Philippe Claudel - The Investigation

“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 excessive 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?”

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?