Philippe Claudel - The Investigation

The voice had lost all its strength. The Investigator had to press his ear against the container wall as hard as he could in order to make out the words.

“Were you investigating the Suicides within the Enterprise?” the Investigator persisted.

“The Enterprise? Suicides? No … no … My job was to … I mean, I was supposed to try to … explain … the decrease of motivation within the Group.… So cold … cold … My lips are freezing, too, and my eyes, I can’t see anymore.…”

“Which Group? What are you talking about?”

“The Group … the Group …”

“Does the Group belong to the Enterprise?”

“The Enterprise …?”

“Make an effort, damn it!” cried the Investigator, losing patience. “If you’re where you are, there’s bound to be a reason, for God’s sake! One doesn’t wind up where you are without a good reason! The Group you’re talking about must be part of the Enterprise. Answer me!”

“Group … motivation … tongue … frozen … Enterprise … can’t anymore … can’t anymore …”

“Answer me!!!”

“… anymore …”

The Investigator began to shout, beating the walls of the box with both hands, abandoning the relatively hushed tones he’d been using up to that point. And thereupon, dozens, hundreds, thousands (or were there more? who could know?) of walled-up voices were raised once again, in an outburst of cries, yells, death rattles, tragic appeals, complaints, prayers, and supplications that made the Investigator feel as though he were being clawed at from every side, clung to like some wretched boat that shipwreck victims cling to, even though they know it won’t be able to save them all, continuing to hold on to it all the same, with the sole, selfish intention of sinking it so that it won’t save anyone, unconsciously preferring the deaths of all to the survival of even one.

The Investigator could find but one escape from all that: He clapped his hands over his ears and closed his eyes.

QUITE OFTEN, WE TRY TO GRASP what escapes our understanding by using terms and concepts peculiar to ourselves. Ever since man attained distinction among the other species, he hasn’t stopped measuring the universe and the laws governing it by the scale of his thought and its products, without always noticing the inadequacy of such an approach. Nonetheless, he knows very well, for example, that a sieve is not a proper tool for carrying water. Why, then, does he constantly fool himself into thinking his mind can grasp everything and comprehend everything? Why not, rather, recognize that his mind is an ordinary, everyday sieve, a tool that renders undeniable service in certain circumstances, performing specific actions in given situations, but is completely useless in many others, because it’s not made for them, because it’s got holes in it, because a great many things pass through it before it can hold them back and consider them, even if only for a few seconds?

Was it because of the unrelenting heat? Was it because he couldn’t stop sweating, seeping, disappearing into his fluids? Was it because he was thirsty without even being completely aware of it that the Investigator was starting to think about human imperfection, about liquids and a sieve?

All was silent again. He still had his eyes closed. He’d dropped his hands long ago, and now they lay along his sides. The voices had stopped. Only the moaning of the wind as it played among the containers reached his ears. All of a sudden, he had the impression that he was a little less hot, and at the same time, the blackness behind his eyelids became still blacker.

A shadow.

It must be a shadow, he thought, a thick cloud hiding the sun, unless the sun itself has finally decided to go down.

He opened his eyes. A man stood before him, a figure he could see only in silhouette. The tall, stout body cast a large shadow over the Investigator. The man looked enormous. He was no cloud. In his right hand, he was holding what appeared to be a broom handle.

“Where did you come from?” asked the Shadow. His was an old man’s voice, heavy, deep, a little hoarse, but it projected, despite that roughness, a lively, fresh, lightly ironic tone. The other voices, the ones that came from inside the containers, rose in lamentation again.

“Be quiet!” the Shadow bellowed, and immediately there was silence. The Investigator couldn’t believe it. Who could this shadow be, that he had such rough, incontestable authority over all those captives?

“I asked you a question,” the Shadow said, addressing the Investigator again.

“The Waiting Room. I was in the Waiting Room, over there …” the Investigator slowly replied, leaning on the wall of the container as he rose, with great difficulty, to his feet. The Shadow moved, turning his head in the direction the Investigator had indicated, and then remained still for a few moments, gazing at the gutted prefab structure with the open door from which the Investigator had emerged. The latter had the sun in his eyes again, the bloody, blinding sun. It hadn’t moved an inch.

“You can’t see a thing,” said the Shadow. “Wait, I’ll fix that for you.”

The Investigator felt a hand on his person, tearing away what was left of his hospital gown. He quickly tried to cover his groin, but the cavernous voice forestalled him: “You’re not going to start with that old nonsense again, are you? What’s the point? Nobody can see you, except for me, and I’m in the same state as you.”

The Investigator heard the Shadow tearing his hospital gown into many strips. Then his hands, his old hands with their long, misshapen fingers, grazed the Investigator’s face as they tied the strips around his eyes in several layers, gently pulling the cloth taut and knotting each strip behind his head, but not too tightly, so that his eyelids would retain their freedom of movement.

“There you are. It’s done. You can open your eyes now.”

When he did so, the Investigator perceived the world through the orangey gauze that up until then had served him as a garment. The sun was now only a yellow ball the color of straw, and the ground had lost its blinding whiteness. Here and there, he could make out darker masses: the unequal hulks of the different containers. They covered the plain, which was perfectly flat, without elevation or eminence, as far as the eye could see. There weren’t dozens or hundreds of them, as he’d at first thought, but thousands, dozens of thousands! And the vision of that infinity sent sweetish bile surging up into his dry mouth. He felt on the point of vomiting. But what could he possibly have to vomit?

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!”