film Red Dragon with Anthony Hopkins, and because he likes one of the poems: “Into the dangerous world I leapt: / Helpless, naked, piping loud; / Like a fiend hid in a cloud.”

He’s convinced himself that there’s nothing less tragic, that disillusion is the opposite of failure.

Miesel can come across as distant and aloof, yet in spite of everything, he has a reputation for his sense of humor. But surely any man worthy of being called amusing is always given this label “in spite of everything”?

“I have not made a single gesture in my life. I know that, from time immemorial, it is gestures that have made me, that not one movement has been made under my own control. My body has been happy to come alive, pulled by strings I did not attach. It is presumptuous to imply that we master the space around us, when we simply follow the curves of least resistance. The limitation of limitations. No takeoff will unfold our sky, ever.”

“The oyster that feels the pearl knows that the only conscience is pain, in fact it is only the pleasure of pain. […] The coolness of my pillow always reminds me of the pointless temperature of my blood. If I shiver with cold, it means my pelt of solitude is failing to warm the world.”

“I have never known how the world would differ had I not existed, nor toward what shores I would have driven it had I existed more intensely, and I cannot see how my passing will alter its movement. Here I am, walking along a trail whose absent pebbles lead me nowhere. I am becoming the point where life and death unite until they are indistinguishable, where the mask of the living man settles restfully in the face of the deceased. This morning, because the weather is clear, I can see all the way to me, and I am like everyone else. I am not putting an end to my existence but giving life to immortality. Ultimately, it is futile for me to write a final sentence that does not seek to change the moment.”

She’s angry, not so much because of his persistence as because he knows he shouldn’t persist but can’t help himself. How can he be so intelligent and so fragile at the same time? But love means not being able to stop your heart trampling all over your intelligence.

And then they returned to Paris, and slowly everything started to sour. Faced with André’s elation, with his arms wanting to hug her, and the kisses he inflicted on her the whole time, contemplating the friends he “absolutely must” introduce her to, like a spoil from some battle he’d won, she gradually withdrew. Why do cats that catch mice refuse to let them live? She wasn’t designed for this sort of invasion; she would have liked fewer imperatives, a slower, more serene commitment. The avid longing of his man’s hands frightened her, their oppressive lust gave her own desire no opportunity to bloom. He didn’t want to understand, and the fragility that André had so adroitly disguised became palpable; and no, she didn’t want to have to keep reassuring him, no, she wasn’t duty bound to comply with his tyrannical appetite, she didn’t need to appease his wounded narcissism, whether or not the wounds were inflicted by age, and she certainly didn’t have to tolerate his puppy-dog eyes whimpering Choose me, take me.

A lady comes in, she’s smiling, she’s black, her hair is smooth, it’s cut short like Mom’s, Sophia thinks, but she doesn’t look as tired as Mom does. The FBI officer kneels down, strokes her cheek, gently, professionally: neuroscience has demonstrated that touch is a crucial means of reassuring children and making them feel safe.

Despite the differences between them—thirty-three years, two billion dollars in stock options, and a set of sparkling veneers—they both make profligate use of each other’s first names when they talk, and this colors their conversations with a refined touch of venomous hypocrisy. If the English language had such niceties, they would use the familiar “you” singular, rather than the more formal “you” plural. Like a middle-class man claiming to be friends with his gardener, Prior allows himself to believe in this fictitious friendship, but Joanna isn’t fooled at all. In Prior’s fixed grin she can read the unspeakable Southern characteristics that hover about him, the signs and symbolic nuances that pervade all interracial exchanges; she recognizes the spontaneous gesture that allows a rich white woman with perfect hair to give her black chauffeur her most radiant smile, a devastatingly affected smile that reveals her imperious conviction that this descendant of a slave is beneath her, the poisoned smile that hasn’t moved an inch since Gone with the Wind, the same smile that, all through her childhood, Joanna saw appear on the powdered faces of her seamstress mother’s clients.

And when the threat loomed of a criminal case over Hexachlorion, an insecticide released on the market before all the tests were validated, when the board of directors showed signs of anxiety, Prior masterfully pulverized their precautionary approach: “My dear fellow board members, I often think of that magnificent poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that ends with these words: ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’ So yes, in the endless struggle to feed the human race, we will leave a trail.”

Jankélévitch, Camus,

Goncharov,

“God, but stupidity oozes from every corner of a religious mind. Every conviction is a thorn in the side of intelligence. Believers lose their wits in their efforts to see death as just another misadventure. Doubt has made me an autodidact of life, and I have enjoyed every moment all the more for that. I am never overcome by mystical emotions, even when gazing at the glorious glittering around a cloud. On the brink of death by drowning, I try to swim, I ...

with an ø that is none other than the symbol for the empty set.

“Nobody lives long enough to know just how little interest anybody takes in anybody.”

“Glory is only ever imposture, except perhaps in running races. But I suspect all those who profess to scorn it of secretly fulminating because they have simply had to relinquish any claim to it.”

They left nothing out; if the Pentagon had asked them to present all the possible outcomes of heads or tails, they would have come up with three: heads, tails and the rare incidence of the coin deciding to balance vertically on its edge. But in April 2002, ten days after the report was submitted, the DoD sent it back with a question written in red felt pen: “What if we’re confronted with a case that fits none of the situations covered?” Tina rolled her eyes: How about the hypothesis where the flipped coin stays suspended in the air?

because there’s nothing more stupid than desire, which is the very essence of life, if Spinoza is to be believed—André

Existence precedes essence, and by quite a distance.

VSM: I’ve seen Spielberg’s film twenty times, I know it by heart: you’re asking me the questions that François Truffaut asks Richard Dreyfuss, almost word for word. What kind of idiot wrote this questionnaire?

The American president sits openmouthed, showing a marked resemblance to a fat grouper with a blond wig.

“Okay, Mister President. I’m going to ask you to imagine superior beings whose intelligence is to ours what ours is to an earthworm’s…Our descendants, perhaps. Let’s also imagine they have computers so powerful that they can re-create a virtual world in which they can bring back to life very precise replicas of their ‘ancestors’ and watch how they evolve in different scenarios. With a computer the size of a very small moon, the history of the human race from the birth of Homo sapiens could be simulated a billion times. This is the digital simulation hypothesis…”

“How perverse do you have to be to design programs simulating such stupid beings and others simulating individuals far too intelligent not to suffer from being surrounded by the first category, and programs simulating musicians and others, artists, and still others, writers, who write books read by yet more programs? Or books that nobody reads, for that matter? Who designed the programs for Moses, Homer, Mozart, and Einstein, and why are there so many programs with no particular qualities, which shuffle through their electronic existence not adding anything—or only very little—to the complexity of the simulation?

Maybe life begins the moment we know we don’t have one.

What difference would it make for them, after all? Simulated or not, we all live, feel, love, suffer, create, and die, each leaving our own tiny trace in the simulation. What point is there in knowing? We should always favor mystery over science. Ignorance is a good traveling companion, and the truth never produces happiness. We might as well be simulated and happy.

The mathematician studies this unsophisticated man, and reaffirms the soul-destroying notion that by accumulating our individual obscurities, we rarely achieve collective brilliance.

“That’s it,” Xi Jinping summarizes glumly. “They’re in the same shit that we were in last April with the Beijing–Shenzhen flight from January. They’re holding two hundred forty-three people at their base on the East Coast…Compared to how many already from the Airbus?” “There are three hundred twenty-two of them, Comrade President,” says a general. “Most of them are still at the Huiyang military air base.” “Should we tell the Americans about that flight?” asks a woman in civilian dress. “Not right away. Maybe never. They haven’t asked for any of the fifteen Americans on board. They’re not missing anyone.” “So, they think so too…” says another four-star military man, “the simulation hypothesis is the most prob—” “Yes, they think so too,” interrupts the president. The president of 1,415,152,689 programs.

No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.

There is a life after death, particularly other people’s.

They’re not a couple, far from it, rather an attentive and anxious old man quivering with love, and a distant young woman. This André is still caught up in the wonder of the early days, still reading Lucie’s reserve as caution, her tepid responses as signs of a certain wisdom. But André March now grasps that he never stopped worrying about frightening her away, about startling this adorable swallow that had consented to fly alongside such an old crow. Fuck it, love—the real kind—can’t be a ball of fear in your heart. He was never relaxed and, of course, this anxiety held within it their demise.

no one should ever love someone who feels so little love for them.

“Cadet Wayne, your mission is to capture this wild animal without injuring it…” The tall blond boy opens the file…and his eyes widen with amazement. “But…it’s a frog!” “It’s a toad. She’s called Betty, why wouldn’t she be? Bring her to us in her terrarium.” “I…” “Should have left already, Cadet Wayne.” “One last thing,” Gloria Lopez adds, “if that toad comes under threat, it’s your duty to die for her.”

“I didn’t want the children to come see you in the hospital, once you were intubated, knocked out by morphine. We can tell them you were getting better.” She says “you” indiscriminately to refer to him—so palpably alive—and to the other man who’s about to die. It’s her way of denying one reality and accepting a new one. Over the next few days, the psychologists will observe this reaction in everyone.

the German language has only one word, Glück, for happiness and luck: perhaps unhappiness is just being really down on your luck.

“I’m no more ‘surplus’ than she is, this woman who’s living in my apartment with my son. Do you know that I haven’t been allowed to talk to Louis for five days?” But Louis isn’t alone in sparking all this fury. She also hates the way the other woman’s chin wobbles when she’s overwhelmed by anger, the tiny twisting at the corners of her mouth, the stubborn attempt to contain the fireworks behind a pretense of detachment, the way she pushes her glasses back up by screwing up her nose. So many readable signs on both their faces. And there was the shock of appreciating her prettiness, even though it’s hers too, of seeing how slim her body is, how waiflike, so fragile that it can’t help inspiring in men an avid urge to protect, a hunger for possession; and as Lucie June angrily studies Lucie March, she thinks of Raphaël.

“The poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you die.” The psychologist gives up. “It’s nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nothing. The poor have nothing, the rich need nothing, and if you eat nothing you die.”

Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man,

“We were born to the same mother, in the same year, in the same month, on the same day, and at the same hour. But we’re not twins. How come?” Both Lucies shake their heads, mystified. “We’re triplets!” Louis announces, laughing.

Vanity of vanities, says Kohelet. Havel havalim Havel, says Kohelet, all is vanity. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done: there is nothing new under the sun.

“Death is never worthy of us, Victor, it’s always solitary. But we can hope that this time for final farewells is at least useful for those who are left behind. If the Stoics are right, if there is nothing between people, no love or tenderness or friendship, but instead the body is everything, if it’s true that all our feelings are rooted in ourselves, well then, Victor, these last words won’t be pointless.”

There’s a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what’s going on in this world he created.

“No one takes their own life, didn’t they teach you that? There are just tortured souls who escape by killing their torturer.”

And at the very heart of this endless fire that has always consumed America, with this war waged by darkness over enlightenment, a war in which reason gradually backs down in the face of ignorance and the irrational, Jacob Evans puts on the dark breastplate of his own primitive and uncompromising hopes. Religion is a carnivorous fish in the abyssal depths. It emits the feeblest of light and needs a vast darkness around it to attract its prey.

Their message is obscure, but freedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it’s clear that people have stopped thinking.

Empathy, emotion, and the absurd sell well, so within a few hours stalls will be offering T-shirts with the slogans “Stimulate me, don’t simulate me,” “I’m a program, reset me,” and “I am 1, U are 2, we are free.” Comedians on the morning shows will venture into sketches about duplication.

“Ever since my father died, more than thirty years ago, I’ve always kept a Lego brick in my pocket. It wasn’t a fetish or a lucky charm. Just a few grams of memories, almost a habit. I’ve been given the one that the other Victor had, and there are now two of them. I’ve forgotten which is which, and I’ve clicked them together. I couldn’t tell you what they mean, but I feel as if I have more options, I’m freer than ever. But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.”

all religious figures run on that software: ‘Here are our beliefs, find the facts that prove them.’ Like Voltaire’s character Pangloss, they believe noses were made to carry glasses and that’s why we have glasses.