The Investigation

XXXIII

THE INVESTIGATOR WAS FOLLOWING the green line. He was doing what the Security Officer had told him to do, and the Security Officer had told him to do what he’d been told to tell him. Thus far, everything was clear. Someone had made a decision and that decision had been put into force, as witnessed by the Investigator’s scrupulous adherence to the indicated path. He stepped meticulously, one foot after the other, and neither foot ever deviated from the green line. The ribbon of color he trod had materialized on the ground at some time in the past, produced by a man who’d been given the mission to paint that ribbon and had carried out his task without trying to understand why it had been assigned to him or what good it served.

The Investigator walked on. He didn’t know where he was headed, but that didn’t worry him. He’d poured out the tablets from the new medicine bottle his friend the Policeman had given him and popped them all into his mouth at once. He chewed them with relish, savoring their bitterness and their subtle bouquet of medicinal plants.

He was thinking kindly thoughts about the Policeman and the Security Officer, and also about the Guide, who according to the Security Officer — there again, he’d been told to tell him — had fallen victim to a Level 6 Impediment and would be unable to receive the Investigator that morning. When the Investigator asked the Security Officer what a Level 6 Impediment was, the other replied that he hadn’t the least idea, and that it didn’t lie within the parameters of his function to possess such information; his mission was limited to ensuring that no unauthorized visitor penetrated inside the walls of the Enterprise. Order doesn’t exist without the concept of society. People often think the reverse, but they’re wrong. Man created order at a time when nothing was required of him. He thought himself clever. He’s had cause to regret it.

Walking along at a moderate pace, the Investigator let strange theoretical analyses occupy his mind. A group of thirty-seven people — eleven women and twenty-six men, all Asians — overtook and passed him. Wearing hard hats and white coats and “External Element” badges, they were following the red line at a rapid clip. He envied them. Not because they were following the red line, but because of the hard hats and the coats. He missed them. The long white coat would have at least allowed him to hide his apple-green sweatpants and mended raincoat, and the hard hat would have given him a serious, professional air, which he thought he no longer had. But the Security Officer could do nothing for him in this regard, having in his possession neither a white coat nor a hard hat. It was the Guides’ job to provide External Elements with those items.

By now, the Asian group was nothing but a memory on the horizon. The Investigator continued to follow the green line. He appreciated having a goal. His cold was getting better, even if his scarlet, swollen nose, an organ worthy of a clown, remained painful, as did his boiled foot, chafed by the rubber boot he was wearing, and the wound on his forehead, which was beginning to close, thanks to a sort of brownish crust whose design recalled a bishop’s crosier or a scorpion’s tail.

The Investigator strolled along languidly, like an idler. He wouldn’t have looked out of place loitering in a landscape on a Sunday afternoon in October, on the banks of a canal decorated with a luminous fog whose densest parts, as compact as flax tows, clung to the blond branches of old poplars.

But his tranquil gait was deceiving; in fact, the Investigator didn’t miss any of what he saw around him. He had the feeling that his vision had become sharper, and that all his senses were in a heightened state of awareness. The thought of beginning his Investigation acted like a stimulating drug. His body, with its modest proportions, feeble muscles, and consummate flabbiness, seemed reinvigorated, newly energetic. He was going into action. He was becoming himself again.

Mentally, the Investigator recorded every building he passed close to. With subtle details and remarkable scope as far as the overall layout of the place was concerned, he successfully reconstructed in his head, as he walked along, a three-dimensional model of the part of the Enterprise he could see. It was by no means certain that this exercise would prove to be of much use in the Investigator’s future, but at least it demonstrated his ability to disengage from direct, material contingencies in order to conceive a schematized idea of physical structures that employed different materials — molybdenum, mild steels, photovoltaic panels — and had been constructed at various times.

What was happening to him? Why all these thoughts? They weren’t like him, none of them. What voice was speaking inside his skull? He stopped. He was dripping with sweat. He recalled his Section Accountant and remembered having once heard her speaking to a Secretary about the voices she, the Accountant, heard from time to time, voices that told her to do this or that, to wear black patent pumps on Fridays, to eat chicken three times a week, to run through the public gardens humming a current hit tune, to lean against her balcony railing and show her naked bosom to the old man in the opposite apartment. Hidden behind the coffee machine, the Investigator had been staggered by her words.

Could it be that he, too, was the victim of inner voices? He pricked up his ears, but he couldn’t hear a thing except the humming of the Enterprise, a sort of one-note music, like the sound of an electrical transformer. However, all those thoughts he couldn’t get rid of, the vocabulary that kept invading his mind in successive waves — they were none of them his. And what if someone — something? — were insidiously beginning to inhabit him, entering his brain and his body, his movements and his words? How, under those conditions, was he supposed to become himself again, despite what he’d thought a few minutes before?

The Investigator compelled himself to stop thinking. He gradually quickened his pace, staring at the green line as if it were the guarantee of his salvation. Then he was almost running, his eyes still fixed on the ribbon of green, the ribbon that represented the course of his life and his destiny, the ribbon he looked upon as an indispensable tool, a safeguard. He started going even faster, his heart pounding in his chest, his breath growing short, sweat dripping from his forehead, down his back, between his shoulder blades, under his armpits, down the back of his neck. Running now, faster and faster, running till he thought his lungs would burst, running as if his life depended on it, he kept his eyes riveted on the green line. The green line replaced all thought. The green line sucked up his gray matter, kneaded it, made it change color, gave it tonalities of celadon, jade, emerald, olive green, forest green.

The shock was extremely violent. The Investigator, with lowered head, sprinting along at maximum speed, galvanized by the tablets given him by his friend the Policeman, crashed head-on, without any last-second attempt to slow his momentum, into a wall of large cement blocks, at the foot of which the green line ended its horizontal run. He lay stretched out on the ground, released from consciousness. His body was relaxed. His cerebral activity was suspended. A swelling like a pigeon’s egg appeared on his forehead, exactly where he’d cut himself before; the wound had reopened, and a thin stream of dark blood was flowing from it.

The temperature started dropping; the sky darkened. Heavy clouds, like enormous, laden barges apparently gathering for a rendezvous, came rolling in from all sides, driven by disgruntled winds. It wasn’t long before the clouds began to bump into one another, smash into one another, rip one another open; and the first drops of icy rain fell on the Investigator, who lay there, still unconscious, and didn’t even feel them.