The Extinction Club Read online

  Illness and misfortune have always struck. A plague such as the Black Death must have caused an almost paralyzing fear. But from the beginning, some people survived the plague. Accidental immunity to a disease provides a way of escape, a place to hide.

  But when a government decides to drop its full atomic load, we perceive, perhaps wrongly, that the possibility of survival, even in a lead-lined bunker, is zero. Life after an atomic holocaust is unimaginable, except in movies and comics. Holocaust, in both its Nazi and atomic-warfare usages, has come to signify an event that is unthinkable in some way. It’s a warning word, warning us not to attempt to be pragmatic in this zone of the unthinkable.

  In the late 1970s, British local government officials, when told that only they, and not their families, would have a place in the command bunker, formally decided that if the bomb was dropped they would hurry home and ignore any orders to descend underground.

  As long as the bomb doesn’t drop, the nerve gas descend, the GM supervirus infect, we are entitled to call ourselves survivors.

  The archetypal survivor is the inmate of a concentration camp. He is someone who has no control over his life in any normal sense and yet he somehow survives. He may trade his cigarettes for bread, or his skill at making musical instruments for cigarettes. Or he may be someone graced by incredible luck—in a fireproof building when firebombs are dropping, or in hospital when fellow inmates are selected to be killed.

  The survivor “gets by,” ‘keeps his nose clean,” doesn’t attempt to fight the system. Instead, he uses knowledge of the system to his advantage. But he cannot hope to confront or change the system; in his heart he knows that his is the life of a cockroach, dodging the heavy aimed boot of a house-owner.

  The survivor cannot really afford to enjoy life. Enjoyment suggests a surplus of opportunity the survivor just doesn’t have. In order to survive he has to wear blinkers. So in his survival lurks a kind of death, a giving up of what is vital and human, the joy and connectedness of life ground down by the gray demands of the day-to-day.

  And very many survivors of the Holocaust, when prompted, reply: “The best did not survive.”

  SURVIVALIST

  ASOCIETY OF only victims and survivors is a stable society. Think of a prison in which no one wanted to escape or even take over the wardens office. Such a prison could run forever. If we can talk of society having its own mechanisms for self-perpetuation, then the survivor—victim dichotomy would be one such, very handy, mechanism.

  The survivor is useful to society. He provides a role model for a kind of dogged helplessness. The survivor accepts his powerlessness in the face of the power of the government. He hopes simply to survive, that’s all.

  The popularity of survival training is due, in part, to its promise of increasing the control one has over one’s own life. Control is returned to the individual without the need for complicated machines or large amounts of money. He can become self-reliant rather than dependent. To make fire with a bow drill of dry wood is to be liberated from the technology of matches and lighters and the money to buy these things. The liberation may only be symbolic, but it is a symbol one can carry around in one’s heart, a psychological fall-back position for when the going gets tough.

  Likewise the study of self-defense.

  These attempts to master a simplified environment empower people who feel overwhelmed by modern life and its strident demands for dependency.

  So, unlike the survivor, the survivalist is an enemy of present-day society.

  The survivalist is lampooned for wanting to make things hard for himself, for trying to turn the clock back on all our amazing timesaving technology. He is regarded as odd for wanting to be self-reliant. Odd because he doesn’t like cars and TV and shopping. In the future, though, perhaps the desire for things will be seen as odd in comparison with the desire for human qualities.

  DETERMINATION

  THE MAJOR and I—he was now in a jacket and tie but still with the clanking ID bracelet on his thick wrist—sat in leather wingbacked armchairs and waited for the results of his latest extinction. With his graying eight-inch handlebar mustache, the Major was known to be a stickler for punctuality. He implied that the committee of the Extinction Club respected this. The mustache, like the Major, was a wily old survivor. During the appalling tedium of one summer in the Lahore barracks, the Major (then a subaltern) had embarked on a mustache-growing competition with the now late General Sir John “Bull” Maclver. By the time of the first monsoon, the mustaches were set to be measured by an agreed-upon group of trusted fellow officers. It was generally accepted that Bull would win. His handsome dark nine-incher bristled farther and finer than the flaming red handlebars of the Major.

  But Bull, by his boasting, had put himself at a disadvantage. He had underestimated the mean single-mindedness of the young Major, who came from no rich and distinguished family, had no famous forebears, had not even attended a very good school. The young Major was a self-made Englishman, and he had never lost at anything.

  The night before the monsoon, when everyone came down with headaches and the wind whistled in the neem trees, the young Major lay awake, his cruel blue eyes pinpricks of light in the darkness. At three o’clock, he leaped from his bed, the moon casting a sliver of light over his pillow. Dressed in a singlet and army shorts, he climbed like a cat out of his window and up onto the roof of the barracks. Along the roof, hanging down to check the sleeping form of Maclver behind the extensive tent of a mosquito net. Down, soft and quick onto the dusty floor, along to the net, out with the kukri. The gleaming crescent of razor steel cut the net. There lay the sleeping Bull—baronet, good sport, generous to women, wealthy, intelligent, a mess-room wit, universally liked, and soon to be sporting a one-handled mustache.

  The cut was quick and delicate and reminded the young Major of an almost forgotten youth helping his father to slit the crops of chickens choking on stalks of grass.

  To leave the hair or not? Better to take it. Disposed of in the endless cow-dung fire of the nightwatchman.

  At six o’clock in the morning, a howl of anguish rang the entire length of the barracks.

  EXTINCTION

  LET us divide up extinction into more manageable pieces. First, there are the great extinctions caused by climatic shirts. It’s simply too hot or too cold for something to survive. This kind of extinction we can understand, since the change of climate attacks food supplies and all aspects of habitat at the same time.

  Then there are the extinctions caused by hunting: the dodo and the solitaire supposedly come into this category.

  Then come the other kinds of extinction, which are altogether more mysterious. Some species are too rigidly specialized. Their lack of adaptability to even small changes, changes so minute that they do not register as such to us, causes them to die out.

  As humans we rightly value the ability to adapt to new surroundings. Those who don’t, we cheerfully label dinosaurs. Companies that can’t adapt deserve to go bust.

  And don’t we feel, deep down, that those species that have become extinct somehow “deserved it” too, that their very inability to survive was a moral black mark against them? By a curious alogic, not surviving means you didn’t deserve to survive in the first place.

  Push this only a little further and aren’t we uncovering a morality no different from that of the crudest eugenics, the well-intentioned Swede rounding up and neutering “mental defectives”?

  CLUBLAND

  THE PRINCIPLES behind the Extinction Club were simple. Members paid handsomely for the privilege of exterminating an entire species, wiping it off the face of planet Earth, leaving behind no zoo specimens and no pets—total eradication. There is a saying of the Prophet Mohammed that it is not wrong to kill animals, they are put there for our benefit, but it is forbidden to kill a species. The Major, despite his disdain for women (they were all either “cats” or “old cats”), clergymen, and the concept of original sin, was not a Muslim, but he did symp
athize with that religion. On this point, however, he and the prophet parted company: the Major had no qualms about killing off an entire species. He had so far dispatched several types of tree vole, a South American beetle found in only one square mile of forest near Belem (he paid for the Brazilian Airforce to napalm the area, reducing each tree to a smoking stump), a blind fish found only in underground wadis of Saudi Arabia, and his latest triumph: poisoning an entire lake in New Zealand with cyanide for the sole purpose of eradicating a species of clawless crayfish.

  By modern standards, the Major was a very evil man, though he had killed no fellow human (in the war he was involved in training and planning) and had committed no crime until this unexpected burst of lawlessness in his late seventies.

  As a member of the League against (modernizing) the London Library, the Major despised the casual clothes and red T-shirts of the staff—reminiscent of Romanian fascists, he said. He hated computers and had a particular dislike of being quizzed by female librarians. If one of them remarked on some overdue item when he was taking a book out, he would ignore her, remaining cold and unspeaking, until the most senior male member of staff came to her bewildered rescue.

  When the Major realized I wasn’t a pinko liberal (or was too intimidated by him to reveal my true colors), he launched into a monologue that outlined his main beliefs. We were sitting in the Extinction Club’s plush headquarters, waiting for the crayfish lab results, which were being Fed-Exed from New Zealand.

  The Major was smoking hard black Brazilian cheroots, his tiny wicked eyes glinting with forceful malicious humor.

  “Only five percent ever counted in this country, and their numbers were decimated in the Somme and Passchendaele. Elimination of the officer class, you could call it. England has been going downhill ever since.”

  “What about Churchill?”

  “That weeping egotist! We might have been better off under the lunatic Hess.”

  The eyes glinted. Interruptions, I quickly gathered, were not required.

  “Having killed off the genetic stock that counted, it was only natural that we let go of the empire. Indeed, once I realized the tragically low caliber of men being sent out to rule India, I was in favor of disbanding the empire as soon as was practical. Of course, the Indians and the Africans have made a terrible mess of things, but we just didn’t have the moral force anymore.

  “You ask why I should take such pleasure in killing. In fact, I don’t. I have my own reasons why I engage in this kind of work, and they are none of your, nor anyone else’s business. I consider myself, in a global, cultural sense, to be extinct already. My views exist only in the addled brains of delinquents and madmen. Whereas before I stood with kings and heroes. We are entering dark times. My own peculiar racialism and prejudice against the fairer sex will be seen as mild buffoonery compared to the harsh world that is coming. The planet grows madder and madder, and I shall be glad to be soon gone.

  “My work, my lasting legacy, will be made known after I die. Perhaps people I have taken into my trust will speak about me. If they do not, I have taken measures to ensure that word will get out. People will be baffled and appalled by my actions. Indeed I estimate that I will remain largely misunderstood until the twenty-second century.”

  He stubbed his cigar out with a workmanlike flourish. The committee chairman was making his long way toward us across the plush green carpeting of the club. I noticed the bronze “feet” that held the soft carpet in place. The Major continued: “When the smoke has cleared, your great-grandchildren may understand.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  He tapped the side of his nose, on which grew an unusually large bulbous mole. “Work it out for yourself,” he smirked.

  “Major, Major,” bleated the committee chairman, “I am pleased to announce Lophophorus ihuysil no longer exists.” The Major raised his eyebrows and nodded at me in a meaningful way.

  PSEUDONYM

  IT WAS all getting a little mad. I’d wanted to help reform a library, and here I was being drawn into a global eco-terrorist conspiracy—but on the wrong side. The Major’s ideas made me sick. Even his view of Darwin was perverted. He believed that the logical outcome of Darwin was not diversity but a single species. The idea was that chance mutation would simply endlessly improve one species as it moved from environment to environment, wiping out other species as it went. All Darwin predicted, said the Major, were extinctions. He said the only thing Darwin had been correct about was multinational business. The growing similarity of every high street from Uxminster to Ulan Bator was single-species proliferation at its most obvious. Whatever I thought about such bizarre ideas, I knew I mustn’t let on about Milu. Using my research, he could conceivably orchestrate their successful elimination, there being fewer than two thousand in existence and all locations well documented.

  I suggested to Brigitte that I write the book using a pseudonym, something like Alan Potts or Benjamin Dale, a name that couldn’t be connected to me. She was unhappy about the suggestion. She pointed out reasonably that the publishers would want to publish me, not just my writing skills, whatever they might amount to. Me included the interviews I’d done, the reviews Id garnered, the TV program I’d been in. Me was practically becoming a brand, whereas Alan Potts was nothing, as anonymous as baked beans in a labelless tin.

  “It’s so hard to establish any kind of presence in the marketplace,” said Brigitte, when I suggested that a book about deer might confuse readers of my earlier book about martial arts. “Any publicity is welcome, and what we already have we should use.”

  I left her intimidating office feeling lightheaded. Being Alan Potts could have freed me up. I could have had fun. I could have forgotten about my “style,” the readers who said they were looking forward to my next book, the people who had already mocked my ideas. I could have forgotten about the Major. For the first time I felt the burden of being me.

  HAIR

  THE BURDEN of being me. As long as I had to be me, I was concerned about the things that increasingly concerned me. My nostalgia for the past, for example, which kept getting in the way, shouting at me that this was the story, the real story: how everything old and interesting and valuable was just disappearing.

  When I was eight, at the height of the fashion for long hair, I’d given myself a short back and sides with the kitchen scissors. My grandmother had laughed when she found out, but Grandpa Tom said nothing. I knew that he knew that the haircut was a sign of allegiance, with him and with the past.

  Grandpa Tom’s own hair was cut in a back room at the pub by a retired barber. Grandpa Tom and his farmer friends would have their hair cut there on a Thursday. The only barber’s in town was now unisex, and even knowledge of how to give a real short back and sides was disappearing. Who would cut Grandpa Tom’s hair when the retired barber died?

  FREAKS

  THERE is no word for definition in ancient Chinese. Instead, Hsun Tzu’s term Chih ming, “management of names,” was used. It reflected an ambivalence about nailing down the essence of a thing with words. Aristotle thought essences were easily nailed down. The Chinese sages were not so sure.

  Milu’s classical name, Su Bu Xiang, or the animal with four characteristics that do not match, is somewhat vague, but an excellent description once you have seen the animal.

  This poetic method of categorization meant that Milu might share a theoretical category with an opossum or a duck-billed platypus—animals that combined defining traits from different groups.

  So Milu sounds like an engaging freak, like an entry in a Borges short story.

  The ungainliness of Milu reminded me of the dodo and the solitaire. Of course, Milu didn’t lack the ability to run, but the meat was known to be exceedingly good, just as dodos were known to be very tasty.

  Milu liked to splash around in marshy places, even in winter. Perhaps this meant they could be easily targeted.

  Another unsupported theory: I am inclined to believe that the freakishness of the b
east, just as with the odd-looking dodo and solitaire, prompted some deep-seated viciousness to surface in humans who encountered it. There is something of the victim about these creatures. They look like animals you can bully. Baby chicks and puppies bring out our parenting instincts. But freaks bring out our unlovely instinct to keep the gene pool clean, untainted, unweakened. Perhaps at some deep primitive level there is a program in our brains to eradicate abnormality, oddness, eccentricity, wherever we meet it.

  The bully victimizes those who look different, but they have to look different in the right way. Individuals who look stronger or more beautiful than average look different in an acceptable way. They are there to strengthen the species. And they look more at home than the rest. Freaks always look as if they don’t quite belong, as if they have strayed from where they are most at home, their manor, patch, turf, ‘hood, demesne.

  A bird that can’t fly has forsaken its natural home; a flightless bird is a refugee, just waiting to be picked on. And Milu—a deer that might be a cow, or a mule, or even a weird kind of camel, with its big, trusting eyes—where would that be at home?

  Perhaps nowhere except in a sanctuary for such similar beasts, a kind of refuge like the forbidden park behind its high impenetrable wall. It seems to me that once we bullying, freak-killing, eccentric-hating humans arrived, Milus only hope was to be in a protected place.

  Did the emperor who decided to save Milu in this way (the anonymous first savior of the animal) understand that he was, in more than one sense, going against nature?

  SNAIL

  AT 5:30 P.M. on I January 1996, the last surviving snail of the species Partula turgida from French Polynesia died. This must be the most precise documentation of an extinction ever carried out. We can only speculate on the exact circumstances surrounding the last dodo or the last mammoth, but with the tiny (thumbnail-sized) snail from the Pacific, we know exactly, because the snail was part of a conservation program set up in 1987 in the London Zoo.