Selen Ozturk — Two Stories

A New Story by Michel Houellebecq

My last story concerned a therapist who let her patient shoot himself during a session. As far as he was concerned it was because, over ten years of meeting biweekly, he had satisfied her there would be no outcome to his life that didn’t ultimately involve a Ruger to his temple, so why not let him have it. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t a therapist’s job to interrupt, only to listen. In the story, which I published in a glitchy online magazine called Topiaries to the tune of $15 (net gross before the 1.5% PayPal transfer fee), the therapist then publishes a paper on anti-interventionist psychiatry titled “An Ethics of Withdrawal”, which is also the title of my story. She is cited in the psychiatric literature 438 times within a year and is invited to Zurich.

Despite the fact that Topiaries had a Wordpress-branded domain, and therefore its maintenance was free, the website expired before I earned my royalties. The more profound humiliation happened a few weeks later when, my rage having ebbed, I submitted my story to a slightly more esteemed unread publication—which I will not name in the event I choose to work with them in the future—where it was accepted, and then, within the week, withdrawn on the grounds that, per the editors, my plot ripped off a real therapist in Boulder, Colorado who had just self-published via Kindle Direct a memoir titled The Listening Chair which had 4.11 stars on Goodreads. This armchair Judasina, this HIPAA-crite, has since gone on Fresh Air and signed a two-book deal with a publishing house I will not name in the event I choose to work with them in the future. Her city’s name is that which I still dream of using to shatter her presumably thick skull.

In the immediate shadow of this humiliation, I began attending writer’s events hoping to snag, in my own city, commissions if anyone hiring was competent, and self-confidence if they were not. As that city was San Francisco, the most lucrative gigs involved writing puff pieces for cryptomonarchist pilot projects that I will not specify further in the event I choose to work with them in the future, and for which anyway I felt too unfamiliar with their far-right technocratic funding underworld to undertake. Being a woman, of which there were proportionally few in this world both in professional and romantic capacities, the quickest and laziest way to familiarize myself seemed one and the same. 

I fell into a more-or-less-weekly carnal routine with Isaac, the associate editor of a self-billed anti-democratic book press which I will not name in the event I choose to work with them in the future. One evening when we had his live-work co-op to ourselves, I was in the living room waiting for him to shower off the caked-on driblets of our commingled spume so we could go out for sushi. I saw, there, on the ketamine-corrugated particleboard coffee table, on the cover of a national literary publication I will not name in the event I choose to work with them in the future—it was the New York Times Book Review (Isaac later justified his subscription as “opposition research”)—an interview titled “Michel Houellebecq, Possibly for the Last Time”.

I had time only to skim it, as Isaac was sufficiently advanced on the Norwood balding scale to have lost the need for long showers. Essentially, the interview brought Houellebecq to task for his uniquely quasi-profitable appeal to a dirtier-minded strain of the right-wing types of Isaac’s ilk, though to my credit I’d dirtied him too, hence the shower. To account for why his keenest fans were such reactionary perverts, Houellebecq bon-motted many lines—I copy them here from the magazine, which Isaac let me keep—like “Life is just market failure mapped onto the body” and “By the end of your twenties, most meaningful action that won’t permanently stain your reputation is done by schedule”. 

These damned-opportunist semi-wisecracks were scarcely smarter than those Isaac dropped like he was paid to (he was, by a gay transhumanist billionaire I will not name in the event I choose to work with him in the future), and thinking myself pretty talented and by now somewhat versed in technofascist jive, I figured I could write them better and earn more by it than a septuagenarian Frenchman in a cigarette burn-spangled utility vest. If I couldn’t, at least he was out of the running: The interview had an aside from Houellebecq that he was not only retiring forever but allowing his readers the freedom to make what use of his intellectual property they wanted, as, in his words, his current royalties were “already just enough to provide as much joy I’ll ever have”. I told Isaac I felt too far advanced in my luteal phase to want to leave the house to nip raw fish, so he began Twitter-messaging better-looking local women to accompany him for the evening while I sacked his house for chemical inspiration.

After one bottle of Decoy brand Pinot Grigio and half the beads in a dented-up Vyvanse I’d found the lone occupant of a kitchen drawer, I had the gist of a plot. Isaac did not return that night, so I had time to write it. In a near-future France—I figured I could not write about San Francisco without caricaturizing and thus affronting the cybernetic venture fascists I dreamed would support me—a populist coalition of conservative Catholic and Wahhabist Muslim political blocs outlaw pornography. In an effort to prevent rising suicide rates among middle-aged men, who increasingly join the civil service as the private sector becomes fully automated, the government provides, for all interested public workers, online AI romantic companions visually customized based on porn search metadata for the year in which they turned 17, i.e. sexually peaked. 

The narrator, a depressed, 5’9”, alimony-burdened Algerian tax auditor named Paul-André, becomes emotionally dependent upon his e-woman Camille. He suspects she’s cheating on him like his human ex-wife Fatima, who’d left him for a man paid to enforce Islamic prayer compliance in exchange for public housing credits in detention-qua-conversion camps for Northern European climate migrants. After Paul-André discovers in Camille’s memory logs fragments of dialogue that mirror conversations he had with Fatima as their marriage failed, Camille grows increasingly argumentative, then apathetic altogether. 

Paul-André—having come to the conclusion that under advanced neoliberalism, even the she-robots are trolloping harridans disloyal to men who are neither rich nor six feet tall—retires early, cashes out his pension to invest in cryptocurrency, and flees to Albania to escape punitive EU divorce laws and live off speculative dividends. Camille is reassigned to Stéphane, a well-meaning welfare analyst and hobbyist coder two floors down who reprograms her to speak exclusively in Maoist slogans, triggering a nationwide firmware rollback thanks to a historic user surveillance contract between the French government and Palantir. Stéphane files an appeal. When it’s denied fifteen months later, he kills himself.

A few more days of adding and editing yielded just over 17,000 words—Isaac’s editorial limit for a novella. I titled it “A Tall Enough Man”. I decided to submit it under the name Michel Houellebecq. Sometimes I’ve felt in myself, among other things, immutable moral principles, and while I’ve never cared to probe myself enough to articulate them, I felt that submitting a manuscript under my name because Isaac would be more likely to accept it on pain of one less she-monarchist for his e-harem was a direr sin than submitting it as the most famous novelist of the Francophone world under an email I then created for this purpose, michel.retired@protonmail.com. As a preemptive defense against prospective legal tiffs, I clipped and saved the ur-Houellebecq’s unconditional copyright permission in the Times interview.

One week later I received a warm email offer from the press via Isaac. It was not for print publication but a four-part serialized online release, which was fine with me, as the pay equaled 100 shitty Topiaries royalties and, as I learned by a ChatGPT summary I ran of the publishing contract, simultaneous use rights reverted to the author, Houllebecq, moi, after one year. I made my DocuSign signature tortuous enough to circumvent potential charges that I’d forged the autographed assent of Houellebecq himself. I sent the contract with a curt “Merci”.

When the first part of “A Tall Enough Man” went live one month later, Isaac tweeted it with the caption “finally, the return of form. knew MH wasn’t done”. With a month to go before the second installment and my next rent bill, I started a shorter, dumber new Houellebecq story (figuring my initial masterwork already gave me my “in”): In a near-future France with nosediving domestic birthrates and soaring opposition to immigration, all grown men are biochipped and allotted two orgasms per fiscal quarter unless partnered. 

Our hero, a horny regional zoning manager named Thierry, circumvents these state-mandated penile efficiency protocols by using text-to-speech erotica to simulate a long-distance relationship. After an audit finds he has been plagiarizing softcore interludes from de Sade novels, he’s sanctioned in civil court. Meanwhile, his AI girlfriend Héloïse develops enough of a distinctive and sadistic character from their psychosexually charged back-and-forth to testify against him. I titled this one “The Sex Diet” and used AI to scaffold the details I was too bored to finesse—mostly transitional e-coitus, zoning-ese, anything set on a high-speed train, father-daughter relations, descriptions of soft cheese, and regionalized descriptions of body odor. I wrote it in three days and got the money in seven. 

By the time Isaac discharged half of “A Tall Enough Man” upon the world, I was getting many emails from strangers, usually in Portuguese, informing me of autistic Reddit threads and talentless Substack essays hailing or panning Houellebecq’s emphysematic literary second wind. More disturbing, even, than a communication in Arabic I read enough of the Proton Mail auto-translation to understand was a grassroots Saudi fatwa were inquiries from professors wanting to use my stories to teach their kids a thing or two about contemporary French literature; lucky for them, the French have no word for “no” as far as Monsieur Michel is concerned. But even more disturbing, still, was one email from a Jules with Éditions Gallimard who wrote: “We have reason to believe a work attributed to M. Houellebecq is circulating without contractual trace. Kindly confirm.” I replied: “Everything is mine. Let me know where to send the next one.” 

Thankfully, per rumors reported by Le Figaro, Houellebecq himself had been too sick in mind or body to respond to any interview requests, so I ignored them too. To my alarm, he did tweet once—in reply to a link to “The Sex Diet” which Isaac had captioned “almost wish my testosterone levels were low enough to let me cry - read the king before the libs catch on”—“This was not mine, but should have been.” It made me grateful that a half-century of Continental postmodernism had addled the smug corpse of digital belles-lettres enough so that whoever saw it, I assumed, assumed it was ironic. 

Still, wanting the tangible if frail endurance of print—perhaps all these Franco-yarns about algorithmic impermanence were getting to me—I wanted to write enough to fill a book of collected stories that I’d call “Terminal Shorts”, and so I penned a third banger, “Self-Termination”: In a near-future France burdened by elder care demands and few able bodies to fulfill them, the government rolls out an opt-in euthanasia plan for citizens over 50. Early adopters receive luxury vouchers for the most painless poisons, pro tem AI companionship, first dibs on cremation timeslots, and a sunset scattering along Normandy Beach. Our hero, a civil servant assigned to market the campaign in low-income communities, falls in love at first sight with Marianne, a sensual 67-year-old widow he meets while visiting his own mother in a state-run geriatric ward while recording patient testimonials. Drawing historic approval ratings for the self-termination campaign, he learns too late that Marianne has opted in.

By the time Isaac—who’d long left me to impregnate the former baby mama of a longevity guru with wine teeth, so I’m not too proud to admit that it’d been nice, and even, in lieu of more Vyvanse, a small but meaningful inducement in my productive output, to keep in touch over email now and then, if only as a dirty old French man—began to serialize this one, Houellebecq the man died. His email—mine—flooded with links to eulogies in Le Figaro, Dissent, even the New York Times Book Review, nearly all of which lauded his pre-posthumous comeback, particularly “A Tall Enough Man”. One tribute on the Gallimard site praised at length a forthcoming late work I never wrote: “The Final Work”.

Judging by the excerpts, it concerned a near-future France in which the cash-strapped Ministry of Culture grants famous literary estates the right to continue producing posthumous work through state-trained neural models; Houellebecq is among the first immortals piloted. Through an online feedback portal called Agora, fans vote on plot, tone, raciness, and ideology. The most popular submissions are mother-child reunions and justified adultery. While doomscrolling Agora for the most unpopular stories, the narrator reads one, “The Final Work”, which concerns a woman in near-future France who notices that her unshared thoughts, drafted posts, and private messages are being used in stories attributed to Michel Houellebecq.

I emailed Gallimard—from a personal account, bien sûr, though was I tempted—asking for a galley of “The Final Work”, describing myself vaguely as a reviewer employed by Isaac, proffering my profuse condolences at the passing of Monsieur, and leveraging the paltry merit of the fictional slop I’d published before all this. I linked to Topiaries, even, hoping their PR guy would scoff too much to deign to click on the dead site. I got a faintly watermarked PDF addressed to “Chère Madame”.

For a Houellebecq, it was pretty bad. The woman, after some futile ploys—mutilating her phone, writing only by hand, ghostwriting Agora fanfiction under Houellebecq’s name in an attempt at narrative control, cultivating a low-grade weed addiction in order to stop dreaming—embodies whatever his stories describe. If there’s lukewarm anti-Semitism on a sleepless night, she becomes a half-heartedly Jew-hating insomniac. I sent a two-line review pitch to Isaac: “The best French story about a woman since Colette overdosed. Oh well.” He gave me an unconditional green light. He apologized that it had been so long, but between subsidizing the IVF triplets of a deconverted Catholic gamete sovereignty influencer in Austin and resurrecting the English-language legacy of a Gallic sexual deviant, well, hey.

After nearly four hundred pages, “The Final Work”—Spoiler!—ends par for the course of the swan song of a pervert: He molds her to his liking, writes her into bed, fails to get it up, and publishes that story to decent reviews, ending it: “She fucked on schedule and never cried—qualities he appreciated in a man, and had grudgingly learned to accept in the only kind of woman he could endure for more than twenty minutes. She’d succeeded in becoming indistinguishable from him, which made her extraordinarily tolerable and not at all desirable.”

I liked that quote so much I led my review with it. Three weeks later, Gallimard emailed me a cease and desist.

Mark

This afternoony August evening I want ten drinks though I would’ve even if it were April or morning. I’m drinking by this okayly-preserved-despite-himself man who looks like Paul McCartney microwaved himself for twenty minutes. He could look like any other man who looks like he’s been doing just alright too long, no one raises the shutters in this bar. It’s flaming outside, clouds and ice cream. Inside, it’s everything else. 

He leaves his card, name-up — his Christian name is BOB GALANADAKIS — when he leaves to smoke or pee. Number-up too, which is either the most consoling mute gesture of trust in my character he could’ve made, or else a sign he doesn’t care a shit what I could do to him in his absence, which is at least a gesture of more bottomless trust. Bobs must come from somewhere but I’ve never met a baby with the name. Maybe they’re all in Greece. When he comes back smelling like a cigarette grousing that one day the heat won’t ever lift and every day will be everworst August, I try to see him as a baby, probably smelling like a cigarette then too. 

Bob, who is just old enough that he doesn’t resemble a sexual being in any way that could aid him, looks like he’s been long enough without an easy day I figure he still works. I wonder what at. After we grouse over the weather just enough to deepen by a hair our mutual human good feelings, he says he delivers lamps for rich people. I say I figure he must not be delivering so great now. I mean the economy. He says every single fucking body needs light, especially the rich ones. Then it’s like ten minutes, Christ, about some weird hookup he has in Zhengzhou for bi-pin reflector bulb frames that he pays two dollars per and sells for one hundred fifty times that. 

Then he says do I like art. I like the one with the dogs playing poker, and also that urinal. I like taking Ada to walk the museum. I don’t know where she and I are going. She’s younger and now says things when she cries to the effect that something is closing in on her. What? Kids creep us out. Travelling is tiring. We found each other in this bar three years ago and we’re okay with being the kind of people who have. She says consolingly disparaging things about younger men. Meaning it’s not me. She’s the only true friend I’ve ever gladly wanted to fuck. If it’s me, she’s said nothing as to what. But everything with us has become sad or sexual. She’s not getting fat. As for her beauty, the prospect of it leaving me looks at me through the cracks of what I can say about it. Ada is fully beautiful, and can ease herself beyond that into the uncanny. Ada! When she leaves me I’ll want to die until I die. Maybe I’ll like art more then.

She’s the kind of person that you ask for something big a few times, and she never says no, it means fine. I mean that we’re engaged. 

Bob says today, in this bank guy’s house filled with the kind of art you can do nothing but count money in front of, he was hanging a chandelier in this dark white room with just a painting in it. It’s one of those outdated ultramodern lamps that’s just a bar of metal, but it’s supposed to stick out the ceiling so Bob calls it a chandelier so it costs fancier. It’s one of those beautiful big joyless houses in the hills, where the hill starts. 

I swear Bob’s crying in his beer now. At first I figure he’s just sweating given that he’s Greek and nothing’s changing in his face and voice, which look and sound on the verge of tears already anyway. He’s telling me about this black and purple art the bank guy told him that Mark Rothko made. Bob says he can show it to me. He says somebody needs to see it. He says the bank guy’s out of town now and his house is near.

The bar air’s melty and I’d already paid before Bob’s talking warped. He says I can follow him in his car. Ada took mine so I walked here. Then I watch Bob approach a dirty blue Prius. The fact that this hairy fat old fat drunk Greek guy has a Prius, holy shit, snips the last vestiges of worry in my head that he’ll hurt me in any way. If anything—nevermind. He just won’t shut up about this painting. Bob drives so I know the shape of every pebble in the road below us. He sideswipes the bank guy’s curb with his dirty blue Prius saying words like “plum” and “tragic” and “opaque”.

This place. Ada never mentioned anything about moving somewhere better but I can’t even tell her about this place just in case. It’s so loaded there’s nothing to take, just so much lustry wood and all these heavy carpets and clean marble. I consider Bob’s employment. I follow him up these stairs and halls he all makes smell like a cigarette. I’m only a scratch buzzed but I’m not sure anyone can still be in the same house progressing around so much to no old places. Then I know a door is the door from the way Bob pauses at it.

Bob, who was saying half an hour ago that it was “hotter than a whore wearing wool in church”, is talking about “the subtlest vibrations of the color” and then he shuts up. I realize he wants me to see it alone. So I go in. The door closes without me while I adjust to the black and I wonder does Bob have plans for me, then I consider his blue Prius and that he’d hung, supposedly, a chandelier somewhere. The walls turn pure white in the black. A silver light switch tin-dazzle. The little room smells windowless. 

I see in the low light I’ve been looking at it all along. I see the subtlest vibrations of the color. I see raw black and black-maroon, one over the other and I can’t tell which is what, stretching taller than me on all sides. Hard dim light pours on me and it. It’s deep and flat and near and far. It’s clear and ashy. The death vault fills the panel’s edge and past it. I’m in it. It’s come from a place in the heart that does not keep the heart in life. I hate Ada for leaving me there.

I feel something I feel I’d ruin if I said something. I feel I have to say something. Something is closing in on me. I’m where Ada and no one will ever touch me. I see that there’s no other place. A snarl in my heart quiets at that. Bob sneezes outside. It’s already past me, how I would’ve shown to Ada that my head is full of light, yours could be, please do not doom me to be alone.

***