Philippe Claudel - The Investigation

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

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?

He was almost naked, and even though he’d left the Waiting Room only a short time before, twenty seconds at the most, his head and body were covered with sweat. (No doubt to convince himself that everything was going to return to normal, he continued to think of the burst prefabricated structure lying ten feet away from him with its door open as the Waiting Room.) He felt extremely light. Walking — he took a few steps — was easy. The only problem was the heat. He’d never known such heat. It was thoroughly upsetting, because, aside from cooking him, it extracted from his body a great deal of perspiration, which slicked his legs, dripped between his thighs, ran down his back, his chest, the nape of his neck, his sides, his forehead, flowed uninterruptedly and especially into his eyes, drowning them, adding liquid blinding to light blinding, with the result that the Investigator not only couldn’t see much, he was also steadily seeing less and less.

With his arms and hands stretched out toward emptiness, hoping in vain to block a sun that was slipping in everywhere, as if his limbs had become transparent, the Investigator looked for shade. He walked in all directions, and in particular he circled the Waiting Room, but it did no good, he couldn’t find the least shadow, which defied all logic and all laws of physics, for if the sun was shining on one wall, it couldn’t be shining on the opposite wall, too, and, what was more, the great star was far from its zenith, contenting itself with hovering lethargically just over the horizon; but the Investigator had reached the point where nothing surprised him anymore.

Out of breath, he stopped, sat — or, rather, knelt — on the ground, folded his body at the waist, drew his chin down to his breastbone, curled his head under himself as far as he could, and put one hand on each temple, getting smaller and smaller, a shape deposited on the ground, nothing but a shape, hardly different from a large stone or a package; had there been anyone to see it, he might have wondered what it could possibly contain. And what did he contain, in fact, aside from several score pounds of burning, ill-used flesh, inhabited by a buffeted, uncertain, and broken soul?

The Investigator had no more tears. Even if he’d wanted to cry, he wouldn’t have been able to. All the water in him was leaving his body in the form of sweat. He groaned and groaned again, trying to get more of his head between his arms and under his torso in order to escape the sun. His groaning became a cry. At first it was low and comparatively muffled, but then it grew, throbbed, rumbled, conveying the last shudders of an energy that sensed its own imminent decline, and culminating in a final explosion of animal howling, extended and powerful, which might have caused chills in a hearer had it not been so hot.

In zoos, it sometimes happens that the cries of the great apes or the peacocks awaken the other animals, and then, in the middle of the night or during the peaceful afternoon hours, when everything’s asleep and there’s no hint of unrest, a sonorous protest breaks out, a sort of living tempest consisting of hundreds of sounds and voices fused together into a thunder of low notes and high notes, of whistling spasms and guttural bursts, of yelping, hooting, growling, stamping, of banged bars and shaken wire fences, of barking and trumpeting, which electrifies the passerby and plunges him into a nightmare all the more frightening because he’s unable to discern the exact source of each of the sounds that scamper around him, bind him tightly, and suffocate him, preventing his escape from the cacophony as it turns into torture.

The Investigator hadn’t completely finished howling when, from most of the containers, gigantic boxes, prefabricated buildings, mobile homes, and storage units scattered around him, there arose a clamor, partly muffled and partly clear, of cries, rattles, rumblings, of voices, yes, no doubt about it, voices, whose supplicant tones he could grasp without understanding the words, the voices of ghosts or of persons condemned to death, the voices of the dying, of outcasts, age-old, ancestral, and at the same time atrociously present, voices that surrounded the Investigator and drowned out his own.