The Investigation

XLII

THE INVESTIGATOR FELT DISTINCTLY that he was on the point of absenting himself for good. He wondered if perhaps he hadn’t already done so. His existence was continuing only intermittently now, in the manner of a dotted line or a blinking neon tube that makes a sound like fragile insects when they fly too close to streetlights on summer evenings and get burned to cinders. He was reduced to living in fits and starts, in brief breaks of consciousness interspersed by black holes, deep tar-pits in which nothing happened, nothing he could remember.

And it was neither hunger nor thirst nor weariness that was the cause of his steep decline. It wasn’t even the unbroken series of obstacles that had littered his path. At bottom, what undermined the final defenses of his soul — the part that was still protected behind the few remaining ramparts and still generating a little sense, whereas the walls, the watchtowers, the moats, the drawbridges, the sentry posts had all been destroyed in a progressive collapse, a sapping operation that had begun with his arrival in the City — was the disappointment of discovering that he’d been a workman in futility, that he would never have had sufficient strength to accomplish the mission assigned to him, namely to understand why men had chosen to kill themselves, why some had decided, at a certain point in their existence, to retire from the game of Humanity and not to wait for the ineluctable degeneration of the organism, the rupture of an aneurysm, the proliferation of metastasis, the obstruction of one of their principal arteries by fat accumulations, a vehicular or domestic accident, murder, drowning, an outbreak of germ warfare, a bombing, an earthquake, a tsunami, or a major flood to end their lives. Why had a number of men — five, ten, twenty or so, thousands; exactly how many made little difference — acted against their most deeply rooted instinct, which commanded them to survive at all costs, to continue the struggle, to accept the unacceptable, because the religion of life must perforce be stronger than the despair caused by endless obstacles? Why had some men — whether within the Enterprise or elsewhere was of quite minor importance — thrown in the towel, handed over their badges, turned in their manly uniforms? How could he, a simple Investigator, a poor wretch, ever have understood and explained that?

Malfunction became the essence of the Investigator’s being. Shaken by an ongoing, irreversible short-circuit, he struggled in a confusion of instants that his exhausted mind turned into a collage made up of moments he’d lived through, hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, memories, and anticipations; and the bombardment of images to which he was subjected and which he couldn’t evade finished the breakup of his consciousness, fragmenting it as a grenade touches the ground and blasts its various shards into a rainbow of death.

“You haven’t answered my question. Is this a common practice with you?” the Founder demanded.

“What question?” murmured the Investigator, who had just re-entered, in a very temporary fashion, the last scene he’d been in, the one in which the unmoving sun flung down its heat ever more intolerably. “I’ve been toyed with, haven’t I? I’m not up to it. I’m not up to my life. And that sun … Isn’t it just a simple light shining through a big magnifying glass above my head? Am I still under observation? Tell me. Is the experiment still going on? Have I passed the previous tests? Please tell me: Am I going to be able to investigate?”

“You answer my question with questions. A rather facile strategy, don’t you think?” The Shadow’s voice sounded irritated. “We’ve been together now for I don’t know how long, I have put up with you, and I’m waiting for your answer. What do you imagine? You think I know more about it than you do? Sometimes you tinker a bit, you invent, and everything blows up in your hands. You’d like to stop the ensuing catastrophe, but it’s too late! So what can you do? Mope? No, not me. I simply decided to turn my back. Cowardice isn’t the failing it’s thought to be. Courage often causes more harm. Let them figure it out!”

The Investigator could no longer understand what the Shadow was saying to him. He didn’t feel he was walking away; it seemed to him, rather, that his body was floating in the air and he wasn’t really touching the ground. His arms had taken on the consistency of fog. Of his hands, as dense as a cloud of incense, only the palms remained, volatile and ashen; the light was already passing through them, revealing billions of particles agitated by contradictory currents, by majestic shocks that carried them off in waves, in whirlwinds, in spirals, hurling them into shafts where they became stars in the midst of darkness, forming innumerable Milky Ways, in the midst of which could be seen the mauve glow of explosions, the radiance of universal cataclysms, the sensational collisions of asteroids, comets, and other bodies launched at the dawn of time into the purest void.

“Don’t worry about anything anymore,” the Shadow went on. “Stop being concerned about yourself. Your fingers won’t come back. Nor will the rest. It’s all going to be eaten away, little by little, you can’t do anything about it, and in any case it’s painless. I guarantee you that. But try to answer my question — you still could if you wanted to. Take advantage of your extraordinarily lucky escape from the container, try to give it some meaning, and answer my question: What is it you think I’ve founded?”

The Shadow’s voice coiled around the Investigator, penetrated him, slipped into what remained of his chest, filled his whole skull. The heat grew more and more frightful, and when he tried to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand, he realized that he no longer had hands, and that his forehead had also disappeared.

“I’m going away …” the Investigator managed to whisper, frightened, surprised, and disappointed.

“Obviously,” the Shadow said, mocking him. “Why would that astonish you? Dying shouldn’t surprise a man who isn’t anyone, as the Poet once wrote. But nobody reads poetry anymore. People wipe their bums with it! Besides, I informed you that you’d be disappearing soon. I haven’t been underhanded with you, I never lie, I’m not made for that. Come on, for goodness’ sake, improve your final moments. Give your death agony some meaning, even if you weren’t able to give your life any. Answer me — you’ve got no more to lose. What have I founded? Tell me, damn it! Do you want me to kneel? Apparently, that used to work in the old days.”

At that point, without knowing why, the Investigator thought about lilacs and their scent. He distinctly saw the pale-purple clusters of their flowers, blooming on a May morning in a distant spring, and he breathed in their pungent, sweet perfume. Then he was on a ship — standing on its prow, to be exact — that was making more than thirty knots; he held the rail with both hands while the sea spray streamed down his face, leaving on his lips the delicious taste of water and salt, and pods of dolphins leaped out of the frothy waves, caressed by the siren song arising from the light-dazzled air. He also saw an infant emerge from its mother’s womb, saw the spread thighs, heard the wail coming from the little body, successfully delivered, and watched the mother’s tears mingling with the blood and matter of nascent life. He was right in the middle of a dancing crowd, celebrating the return of peace after a war that had claimed millions of victims. He whirled about, was embraced by women who pressed their warm lips to his, saw their laughter, their eyes glittering with joy, and he caressed their hips and their breasts, forgot himself in them, and then, suddenly, everything was gone.

“We could go on with more images if I let you have your way,” the Shadow said, sounding piqued. “It’s easy to believe in happiness. All you have to do is graft a few moments like those onto one or two of your brain cells, and the thing is done. I’ve offered you the opportunity of enjoying those last little pleasures that you’ve never known, I’ve given you a few false, two-bit memories, to prove to you that I’m not a bad old guy, but answer me now! I want to hear it from the mouth of a man! What am I supposed to have founded?

So what had become of that big, incandescent sun? And that vast plain, with its chalky soil? Was it night at last? The Investigator, unable to make out anything anymore, considered those questions, helplessly aware that his meager remaining strength was leaving him.

“Not yet,” the Shadow whispered to him. “Not yet. That would be too simple. The night … the night’s for later.”

And yet everything had begun so normally. In a train station similar to many other train stations. On a square much like the other such squares that exist innumerably all over the Earth. Inside a bar of the most ordinary sort. Why had everything become so complicated after that? He’d set foot in a town, or in a life. He’d crossed paths with figures, with persons who stood for millions of others. He’d tried to unconfuse the issue, to give things names, to make them simple and clear, to go where he’d been told to go, to do what he’d been told to do. In the very beginning, even the account of events had followed established codes and depended on comforting structures before starting to free itself from them, to let itself go, to saw off the branches on which it had rested for so long, to do its part in bewildering him still more.

“I had an Investigation to conduct,” breathed the Investigator, trying in vain to touch his chin to his chest, which no longer existed. “An Investigation I wasn’t even able to begin …”

“How do you know? Who says you haven’t conducted a successful Investigation? You’ve located me, haven’t you? And to hear you tell it, I’m the Founder, right?”

“I wasn’t looking for you. I had an Investigation …” the Investigator murmured, before his lips dissolved, and with them his face.

“By not seeking, you shall find. Am I perhaps the cause of all this as well as its consequence? The beginning of the loop, the end of the loop? How do you know? You call me the Founder, but who knows, I could also be the Gravedigger, couldn’t I? That would suit me better! Think about all those containers! I’m surrounded by corpses. Come on, hurry up and answer my question, you’re not eternal. You’ve asserted that you were the Investigator. You had a mission, a role, a purpose, and even if you don’t think you reached your goal, the fact nevertheless remains that you know who you are and why you are who you are, but as for me, who am I, really? A broom was placed in my hands, I no longer know when, and it never made much sense anyway. What is my function? What do you think I’ve founded? What am I the Founder of?” the Shadow bellowed, and his reverberating cry set off a cascade of echoes that crashed against one another in a prolonged fall, inflicting mutual damage and making Heaven and Earth shake with dreadful thunder.

The Shadow was waiting, but the Investigator turned away from him, for he saw ghostly figures coming to greet him as in a ceremony of condolence: silhouettes, ideas, recollections, holograms, fictional characters, among whom he clearly recognized the Policeman, the Giantess, who smiled at him, the Guide, the Manager, the Server, the Security Officer and the Guard, the Child with the burning eyes, the Psychologist, who hung back a little, the Tourists, the Displacees, the Crowd. They all seemed somewhat ill at ease as they spent a few moments in silence before the body of a man of average size, with a round face and a balding pate, a man who resembled them like a brother, who was the victim of a farce in which they’d played their roles without trying very hard to step out of them, because it’s more comfortable that way. They had always been well ahead of the Investigator, and so they remained, even if that didn’t help them in any way and wouldn’t save them.

There were still some letters, drawn by a hand writing on a blackboard. A needle piercing a vein to draw out blood or inject some liquid. A very clear image of slow dripping and the soothing music it produced, soon covered by the sound of sheets of paper being torn up and then burned, and the faint whisper of ink poured out onto the pages of a book.

“So what have I founded!!!???” the Shadow shouted for the last time.

In the Investigator’s weak, doomed heart, there still trembled one or two mute words, barely formed, before what remained of his consciousness was carried off into the void, like the last puff of a cigarette in the wind. Then everything in him died, the answer to the question, the signs, the traces of light, his memory, his doubts. He thought he heard a slight noise, like the sound made by the lid of a laptop computer when the screen is closed on keys still warm from the fingertips that have caressed them so long.

“Click.”

And then — nothing more.

Nothing more.