The Investigation

XXXVII

THE PSYCHOLOGIST HAD SEALED the envelope, and it wouldn’t have occurred to the Investigator to open the letter and read it, because the Psychologist had addressed the envelope in such a way that the bearer was simultaneously comforted and interdicted from looking inside. The large capital letters, written in a self-assured hand that brooked no opposition and contained no trace of hesitation, read: TO THE FOUNDER.

The Investigator was sitting in a sort of waiting room. The Psychologist had led him there, very kindly assisting his every step along the way, as if he were quite ill, when in reality — if he excepted the pain still drilling inside his head, and even that was beginning to abate — his general condition seemed to him to be pretty satisfactory. His hunger had stopped tormenting him, and he wasn’t even thirsty.

“Take a seat,” the Psychologist had said. “I’m going to look for, I’m going to look for … ah, what should I call them? Something you’d like …” He’d hesitated a moment with his left index finger on his lips as he contemplated the Investigator. “How about ‘Escorts’? Would that be all right with you, Escorts?”

“Escorts? But that’s perfect!” the Investigator had seen fit to reply. The very term, “Escort,” resonated reassuringly in his mind.

“They’ll take you to where the … Founder is. I’m certain he’ll be very happy to meet you.”

The Investigator had thanked the Psychologist, who had thereupon exited, leaving him in the company of a green plant, a water fountain — dry — and a pile of magazines placed on a low table. The Waiting Room was violently lighted and windowless. Like the Psychologist’s office as well as the corridors they’d passed through, it was white, entirely white, its walls and floor covered with the same smooth yet spongy material that absorbed shocks as well as sounds.

As he looked at the floor and the walls and the violent light, as he remembered the Psychologist’s words and the way he’d looked at him and listened to him, the Investigator suddenly felt an insidious malaise, to which, at first, he paid no attention. It was like an idea scratching at a distant door in a dwelling that comprised dozens of rooms and dozens of doors. Or, to transcribe another image that occurred to the Investigator, it was as if a person in a room on the fourth floor of a building had the impression that someone had just pressed the doorbell button outside the main door, but so briefly, so fleetingly, that the person in the fourth-floor apartment doesn’t know if he heard the sound or imagined it. In any case, however, his perception of things is modified by it, he’s no longer the same as he was a few seconds before the real or hypothetical ringing of the doorbell, and the actions he undertakes in the future will be influenced, one way or another, by what he heard or thought he heard.

Decidedly, the Waiting Room contained too much whiteness. Much too much whiteness. A world of whiteness, in which shapes as well as objects — all of them white as well — had a tendency to disappear: for example, the chair he was sitting on, the low table with the stack of magazines, the water fountain, and the pot that held the green plant, which had nothing green about it except its name (being itself totally white, with white leaves and white stems) and looked something like a large, bleached fern. After all, the Investigator thought, lingering for a moment over the plant’s strange aspect, albino rabbits exist, why not albino ferns? And the whiteness all around him, in even the smallest details and smallest objects in that room, transported him, as pure, solidified snow produces an impression of serene, rigorous, simple beauty endowed with the power to rest both eye and mind.

The Investigator closed his eyes and passed from white to black. He stayed like that, with his eyelids shut, for a long time, trying to cut himself off from the whiteness surrounding him; for he had the feeling that it might absorb him, dissolve him, make him disappear, if he let himself go. He made an effort not to think about it too much. Not to let himself go, that was it. Be the Investigator. Don’t forget to be the Investigator. Remain the Investigator. Keep being him, come what may.

He would no longer be surprised or dismayed by situations like the ones he’d been landing in for the past few days. After all, life is made up of impossible moments that come with no justification, are hard to interpret, and may not make any real sense. Life is nothing but a biological chaos one tries to organize and justify. But when the organization breaks down for some reason, whether because it’s eroded away, inappropriate, obsolete, or because the person in charge of it has resigned, one finds himself facing up to events, emotions, questions, impasses, and illuminations piled on top of one another like blocks of ice, all of different sizes, carried along by heavy avalanches, and deposited in the shape of a pyramid with broken sides, balancing in unstable equilibrium on the edge of a great precipice.

The Investigator opened his eyes again and concentrated on what he was holding with both hands: the envelope bearing the words TO THE FOUNDER. Now, here was something tangible and indubitable. The Investigator felt the force of the object, of the actual, palpable object, whose material was in contact with the cells of his skin and the nerve endings implanted there, which in a millionth of a second transmitted to his consciousness the proof of the object’s reality. This was nothing like some hypothetical doorbell that may have been rung or not! But why was he suddenly thinking about a doorbell?

He chased that thought away and picked up one of the magazines. There was neither a name nor a photograph on its glossy paper cover, which was blank and virgin white. He opened the magazine and flipped through it, increasingly nervous. Nothing. Every page was as milky-white as the cover. He took up a second magazine, then a third and a fourth, and finally went through them all. None of them contained a single printed character, the smallest illustration or photograph, or the tiniest drawing! They were all different from one another in format, thickness, or paper quality, but they were also all identical, because they all contained nothing! They were only gatherings of pages, pages whose whiteness was constant, uniform, monotonous. But the thing that most disturbed the Investigator, the thing that made him shivery and anxious, was that dozens, hundreds of fingers had leafed through those magazines, as demonstrated by the lower corners of the pages, which were dog-eared, crumpled, and sufficiently soiled to have gained an ivory patina. Those pages had been turned, or they’d been read.… If his eyes couldn’t make anything out, did that mean no one else’s could, either? Might he not be the victim of partial or selective blindness? Was it likely that anyone was printing, distributing, creating, or even imagining totally blank magazines? Magazines with no content? None whatsoever? And that people, whether idle, conditioned, or stupid, would read them all the same, spending their time and wearing out their eyes on pages empty of all information, of any text, of all photographs? What was to be gained from that? Yes, what could be the reason why individuals would devote time to reading what didn’t exist?

The Investigator again felt feverish, nervous, uneasy. He threw the last magazine on the floor and pulled the Psychologist’s envelope out from under his thigh.

TO THE FOUNDER. He reread the address three times. If he was reading it, that meant he had the ability to read it, and that it could be read. It followed, therefore, that those three words existed, written on the envelope. And it further followed that he was indeed able to read them and had not all at once — because of the shock of his collision with the wall, or because he’d abused his medications — become incapable of perceiving handwritten or printed characters. Wishing to be delivered from his doubts, without stopping to think, he ripped open the envelope and took out the sheet of paper the Psychologist had written on.

The paper was creamy white and folded in quarters, quite carefully; the Investigator could still see the traces of the Psychologist’s fingernails where he’d conscientiously pressed the edges of the folds. The Investigator unfolded the sheet of paper, looked at it, turned it over, turned it over again, and then started flipping it back and forth more and more violently, with trembling fingers. The sheet of paper was blank, dramatically blank, irremediably blank.

It bore no trace of ink, not a single word.

Nothing.

It was immaculate.