The Investigation

by Philippe Claudel

  The Investigator opened his eyes again and concentrated on what he was holding with both hands: the envelope bearing the words TO THE FOUNDER. Now, here was something tangible and indubitable. The Investigator felt the force of the object, of the actual, palpable object, whose material was in contact with the cells of his skin and the nerve endings implanted there, which in a millionth of a second transmitted to his consciousness the proof of the object’s reality. This was nothing like some hypothetical doorbell that may have been rung or not! But why was he suddenly thinking about a doorbell?

  He chased that thought away and picked up one of the magazines. There was neither a name nor a photograph on its glossy paper cover, which was blank and virgin white. He opened the magazine and flipped through it, increasingly nervous. Nothing. Every page was as milky-white as the cover. He took up a second magazine, then a third and a fourth, and finally went through them all. None of them contained a single printed character, the smallest illustration or photograph, or the tiniest drawing! They were all different from one another in format, thickness, or paper quality, but they were also all identical, because they all contained nothing! They were only gatherings of pages, pages whose whiteness was constant, uniform, monotonous. But the thing that most disturbed the Investigator, the thing that made him shivery and anxious, was that dozens, hundreds of fingers had leafed through those magazines, as demonstrated by the lower corners of the pages, which were dog-eared, crumpled, and sufficiently soiled to have gained an ivory patina. Those pages had been turned, or they’d been read.… If his eyes couldn’t make anything out, did that mean no one else’s could, either? Might he not be the victim of partial or selective blindness? Was it likely that anyone was printing, distributing, creating, or even imagining totally blank magazines? Magazines with no content? None whatsoever? And that people, whether idle, conditioned, or stupid, would read them all the same, spending their time and wearing out their eyes on pages empty of all information, of any text, of all photographs? What was to be gained from that? Yes, what could be the reason why individuals would devote time to reading what didn’t exist?

  The Investigator again felt feverish, nervous, uneasy. He threw the last magazine on the floor and pulled the Psychologist’s envelope out from under his thigh.

  TO THE FOUNDER. He reread the address three times. If he was reading it, that meant he had the ability to read it, and that it could be read. It followed, therefore, that those three words existed, written on the envelope. And it further followed that he was indeed able to read them and had not all at once—because of the shock of his collision with the wall, or because he’d abused his medications—become incapable of perceiving handwritten or printed characters. Wishing to be delivered from his doubts, without stopping to think, he ripped open the envelope and took out the sheet of paper the Psychologist had written on.

  The paper was creamy white and folded in quarters, quite carefully; the Investigator could still see the traces of the Psychologist’s fingernails where he’d conscientiously pressed the edges of the folds. The Investigator unfolded the sheet of paper, looked at it, turned it over, turned it over again, and then started flipping it back and forth more and more violently, with trembling fingers. The sheet of paper was blank, dramatically blank, irremediably blank.

  It bore no trace of ink, not a single word.

  Nothing.

  It was immaculate.

  XXXVIII

  MANY WARS AND MANY OTHER, less extreme circumstances have tested man’s faculty of resistance, subjecting him to physical and mental trials whose ongoing refinement, from century to century, serves to demonstrate the human being’s capacity for surpassing himself in the imagination and execution of horror.

  From simple drops of water falling one after another on a prisoner’s forehead to the Pear of Anguish, from torture with the boot, on the wheel, by drawing and quartering, by the inoculation of gangrene into healthy bodies, by the insertion of living rats into the vagina of a female victim, by the peremptory amputation of all four limbs, by the sun, to which one leaves the task of baking the skull of a naked creature buried up to the neck in desert sand, by slowly removing a hundred strips of flesh from a living body with a knife, by plunging a child into a tub of icy water so that the duration of its death agony may be accurately timed, by shocks of electricity, by inflicting upon a man the spectacle of his wife, his daughter, his son executed with a bullet in the back of the head, by the traditional and constant use of rape, by disemboweling, by prolonged detention in precarious conditions, by forced nudity intended as humiliation, by the blade, deliberately chosen for rust and dullness, that gradually slices through a victim’s throat, and by endless solitude, to the conviction planted in the victim’s mind that he himself is solely responsible for the situation he’s in and for the tortures being inflicted upon him, man has revealed himself to be not a wolf to man, despite the ancient saying—an old saw unfair to wolves, which are genuinely civilized and socialized creatures—but, more accurately, the anti-man, as physicists speak of antimatter.

  Who wanted to destroy the Investigator, then? Who was it who was so determined to grind him down like a common grain of wheat and scatter the poor flour to the wind, never to return? Who, and why? For this was the conclusion he’d come to in the soundless privacy of the white room, a conclusion in the form of a double question. Well beyond his hunger and his thirst, well beyond time, whose passage he couldn’t—or could no longer—quantify, having had his nose rubbed in its irrefutable relativity, well beyond pure questions of identity—who was he, really?—the Investigator was gradually apprehending the void in which he floated and out of which he was made. Had he not himself become a portion of matter confronted with antimatter in expansion? Was he not progressing, swiftly or slowly, it made little difference, toward the black hole that was going to ingest him? Did someone—but who? who?—want to bring him face-to-face with a radical, definitive, metaphorical insight into his life, into human life in general?

  The Investigator doubted his thoughts as well as his faculty of thinking. In the absence of any reference point—how could one cling to whiteness, to magazines composed of vanished texts, to a green plant that wasn’t even green?—he persuaded himself that perhaps he wasn’t completely living, and therefore not completely thinking. I don’t think, he thought. Someone’s thinking through me, or, rather, someone’s thinking me. No initiative is within my possibilities. I’m made to believe that I have an Investigation to conduct. In reality, doubtless, I have no such thing. I’m tossed back and forth, bashed around, bruised and then petted, knocked over and then stood upright again. I’m placed and displaced. I’m forbidden to cross a street and then I’m led across it. I’m smiled upon, I’m embraced, I’m cheered, only to be dashed the next minute against a wall. My brain is washed with floods of rain and avalanches of snow, with waves of cold and heat, I’m starved, I’m dehydrated, I’m stuffed with food, I’m made to vomit, I’m humiliated by the ridiculous clothes I’m compelled to wear, I’m prevented from washing myself, I’m walled up in a room, I’m listened to patiently in order to be all the more quickly abandoned to my fate. What justification can I seek for all that?

  The Investigator would have paid dearly to be able to go backward, to be a reel of film that could be rewound, to make a long march in reverse, gradually returning to the train and its steps, thin rectangles of open-worked metal he should never have gone down, to the train compartment, which he scarcely remembered, then to his apartment on the morning of his departure—but he was too tired to visualize his apartment, and he would have been incapable of describing it or even of giving its exact address, to say nothing of the furnishings or the floor covering (carpet? tiles? parquet?) or the walls (painted? wallpapered?)—and then, finally, back to the Head of Section’s office at the moment when he’d spoken to him of his mission. The Investigator wondered what exact terms had been employed; they were difficult to recall.

  At that very moment, which could still have be
en dated, even if dating it was no longer of any use, he had another thought without any logical basis, a dazzling illumination destined to die at once, like big fireworks in the dark skies of summer nights: He felt that all the places he’d passed through, all the streets he’d gone down, the walls he’d walked past, the buildings he’d seen, the first night’s bar, the Hotel and the Guardhouse, the glass cone where the Manager’s office was, and maybe even the Psychologist’s office, no longer existed—from a certain point of view, he was right—and that in fact they had existed only for the brief moment of his passage, and that no doubt the same went for the people he’d encountered, who had likewise disappeared, annihilated along with their settings, plunged into the endless torpor for which the Guide’s Level 6 Impediment was a metaphor, and that this universal, complete, irreversible disappearance perhaps signaled the failure of his memory and the exhaustion of his intellectual and physical faculties, which no longer allowed him to retain anything, and that he was now getting ready to become a person who, quite simply, would soon cease to be a person at all, would meet the fate of all other people, who wind up dying one day even if, throughout the course of their existence, they have never stopped denying the implacable evidence.

  At the same time, the thought of the destruction of his thoughts, the awareness that the whiteness that surrounded him and had contaminated everything in sight, both walls and furniture, surely prefigured the greater, limitless whiteness toward which he was moving—this very thought proved that he was, in spite of everything, still thinking! And that the hope of remaining, of lasting a while longer, even if it was only a very little while, existed. All his misadventures, his crash into the wall, his obsession with seeing the Founder’s portrait everywhere, and his isolation in whiteness had as yet failed to destroy him completely. The Investigator turned out to be quite solid, unshaken even in his awareness of impending disappearance. But how sorrowful all that was! He couldn’t take it anymore, the mad race going on inside the walls of his skull. And he was starting to get cold. Very cold.

  He grabbed the bottom of his light, too light, hospital gown and tried in vain to stretch it, to lengthen it, to pull it over a little more of his body; but by twisting the fabric he succeeded only in tearing it at the left shoulder, and it was at that moment, at the precise moment when he was performing the very human action of clothing himself, of covering his naked skin with an article of clothing, that the walls and floor of the Waiting Room started moving, as if the movement had been synchronized with the ripping of the gown, which made a delicate sound like opening a zipper, and a few fractions of a second later, in proportion as the trembling of the floor and the walls increased, a metallic racket broke out and gathered force, a concerted din of axles set in motion, wheels, squeals, clangs, and bangs that caused an image to spring up in the Investigator’s brain, a very distinct image of the train that had brought him to the City and whose dilapidated condition had surprised him a little, even though he hadn’t really dwelled on it, yes, that train sprang up in his memory, along with many others, dozens, hundreds, thousands of trains, their engines united and their cars filled with resigned travelers, all of whom had features more or less in common with those of the Investigator, all of them tossed about, powerless, surprised, and together making up, in spite of themselves, the interminable and stupefied procession of human History.

  The pitching increased, and so did the racket. While both grew in magnitude, the sounds of whistles, of hammer blows, and perhaps of voices, too, though he wasn’t sure about that, seemed to transpire through the padded surfaces around him, literally to transpire, the clamor changing into drops of sweat, of oily, sticky liquid, a kind of resin seeping in from outside and suffusing the white walls, penetrating them, passing through them, and saturating the room.

  The Investigator would have liked to puncture his ears so he wouldn’t hear anymore, pierce his eyes so he wouldn’t see anymore, burst his soul so he’d stop suffering this nightmare, but he couldn’t do any of that. The room was flinging him in every direction, contradictory forces were crushing him, spinning him, sending him flying to the ceiling, the ceiling that changed into the floor, then into a side wall, and then again into the ceiling, just before it violently became the floor again. Despite all this nonstop banging around, the Investigator felt no physical pain. Everything was soft. The shocks were cushioned, and whenever an object—low table, chair, magazine, green plant that was white—struck him, he had no sensation at all, just the impression that the object was going through him without causing any pain or damage. He thought about the men whom the Species, for the past several decades, had regularly been sending into space in order to explore its confines or ridiculously, and quite briefly, to take possession of it. He remembered seeing some of those men floating in the air of their cabin, pirouetting, sucking up liquids that remained in suspension in the form of little drops of different sizes and various colors, playing with wrenches that had assumed the weight of feathers and steel balls no heavier than soap bubbles. He remembered their slow voices, muddled and staticky from the hundreds of thousands of miles they’d had to travel to reach Earth, and the slow-motion smile on their faces, and how they were shut up in a narrow space, far from the world, zipping through the universe at astronomical speeds, alone, with no real possibility of return nor desire to return. Yes, he remembered their smile, an eternal smile that no longer had anything terrestrial or human about it, loosed as they were from the original blue globe, which took on for them the proportions of a child’s ball, small and far away.

  Then he too began to smile, and he let himself go.

  XXXIX

  A RAY OF WHITE INCANDESCENT LIGHT had been striking the Investigator’s left eyelid for the past several minutes. Eventually, feeling the heat, he opened the eye but closed it at once; the light was impossibly dazzling. He tried to open his other eye, but with no more success. The light was simply too fierce. He shifted his head and body a little and half opened his eyelids again. Sparing his eyes, the light now fell hard on his neck. The lock on the door had given way, and the light was streaming in through the narrow opening.

  The Investigator came completely awake and looked around him. The Waiting Room had been turned upside down, the chairs and table were broken, the livid plant lay sprawled in the ruins of its pot. The magazines looked like shavings from enormous, chlorotic tubers. He stood up and touched his body, expecting it to fall into a thousand pieces, but he was all right. The rip in his gown, however, was worse than before and now left two-thirds of his torso uncovered.

  A little fearful, he pushed open the door, slowly, and then, since nothing frightening happened, he flung it open with some force, so that it thudded against the outside wall. The sun rushed in like water through a suddenly lifted sluice gate. The light, he realized, was coming from the sun, only the sun, which beat down on him ferociously. It was a pale-yellow ball of fire, a circle with a shimmering circumference suspended above the horizon. He couldn’t tell whether the ball was moving away from the horizon or preparing to dissolve in it. The Investigator made a visor of his hands. Thus protected, he was gradually able to take stock of the place where he found himself.

  It was a sort of immense vacant lot, dusty and perfectly flat. Scattered here and there, according to some incomprehensible arrangement, were stacks of containers. They resembled big trailers without wheels, some of them sheathed in steel or aluminum, armored parallelepipeds incandescently reflecting the sunlight, whereas others were wrecked and looked like giant, battered cardboard cartons. There were also many site sheds, with plasterboard or pressed wood or sheet-metal walls. Sometimes a group of them were in perfect alignment; others were shoved together in clumps, lopsided, tipped up, overturned, resting on their sides. A few containers stood in isolation; although there was no sign on the ground of a border or an enclosure or a boundary, a prudent distance was apparently maintained around them. In certain groups, hierarchies of size, shape, material, or condition, whether good or bad,
seemed to hold sway. Some containers were brand-new, as if they’d just come off an assembly line; others, by contrast, showed evidence of decay in the corrosion of their component parts, the dirty stains covering their original surfaces, the fanciful geometry of their wall assemblies.

  The Investigator moved forward a few paces. The heat was stifling, and the sun didn’t move. There was no indication that it was going to set, just as there was none that it would rise higher. The day was suspended, scorching; it had neither evening nor morning and was distinguished not by its place in a classic temporal sequence but by the immobility of its light and its heat. The whiteness of the ground, which was covered with soil that resembled plaster, prevented the Investigator from really being able to take in his surroundings. He could make out things in the foreground fairly clearly, could discern the dozens and dozens of containers located not far from him, but beyond that, and despite all his efforts, he couldn’t see at all, because everything disappeared in the wobbly fluctuations of the air, which dilated the atmosphere into moving, translucent fumaroles, and behind them the landscape collapsed in an unfathomable void.

  The Enterprise couldn’t be far off, or the City, either. His journey in the container hadn’t lasted very long, or at least that was his impression. But, then again, what did he know?