The Investigation

by Philippe Claudel

  In each of those boxes, he told himself, there was a man, a man like him, a man who’d been knocked about, mistreated, allowed to hope, who’d been made to believe that he had a mission to accomplish, a role to play, a place in life, who’d been driven crazy, humiliated, brought low, who’d seen the fragility of his condition, his memory, and his certainties repeatedly demonstrated, an Investigator, perhaps, or someone claiming to be an Investigator, a man who was now howling and pounding the walls, and whom nobody could ever help. A man who could have been him if his box, less solid or more abused than the others, hadn’t opened.

  For such a long time, he’d thought himself unique; now he was able to measure the magnitude of his error, and it terrified him.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  The Investigator started. He’d almost forgotten the Shadow.

  “Here, it’s by blindfolding yourself that you’re able to see.”

  The Shadow was becoming more distinct, as a mirage sometimes does. The Investigator could make out his features and the details of his body. He was decidedly an old man, with a distended paunch that fell in several folds and hid his sex. The skin of his thighs put the Investigator in mind of very ancient animals, members of species that vanished ages ago, and his sunken pectoral muscles resembled the withered breasts of an elderly wet-nurse. His shoulders sagged, too, presenting soft, round, receding contours attached to obese arms on which the skin hung like tattered spiderwebs. But when the Investigator raised his eyes to the Shadow’s face, his shock was so great that he felt the earth vanishing under his feet and would have fallen had the other not held him up with his right hand, while his left retained its grasp on the broom handle, which apparently served him as both cane and scepter. The broad forehead, on which a network of wrinkles etched deltas and streamlets; the drooping jowls; the dimpled chin; the ears, behind which his silvery hair cascaded in gray waves; the heavy mustache, whose thick points descended on either side of his mouth, with its cracked lips—those were features the Investigator had contemplated many times, and even though he couldn’t make out the eyes, which disappeared almost completely behind the blindfold, he nevertheless had to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence: “The Founder!” he managed to blurt out, feeling waves of electricity surging through his body. “You’re the Founder!”

  “The Founder?” the Shadow repeated. He seemed to reflect for a while, and then he shrugged. “If it makes you happy … I’m not in the habit of being contrary. On the other hand, if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that you’re the first man.”

  “The First Man …?”

  “Yes, the first to come out of one of those boxes. No one was ever so lucky before. But don’t kid yourself, you’re only getting a brief reprieve. You’ll wind up like the others. Whether you’re inside or outside doesn’t change anything. That’s the distinctive characteristic of this ship; everyone’s aboard, one way or another.”

  The Shadow dealt the container a heavy blow, which provoked no reaction on the inside. “You see? It’s all over for him. He must have breathed his last. These boxes are so well designed and so well sealed that any attempt to open them is useless. I often tried my hand on one or another of them, for philanthropic reasons, no doubt, or to relieve my boredom. I gave up after breaking three fingernails and spraining my wrist.”

  Joining the deed to the word, the Shadow massaged his forearm, as if his evocation of the incident had reawakened the pain. “What’s curious,” he went on, “is to discover that the weight of misfortune becomes fairly light in proportion as it intensifies or proliferates. Seeing a man die before your eyes is quite unpleasant. Almost unbearable. To see or hear millions die dilutes both atrociousness and compassion. Rather quickly, you find you no longer feel very much about what happened. Number is the enemy of emotion. Who has ever felt bad while trampling an anthill, can you tell me that? Nobody, that’s who. I talk to them sometimes, to keep them company when I’ve got nothing better to do, but they’re tiresome.… They want me to put myself in their place, but it never occurs to a single one of them to put himself in mine. I’d like to make them feel better, but all they know how to do is complain. Some of them still have telephones. They try to reach their loved ones or some emergency-services number, but they exhaust their credit or their battery in the mazes of the automatic switchboards, which never manage to put them in touch with the person they want to reach. Besides, even if they made contact, what could the person on the other end do for them? What could we do? Nothing, as I already told you. After all, I’m not responsible for putting them where they are. And if I did have some responsibility at some point, it was so long ago that the statute of limitations has run out by now.”

  There was a silence. It lasted a fraction of a second or a thousand years, how could he know? Time had become an accessory dimension. The Investigator’s body was visibly melting. He was departing bit by bit, baked by the sun, squeezed and twisted like a rag that’s wrung out one last time before being thrown into the garbage.

  “Quite fortunately,” the Shadow resumed, “these poor creatures never last very long. In the beginning, they howl like pigs getting their throats slit, but they start to weaken very soon, and in the end they quiet down. Forever. The big silence. Why would anyone hold that against me? What a funny idea! What can I do? As if I had anything to do with it! To each his destiny. Do you think it’s easy to sweep up here? One gets what one deserves. There are no innocents. Don’t you believe that?”

  “I don’t know.… I don’t know anymore …” the Investigator declared. “Where are we? In Hell?”

  The Shadow nearly choked and then burst out laughing, a huge laugh that ended in a horrible coughing fit. He cleared his throat and spat three times, very far.

  “In Hell! The things you say! You like simplistic explanations, don’t you? These days I don’t think that works anymore. The world is too complex. The old tricks are worn out. And besides, people are no longer children who can still be told tall tales. No, you’re simply here in a sort of transit zone of the Enterprise. Over time, this area has been transformed into a big, open-air dumping ground. Whatever’s out of service, whatever can’t be put elsewhere is piled up here: things, objects, junk no one knows what to do with. I could show you entire hills composed of prostheses, wooden legs, soiled bandages, pharmaceutical waste, valleys filled with the cadavers of mobile phones, computers, printed circuit boards, silicon, lakes loaded to the brim with Freon, toxic sludge, acids, geological faults plugged with great shovelfuls of radioactive material and bituminous sands, to say nothing of rivers carrying along millions of gallons of waste oil, chemical fertilizers, solvents, pesticides, forests whose trees are bundles of rusty scrap iron, metallic structures embellished with reinforced concrete, melted plastic amalgamated with millions of tons of used syringes, which end up looking like defoliated branches, and I forget the rest. What do you want me to do? I can’t clean up everything for them—this is all I’ve got!”

  The Shadow punctuated his words by waving his broom.

  “There’s nothing here yet,” he went on. “It’s new territory. A landscape in progress, waiting for the artists who’ll celebrate it at some future date and the families that will come here, sooner or later, for Sunday outings and picnics. We’re just at the beginning. Only containers are arriving at the moment, prefabricated structures built in haste according to need. The Enterprise is expanding so fast. One may well wonder who the head of it is, because, try as I may, I can’t understand his strategy. The Enterprise needs new business locations, but it gets rid of them just as quickly as it acquires them, because at the same time it’s constantly being restructured, and sometimes regrettable errors occur, mistakes that inevitably entail a certain number of victims. The production rates imposed are such that the Transporters load the containers even as people are still working on them. Bad luck for the workers, but they just have to make sure they get out in time. Distraction comes at a high price these days, and so does ex
cessive zeal. Overtime hours dig the graves of those who accumulate them. The age of the utopians is over. Later, people will still be able to buy pipe dreams, on credit, from antique shops or collectors or village flea markets, but for what purpose? To show them to the children? Will there still be children? Do you have children? Have you reproduced yourself? In our time, man is a negligible quantity, a secondary species with a talent for disaster. He’s no longer anything at this point but a risk that has to be run.”

  The Shadow spat again, ejecting a fat, slimy, greenish gob that landed in the dust, forming there a narrow-bodied, oblong-headed snake that sank into the ground without further ado.

  “So, according to you,” the Shadow went on, looking at the Investigator through his blindfold, “what am I supposed to have founded?”

  XLII

  THE INVESTIGATOR FELT DISTINCTLY that he was on the point of absenting himself for good. He wondered if perhaps he hadn’t already done so. His existence was continuing only intermittently now, in the manner of a dotted line or a blinking neon tube that makes a sound like fragile insects when they fly too close to streetlights on summer evenings and get burned to cinders. He was reduced to living in fits and starts, in brief breaks of consciousness interspersed by black holes, deep tar-pits in which nothing happened, nothing he could remember.

  And it was neither hunger nor thirst nor weariness that was the cause of his steep decline. It wasn’t even the unbroken series of obstacles that had littered his path. At bottom, what undermined the final defenses of his soul—the part that was still protected behind the few remaining ramparts and still generating a little sense, whereas the walls, the watchtowers, the moats, the drawbridges, the sentry posts had all been destroyed in a progressive collapse, a sapping operation that had begun with his arrival in the City—was the disappointment of discovering that he’d been a workman in futility, that he would never have had sufficient strength to accomplish the mission assigned to him, namely to understand why men had chosen to kill themselves, why some had decided, at a certain point in their existence, to retire from the game of Humanity and not to wait for the ineluctable degeneration of the organism, the rupture of an aneurysm, the proliferation of metastasis, the obstruction of one of their principal arteries by fat accumulations, a vehicular or domestic accident, murder, drowning, an outbreak of germ warfare, a bombing, an earthquake, a tsunami, or a major flood to end their lives. Why had a number of men—five, ten, twenty or so, thousands; exactly how many made little difference—acted against their most deeply rooted instinct, which commanded them to survive at all costs, to continue the struggle, to accept the unacceptable, because the religion of life must perforce be stronger than the despair caused by endless obstacles? Why had some men—whether within the Enterprise or elsewhere was of quite minor importance—thrown in the towel, handed over their badges, turned in their manly uniforms? How could he, a simple Investigator, a poor wretch, ever have understood and explained that?

  Malfunction became the essence of the Investigator’s being. Shaken by an ongoing, irreversible short-circuit, he struggled in a confusion of instants that his exhausted mind turned into a collage made up of moments he’d lived through, hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, memories, and anticipations; and the bombardment of images to which he was subjected and which he couldn’t evade finished the breakup of his consciousness, fragmenting it as a grenade touches the ground and blasts its various shards into a rainbow of death.

  “You haven’t answered my question. Is this a common practice with you?” the Founder demanded.

  “What question?” murmured the Investigator, who had just re-entered, in a very temporary fashion, the last scene he’d been in, the one in which the unmoving sun flung down its heat ever more intolerably. “I’ve been toyed with, haven’t I? I’m not up to it. I’m not up to my life. And that sun … Isn’t it just a simple light shining through a big magnifying glass above my head? Am I still under observation? Tell me. Is the experiment still going on? Have I passed the previous tests? Please tell me: Am I going to be able to investigate?”

  “You answer my question with questions. A rather facile strategy, don’t you think?” The Shadow’s voice sounded irritated. “We’ve been together now for I don’t know how long, I have put up with you, and I’m waiting for your answer. What do you imagine? You think I know more about it than you do? Sometimes you tinker a bit, you invent, and everything blows up in your hands. You’d like to stop the ensuing catastrophe, but it’s too late! So what can you do? Mope? No, not me. I simply decided to turn my back. Cowardice isn’t the failing it’s thought to be. Courage often causes more harm. Let them figure it out!”

  The Investigator could no longer understand what the Shadow was saying to him. He didn’t feel he was walking away; it seemed to him, rather, that his body was floating in the air and he wasn’t really touching the ground. His arms had taken on the consistency of fog. Of his hands, as dense as a cloud of incense, only the palms remained, volatile and ashen; the light was already passing through them, revealing billions of particles agitated by contradictory currents, by majestic shocks that carried them off in waves, in whirlwinds, in spirals, hurling them into shafts where they became stars in the midst of darkness, forming innumerable Milky Ways, in the midst of which could be seen the mauve glow of explosions, the radiance of universal cataclysms, the sensational collisions of asteroids, comets, and other bodies launched at the dawn of time into the purest void.

  “Don’t worry about anything anymore,” the Shadow went on. “Stop being concerned about yourself. Your fingers won’t come back. Nor will the rest. It’s all going to be eaten away, little by little, you can’t do anything about it, and in any case it’s painless. I guarantee you that. But try to answer my question—you still could if you wanted to. Take advantage of your extraordinarily lucky escape from the container, try to give it some meaning, and answer my question: What is it you think I’ve founded?”

  The Shadow’s voice coiled around the Investigator, penetrated him, slipped into what remained of his chest, filled his whole skull. The heat grew more and more frightful, and when he tried to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand, he realized that he no longer had hands, and that his forehead had also disappeared.

  “I’m going away …” the Investigator managed to whisper, frightened, surprised, and disappointed.

  “Obviously,” the Shadow said, mocking him. “Why would that astonish you? Dying shouldn’t surprise a man who isn’t anyone, as the Poet once wrote. But nobody reads poetry anymore. People wipe their bums with it! Besides, I informed you that you’d be disappearing soon. I haven’t been underhanded with you, I never lie, I’m not made for that. Come on, for goodness’ sake, improve your final moments. Give your death agony some meaning, even if you weren’t able to give your life any. Answer me—you’ve got no more to lose. What have I founded? Tell me, damn it! Do you want me to kneel? Apparently, that used to work in the old days.”

  At that point, without knowing why, the Investigator thought about lilacs and their scent. He distinctly saw the pale-purple clusters of their flowers, blooming on a May morning in a distant spring, and he breathed in their pungent, sweet perfume. Then he was on a ship—standing on its prow, to be exact—that was making more than thirty knots; he held the rail with both hands while the sea spray streamed down his face, leaving on his lips the delicious taste of water and salt, and pods of dolphins leaped out of the frothy waves, caressed by the siren song arising from the light-dazzled air. He also saw an infant emerge from its mother’s womb, saw the spread thighs, heard the wail coming from the little body, successfully delivered, and watched the mother’s tears mingling with the blood and matter of nascent life. He was right in the middle of a dancing crowd, celebrating the return of peace after a war that had claimed millions of victims. He whirled about, was embraced by women who pressed their warm lips to his, saw their laughter, their eyes glittering with joy, and he caressed their hips and their breasts, forgot hi
mself in them, and then, suddenly, everything was gone.

  “We could go on with more images if I let you have your way,” the Shadow said, sounding piqued. “It’s easy to believe in happiness. All you have to do is graft a few moments like those onto one or two of your brain cells, and the thing is done. I’ve offered you the opportunity of enjoying those last little pleasures that you’ve never known, I’ve given you a few false, two-bit memories, to prove to you that I’m not a bad old guy, but answer me now! I want to hear it from the mouth of a man! What am I supposed to have founded?

  So what had become of that big, incandescent sun? And that vast plain, with its chalky soil? Was it night at last? The Investigator, unable to make out anything anymore, considered those questions, helplessly aware that his meager remaining strength was leaving him.

  “Not yet,” the Shadow whispered to him. “Not yet. That would be too simple. The night … the night’s for later.”

  And yet everything had begun so normally. In a train station similar to many other train stations. On a square much like the other such squares that exist innumerably all over the Earth. Inside a bar of the most ordinary sort. Why had everything become so complicated after that? He’d set foot in a town, or in a life. He’d crossed paths with figures, with persons who stood for millions of others. He’d tried to unconfuse the issue, to give things names, to make them simple and clear, to go where he’d been told to go, to do what he’d been told to do. In the very beginning, even the account of events had followed established codes and depended on comforting structures before starting to free itself from them, to let itself go, to saw off the branches on which it had rested for so long, to do its part in bewildering him still more.

  “I had an Investigation to conduct,” breathed the Investigator, trying in vain to touch his chin to his chest, which no longer existed. “An Investigation I wasn’t even able to begin …”