The Investigation

XXXVI

THE INVESTIGATOR BURST OUT LAUGHING. It was a big laugh, protracted and supple, and he made it last as long as possible, hoping that the Psychologist would find this slightly artificial good humor infectious and join him in modulating to a brighter key. But the longer the laugh went on, the more forced it in fact became; and the harder the Investigator tried to keep it up, to infuse it with new variations, the more rigid the Psychologist’s face grew, and the more it changed into a dull, unyielding surface, as cold as a rock, as impenetrable as granite.

The Psychologist placed his pen on the index card, and then the Investigator stopped laughing. He knew he’d lost. His thoughts started to race about in his head, rushing in every direction like creatures trapped in a circular room, dashing around it, charging its walls, crashing into them, rebounding, howling, injuring themselves, calling out, begging for deliverance, or at least for a response. He was searching. He was searching for his name. The name that was written on his identity papers. A simple action would have sufficed, a glance at a little plastic card bearing his photograph with his name printed under it. Could he have forgotten his own name? Was this among the consequences of his accident with the wall? You don’t forget your name! He must have said it a dozen times since his arrival in the City. Of course! He thought about that, passed in review all his encounters with other people — they hadn’t been so numerous — and tried to remember how he’d presented himself to them. “I’m the Investigator.” “Hello, I’m the Investigator.” “Let me introduce myself: I’m the Investigator.” The sentences followed one after another, all of them identical or nearly so. The Investigator recalled that he always designated himself as the Investigator, which happened to be precisely what he was. But he gave no name. No name at all. Ever.

“I’m the Investigator,” he finally said to the Psychologist, raising his shoulders and letting them fall at once by way of apology for the obviousness of his assertion.

The Psychologist stood up, returned to his rolling stool, sat on it, and scooted over to a spot very close to the Investigator. His hard face softened somewhat, and when he began to speak again, his voice was mild.

“Are you aware that you’ve talked of nothing but functions ever since the beginning of our session? You’re the Investigator, and you refer to the Policeman, the Guide, the Watchman, the Server, the Guard, the Manager, the Security Officer, the Founder. You never use proper names, not for yourself or anyone else. Sometimes you add a numerical adornment — you’re number 14, you’re number 93—but it comes down to the same thing. Answer this simple question: Who am I to you?”

“You’re the Psychologist. You told me so.”

“No. I told you I was a psychologist, not the Psychologist. Besides, you seem not to have noticed that I’m a woman, and your failure to observe this obvious fact confirms my analysis. You deny all humanity, in yourself and in those around you. You see people and the world as an impersonal, asexual system of functions, of cogs and gears, a great mechanism without intelligence in which those functions and cogs operate and interact in order to make it work. When you refer to a group, it’s always vague, it has no precise limits. You mention the Enterprise, the Crowd, the Tourists, the Displacees, nebulous entities one doesn’t know whether to take literally or metaphorically.”

“What about the Giantess?” the Investigator cried, full of hope, as if he’d retrieved the blessed formula for sending an SOS, even though he could feel that his ship was already almost completely submerged.

“The Giantess,” the Psychologist repeated, smiling one of those smiles bestowed on a person who’s having trouble understanding even though he’s been provided with all the elements he needs to understand. “The Giantess is also the Mother, your Mother, as simple as that. Or you might as well have said the Woman. Here again, you designate someone by function, and the exaggeration of the function that can be seen in your use of the word ‘Giantess’ simply transcribes the oppression you seem to feel when faced with the feminine, and perhaps also the fantasy of being dominated by it, enveloped by it, of returning by a sort of reverse childbirth into the greater, the first, the ancestral womb, as a way of escaping a world in which you find it difficult to win, or to keep, your proper place.”

The Giantess, his Mother! His Mother, to whose womb he dreamed of returning. This woman was mad! To prove it, the Investigator couldn’t even remember his Mother’s face.

“Moreover, this is the reason why you were wearing women’s undergarments, isn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

The Psychologist rolled his stool over to a small cabinet, opened one of its drawers, thrust his hand inside, and pulled out the pink panties with the black lace trim. He waved this article of clothing in the air for a few seconds before letting it drop back into the drawer, which he closed with a flick of his fingers.

“I can explain everything …” stammered the humiliated Investigator.

“But I’m not asking you for any explanation. I’m not the Policeman, to use your terminology. It’s my job to furnish explanations, that’s what I’m paid to do, not you. Since you respect functions so much, I ask you please not to confuse them, but, rather, tell me about this famous Investigation of yours. Who sent you on this mission?”

“The Head of Section,” the Investigator answered quickly, glad to let the little pair of panties lie forgotten in the Psychologist’s drawer.

“Once again, you’re identifying someone in terms of his function. What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea! Among ourselves, we always call him the Head of Section. He’s the Head of Section, and that’s it.”

“When you say ‘Among ourselves,’ to whom are you referring?”

“Well, the others! The other Investigators!”

“There are several of you?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know the answer to that! Five, six, a dozen, hundreds, or even more, I have no idea. The Head of Section knows. It’s not my job to know!”

“And if I ask you the names of some of the other Investigators, you’ll say …”

“I don’t know their names. I run into them infrequently, I never speak to them, I stay focused on my Investigations.”

The conversation was turning into torture. The Investigator kept getting bogged down in responses that weren’t responses at all. His awareness of this fact had the effect of making him feel even more fragile, and to top it all, he saw the Psychologist’s eyes change and read there the progressive metamorphosis taking place in the professional’s mind. Little by little, the Psychologist was ceasing to consider the Investigator a person somewhat like himself, a person evolving in a relatively normal fashion, though understandably given to some perversions and foibles that were, on the whole, socially and humanly acceptable, and now he was beginning, little by little, to apprehend the Investigator in all his difference, a difference that was obviously pathological, monstrous, a unique case whose study would prove to be, if not exciting, at least completely odd.

“And this Investigation, let’s talk about it. Its object is supposed to be …?” the Psychologist replied, letting his words fly through the air and hang there suspended.

“The Suicides.”

“The Suicides?”

“Yes, the epidemic of Suicides that has struck the Enterprise over the course of the past several months.”

“I’m not familiar with them, and if there’s anyone who should know about such matters, it’s me. Do you have proof of what you’re saying?”

“My Head of Section isn’t in the habit of playing jokes. He has a horror of wasting his time and making his subordinates waste theirs. I have to suppose that if he sent me here to this City to investigate a wave of suicides inside the Enterprise, then that wave exists. And besides — even though I think this is going to make you smile, I’m going to say it anyway, because I’ve reached the point where I no longer have anything left to lose, and certainly not face — I met the Suicides in a dream, and I was able to talk to them. It was right after I ran into the wall.”

The Psychologist took a deep breath, smiled, lifted his arms skyward, and let them fall back to his thighs. “Naturally!” he said.

He put his right hand on the Investigator’s shoulder and patted it a little. It was a slumped, soft shoulder, a shoulder one would have thought had no bones to support it, nothing but fat and atrophied muscles; and it formed part of a maltreated body that had eaten nothing for three days.

“You’ve convinced me,” the Psychologist said. “I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that you’ll be able to bring your Investigation to a successful conclusion.”

He returned to his desk and wrote a long letter. “A sort of ‘open sesame’ to help you get through doors,” he said. From time to time as he wrote, he would look up and give the Investigator a kindly glance.

Finally feeling reassured, the Investigator was able to relax. He considered himself very close to starting work on his mission in earnest. His confidence returned, and this feeling wasn’t due solely to the comfortable fabric of his thin hospital gown — he ran his fingers over it, first in one direction and then in another, using a slow, caressing motion — or even to the Policeman’s medicine. This temporary fragment of happiness arose from the conclusion he’d come to: You should always play with all your cards on the table, he told himself, it’s the only way to be taken seriously in life, even if the cards sometimes present unseemly figures, blind kings, one-eyed jacks, questionable queens, which can disconcert the strongest among us and make them mistrust the hand they’ve been dealt. Fortunately, however, there are individuals who think beyond appearances. And the Investigator, while reflecting upon all those things, admired the features of the Psychologist, bent over his desk, as we admire the men and women who comfort us in our existence.