The Investigator strolled along languidly, like an idler. He wouldn’t have looked out of place loitering in a landscape on a Sunday afternoon in October, on the banks of a canal decorated with a luminous fog whose densest parts, as compact as flax tows, clung to the blond branches of old poplars.
But his tranquil gait was deceiving; in fact, the Investigator didn’t miss any of what he saw around him. He had the feeling that his vision had become sharper, and that all his senses were in a heightened state of awareness. The thought of beginning his Investigation acted like a stimulating drug. His body, with its modest proportions, feeble muscles, and consummate flabbiness, seemed reinvigorated, newly energetic. He was going into action. He was becoming himself again.
Mentally, the Investigator recorded every building he passed close to. With subtle details and remarkable scope as far as the overall layout of the place was concerned, he successfully reconstructed in his head, as he walked along, a three-dimensional model of the part of the Enterprise he could see. It was by no means certain that this exercise would prove to be of much use in the Investigator’s future, but at least it demonstrated his ability to disengage from direct, material contingencies in order to conceive a schematized idea of physical structures that employed different materials — molybdenum, mild steels, photovoltaic panels — and had been constructed at various times.
What was happening to him? Why all these thoughts? They weren’t like him, none of them. What voice was speaking inside his skull? He stopped. He was dripping with sweat. He recalled his Section Accountant and remembered having once heard her speaking to a Secretary about the voices she, the Accountant, heard from time to time, voices that told her to do this or that, to wear black patent pumps on Fridays, to eat chicken three times a week, to run through the public gardens humming a current hit tune, to lean against her balcony railing and show her naked bosom to the old man in the opposite apartment. Hidden behind the coffee machine, the Investigator had been staggered by her words.
Could it be that he, too, was the victim of inner voices? He pricked up his ears, but he couldn’t hear a thing except the humming of the Enterprise, a sort of one-note music, like the sound of an electrical transformer. However, all those thoughts he couldn’t get rid of, the vocabulary that kept invading his mind in successive waves — they were none of them his. And what if someone — something? — were insidiously beginning to inhabit him, entering his brain and his body, his movements and his words? How, under those conditions, was he supposed to become himself again, despite what he’d thought a few minutes before?
The Investigator compelled himself to stop thinking. He gradually quickened his pace, staring at the green line as if it were the guarantee of his salvation. Then he was almost running, his eyes still fixed on the ribbon of green, the ribbon that represented the course of his life and his destiny, the ribbon he looked upon as an indispensable tool, a safeguard. He started going even faster, his heart pounding in his chest, his breath growing short, sweat dripping from his forehead, down his back, between his shoulder blades, under his armpits, down the back of his neck. Running now, faster and faster, running till he thought his lungs would burst, running as if his life depended on it, he kept his eyes riveted on the green line. The green line replaced all thought. The green line sucked up his gray matter, kneaded it, made it change color, gave it tonalities of celadon, jade, emerald, olive green, forest green.
The shock was extremely violent. The Investigator, with lowered head, sprinting along at maximum speed, galvanized by the tablets given him by his friend the Policeman, crashed head-on, without any last-second attempt to slow his momentum, into a wall of large cement blocks, at the foot of which the green line ended its horizontal run. He lay stretched out on the ground, released from consciousness. His body was relaxed. His cerebral activity was suspended. A swelling like a pigeon’s egg appeared on his forehead, exactly where he’d cut himself before; the wound had reopened, and a thin stream of dark blood was flowing from it.
The temperature started dropping; the sky darkened. Heavy clouds, like enormous, laden barges apparently gathering for a rendezvous, came rolling in from all sides, driven by disgruntled winds. It wasn’t long before the clouds began to bump into one another, smash into one another, rip one another open; and the first drops of icy rain fell on the Investigator, who lay there, still unconscious, and didn’t even feel them.
XXXIV
DURING THOSE SEVERAL HOURS, the ones he spent lying unconscious on the ground, the Investigator’s assessment of things was accurate; he was indeed dreaming. His was a real dream, that is to say, a mental construction produced when the mind is at rest, when it has no other employment, when it’s slothful and seeks none, when it’s curled up in idleness and refuses all offers of activity. The nonsense that informs the content of most real dreams is an allegorical testimony to the pernicious consequences the absence of work can have for every individual.
The Investigator passed the Enterprise’s Suicides in review. They’d all been brought into a room and lined up on the floor, one next to the other: twenty-two bodies plus one urn, containing the ashes of an employee who’d been cremated.
The Suicides still bore the signs of their final actions. Seven had ropes around their necks and protruding tongues. Six presented temples shattered by single pistol shots. One’s throat was slit; for three others, it was the veins in their wrists; two more had charred bodies, the result of their self-immolation; another’s totally cyanotic face was visible through the plastic bag he’d used to smother himself; water dripped from the bodies of two who had leaped into the river.
They were all resolutely dead, there was no doubt about it, and yet the eyes of each followed the Investigator as he moved from one to another, studying them minutely and professionally. That vision, which might well have frightened him, didn’t disturb him in the least. Similarly, he found it completely normal that the Suicides answered all the questions he put to them concerning the procedures they’d followed, their motivations, whether their successful effort had been preceded by one or more previous attempts, and the reasons why those attempts had failed. Thus far, the Investigator had somewhat neglected the urn, but when he asked who had died from gas, it was the urn that replied, and the fact that a funeral urn began to speak didn’t strike him as the least bit absurd.
“It was me, sir,” it said.
“Please call me ‘Mr. Investigator.’ ”
“Very well, Mr. Investigator.”
“So the gas, that’s you?”
“Yes.”
“One question comes to mind: Was it an accident, or was it suicide?”
“A little of both, Mr. Investigator.”
“What do you mean? That’s impossible.”
The urn seemed to hesitate before speaking again.
“I had the intention of committing suicide. My mind was made up. But I wanted to throw myself from a window, and I didn’t have time to do that. The explosion happened just as I was about to jump.”
“Were you in your apartment?”
“Yes. I’d made some coffee to give myself courage. I must have turned off the burner but forgotten to close the gas valve. It took me a long time to take the plunge, if I may use the expression. The gas escaped. I didn’t smell anything — my nose was always stopped up, owing to my numerous allergies, notably to hazel and birch pollen, acarids, and cat hair, allergies that had poisoned my existence ever since adolescence. I climbed up on the windowsill, turned the catch, and then boom. After that, nothing.”