“How do you know? Who says you haven’t conducted a successful Investigation? You’ve located me, haven’t you? And to hear you tell it, I’m the Founder, right?”
“I wasn’t looking for you. I had an Investigation …” the Investigator murmured, before his lips dissolved, and with them his face.
“By not seeking, you shall find. Am I perhaps the cause of all this as well as its consequence? The beginning of the loop, the end of the loop? How do you know? You call me the Founder, but who knows, I could also be the Gravedigger, couldn’t I? That would suit me better! Think about all those containers! I’m surrounded by corpses. Come on, hurry up and answer my question, you’re not eternal. You’ve asserted that you were the Investigator. You had a mission, a role, a purpose, and even if you don’t think you reached your goal, the fact nevertheless remains that you know who you are and why you are who you are, but as for me, who am I, really? A broom was placed in my hands, I no longer know when, and it never made much sense anyway. What is my function? What do you think I’ve founded? What am I the Founder of?” the Shadow bellowed, and his reverberating cry set off a cascade of echoes that crashed against one another in a prolonged fall, inflicting mutual damage and making Heaven and Earth shake with dreadful thunder.
The Shadow was waiting, but the Investigator turned away from him, for he saw ghostly figures coming to greet him as in a ceremony of condolence: silhouettes, ideas, recollections, holograms, fictional characters, among whom he clearly recognized the Policeman, the Giantess, who smiled at him, the Guide, the Manager, the Server, the Security Officer and the Guard, the Child with the burning eyes, the Psychologist, who hung back a little, the Tourists, the Displacees, the Crowd. They all seemed somewhat ill at ease as they spent a few moments in silence before the body of a man of average size, with a round face and a balding pate, a man who resembled them like a brother, who was the victim of a farce in which they’d played their roles without trying very hard to step out of them, because it’s more comfortable that way. They had always been well ahead of the Investigator, and so they remained, even if that didn’t help them in any way and wouldn’t save them.
There were still some letters, drawn by a hand writing on a blackboard. A needle piercing a vein to draw out blood or inject some liquid. A very clear image of slow dripping and the soothing music it produced, soon covered by the sound of sheets of paper being torn up and then burned, and the faint whisper of ink poured out onto the pages of a book.
“So what have I founded!!!???” the Shadow shouted for the last time.
In the Investigator’s weak, doomed heart, there still trembled one or two mute words, barely formed, before what remained of his consciousness was carried off into the void, like the last puff of a cigarette in the wind. Then everything in him died, the answer to the question, the signs, the traces of light, his memory, his doubts. He thought he heard a slight noise, like the sound made by the lid of a laptop computer when the screen is closed on keys still warm from the fingertips that have caressed them so long.
“Click.”
And then—nothing more.
Nothing more.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philippe Claudel is the author of many novels, among them Brodeck, which won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2007 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His novel By a Slow River has been translated into thirty languages and was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2003 and the Elle Readers’ Literary Prize in 2004. Claudel also wrote and directed the 2008 film I’ve Loved You So Long, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, which won a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
ALSO BY PHILIPPE CLAUDEL
PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH
Brodeck
By a Slow River
The Investigation Page 18
