I’m auditioning for the part of narrator in Houellebecq’s next novel. The mortality sucks, but the fellatio’s out of this world.

…as he burbled on happily in this vein, I allowed my gaze to wander out of his office window to the street below. Two girls were passing, about fifteen years old, wearing gauzy tops through which the outlines of their breasts were clearly visible; above the waist of their cropped white trousers you could see that they were wearing thongs of different colours - the one on the left’s was yellow, the one on the right’s a peachy pink colour. On reflection, I decided that I preferred the pink, although in truth there was little to choose between them, the sluts. As we get older, we do not get any younger; but the policemen get younger all the time. I thought about pussy for a while, and my eyes began to mist up. It was definitely time to snap out of it and pay attention to what the old bastard was saying.

As it happened, he was still talking excitedly about C?line; frankly, I couldn’t see the point in it. Who gets excited about anti-semitism any more? If you want to be really offensive nowadays, you have to be racist towards the Arabs. I’d tried this for a while, and even managed to spend almost a whole week in a state of furious hatred for the miserable, backwards, shit-eating camel-molesters; but it soon wore off, and my cock remained as flaccid and impervious as ever to the stimulations of late-night soft porn on TV5. Later on I’d discovered Viagra, and was largely cured of any impulse towards racism: so long as the floozy giving me a hand-job was competent, considerate and reasonably-priced, who cared if she was from Algeria or Belarus?

In the future

we mooch around

tossing off endless

limpid quatrains

Just then it occurred to me that the solution to humanity’s ills must have something to do with quantum energy; perhaps by exploring hitherto neglected properties of the topology of Hilbert spaces we might rediscover the possibility of unconditional love. The Krause’s corpuscles at the end of my glans penis began to throb emphatically: the girl in the yellow thong had clearly made more of an impression on me than I’d first supposed. Soon I’d have to excuse myself and go and wank off under one of the plastic tables in the cafeteria, covering my exertions with the copy of Scientific American I’d filched from the desk in reception. All things considered, public masturbation has an undeservedly bad repution; it’s a harmless enough pleasure, certainly no worse than reading Teilhard de Chardin. You can get to the omega point a lot quicker with a deft five-finger shuffle, that’s my opinion.

The professor was pacing up and down behind his desk now; he seemed barely to have noticed my state of distraction, never mind my state of arousal. He had moved from C?line to Bataille; soon there would be mention of Sade, no doubt, and then the circle would be complete. What was it about these desiccated old farts and the wicked old Marquis? Did their wives, assuming they had them, ever comment on the copy of the 120 Days of Sodom lying suggestively open on the bed-side table? It was unthinkable; perhaps they had mistaken the great sinner’s works for an anthropological treatise on the mores of some distant tribe of savages, and no doubt they were right, for what could be more distant now than de Sade’s childish delight in cruelty and malign invention, his naive optimism about the limitless possibilities of human perversity? The only true sadists nowadays are children; even in the wildest S&M clubs, all you will find is bored has-beens going through the motions, lacerating their tired and unattractive flesh in the vain hope of arousing a little frisson of outrage in the straights outside.

Finally I could stand it no longer, and I interrupted the professor just as he was getting onto the topic of how the latest developments in Galois theory provided a solid mathematical basis for the theorem of the accursed share. “Indeed,” I cried, jumping from my chair and wagging my finger in an exaggerated fashion, “but in my opinion you’re forgetting the contribution made by Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene in their seminal paper on the role of apomorphisms in the articulation of comonadic bijective schemata, which clearly indicates - to those who have eyes to see - the possibility of developing a new species out of the synthesis of jaded forty-something fashion magazine editors and sofa-humping thirteen-year-old boys.” He looked at me with something akin to admiration, mixed with no small measure of bewilderment. “I’ll have to think about that…”, he was mumbling to himself, patting his jacket pockets in search of his spectacles as I sprinted for the cafeteria…