The Napus, page 5
His trembling finger indicated the cinebooks—which, on their gilded copper shelves, had indeed taken on a threatening aspect. He had certainly caught wind of thesis number three, attributing the Disease to extreme erosion by internal and external images, multiplied by moving illustration.
In order to reassure him and discourage him at the same time, I told him about the case of Mère Grégeois, napusified before my eyes, even though she was a pillar of our institute and a leading member of the prophylaxy committee.
He repeated, with a somber expression: “I sense that, if I stay here, it will end up happening to me.”
Personally, I was not very reassured either, for I observed that this was the fourth case that had occurred in my presence since the beginning of the epidemic. Was there, then, something about me that attracted the Faceless Death? I promised the librarian, however, that if my faithful Mouillemouillard should happen to disappear, by virtue of normal death or the Napus, I would take him on as the brave Lyonnais’ successor.
As he handed me my hat and cane, he said: “I’d also like to ask you, my dear Maître, what you find so funny about the total disappearance of a living being? I was struck by the fact that you laughed when that poor young man.…and yet you have a good heart, in your capacity as a scientist.”
Among the people, everyone is convinced that every man who works, especially in Science, has a good heart, while all idlers with private incomes are wicked. It’s a relic of Romanticism. I refrained from explaining to my interlocutor that ethnic confusion atrophies sensitivity, even the sensitivity of Polyplasts. I talked to him about nervous laughter, an insurmountable tic that desolated my existence—to effectively that he gradually lost his suspicious expression and resumed the attitude of great veneration that is the rule with regard to the depositories of Knowledge with a capital K.
On this subject, it’s necessary that I tell you an anecdote that illustrates a social condition.
One of the most inventive Polyplasts of our Foundation was also a poisoner, of rare perversity. It seemed that his criminal instinct was a function of his medical genius, or vice versa, for each of his discoveries corresponded to a crime bearing his hallmark, such that neither the police, not the magistrates, nor a jury could have any vestige of doubt. He was sentenced to death six times, but pardoned and set free every time, because people in high places wanted him to resume his occupations, so useful to suffering humankind. It was calculated that he had killed, amid his admirable endeavors, a hundred individuals of the two sexes. Now, he encountered on his path a saintly man who made him ashamed of his crimes, led him to repentance and even to perfect contrition, with the result that he renounced his phials of toxins and devoted himself to charity—for he had accumulated great wealth with his remedies and pharmaceutical specialties. Yes, but from the day he ceased poisoning people, he also ceased to invent, as if the two wellsprings, the benevolent and the malevolent, had dried up at the same time.
It appeared to me that the napusification of the reader of Manon Lescaut was the kind of thing that would interest Professor Eustache, to whom I paid a visit in his magnificent town house in the Rue de Monsieur, filled with fake Old Masters and antique furniture forged by skillful cabinet-makers.
Pale and glabrous, the scientist in question, to whom we owe the most beautiful studies of the “corporeality of images” and hereditary memory, received me eagerly, and became totally livid—in him, a sign of anxiety—when he discovered the objective of my visit. He had a long nose, thin lips and a high forehead, somewhat reminiscent of Dante. He was reputed to detest Polyplasts, but he gave no sign of it to me.
Naturally, in his view, Professor Ailette’s cellular explanation was untenable, as was Sidoine’s electromagnetic explanation. He had been told by the Prefect of Police, his nephew, that thirty per cent of cases of Napus had been produced in habitués of the municipal library and the Bibliothèque Nationale—which is to say, cinebook readers—but I found out subsequently that the nephew had massaged the statistic in order to please his uncle, a bachelor on whose inheritance he was counting.
Eustache told me that a great debate was about to take place at the Académie de Médecine, in which he would participate, along with Ailette, Sidoine, a German professor named Murmelthier, an English professor named Morrow, an American professor named Harold-Feller, a Spanish professor named Ladilla, a Japanese professor named Kasavigata, a Russian professor named Broussoloff, and an Italian professor named Salvibianchi.
“Just as long as the death without remains doesn’t choose that fine meeting to exercise its ravages,” I said, innocently.
That simple remark had an extraordinary effect on my eminent colleague. In fact, by virtue of studying images and their action on the organism, he had developed an unusual sensitivity to any mental representation translatable into words. Large drops of sweat formed on his forehead and ran down his cheeks and nose. He was extremely pale, like the fresh “roughcast” plaster that masons apply with a trowel. He was having difficulty breathing. I wondered whether he might be about to furnish me with another example of aphanasia right there and then.
“Do you think,” he said to me, in a halting voice, “that the fact of occupying oneself medically with the Napus is capable of favoring the appearance of the Plague among those who study it? That comes within the scope of my studies of imaginative pathology. It’s a question I’m asking myself.”
I explained to him that I had observed, some weeks earlier, the first authentic Parisian case of death without remains, and that I had witnessed several others—but that I was still here, and even, as the slang term has it “all there.”
“That’s because you’re also a Polyplast, and thus especially armored against the aggression of images,” the Master replied, with a sigh, “for I don’t believe in either a particular fragility of your tissues or an exceptional metabolism of your cells. But if there were the least presumption of such a risk, I’d immediately call off the Académie debate. Shall I admit to you that I have no fear of any malady, old or new, colonial or metropolitan, epidemic or otherwise, contagious or otherwise—but that aphanasia scares me? It’s unexpected, it’s annihilation, it’s the void, the desert, the inexplicable—in brief, it’s frightful.”
In saying that, the professor, celebrated for his harshness with regard to humans and animals, the pitiless vivisector, who had every right to bear the name of a knife,8 had adopted the expression of a fearful and quivering Dante, menaced by all the demons of the infernal “bolges.”
Wiping away the salty stickiness of his sudoriferous glands, he continued, in a more confident tone: “Would you ever have imagined that a man like me, who doesn’t believe in anything except the force of images—the annotator of Lucretius, the figurehead of the New Materialism—would light a candle at Notre-Dame des Victoires to deflect the plague away from me? That, however, is what I’ve done. Yes, my dear chap, I went, secretly, to beg for my survival, for the few years that remain for me to drag my package of cells around down here, with their magnetic centers and their congenital impressionability. There was an enormous crowd in that ancient church, before the flickering candles, as, I suppose, there was in the year one thousand, since the terrors of the millennium have come back again—but seriously motivated this time. I’d undoubtedly been seen, but I made myself scarce. The important thing, for me, is not to dissolve into nothing at all after that little click…oh, what horror!”
I thought that I ought to make the observation that practitioners do not catch all the ailments of their clientele, and that many reach a ripe old age, after having consigned to the grave a multitude of invalids of both sexes.
He answered me volubly: “Disillusion yourself, my dear Polyplast 17,177, and ask your comrade Poly 14,026 to inform you of the very curious statistics that he has compiled on this subject. The more time goes by, the more susceptible a man who cares for others becomes to the afflictions of those for whom he cares.
“Two hundred years ago, specialists in malignant tumors only developed cancer in a proportion of one in a thousand, which did not permit any distinction to be made between pure coincidence and contagion—but today, by virtue of the accumulated and somatic penetration of images”—he emphasized the word somatic—“the proportion is ten per thousand, which is becoming disquieting. It’s the same with diabetes.
“So, is it permissible to ask, before a disease as sudden, unexpected, and overwhelming as the Napus, whether the mere fact of occupying oneself with it, of being impregnated by the thought of it, might not predispose one’s tissues to the instantaneous disaggregation that it signifies?
“As for that fool Ailette’s preventive cellular broth, you can take it for granted that it’s as effective as Perlimpinpin’s powder or the serums of the 1920s. Oh, that Ailette would take the gold off a chair-leg or a tear from an orphan, as they say where I come from.”
I knew that Eustache was an enthusiastic collector, a great lover of reproductions of tapestries, copies of paintings, pseudo-antique silver and supposedly-precious furniture, and I tried to guide the conversation on to that terrain, in order to give him a chance to get a grip on himself, but he interrupted with profound sighs the questions I asked him about the fakes, knick-knacks, curios and items of bric-à-brac that crafty merchants had sold him, or the supposedly twentieth-century sideboards, the Goyas fabricated in Montrouge and the fifty-franc Pissarros that had been “a steal” at forty-five thousand.
Emerging from the house of that Prince of Medicine slightly weary of my scientific colleagues and comrades, I headed for the Palais de Justice, which today takes up the entire area between Notre-Dame and the Louvre, by reason of its formidable growth, due to the extension of courts and tribunals.
The Place Dauphiné has become an interior courtyard, the Pont Henri IV an interior bridge—the Seine passing through the Palais—and the buildings destined for the use of the legal profession resume on the right bank, extending as far as the Rue de Rivoli. A small electric tram links the various sectors of that gigantic caravanserai, which is nevertheless twenty times smaller than those of New York and Sydney.
The number of advocates and judges has multiplied tenfold since the year 2000, in proportion to that of trials and quibbles of every sort and the superimposition of electrical, magnetic, industrial, commercial, economic and international Codes, extending almost to infinity the thorns and thickets of procedure, in spite of the attempts at simplification made by ingenious jurists.
I was able to observe, as soon as I arrived among the wigs and gowns, busily employed or standing around in groups chatting, that the great topic of conversation was the terrible Napus. In this realm there had only been some sixty victims thus far, but prominent ones, including three presidents of the Court of Appeal and eight counselors of the Court of Cassation “blown away” in the course of hearings, seventeen preliminary magistrates and assessors, and three examining magistrates. The Bar had been spared thus far, hence the dictum that it was necessary to await the Disease standing up rather than seated. It was said, however, that the Public Prosecutor was already more dead than alive and that the King’s Prosecutors were in a bad way before the trembling of their chief. The result of that was an immense confusion in matters pending, which had spread to the clerks, the judiciary identity services, the judiciary police and the special police—to such an extent that thefts, murders and other violent crimes were multiplying in cities in the most disquieting fashion, overwhelming the local commissariats and the services of the Sûreté in general.
But these consequences were trivial as yet, compared to the upheavals that the death without remains had brought to jurisprudence and legislation—principally in matters of inheritance and certifications, civil and otherwise—which had not been foreseen, with good reason. That was what old magistrates with the heads of eunuchs or gorillas, their eyes obscured by cataracts, were rabbiting on about, surrounded by young lawyers, like lumps of rotting meat by buzzing flies, as far as the eye could see.
Some kept their arms in front of them while others held them behind their backs, inflating the sleeves of their robes as in the drawings of the great Daumier and Forain, which have traversed the centuries without growing old. Some burst into forced laughter, above their bulging briefcases. Others, putting on grave expressions, drew colleagues away by the shoulders as if to make them some important confidence—but the secret in question was bunkum or the produce of Mr. Punch, which would return to him. Yet others could be seen leaning on walls, legs buckled, shaking their heads like waiting horses in the days when horses waited. Circles of discussion formed, a few paces from other sordid circles, formed by the delinquents of common law, descended from police-vans, who were also talking about the Thing in low voices, as if they feared awakening and attracting upon themselves its blind rage.
As soon as I was perceived by some of my former comrades and neighbors from the École de Droit I was recognized and grabbed. I had acquired a certain notoriety of late, not because of my work at the Aristotle Foundation, nor my situation as a Polyplast, but by virtue of the fact that I had been a witness of the first authentic and verified case of the Napus. I was obliged to recount, for the hundredth time, the exclamation of the little girl who had baptized the death without remains, the disappearance of Mère Grégeois and that of the young man of the cinetexts. It was necessary for me to explain, briefly but precisely, the theses of Ailette, Sidoine and Eustache and reply to various objections raised by those quibblers, accustomed to splitting hairs into eight or sixteen and arguing about terms.
The announcement of the international debate at the Académie de Médecine caused a sensation.
One might imagine, in fact, that various opinions set in deliberation, might resolve a difficult better than the solitary ripening of a single opinion—but that is contrary to the truth. When it is a matter of finding a median between different, and sometimes opposed, texts and articles, a congressional debate might perhaps have some utility, but if it is a matter of an immediate, menacing reality and a frank and prompt resolution, that can only be the affair of a single individual who imposes his point of view on others when it is time to act.
A president of an initial tribunal, very knowledgeable and artful, by the name of Palemon, made the observation that it would be easy for murderers and accomplices to get rid of someone, dispose of the body and then come to testify to his death without remains. “We now find ourselves, Messieurs, in the presence of a capital danger, of an encouragement to murder such as has never been known before. What is more redoubtable than aphanasia itself is the simulation of aphanasia.”
The circle approved, and everyone racked his brains in search of an appropriate solution—but no one could think of one. The optimists insisted that everything would settled down and that the first historical epidemic of the plague or cholera must have been far worse. The pessimists riposted that the Napus had a mysterious and universal character that exceeded the proportions and the level of an epidemic, and that the fate of the entire human race was at stake. Everyone agreed in regretting that the protective penetration of human intelligence had not grown in proportion to the evils unleashed by the mechanical inventions of that same intelligence. There was a continual reversion to the formula: “It’s a pity that the qualitative has been allowed to be overtaken by the quantitative.”
There was a sudden stir among the lawyers; it was the Minister of Inventions, Tonqueloque, who had come to visit the Public Prosecutor, evidently with regard to the Napus.
Tonqueloque belonged very evidently to the quantitative genre, being primarily a mathematician, and as such accustomed to seeing everything from the viewpoint of the absolute, even though everything terrestrial is relative and that which is biological is malleable. Physically, he was a short stout man with neatly-brushed hair that might have been mistaken for a wig, a stammer and a squint that were irritated and confused by the slightest objection. I knew him well, having dealt with him on numerous occasions with regard to the inventions—ephemeral, I must admit—that inevitably emerge from the Aristotle Foundation, and which our envious rivals have baptized “five-minute discoveries.” Our characters were not compatible.
“Bonjour, Monsieur le Ministre.”
“Bonjour, my dear Poly 17,177. Do you have anything new with regard to the treatment of the Disease? What is the effect of Professor Ailette’s broth?”
That question had the effect of making the advocates and magistrates present—and Palemon most of all—laugh heartily. Tonqueloque adopted an irritated expression. “I don’t see, Messieurs, that there’s anything particularly cheerful about the present situation, and I must confess that it seems to me that serious questions ought to be treated seriously in the Palais de Justice.”
“Excuse me, Monsieur le Ministre,” said an old advocate by the name of Levert, who had a reputation as a joker. “We’re laughing at human impotence in the face of the new abyss that has opened beneath our feet. There’s no hilarity more philosophical.”
“It has occurred to me,” Tonqueloque said, without further insistence, “that there might be considerable scientific interest in recording the points at which the unfortunate aphanasics disappear and linking these points by a line on an appropriate map. One would thus obtain a curve that would not lack interest.”
That baroque idea, well worthy of a mathematical mind, increased everyone’s gaiety. Several put down their briefcases stuffed with files in order to dilate their rib-cages more easily. The clerks coming from all parts of the Palais to investigate the reasons for that joy already imagined that an irresistible means of combating the Disease had been found.
The Minister was bewildered. In order to say something, he added: “It might be the case that some kind of cellulo-explosive phenomenon, comparable to a limited tornado, is circulating on the surface of the planet, selecting its victims in accordance with a determined asymptote. That too is calculable.”
