Utopia (3 page)

For some reason I can’t understand, these people insist on
living. Really, I’m not joking here or exaggerating. If I were one of the Others, I would have let the car’s tyres run over my innards.

Mahi finishes her turn, and peels away to catch up with Rasim. In all probability, cars will be wrecked today. But the problem is that we don’t die. I don’t mean that we are immortal, but we’ve transcended illness and accidents. The Others get ill and go for hospital treatment, and their cars that still run on petrol flip them over into ditches or slam them into a tree. If only death were so easily available here! Then the excitement would be huge. I don’t know why, but accidents are rare among us, and even when they happen, they don’t kill anyone.

From time to time, you see a violent chase between young people in cars. Often a car or two flips over, which throws an out-of-the-ordinary excitement into life, but unfortunately, you can’t flip a car every hour of the day.

Why don’t we kill ourselves? I don’t know. Suicide seems vulgar, rather common. All that foolishness reminds you of the Others. The lovelorn youth sets himself alight – the vulgarity of it! Kerosene, a flicker of light, a poor neighbourhood and some chickens. Chickens, of all things! All of it makes my stomach turn. The father who failed to feed his children, the girl who swallows a bottle of aspirin …

We are bigger and superior to all that nonsense. Death should be elegant and theatrical.

Your death and the deaths of the Others are alike. So let other people die. At least you can watch them as they die, instead of them seeing you.

Meet Mike Rogers, head of security. An American man from Missouri, he’s good company. He has a thin, blond moustache, that distinctive crew cut, bulging muscles; the edge of his
olive-green undershirt sticks out from his jacket. I enjoy talking with him in American slang, using that drawn-out country accent like a lazy cow mooing as it grazes in the meadow, and a lot of obscene insults that make him laugh.

Mike was a Marine. He fought in Vietnam at the beginning of the century. No, sorry – he fought in Iraq. I confuse Vietnam and Iraq a lot, since they are two far-off, remote countries that Americans had rough experiences in. He once told me, as we were taking phlogistine, ‘Our mistake in Iraq was that we were there among the population more than we needed to be. We quickly corrected that mistake and withdrew from the cities to solidify our presence in locked, fortified bases around the oil wells.’

‘From what I’ve learned, you were defeated in Iraq.’

He laughed heartily, then collected his breath. ‘You’re talking like the Europeans,’ he said. ‘We started the war to topple the tyrant, control the oil, and transform that wealthy country into fragments. OK – we did all that to the letter, so is there some other word for “victory”?’

‘Was oil that important?’

‘It was. How many wars we got into because of it! Then biroil suddenly appeared, right out of the blue. That American chemist who formulated it in 2010 got the Nobel prize. Only then was it possible for us to forget the Middle East and stick out our tongues at the oil sheikhs and tell them what we really thought of them. They can drink their oil if they want, but getting biroil has its price!’

‘Was that when you bought all the Egyptian antiquities?’

‘Yeah. The Egyptians didn’t have anything for sale except the past, and we bought it. We paid for it in the biroil that Utopia and
communities like it monopolise. A fifty-year contract that provides you with all the biroil you need to live. How do you suppose those cars and planes of yours move? For the last ten years, all cars and planes have run on biroil. The age of cars and engines that run on gas is finished, or nearly finished. Gas has become as cheap as water, but the problem is that there are so few machines that use it!’

This history lesson didn’t interest me at all. I’m not interested in how things were, or how we ended up where we are now. What interests me is what we are now and what we will be.

We then discussed the most important service he could render me.

I asked him if I could try hunting. I offered him my reasons, which could be summed up in three words: boredom, boredom and boredom.

His manner changed and he placed the official glass barrier of formality between us. ‘Impossible,’ he said firmly. ‘Even if you attempted it, I would prevent you. Things are dangerous these days, and risking it isn’t safe.’

‘Ever since I was born, you’ve all been saying that things are dangerous these days,’ I said in annoyance. ‘Nothing happens. Those people outside the fences are nothing but sheep, believe me.’

‘If the angry sheep ganged up on a child, they’d tear him to pieces with their legs,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette.

‘Have you ever heard of angry sheep?’

‘They’ve lost the capacity for anger but, like sheep, they sometimes get agitated for no reason, and with no clear justification. We’re living in one of those moments.’

Then he let out a puff of smoke. ‘Listen,’ he said finally, ‘I
won’t allow you unless I receive a clear directive from Mr Mourad.’

I knew that Mr Mourad wouldn’t agree to it. He doesn’t want to take chances with his sole heir.

So I sat around that night with the rest of the gang as we took phlogistine.

The faint smell of lemon filled the place.

We sat on the ground. Someone passed around the thin glass pipe. In it was a small dropper that you fill. Then you squeeze three or four drops on your forearm.

Hand it to the person next to you. Then wait.

Wait until you see the dancing green flame …

Let it drip out all the perfumes of existence. Let it drip out the fragrance of ferns in the swamps where dinosaurs walked millions of years ago. Let it drip out the scent of Cleopatra’s sweat and Julius Caesar’s blood. Let it drip out the incense the dervishes burned in the nights of Fatimid Cairo. Let it drip out the flames that consumed Cairo, or so they told us, and let it drip out the fragrance of all the
belles
of Paris dancing the can-can. Let it drip out all the musk of sperm whales and the breaths of Asian tigers slinking through the jungle darkness. Let it drip out the jungles themselves. Let it drip out the fragrances of pansy, narcissus, lilac and iris. Let it drip out all these scents together, then … then what? I forget …

Now you are no longer here. Now you are the master of space and time and existence itself. Now all that you have ever dreamed of is right here with you. You can imbibe ideas in cups, and pour the liquor into the antechambers of your mind. You can swallow fragrances and see them. You can smell light. Everything you
feared has departed to the place of no return. Genius ideas occur to you but you forget them when you examine them closely. Brilliant witticisms evaporate before they leave your mouth. But you decide that your friends heard them. So you laugh. So they laugh. A little later comes the numbness and your eyes glaze over. This is the moment. It’s the tunnel you won’t come out of for hours.

I signalled to Germinal to come over to me. She was a little pale after the scrape-and-suction surgery she’d had last week – for the third time – to get rid of my latest child. She was completely in the moment, so she must have been deep in the middle of the green flames now.

‘I decided to experience it,’ I told her. ‘I want to bring back a souvenir.’

She swallowed anxiously, although it didn’t seem as if she were really alarmed.

‘We’ve tasted all the amusements here,’ I added. ‘The same thing happened to Nero and Caligula. There’s no longer anything like the methods the two of them had to add some excitement to life.’

‘But that’s dangerous,’ she whispered. ‘You know that. The people there hate us with a passion. If they saw us among them, they’d—’

‘That’s what I want. Danger. Death.’

Her face began to glow with euphoria at hearing that word. Danger. Excitement. Words that are no longer in our lexicon.

Hunting people isn’t that strange. I’ve read a lot about the subject. Did you know that hunting tribes of Bushmen was a sanctioned sporting activity in South Africa in the last century? In the year 1870, the last Bushmen from the Cape died out from all the hunting.

Although hunting is illegal in Utopia, the grown-ups overlook it as long as we don’t do it openly. It’s Utopia’s all-purpose motto: Do what you want, as long as you don’t infringe on the property of the rest of Utopia’s residents. Most importantly, do what you want but keep it a secret – we don’t want the burden of having to appear to take a firm hand or show any empathy with anyone.

But we, the young people, have come to consider hunting a kind of test of manhood. Rasim did it. One night, he sneaked into one of those scary districts where the Others live. I think twenty years ago it was called Bab el-Shaareya or something like that. He kidnapped one of those worthless Others and brought him back to Utopia. He and his friends spent some fun days chasing this abductee in their cars. Then they killed him and Rasim kept his amputated hand, after having it embalmed. Every one of my friends has taken part in this sport at one time or another: the sport of hunting the Others, and bringing back a valuable souvenir to show to people like me.

‘Tonight we’ll set off outside to bring one of them back,’ I told Germinal. ‘You’ll come with me.’

She loves it when I order her about. It makes her feel defeated and titillates her masochistic streak.

When no one gives you an order in your whole life, when everyone pampers you, when your most trifling dreams are realised, then you desire the person who forces something on you. We used to play that game a lot: we would order the girls around, and each girl would have to do what she was told, whatever it was.

Anything.

Germinal’s eyes twinkled with enthusiasm.

But I was thinking about a suitable plan. It’s not easy to sneak into the world of the poor outside. The greatest difficulty is getting
through the gate in the reinforced security perimeter around Utopia. The poor and the children of big-shots look alike when you see them in the dark from a helicopter. Shots in the dark, two lifeless corpses and a regrettable incident. The problem would be solved by a meeting of the adults, and my father would get several million by way of compensation. I think this solution would please him, but it wouldn’t please me. That’s all.

What should I do?

You dive into the middle of the green flames that are the distinct characteristic of the drug phlogistine. That cold green fire that you swim in and get high from. Then you stick your head out, seeking more.

I told Germinal, ‘Did you know that they don’t use the names “Larine” and “Germinal” there? They use names like Batiaa, Zakiyya and Atiyyat.’

She burst out laughing. I don’t know why, exactly, but it pleased me quite a bit.

‘I know that,’ Germinal said as she smoked her fifth joint. ‘We see it sometimes on TV in those old shows.’

The truth is that we have our own special television that only shows us what we want to watch. It’s a cable and home-movie arrangement. There’s a high demand for movies about sex, violence and crime. It’s weird that the Others are interested in the same movies on their cheap televisions but for different reasons. Here, our love of violence is caused by boredom. Their love of violence is caused by poverty and repressed hatred. Why did the Roman emperors and plebeians love to watch slaves tearing each other
apart? Why didn’t poverty make the poor more merciful? If only a sociologist could explain that to me. As far as I know, the nature of emperors is completely different from that of plebeians, so why did the two natures agree on one thing – namely, brutality?

It was ten o’clock. It was time to get moving. I had a carefully devised plan. At eleven o’clock, the bus that transports the workers to their different neighbourhoods would arrive. Yes, there are workers in Utopia because there are jobs we can’t do. They come in the morning in a special bus and return in it at night. They are under observation at all times. They don’t talk and don’t raise their eyes, but you can smell their unpleasant mix of hatred, malice, flattery and suppressed anger. Years of subjugation have made them closer to animals. Day by day they lose part of their humanity until they end up truly horrible creatures.

I waited with Germinal in the darkness near their meeting place. My eye fell on a man who seemed about my size, and her eye fell on a woman just about her size. It was a simple trick: in fact, the oldest trick in the world.

I stood a few steps away from the man as I bit into a hamburger with relish. I saw the man’s eyes widen as he stared at my sandwich. His Adam’s apple moved as he gulped down his saliva.

‘You want a bite?’ I asked to entice him.

He looked at me warily, like a wolf when another one calls him to a piece of meat. He didn’t respond.

I looked around me, then said in a whisper, ‘I can’t give it to you here. Come behind this wall. If one of the guards saw us, there would be trouble for you.’

I didn’t give him the chance to think about it. I hurried behind a nearby wall and stood there.

After a minute, he appeared as I expected, drooling, his eyes fixed on the sandwich.

‘Here it is!’

How ugly he looked! His entire world had narrowed down to this sandwich in my hand, and he was no longer aware of anything taking place around him.

At that point, Germinal came around the wall, then slammed a piece of brick she had hidden in her bag onto his head. It wasn’t easy for her because she wasn’t used to it, so she was forced to bring it down on his head twice because the first blow didn’t finish him off. Right there in the dark, we tore off his clothes and I put them on. The advantage of these clothes is that there is an ID card in each pocket. He had worn a cap on his head. No problem: that would hide most of my face.

Shaking, Germinal took the sandwich from me and stood near the selected woman.

The scene was repeated with almost the same steps: the lure, the wall. I brought down the piece of brick on the woman’s head, then stripped her of her clothes so Germinal could wear them. We hid our original clothes under a rock. The woman’s head was wrapped in a scarf, which again simplified matters.