The Investigation

XXXV

THE INVESTIGATOR LET HIMSELF be taken by the arm and guided like a sick child. They left the room, which might have been some sort of infirmary. As he walked, he realized he wasn’t wearing his raincoat anymore, or his sweatpants, either; what he had on was a simple hospital gown, salmon in color, made of some light, comfortable material — cotton, maybe Indian cotton, doubtless not silk, such a precious fabric would never be used in manufacturing that sort of garment, but the impression it left on the skin was nevertheless like that left by silk, warm and ethereal — and reaching down to the middle of his thighs. He had the awkward feeling that he was totally naked under the gown, but he didn’t have the nerve to check.

They were stepping warily down a white corridor whose floor, walls, and ceiling seemed to be covered with foam padding, which muffled the sounds of their progress and made walking an activity both delicate and spongy. At the end of about a hundred yards, the Psychologist opened a door on the left. He entered and led the Investigator to a swivel chair, chose for himself a wheeled stool — a rather tall metal object with a seat shaped like a tractor seat, one of those stools that hairdressers use to rotate around their clients — and rolled himself very close to the Investigator.

The office décor presented nothing of interest, or in any case nothing sufficiently arresting for one to pause and describe it. Nevertheless, one item leaped to the Investigator’s eyes — namely, the immense portrait of the Old Man; the face, clothes, and pose, he saw, were identical to those in the photographs on the key ring, in the Hotel room, and in the Manager’s office. Although the Investigator didn’t understand why, this realization terrified him, and his disquiet didn’t escape the Psychologist’s notice.

“Why are you looking at the wall?” he asked.

The panic-stricken Investigator couldn’t detach his gaze from the Old Man’s smile, from his drooping eyelids, whose curves exactly matched those of his mustache, from the light — mocking? cheerful? kindly? appalling? — that burned in his eyes, from his wrinkled, liver-spotted, fissured hands, by themselves a résumé of great age, or from his clothes, which the viewer felt like stroking, and against which he could perhaps snuggle up and fall asleep, so that thus he might obtain forgiveness for his mistakes, for his lies, for his lesser and greater sins.

“That man there …”

“A man? Talk to me about him,” the Psychologist said, having just looked at the wall himself.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You mentioned a man. Who is he?”

“I don’t know.… I don’t know. I have a vague notion.…”

“If it makes you feel any better, so do we all.”

“Is he the Founder?” the Investigator ventured to ask.

Moving like a crab, the Psychologist rolled his stool to one side, placed himself facing the Investigator, and repeated “The Founder?” in a puzzled voice.

“Yes. Is he the Founder?”

The Psychologist hesitated, seemed about to say something, reconsidered, and shrugged. “If you say so! Well, good. Now, provided you have no objection, I’d like us to talk about you. What brings you here?”

The Investigator would have gladly swallowed one or two of his friend the Policeman’s blue-and-yellow tablets, but the medicine bottle, like his discharged cell phone, had remained in his raincoat, and in any case, the bottle was empty. He wondered where his clothes could be. He didn’t miss them very much; the gown he had on was generally much more practical and certainly much nicer; he thought it becoming, and it was as thin and soft as a second skin.

Forgetting his headache and gathering his thoughts, he began to give a summary of his situation to the Psychologist. He started with his arrival in the City, repeatedly stressed his status and his mission, recounted his wanderings in the streets, his sensation of being lost, of being manipulated, the strangeness of the Hotel, the differences in how he was treated from one morning to the next, the Policeman’s hostile and then friendly behavior, the conduct of the Giantess; he talked about the deserted nighttime streets, about his feelings of abandonment and isolation, about the vastness of the Enterprise, which encompassed the entire City and perhaps even the visible world, about the Crowd that inundated the City during the day, impeding the slightest movement, unless you were a policeman, in which case the Crowd became a flock of sheep that a symbolic cudgel blow, a raised hand, a glaring eye sufficed to bring under control, about hostile sandwich-vending machines, about the Exceptional Authorization, about the Manager’s unsuccessful leap over his desk, about the Guide who was also the Watchman, about room 93, which the Investigator had methodically trashed, about the Tourists, the Displacees, the inconstancy of the weather, and the inability of the Hotel’s Architects to design stair risers of uniform height.

“Have you finished?” the Psychologist asked.

“Yes, I think so. I don’t have anything to add, at least not at the moment.”

The Investigator had spoken for almost an hour. Talking had done him good. He felt that the Psychologist could understand him. Now the Psychologist got off his wheeled stool and went to sit behind the desk. He opened a drawer and took out an index card and a promotional ballpoint pen on which the Investigator thought he recognized the photograph of the Old Man, but the reproduction was so small that he couldn’t be sure. The Psychologist jotted down a few words the Investigator was unable to read.

“Your name, please?” The Psychologist kept his head down and his eyes on the index card, doubtless assuming that the reply to his question would come too quickly to warrant raising his head and looking at the person across the desk.

“My name?”

“Yes.”

His head still lowered, the Psychologist was holding his pen ready to write down the Investigator’s name; the ballpoint hovered an inch above the card.

“My name … my name …?” the Investigator stammered, making an immense effort that he tried to hide behind a smile. In spite of himself, what he produced seemed rather like a grimace.

The Psychologist slowly raised his head and looked across the desk. His face betrayed not the slightest emotion, not the smallest thought inclined this way or that. In other words, it was impossible at that moment to know what the Psychologist thought about the Investigator or about the Investigator’s hesitation in giving his name. Only the fact of his having lifted his head, that is, of his having swapped a banal attitude for one a little less so, one that suggested a more intense — more intrigued? — attention, indicated that the time the Investigator was taking to reply to him constituted, in his opinion, an opinion given weight by his status as a clinician and supported by his knowledge and long professional experience (he was not in his first youth), an almost imperceptible break with normality.

Meanwhile, the Investigator was losing his footing, sinking in quicksand, experiencing something whose existence he’d always doubted. For years, he’d filed quicksand in the same mental drawer that contained Aladdin’s lamp, flying carpets, Scheherazade’s stories, and Sinbad’s Cyclops. He’d heard about all those things, but they’d remained hearsay. Legends and stories had never interested him. He did without them. He left all that to children. He was wrong.

“You don’t remember your name?”