“Give me … a hug?” the Investigator stammered.
“You didn’t notice a thing, right? I don’t mean to boast, but I’m a good actor. I thought about it all night long. I was cross with myself for not having done it. Regrets are terrible. My life is loaded with regrets, and it’s getting harder and harder for me to live with them. I look into other people’s eyes, and I see what I am to them: a uniform, a brutish type doing a brutish job. They stare at me as if I were an animal, a mound of muscles, a beast without a brain. But I have a brain, and above all, I have a heart. A beating heart, a heart that needs love. Do you know, at night, when I take off this uniform and these doodads, when I’m naked and alone again, I weep? Like a child who’s been punished or abandoned. When I saw you yesterday, I felt you could understand me. I felt you were like me, and that we were two of a kind. I wasn’t mistaken, was I?”
The Investigator was dumbstruck.
“Tell me, was I mistaken?” the Security Officer repeated imploringly.
The Investigator made a vague gesture that might have passed for encouraging.
“I was sure I was right. I vowed last night that if the situation arose again, I wouldn’t cause myself any additional regrets. And so, if you have no objections, I’d love to give you a hug, right here, right now. It’s not every day that one has the good fortune to meet an investigator, to say nothing of the Investigator, a man who plays a leading role, whereas I, I’m a mere underling, a shadowy figure summoned at the last minute and very quickly forgotten, a secondary character. It’s my lot in life. A fate I’ve grown used to. I accept it.”
Basically, the Investigator said to himself, this could be just another form of torture. The extravagant benevolence and the exaggerated friendliness, both of them unmotivated and ridiculously hyperbolic, were of a piece with the rest: the brutality, the mistreatment, the indifference, the nitpicking, the absurdity. This is another test, he thought. I’m being messed with. I’m being studied. I’m nothing but a toy, undergoing performance evaluations before being put on the market. Surely someone, somewhere, is watching me. But who? My boss, the Head of Section? His boss? His boss’s boss? The Manager? The Guide who is also the Watchman? The Policeman who claims to be my friend? The Giantess who rules the Hotel? God? Someone more important than God? All my reactions are being noted. I’m probably in the midst of some sort of validation protocol, some convoluted quality-control process, under observation by an entire team of men in white, Scientists, Censors, Judges, Arbiters, and who knows what else. I’m supposed to be the Investigator, but am I not myself the center of another Investigation, one that goes well beyond me, one whose stakes are much more vital than those of the one I’m conducting?
“Well?” said the Security Officer ecstatically.
“Well, what?”
“May I give you a hug?”
This was a strange scene indeed, though nobody saw it: the huge Security Officer, with his Minotaur’s forehead, clutching the puny Investigator to his bosom, wrapping his immense arms around him, holding him tight for a long moment, almost smothering him, as though desperately trying to experience the living character of another individual homologous to himself, yearning to feel a sense of belonging to the same species, seeking the certitude of being chained to the same bench in the same galley.
The embrace was ended by a crackling sound in the Security Officer’s earpiece. As though he’d been called to order, he released the Investigator at once and took two steps backward, his face hard and serious again. He listened. And the Investigator, who’d been on the verge of suffocation, was finally able to breathe.
The caller spoke to the Security Officer at length. Something was being explained to him. He responded from time to time, always in the same manner, repeating the word “Affirmative” or the expression “I read you loud and clear,” putting them in play alternately, as a juggler does with balls or tenpins.
He towered over the Investigator, and it occurred to the latter that, of all the people he’d spoken to, only this man was so tall, so powerfully built, so young, so thick-haired; the others conformed to the same physical type — pretty short, pretty bald, pretty middle-aged — as he, the Investigator, did. This observation was of no use to him. Men often have thoughts whose immediate utility they don’t see, and besides, many of the said thoughts turn out to have no usefulness at all. But thinking is sometimes like running an empty washing machine: The exercise may serve to verify proper functioning, but the dirty laundry left outside the machine stays dirty eternally.
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.