“Boom?”
“Yes, boom, Mr. Investigator. A great boom. It’s the last memory I carry from the world of the living.”
The Investigator reflected a few moments, contemplated the urn at length, and noticed that all the other Suicides were attentively following the conversation, doubtless waiting to learn what his conclusion would be.
“Well,” the Investigator said, “that makes no difference, because you wanted to kill yourself and now you’re dead.”
“At the risk of taking up too much of your time, and with your permission, I’m not completely in agreement with you, Mr. Investigator,” the urn said hesitantly. “I’m certainly dead, but my death didn’t occur at all the way I wanted it to. And may I point out that I died several seconds before I was able to kill myself? Therefore, it wasn’t really suicide.”
“But you fell from the window all the same, didn’t you?”
Noting the urn’s apparent confusion, the Investigator told himself he’d just scored a point.
“Ye-e-es …” the urn said. “That’s undeniable, but … what actually caused my death? The fall? A cardiac arrest resulting from the shock and terror of the explosion? Or the explosion itself, which could have torn apart my lungs and all my other organs, thus leading to death almost instantaneously, or at least prior to the moment when my head struck the ground?”
“I’m waiting for you to answer those questions! What was the cause of death recorded in the autopsy report?”
“There wasn’t any autopsy. My wife had me cremated before the Police or the Enterprise had the time to demand one.”
The Investigator was stunned. All things considered, it was impossible to determine whether this particular case was a suicide or an accident. The statistical table he’d wanted to include in his Investigation made no provisions for such a scenario, and in the realm of statistics, uncertainty was intolerable. This state of affairs would discredit the seriousness of his work, and as a result, he himself would be undermined.
The urn remained silent, clearly ill at ease for having put the Investigator in such an embarrassing predicament. The Suicides looked away. Everyone could perceive the Investigator’s mounting anxiety. The moment was drawn out to such a length that it seemed it would never end.
He was delivered from it by unbearable pain.
“Don’t move! I’ll be gentle,” said a voice. A woman was bending over him. He hadn’t seen her before, yet she looked familiar to him. She had a round face, unmarked by age, and fine hair. She was wearing a long white coat. By all indications, she was either a nurse or a physician.
“What happened to me?” asked the Investigator, brutally yanked out of his dream. In every part of his skull, he felt rare, concentrated, excruciating pain.
“You ran into the wall. It happens often enough when people are distracted. Most of them get away with a bump, but I figure you must have been running like the wind if you put yourself in this state. When you were picked up, you were completely unconscious. Still, you were luckier than the Korean.”
“What Korean?”
“Two months ago. But he must have been moving even faster than you were — those people put a great deal of energy into whatever they do. That’s what gives them their economic force. The result was a Level 7 Impediment.”
“And that is …?”
“Death,” the woman replied distractedly, injecting some substance into the Investigator’s arm as she spoke.
“I was only following the line …” the Investigator murmured, as if to himself. He was thinking about the faceless Korean, whose fate the Investigator had just barely escaped.
“The problem,” the woman went on, “is that everyone follows that line without exercising good judgment. If you raise your eyes, you see quite clearly that the line goes straight into a wall. It’s the result of bad planning or a discreet attempt at sabotage; we’ll never know. The Employee who painted the line misunderstood his orders, or maybe he didn’t want to understand them, and, rather than make the line veer off to the right so that it would lead people to my office, he let it go smack into the wall and even continued it up the wall, for close to seven feet — that is, to the highest point his brush could reach — and then he finished off the line with an arrowhead pointing to the clouds. Your case, like the Korean’s, is extreme, but bear in mind that I’ve seen certain individuals approach that wall and try to scale it because they didn’t want to stray from the green line. They tried to climb that wall, even though it’s about sixteen feet high, it offers no handholds, and it’s topped by barbed wire. As a result, they cut their fingers and broke their nails, and to go where? To the sky? You can understand the degree of psychological conditioning people have undergone when you observe them in certain circumstances, like when they’re supposed to obey instructions, advice, or orders.”
This whole conversation was still a little complex for the Investigator, whose badly bruised head had allowed him to grasp some fragments — the line into the wall, the Korean’s death, Level 7 Impediments — and not others, which were too abstruse for him at that moment. “How would you assess my Impediment level?” he asked.
The woman looked at him, palpated his forehead, which made him cry out in pain, took his pulse, closely examined the whites of his eyes.
“Our Impediment scale goes from Level 1, which consists in absenting oneself from one’s work for two minutes to go to the restroom, to Level 7, which designates the irreversible cessation of an individual’s bodily functions. After a cursory examination, and with the obvious stipulation that this assessment cannot be used in a claim proceeding before an insurance company or in a court of law within the framework of a judicial action brought against the Enterprise, I’d say that you are the object of a Level 3 Impediment, but that, I repeat, is not an actual diagnosis. Certain skull fractures, for example, are undetectable in a superficial examination, but that doesn’t stop them from causing a swift death a few hours later.”
The Investigator’s thoughts turned to the Guide, who the Security Officer had told him was the victim of a Level 6 Impediment. Wondering what such an Impediment entailed, the Investigator couldn’t stop himself from asking the woman to define it.
“Cessation of cerebral function.”
The Investigator began to tremble. He felt a knot forming in his throat. What could have happened to the Guide? “Thank you, Doctor,” he groaned.
“Please don’t think I’m reproaching you for your mistake, but I’m not a doctor, I’m a psychologist,” the woman replied with a smile, and as he looked at that smile, it was as if he were contemplating his reflection in a mirror, a reflection of himself with a little lipstick on his lips, lightly made-up eyelids, and rather more hair.
The Psychologist stood up. “I believe you have now recovered sufficiently to follow me. We’re going to my office.”
XXXV
THE INVESTIGATOR LET HIMSELF be taken by the arm and guided like a sick child. They left the room, which might have been some sort of infirmary. As he walked, he realized he wasn’t wearing his raincoat anymore, or his sweatpants, either; what he had on was a simple hospital gown, salmon in color, made of some light, comfortable material — cotton, maybe Indian cotton, doubtless not silk, such a precious fabric would never be used in manufacturing that sort of garment, but the impression it left on the skin was nevertheless like that left by silk, warm and ethereal — and reaching down to the middle of his thighs. He had the awkward feeling that he was totally naked under the gown, but he didn’t have the nerve to check.
They were stepping warily down a white corridor whose floor, walls, and ceiling seemed to be covered with foam padding, which muffled the sounds of their progress and made walking an activity both delicate and spongy. At the end of about a hundred yards, the Psychologist opened a door on the left. He entered and led the Investigator to a swivel chair, chose for himself a wheeled stool — a rather tall metal object with a seat shaped like a tractor seat, one of those stools that hairdressers use to rotate around their clients — and rolled himself very close to the Investigator.