The Investigation

XIV

HIS EXPERIENCES WHILE HE WAS involuntarily adrift in the Crowd were without a doubt the strangest he’d gone through since his arrival in the City. When he allowed himself to be carried away like a wisp of straw on the current of a mighty river, the Investigator surrendered. For the first time in his existence, he gave up thinking of himself as an individual with a free will and freedom of choice, residing in a country that guaranteed fundamental human rights, so fundamental that most of the time its citizens, including the Investigator, enjoyed those rights without being fully conscious of them. Dissolved in the immense, moving mass of silent pedestrians, he slid along, stopped thinking, refused to analyze the situation, made no effort to fight it. It was almost as though he’d abandoned his body in order to enter into another body, vast and limitless.

How long did it all last? Who could really know? Not the Investigator, in any case, and that was for sure. He no longer knew very much. Like a man afflicted by a powerful psychotropic drug, he’d forgotten his raison d’être. He continued to exist, but weakly. He was losing thickness.

It started to get cooler again, and then it abruptly became cold. The sky was covered with a gray veil from which a few snowflakes soon escaped. Two or three of them, little, icy, ephemeral points, fell on the Investigator’s head and brought him back to his present condition. Shivering, he realized that a sign was becoming visible up ahead in the distance, above the flowing masses of people and vehicles: a hotel sign, his Hotel’s sign, the sign for the Hope Hotel. He told himself it had come to this: His perceptions were obviously in total disarray. He’d thought the Crowd had been sweeping him along for hours, but in fact he hadn’t gone very far at all.

All the same, one detail gave him pause. Was that really the same Hotel? The same sign? Something had changed. The Hotel was in its place on the other side of the street, between two buildings he also positively recognized. On the other side of the street. On the other si—! But of course! That was what was different. If the Hotel was on the other side of the street, that meant he couldn’t be on that side anymore, which therefore meant that he’d crossed over at some point, and that he was now walking on the side where the entrance to the Enterprise was located! And, yes, there, there it was, on his left, a little farther on, that was the entrance! He could even make out the Guardhouse.

He had to move fast. He had only a few seconds to get as far to the left as he could, slipping sideways across the current of humanity, so that he might escape from the streaming Crowd, leave the mass, and become again a discrete, unique creature. Just a few steps more, a few more yards, he didn’t want to time his exit wrong, he didn’t want to be blocked at the last moment by somebody he hadn’t seen closing up behind him.…

Phew! Made it!